The Civil War, Part I

The American people is at war, and it not just war with Russia over Ukraine or war with the Syrian Jihadists we have been bankrolling.  Our greatest war is with ourselves.

The terrible war of 1861-1865 was only a civil war on the fringes, in borders areas where neighbors might find themselves on opposing sides.  Like the Revolution of 1776, where Patriots and Tories were also killing each other in the backcountry, the so-called Civil War was a war of secession.  The civil war we are engaged in these days is the real thing, a conflict that divides neighbor from neighbor, colleague from colleague, brother from brother.

In this series of columns, I shall do my best to describe the warring parties and to delineate the irreconcilable differences that divide them.  But we should start at the beginning by defining the term "civil war."   Since no definition will fit all cases or satisfy everyone's vanity, I shall be content with stating as clearly as possible what I mean by "civil war."

A war, in modern parlance, is any large-scale conflict between parties who wish to occupy or control or exploit a territory or population.  While the term "war" used to be limited to armed conflict between two organized bodies of warriors, frequent metaphorical misuse of the word has led us to speak of cold wars, wars of words, and even wars of  nerves, but even a war of nerves, if left to run its course, will generate killing and slaughter.  The War on Poverty is obviously at the root of much of the violence that is destroying American cities, as taxpayers are forced to pay dangerous felons not to work so that they will have the free time and a free hand in committing violent crimes.

A civil war is, by definition, a war among the citizens or subjects that owe at least nominal allegiance to the same regime.  Civil wars have many causes.  At a simple level, they are like turf wars between rival urban gangs.  England's 100 Years' War was fought by partisans of two branches of the Plantagenet Dynasty that established by Henry II, son of Geoffrey le Bel, the Count of Anjou.  Of called "the cousins' war," the conflict caused the deaths of thousands of English aristocrats, their retainers, and their peasant followers.

Turf wars can be accompanied by religious and ideological struggles.  16th century France was torn apart by a conflict between Catholics and Protestants that was complicated by disputed succession to the crown.  Class conflict frequently plays a part as it did in the staseis that broke out in ancient Greek cities like Mytilene, in which the poet Alcaeus played a role.  One of the most memorable and incisive descriptions of such conflicts is provided by Thucydides in his account of the stasis on Kerkyra (known as Corcyra to the Romans and Corfu to tourists.)

During the civil war on Kerkyra, the the Athenians aided the "democratic" faction and Corinthians  the oligarchic side, and such interventions are not uncommon.  The Soviet Union and the Communist Party involved themselves in civil rights conflicts in the American  South, and the US and USSR fought proxy civil wars in Central America, Africa, and the Middle East, and neither capitalists nor communists seem to feel any mercy for the people whose lives were destroyed.

The French Revolution had several dimensions:  It  began with an attempt of aristocrats to seize power from the king and evolved into a power-grab by discontented middle-class lawyers but France's traditional rivals, Britain and Austria joined in the game from an early date.  Revolutions and wars of secession easily generate both civil conflicts and foreign intervention.  In the American Revolution, not only did civil war erupt in the Carolinas but it was only the intervention of the French that enabled the Americans to gain their independence

Whatever the cause(s), participants in Civil Wars may come to see former friends and fellow-citizens as enemies who deserve no quarter.  The moral and emotional burden may become intolerable, as may have been the case with Viscount Falkland in the English Civil war.  Falkland had been an advocate of reform and an opponent of Charles I's exercises of the royal prerogative, but as the conflict between Parliament and Crown escalated, he came to believe--quite correctly--that the Puritans in Parliament were a far greater threat to British traditions than the poor Charles could ever be.  He wrote his will,  rode off one night, and  was killed by Parliamentary soldiers.

Monarchical regimes, as they centralize power, are often subject to struggles over succession and secession movements, as in the later history of the Assyrian Empire and in the endless wars among Alexander the Great's successors.  But in republics and in  states that cherish the fiction of democracy, electoral struggles can range from exchanges  of insults to street violence of the sort that are described in Cicero's letters to the armed conflicts between revolutionary communists and their conservative and fascist rivals for power in Germany, Italy, and Spain in the period between the two wars.  As such struggles become more open, more intense, more violent, the  parties may drop the fiction that the conflict is legal or procedural and resort to military coups or something like Mussolini's melodramatic "march on Rome."

If you ask me for historical parallels to the American predicament, I would suggest that the first parallel  to examine is the revolutionary violence that broke out between the two world wars, when the old order of kings and constitutions had lost legitimacy, and the partisans of the various sides had come to see each other as enemies not just of their side but of human the race.  "History belongs to us," chanted the Nazis, and their spiritual descendants today have toned the expression down to an insistence that they are on the right side of history.