Historians Don’t Think a US Civil War Is Likely—but They’re Still Nervous

“We either had to use shotguns,” Alameda County Sheriff Frank Madigan said at the time, “or retreat and surrender the city to the mob.”

The response to what became known as the Bloody Thirds got so out of hand that helicopters dropped CS gas—a more intense form of tear gas, which was used by the FBI against the Branch Davidians in Waco—on the protesters. The wind took him to the hospital.

fog of war

That’s where Matt O’Brien, an Ohio-based historian specializing in 20th-century Ireland, sees a parallel to the issues: the use of out-of-state National Guard troops in cities and the creation of Homeland Security departments, who don’t have the same training as law enforcement or familiarity with the arenas in which they operate.

“A lot of the British soldiers sent to Northern Ireland were 18-, 19-year-old kids from Liverpool and Birmingham,” O’Brien said. “Some of them were of Irish descent, and they were expected to do police work, and they were very unprepared.”

In the U.S., federal immigration officers and National Guard troops remain in cities they haven’t signed up to police, with no clear end in sight. It’s unclear where the administration takes this campaign from here, especially given its context Court ruling Which prevented them from going as aggressively as the administration wanted.

For Pape, the uniquely American and Trumpian nature of the problem makes it difficult for us to grasp. Or, at least, harder to perceive than those who are exposed to it from abroad.

“I think it’s basically hard for everybody here — and I would put myself in it — to have analytical distance when violence is happening right next door, in our country,” Pape said.

With so many terrible things going on, I want to end on a positive note. I reached out to Bill Ayers to talk to me right now. Ayers knows a thing or two about militant armed resistance from his time in the Weather Underground in the 1970s and how dangerous it can be. His group, which opposed the Vietnam War and saw the US government as an imperialist entity, targeted federal buildings with homemade bombs in the 1960s and 1970s. There were three members of Weather Underground Killed in a sudden explosion In 1970. Ayers remained on the run for the next decade before he and his wife turned themselves in when federal charges against them were dropped. He became a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.