The Psychology of Rebellion – and Martyrdom

Rebellion comes naturally to most of us – particularly to late teenagers. As we get older, we want to make our mark in the world, to demonstrate our distinctiveness to our academic peers. So I can understand why David Betz feels it necessary to show that his coat is made from different material than that of other academic military historians such as Colin Grey or Lawrence Freedman.

Our reputations – let alone social media - require us to try to find an appropriate niche into which people can put us. Betz developed his view further in this article published in late 2023 The Future of War is civil war which is worth reading IN FULL

I personally am convinced of the inevitability of outright, active, and wide-scale civil war in North America and Western Europe. The best that can be hoped for, I think, is to diminish the period of horror. Some readers may be more optimistic; none, though, can objectively deny that there are strong and well-understood indicators showing that our current societal arrangements are failing at an accelerating rate.

This last section of the paper is based in part on approximately ten years of lurking on the darker corners of the internet listening to what incipient revolutionaries, neo-anarchists, and want-to-be militiamen think and talk about….

I shall not conclude with thoughts on what might be done to prevent the occurrence of the civil wars that are coming because there is nothing that can be done about it. The unfortunate reality is that society has already passed the tipping point after which prevention of the eruption of violent civil conflict is impossible.

You can almost see this guy rubbing his hands and saying “I told you so”!

How Likely is Civil Strife in Britain?

I had a bit of a nightmare last night – caused undoubtedly by my viewing “The coming UK Civil War” in which war academic David Betz discusses the reasons he finds this a near certainty – at one stage he suggests this coming summer as a possibility. Listening to him gives me the sense that he would actually relish this – although other academics in this field (such as Lawrence Freedman or Paul Rogers) don’t give me that sense. This recent article in the Military Strategy Magazine gives a sense of his arguments

The major threat to the security and prosperity of the West today emanates from its own dire social instability, structural and economic decline, cultural desiccation and, in my view, elite pusillanimity. Some academics have begun to sound the alarm, notably Barbara Walter’s “How Civil Wars Start—and How to Stop Them”, which is concerned primarily with the dwindling domestic stability of the United States.[ii] To judge from President Biden’s September 2022 speech in which he declared ‘MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic’ governments are beginning to take heed, albeit cautiously and awkwardly.[iii]

The field of strategic studies, however, is largely silent on the issue, which is strange because it ought to be something of concern. Why is it correct to perceive the increasing danger of violent internal conflict erupting in the West? What are the strategies and tactics likely to be employed in the civil wars to come in the West and by whom? These are the questions which I shall address in this essay……

and concludes

Moreover, it is not simply that the conditions are present in the West; it is, rather, that the conditions are nearing the ideal. The relative wealth, social stability and related lack of demographic factionalism, plus the perception of the ability of normal politics to solve problems that once made the West seem immune to civil war are now no longer valid. In fact, in each of these categories the direction of pull is towards civil conflict. Increasingly, people perceive this to be the case and their levels of confidence in government would seem to be declining even more in the face of the apparent unwillingness or inability of leaders to confront the situation honestly. The result, society-wise, is a reinforcing spiral calling to mind the opening lines of Yeats’ famous ‘The Second Coming’.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…

The fact of the matter is that the tools of revolt in the form of various appurtenances of modern life are just lying around, knowledge of how to employ them is widespread, targets are obvious and undefended, and more and more formerly regular citizens seem minded to take the shot.

So we are warned! Given polarisation, social media, general distrust of most institutions (not least the police), the indifference developed by the newspapers to migrants and other “scum of the earth” (to use the title of a famous 1941 Arthur Koestler book), anger and fear seem to have become the main features of many British people.

But the David Betzs of this world seem determined to inflame these feelings. Betz developed his view further in this article published in late 2023 The Future of War is civil war

I personally am convinced of the inevitability of outright, active, and wide-scale civil war in North America and Western Europe. The best that can be hoped for, I think, is to diminish the period of horror. Some readers may be more optimistic; none, though, can objectively deny that there are strong and well-understood indicators showing that our current societal arrangements are failing at an accelerating rate.

The second part will briefly address the strengths and weaknesses of the extant future war literature, focusing mainly upon influential works of fiction rather than the quasi-rigorous outpourings of the ‘futurology’ discipline. For the purposes of analysis, I divide these into three groups: military futurism, social futurism, and ‘the unmentionables’. My argument, in a nutshell, is that we focus too much on the first, too little on the second, and especially not enough on the third, which is where most of the important contemporary ideas are to be found.

In the third part, I will attempt to describe the shape or character of the wars to come which, in short form, I expect to prominently exhibit the following: a distinctive rural verses urban dimension; jarring societal splits along the fracture lines of multiculturalism; a ‘hi-lo’ mix of weapons featuring extensive innovative reuse of civil tech for military purpose, particularly attacks on infrastructure; and a ‘shock of the old’ reversion-mutation to savage tactics, notably the use of famine and destruction of shelter as tools of coercion.

This last section of the paper is based in part on approximately ten years of lurking on the darker corners of the internet listening to what incipient revolutionaries, neo-anarchists, and want-to-be militiamen think and talk about….

I shall not conclude with thoughts on what might be done to prevent the occurrence of the civil wars that are coming because there is nothing that can be done about it. The unfortunate reality is that society has already passed the tipping point after which prevention of the eruption of violent civil conflict is impossible.

I’ve taken all day to do this post – it involved a fair amount of background reading eg the statistics on policing or the UK debate on racialism – not least the dispute on whether “institutional racism” exists.

You can almost see this guy rubbing his hands and saying “I told you so”!

You can also see him in this discussion - Civil War is Coming and a new interview on 13 June

Further Reading/viewing

https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west/

https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west-part-ii-strategic-realities/

View from the Danube (includes Goodwin input)

The coming civil war https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG_5dFaTje8

The mad Dominic Cummings supports the notion 

Perceptions of Policing - a review of research (Ukgov 2023)

Policing Surveys (2023)

Guardian article about trust in police (2024)

2023 https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2024-09/police-activism-impartiality-research-tables-ipsos-2024.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Stephen_Lawrence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Stephen_Lawrence#The_Macpherson_Inquiry

Institutional Racism – fact or fiction? 2000

Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics N Dennis et al Civitas 2000 

On the Cusp of Revolutionary Change?

A great post from one William Finnegan who has a substack entitled The Long Memo whose post yesterday was quite outstanding

Entitled “The US election didn’t matter”, this was its main argument -

There was a time when electoral outcomes shaped policy, governance, and the global order. That time is over. What we’re witnessing—what you likely feel, whether you can name it or not—is the collapse of coherence.

We got Trump. We rolled craps. Accelerationism. Nihilism. A full-speed explosion of the rule of law. The car’s already off the cliff. He just cut the brake lines and floored it. So yes, many people blame him. But it’s not him—not entirely. He’s the maniac behind the wheel, sure.
But the road was already washed out. The chaos was baked in.

Stochastic Anarchy

• The world still looks like a system of nation-states, but under the hood, it’s glitching. The assumptions that held it together—about rational actors, enforceable rules, and coordinated outcomes—are breaking down.

  • The state still exists. But its capacity is hollowed out.

  • Laws still exist. But enforcement is arbitrary, delayed, or nonexistent.

  • Institutions still exist. But trust, legitimacy, and effectiveness have evaporated.

Stochastic, because outcomes are now governed by what feels like 

randomness, shock, and probabilistic influence—not deliberate policy.
Anarchy, because there’s no longer a coherent sovereign authority at any level. 

Just fragments of control, flickering in and out of relevance.

Let me make this concrete. We now live in a system where:

A U.S. president can ignore a Supreme Court ruling, say he’s 
complying, and the system shrugs.
A tech billionaire can unilaterally reshape space policy, financial markets, 
and speech law.
The EU can claim a defense policy—while relying entirely on NATO and 
outsourcing deterrence to the United States.
Multinational corporations can override national regulations more effectively 
than most foreign governments.

This is not chaos. This is something worse. It’s a system that still performs 

the rituals of governance—elections, treaties, laws—but no longer produces 

results. It’s signal without coordination. Authority without follow-through. 

Motion without meaning.
Outcomes still occur. But they no longer emerge from rules, norms, or strategy.

They emerge from noise, reaction, and memetic acceleration. You may vote. 

You may appeal. You may sue. But the result? That depends on a stochastic 

blend of:

• legal ambiguity,

• social media pressure,

• algorithmic timing,

• institutional inertia,

• and who happens to be in the room.

That’s been building for decades. One might argue since 1960, but for me, I can 

definitely trace from 1980 to now. I’ve written about it multiple times here at TLM, 

but for those who need a refresher, here’s the quick map:

1980s–90s: Market Uber Alles

Deregulation, globalization, and privatization have become bipartisan 

gospel. Neoliberalism hollows out the public sector. The state retreats, 

voluntarily, from economic stewardship and infrastructure ownership.

→ Structural capacity begins to decay.

1990s–2000s: Capture and Complexity

Policy becomes so complex that lobbyists effectively write it. Financial 

institutions self-regulate into crisis. Tech and capital start outpacing 

law.

→ Governance shifts from institutions to markets.

Post-9/11: Security State Expansion

Massive growth of the national security apparatus under opaque executive 

authority. The War on Terror rewires legal norms, increases secrecy, and 

trains institutions to treat oversight as optional.

→ The rule of law becomes situational.

2008–09: The Bailout and the Bluff

The global financial crisis exposed that the state can no longer regulate 

or contain capital—only absorb its failures. Wall Street gets bailed out, 

and Main Street gets austerity.

→ Legitimacy hemorrhages.

2010s: The Platform Takeover

Algorithms begin to mediate truth. Facebook shapes elections: Google, Amazon, 

and Apple scale beyond sovereign reach. States become lagging indicators, not 

rule-setters.

→ Narrative control slips from public hands.

2016–2020: Trump as Beta Test

The first Trump administration broke norms, but revealed they were only norms. 

Checks and balances failed. Congress claimed oversight but could not enforce it.

→ Stress test fails. System reveals hollowness.

2020–2024: Pandemic and Permissionless Collapse

COVID-19 exposed total institutional brittleness: Health agencies, courts,

legislatures, and Fragmentation accelerates.

present: Phase Shift
The second Trump administration doesn’t break the system. It inherits a 

broken one—and simply refuses to pretend anymore. The rituals continue. 

The functions are gone.

CCCompare this,  for example, with The Future of Change – how technology shapes 

social revolutions by Ray Brescia (2020), one of several books I’ve now included in 

e compendium A Note on Change - an annotated list of the 130 books I’ve been 

able to find on the subject. Other books I added yesterday were 

• The Gutenberg Galaxy – the making of typographic man Marshall McLuhan (1962)  

• The Gutenberg Elegies – the fate of reading in an electronic world Sven Birkerts (1994)

US Democracy in action

Some 30 years ago, Robert Reich was, for some 4 years, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State for Labor. He’s now left politics and academia behind to become a successful blogger.

Every Saturday morning, he holds, with Heather Lofthouse, a wonderful “Coffee Klatch” or conversation. This morning’s was particularly inspiring since it brought in, at 35 minutes, a woman (Emily Finer) who had gone to a Town Hall meeting to ask her Republican Congressman a question. There was a massive police presence outside and everyone had to sign off/agree to a range of questions about their behaviour. Needless to say, the Congressman didn’t answer her question and when, she repeated it, she was ejected from the meeting – despite the protests of the audience who clearly supported her right to ask the question. The whole scene is a vivid illustration of the depths US democracy has reached – effectively to deny the right of protest.

What on earth were the mayor’s “storm-troopers” doing to carry her out???

SNIPPETS

Robert Kaplan and Michael Lewis are two US journalists who epitomise the best of journalism – keen-eyed, they see what most of us miss.

Kaplan first came to my notice in an article about “the coming anarchy” he wrote in The Atlantic in 1994, using the title in a book he published in 2000 when he also produced Eastward to Tartary – travels in the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus Robert Kaplan (2000)

He showed great sensitivity and insight with In Europe's Shadow - two cold wars and a thirty year trip to Romania and beyond Robert Kaplan (2016) which I reviewed when it first came out.

And his most recent book is Wasteland - a world in permanent crisis Robert Kaplan (2025) about which he was interviewed recently on “The Rest is Politics” (Leading)

Lewis is probably better known for his treatment of the global financial crisis – both as a book The Big Short – inside the doom machine (2010) and in a subsequent film. He has now produced Who is Government? The untold story of public service Michael Lewis (2025) which focuses on the individuals who are proud to serve the public.

And, on the very day that Cardinals assemble in Rome to elect a new Pope, let’s 

not forget the legacy of Francis who gave us an important Encyclical 

about the COMMON GOOD Fratelli Tutti (2020) - although the new Pope, in 

choosing the name LEO, seems to be reaching back to the last Pope who bore 

this name and who gave us the one about SOLIDARITY 

Rerum Novarum (1891 Vatican Library)  

A confession

At University I read Karl Popper and was an enthusiast. I was a Croslandite – fan of “The Future of Socialism” (1956) – a Gaitskellite chairman of the local Young Socialists. But also an early reader in 1960 of New Left Review and still an avid reader. 

A supporter of Nuclear Disarmamement – indeed a hesitant Bennite who supported 

the Lucas plan Very confused! But ambivalent about the Trade Unions – never a 

Scargill supporter.
 
In short, a bleeding liberal – and an architect on Strathclyde Region of its 1975 

Deprivation Strategy, confirmed in its 1982 Social Strategy for the Eighties and 

continued by the Scottish government since 1997
In this post, I want to confront the possibility that the claim I’ve made 

since I left Scotland in 1990 of developing that strategy in good faith may in 

fact be dubious. The claim was made in this article I submitted last year to 

“Emancipations” which I don ‘t expect will ever be published. 

Basically it sets the 1976 Regional strategy on Multiple Deprivation in the 

context of 

• the Labour government’s initiatives of 1964-70 and 1974-79

• the “Born to Fail?” report of 1973 which revealed the scale of the problem of 

urban poverty in the Region

• the community development programmes launched by Labour in the early 1970s 

but soon terminated for their strong left-wing critiques

Rosabeth Kanter is one of the most famous management writers and gave us, 

a few years later, “10 Commandments for implementing Change”¹ which were -.

• Analyse the organisation - and its need for change

• Create a shared vision and common direction

• Separate from the past

• Create a Sense of Urgency

• Support a Strong Leader

• Line up Political Support 

• Craft an Implementation Plan

• Develop Enabling Structures

• Communicate, Involve People and be Honest

• Reinforce and Institutionalise the Change

This gives us a useful checklist against which to check the performance of the Region -

• The shocking 1973 “Born to Fail?” report identified the West of Scotland as a UK leader in 

“multiple deprivation” and a few of us, instead of acting defensively, saw this as an opportunity 
to ensure that the Region recognised this as its basic priority, established and sustained a shared vision.

• “Separating from the past” was easy at one level since the Region was starting from scratch but enormously difficult at another since it was an amalgamation of six large powerful bodies – each with its distinctive style – let alone the strength of the professional cultures to be found in departments such as Education, Police, Water, Fire and Social Work 

• There was an urgency in the Region having to prove itself – which gave us the incentive 

to do things differently.

• For the first 4 years, leadership was shared by 2 very different characters – a community 

minister being the charismatic public persona and a miner being the behind-the- scenes 
deal-maker. This allowed a rare combination of practicality and idealism to flow in the wider leadership

• And community activists were brought into that

• With the implementation plan taking several years to evolve

• With appropriate enabling structures at political, administrative and community levels 

• Communication was intense and continuous – as you would expect of a democratic system

• And appropriate strategic changes reinforced and institutionalised

By this measure, it appears that Strathclyde Region may have got things about right.

Recommended Reading
Gilding the Ghetto (Coventry CDP 1977)
The Makings of a Ruling Class (Batley CDP 1979)
Architect or Bee? Mike Cooley (1987)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Cooley_(engineer)
Crosland’s Socialism Geoff Horn (2006)

Poverty Safari – understanding the anger in Britain’s underclass Darren McGarvey (2017)

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/09/are-centrists-evil.html 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yLkwildDw4 Darren McGarvey (2023)
Ten Commandments for Executing Change from “The Challenge of Organisational Change” ed Kanter, Rosabeth
	et al pp 382-386 (Free Press 1992)

the importance of countervailing power

I’ve been looking for some time for a book which does justice to our fall from innocence in the 1970s. I start from JK Galbraith’s concept of “countervailing power” which sustained the post-war period in western development. This was the theory that the corporate, union and social power held each other, for a “glorious 30 years”, in a certain balance until 1980 – with results good for everyone. That balance was destroyed by something we too easily try to explain away by the use of the meaningless phrase “neoliberalism”. I’m familiar with the various efforts a range of social scientists have made to put meat on that particular bone – such as Philip Mirowski, Vivian Schmidt and, more recently, Quinn Slobodian. But, for my money “Licence to be Bad; how economics corrupted us” by Jonathan Aldred (2019) offers the most readable explanation of how we have all succumbed in the past 40 years to a new highly individualistic and greedy virus…..The question which has been gnawing at me since the start of the new millennium is what can be done to put a new system of countervailing power in place…..????

Until now, few books dared raise or pursue that question, But Michael Lind’s The The New Class War – saving democracy from the new managerial elite (2020) offers to do precisely that……It starts powerfully – 

Demagogic populism is a symptom. Technocratic neoliberalism is the disease. Democratic pluralism is the cure.

before reminding us that -

In the 19^th and early twentieth centuries, five major schools of thought debated the future of industrial society: liberalism, producerism, socialism, corporatism, and pluralism (p39) 

……Producerism is the belief that the economy should be structured by the state to maximize the numbers of self-employed family farmers, artisans, and small shopkeepers in society. The moral ideal of this school is the selfsufficient citizen of a republic with a small-producer majority whose economic independence means that they cannot be intimidated or blackmailed by wealthy elites. In the form of Jeffersonian agrarianism, producerism has a rich history in the United States. The rise of mass production in the economy, and the shift from a majority made up of farm owners and farm workers to urban wage earners, rendered the producerist ideal irrelevant in the modern industrialized West. While small-producerism still has appeal to romantics on both the left and the right, it is and will remain anachronistic, and having criticized it elsewhere, I will not discuss it in this book.

….. A fourth philosophy, opposed to free market liberalism and state socialism alike, envisioned a harmonious society of state-supervised but largely self-governing “corporations,” by which was meant entire economic sectors, not individual firms, rather like medieval guilds.6 This tradition influenced Catholic social thought, as expressed in the papal encyclicals Rerum novarum (1891), Quadragesimo anno (1931) or Fratelli Tutti (2020). For the French sociologist Émile Durkheim and others in the secular French republican solidarist tradition, the organization of labor and business could be an antidote to “anomie,” a phrase Durkheim devised to describe the isolation and disorientation of many individuals in urban industrial societies.7 The same term, “corporatism,” is often used for both democratic and dictatorial versions of this political tradition

….. The view of society as a community of self-organized and self-governing communities, under the supervision of a democratic government, is best described as “pluralism,” the term used by the English pluralists of the early twentieth century, like Neville Figgis, F. W. Maitland, G. D. H. Cole, and Harold Laski, and by their late-twentieth century heirs, including Paul Hirst and David Marquand. 

And then goes on to argue that – 

Only a new democratic pluralism that compels managerial elites to share power with the multiracial, religiously pluralistic working class in the economy, politics, and the culture can end the cycle of oscillation between oppressive technocracy and destructive populism.