The United States of America cannot Balkanize. This is a contention I made last month in an article that I recommend reading before this piece. The gist is that despite the increasing heterogeneity and polarizing politics of the United States, the warring poles in America are not sufficiently geographically concentrated to divide the national state into a handful of smaller states.
There is no Southern Confederation, no Cascadia, no Republic of the Great Lakes, no New Afrika, except in the minds of online ideologues. The largest state on the North American continent is the United States Federal Government, and the second-largest most plausible functioning state within USG is a hypothetical City-State of New York. Whatever regional differences existed in America have been effectively subdued by the leveling power of the federal government since 1861.
This is not unwarranted pessimism but the sober reality that has to be accepted before any real goals can be achieved. Even an activist for the Cascadian Empire should begin by recognizing the uphill climb ahead of him.
Just because the United States cannot Balkanize does not mean it cannot collapse into chaos, however. The example of the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s is worth recalling: Yugoslavia Balkanized into several mutually hostile homogeneous states such as Croatia and Serbia, but the most heterogeneous state within Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, did not Balkanize. It collapsed into years of sectarian violence, low-level warfare, and village-sized genocides without ever splitting into smaller functional states.
After several years of bloodshed, the United States intervened just before Croat and Serb forces managed to divvy up Muslim areas between themselves, and subsequently froze Bosnia and Herzegovina into a dysfunctional peace. Bosnia today is a semi-failed state and additionally one of the exemplars of the total failure of government by protocol or algorithm. It has a bizarre, byzantine system of government wherein the country is divided into an autonomous Serb Republic, a mixed Croat-Muslim Federation, and a third little neutral self-governing city district.
Each of Bosnia’s three sub-entities has its own President (or mayor), Prime Minister and legislature, and on top of that the country has a national elected legislature as well as a national Presidency occupied by three people at all times – one Croat, one Muslim and one Serb. A national total of four legislatures and seven Presidents. Bosnia-Herzegovina probably has more politicians per capita than any country on the planet and it has the dysfunction to prove it.
Why is Bosnia so instructive? Of the successor states to Yugoslavia’s socialist republics, Bosnia was the most diverse, the most heterogeneous, the most geographically mixed, and the most similar to the United States’ demographic composition of today. At the outbreak of war in 1991, the Yugoslav census of the that year showed that Slovenia was 90% Slovenian. Croatia was 80% Croatian. Serbia was 80% Serbian. Bosnia was 40% Muslim, 30% Serbian and 20% Croatian.
When Slovenia seceded, the ensuing war lasted all of ten days. When Croatia declared independence, the Yugoslav army used the majority-Serb interior of Croatia as a base to take back the whole country, but failed after a year and switched to supporting Serb separatists. After a few years of sporadic warfare, the Croatian army moved in and pretty much ethnically cleansed Croatia of Serbs in an event called Operation Storm. Serbia proper never experienced any warfare – the second-largest ethnic minority in Serbia were Hungarians, not Croats or Muslims.
The wars in Slovenia and Croatia wrapped up quickly compared to the war in Bosnia, and resulted in even more homogeneous states rather than multiethnic gridlock. Croatia was 90% Croatian 10 years after the outbreak of war. The war in Bosnia, on the contrary, was a complete mess, and to this day the conflict isn’t resolved by any meaningful definition of the word. This map shows you the level of mixture of ethnic groups in 1991, which did not change much geographically since then despite many attempts at ethnic cleansing. How do you split up a country like that into ethnic states? The short answer is that you can’t. The long answer is that you can only do it with biblical amounts of bloodshed.
Now back to America. Here is a link to an excellent interactive map called the ‘Racial Dot Map.’ All fifty states are broken down by racial demographics for you to see. Notice how, despite wide swathes of the lily-white rural interior, most urban areas are more mixed than Bosnia, as are the Southern Black Belt, Texas, the Southwest and California. If an ethnic free-for-all came to America as it did to Yugoslavia, vast swathes of the United States, as well as almost every single urban area, would have the potential to turn into bloodbaths on the order of Bosnia.
Separation would occur, but not on the order of U.S. states, state confederations, regions or mini-countries. The homogeneity and independence necessary for that simply doesn’t exist. Slovenia was a 90% Slovenian state. Croatia was 80% Croatian and still had a year of official war and three years of insurgency. The most ethnically homogeneous state in America with a significant population is Utah, and Utah is only around 50% Mormon. Utah is without question the most ethnically, culturally and religiously homogeneous state in America, but Utah is barely more homogeneous than Bosnia was in 1991. Bosnia is the best-case scenario for an American collapse scenario.
It’s true that there are very homogeneous white states like New Hampshire and Vermont that are close to 90% white, but the white political split in those states is going to be something to watch out for, and the homogeneous states are so tiny that they simply don’t matter compared to the rest of the country. New Hampshire and Vermont combined have a population that is less than 2 million, which is less than 1% of the total U.S. population. Most people in the United States live in diverse areas like California (population close to 40 million), the New York metropolitan area (population 20 million) or the American South (population upwards of 40-50 million, depending on where you draw the borders).
Civil war in America would entail separation on the order of towns, villages, suburbs, and neighborhoods. Cities like Chicago and New York, which already have de facto segregation, would remain demographically identical with some minor population sorting, but the toll for entering the wrong neighborhood would not just be glares, harassment or a mugging, but gunshots. This situation could go on for years or even decades without anyone attempting a multi-state solution that would allow for a Northwest American Republic or New Afrika.
Does that sound too awful to be possible? That is the exact situation Syria has been in since 2011, that Lebanon was in during the 1970s and 1980s, and that Bosnia was in during the 1990s.
A formerly peaceful multicultural city hit by political instability erupts into bloodshed and splits up into multiple ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods and suburbs. The inhabitants continue to live life much as before, but pay careful attention not to walk into the wrong neighborhood. Nobody stays out past midnight anymore. Sporadic mortar fire arcs from one neighborhood to the next. An occasional suicide bombing or sniper attack occurs. 14th street is safe, but 15th street is deadly. Inhabitants learn the meanings of Green Lines, Green Zones, and No Man’s Land. Street travel becomes a Sisyphean task as barricades and checkpoints become ubiquitous. But life still, somehow, goes on.
That’s life in Damascus and Aleppo; it was life in Sarajevo and Beirut. Some of the same patterns are already noticeable in Baltimore, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and other heterogeneous American cities.
Here’s a short video from the BBC depicting some scenes from wartime Damascus. If they didn’t tell you, you never would have guessed that a war was going on. People walk around calmly, merchants sell their wares on the street, things seem quiet. The two Syrians they interview complain about the lack of parties and bar patrons’ new preference for going home early. Yet other neighborhoods of the city are under siege, experiencing something close to Hell on Earth.
Peter Oborne spent two weeks in Damascus late last year, and his report describes the violently Kafkaesque situation of diversity plus urban warfare:
It could have been a society wedding in London, Milan or Paris. Instead, the packed event took place in the heart of Damascus’ Christian quarter. The men wore formal suits, the women elegant dresses. As the solemn ceremony led into a cheerful after party at a hotel in the centre of town, it seemed that the brutal civil war ravaging the country did not exist. Yet everybody I talked to had suffered misfortune or disaster. Some had been kidnapped. Many had lost their businesses. Others had received death threats. They were all resigned to the possibility, in some cases the likelihood, of sudden death.
You end up with war and peace being not an obvious dichotomy, but parallel realities that change with the very street:
Walk down one street where all the appearance of life seem to be going on (shops, cars, cafes), then turn off and it becomes a parallel world of sandbags, look-out posts, armed men and bunkers.
Oborne’s report continues with a fascinating metaphor for Damascus as London that tries to convey the situation intuitively to a Westerner. The whole thing is worth reading. In another example, Marwan Hisham reports from Aleppo:
Since the war, most of the old city’s neighborhoods had become inaccessible. Charred vehicles blockaded central streets. Trips that before the war took minutes had become seven-hour marathons, traversing hundreds of kilometers and dozens of checkpoints, each controlled by different warring groups. Regime snipers positioned atop the Citadel’s towers could survey huge areas of the city. Bodies caught in their cross fire might remain unburied for weeks, or months.
A lot more stories like these are available from people who survived Beirut in the ‘80s, Sarajevo in the ‘90s, or a multitude of other multiethnic cities in wartime.
If the federal government of the United States were to dissolve or collapse for some reason, there would not be an easy vacuum for aspiring state-builders to fill. The immediate consequences would probably be as described above: violent warfare and separation on the order of villages, towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods. Following that, sporadic violence and dysfunction for a long time to come. Bosnia is still a mess. Lebanon is still a mess. Syria is still a mess, and will probably remain a mess for decades despite Russian support for Assad.
National newspapers still lament the fact that major American cities like Chicago and Washington, D.C. are racially segregated. Recent efforts by the Obama administration’s Department of Housing & Urban Development to “diversify” homogeneous neighborhoods are only ensuring that the ethnic powder keg is fully topped up.
In America, the old maxim is ‘United we stand, divided we fall.’ Under the stewardship of USG, America is unlikely to stand much longer, but if it falls, it’s not going to get back up in pieces.
Mark Yuray is verified on Gab. Follow him there and on Twitter.
I agree that the US cannot Balkanize and that geography is a factor. However, I think that the primary reason is that no empire in the history of the world has ever been so rich, so powerful or had such complete control over its subjects. There is only one group of elites. There are no alternative elites. They are in complete control. With the advances in technology and spying, no serious uprising could ever get beyond a handful of people before it was sniffed out and destroyed. Obviously, uprisings are provoked by the elite or allowed to occur where it is of a benefit to them, but no popular uprising or Balkanization could ever occur in the US.
I’d like to add a caveat. Despair is a mortal sin. Thus, only a Christian awakening among some of the elite could cause any change.
Maybe America can’t Balkanize, but it can’t have a Bosnian or Syrian style civil war either. East Asians are not numerous enough to threaten White supremacy, and they generally get along well with Whites. Blacks, Latinos, and Arabs are retarded monkeys who can’t shoot straight and depend on welfare and affirmative-action jobs just to survive.
I think the USA will evolve into another Brazil, where everyone mouths multicultural pieties but no one believes them. In the southernmost states, where winters are cold and the population is over 80% white, Brazil is actually quite nice.
>Blacks, Latinos, and Arabs are retarded monkeys who can’t shoot straight and depend on welfare and affirmative-action jobs just to survive.
Arabs don’t qualify for affirmative action and, in any case, the one’s in America are relatively functional, at least as far as I can tell.
Anyway, although I’m not necessarily trying to let the blacks and Hispanics off the hook here, the reality is that most Americans, I’d estimate ~80 percent or so of them, are dependent on government to a more or less degree for their living. Just think about the huge swaths of the population, irrespective of race, who work in industries that rely heavily or entirely on government subsidy (i.e. health care, education, the military, etc.) and who collect transfer payments of varying kinds through the state and federal governments. It is easy to pick on NAMs, but it is only easy to do so because their sort of economic dependency is much more obvious and much less easier to justify.
That Americans are so reliant on government for their livings is, in fact, one of the main reasons why I think that disintegration, though it will inevitably happen, will not happen without people resisting it with all that they’ve got. They will want the federal government to fix things because they will know that if America goes, so does their health care (among other things). This is why, for example, that many of them are preparing to elect Trump, whose main appear is his avowed ability to reverse the disintegration that is already setting in, and to preserve the welfare state while doing it.
I would think it would be easier to justify from a human rights standpoint. Blacks “rights” are constantly being denied by evil whites.
But I think you hit on a very important point, i.e., the way in which government acts as a pusher and the voters as the junky. Everybody wants something for nothing, otherwise why have social security, medicare, and so forth.
>I would think it would be easier to justify from a human rights standpoint. Blacks “rights” are constantly being denied by evil whites.
I should have been more clear. What I meant was that economically dependent NAMs are typically obese single moms with sub-80 IQs who collect food stamps, live in Section 8 housing, get Medicaid, send their bastards to public schools, etc.. It is obvious that these kinds of people are economically dependent, and it is impossible to convince anyone with any sense that these sorts of people are good people. None the less, the typical economically dependent American is usually a divorced woman whose using the government to shake down her ex-husband for alimony and “child support”, or unemployed factory workers relying on a whole host of different kinds of government programs to make ends meet. etc.. The people in these latter examples are much less likely to be considered as economic dependents, even though that is exactly what they are.
In a healthy culture and society, the latter would be independent and capable of providing for themselves. The former will always be a dependent in any situation.
Many wise observers noted that if segregation were ended, the lowest class of whites would become debased by interacting with and adopting degenerate black culture. This is precisely what happened.
>In a healthy culture and society, the latter would be independent and capable of providing for themselves.
Why? There’s no reason why unmarried white women, or sub-95 IQ white men, shouldn’t be poor, given that most of them are, in large part, incapable of providing for themselves, especially in our cut-throat, post-industrial economy.
>Many wise observers noted that if segregation were ended, the lowest class of whites would become debased by interacting with and adopting degenerate black culture. This is precisely what happened
But what I’m saying extends to most whites, as in over 50 percent of them. Most whites have little personal contact with blacks on a daily basis, but most of them are in fact dependent on the government to a more or less degree for their living.
Well, until fairly recently in Western culture, unmarried women would be living in their father’s house until they were married and they certainly wouldn’t have any bastard children. If their husband had died or abandoned them, they would fall back on their family, church or neighbors. That is what I mean by a healthy society.
Lower class white men, guided by their betters and kept from corrupting influences, would be productive members of society, even if poor.
>Well, until fairly recently in Western culture, unmarried women would be living in their father’s house until they were married and they certainly wouldn’t have any bastard children. If their husband had died or abandoned them, they would fall back on their family, church or neighbors. That is what I mean by a healthy society.
Fair enough.
> Lower class white men, guided by their betters and kept from corrupting influences, would be productive members of society, even if poor
Sub-110 IQ white men were once capable of providing for themselves. It isn’t clear that they are any longer capable of this.
“Most whites have little personal contact with blacks on a daily basis, but most of them are in fact dependent on the government to a more or less degree for their living.”
You could take Barry Soetoro’s “you didn’t build it” argument to apply to every person who drives on a public road or hasn’t been killed because the US military has kept them safe, to mean that every person residing in the country is dependent on the government.
For most people, if somebody gives you something and begs you to take it, you are going to take it. This does not necessarily mean that you need it or cannot exist without it, but you’ll take it because it seems to be free. I don’t think that the majority of whites who receive it are necessarily dependent on it, they have just grown accustomed to it, and they took it in the first place because it was offered to them. Liberals in the media are constantly pointing this out when they show statistics that poor whites in the South are the group most opposed to welfare, but are the largest group of whites to receive it. The two are not mutually exclusive. You can take the money and still think it is a bad idea and shouldn’t exist. You can also take the money and not really need it, or take the money because you’re lazy, but if push came to shove you could hump and get it, without the money.
>You could take Barry Soetoro’s “you didn’t build it” argument to apply to every person who drives on a public road or hasn’t been killed because the US military has kept them safe, to mean that every person residing in the country is dependent on the government.
Look, I’m merely pointing out that government spending makes up about 40 percent of GDP, and the number of Americans that owe their living to this government spending, whether because it keeps them employed or else distributes transfer payments to them, numbers well into the hundreds of millions. And of course, this isn’t even counting the people whose living is dependent not necessarily on government spending but on government laws and regulations which allow them to have nice comfy jobs as “human resources specialists” or to collect alimony and “child support”.
>For most people, if somebody gives you something and begs you to take it, you are going to take it. This does not necessarily mean that you need it or cannot exist without it, but you’ll take it because it seems to be free. I don’t think that the majority of whites who receive it are necessarily dependent on it, they have just grown accustomed to it, and they took it in the first place because it was offered to them. Liberals in the media are constantly pointing this out when they show statistics that poor whites in the South are the group most opposed to welfare, but are the largest group of whites to receive it. The two are not mutually exclusive. You can take the money and still think it is a bad idea and shouldn’t exist. You can also take the money and not really need it, or take the money because you’re lazy, but if push came to shove you could hump and get it, without the money.
You can apply this to blacks as well. The black underclass won’t necessarily starve to death if they are cut from their economic dependence on the government, they’ll simply become much more impoverished, and they’ll likely deteriorate to a miserable condition similar to what we see in the worst parts of Western and Central Africa.
But when we say that a given person or group of persons are dependent on government for their living, we don’t mean to say that without the government, this person or group of persons won’t be able to survive. We just mean that without the government, their standard of living would deteriorate very significantly.
So where whites who are economically dependent on government are concerned, yes, they probably won’t all perish without the government, but their lives will become much more difficult, if not intolerable, without the government. Without the government, most whites would stand to lose something, whether that be their jobs, their homes, their income, their health care, their retirement, etc., and the really dependent ones would probably be reduced to an economic existence not much different from that of a Brazilian shantytown dweller.
This, by the way, is why the liberals constantly attack government dependent whites for espousing ostensibly anti-welfare policies or for voting Republican or whatever. It is because the liberals notice that these whites don’t necessarily oppose government spending or anything like that, they just oppose it when non-whites or illegal immigrants are the beneficiaries.
“You can apply this to blacks as well.”
Now you’re falling for silly notions of equality. Lincoln told blacks to “root hog or die,” and at the time of the war, there was a popular opinion that if slavery were eliminated and blacks were left unprovided for, they would simply die out. To some degree, this probably would have happened, except that well-meaning whites in the South created segregation, and blacks were essentially managed by upper class whites and kept from direct competition with whites.
Poor whites have generally been able to fend for themselves when they needed to.
>Now you’re falling for silly notions of equality.
I said nothing about equality.
> there was a popular opinion that if slavery were eliminated and blacks were left unprovided for, they would simply die out. To some degree, this probably would have happened
It might have happened. But unless whites decided to round the blacks up and kill them, it seems more likely that the blacks would not have died off completely, but would rather have muddled along in the way that they currently are in Western and Central Africa.
>except that well-meaning whites in the South created segregation, and blacks were essentially managed by upper class whites and kept from direct competition with whites.
Segregation, whatever its impact on blacks, was a policy that was naturally to the benefit of lower class whites whites. But because now lower class whites have nothing, it seems unrealistic to advocate that the government actually take an active interest in their well-being, much less to reorganize American society in accordance with their interests.
>Poor whites have generally been able to fend for themselves when they needed to.
Like when?
“I said nothing about equality.”
You’re equating the abilities of poor whites with those of blacks.
“Segregation, whatever its impact on blacks, was a policy that was naturally to the benefit of lower class whites whites. But because now lower class whites have nothing, it seems unrealistic to advocate that the government actually take an active interest in their well-being, much less to reorganize American society in accordance with their interests.”
Rubbish. Blacks were the primary beneficiaries of segregation. Black businesses, churches, schools, newspapers, places of recreation, etc. flourished under segregation, where they would have been non-existent if they had to compete directly with white establishments. Now, these things primarily exist because they are subsidized by the government, corporate interests and white foundations. The black history museum in my town ran up $50 million in debt that was forgiven. Then a bunch of corporate and foundation money was put together to buy it back out of bankruptcy. Now a white-directed board is running it.
“Like when?”
Most of the Western world for the past two millennia. Ireland? Scotland? Poor whites have existed in Appalachia for a long time.
>You’re equating the abilities of poor whites with those of blacks.
Well, they are both poor, aren’t they? The only important difference that I can detect between poor whites and poor blacks is that the latter are much more impulsive and violent than the former. Other than that, they’ve both got low IQs, high rates of alcohol and drug abuse, etc..
>Rubbish. Blacks were the primary beneficiaries of segregation. Black businesses, churches, schools, newspapers, places of recreation, etc. flourished under segregation, where they would have been non-existent if they had to compete directly with white establishments.
Understand what I’m saying. I agree that segregation was good for most blacks, except for maybe the high IQ ones, but the point here is that segregation was not implemented in order to benefit blacks. It was there to benefit whites, especially middle and lower class whites.
Now of course the size of the white middle class has shrunk almost to non-existence, and the overwhelming majority of these formerly middle class whites are now lower class whites. And these whites, both the newly lower class ones, and the ones who were always lower class, are in no position to demand that society is reorganized in accordance with their interests, given that at this point, they’re so weak that they should consider themselves lucky that those of them who are still employed have had their jobs taken by a 70 IQ Indian peasant.
>Most of the Western world for the past two millennia. Ireland? Scotland? Poor whites have existed in Appalachia for a long time
Read A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark to see what the West, but especially England, has been doing to its whites for the past 2 millennia, up until the advent of the welfare state.
“Well, they are both poor, aren’t they? The only important difference that I can detect between poor whites and poor blacks is that the latter are much more impulsive and violent than the former. Other than that, they’ve both got low IQs, high rates of alcohol and drug abuse, etc..”
“Understand what I’m saying. I agree that segregation was good for most blacks, except for maybe the high IQ ones, but the point here is that segregation was not implemented in order to benefit blacks. It was there to benefit whites, especially middle and lower class whites.”
I don’t agree. It might have been sold to poor whites as being of a benefit to them, but really, they remained poor the entire time. They had more political power, but it didn’t benefit them financially. The real intention, I believe, was to make the best of a bad situation, devise a system where two disparate groups could live a parallel, but separate existence in the same area, and avoid a bloodbath or situation where masses of blacks starved to death.
“Now of course the size of the white middle class has shrunk almost to non-existence, and the overwhelming majority of these formerly middle class whites are now lower class whites. And these whites, both the newly lower class ones, and the ones who were always lower class, are in no position to demand that society is reorganized in accordance with their interests, given that at this point, they’re so weak that they should consider themselves lucky that those of them who are still employed have had their jobs taken by a 70 IQ Indian peasant.”
You’re making Kevin Williamson’s disgusting argument. If you’re white and not rich, you deserve to die. If you’re white and work a blue collar job or do menial labor, start shooting heroin because your life is about to get a whole lot worse. The problem with these arguments is that there are a lot of people in the world, and with few exceptions, they are all replaceable. When the intelligent Indian or Chinaman willing to live in a studio apartment and make 35k a year comes for your job, are you going to be ok with it? Because that is where it is going…
>I don’t agree. It might have been sold to poor whites as being of a benefit to them, but really, they remained poor the entire time. They had more political power, but it didn’t benefit them financially.
It didn’t have to benefit them financially in order to benefit them. In fact, the very presence of blacks has always harmed poor whites economically. Yet they did benefit in many ways by having the blacks segregated, and in fact it was always they who were the most avid and uncompromising supporters of segregation.
>The real intention, I believe, was to make the best of a bad situation, devise a system where two disparate groups could live a parallel, but separate existence in the same area, and avoid a bloodbath or situation where masses of blacks starved to death.
Yes, this is what you believe. But the reality is that segregation was not conceived with the interests of blacks in mind. It was crafted by and for whites, mainly middle and lower class whites. And in any case it is absurd to suggest that blacks would have starved to death without segregation, seeing as how their labor as sharecroppers was in high demand, whether segregation was implemented or not. Blacks would have been employed and therefore fed anyway.
>You’re making Kevin Williamson’s disgusting argument. If you’re white and not rich, you deserve to die. If you’re white and work a blue collar job or do menial labor, start shooting heroin because your life is about to get a whole lot worse.
Poor whites don’t deserve to die, and they shouldn’t do heroin, but certainly no one owes them a living.
>The problem with these arguments is that there are a lot of people in the world, and with few exceptions, they are all replaceable.
Non sequitur. Everyone may or may not be replaceable, but if they are, that doesn’t mean that there’s a problem with these arguments.
>When the intelligent Indian or Chinaman willing to live in a studio apartment and make 35k a year comes for your job, are you going to be ok with it? Because that is where it is going…
The most that these intelligent Indian and Chinese workers can do is undercut the salaries of people working in high IQ professions, but they can’t replace them. Only the low IQ types will be getting replaced, at least for the foreseeable future.
MD, in no modern technological society can the lower end of the gene pool thrive.
Blame computers and automation if you like but technology creates very few jobs compared to how many it destroys.
Take Craigslist. Its basically destroyed the revenue stream of every single newspaper. in exchange it created about 30 high end jobs.
You tell me if this is a good trade off.
Fact is every new piece of technology destroys jobs and shrinks the economy through demand starvation. This means a bigger state
Once that state implodes, the urban areas are going to be destroyed unless some power can keep the brittle food channels and distribution open
Its not possible for Chicago say to drive out to farms to loot food or for them to make anyone plant a new crop and we no longer have a grain reserve,
The rest of the world certainly can’t meet the demand either unlike tiny Yugoslavia, there’s is no one to bail us out
In time it will settle down into enclaves but at first a real collapse without dictatorship means mass famine and deaths on a massive scale do to violence, hunger, privation and disease,
So the author is correct , it won’t be balkanized , it will implode. After a time, new pieces will form and new nations of course,
Those will be mostly homogeneous I think but that is another story.
Nobody said it would be easy, or quick. America already is Balkanized to a large degree, and low-level civil war or race war is going on all around us. This country is shockingly vulnerable to an escalation of these events, if you’ve been paying attention. For all the scaremongering about State surveillance that goes on in Alt-Right circles, we have a regime that is uniquely incompetent when it comes to governance. As the situation deteriorates, local actors will increasingly take its place. Therein lies our opportunity.
America is not Balkanized to a large degree. America is very mixed, especially in the Southern half of the country and 95% of urban areas. You can talk about Balkanization occuring on the order of cities or towns, but definitely not on the order of the whole continent — not unless you’re using a 500-1000 year timeline, in my opinion, but that’s not foreign affairs or geopolitics anymore, that’s history. Different frame, different toolset.
There is a low-level race war going on, but that race war can intensify almost without limit without requiring any kinds of homogeneous national states to form. That is why civil war is really not such a great outcome for anybody.
Only egghead academics are talking about Balkanization of the entire continent, but it’s definitely happening on a local scale right now. Civil war may not be an optimal outcome for any side at the moment, but that still doesn’t mean it won’t escalate.
“Only egghead academics are talking about Balkanization of the entire continent.”
Not so sure about that. Most people talking about Balkanization of the entire continent are fringe ethnonationalist activists, a large number of whom frequent these underground circles of ours.
“Balkanization” on a local scale doesn’t really make sense because the word is supposed to refer to a large region or country breaking into subdivisions. That’s why it comes from the word “Balkan,” referring to the Balkans, where that happened frequently. I get what you mean by saying “local Balkanization” (I say it too sometimes, semi-seriously), but you’re torturing the word a bit. That torture of the word has happened a lot anyway, but it’s an important distinction if we don’t want to get confused all the time.
What you’re describing is feudalisation much like the collapse of the WRE.
The big boys stepped in to help the new chief of DC Metro fire 30 top managers. More on the way. Senator Cardin of Maryland and Rep. Connolly of Fairfax County VA, both Democrats, stood behind the shakeup. (These politicians paradoxically support massive amounts of non-european immigration. Because magic dirt.) The Washington Post kinda agreed but hedged enough for plausible deniability should the wheel of fortune turn once again. So far, the NAACP, ACLU, Jackson, Sharpton, Obama’s Justice Department, et. al. have not called anyone a racist. To my knowledge the SPLC have yet to declare the Metro Board a hate group. And there are no disparate impact lawsuits, yet.
I have to say I was surprised by the ballsyness. There’s a lesson to be learned here: If liberal whites want something bad enough they will actually fight entrenched Negroes head on. Cardin and Connolly may have been getting so many complaints from their liberal constituents that even they mustered some courage.
On the other hand, could Trump have been seen as the real threat looming on the horizon? If you think this is bad, us firing a few managers, just wait and see what these racist, bigot haters are going to do. Oh, the horror, the horror.
“If liberal whites want something bad enough they will actually fight entrenched Negroes head on.”
This is true, which just underscores that we shouldn’t forget the race war isn’t between whites and blacks, it’s between one kind of whites and another kind of whites, both using various non-white groups as political auxiliaries in the battle against the other (though one group uses them a lot, lot more).
The real problem is that liberal whites just want less and less as each year goes by. Abdication of life.
We’ll see a constant, low-level simmering violence — the Brezhnevian sclerosis of violence — in our formerly shared public spaces. Homogenous rural areas and wealthy, gentrified cities & suburbs will be fine. But the places where everyone once interacted or is forced to interact — non-wealthy urban and suburban areas which transition between cities & the countryside, interstates and highways and especially the box-store shopping sprawl that feed off traffic, sports arenas and festivals, government offices, non-wealthy hospitals, non-wealthy schools, etc. — will see generally stupid, seemingly random, and increasingly barbaric acts of violence.
The frustration that underlies Brezhnevian sclerosis builds up in everyone, and will come out in the places where they have to interact with others.
The wealthy will turn inward, small towns and rural areas will self-police, but the transition zones will be terrible.
Imagine what a shipping yard or truckstop near the US-Mexican border looks like now. Now insert that tense, potentially criminal, potentially violent energy to any and all small to mid-size cities in the country.
In America, particular communities or groups simply aren’t unified enough to reach a critical mass for any sort of organization or collective withdrawal on a Balkan-war type level. And barring some unforseen factor, violence will never reach a Balkan-war critical mass.
It will just become an increasingly loud part of the background noise of life in Weimerica.
Potentially more pessimistic than my prediction, but yes, you have the right idea. The whole “America will Balkanize after Civil War 2.0 and everybody will get their homogeneous national state!” idea is 90% revolutionary mythology and 10% reality.
It depends on the death rate and who dies really.
I’ve seen reasonable guesstimates in the 200 million range, that much death will mean basically extermination of the urban population entirely . The US will be homogeneous small towns and a few minor cities and villages at that point. It will resemble Eastern Europe and those towns will be highly homogeneous.
Right now less than 2% of the population is a farmer and only 15% actually packages and distributes food. Its brittle beyond measure
And such crashes and famines are historically quite plausible, Rome went from one of the mightiest cities on Earth with a million people to a place where a few people, around ten thousand eked out a living and scavenged stone . That is a 99% casualty level by the way.
The entire US wouldn’t drop that far of course not everywhere but we could take one hell of a hit until smaller farms, gardens and such popped up.
Also it depends on when it happens, genetic engineering is getting almost easy. If someone uses it? uses CRISPR ? Things could get a lot worse.
Like an idiot I forgot something kind of important.
In the end the remains of the US will be balkanized but until than, I agree with the author. The US is not homogeneous enough to support it at this time and without a crash.
Even if somehow a highly unlikely, Trumpist reformation happens or the PGNR occurs it still won’t balkanize as the reformed US would be more homogeneous not less
The peculiar conditions don’t exist here,
America are not sufficiently geographically concentrated to divide the national state into a handful of smaller states.
There is no Southern Confederation, no Cascadia, no Republic of the Great Lakes, no New Afrika, except in the minds of online ideologues. The largest state on the North American continent is the United States Federal Government, and the second-largest most plausible functioning state within USG is a hypothetical City-State of New York. Whatever regional differences existed in America have been effectively subdued by the leveling power of the federal government since 1861.
Agree. I don’t even see civil war as a possibility. Sporadic protests are as much as anyone can expect.
Marcus Yurayus in 290 AD: “The Roman Empire cannot disintegrate.”
And there would have been every reason to believe it, too.
To be fair, it took the Roman empire almost 80 years to fully disintegrate after 290, and even then it was brought back as a figment of the imagination some centuries later.
Yuray’s prognosis deals with near future (our lifetime and our kids lifetime) events, which are the only ones that are possible to predict. Eventually, the US will split up in some racial and cultural way just like the Roman empire and Europe, and those ME countries, and probably South American countries too (France and Germany and Britain didn’t come happen overnight you know). It’s just going to take a long time to happen.
For the record, AntiDem has been mistakenly equating Balkanization with disintegration for a while now. The whole point of the post above is that distintegration is the future. It just won’t lead to Balkanization. The two are very different beasts.
If you mean that the United States won’t disintegrate *exactly* the same way that Yugoslavia did, I already knew that. So did anyone with a brain in their heads. Different situation, different culture, different history, different geography, different demographics. That’s why history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. So the precise manner in which the United States disintegrates will be its own. Fair enough. But how is that a point that’s worth two full-length essays?
I understand you may be trying to raise the level of the discusion here, but you’ve missed the point.
1) Yuray defines Balkanization as a specific class of state disintegration paths characterized by split into distinct ethnic regions on the scale of small European states, a larger scale than cities or neighborhoods but smaller than the disintegrating state.
2) Yuray argues (well, in my opinion) that this class of paths is not likely to contain our future path. Our ethnicities are too finely mixed even at the city level. Disintegration will proceed differently.
3) You argue that he is talking about all paths (“Empire cannot disintegrate”) then just one path (“exactly the same way”), missing the intermediate (1).
4) You dismiss the argument as trivial.
I personally encounter a fair number who consider the class of Balkanization disintegration paths as quite likely to include ours. Two short essays is honestly not much to seriously discuss the point, especially since on a medium like the internet, even if only 0.1% of the potential audience is engaged enough to appreciate both, that’s still enough to make the writing worthwhile. Speaking for myself, I’m in that 0.1% or whatever number it is (I’m guessing more).
This is a fair and clear review of my thoughts and intentions. Thanks!
The problem with analogies between the U.S. and Yugoslavia, Lebanon, or Syria is that the conflict in those areas is/was between identity groups with roughly equal genetic abilities. That’s a big part of the reason they can drag on so long; the combatants have roughly equal abilities.
But in the U.S. we’re mostly talking about whites versus blacks versus Latinos. And I think it’s obvious that in an all-out struggle, whites can defeat blacks and Latinos, separately or together, quite easily. The current situation is one where there is more or less continual ongoing aggression by blacks towards whites, but virtually none by whites towards blacks because whites have so much to lose by it. If things get bad enough the white men no longer have anything to lose and begin to fight, no holds barred, it’s going to be over very quickly for the rest.
The only wrinkle would be if foreign powers supported blacks or Latinos against whites. But even then, I like whites’ odds. I don’t recall offhand a war that whites ever lost to another race, at least not in the last five hundred years or so. All the war damage has been inflicted by whites on other whites.
Nearly half of the white people in this country hate themselves, their ancestors, and their culture. The old 60’s revolutionaries + their useless kids + their little twittering SJW grand-kids = a pretty significant chunk of the white population. These people would gladly let a savage lop off their head if it proved they were sufficiently progressive and not a racist. Throw in the Marxist social justice Catholics, the white sportsball class who worships black athletes, and the bargain-basement whites whose culture has been replaced by black ghetto culture (even if many of them profess to dislike blacks,) etc. and the number of white people, proud of their history and culture, and willing to stand up and say so, might be 10% of the US population.
“Nearly half of the white people in this country hate themselves, their ancestors…These people would gladly let a savage lop off their head if it proved they were…not a racist.”
Wrong on several counts, the first being that whites that hate themselves or their culture compose half of the white population of the US. I actually think that they comprise a very small percentage, but are very vocal and visible. Further, SJW talk is a powerful form of virtue signaling, and thus many prominent people who don’t really believe the ideology will parrot it for advancement.
And even of the ones who talk down their culture, only a small percentage would be OK with being killed. That is surely quite rare.
“Throw in the Marxist social justice Catholics…”
Hilariously, 60s Klan style wrong. Most of your true liberals are mainline Protestants and Jews. Most Catholics who are Democrats are so for economic reasons, i.e. they’re in Unions. They’re about as race realist as you can get, as they put up with quite a bit of diversity, and often are quite socially conservative to boot. They aren’t Republicans because R’s tend to fuck with their livelihood (not taking sides on this, just relating the perception).
To demonstrate my point, consider the Supreme Court: EVERY SINGLE CONSERVATIVE JUSTICE IS CATHOLIC. Even Clarence Thomas is Catholic. The Liberal side is made up almost entirely of Jews.
“Wrong on several counts, the first being that whites that hate themselves or their culture compose half of the white population of the US. I actually think that they comprise a very small percentage, but are very vocal and visible. Further, SJW talk is a powerful form of virtue signaling, and thus many prominent people who don’t really believe the ideology will parrot it for advancement.
And even of the ones who talk down their culture, only a small percentage would be OK with being killed. That is surely quite rare. ”
My comment about a savage lopping off their heads was a bit of hyperbole. In fact, they are quite content disappearing altogether. LGBT’d, aborted, birth-controlled, OD’d, etc. out of existence. I think you severely underestimate the success of Marxist indoctrination and western self-loathing.
“Hilariously, 60s Klan style wrong. Most of your true liberals are mainline Protestants and Jews. Most Catholics who are Democrats are so for economic reasons, i.e. they’re in Unions. They’re about as race realist as you can get, as they put up with quite a bit of diversity, and often are quite socially conservative to boot. They aren’t Republicans because R’s tend to fuck with their livelihood (not taking sides on this, just relating the perception).
To demonstrate my point, consider the Supreme Court: EVERY SINGLE CONSERVATIVE JUSTICE IS CATHOLIC. Even Clarence Thomas is Catholic. The Liberal side is made up almost entirely of Jews.”
I am Catholic, but I am capable to recognizing the incredible faults of American Catholics and their leaders. The Klan was right in hating Catholics in the 1960’s. Look at the pictures of the “civil rights” marches. Catholic priests and nuns are leading many of the protests. Your explanation that Catholics are Dems because they are in unions ceased being true 20 years ago. Unions are barely relevant in the private sector, and most of these have been co-opted by the open borders, globalization crowd. If Catholics are still Dems for economic/union reasons, they are fools. The younger Catholics at my church are as about as far from “race realist” as you can get. They are “social justice” Catholics and they love the Marxism of Pope Francis and the Pope worship of John Paul. Most of them really disliked Benedict. Of course, the Republican Party is awful, as well, but at least they pretend to care about abortion and social issues.
Anthony Kennedy, Sotomayor, and John Roberts are abysmal justices and Catholic. William Brennan was terrible. Alito, Scalia, and Thomas might be considered “conservative,” but they are/were statists and not at all Constitutionalists. I guess the best would have had to have been Roger Taney, who at least attempted to follow the Constitution, though Lincoln thwarted him.
You’re missing an important historical counterpoint to Bosnia – Greater India.
In 1947 Pakistan was created and a massive internal population transfer took place. Muslims moved north, Hindus moved South. The failure, as it was, was that the population migration was not complete and India was left with a rump Muslim population, which, to this day, causes it numerous headaches.
The solution for the US, if it still has wealth and a “functioning” government is to accept the new reality and create something like the “Resolution Trust Corporation” which buys the home/business of Person A in Territory X who must move to Territory Y and sells him the home/business of Person B who is moving in the reverse direction, to Territory X.
There’s no easy-peasy solution on offer, so forced population transfer is the only way to arrive at a peaceful and stable outcome. The trick here is to be as equitable as possible and minimize disruption in order to get this population transfer over with as quickly as we can. The people who agree to move are going to be the least headache for society, while the people who have roots in an area and are adamant that they’re not leaving, are going to cause endless headaches. You thought eminent domain evictions were bad, this will be much worse, but the alternative is a never-ending Bosnia for these people.
Now, because we know that people are prone to making the same mistakes, over and over again, we have to insure that population migration via immigration doesn’t, through neglect, result in creation of multicultural states once again. If the US divides into racial enclaves and there remain many whites who are are committed to diversity, there will likely remain a section of the country which is diverse. Those who choose to stay in their multicultural society need to be locked in forever, otherwise we begin anew what we currently know as the Purple State Effect, they’ll flee their multicultural failed state, arrive in a homogeneous state and then agitate politically to alter the homogeneous state into a multicultural state and thus give birth to the same problems which led to the destruction of the US.
You bring up an interesting point, but it just comes back to sane governance and the incentives in favor of sane states. A Resolution Trust Corporation would be an excellent development — the only question is whether or not it would be able to work and make a profit. Do the incentives make sense? The only way to find out is to start such a corporation.
The dystopian situation described above worked for years and decades in Bosnia, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere, simply because the momentum to switch up the equilibrium was not there.
In any case, that’s the problem for a Resolution Trust Corporation to solve. Best of luck to them.
You bring up an interesting point, but it just comes back to sane governance and the incentives in favor of sane states.
We’ll never see this from the present system. Too much diversity in political thought. This can only arise after a coup and from a strongman who is intent on breaking up the US into various enclaves and will have the backing of the military to enforce population transfers. This means that in order for this to be the best road forward, the existing situation has to be on the order of Sarajevo.
Too many people are committed to multiracialism and multiculturalism as high ideal states. They will, like communists before them, excuse all of the failings and harm caused by their system because they’ve been propagandized into believing that their system is the most highly evolved and that they. as supporters of the system, are the most enlightened of all people. They would never go along with the idea of forced population transfer, they would instead devote their efforts, doubling down, to making the existing system work. Doubling down on stupid is not a good bet.
A Resolution Trust Corporation would be an excellent development — the only question is whether or not it would be able to work and make a profit.
It doesn’t need to make a profit. When society is failing all around you you have to work under different rules. The point here is “do the least harm.” With most population transfer schemes people lose everything and so they have every reason to fight to the bitter end because the thought of starting with only 2 pennies to your name when you are 50 or 60 is soul crushing, you know that you will die a pauper somewhere.
The goal here is to take person A, with a net worth of $200,000 and link him with a counterpart, of same net worth, moving in the other direction, to effect a swap of assets. The black locksmith in Seattle swaps a locksmith shop with the white locksmith in Atlanta rather than each staying in place, defending their businesses, or homes, to the last in burnt out cities because to do otherwise leaves them penniless.
Blacks will never leave whites voluntarily. Never.
Hence the forced population transfer policy.
The counterpoint to your argument is that many whites won’t want to leave their towns, regions. If the South is ceded to blacks, think of the resistance from the whites who have to be moved to the East Coast or the Midwest.
No one takes cod liver oil voluntarily, your mother has to jam it down your throat because she thinks it is good for you. Same thing here.
The scheme will either have to make a profit or be backed by overwhelming force. For-profit ethnic population swaps do not have a history, as far as I know. The typical method is overwhelming force, sometimes employed by two states to do a population swap (i.e. 1920s Greece-Turkey).
I’m not quite sure which is more likely to manifest itself, especially since the only extant state in the area has a towering vested interest in exactly the crappy situation described above. In any case I’ve limited myself to describing the problem to be solved thus far rather than the best means of solving it.
I’ll second that this is an interesting alternative to look at. The possibility that heterogeneity might increase abruptly in the course of disintegration is worth examining. The Greater India example, migration of existing groups in the direction of heterogeneity, is one possibility. An opposite would be the emergence of new group identifications based on large-scale heterogeneities currently hidden behind our usual ways of looking at things. I share Yuray’s concerns about the specific form of a “Resolution Trust Corporation,” but more approaches of a similar type may be conceivable.
An opposite would be the emergence of new group identifications based on large-scale heterogeneities currently hidden behind our usual ways of looking at things.
Some classification schemas are more permanent than others. What is included in the category of Rock n Roll or popular music or jazz is far more fuzzy than trying to jam a cow and a pig and a chicken into one category of animal suitable for butchering. Beef and pork will always be different from each other and the two will be distinct from poultry and we won’t find a way to make them all together so that the present meanings don’t matter.
That’s a long, roundabout, way of addressing the issues of racial differences.
http://i.imgur.com/aGJJALL.gif
http://i.imgur.com/ZHPbAs3.jpg
This is always with us. You can’t erase this away and still have a functioning society. Whatever new group identity you devise the old group characteristics will still be acting within the new group and will work to create differences that you’re trying to erase.
No need to argue this point to me, you’re among realists here. What I had in mind was multiethnic coalitions only cohesive enough to form states intolerant of non-coalition members and no more. Discovery of complementary cohesion rather than erasure.
Recall that this milieu generally takes the categories in your linked tables, like ‘white’, to be multiethnic aggregates rather than unitary, reasoning along the lines of Albion’s Seed and its like.
I appreciate this article, I really do.
That being said, we are trying to imagine what the future will be like using our present understanding of the world today. While you might as well end up being correct in your analysis, you have just as much of a chance to be wrong.
How can we talk about solutions that haven’t been thought up yet? We can’t- just as much as people hundreds of years ago envisioned instant communication around the world but couldn’t imagine that a thing called ‘the internet’ would get us there.
The future is ours to write.
This is a bit of a non-comment that you’ve written here. Yes, it’s true that nothing is certain. Yes, it’s true that the future is ours to write. But so what? It sounds like you have an action-oriented frame of mind. If that’s the case — perhaps you are my activist for the Cascadian Empire — then take the problems described above into account before you execute any course of action. Accurate information and reasoning imrpoves your chances of success.
I am not much for something like a ‘Cascadian Empire’. As far as I’m concerned, White Americans have a right to every single inch of soil in this country- bought and paid for by centuries of blood, sweat, and tears.
It was not in our ancestor’s nature to capitulate and I don’t think it should be in ours. While right now the task at hand seems insurmountable, I think that the history of European civilization can attest to our ability of being able to overcome nearly any obstacle, no matter how long it takes.
Do you think that Asians in Silicon Valley or Mestizos in South Central LA would be willing to die for that land, especially in the face of tanks, drones, and whatever else? Maybe some, but I would figure that many would pack up and leave because the only thing they are really tied to in this country are the opportunities.
What matters most is the will to fight. As life gets tougher for white males in this country and there are more opportunities for alternative media to red pill them (ex: this site), we will see an ever increasing number of ready and willing men. And if violence actually does occur, who would we be fighting against? Transgenders and gays? Females? Fantasy land liberals and Harvard graduates? Low IQ third-world immigrants?
More importantly, would these two groups actually be playing by the same rules of warfare? As recent history shows, the Left isn’t really willing to get their hands dirty. So I do not think so.
This is all really a thought experiment of course and I myself don’t condone any violence at this point in time. But what will the world look like 10-20 years from now?
To answer your last question, I think the most likely scenario is a lot like the one I described above. I can’t disagree with the rest of what you said.
You miss the obvious polarity. It is between rural and urban/suburban. A rural secession and siege focusing on major highways would shut down the country and starve out the urbanites. The war could be won in weeks.
This is a pretty delusional comment. Pretty much all of America’s economic activity is centered in its urban parts at this point, and rural America is no longer populated by independent farmers but white trash and the most backwards blacks imaginable. These latter folks are in no position to “shut down the country and starve out the urbanites”.
Irving, your city roots are showing
62 million people are still considered Rural and there are plenty of small towns too, organized, highly functional with good social comity.
Also the militias have publicly discussed the options in this matter, it won’t come from out of left field in any case.
Also less than 2% of the population are farmers. While a rural uprising probably can’t happen as Hart thinks, a massive deliberate Holodomor style famine possibly could.
I don’t think the Feds would organize it though I’m also not so sure that a modest force couldn’t actually disrupt food supplies.
However in any case the cities are simply death traps waiting to be sprung, decaying infrastructure, “die-versity” corruption and heavily dependent on outside supplies. They actually contribute anti-value to society , degradation and are parasites of the worst sort and that instability leaves them vulnerable.
If you want to see the city of the future today, try Detroit only with no industry or EBT.
However the State is probably strong enough to stop such a thing at this time thanks goodness and such an event would have to happen under other chaotic circumstances, a currency collapse, foreign EMP/nuke event or a civil war that kind of thing.
possible but not certain
You might want to read this:
According to this executive order, the federal government is now (2012) launching a program to beef up the production and deployment of the entire chain of command and procurement concerning any type of national emergency.
“The authority of the President under section 710(e) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2160(e), to determine periods of national defense emergency is delegated to the Secretary of Homeland Security.” – part v, 501 (b)
Linked here for the whole thing.
Oops, bad link. Try this.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/03/16/executive-order-national-defense-resources-preparedness
America will indeed be Balkanized once the petrodollar collapses, and global resource wars become the norm in the future. The United States cannot function without the current globalized corporate system, once that is over their empire is over, and when they stop being an Empire they will collapse.
You mainly study race, religion and ethnicity, but a second civil war in the US will more resemble the Russian one. It will due to ideological splits, de-legitimization of democracy, poverty ,complete lack of job opportunities due to automation, and new apartheid’s . The United States will also have to cede territories like California and Arizona to Mexico.
My prediction is the split will be between North (Second Rome type state centered on entirely on Wall Street) , South (petrostates centered on ethnic lines), West (specifically the silicon valley parts, that will acquire large political independence in the coming future) .
Verwoerd wrested control of SA from the British. Ian Smith took over Rhodesia when the Brits pulled out.
Endless violence of the Syrian/Bosnian sort happens when you have a bunch of warring ethnic groups *of roughly similar ability and merit*. When you have warring ethnic groups of *vastly different capability*, the outcome is much rosier.
Who’s going to resist a provisional government arising out of greater Spokane/Coeur d’Alene? Is it the scattered Chinese and Japanese who people the white neighborhoods? The small pockets of black poverty? The little Mestizo patches in the shadow of I-90? None of these. You’ll have de fact white rule in a matter of hours. The same across the Redoubt.
Yeah, LA will get ugly. Phoenix might bifurcate. South Chicago will be a no-go. But vast regions will coalesce. The whole of the Gulf Coast can hold its own, even if negro road gangs run wild in portions of the old Confederacy. Indianapolis will get their shit together right quick. Detroit will build a big-beautiful wall down the center of Eight Mile and life will continue as always.
I just don’t see any basis for the fatalism.