By Rod Dreher, European Conservative.
(Editor’s note: When peaceful advocates of free speech and reasoned debate are shot in cold blood, as Charlie Kirk was, we have reached a critical point in western societies. Rod Dreher offers a thought-provoking reflection on the issue)
Civil war is coming,” David Betz told a Budapest audience on Thursday night. And later: “Sorry, but I don’t think there is a peaceful solution at this time.”
Betz should know. The professor is head of the war studies department at King’s College London and is an academic expert in civil war. For years he has been writing that all the conditions for civil war to break out have been met in most Western countries; all that is needed is a spark.
Betz’s message has gained far more attention this year, thanks to podcast interviews like this one with Harrison Pitt of europeanconservative.com. What makes his warnings especially chilling is that he delivers them calmly, driven by data and logical analysis. He is the furthest thing from a wild-eyed apocalypticist shouting on a street corner.
By “civil war,” Betz does not mean two uniformed armies clashing. He’s talking instead about violent chaos, like Northern Ireland during the Troubles, Italy’s ‘Years of Lead,’ or the cataclysm that engulfed Yugoslavia as it broke up. He warned Budapesters that anyone who relishes the coming of civil war to get things sorted has no idea what they’re talking about. He predicted that millions will die in Europe, and millions more will be forcibly displaced, including through deportation.
Betz has been speaking mostly about civil war prospects in Great Britain and continental Europe, but his analysis also covers the United States. Civil war in America came a lot closer this week with the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Kirk, 31, was not a politician. He was an astonishingly effective advocate of mainstream conservative values, which he advanced chiefly by going onto college campuses and debating people who disagreed with him. Kirk was a cheerful man, unbending in his conservatism but respectful to his opponents, and beloved by countless men and women of his young generation.
And someone shot him to death in front of his wife and two young children for the crime of doing what every citizen in a democracy is supposed to do: peacefully debate issues in the public square. When a liberal once asked him why he visited college campuses to debate leftists, Kirk responded, “When we stop talking to each other and arguing our differences, that’s when people turn to violence, and I’m trying to prevent that.”