By Rod Dreher, European Conservative. (image: Unsplash)
Ordinary Europeans are starting to admit what their leaders won’t: civil unrest may be closer than anyone dares to say.
Two months ago, the English podcast host Louise Perry hosted David Betz, a professor at King’s College, London, and an expert in civil wars. The topic? “The Coming British Civil War.” Betz argues that the United Kingdom now has all the traditional hallmarks of a society on the verge of violent civil conflict. He mentions the collapse of faith in British institutions, the two-tier justice system, Islamic radicalization, and the polarization wrought by official multiculturalism, among other factors.
The YouTube version of the interview has had nearly 200,000 views—so many that Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley noticed, writing in his April 3 column that events both in Britain and on the European continent (he cites a French court banning Marine Le Pen from running for the presidency) are driving things to a reckoning.
Writes Stanley:
Every conspiracy theory is confirmed, and without a democratic outlet for anger—seeing their aspirations limited and being too poor to emigrate—where else will a militant faction of angry whites go but to violence?
Nearly every educated English person I know under the age of forty is seeking to emigrate, having lost hope that their country has the wherewithal to pull out of its cultural and economic crisis. In Oxford recently, an American student told me, “If the ruling class here openly hated the British people, it’s hard to know what they would be doing differently.”
Spending a week in France last month, I recalled the scandalous open letter that 20 retired French generals and 1,000 active duty service members released in 2021, warning that their country was headed to civil war unless the government acted firmly against Islamic radicals in the suburbs, and turned away from divisive policies driven by so-called “anti-racism.”
In a number of private conversations with ordinary French people—this was before the Le Pen verdict—I brought up the Betz interview (none had heard about it), and asked them if they foresaw civil war coming to France. Nearly all of them said yes. They said so with an unnerving sense of calm, as if they accepted it as a matter of course. When I complimented one couple on their country, and told them that one day I would like to live in France, they responded in unison, “No!” Stay in Hungary, they said; you’ll be safe there.
You would never know from the mainstream media that this sort of sentiment is bubbling among the population of Europe and the UK. In his interview with Perry, Betz says that many people suffer from what he calls “normalcy bias”—that is, the belief that such a thing cannot happen here. Oh, but it can!