but he very clearly came out and said that multiculturalism was draining the nation's Social Capital it was feeding factionalism and polarization uh as well as uh destroying uh our uh National sense of a common pre-political loyalty uh and this in line with what subsequently uh has come along the Triumph of identity politics uh has has produced a very profound um volatile situation this coming Civil War which I talked about I imagine is going to have initially the qualities of a Latin American style Dirty War I is to say chronic uh uh characterized by chronic low-level violence but it will increasingly take on uh a strongly rural versus Urban uh dynamic as far as the islamist um uh factions are concerned they're somewhere in uh at the beginning of phase 2 there are parts of British cities where there is negotiated policing um the police either don't go go there or they go there uh when they go there they go with the uh with they prepare by Consulting with local leaders uh and and and uh and the like they're clearly in already in a phase of conducting semi-regular uh at regular attacks [Music] hello and welcome to the show I'm Peter Whit now my guest this week is David Betts who is Professor of war in the modern world at King's College London he's also a senior fellow of the foreign policy Research Institute he's the author of four books most recent of which is the guarded age and he's advised governments and the military um it's very impressive intro there uh David thank you very much for joining us um I wanted to talk to you and that's going to be the main subject of our of our talk uh about Civil War in particular um now basically it's one of those issues it seems to me that people are very very Lo to discuss because somehow discussing it makes it real you know um and there is this fear all the time that one is making you know into reality something which seems to be Unthinkable um but how long have you actually been studying specifically what brings about Civil War uh it depending how you look at it it's either 20 years or 10 years or three years right uh I I I've been a student of irregular warfare Insurgency counterinsurgency for effectively the entirety of my academic career so something over 20 something around 25 years put it that way yes um of course uh most of that uh effort was has been uh directed at understanding Insurgency in the context of foreign Societies in which the the uh the role of Britain is would would have been uh or was rather uh as an external um agent right uh it was about 10 years ago in the context of the Parliamentary Shenanigans over uh the implementation of the brexit uh um um um referendum that I began to think that there was something actually very critically ill about our own Society uh and to observe specifically that what those uh what those Mas ations on the part of the British British Elite at that time represented was effectively Elite o uh overreach which is a term often used in uh in discussion of uh domestic turmoil in foreign societies a situation in which Elites essentially have exceeded the boundaries of their own um of their um legitimate capability yes in in ways that had the tendency to undermine um uh broader faith in the coherence uh and the validity of the um status quo effectively uh and so I began to um uh look more and more at the domestic scene um at around that period I then became uh um uh began to write much more deliberately uh this was sort of I suppose initially a kind of apprehension that there was something in important going on here but it wasn't until relatively recently about three or four years ago I began to uh write about this uh systematically and to publish uh on on the issue of Civil War and specifically in Western countries for reasons that I'm happy to elaborate um uh on um uh further but suffice to say uh that that was that was something which came relatively recent and probably the publication which caught the most interest was one called Civil War comes to the West which I published in military strategy um that was a couple of years ago was it 2023 couple of years yes yes a couple of years ago so basically it begs the question should go at the deep end here if you like uh David uh what do you see is the possibility of being some form of civil war Civil convulsion happening in Britain I see the possibility as being very likely indeed um I can go into the statistics of that but um in in a moment if I just paint a a word picture uh beforehand uh before I get into the the the mathematics of it it might be it might be helpful yes my basic point is that the primary threat to the security of Britain uh to the security and prosperity of Britain today is not external um but internal specifically it is the threat of uh of Civil War and I've arrived at this calculation through analysis of the official sta uh official statistics of the British government itself on social attitudes on mainstream academic ideas about things like Social Capital so societal cohesion and political stability as well as long established theories of Civil War causation I'm not inventing theories uh about Civil War causation here I've simply read a lot of books about uh about the issue uh and applied it to um uh our own context um for reasons essentially that those things which The Civil Wars literature tends to point to as being causal uh are uh actually pretty obviously manifest in British society today the fact of the matter that the country is explosively societally configured David Cameron identified the main problem 10 years ago whatever his motives in do for doing so might be debate debated but he very clearly came out and said that multiculturalism was draining the nation's Social Capital it was feeding factionalism and polarization uh as well as uh destroying uh our uh National sense of a common political loyalty uh and this in line with what subsequently uh has come along the Triumph of identity politics uh has has produced a very profoundly um volatile situation nativist sentiments are uh increasingly manifested in a in a narrative of downgrading that is one of the most powerful causes of civil conflict um according to the ly all of the accident literature hello please excuse this brief Interruption but I'd be really grateful if you could please hit the Subscribe button and subscribe to our Channel our mission is vitally important and we must grow this channel to ensure that our content reaches the biggest possible audience the best way to do this is for you to subscribe it's totally free and in addition to subscribing if if you're able to donate or join our membership scheme please click on the link in the description or visit our website new culture forum.org do.uk we've got great plans ahead but we can't do it without your support from only £4 per month you'll receive a range of perks and benefits including exclusive content thank you so can I just uh can I just come in there David when you say I just I just want to be clear for everybody uh nativist sentiment in terms of downgrading meaning that basically the indigenous population feels that it is being basically downgraded yes effectively that that is exact that is exactly right if you want to have a picture of what uh uh what indigenous population might be you might just assume it to be that part of the population which is excluded from special dispensation under the recently announced uh sentencing guidelines yes um right it's not so I'm not being koi here it's not really mysterious yeah government is the government is extremely clear on on on um on these on these divisions which is why they are now effectively written into government regulation uh which is going to come into effect very shortly apparently so at any rate to continue this coming Civil War which I talked about I imagine is going to have initially the qualities of a Latin American style Dirty War I is to say chronic uh uh characterized by chronic low-level violence but it will increasingly take on uh a strongly rural versus Urban uh Dynamic the primary anti-status quo strategy to judge from uh the way these things are discussed amongst uh anti-status quo communities is will be to collapse the major cities through infrastructural attack causing cascading crisis uh uh leading to systemic failure and a period of mass chaos which they hope to wait out from the relative security of the rural Pro rural provinces the plausible effectiveness of this strategy should not be uh should not be dismissed it's uh destructively simple it's well reasoned it's practically Rel relatively straight forward to implement it's based on uh established techniques that are well well known uh it's aimed at Targets that are effectively uh unguarded uh and it um it builds upon it depends upon uh the existence of a tenuousness of the urban condition which urban studies Community the people in urban Studies have been talking about for 50 years so if we were to take just in in order of press you know in not in order of preference but if we were to take say a a a list of attributes of a society which is on which is on the prep precipice of Civil War it might look like something look something like this uh it would possess uh a situation of elite overreach as I described uh it would be characterized by a collapse of trust in that Society uh one would see High um rates of of polarization specifically uh and specifically of factional polar polarization which is a um uh very dangerous uh form of of polarization where people are no no longer disagreeing specifically over issues themselves but they are disagreeing on the basis of what they think is the consensus view within their own identity Community um in other words uh uh a particularly virulent form of political factionalization that is overlaid on some um on some other social societal fraction there is uh economic pressure uh which we can we can go into but I think is pretty uh pretty obvious economic pressure leads to expectation gaps particularly on the part of the youth population which now um is probably for for the most part is locked out of things uh the potential of things which were very reasonable Bal expectations of their parents like home ownership um certain sorts of per permanent employment the possibility also in in fact of of building their own families this is a very dangerous uh situation there is a plausible strategy uh there are techniques uh and tools simply techniques that are well understood and tools lying around um and so all of those things now now exist I think fairly undeniably uh to which I would add uh a further which is likely to occur probably over the next year which is a significant defeat in a major external War right um so all all of this together uh makes a an extremely volatile situation um it puts us right on the edge in my opinion yes uh you you started there by talking about Elite overreach uh and in terms of like the brexit vote and I would say also coming after that this uh attempt to swart it which I think changed a lot of people's views about what our institutions were um but I suppose that you could say I mean for example you just mentioned there the had justice week we had this new sentencing guidelines coming out which essentially uh well basically have completely destroyed the idea of equality before the law um and of course uh we've had last year these extraordinary sentences handed out to people who during the Civil disorder um of Southport um those were all examples are they not also of elite overreach would you say yes uh yes I think they are uh you one could interpret them in that way I mean in essence they are all they all reflect an increasing distance between the apprehensions preoccupations the basic beliefs uh of the elite as opposed to uh the uh non- Elite the mass yes uh where they're they're simply is a is you know they're talking past each other it it would seem um so yes is is the answer I think those uh reflect what I'm speaking of when I use the term Elite overreach yes um I wonder I mean this is might seem a very basic question to many people watching uh or even to you but um it is really important who would this who would this any kind of Civil War who would it be between because the reason I ask you is that in some ways if you as you described things uh we have a situation which could also be seen as being a possible Revolution which is sort of different is it not to a Civil War I mean it's basically people against PE the governing class it's subtly different maybe to a Civil War which tends to be you know well we all know what that is um who would it be between okay well I'm going to restrain the academic and me which would love to just spend the afternoon talking about distinctions between Civil War Revolution and and uh and and the like and and the fact of the matter is that Civil War within the literature is itself not particularly well defi well defined as as far as academics are concerned anyway I'm going to hold back on that because it's not going to be terribly interesting uh to your viewers and we'd eat up whatever remaining time was was left I use the the term Civil War uh because uh of the terms available I think it is the most uh the most appropriate but I don't deny the the uh the uh the fact that there are aspects of this which look uh uh which one might characterize just as easily as a a Revolt or specifically a a peasant Revolt a peasant Revolt is by definition a conservative uh uh Revolt um uh and I I mean in the sense of a traditional peasant peasant traditional peasant revolts are are usually um reactions against uh situations where uh Elites are seem to be changing the rules of the game without U uh against the without permission effectively a bit like what Tyler you know what the what Tyler Revolt peasants Revolt exactly that sort of that sort of situation uh so we might uh we we might well choose um um um different different terms and I'm not particularly uh dogmatic uh about that the most basic definition of a civil war is a war uh that is occurring between two or more belligerent who at the beginning of the conflict were under the same Sovereign Authority yeah um so if you if you just simply take it uh take that for what it's worth um or as a as a definition uh one can cover quite a lot a lot of things I think the more pertinent aspect of your question though was who who is this going to be um initially and already and basically at this stage I think we're talking about essentially um uh um relatively small factor relatively small factions within distinctive identity um uh distinctive communities identity groups uh specifically breaking along uh uh ethnic ethnic lines as I um spoke of and indeed as David Cameron was talking about when he talked about ghetto wiseed communities living in their silos and so on so initially uh and I think probably already now what we're talking about are are small fractions within those group groups that are uh highly radicalized that are that are intent on uh on on um that are intent on on violence the distinction the the the main split here now is we already have uh we already have a fairly active anti-status quo um uh violent movement within the Muslim Community in in in Britain that's why we've got 50,000 people on the terror watch list or roughly thereabouts let's say somewhere between 40 and 50,000 on the uh Terror watch list we've got a fairly regular occurrence of Terror uh of Terror attacks so on one on within uh one of these factions we already have a perfectly obvious readily identifi identifiable violent extremist faction that is attempting uh in various ways to uh to uh increase the tensions within Society to take further greater and greater control over its uh conscience Community um and and uh create a greater split the government has said a bunch of times that they're terribly concerned about the counter phenomenon a phenomenon which you might say say is in natural counterposition with that which is the nativist or the extreme right or however they uh they tend to charact characterize this this is essentially uh and by by this all they really mean is they're they're concerned with the emergence of uh of a white identity movement that essentially adopts uh fully the uh the uh the same uh the same patterns of behavior the same insistence that uh that uh essentially U uh a multicultural uh life is impossible uh for the country and begins therefore to conduct uh attacks these now we we we haven't really seen uh any of these that are terribly uh terribly significant um there have been there have been a handful but relatively speaking these are um these are uh rudimentary but the government is concerned that the that uh the seed is there the potential is there and I think they're perfectly right to be concerned that um to be concerned that about exactly those things um yes the major concern really is that whereas Islamic uh Islamic extremism or islamism that combination of uh of uh um Islam and fundamentalism and are poit and political [Music] fundamentalism uh is ultimately uh an extremist movement Within in a minority Community whereas the the the uh the emerging anti-status quo ideas Identity or identity movements within the white Community have the potential for Mass mobilization on account of the fact that that the white population is still um the majority uh population of the country um you need a you need a mass population to support a mass uh a mass movement so that combination of factors and particularly the potential for radicalization effectively of the majority Community is extremely worrisome from a societal cohesion from a from a from the perspective of someone who might be worried about the outbreak of uh of U substantial violent uh uh domestic political termoil um in your writing I mean and i' I've watched some of the other things you've done you very clearly sent out the kind of various stages um I know that you have you have indeed said that there are different kind of um theories about uh the starting of a civil war but the one that you came down on or rather the one that you used was actually chairman mes was it not um and I I wonder whether you could go through those stages with us they quite simple three stages aren't there and and at what stage do you think think we might be at at the moment if any I used the chairman Maes um model that because it is the most common model of Insurgency so um if you're if you're in a class University class on Insurgency or you're studying it in a military Staff College or something like that you'll hear uh you and you hear reference to something called classical Insurgency essentially what they're referring to is uh uh the maest model and it's very simple it has three phases the first phase is usually described as the U as the defensive phase or phase one is the defensive phase uh and it's defenses from the perspective of the Insurgent actor during this phase one what the uh what the Insurgent is doing is primarily political organization uh proz propaganda activities it is getting it house in order it is building its conscience Community by just just an academic word for people who listen to it um or the people that who whom it is trying to energize to mobilize uh so it's building up a it it's building up a structure it's working out its narratives uh it's uh on doing all these sorts of things in Phase One the Insurgent is uh usually uh not very Physically Active uh there might be a handful of you know pin prick attacks here and there um you know in order to obtain weapons or materials or something like that um often times there there is an alignment in the early stage uh in the very earliest stage between criminal groups and the Insurgent group because criminals tend to have uh access to muscle uh in ways that uh the the political political insurgents usually don't in the beginning phase two is uh so this and this can last a long time it may last it may last 5 years 10 years 50 years uh um then phase two is usually referred to as the stalemate uh and that's when uh attacks have begun to occur but the Insurgent forces um are um are not superior to the government Security Forces they don't have more muscle but they have the potential to create uh no-go areas they have stable base areas um they're beginning to build up a military structure they've got you know a um you know it might be a rudimentary military structure but they've got a fair number of tough guys uh who are reliable reasonably well armed can conduct uh operations um and again this might last a long time but it's when you start to see um uh ambushes on police stations for example or attacks on government figures judges lawyers media figures um that mix of uh so a mix of uh it becomes more physically uh active yeah and the third phase is the uh the usually called the offensive and that's when the Insurgent has built up sufficient uh material strength uh while while the counterinsurgent or the government has uh weakened to the extent that the Insurgent can contemplate actual uh peer-on-peer uh combat with uh with the security forces you know so that's the that's the classic maest Model and more or less tracks what happened in the Chinese Civil War and some other uh cases of Insurgency which we might give example of I think that uh Britain has very likely no chance whatsoever of uh going to a phase three um sort of civil Civil War uh largely because we don't we don't have the the kind of fractures that I'm talking about don't have uh a a defined political Geographic entity uh to attach themselves to you're not going to have North Umbria versus you know the north ver versus uh the South it isn't going to split that way it's much more complex as you said City sort of country versus City almost so I think the main the the main thing is going to be uh Urban versus rural uh and specifically I think London is the most is the most endangered if you look at just that the way power um you know power actual literal power not not not abstract political power flows um actual power uh in brit flows from the north to the South so our major power lines uh our gas lines uh compression stations all of that Associated infrastructure is essentially located in Rural and periurban areas uh and feeds um um uh giant uh and feeds that giant Metropolis in the South which is rather unstable at the best of times uh so you can imag what London might be like if you switch the power off yes yeah uh for a week or so uh a week or a couple of weeks and you do that five five or six times in a winter uh switch off the electricity the gas you disrupt the electric uh the transportation system um it will rapidly be it most estimation will just rapidly uh tear itself apart uh or at least that's the Assumption and is my working assumption when when I I think about you know red teaming uh the strategy of an Insurgent group but you asked where we where we are uh with respect to this uh the answer is I think that as far as the islamist um uh factions are concerned there somewhere in uh at the beginning of phase two there and we know this because there are plenty of no-go areas in the in in in Britain there are there are parts of British cities where there is negotiated police Poli in um the police either don't go go there or they go there uh when they go there they go with the uh with they prepare by Consulting with local leaders uh and and and uh and the like they're clearly in already in a phase of conducting semi-regular uh regular attacks um and clearly there is a large enough contingent of uh of uh Poss uh attackers to sustain a pretty gigantic internal uh security um uh Network covering as I said somewhere between 40 or 50,000 people at any given uh at any given time as far as the uh the uh the uh uh the other side the white identity groups I think we're somewhere in the middle of phase one probably in terms of uh Britain to be sentimental from minut it British always tended to Pride themselves rightly or wrongly on this sense of uh lack of political violence you know in the country and on being you know just a country that is evolved in some ways it's not true obviously we we did have a civil war um you know back in the 1640s but um you are from or America originally are are you not David no I'm Canadian originally yeah oh Canadian um well as a Canadian when you look at Britain are you surprised that you uh could possibly be able to apply this to this country does it surprise you uh yes yeah it does very much it it doesn't I I moved to Britain in um 1998 right and I feel it's been uh it's you know I feel very much at home here uh but I feel it's a it's a country that has uh changed enormously in in that in that period I can see you're nodding along and and almost everyone of your listeners has got to be nodding along to those stats yes it would be also also um so I'm not really saying anything that people don't uh people don't recognize yes I'm surprised I think it um I think it's very sort of it feels very out of character U out of national character ultimately though I think that the Brit British people have a seemingly accurate self-perception of be of themselves of being open and trusting uh people on an interpersonal level the the problem is I think that Elite discourse by contrast tends to the opposite so yeah um you look at our newspapers or the outpourings of our government the police forces are institutionally racist universities need to be decolonized Armed Forces culture is hostile to minorities haes de needs to be policed ever more vigorously and so on and so forth all of that in turn seems to require from the titular Nation a reflection on its past sins rectification of the supposed cause of all of these uh uh uh terrible things and redress of its harms and the matter is so widespread and so many in there are so many instances of this several of which we've already mentioned in the context of this discussion that you know listing them would just be tedious yeah um recently you know fairly recently it was even noted that landscape painting was um was racially charged uh yes also it seems to be as well actually if I just break in there that uh a lot of the um targets for those kind of cultural attacks uh tend to be quite specifically quite popular um cultural icons of Britain so it's not just any old author it's it's say Agatha Christie or it's Charles Dickens or it's these people who sort of mean something to the popular mind you know which I think is very very important that those are the ones that are chosen you landscape painting there consor again very much was a Target why well the most one of the most popular uh pictures in British homes was always the hay way um and uh it seems that these are the kind of targets that are always um always targeted yes uh and we shouldn't be surprised by that because you use the word icon so iconic destruction is is a is a perfectly well-known and understood strategy of of in of Insurgency it's terribly useful right uh right so when you're attacking each other um when communities are are attacking each other's icons what they're doing is they're uh increasing the the the they're uh they're destroying the bridging social capital in that Society so they're pulling those factions apart at the same time as they're at the same time they are uh building um essentially they're making it very it it makes it very difficult to hold a Centrist modern moderate position once you start to get in on icon destruction so there's kind of attack on Attack on totems is is very uh very destructive and very very powerful uh and also it's and it's not it's not coincidental it's quite deliberate if I was if I if you had asked me to write a strategy for how to create uh an Insurgent an Insurgency in a place that had some existing tensions or conflicts you know some areas uh I would I would I would suggest exactly that you would create you you would you would go after these things where that produce outsize emotional reactions when they are disparaged uh or uh destroyed yes I think actually that is that is a that is a very a very important point that basically I you know if if people wanted to bring about extreme anger should we say uh this is the way to do it isn't it and quite often it almost looks like the government is kind of just egging it on you know it's extraordinary the things they're doing um David we have to actually um uh call it today here now I think this is probably the most important subject we've discussed for a long time on the new culture forum and I I would just sort of hope that maybe you would uh not mind doing a return talk uh maybe later in the year uh when you have time um because uh there's a lot more to cover unfortunately we are rather restricted for time on this but um can I thank you very much for joining us um and uh I know this is going to get a lot of comments from our viewers and I hope therefore to see you perhaps later in the year if that's possible yeah sure uh I'd be happy to come in and and do some stats and maths with you on probability if you like or anything else you're interested in it's a it's not a pleasant uh it's not a pleasant talk topic to talk about but it's I think terrifically important that we oh hugely yeah thank you very very much indeed uh that is Professor David beter um and uh that's it for the show this week but uh I hope you join us next week and uh in the meantime have a good week won't you bye-bye our mission of the new culture forum is and always has been to defend and celebrate Britain's history culture and its people and indeed Western Civilization at a time when both are under sustained attack we have grown from Small Beginnings to become the country's most influential right leaning cultural Think Tank our content is watched and read by some of Britain's most influential political figures but 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