Nigel Jones is a writer, historian and journalist.
Many experts agree that the United States is closer today to civil war than at any time since it’s actual civil war in the 1860s.
That conflict, between the Federal northern states and the Confederate south over the issue of slavery, killed more Americans than all its foreign wars put together – including the two world wars, Vietnam and the Korean War.
Today, the nation is as deeply divided as it was then, with the MAGA movement that twice propelled Donald Trump to the White House accused by the Woke, antifa Left of being Nazis, and university campuses becoming scenes of conflict rather than seats of learning.
The brutal slaying of conservative activist and Internet influencer Charlie Kirk while he spoke at a university in Utah last week has sent waves of horror across the nation, and brought the US face to face with the reality that a society armed to the teeth with lethal weapons is on the brink of an internal war between fellow Americans.
Trump’s former Chief strategist, the right-wing ideologue Steve Bannon, who heads an activist outfit frankly named ‘the War Room’ declared unambiguously in the wake of Kirk’s murder: ‘We are at war’ while Trump himself once again denounced the ‘terrorism’ of what he calls ‘radical left-wing lunatics’ and vowed to crush it.
The President takes the killing of Kirk very deeply to heart, not only because the victim was a personal friend whose Turning Point campaigns among the young helped him win the presidency, but also because he himself so nearly became the fifth US President to die by an assassin’s bullet when, in an identical attack to the Kirk assassination, a lone sniper firing from a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 2024 wounded the President’s ear and killed a member of his audience.
Trump’s defiant ‘Fight! Fight! Fight! ‘ call seconds after that shooting, and the image of his face streaming with blood, encapsulated his determination to wage war on far- left violence, and was a major factor in his second victory in the Presidential race last year.
So has there ever been a case when a single assassination like Kirk’s killing sparked a real civil war?
By spooky coincidence, next year sees the 80th anniversary of just such a murder, which was the spark that set Spain ablaze and triggered a full scale civil war there costing half a million lives.
Spain in the hot summer of 1936 was eerily similar to the USA today.
The country was deeply split between extremes of left and right who were, like the well armed American extremists, all too prone to settle their political differences with guns. Tit for tat assassinations between socialist and fascist gunmen were a daily occurrence, and a hard fought election had recently narrowly put a left-wing ‘Popular Front ‘ government in power in Madrid.
One such political murder, of a member of the left-wing police force called the Asalto Guards, by right-wing gunmen, provoked the victim’s comrades into seeking bloody revenge.They decided to overreach and kill the leader of the conservative monarchist opposition in the Spanish Parliament, the Cortes. In British terms this would be like members of the Met’s firearms unit taking it upon themselves to kill the leader of the Tory party.
On 13th July 1936, a van load of Asaltos set off through the streets of the Spanish capital bent on kidnapping and killing Jose Calvo Sotelo, a former Finance Minister, who in his most recent parliamentary speech had proudly proclaimed himself ‘a fascist’ who would save Spain from an orgy of violent anarchy, and restore tradition and order. The armed Asalto squad abducted Sotelo from his apartment, and drove him away. Seconds later, the policeman sitting behind the politician fired a bullet into his head, killing him instantly. The police killers then dumped his body at a local cemetery.
Calvo Sotelo’s murder shocked the Spanish right into action. The country’s leading Generals, who up to then had confined their anger at the Popular Front to mere grumbling, activated a full scale conspiracy to raise the army in revolt, take over the country by force and shoot anyone who opposed them.
Days later, on July 18th, the coup was put into effect, and all over Spain, army garrisons rose in rebellion against a government that they believed was leading the country to its doom. The coup was successful in many towns such as Seville, Granada, Pamplona and Cadiz, but in Spain’s two major cities, Madrid and Barcelona, the militias and trade unions of the Communists , Socialists and Anarchists fought back, armed themselves, and massacred the rebels without mercy.
Spain was thus split in two geographically as well as politically, and the next three years saw a fearful bloodletting that drew in the outside world to take part in the slaughter. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy sent men and planes to help General Franco’s Nationalist rebels, while Stalin’s Russia and Communist volunteers organised in the ‘International Brigades’ weighed in on the Republican government side.
Many of the half million dead were civilians murdered behind the lines on both sides rather than soldiers killed on the battlefields. Merely to have voted the wrong way in the last election could cost victims their lives. Bishops, priests and nuns were killed by the Reds, while workers and peasants suffered the same fate in Nationalist areas. The Republic was further fractured by a civil war within the civil war between Trotskyists and anarchists on one side versus Stalinist Communists on the other.
As the Communists, aided by Stalin’s secret police, gained control of the shrinking Republic, Franco’s firepower, helped by his Nazi and Fascist friends, finally gave the Nationalists the upper hand. In the Spring of 1939 Barcelona and Madrid fell, and the war ended. Franco’s dictatorship ruled Spain for the next 35 years until the dictator’s death.
If Civil War does come to the USA, it is unlikely to resemble the Spanish catastrophe, with conventional pitched battles between professional armies, and cities bombed to rubble in air raids. Much more likely is the scenario pictured in Alex Garland’s film ‘Civil War’ last year in which roving bands of armed vigilantes and criminal gangs battled each other and casually killed anyone who got in their way.
America, after all, was built on and lives by gun law and random violence, and looks all too likely to die by it as well.
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