You Should Know

History repeats itself—if we let it.

When building power, some leaders pick a group to blame: Hitler targeted Jews, Trump vilified immigrants. Once momentum builds, the list of "enemies" grows—anyone who disagrees becomes a target.

Recognizing these patterns is the first step to stopping them. Let’s learn from the past and stand against division.

#HistoryMatters #NeverAgain #UnityOverHate

Well, Trump and MAGA have ensured that the US is cooked anyway no matter what happens

In real life when you get hit, hiding behind cover does not regenerate your health and picking up health packs or eating food does nothing.

Also most war will be 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror.

Answering a question that who asked? Who would think war is a video game? Everyone's a badass until they're on the wrong end of a shooting range. If war causes infrastructure collapse to shipping of critical supplies like foods and fuels tens of millions could die, or more. Exposure, lack of meds (like insulin, anti-rejection, etc.), and lack of clean water will wipe out a huge number of people, too.

The question is what the alternative would be. Look at history for the answer. The easy comparison would be Germany leading up to, during, and after World War 2, but that would be low-hanging fruit considering how very directly the US regime is trying to force other countries to join them. (Anschluss, anyone?) Look also at the countries where extremist regimes took over and didn't get forced out until years later and the damages they did to their country and the people living in it. Unfortunately too many examples there to name. The US regime and their stormtroopers will continue to harass, arrest, and outright kill people who have a legal right to live in the US simply over the color of their skin or otherwise until they are stopped. And they will most assuredly not stop by the power of fingerwagging and strongly stated words.

The next "civil war" will just be a series of Luigi-like instances. My prediction is that the justice system will simply start failing to get grand jury indictments like they did with the ham sandwhich throwing incident.

I heard there's no respawns in IRL.

Yeah no shit. Who thinks that?

"Americans will finally have first hand experience of real war torn violence"

Someone missed the War on Drugs which is just another genocide. Also millions of Americans live under the threat of gun death everyday. Have you ever ducked when you hear a gun shot? This is the reality for many urban citizens.

We lose the equivalent of a ongoing war 40-60k gun deaths every year and have so for the last several decades to gun death.

"Over 1.5 million gun deaths occurred in the U.S. between 1968 and 2017, exceeding combined American military deaths in all wars (Revolutionary, Civil, World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, etc.)."

Our government is the most evil collaboration of wealthy people the world has ever scene. They have their hands in everything and control the majority of the world.

We have always been at war with ourselves. I have lost multiple people in my life to gun violence. I know many people's lives ruined by the war on drugs. We have destroyed tens of millions of families and show no interest in slowing down.

We lock up a disproportional amount of people in the US accounting for 20% of the world's prison population but only 4% of the world's population.

We were cooked frogs a long time ago.

Not American, so feel free to stop reading.

It's ridiculous to me how you yanks go from zero to a hundred like this. Either normality or civil war. Like there is no in between? You have an authoritarianism problem. So resist authoritarianism. What makes you think that the only way to resist is shooting people? Resistance is a spectrum, and you have barely started using democratic means to fight back (you just started electing democratic socialists), much less active procedural and institutional warfare (is Bernie demanding a vote for every procedural point requiring a vote? Are the Dems actually using any rat fucking tactic to make the state ungovernable? Are your local and state governments really resisting beyond making angry noises?). You have barely tried non violent resistance (not the same as peaceful!) but you're such a violent culture that you jump straight to military solutions. Wtf. Those come at the very end, if everything else has failed. Has it? Nowhere near. So this talk about civil war, is that really useful?

Americans are sadly locked into the path of violence as the other path will force them to face their systemic racism, and corporate idolization which is clearly not going to happen.

It took Nicole Good to be face shot before people really started to react despite 4 other similar events with non white females and I am constantly shocked how many Americans defend corporations that are literally exploiting them. America is cooked unfortunately as like most humans, myself included, we tend to become blind with power.

you are saying this like the terms of the required action are dictated by the oppressed, and they bear the responsibility of the result. but that is wholly decided by the regime. if your asking people to weigh the cost of freedom verses the ease of tyranny, just remember that time does not make the cost any more palatable, it makes it worse.

... Americans don't realize they're already in a civil war? Bro a city is occupied. Secret police roam freely. Tens of thousands disappeared.

the problem with a civil war is collapse of the supply chain for most people, and you'll have to become useful to get protection

One side in this supposed civil war has a monopoly on weapons, training, tactics, supplies, and political power. The other side has legal weed dispensaries. It wouldn't be a civil war, more like a Gaza style genocide.

I'm dead in a month as soon as any major part of our infrastructure/supply chain crumbles. yaaaay.

I do wonder if I'm on somebody's list.

you dont get battle lines until there's been a few years of mass killings on both sides, before Regime Loyalist and Opposition "states" or lines solidify.

YSK: The average citizen doesn’t have much control over the cork in the bottle.

This administration is repeatedly and consistently provoking people. Randomly shooting people in the face, and talking about sending the military to Minnesota is going to cause things to boil over if the other people we elected don’t step in and force them to cool down.

It's worthwhile you mention Sarajevo, and in reference to that I will post this tidbit posted by a MetaFilter user in 2009 regarding their experience in the siege of Sarajevo. I have it bookmarked and post it from time to time where it seems appropriate. The reality is though, you're correct, Americans by and large don't know what they're asking for.

Well, unlike the majority of you (I assume), I actually lived several years in a period of savagery and killing, during which nothing - food, water, electricity, phone, clothing, sense of safety, school, the ability to go out in public, etc - was available, except during totally unpredictable, brief and sporadic occasions.

Of those who couldn't leave my city, Sarajevo:

Some people (very few) were prepared for what they thought would be the "long haul" - this tended to be a couple of months. These people were widely seen as lunatics and dangerously pessimistic ones at that.

Most people were not at all prepared. This included my family. Many of those - like my family - considered the idea of "preparation" to be an affront to the decency we felt most people possessed. Were we wrong? Well, I don't know. We suffered greatly; my parents were killed. But speaking only for myself, I never felt I cheapened my soul by betting on calamity. Today, that still feels like it's worth something.

But here's the main point: "Preparing" for the disaster really didn't do anyone much good. Those who "prepared" ate a little better for a while. They stayed warmer for a few extra days. They enjoyed the radio for a while longer (via batteries.) But in the end, they ended up hungry, cold and bored too, just like the rest of us. Guns and weapons helped no one directly and were even of little to no use in the defense of Sarajevo, since they were toys compared to the shells, bombs and high-powered armaments of the attacking forces. The worst parts of war were psychological - the fear, anxiety, boredom, loneliness, paranoia, bad dreams. Respite from those things came with sharing food with a neighbor, finding a piece of clothing that would fit someone you knew, commiserating with others in your position, figuring out how to make make-up from brick or french fries from wheat paste and spreading this newly-acquired war knowledge around the mahala.

We knew who had extra food and supplies. For the most part, they weren't attacked or hassled or bothered. Contrary to what these survivalists say, those in dire times generally hold on to their personal sense of pride even more than they do in normal times. I'd take a bite of a friend's salad without bothering to ask in normal times. I'd never have done that in wartime, no matter how hungry I was.

Within the domain of those trapped in the city, civility greatly increased.

You often hear how Holocaust survivors felt guilt at surviving. Well, during war, that was a feeling everyone was aware of - people started dying right away (my parents were killed near the start of the siege, for instance) - and there was a palpable enough common sense of karma to make everyone into good Samaritans. None of us understood why we survived while others didn't. I shared food when I had it, even though I often knew I wouldn't have a crumb the next day. Which was no big achievement, because nearly everyone did the same.

Those who'd prepared, well, the majority of them shared their food and whatever else they had as soon as someone else was clearly in need. I can't swear it, but I think they felt a little foolish to have been so self-obsessed, and giving away that stuff might have lessened that feeling. There were a few people who hoarded things until they ran out of stuff - eventually everybody ran out of anything worth hoarding - and they soon became wishful beggars like the rest of us. Again, I can't swear it, but I hear stories, and it seems that these people suffer from post-war trauma, guilt and nightmares more than the rest of us.

Those survivalists, I feel sorry for them. It's no way to live.

posted by Dee Xtrovert at 9:33 PM on January 28, 2009