… Or Panem in The Hunger Games. My biggest worry is the US invading Canada for resources and arable land. Canadian SF author Peter Watts has been talking about that as an inevitability for a decade.
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And the right loses their minds.
It’s not his daddy’s War Measures Act, but he will have to step carefully with it.
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I think that’s part of the problem with the assumption. Just sort of pre-supposes it’ll follow the pattern of the previous Civil War.
A block of states or parts of states attempting to break off.
The divide here isn’t one of a region seeking to preserve the status quo. Let us keep slavery or we’ll go off on our own and do it anyway.
I kinda doubt that Texas, Georgia and Florida who have the largest in raw numbers Black populations, or the 4 states that are 1/3 black (also including Georgia). Are gonna cleanly break off into a white supremacist rebellion just because they’re Southern and mostly GOP controlled.
I doubt California and NY just shrug that off because some Techno-librarians said their economies would be stronger alone.
I doubt Trump’s coordinated effort to overturn an election would have been happy to just peel off Idaho.
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Lots of people who are better-versed in modern conflict than I am have written at length about various Civil War scenarios the United States could be facing soon. But as you say, none of them look that much like the last Civil War even if there are echoes of it. It might look a little like The Troubles in Northern Ireland, a little like the Bosnian War and a little like the worst parts of American Reconstruction but ultimately it would be its own new horrible thing that might or might not end with new geopolitical entities controlling the territory currently known as the United States of America.
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That’s the least likely outcome. A civil war in a decaying geopolitical empire is unlikely to look anything like a civil war in a newly independent and somewhat insignificant former colony.
The historical parallels are the fading empires: Roman, Austro-Hungarian, Soviet. Once it’s clear the centre can no longer hold, the factionalism metastasizes.
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If I had to guess, they’ll be in the first wave of refugees. The ones who scream loudest about their freedoms are the ones least well-equipped to deal with the stress of living in a failed state. They’d be the first to freak out when the garbage trucks stop hauling, their local watering hole quits serving, and their internet provider shuts down.
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i will race them im sure. i think more truly prepers will realize they wasted* a lot of money on novelty crap, and we’ll all be standing in the breadline hoping that the drive-by shootings are over
(* of course, the money i saved not buying junk will likewise be worthless when either it or the banks disappear… there’s not much of a moral in this tangent except that economically a civil will hurt everyone. tho not everyone equally )
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The biggest problem would probably be Americans trying to be American in Canada. We already have a problem with average Americans trying to smuggle their guns across the border and when caught decrying the confiscation as violating their 2nd amendment rights. It’ll be a culture shock for both parties.
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somehow a former co-worker of mine finagled it. he, a tech worker, she working full time taking care of the kids. and they were all able to move to canada together
( they weren’t american citizens though, so i don’t know if country of origin factored into it. and while i don’t know all the details, it didn’t sound easy )
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Indeed. As Pierre Trudeau poetically waxed “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt” and it will be a fitful journey to the end of the night.
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But I’d wager you’ve spent time building relationships and establishing connections with people who aren’t paranoid assholes fantasizing about the end of the world. I bet you’ve got people who’d have your back. The average prepper has a social circle of others who they anticipate they’ll have to eat when the MREs run out. And who think the same way. At least…that and farming are what I’m counting on!
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Canadas numbers are rookie numbers. Sorry. They just are.
In the scenario the professor is talking about the federal government is on the side of the bad guys
What other choice does it have? Invade the US? That’s impossible
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In the scenario that a fascist central government takes power in Washington DC and retains broad sovereignty over the continental U S, Canada will likely “Finlandise” to that government while strengthening ties with the EU and former Commonwealth countries (the UK will ally with the U.S. under its own fascism-infused Tory government).
In that scenario there will still be a nasty and messy Syrian-style civil war in the U.S., with neighbourhoods, towns, cities, counties, and states either resisting or supporting the central government and fighting amongst themselves. The central government will arm and fund their supporters. Canada may be used as a staging area for other OECD liberal democracies to support the resistance.
All that will mean a flood of refugees coming into Canada and a reduction in the American trade goods that Canadians are accustomed to. However, except for propaganda efforts and supporting the Canadian far-right fringe the American fascists will be too busy fighting resisters at home to carry out military attacks on Canada.
Canada should take the Flu Trux Klan as a serious warning. I sincerely hope, but unfortunately doubt, that this emergency powers declaration by Trudeau is taken as an opportunity to crack down on the fascist ringleaders of this occupation/blockade. Canadians, like Americans, have to understand that fascist governments aren’t voted into power by a majority but rather are foisted on nation-states by a thuggish and violent minority.
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Yes, they are. You’ve got 40 million people. Turkey has twice that much and hosts about 4 million fresh refugees from Syria, Columbia has more refugees in her borders than Canada took in according in nearly 40 years.
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I don’t know the situation in Colombia that well, but a lot of the refugees in Turkey are in temporary refugee camps. It is not the same as resettling.
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this is not how sentences work
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Yep. NATO will side with whoever has control of the nukes.
The US is Canada’s 60% trade partner.
A US civil war would be a humanitarian disaster generally, and an economic disaster for Canada as well. It’s a chilling thought, because fascism seems to have a habit of sprouting like weeds wherever there’s a lot of economic discontent.
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