Nothing in this article is advocating violence.
The War Studies course at Kings College London was actually something I recall being vaguely interested in. It was billed as a unique University degree that merged such subjects as History, International Relations, and Politics through the lens of studying war. It is interesting on a personal note to see one of their professors David Betz crop up on the podcast circuit. To date he has appeared in a fair few places that are all firmly outside the mainstream. I have listened to him on both Louise Perry’s interview and Peter Whittle’s show. Betz seems earnest and genuinely concerned about the future of Britain, and indeed wider Europe given that he mentions France as another place he would consider unstable enough to be drifting towards a civil conflict. Betz’s appearances have generated a buzz to say the least and in part we should be honest that this is a legacy of credentialism. Betz has written and worked on such topics, he is by all accounts an expert and thus he gives that kind of weight. It is not surprising to me then that Louise Perry was so shocked by some of his thinking. But how likely is it and going off Britain’s extensive past relationship with civil conflict and terrorism how effective would the state be in quashing such events?
Firstly I think we need to give Betz credit in that he is in part trying to raise awareness of this to get the government to change track. That is clearly a motivation he has, the mainstream have yet (at the time of writing) really begun to pick up on what he is saying. Perhaps because it is quite inflammatory. So Betz has a motivation that he is honest about in wanting to not see this come to pass, he is not an accelerationist in any sense. Secondly whilst Betz is presenting his ideas he is not quite as gung ho as some of the podcast headlines appear. A lot of what he is writing about comes as a historian and a study of the past and these are directions that things could go. Ultimately I think it is worth understanding what he is really arguing is that the state of the country of Britain is likely to radicalize homegrown violent movements. People who are not going to just rally in Trafalgar Square but actually meet clandestinely and plot acts of violence on either physical targets or actual people. He frequently uses the example of dirty wars in South America and also mentions Northern Ireland. That conflict didn’t just have the big bombings but also rivals who kidnapped non combatant civilians off the street and executed them in cold blood. A true sectarian conflict that is largely forgotten in Britain because most of the violence of that sort took place in Northern Ireland.
Others have expressed criticism of Betz but what I have seen didn’t cover too much detail on the history of how effective the British state has been in infiltrating and controlling protest movements they consider dangerous. Some lip service was paid to the power of the state in terms of electronic surveillance yes but that doesn’t paint the picture well. Betz himself I have also not heard talk about these counter-measures that the State has. We’ll start with a brief overview of the British states formidable expertise in this and go on with further objections to Betz’s hypothesis.
Police Spies and Lovers
You might think we’d start in Northern Ireland. After all there was almost total penetration of every violent movement in that conflict. Only a very few paramilitaries there were not infiltrated or had an informant in them. I think the Red Hand Commando is the only loyalist group that was not cracked for example. But no we aren’t starting there as that story is already better known. Instead we start with a man named Mark Kennedy.
Mark Kennedy was a Police Officer for the Metropolitan Police - the Police that cover London who was charged with infiltrating the environmental movement in the UK that was protesting fervently against fossil fuels. These Greens of course are now in charge, Net-Zero policies are the norm and so it is a bit baffling to look back from where we are now and see that the British state was so focused on bringing them down and stopping them. It really goes to show how quickly things can change and is a good thumb in the eye of the ‘nothing ever happens crowd’. No things do happen but you’re probably just ignorant of what has happened and the victory of this anti-energy green movement is a great example of that. People being arrested and targeted by undercover police now have their policies being enacted at highest levels of power!
Back to Kennedy though. Kennedy infiltrated the movement for years. Think FBI style intrigue except these weren’t biker gangs selling meth these were environmental protestors who were looking to engage and shut down power plants. Weirdly similar to a scenario that Betz himself talks about, that this infrastructure is relatively unprotected. Kennedy’s story is all the more shocking with the extreme moral license he was seemingly given. He entered into sexual relationship with numerous women in these groups and led relationships with them that many of them considered utterly serious. Meanwhile he had a wife and children. He wasn’t the only one either. You can peruse the Wikipedia article for more details. Keep in mind we aren’t talking about the actual British domestic intelligence agency MI5 we are talking about ‘normal’ police forces who had the resources and drive to do this themselves. The system is quite powerful at even a level below. This power and level to act and thwart action harms some of Betz’s ideas.
MI5 and Robust Response
As we’ve alluded to MI5 has extensive experience in infiltrating and getting informants in violent groups thanks to the Northern Ireland conflict. If anything else it also shows that for this group and the majority of people that could be targeted in the future are likely to be white British. White Muslim converts definitely exist and perhaps the security services have tried using them to go after the radical Muslims but I imagine it raises more of an eyebrow if a white Brit turns up. It was interesting in his interviews that I didn’t recall Betz mentioning the most infamous right wing group to have been proscribed in Britain. National Action. They are the useful bogeyman in all this, a right wing group deemed a terrorist organization. Interesting they didn’t get a mention as an example.
One of the things that helped paramilitary organizations grow and develop in Northern Ireland is that they grew from established community. Community was real then, people were far less atomized. Men knew each other and had pre-existing relationships that engendered high levels of trust. Even this, over time, was not enough to prevent informants and infiltration but during the early operating period they were protected by that. The world is a different place today. It is not that such communities don’t exist but that they are smaller, there is a higher threshold barrier to meet to get to that stage. We are talking about men meeting in conspiracy to commit violence after all. The exposes of much more harmless groups in the UK by either television companies with the help of state funded anti-fascist groups just shows how difficult that is. Any vaguely right wing movement is prone to immediate infiltration and containment. Outside of explicit ideological connections the next great way people connect would be through existing community. The dead working mens clubs or unions. Hard to see that happening in the atomized way. This does make all the intelligence services jobs easier.
Terror Attacks are Not Civil War?
Continual action defines civil conflict and civil war not one off attacks. It’s interesting that Betz predicts a civil war or civil conflict but again in both episodes I listened to he didn’t talk much about the repeated terrorist attacks that Britain has endured at the hands of the most violent organized minority group. To give a short list of Islamist terror attacks in the UK:
2005 the 7/7 Bombings in London killed 52 people injuring 700.
Glasgow airport attack 2007 - only one of the Islamists died in this botched attack.
2010 a British MP is stabbed by an Islamist woman.
2013 British soldier Lee Rigby is stabbed to death by two Islamists
2017 Westminster London an Islamist kills 5 people in a car and knife attack
2017 May Manchester Arena Bombing - 22 killed many of them children, the youngest being 8 years old.
2017 London Islamists drive a van into people then jump out and start mass stabbing people. 8 people die.
2017 Failed tube bombing by an Islamist in London leaves 30 injured
2018 Another Westminster car attack injures three.
2018 Manchester Train station stabbing injuries three.
2019 London bridge stabbing two people killed.
2020 Streatham stabbing injures two people
2020 Reading stabbing - Islamist kills three.
2021 Murder of MP David Amess by an Islamist
2021 Attempted terror attack with a bomb on Liverpool hospital injures 1.
2023 Islamist stabs to death a 70 year old British man in protest over Gaza
2024 Southport stabbings (though the mainstream deny this was a terror attack)
Just writing that list from Wikipedia was exhausting. Just how cowed are the British people to forget this mounting list of terror? Stop and look at it. In 2017 there were four unique attacks alone that were not inter connected as far as we know. Organic Islamist terror and most of them in subsequent months. But this isn’t example of a civil war that is already hot and ongoing? Not to pull the shoe is on the other foot trope but stop and re-imagine that list instead being about right wing terror cells and tell me the narrative would not be entirely different. The media in the UK can’t shut up about the danger the ‘far right’ pose and whilst there are a few attacks that have happened it is absolutely tiny in comparison to these Islamist attacks. If Betz and his supporters want to be taken seriously I’d love to hear the explanation of why these attacks added up together don’t constitute low level civil conflict?
Going a step further let us think about some of what Betz said. At one point he hypothesizes about attacks on infrastructure - gas relay stations or power plants. Let us assume that a group carries out a lone attack that successfully damages or destroys one. The fall out from that is going to be immense - but in and of itself it is a singular attack, a single moment in time that will become harder to repeat. Once you hit the first target do you think the British state is going to sit back and just wait for these other relays or power plants to get targeted? No not at all they are going to turn those into hard targets with real security. The Southport stabbings saw organic outrage from the population and look how insanely hard the UK state has come down on those people, nothing spiraled or developed out of it. Ordinary people are in jail for Facebook posts (admittedly this is just another day in the UK now) about this and the State turned a blind eye to the Islamists in the street with weapons.
Betz gives an example as well of the Blade Runners. For those unaware London has congestion and now pollution controls, drivers get charged to drive into London if their car doesn’t meet certain emissions regulations. The zone was recently expanded and it is enforced with automated CCTV. People have taken to disabling these cameras. Organic and violent. Seemingly the full force of the Met has not been unleashed but then I’ve not heard much about it. Has it petered out, a few brave guys doing a few acts and then deciding the risk was not worth the reward? Certainly it does show people when pushed will take action but the UK has been a speed camera hell for years and only a very few of them have been destroyed. Betz also alludes to some of the failed attacks on where they are hosting the military age migrant males, again these have happened but they have been very disorganized and clear lone wolf actors. It remains to be seen if this ramps up further and we see something come of it, although the question remains how such an attack can be called civil conflict if Betz won’t name the Islamist terror we just looked at gets off scot free - is this just academic anti-white bias? Is he afraid of reminding listeners of the staggeringly high number of Islamist attacks that have taken place?
A Brief Detour to 2001
The following is cribbed from an archived article I wrote in the wake of the Southport stabbing and the protests that followed - I am republishing it here as it is important to recognize the history of past ethnic violence between native Brits and the Islamists in this conversation about the possibility of civil conflict.
What if I told you in 2001 there was serious ethnic violence between whites and browns (the UK as a whole moronically refer to people of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India as ‘Asian’) in a number of towns in the UK?
We’ll start in Oldham:
We all know Wikipedia is kind of a cucked source but even they have some cold harsh truths about these riots:
The (white-owned) Live and Let Live pub was targeted and pelted with bricks, stones, bottles, and then petrol bombs. Cars were driven to block the fire exits, in an attempt to stop the patrons from escaping the flames, whilst vehicles in the surrounding roads were ignited, and police were called. Police officers were pelted by groups of Asian males. A night of violence began, and riot police were quickly drafted in to the Glodwick area, rife with both Pakistani and Bangladeshi rioters.
On 21 April 2001, a mugging and attack upon 76-year-old white World War II veteran Walter Chamberlain by three Asian youths was amongst the first major provocations which led to the riots.[17] Chamberlain was approached as he walked to his home after watching a local amateur rugby league match. He was mugged and badly beaten, receiving fractured bones in the face amongst other injuries. His battered face appeared on the front of the Manchester Evening News, and the story spread to all the major national newspapers. In the Daily Mirror, his face appeared under the headline "Beaten for being white: OAP, 76, attacked in Asian no-go area". Media pundits began to speculate on the apparent transformation of young Asian males - from the stereotype of hard-working boys, who respected their parents, to the new stereotype of angry, violent thugs.[10] An Asian male (a Mr. Fokrul Islam) was ultimately charged for the crime of racially aggravated grievous bodily harm on 1 October 2001, some time after the riots. Chamberlain and his family, in an attempt to try to calm tensions in the borough, stated at the time that the mugging was just that, and not at all racially motivated.[12] "It was a violent assault on an elderly man", said Chamberlain's son Steven. "As a family we don't think it was a race issue at all."[14]
Let us stick with Wikipedia a bit longer in how they describe the immediate run up to the violence
At 8 p.m., a fight occurred between one Asian youth and one white youth near the Good Taste chip shop on the corner of Salford Street and Roundthorn Road in Glodwick.[12] The fight, which was witnessed, and included racist language from both sides is said to have ended abruptly, but led to the hasty gathering of a gang of white youths assembled via mobile phone.
Following this earlier fight between the two youths, further violence erupted as a gang of white men attacked an Asian business and threw a projectile through a window of a house in the Glodwick area, where a heavily pregnant Asian woman was in residence. Violence spiralled from this group as they rampaged through Glodwick attacking a number of persons and properties.
Retaliatory violence soon followed, as large gangs of Asian men gathered and began to rally. Some of the earlier (but by then dissipating) group of white men were found and attacked. Further to this, a number of cars and commercial windows were also smashed in retaliation.
Oldham wasn’t alone.
Burnley also experienced violence:
At around 10pm, as the evening reached a climax of merriment, Marie received a mystery call at the pub.
The message she received before the line went dead, would precede one of the most infamous events in Burnley's history.
"You have to get out of your pub and take your children with you, they're going to petrol bomb it tonight."
…
Over a mere 60 hours, Burnley turned into a battleground between gangs of white and Asian men, who would later unite to turn on the police, as hundreds of people clashed on the streets.
The violence, which saw pubs, cars, and businesses go up in flames under the barrage of petrol bombs, told a larger, more disturbing story - that an "us and them" rhetoric was alive and kicking between communities living in the town.
Bradford also experienced race riots. Leeds as well.
This was in one summer. 23 years ago.
People online like to meme and say things like “When the Saxon Began to Hate” - we cling to this idea that something will kick off and change things. A revolutionary mindset perhaps or wishful thinking. People often lack any historical context or knowledge.
This is meant to be a slap across the face.
All the problems of today were the same problems of 23 years ago. Whole communities erupted and it was tamped down again. The Saxon has already been awake and learned to hate. He is firmly however under the boot.
Think how much worse the UK is today than in 2001 - how many more immigrants have been flooded in. How much worse the woke cult is?
The following were recommendations from reports commissioned by the Government at the time:
Different communities lived "parallel lives"
Fear grew from ignorance about other communities and was exploited by extremists
More than 67 recommendations made covering areas including housing, education, youth, leisure facilities and regeneration
Weak local leadership, national and local government and policing policies all criticised
Government policy of encouraging single-faith schools criticised for raising possibility of deeper divisions
A meaningful concept of citizenship should be found
Immigrants could take an oath of allegiance setting out a "clear primary loyalty to this nation"
Open and honest debate about multi-culturalism in Britain needed
Some of those really stand out don’t they.
Have we ever had an open and honest debate about ‘multi-culturalism’ in Britain? Have single faith schools stopped their march? Have communities not continued with their parallel lives?
In truth I don’t have much to add here. This is just meant as a moment of education - that in fact in the recent past we have had and seen serious racial violence flair in the UK. The tragic murder of three white girls by a Rwandan black teenager in Southport has triggered a momentary flare of violence but don’t kid yourselves that this is some grand awakening. I’d love to be proven wrong about this but we have to be real and look at history.
As stated before the surveillance state is far more powerful today.
The multicultural religion is far more embedded today.
The above was written in 2024
Political Containment and Character
Political containment is the equivalent of throwing the dog a bone. Right wing parties exist to act as containment and Reform will be the latest version of containment. Farage is a yes man, a patsy, a useful idiot. He is after all a total narcissist and such people are easily controlled and manipulated. They do it to themselves more than anything because of the ego drive that they have. His altruistic ideals extend only so far and it becomes all about him. Luckily for the State Reform can act as a “we can try and do this the normal way” but it will suck energy out of those radical. A clandestine meeting of people breaks up because some still see hope in a political solution and the numbers don’t matter. Thinking we can win on the ballot box with another bunch of politicians who will sell you down the river.
Britain, and the English, are moderate people. Betz doesn’t talk much about this or the national character of the island nation but I think it matters. The UK hasn’t had extreme politics outside of the Ulster Loyalists who are seen as distinctly ‘other’ by most English themselves. The kind of passion and the idea of rebelling against the State just isn’t quite as present. The English do not behave like the French with their Yellow Jacket protests, they just don’t. Nor has England ever had a far right party that ever really broke through. The BNP came close at one point but failed miserably and faded away into oblivion. Now the landscape of the British far right political parties is a fractured one of micro parties whilst Farage and his Tory Turncoats sweep up the votes. These factors all matter in the likelihood of civil conflict (if we are not already in it).
Lastly on a more practical level we should consider the control in Britain of things like firearms. Gun crime exists and England is an island nation but the English themselves do not have a robust or wide reaching gun culture. Most English people are unlikely to have ever handled a gun or even to know someone who has a gun. Contrast that to America or Canada. Gun ownership is widespread and even liberals likely know of an uncle who has a hunting rifle that they may have even handled. This is a minor point of course but having lots of firearms available and ammunition would make civil conflict easier because the barrier to obtaining and using a gun is lower. As it is they are highly regulated and controlled, not impossible to get but the added complexity makes the likes of interception and control by state assets much more difficult. Robbing an English gun store isn’t going to net you the same firepower as if you knocked over an American one…
Beaten Housewives
Many European friends have told me they see their countries and populations as hopelessly lost. People so cucked and beaten down that resistance is futile. For all the American hate we have some things going for us over here. Freedom of speech actually does matter it turns out even if that too is under assault here. There is always an assumption that has run through the Western mind that you can push a people so far and they will break. People are being pushed but there are still lots of bread and circuses going on. For all the appalling change being wrought in many of these places a lot of people still have jobs and the supply lines are still going. Things are becoming more unstable but I think a lot of our side make pretty dramatic claims about resilience that haven’t held up. There is a lot of talk about we’re a “just in time” supply chain system and yet it keeps going. We even saw our rulers shut down the economy and lock people in their houses and things kept moving. The logistics people are more competent than some right wing talking heads seem to think. This might sting some people but I think a lot of claims about fragility might be overstated and it might equally be fair to say that none have been tested. That is one power of the larger complex societies that we have though. The level of options and ability to work around and adapt is still there there is more resilience in our systems than we critics are willing to admit.
Like beaten housewives a lot of people will never turn on those who actually abuse them. The propaganda is effective. Scroll up, look again at the Islamist terror attacks in the UK and think about just how effective the pro-Islam propaganda and multiculturalism has been in the light of all that. North Korea is a looming shadow of what a totally cowed people look like and even recent history of the GDR should remind people of how willing many are to go along to get along. Civil conflict might feel inevitable to Betz from his academic research, and that he references South America is telling. That is a dramatically different society from Britain and Northern Europe and again that really matters. It is a more racially stratified society over the years and any comparisons to the class system in the UK are wholly inadequate.
Some might see this article as blackpilling. It isn’t really intended to be. Betz though is making some quite sensationalist claims. Claims that some people might latch onto as hope, still others could take the conspiratorial route and think he’s goading people into it. A single attack like we mentioned above and it’s the license to employ some serious restrictions on the remaining civil liberties that the British do enjoy. Personally I think Betz may just be off in his timing in a best case scenario. There are some unknowns and if life becomes economically much harder than ironically that creates more room for community to come back. It the dreams of Net Zero do stumble and blackouts suddenly become the norm that is a pretty big change. If our so far pretty resilient just in time economy does start to stumble, which it certainly could then who knows? Those events represent fundamental changes but they are serious ones. The slow boil and strangulation currently ongoing feels less likely to provoke the outcome predicted. So many of us are stuck like frogs in heating water.