Civil War Talk Vile And Stupid

At a July rally for Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, Ohio GOP state Sen. George Lang introduced the newly-chosen Republican nominee for vice president with a rousing, “Trump and Butler County’s J.D. Vance are the last chance to save our country politically. I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country and it will be saved.”

He later elaborated: “If we come down to a civil war, I’m glad we got people like Schmidty [state Rep. Jean Schmidt] and the bikers for Trump on our side.”

While Lang later said he regretted calling for bloodshed, Vance – the running mate of the man who sicced a violent mob on the U.S. Capitol to overthrow the 2020 election – did not repudiate those remarks during his speech.

Lang is not the first Republican to suggest murder as a viable political option. In June, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, running for governor, told a church gathering:

“We now find ourselves struggling with people who have evil intent. You know, there’s a time when we used to meet evil on the battlefield, and guess what we did to it? We killed it! ...           

“Some liberal somewhere is going to say that sounds awful,” he said, which tells us who are in his crosshairs. “Too bad.”

It was a rousing speech: “Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!”

Necessity? Faced with the possibility that this vile inciter to violence would succeed him, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper found it necessary to withdraw his name for consideration as a possible vice-presidential running mate of Kamala Harris.

At an April rally, Kari Lake, chosen July 30 as the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Arizona, told the crowd:

“We’re going to strap our seat belt. We’re going to put on our helmet or your Kari Lake ball cap. We are going to put on the armor of God. And maybe strap on a Glock on the side of us just in case.”

Of course, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, elected by the good people of Georgia, has long advocated violence against her enemies, equating Democrats with feral hogs that need to be eradicated and supporting the execution of Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019 before she ran for Congress. She has even called for a “divorce” from the Union – too stupid to realize that Georgia voted for Biden/Blue in 2020.

And all of these hate-mongers are following the example of former President Donald Trump, indicted for his part in the coup attempt and promising pardons for his convicted shock troopers if elected, and who holds out the threat of further violence if he loses again.

Trump and his acolytes filed more than 60 lawsuits contesting the 2020 election – and lost them all, many cases presided over by Trump-appointed judges. His constant lying about that election has become the GOP credo. Bill Leuders of The Progressive assessed the Republican National Convention by saying they “find solidarity in lies.”

Trump told Time magazine earlier this year that he would accept an election defeat if the voting is fair. But he has since claimed that this year’s election will be rigged. His lies lay the groundwork for justifying any violence he might stoke to overturn another defeat.

In 2020, ABC News found 54 cases of political violence or threats “where a link to [Trump] is captured in court documents and police statements … These links are not speculative – they are documented in official records.” Stochastic violence means literally stoking others to commit the violence you advocate.

Trump’s promise to followers last month that, if they elect him this year, “you won’t have to vote anymore” provides proof, right from the horse’s – mouth – of his anti-democratic, anti-republic desires. He has reiterated such “dictator on day one” rhetoric enough times that people need to believe him.

Uncivil civil war rhetoric has found willing exponents among Republicans. Let’s attribute this localization to their constant attacks on education. “Solidarity in lies” and strength through collective ignorance. Maybe they’re just too ignorant to know what kind of carnage they are promoting.

My first literary hero was Robert Jordan, Ernest Hemingway’s anti-fascist American fighting for the Spanish Republic in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The writing is great though it took an older version of myself to realize that it was written as if translated from Spanish. I read it early on, and it stayed with me. [John McCain said he, too, gained youthful inspiration from the novel.]

Perhaps, it was the realization that the good guys could actually lose that struck me. Thanks to Hemingway – and then Gary Cooper [the source of my name] when I saw the movie – the Spanish Civil War has been a lifelong subject of interest. Bellicose bombasts braying about another American civil war need to do some deep-dive research – and soon.

Francisco Franco led traitorous army troops in the overthrow of Spain’s Second Republic, which had loyal troops of its own. These armies inflicted death upon their countrymen, of course, but local, neighborly brutality became a hallmark of the struggle. Cities, towns and villages were divided into republicans and fascists. Whoever had temporary dominance executed enemies – and sometimes conveniently denounced rivals not political opponents.

The chaotic situation in Spain makes a body count impossible. Estimates range from 500,000 to a million people. Off the battle lines, History Channel estimates that Franco’s Falangists “murdered about 150,000 prisoners of war and civilians over the course of the conflict – plus another 20,000 following their victory – compared to about 49,000 murders at the hands of the Republicans.”

Hemingway includes two such internecine atrocities in his novel.

Jordan has been dispatched to blow up a bridge to abet a Loyalist offensive. His accomplices are to be guerrilla bands entrenched in the mountains. The one he joins is ostensibly led by Pablo, who gained notoriety for his zealous persecution of fascists and their sympathizers. This translates roughly to include rich landowners, bankers and priests – those who oppress the peasantry and those who justify that oppression.

Jordan’s guide, Anselmo, brags that “Pablo was brave at the beginning ... Pablo was something serious at the beginning.

“He killed more people than the cholera … Pablo killed more people than the typhoid fever … Pablo killed more than the bubonic plague.”

But Pablo has grown cautious, and his band now looks to Pilar, his wife, for direction. She later describes the carnage during Pablo’s rise to prominence in their village.

“And in that moment, looking through the bars, I saw the hall full of men flailing away with clubs and striking with flails and poking and striking and pushing and heaving against people with the white wooden pitchforks that now were red and with their tines broken, and this was going on all over the room while Pablo sat in the big chair with his shotgun on his knees, watching, and they were shouting and clubbing and stabbing and men were screaming as horses scream in a fire.”

Put assault rifles into this mob’s hand and ramp up the bloodshed exponentially.

And these were the good guys, those fighting to save the republic. Representing the brutality of the other side for Hemingway was Maria [Ingrid Bergman], who becomes Jordan’s lover.

She joined the little group after it had taken part in blowing up the train that was transporting her between prisons. She had already seen her republican father executed and had then been subjected to a gang rape by soldiers that had left her traumatized to muteness when Pilar [Katina Paxinou, who won an Oscar] insisted that she be rescued. Her close-cropped hair was growing back after her head had been shaved.

Fiction, yes, but based upon reality. Hemingway served as a war correspondent during the fighting. He knew that of which he wrote. He modeled Jordan after a real American.

Historian Mario Escobar produced another novelized account of those times in Remember Me [2019], which follows the plight of the children of Spanish republicans who were sent to Mexico to wait out the war for a happy reunion in republican Spain that was never to be.

Drawing from historical accounts from the children themselves, he documents the routine and deliberately brutal killing of those deemed enemies, the self-servers who betrayed friends to ingratiate themselves with those in power and the long-lasting psychic damage to those involved.

Spain still deals with the fallout. After Franco’s death, one of the first laws passed by the new parliament was The Law of Forgetting, which forbade the prosecution of those who tortured and executed political prisoners from the fall of the Republic through 1975.

New mass graves are discovered regularly. Some activists have managed to get the names of war criminals removed from streets and public buildings. Much of Catalonia, the last part of the country to fall, remains vocally anti-monarch since royalists were among the staunchest supporters of the overthrow of democracy.

And it was only on July 30 – nearly 84 years after the fact – that the Spanish government annulled the sentences that led to the 1940 execution of Lluís Campanys, president of the Catalonian Generalitat, by the victorious fascist regime.

In 2016, Pete Ayron published ¡No Pasaran!, a collection of 38 first-hand accounts of the slaughter, betrayals and despair. Some were written during the conflict, others recollected later. “¡No Pasaran!” [“They shall not pass!”] was the watchword of the ultimately doomed Loyalists.

For about three years, with armies on battle lines, many Spanish civilians lived under mob rule, with today’s instigators becoming tomorrow’s victims. Today’s victims were dead, of course, but others arose to avenge them.

This volume might be worth reading for those thinking that they agree with Trump’s co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita, who hinted at another coup attempt during an interview with Politico: “It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath. It’s not over until then. It’s not over on Election Day, it’s over on Inauguration Day, ‘cause I wouldn’t put anything past anybody.”

The book would probably do the uncivil LaCivita no good. Blowhards who try to incite followers to violence always think themselves above the consequences. Studying the Spanish Civil War could disabuse them of that notion. Franco only became the leader of the fascists after more prominent rebels had left the stage.

This spring, Filmmaker Alex Garland debuted Civil War, a dystopian [word of the season] view of the United States in the midst of such a conflict. Kirsten Dunst, 19 years removed from being a manic pixie dream girl, stars as Lee, the leader of a group of reporters covering the carnage.

In his report for National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, The New Yorker film critic Justin Chang found issue with the lack of clearly defined political motives and the episodic nature of the film.

“But as stunningly detailed as Civil War's dystopia [I told you] is, from moment to moment, I hardly believed a thing I was seeing. As Lee and her pals inch closer to DC, they go from one violent set-piece to another, each one calculated for maximum terror.”

But Chang’s charge that, “The result is more of a button-pushing genre exercise than a serious reckoning with the consequences of the movie's premise” reveals his own unfamiliarity with the chaos inherent in such scenarios.

Nobody trusts anybody else – not even comrades. Ideologies are irrelevant. Random “violent set-pieces” are the norm. You better believe it.

George Orwell was wounded fighting the fascists in Spain. He reports in Homage to Catalonia of his later return to Barcelona – from the front lines – only to discover that his militia had been outlawed amid the infighting among the various Loyalist factions. And, as an example of reality becoming fictionalized, scholars have equated the political machinations documented in Homage to Catalonia with the characters and situations Orwell presents in Animal Farm.

Orwell and his wife escaped to France. Others of his ilk were imprisoned, tortured or executed by former allies who questioned the purity of their commitment. Such purges are standard procedures for insurrectionists as exemplified by the French and Russian Revolutions.

In civil wars, the violence and bloodshed take on lives of their own. They become ends themselves, not the means to a supposed noble end.

Republican advocates of an American civil war – that anti-American hate speech does not come from my side of the aisle – need to tone down their rhetoric. Many need to stop lying about election integrity.

In a democratic republic, we vote. We win some and lose some. We don’t need a bloody reign of terror to drown our defeats in infamy.