According to various memes and commentaries, the US avoided civil war by an inch during an outdoor rally July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania when an assassin’s bullet only grazed Donald Trump’s ear instead of killing him. And if the bullet had done its job, would MAGA supporters organize into militias and march on Washington? If so, then what?
Recall the situation brewing prior to World War I, when Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited the city of Sarajevo in Bosnia on June 28, 1914. Fighting for independence from Austro-Hungarian rule, a Serbian terrorist group mixed with the crowd along the archduke’s motorcade. One of the terorists, Nedeljko Čabrinović, tossed a bomb at Ferdinand’s double phaeton as it passed by but it bounced off the vehicle and exploded under the one behind it, injuring about 20 others.
In Trump-like manner, the archduke insisted on visiting the bombing victims in the hospital, but on the way his chauffeur, Leopold Lojka, took a wrong turn and brought the archduke and his wife face-to-face with their killer, teenager Gavrilo Princip. His first shot hit the pregnant Sophia who died almost instantly, while the second shot hit Ferdinand in the neck, and he died shortly after. Princip was arrested immediately. See this.
Lojka identified Princip at his trial as the killer of the archduke and his wife. Under Austro-Hungarian law Princip could not be executed because at age 19 he was not yet an adult. He was sentenced instead to twenty years in solitary confinement at notorious Theresienstadt prison, where he died four years later of tuberculosis.
Nation-states had been gaining power during the 19th century and some were forming alliances, presumably to enhance their power further. The alliances had implications for trade, labor, and culture but, more critically, also contained agreements that should one of them go to war, the others would join on its side. In 1882 the Triple Alliance was formed, consisting of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. An opposing alliance known as the Triple Entente became official in 1907, with the UK, Russia, and France its principal members.
With the dominoes in place, events after the Sarajevo murders proceeded as follows:
July 28 — After diplomacy delayed the inevitable, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, one month to the day after the assassination.
July 29 — Russia, in support of ally Serbia, began to mobilize against Austria-Hungary
August 1 — Germany declared war on Russia
August 3 — Germany declared war on France
August 3 — Great Britain declared war on Germany
For a readable account of the horrors that followed, see World War I: A History From Beginning to End.
Do governments attract psychopaths?
The war shocked people with its unprecedented death and destruction. Certainly more destructive weapons such as tanks, machine guns, mustard gas, and artillery contributed to the outcome, but some writers began questioning the mental state of those who used them. Are they what clinical psychologists would call psychopaths? By definition,
Psychopathy is a condition characterized by the absence of empathy and the blunting of other affective states. Callousness, detachment, and a lack of empathy enable psychopaths to be highly manipulative. . . .
Psychopaths can appear normal, even charming. Underneath, they lack any semblance of conscience.
In 1916 during the Battle of Somme, well over one million people were killed or injured, with the British suffering 57,000 casualties on a single day, a record that still stands. The commander in charge that day of Britain’s foremost loss of life, Douglas Haig, was promoted to Field Marshal the next year. Later, after the armistice of November 1918, Britain maintained a starvation blockade of Germany that eventually killed 750,000 people. Winston Churchill, “largely regarded as Britain’s greatest statesman of the 20th century,” admitted its purpose was to “starve the whole population — men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound — into submission.”
Clearly, “callousness, detachment, and a lack of empathy” were job requirements for human slaughter.
The assassination team that zeroed in on poor Ferdinand had a second chance and made good on it. A few years later 20 million people were dead and another 21 million wounded, counting both military and civilian casualties. And WWI lit the long fuse for the bigger conflagration 20 years later, when according to one source nearly 66 million people died, excluding deaths from the atomic bombings.
Trump is still out in public in front of large adoring crowds. The political climate is ripe for more attempts on his life, perhaps in the form of a bombing attack intended to kill him and whoever happens to be nearby, rather than risk another rifle shot. If the Deep State is in on it they certainly have the resources to get it done decisively, as it’s done many times before.
Trump has become something of a messiah for the politically voiceless. If he’s removed from contention his peaceful followers might mobilize, though it’s likely the Democrat-RINO-controlled government will anticipate this and tell Biden to impose martial law immediately. A military presence will be seen almost everywhere enforcing curfews and shutting down any protests or attempts at armed resistance. For American citizens, liberty will be replaced by government permissions.
Much has been written about how the government instituted a command economy during World War I and shut down any protests against the war. Martial law will be much more restrictive if Trump’s enemies manage to take him out of the election.
In spite of its firepower and other advantages, the government will be challenged to keep the peace. It will be dealing with injured parties that have fire in their eyes, who’ve seen regime-sponsored thugs take out their savior then intern them like criminals. Some will fight to the death. Is it unthinkable that the regime could hit them with a tactical nuclear weapon if conventional tactics were failing?
What would this signal to the rest of the world? Weakness. Vulnerability. An absolutely desperate state of affairs.
The complications following an assassination are anyone’s guess, but unrest domestically and a failure of martial law could easily lead to full-out war with any number of possible adversaries. If the US regime nuked its own citizens, why would it hesitate to use them against another country?
It’s been long understood that governments don’t surrender power even when it conflicts with existing law. Put another way government leaders almost never find themselves guilty of a crime, no matter how egregious, even if it’s an American president approving the use of atomic bombs on mostly civilian populations when there’s no military necessity. If this means they’re psychopaths do we really need them?
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