Historians don’t think a civil war in the United States is likely, but they remain nervous

“We either had to use guns, or stand back and hand the city over to the mob,” Alameda County Sheriff Frank Madigan said at the time.

The response to what became known as Bloody Thursday got so out of control that helicopters dropped CS gas — a denser form of tear gas, the same type the FBI used against the Branch Davidians in Waco — on protesters. The wind drove him to the hospital.

Fog of war

This is where Matt O’Brien, an Ohio-based historian who specializes in twentieth-century Ireland, sees a parallel with the Troubles: the use of out-of-state National Guard troops and Department of Homeland Security formations in cities, who don’t have the same training as law enforcement or familiarity with the arenas in which they deploy.

“A lot of the British soldiers sent to Northern Ireland were 18- and 19-year-olds from Liverpool and from Birmingham,” says O’Brien. “Some of them were of Irish descent, they were expected to carry out police duties, and they were completely unprepared.”

In the United States, federal immigration officers and National Guard troops remain in cities they did not join as police officers, with no clear end in sight. It is unclear where the administration will take this campaign from here, especially in the context of… Court rulings Which prevented them from moving as forcefully as the administration desired.

For Pep, the uniquely American and Trumpian nature of the problem makes it difficult for us to understand. Or at least, it is difficult to understand compared to those who see this unfolding from the outside.

“I think it’s hard for everyone here — and I include myself in this as well — to have an analytical distance when violence is happening right in our country, right next door,” Pape says.

Since things are so bad, I want to end on a positive note. I reached out to Bill Ayers to talk me through this moment. Ayers knows a thing or two about armed resistance from his time in the Weather Underground during the 1970s, and how dangerous it can be. His group, which opposed the Vietnam War and viewed the US government as an imperialist entity, targeted federal buildings with homemade bombs in the 1960s and 1970s. There were three members of the Weather Underground He was killed in an accidental explosion in 1970. Ayers remained on the run for the next decade before he and his wife turned themselves in when federal charges against them were dropped. He ended up becoming a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.