Brace yourself for a riveting, disturbing film. Alex Garland, the brilliant British filmmaker behind Ex Machina and The Beach, is about to unleash Civil War on cinema audiences. A terrifying trailer shows the US collapsing into violent chaos as the “Western Forces” and “Florida Alliance” clash with the state. A paramilitary soldier forces a family to put their hands up at the roadside. “We’re Americans, OK?” the father pleads. “OK,” he drawls, with a chilling disregard. “What kind of Americans are you?”
The United States is not yet 250 years old. Is this how One Nation Under God will tear itself apart? Empires end, the film warns. Early viewers have described the film as an unflinching “masterpiece” that is “scary as hell”.
Garland began writing his edgy screenplay in 2020 as the last election was hurtling towards its climax with the riot at the Capitol. The film stars Kirsten Dunst as a photographer, with a gravelly voice that reminds me of the late Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin. “Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home: ‘Don’t do this,’” her character says. People try to block out the violence and go about their own lives, while the president promises a swift end to the uprising. Soon refugees are on the move and rebel troops are besieging Washington.
Garland has been called a visionary, particularly over the threat from AI, and this scenario is not completely far-fetched. No, I don’t think civil war is primed to explode imminently, but America is armed, volatile and dangerous. Commentators have been parsing the meaning of Donald Trump’s violent rhetoric at an Ohio rally last weekend. “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath,” Trump said. “That’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”
One problem is America is awash with firearms — there are nearly 400 million privately owned guns
Ha, ha, Lefties and liberals. The joke’s on you. Don’t you get it? Trump was referring to the decimation of the auto industry in a car-making town, defenders say. They insist it’s pure media bile to strip out this context. Detractors point to the obvious ambiguity of Trump’s words, his whipping up of anger in a roiling crowd, and the way the rally opened with “Please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6 hostages,” before blasting out the prisoners’ profane rendition of the US national anthem.
The Biden campaign quickly assembled a social media montage of Trump’s comments in their perceived “context”. Watch it if you can next to Garland’s trailer. The ad is nearly as alarming. It splices Trump’s “bloodbath” warning with American fascists chanting “Jews shall not replace us”, swastikas and KKK flags flying, his call for Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”, police getting assaulted at the Capitol, and his steadfast refusal to disown violence.
There are plenty of other troubling comments by Trump. He said in New Hampshire recently: “The threat from outside forces is less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.” He has accused former defence chief General Mark Milley, who regarded January 6 as a Nazi “Reichstag fire” moment, of treason “punishable by death” in another era, and wants to lock up Liz Cheney, his fiercest Republican critic.
Is Trump just being Trump, fomenting outrage for the hell of it, or should we be terrified? One problem is America is awash with firearms. There are nearly 400 million privately owned guns in the US. I recently read that one in three Americans knows somebody who was shot. At first I was shocked, but then it dawned on me that I personally know six (I don’t know any Britons who have been shot).
There was the handsome boy in Alabama who sent me my first Valentine’s card, aged eight. He was accidentally killed by his older brother at 11. The brother became a big guns and hunting rights advocate. Then there was the policeman at my children’s primary school in Washington. I used to think of him as a friendly, armed lollipop man. When the teacher he was dating rejected him, he seized her, shot her and died in a hail of bullets from his police colleagues. I could go on.
When people have guns, they are tempted to use them. I’ve encountered plenty of Trump supporters who are itching for strife — and not just among the cosplaying Make America Great Again crowd. Influential intellectual champions of a new civil war can be found at the Claremont Institute, an arch-Right think tank in liberal California. In 2019 Trump awarded them a National Humanities medal for “championing the Nation’s founding principles and enriching American minds (sic)”.
In 2020 they published a series on The Separation, echoing Abraham Lincoln’s prophecy that a “divided house cannot stand”. The most provocative essays were penned by “Rebecca”, who adopted Lincoln’s former nom-de-plume to argue against the very unity the civil war president paid with his life to defend. In his view — I’m sure the author is a man — America’s second civil war will be marked by a voluntary assorting of people into “red” Republican and “blue” Democrat states, with the power to set their own taxes and laws.
It’s already happening. How else to describe the 2022 Supreme Court overturning 50 years of precedent on abortion and allow individual states to determine women’s reproductive rights? Next up, according to the Claremont Institute, is an assault on the “administrative state” (aka the deep state), “modern feminism and the radical homosexual and transsexual rights movements”. They mean it. One of their lawyers, John Eastman, was a leading election coup plotter.
I’ve encountered plenty of Trump supporters who are itching for strife
In Rebecca’s scenario, the US would continue to have one military, one currency and one Olympic team, but such a truce might not last. Barbara Walter, author of How Civil Wars Start, believes the US is in a febrile state of “anocracy” — somewhere between democracy and autocracy — that could tip into mass casualty events forcing Americans to choose sides or seek protection from a strongman. “Civil wars are unbelievably destructive,” she says. “It will scar generations.”
Garland believes guns are not necessary for conflict. “Any country can disintegrate into civil war whether there are guns floating around the country or not,” he noted at SXSW. “Some civil wars have been carried out with machetes and still managed to kill a million people.” Yet his own film shows US fighter planes turning their firepower on civilians as heavily armed militias seize the streets.
The first US civil war delivered death on an industrial scale the world had never seen. How much worse might a hi-tech one be? I hope we never find out.
