Divide and Conquer

My last blog was a not completely tongue in cheek suggestion that we end the 156 year long truce of the Civil War, finally permitting the red states to secede. I won’t go into the details of that proposal here, but you can read it at anauthorsinnermind.blog under the title, “Time to End the Civil War.”

Of course my suggestion, practical and ingenious 😂😂 as it is, will not happen, but maybe it should. As things now stand, the nation is unraveling rapidly, and, in the absence of some drastic solution, we are on an express train to oblivion. That solution has to include putting an end to the outsized influence of the most ignorant, dangerous and regressive segment of the population on our national affairs.

A formal division into a red and a blue country would permit the “Blue-nited States” to progress toward becoming an ever more enlightened and modern nation. The “Redfederation” would sink further and further into its morass of prejudice, ignorance, and anti-democratic policies. As long as they don’t start outright hostilities, let them stew in their juices.

I actually think this idea is not as farfetched as it may appear to be. The nation is already divided, and irretrievably so. The division is not over a single issue. It’s about fundamental differences in beliefs, values and priorities on which neither side will budge.

Maybe we should accept that and create a formal split. Paradoxically, only in dividing may we perhaps create unity. People could choose which nation to live in based on their value systems. Once the population redistributes itself, emigrating to the nation that suits them, there would be much more unity in each of the new individual nations permitting them to pursue policies amicable to their constituents. As two independent nations, engaged in free commerce with a formal agreement not to meddle in each other’s internal affairs, we could focus better on outside threats to the security of the larger territory both nations occupy and whose defense is vital to both. We won’t have to hate each other, because the policies of our neighbor would not affect our own personal lives at all. Live and let live. Or, as in the case of the Redfederation’s Covid policies, let die.

In the James Bond film, “From Russia With Love,” there is a scene in which the evil head of SPECTRE demonstrates to a Russian operative how to emerge as victorious in a power struggle without struggling. She is shown a fish tank containing three fighting fish. Two engage in a struggle to the death while the third waits. The winner will be so weakened, the third fish will easily kill it and become top fish.

There has been a big bruh-ha-ha over Russian interference with the 2016 elections. While this, no doubt is true, the Russians, and the Chinese, are focused on more than simply influencing who is elected. Their efforts to affect elections through propaganda and disinformation have worked beautifully, of course, and getting Trump in the White House was a boon to them. But they are less concerned about who wins the elections than they are about generally weakening us, so that, like the third fish, they will swoop in for the kill.

What they have done, and continue to do is to identify the issues that divide the population and drive our factions further apart while stoking the flames of our antipathy toward one another. They have succeeded so well that, at this point, we are doing their job for them.

The nation is at once totally distracted by internal strife and paralyzed by the dysfunctional government that has mirrored our internal schisms. While we fiddle time away and accomplish nothing, our enemies make hay. Like the two fighting fish, we are so wrapped up in our internal struggle, we are hardly aware of what they are doing and woefully unprepared for what they will eventually do.

The reality is the Civil War truce was broken on Jan 6, 2021. We are now re-engaged in a great Civil War, and, sorry Abe, we are failing the test of whether this nation can long endure. If the war continues to go on and leaves us as one more failed democracy, we will find ourselves at the mercy of foreign powers. We are living in a delusion that we are the exceptional and invincible nation that emerged from WWII. That America is long gone. Very soon our deterioration will be so severe, it will be child’s play for our adversaries to supplant us as dominant on the world stage. They are well along the path of doing so.

Divide and conquer. The oldest trick in the book. And, sadly, we are too busy fighting among ourselves to see that’s exactly what’s going on. One option is to divide formally. The two independent nations can stop fighting each other and, when necessary, temporarily put aside their differences to oppose a common threat. A model similar to the EU and NATO.

If we, on the other hand, continue to be united in name only, trying to pretend we are still one nation, we will surely be conquered.

In this context the old saying should be revised to “Divide to not be conquered.”