The Rest Is History - 2. Civil War

Episode Date: November 2, 2020

What are the conditions needed for a civil war to start? Could we see a modern industrial nation turn upon itself again? Historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook explore examples from ancient history though to Spain in the 1930s and Yugoslavia in the 1990s to work out what it takes for neighbour to murder neighbour. Produced by Jack Davenport Exec Producer Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is Restless History with me, Tom Holland. Sitting opposite me is the ever-lovely Dominic Sandbrook. You're very kind, Tom. And Dominic, last week we were talking about greatness. Missed myself out. So I guess a complete lack of modesty is a central attribute of greatness

aside from yourself um i mean we we went through a lot of great people last week um in the intervening week have you come up with any great people because you see we didn't talk about writers musicians we didn't talk about shakespeare or mozart or the beatles so actually it's not just about we were wrong it's not just about killing people and scoring goals. It's also about, you know, well, that's a whole podcast in itself, isn't it? OK, so Elvis, the Beatles, they'd be great. OK, well, today I thought that we could talk about civil war. Nice.

Not a cheery topic. Jolly subject. Prompted specifically by an amazing poll i saw um well you saw because i gave it to you yeah it's and it's sitting right here in front of me um in which um americans who identify as democrat or republican it says um one in three now believe that violence could be justified to advance their party's political goals uh and this year in america we've seen kind of armed militias starting to roam the street i mean it's what's the difference between a fraying of

civil order and full-scale collapse into civil war what what are the lessons of history on that um if you're about to collapse into um civil war yeah do you know when it's coming yeah do you know when it's coming so what what would you say the less what are the lessons of history there on that oh easy subject see i this is something that's always um fascinated me because i can remember going to university at about the point when the yugoslav civil wars were kicking off and yugoslavia was a country that existed throughout my entire childhood. You know, football team, anthem, flag. Winter Olympics.

The Winter Olympics in 1984. Torval and Dean. Torval and Dean in Sarajevo, I think it was. So, you know, Yugoslavia was a sort of fixed point in the Atlas. You know, you learned that Belgrade was the capital. People went on package holidays in the 80s. It was a very trendy kind of package tour destination. And then it implodes. And then it fell apart in that incredibly gruesome way.

I mean, any listeners of our age will remember, you know, neighbor turning on neighbor because of religious differences, because one was a Bosnian Muslim family and one was a Bosnian Serb family. And that sort of terrifying sense that everything can just fall apart you know almost sort of JG Ballard I mean um nightmare can become real so quickly I mean yes and so it's it's the fact that it's happening in in a European modern European state yeah I mean that's terrible to say so but that's obviously part of the impact isn't it that it was so close but I guess I mean one thing that thing that strikes me about the way that Yugoslavia implodes is that it was a kind of, it was an artificial nation.

Yeah, but all nations are artificial, aren't they? Yeah, but it was stitched together from the constituent parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. So these empires that that had collapsed and then in a sense after the the second world war it although it wasn't officially part of the warsaw pact it was part of the the communist sphere of influence yeah so in that sense it was it was kind of frozen by the cold war and it's when the berlin Wall comes down and the Cold War ends that the ice melts and all these kind of ancient hatreds have been busy incubating. I don't agree with that. I don't think it is ancient hatreds. That was an argument. Ancient hatreds was actually a phrase used in the 1990s in the White House by the Clinton administration to justify not intervening.

They said, oh, it's all these ancient hatreds of these people who are all basically tribesmen who hate each other. So what do you think causes it? I think it's, you know, you look at all these civil wars, you look at Spain in the 1930s, even if you look at England in the 1640s, and the patterns are not so different. You see this sort of escalation of rhetoric, this belief that the other side pose a mortal threat

to the health of the nation and to you and your community. There's often a sort of religious dimension. You see think i think it's down to diocletian diocletian yeah roman emperor diocletian the roman emperor at the end of the third century who effectively divides the roman empire in right in two so you have the uh the western half and you have the eastern half you have orthodox and you have the catholic and the fracture line is almost exactly onto uh this is yugoslavia yeah yeah that's it i throw that i throw that into the mix but but you see i think also another another place where um you mentioned the ottoman empire yeah and of course the the the country that is most has been most savagely torn to pieces by civil war over the past decade is Syria. Yeah. And you've had civil war as well in Iraq.

And I think there's a sense that, again, both countries are kind of artificial entities stitched together out of the tatters of what had been the Ottoman Empire. And there is a case for saying that civil wars get incubated in nation states that perhaps previously had been part of imperial frameworks in which the idea of the nation state made no sense at all. But that's, okay, I can buy that a little bit. So you've got these sort of what you call artificial creations where they're sort of baked in with these differences.

But then you look at Spain in the 1930s. So Spain is a country with centuries of history. Of course, there are separatist movements in Spain in the 30s, but Spain was a sort of plausible, reasonable nation state. And even in areas with no separatism, people still killed their neighbours. When I remember reading a book about three or four years ago, which made a massive impression on me, called The Spanish Holocaust by Paul Preston. And basically, the argument of this book was that what happened in Spain, the dehumanisation of the opposition and the

belief that killing them was a moral thing to do, was not so different from what happened in Central and Eastern Europe, you know, four or five years later under Nazism. And actually, the individual stories, I mean, there's one village I remember where the landowner and his friends basically round up all the people in the village who he doesn't like, and they do a sort of mock bullfight with them, get them to run round the stadium, and then they butcher them. They kill them all. And this sort of thing happened in village after village, town after town, where there were no religious differences other than...

But hatred kind of grows exponentially, doesn't it? Well, that's the terrifying thing, though, isn't it? See, we think we're immune. Well, do we? Well, that's the terrifying thing, though, isn't it? See, we think we're immune. Well, do we? Well, that's the interesting question, because we've lived through a period in Britain where political differences have been very, very highly charged, and we are living in a time when, on social media,

people regularly say that their opponents are evil, they are purely maligned, they're motivated only by greed or hatred and all the rest of it. I mean, the left will say that the right and the right of the left completely happily. And those are the preconditions for conflict. Because if you really do believe that your opponents are not properly human, then why wouldn't you kill them? I suppose the reason that it hasn't is that everyone who thinks that is too busy on Twitter actually to get out on the streets. Right, yeah.

But of course, I mean, we have had a civil war within the United Kingdom, if not in Great Britain, because we've effectively, Northern Ireland was, you know, in the 70s, was a scene of effectively of civil war. It basically was a civil war. So in the early 1970s, you know, you have hundreds of people being killed in Belfast every year.

You have bombs going off. At one point, I think, in about 1972, you basically have a bomb going off in Belfast every single day. And you go into the shops, you go into work, you have to go past military checkpoints. There are soldiers everywhere. There are tanks. There are armed paramilitaries in the streets.

I mean, that's as close to a civil war as the the whole of Great Britain and Ireland in the 17th century. Yeah. So in a sense, it's been an enduring legacy of... Well, I don't know if you'll agree with this, but the people always say, and particularly very well-meaning teachers, people of that sort of denomination will say, if only we understood history, if only we knew a bit more history, we'd be so kind to each other and it would be really nice.

In every war that we've spoken about, particularly Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland, it is history that is in some part the culprit it's because people have such a strong sense of history yes i you know maybe people knew less history i think that's true and i think i think it's um it's when um identities that are rooted in religion or in an idea of nationhood um rub up against equally strongly held ones that that you get it and i suppose that's what that that that's what happens in in spain in the 30s is that thrown into that mix is kind of ideological tensions bred specifically of the 20th century that then kind of fuse with with much older religious and national identities um but

but you were asking at the beginning about whether is there a point at which you know you see the alarm bells ring can you see an alarm bell ring you can hear an alarm bell ring is there a point at which you can hear the alarm bell ringing and i wonder what that point is because often you know let's say britain in the 80s which I've written about, the rhetoric was incredibly impassioned. Routinely, you know, tens of thousands of people... To the battle of all grief. Yeah, well, I mean, you've got the miners' strike in 1984-85, where you've got miners and police sort of doing, having a pitched, albeit sort of not fully armed battle. But the racks of the police with the shields. Yeah, the racks of the police with the shields.

Yeah, the racks of the police, the shields, sort of the police horses charging the miners. You know, the police would then say, well, we've confiscated these weapons, the sort of makeshift weapons that Pickett's had brought. So there was obviously violence on both sides and people would talk about it as a sort of, you know, as an unacknowledged civil war.

Now, it wasn't a civil war because people didn didn't kill each other, and there's no great death toll, but the passions are not so different. And obviously, at that point, the alarm bells were going off, because people were, you know, in the newspapers, people were saying, this is a terrible situation, you know, are we sliding towards something more serious, the government must get a grip, the government mustn't inflame things as mrs thatcher was perceived to have done and and you you probably isn't it true that in france over the issue of algeria whether algeria should yeah which was part of metropolitan france but the goal then kind of cut it loose yes isn't it i mean that's

the kind of the plot of the day of the jackal is it is well the generals tried to there was a coup in algiers um uh what day to be doing i think about 1961 if i remember right i might be wrong there was a coup in algiers which was then part of france the capital of algeria um the generals tried to they they they thought they would use this as a springboard to take over France itself and to basically impose a military regime that would keep Algeria part of France. And there was this moment when, you know, could it have come to armed conflict? I mean, it didn't because the generals lost that nerve. How close did it come?

I don't think it did actually come very close. I mean, kind of on a level with a... But, you know, what's interesting is that a few years later, in 1968, you know, everyone of a certain age will know what I mean when I talk about the événements of 1968, the kind of riots in the streets of Paris and students throwing cobblestones at the police and car factories on strike and all the rest of it. And de Gaulle famously disappears

he flies off to the French military base in Baden-Baden in West Germany to basically get the loyalty of the army because he thinks he's going to have to come back with the army to fight a civil war to retain his position so as recently as that yeah France was a country where the idea of a civil war was possible yeah it Yeah, was conceivable. Was embedded. I mean, you've been occupied by the Germans, you've had Vichy, you've had the resistance, you've had the liberation. Why wouldn't you have a civil war 20 years later?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I suppose in answer to your question about do you know when civil wars are going to start, going right back, I suppose the most famous example of that would be Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, which, you know, crossing the Rubicon has become... Yes. So what's the significance of that?

You're not allowed, a general is not allowed to cross the river. So you push things back far enough, and what happens in kind of the ancient states of Greece and of Rome is that invariably comes down to personal ambition. And that's absolutely the case with Caesar. Yes, that he's been off in Gaul for 10 years, beating up asterisks and everyone like that and feels that he is entitled to to be treated treated with great honour and respect. The problem is that his achievements and the way that he obtained his governorship has created so many enemies back in Rome

that he has people who are desperate to destroy him and they want to destroy him legally. So the moment Caesar lays down his command, he becomes a private citizen and then he can be prosecuted and hopefully, from the point of view of his enemies enemies ruined so what caesar wants is to go seamlessly from being governor of gaul to becoming consul with no point become being a private citizen and his enemies kind of move maneuver him into a situation where he's he has the choice of laying down his command and going back being a private citizen risking risking ruin or keeping hold of his

command and in crossing the rubicon which is the boundary between his province and italy that's quite the moment he does that then then then effectively he's declaring but that's different from the examples we've talked about before because that's generated by the ambitions of one man yes absolutely absolutely except of course that the reason that caesar is able to um command troops and loyalty is that he's tapping into mass resentment. OK, so the resentment is there, it's latent. Yes, but I think that Caesar is kind of an example of someone who, well, I suppose without Caesar, maybe the Republic would have fallen apart anyway. But he's definitely the driver of that civil war.

Whereas with the more modern civil wars that we're talking about, the sense that this is like a kind of cancer in the body politic... Yeah, but they have drivers too, though. See, they have drivers too. That goes back to the ancient hatreds thing. So Yugoslavia wouldn't have happened. I mean, there might have been some conflict, but it wouldn't have been the same if it hadn't been for Slobodan Milosevic,

who was the leader of the Serbs, deliberately inflaming the situation by saying that Serbs were being persecuted in these sort of breakaway republics. And then the leaders of some of these other republics firing up their own base at the same time and saying, we must take up arms, we must arm our police, we must be free of the Serb, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So basically, people are deliberately pouring petrol on the flames. I mean, isn't that just a very, very, very weaponized version of what's been a very, very, very weaponised version of what's been happening in, say, British politics recently?

This is the question, isn't it? Is it? Because obviously... Well, I don't know. I mean, you're the modern historian. Tell me. Well, I mean, what I was thinking about was that... So the figure of Milosevic, the figure of Milosevic who fires up his base and it all implodes and then results in civil war

i mean how is that different that that's the model yeah how is that different from any other politician i mean you're right that actually now arguably a more sort of unsettling question is you know is democratic politics itself a kind of aberration a failed experiment no um is it is it a um is it a sort of sublimated version of a civil war and does it have the germ of civil war in it so in other words if you have two parties screaming at each other across a chamber and they say to each other you know you are betraying the nation you are oh you are greedy you are only interested in yourselves you are you are failing people are dying because of you i mean we hear this now You are betraying the nation. You are greedy. You are only interested in yourselves. You are failing.

People are dying because of you. I mean, we hear this now all the time. So in the British context, it isn't the fact that we have the idea of Her Majesty's loyal opposition. Yeah, I think you're right about that. Is that not a legacy of the civil wars? Exactly, because you need the opposition to be part of the civil wars because you need exactly because you need the opposition because the pro you know i mean it's not just it's not just um the um the the civil wars that precede the cromwellian protectorate i mean wars violence unrest persists throughout britain and ireland

for decades to come i mean really right they're up to culloden i suppose you could say and the the experience of that the understanding of where um factions within the body politic that refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of those who are opposing them can lead is a lesson that kind of burns itself into the fabric of England and Scotland. I think you're right, and I think what happened... You see, my theory, I was always... We did the English Civil War at A-level, and I was always fascinated by the fact that, you know, we stopped, I think, with maybe...

We went into Charles II, and then we sort of stopped after the Glorious Revolution, I think. So we sort of did, you know, from James I to William of Orange. And I was always interested, what happened next? Because all these guys who've been killing each other all this time, and why do they suddenly start just going to coffee houses and talking about the South Sea bubble and reading Gulliver's Travels? Why aren't they still fighting each other? Because the issues are still there. And clearly what happened was that the wars had been utterly traumatic. And the people basically stopped resorting to violence as that in a way british

politics became slightly more de-weaponized yeah so you know in just before the english civil war broke out in 1642 um charles the first chief minister the earl of strafford had been executed um by after an act passed by Parliament. So he'd been, you know, he was condemned for basically doing his master's bidding. And execution, impeachments and execution, were kind of political, reasonable political tools. There's obviously a point later on where you just stop executing your opponents. You know, no one executed Gordon Brown in 2010 or David Cameron in 2015. I mean, they weren't even exiled.

I thought Cameron was kind of exiled to his shed, wasn't he? Yes, he was. His posh shed. He was. He's living a kind of... Yeah, but you'd rather be exiled to a posh shed than have your head chopped off. Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

I mean, I don't know what life's like in David Cameron's shed. I mean, I don't actually live very far away from David Cameron, so I could easily find out. Well, yes, go and do that next week and report back. Extraordinary laziness that I have. It's the idea, I mean, and I suppose that's what's so unsettling about that idea of the poll of Democrats and Republicans thinking the same, is that a functioning democracy

depends on extremes acknowledging the legitimacy of the pluralism. Unless you have that, then you don't really have a functioning democracy. But there are times, politically, certainly in modern political history, where that pluralism frays, I think. So if you say, we talked about the 80s, if you go to the 80s, there was a point there where, to some extent, both sides denied the other's legitimacy. You know, Margaret, one of Margaret Thatcher's sort of defining qualities was that she basically didn't say socialists are wrong. She said they are evil. They are their forces of wickedness. And equally, her opponent said of her, she's not just wrong. She's not pursuing just wrong policies. She is a genuinely evil person.

Yes, but at no point do de thatcher or kinnock deny the right of the other one to stand up in the house of commons and you know they don't start importing arms to distribute their party but but you know prime minister's question time thatcher stands there and kinnock questions her as the duly elected prime minister yeah you're right and and and likewise thatcher takes questions from kinnock as the duly elected um leader of the labour party and the the the kind of the the fraying is is there on on the the kind of the hard left of of labour where there are people who deny the legitimacy of of bourgeois democracy and on the right where there are people who kind of fantasize about coups and and and military takeovers and that that's always as long as they that those two extremes are kept on the extremes then you have a functioning democracy once they start kind of um but we're

in a more dangerous time now aren't we because the sort of the mainstream of democracy is more discredited than it ever has been in our lifetimes. I mean, trust in democracy is lower among young people, particularly with the most the people always most likely to drive a civil war because they're young and they're kind of active and then they don't have a mortgage. Well, and also, I mean, famously, one of the drivers of if not civil wars and then then mass civil unrest is graduates who don't get jobs. Yes, that is precisely where we're heading. We'll have further civil unrest after this break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest of the entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com to go back to america which is where we started, I think what's worrying about that, as opposed to Britain, is the number of weapons. I mean, that's what you need to have a civil war.

So basically, the English Civil War starts because both sides want to get their hands on weapons and they want to get their hands on the army, the king and parliament. In the US, I mean, in Northern Ireland, they could kill each other because they had weapons. They had imported guns. In the US, they have guns already. I mean, we've all seen the footage of sort of people

during the Black Lives Matter protests standing on their front doorsteps with their, you know, semi-automatic rifles. Don't you find that worrying? Yeah, I generally find the idea of people having lots of guns worrying, but that's because I'm a very English wuss. Yeah, slightly nervous about that. And you've got sort of Donald Trump, you know,

doing his best to delegitimize the election result before it happens as well. That sense of democracy itself not being legitimate. Yes, so that is... Yeah, so essentially you have to respect the legitimacy of elections and the process. And when you don't, that's when the risk is, I guess.

And do you think, I mean, I know you have strong views about things like the future of the United Kingdom. Do you think it's ever plausible you could have a kind of civil war in the UK itself, for example, if part of it tried to break away um i no i i i can't imagine that um if it's the will of the scottish people to leave the uk that that a uk government would would oppose that

people of northumberland won't take up arms to compel their neighbours to... No. I mean, I am... You know, there's a reason why England and Scotland joined, which was that... Money. Yeah, well, money, but also, you know, it was money for the Scots and it was a desire to kind of protect

the northern frontier for the English. And it'd be interesting to see whether, you know, the, the factors that, that, that, that influenced the, the joining of the United Kingdom,

whether they would recur if the UK came apart. I mean, I, I don't know, but I, I, I wouldn't worry about that so much. I,

I mean, I think, I think one of, one of the things that, that when you think about say the, the civil wars in Britain in the 17th century or indeed the American Civil War, is that your sense of why a war is being fought must evolve over time and indeed retrospectively so so with the american civil war being the classic example that now we think of it as having been fought about slavery but but there's a sense in which that wasn't i don't know it was always wasn't it i don't i don't know if i i mean it was very you're going to say it was about the right of secession of the southern

states well i i think i mean i think in its fundamentals it was about slavery. But I'm wondering whether it was seen as having been about slavery by people who were fighting at the time. Was that a kind of idea that kind of evolved over the process of fighting? And likewise in the Civil War in Britain, the understanding of what people were fighting about, I would guess, was pretty different at the beginning in the civil war in in in britain the understanding of what people were fighting about i would guess was pretty different at the beginning of the wars it was you know yeah because at the beginning i don't think anyone was fighting i mean obviously the civil wars the english civil war is a great example where the the meaning changes so the beginning nobody is fighting to get rid of the king yeah and certainly nobody is fighting for a republic but at the end of the war

people didn't think that charles stewart does they charles stewart is a man of blood yeah and he has to be killed and there are proper republicans in the army who then for the next 10 years are fighting any attempt what they see as sort of backtrack on the radical vision that has taken root among the soldiers so i think one of that that's one of the things that often happens in a civil war as opposed to another war i think is that you have a very engaged consequences yeah you have a very engaged kind of rank and file because they're fighting on home soil they're fighting for hearth and home they're fighting against their neighbors it all just means much more yeah and then they become radicalized over time and i think that that to that extent extent, you could say that, say, the tensions that have afflicted Britain over this decade, kind of the same thing has happened. That things have happened that people would not have anticipated.

That perhaps the Brexit vote has unleashed arguments and tensions and crises. People did become radicalised, didn't they? Yeah. But it was a de-weaponized yeah thankfully thankfully but but you can kind of see that that um civil wars mutate ideologically yeah they do but also i think tom what one of the disturbing things about them is that you know brexit is a good example actually because there you have an issue that you know everybody has an opinion but most people probably don't have an intensely strong opinion, that a lot of the sort of the shouting is done by a relative minority. But

that's true in civil wars, too. Yeah, most of the people, I mean, if you ever read interviews of people in the Yugoslavian civil war in the 1990s, or indeed in Spain in the 1930s, a large proportion that would say, actually, I wasn't really, I didn't want a war, I wasn't really that bothered. It was my neighbours who had always been incredibly political who drove this, and the rest of us were sort of swept up in it. And that's the scary thing. I mean, in the English Civil War, I was identified with the club men.

Oh, yeah. So tell us about the club men. Because I grew up in Wiltshire, and the club men were very strong in Wiltshire. They were people who basically didn't want to fight on either side. So they'd fight both. So they would get clubs, hence their name, anding from all the debate going living in the wood. And kind of wondering, well, you know, what would it take to precipitate an actual civil war in a modern Western liberal democracy? You know, is it the definition of living in a Western liberal democracy that it can't go?

No, of course it can happen. Of course it can happen. So how would it work? Well, I suppose it would be preceded by a period, let's say 10 years, possibly longer, of growing passion, intense politicisation. This is why I think apathy is so underrated. Yes. Because the more, you know, if you ever want to find somewhere where everyone cares about politics, they're talking about politics, which is what sort of politicised people want. Yeah. That place is Spain, 1934. You don't want to be there.

Happy the land that takes no interest in politics. Right, exactly. So I think you have an intensely politicised public. You have young people, so the people who are most likely to fight. Basically have young people who are on the streets, who maybe don't have jobs. Yeah, and who feel that they are not getting the jobs, that their education... They've got nothing to lose. They've got nothing to lose. I think you have a sense of sort of dehumanisation or delegitimisation.

So your opponents are not just wrong, they're evil. And the process itself is worthless and flawed. So there's no point in persisting with it. I mean, I think there is the way that Trump has been trying to argue that he's not going to leave. I mean, that's a kind of major step. But it's kind of there on the left as well. Because the question, you know, if Trump wins, would people opposed to him accept it? I mean, I can't imagine they would either.

At what point, if you're the governor of California, do you just say, sod it? It's the seed. Yeah, but I think the other issue is, you know, to have a war, you have to be able to kill people. So you either have to have paramilitaries with access to weapons, so they're getting there from outside, so the intervention of some foreign powers, or you have a very politicised military. So in other words, the army will step in

and will fight on one side, or there are elements of it that might fight on the other side. But I mean, I have to say that, I mean, all of these conditions are clearly, but I'm relieved to think that they are all pretty unlikely so well some of them are i mean i mean i think in britain for example the one that is the least likely is actually probably the military um and in that you know in the 70s there was talk of this happening yes man batten was man batten and his coup so lord man batten supposedly was going to

lead a coup to install a government no it wasn't true but it was in the crown it must be true so the most famous story is that Cecil Harmsworth King who was basically the um the boss of the Daily Mirror he summoned Mountbatten he used to keep in his desk this is the late 60s he used to keep in his desk a list of his cabinet when he became emergency prime minister which is an unusual thing for a newspaper i mean maybe it's not maybe all newspaper workers do this i'm sure we can all think of newspaper editors who probably do have lists in their desks of of their government when they assume supreme power but anyway cecil king had this list and matt batten was on it and he basically arranged a lunch with matt batten in which he said here's the story um I want you to take over as dictator and the Daily Mirror will support you. And Mountbatten sort of was,

you know, he didn't know what to make of it. He basically didn't make anything of it. I think supposedly he went back to the Queen Mother and said, I've just had the most extraordinary conversation with a friend of yours. And it was never really mentioned again. But when the Mirror found out about it, they basically booted out Cecil King as their chairman.

I think if a chairman is plotting civil war, I think that's fairly reasonable. Well, it was risky. I mean, if he'd succeeded, they would all have been for the chop, presumably, or maybe exiled to the Isle of Man or something. But anyway, there were stories that in the 70s, this would be discussed at Sandhurst and whatnot. You know, what will happen if people come to us and they say, we need to step in, you know, the trade unions are taking power

and we need to arrest all the leaders of the TUC and the Labour Party or something. And generally, as far as I understand, the mood was, this is ridiculous, we wouldn't have anything to do with it. And I think Britain is in a relatively fortunate position of having a relatively unpoliticised military that's hard to imagine taking part. But the United States is slightly different. I mean, if you're there, you've got the president is the commander-in-chief.

The president gives you an order. You have to follow it. Or you're breaking the chain of command. So imagine that the election in the US. I mean, in the US, a lot of those conditions have been met, haven't they? There is the delegitimizing of the process. There is already violence on the streets. There are a lot of guns. There are people who genuinely believe that their opponents are evil and are out to get them and are going to steal all their money or kill their kids or all this kind of business. imagine a situation which is an electoral deadlock

the president as commander-in-chief refuses to leave gives the army a direct order you know governors give their their police forces different orders dominic i i thought that we'd end on this note because it would be a kind of cheery note because i in no way thought that you'd go for we haven't even gone into France yet. ...full civil war. But it's still, you know, let's end on a positive note. Very unlikely, isn't it? But is it, though?

Well, yes. So I don't know. I mean, how long... I think... Let's say we've both got, what, how many years left? Let's be optimistic. We've got 30, 40 years left until we're dragged off to the great archive in the sky.

In that time, is it plausible that we will see some sort of breakdown of order, some kind of violence in an industrialised, in a vertical, developed country? I'd have thought so, but I wouldn't have thought... We will, won't we? I wouldn't have thought that it would be a kind of traditional civil war. I think it's likely to be prompted by climate emergency... See, I think civil wars have been a constant of human history.

Well, yes. I'm hearing your gloomy Spenglerian pessimism. The difference in conventional wars, right, is that a conventional war becomes less and less likely because the stakes are so high the technology is so but a civil war you're not going to drop a nuclear bomb on somebody

but butchering your neighbour with a kitchen knife I suppose what I can see is something akin to Northern Ireland so ulsterisation never an open civil war but just bombings, paramedics on the streets of Luxembourg. Well, I think on that note,

I think we have nowhere to go after that. So, we will draw a line on that, which I think it's not been a cheery conversation. No, I think listeners should tweet us and suggest their own favourite civil war. listeners should tweet us and suggest their own favourite and say why Dominic's wrong cheer me up

on that sombre note we will bid you have a lovely day bid you farewell thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com.

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