Tribal War is Coming, Part II

Where We Are Today in the Looming Conflict

For Part I, click here.

For Part III, click here.

If you prefer the audio of this article, click here.

Nothing in this article amounts to an endorsement of or a call for violence of any kind, political or otherwise.

In the last article we explained how mainstream experts agree with Imperium Press on the inevitability of “civil war” in the West. We explained the root causes and historical precedents. This week, we will explain where we are in the trajectory leading toward tribal warfare.

The best way to understand the coming civil conflict is to look at the theoretical model furnished by one of the great participants in a modern civil war, that of Mao Zedong.¹ The Maoist model, also known in academic literature as the classical insurgency model, consists of three phases.

Phase 1: Defensive – As society moves toward conflict, insurgent forces begin in a weak position relative to the sovereign authority. At this point, open violence is rare. Insurgent forces are mostly engaged in rhetoric, theorization, and folkbuilding. They are busy with proselytization and propaganda, recruitment, avoiding lawfare, and working out their narratives. They are getting their house in order and building what we have called communities of belief, or what the academic literature calls their “conscience community”. There are few physical attacks, and in this early phase there may be some temporary alliances with criminal organizations.

Phase 2: Stalemate – As conditions worsen, the insurgent group is pushed from words to action. At this point, attacks begin to occur with some regularity, but the insurgent forces remain inferior to the forces of the sovereign authority. They will create “no-go zones”, where outsiders fear to tread. As this phase proceeds, insurgents will even establish strongholds in which policing is “negotiated”—geographical areas where the state itself must consult with local leaders before being allowed to enforce the law. Toward the end of this phase, insurgent forces will have stable base areas in which they wield de facto sovereignty, as well as a rudimentary military structure (hence the state’s worry about things like Patriot Front and active clubs). This is where “dirty war” becomes visible.

Phase 3: Offensive – At this point, the insurgent forces have built up sufficient material strength to openly contest the sovereignty of the central authority, whose strength has weakened. Violence is chronic, and engagements are no longer asymmetrical. This is when what we commonly think of as “civil war” actually gets going.

It is worth noting that while this model is typical, civil conflicts do not always proceed regularly from one phase to another before the conclusion of hostilities. Sometimes civil wars conclude without ever reaching the third (offensive) phase, such as the Greek Civil War of 1946–1949. Sometimes civil wars skip the second (stalemate) phase entirely, going right from defensive to offensive, such as the American Civil War. Specific conditions on the ground count for much more than theoretical models.

David Betz places Britain in 2025 somewhere near the beginning of the stalemate phase:

We can say that the coming civil war that I imagine will initially have the qualities of a Latin American dirty war. But that is going to metastasize pretty rapidly into a broader civil conflict that will have an essential rural vs. urban dimension, and that relates essentially to demographic patterns in the broader society. The primary anti-status quo strategy of those involved will be to collapse the major cities through physical infrastructure attack with a view to causing cascading crises in those cities, which will lead to systemic failure and a period of mass chaos, which they would hope to wait out in the relative security of the rural provinces.

What is all this in aid of? I think the primary aim [...] is to effect a retrograde change in the population demographic on a large scale, and rapidly. A secondary impulse, that is very clear in popular discourse now, is to punish domestic elite for having failed, willfully or simply negligently, for this perceived failure to maintain the social contract. In character, I think the conflict is probably going to echo the peasant revolts of the distant past more so than the progressive leftist revolutions of the previous century and a half. It’s essentially a conservative reaction against a perceived elite alteration, or elite betrayal [...], of the previously understood social rules of the game.²

At this point it is worth asking—who will be the belligerents in the coming tribal wars? What are the “sides”?

The “sides” in the coming tribal wars will consist of relatively small factions within distinctive communities—that is to say, within ethnic groups—which are highly radicalized and intent on violence. In modern Britain, the main such communities are the various Muslim communities³ and the native British community, whose respective radicalized factions are Islamic fundamentalists and the white identity movement. Each of these are already increasing tensions within society and attempting to exert greater control over their communities of belief.

However, there are some important differences between the Islamic fundamentalists and white identitarians. Firstly, whereas Islamic fundamentalists are increasing fragmentation by attempting to increase the power of a minority community, the white identity movement is attempting to reverse fragmentation.

Secondly, the sovereign authority is effectively only cracking down on the white identity movement, for the reasons laid out earlier—i.e., that the sovereign authority is trying to head off civil conflict by making society too fragmented for a mass movement to form. Islamic fundamentalism is a radical ideology, but one within a minority community, which has no potential for mass mobilization. However the white identity movement is a radical ideology within a majority community, and therein lies the danger to the elite strategy.

But both Islamic fundamentalists and white identity extremists can and do attack the sovereign authority, so we can take the state to be a distinct actor in this dynamic. Across the West, we can see the tribal conflict shaping up to be between the three following belligerents:

• An alliance of ethnic foreigners

• White nativists

• The state

Speaking in terms of the classical insurgency model, David Betz places Islamic fundamentalists somewhere near the beginning of the second (stalemate) phase, and the white identity movement in the middle of the first (defensive) phase.

At present, a third phase (offensive) civil war between Islamists and nativists is exceptionally unlikely. For one, the ethnic/ideological fissures in British society do not align with geographical reality—while there are ethnically Muslim strongholds, those strongholds do not occupy strategically important positions. What’s more, while there are still homogenous ethnically British areas—mainly outside of the cities—there are no radicalized nativist strongholds. Incidentally, this explains why governments across the West are tripping over themselves to move ethnic minorities into the countryside: they are trying to forestall the establishment of any ideologically charged nativist strongholds.

Once again, the belligerents exhibit important differences from each other: specifically in their threat level. The Islamist threat to the state is very near to its maximum potential—perhaps the middle of the second (stalemate) phase. The nativist threat, on the other hand, has so far reached only a fraction of its potential—a full-blown third (offensive) phase mobilization. The Southport riots in July–August of 2024—where spontaneous anger over a mass stabbing incident boiled over into a general rage that spread to various large British cities—manifests an early sign of this nativist potential. The British government takes this potential very seriously, as proven by the harsh, almost hysterical legal response to these riots.