Historians don’t think the US Civil War is likely — but they’re still nervous

Alameda County Sheriff Frank Madigan said at the time: “We either had to use the shotgun or we were going to retreat and give the city over to the mob.”

The reaction to what became known as Bloody Thursday got so out of control that helicopters dropped CS gas — a more potent form of tear gas, the same gas used by the FBI against the Branch Davidian in Waco — on protesters. The wind pushed it into the hospital.

fog of war

That’s where Matt O’Brien, an Ohio-based historian specializing in 20th-century Ireland, sees a parallel to the problems: the use in out-of-state cities of National Guard troops and Department of Homeland Security units, which don’t have the same training as law enforcement or familiarity with the areas in which they are stationed.

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

In the United States, federal immigration officers and National Guard troops remain in cities where they have not signed up to police, with no clear end in sight. Where the government takes this campaign from here is unclear, especially in the context of court rulings that have prevented it from being as aggressive as the government would like.

For Pip, the uniquely American and Trumpian nature of the problem makes it harder for us to understand. Or at least it’s harder to understand compared to those who see it from the outside.

“I think it’s hard for basically everybody here — and I put myself in that position — to have analytical distance when violence is happening right here in our country,” Pipp said.

In a very dire situation, I want to end on a positive note. I called Bill Ayers to talk to me about this moment. Ayers knows a thing or two about militant armed resistance from his time in the underground climate during the 1970s and how dangerous it can be. His group, which opposed the Vietnam War and saw the US government as an imperialist entity, bombed federal buildings in the 1960s and 1970s. Three members of the Weather Underground were killed in an accidental explosion in 1970. Ayers remained a fugitive for a decade before he and his wife turned themselves in when federal charges against them were dropped. He eventually became a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.