Some terrifying sounding statistics on political violence in the US in this month’s Byline Times.
The technical definition of a civil war is a thousand combatant deaths within a year, according to the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. The definition of civil strife starts at 25 deaths within a single year.
During the five past years, rightwing extremists have killed, on average, more than 60 people a year in the United States. Therefore, by definition, America is already in civil strife, and some argue that it is now on the threshold of civil war.
And later:
Today’s political violence is almost exclusively right-wing, as documented in a study conducted by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies which found that, of the 893 terrorism incidents that took place on US soil between January 1994 and May 2020, left-wing groups and individuals were responsible for 22 of the 3,086 deaths. These numbers do not include the dozens, if not hundreds, of planned right-wing attacks that will have been foiled by law enforcement authorities.
Marche says that the mainstream media is yet to understand and articulate the size and scope of this growing domestic terror threat, arguing that even fringe groups within the anti-government patriot movement are “sizeable”, with one - Sovereign Citizens, which rejects government authority and existing legal systems attracting more than 300,000 active members alone.