...Now of course there’s a point to talking about, and learning
from, the abuses inflicted by groups of people on other groups of people over
the last five centuries or so of North American history. Such discussions, though, have very little to
offer the topic of the current series of posts here...
North America being what it is today, a great many people
considering the sort of future I’ve just sketched out immediately start
thinking about the potential for ethnic conflict, especially but not only in
the United States. It’s an issue worth discussing, and not only for the currently
obvious reasons. Conflict between ethnic groups is quite often a major issue in
the twilight years of a civilization, for reasons we’ll discuss shortly, but
it’s also self-terminating, for an interesting reason: traditional ethnic
divisions don’t survive dark ages.
In an age of political dissolution, economic
implosion, social chaos, demographic collapse, and mass migration, the factors
that maintain established ethnic divisions in place don’t last long. In their
place, new ethnicities emerge. It’s a
commonplace of history that dark ages are the cauldron from which nations are
born.
So we have three stages, which overlap to a greater or
lesser degree: a stage of ethnic conflict, a stage of ethnic dissolution, and a
stage of ethnogenesis. Let’s take them one at a time.