With cities burning, symbols defaced, and populations turning hostile, the writing is on the wall.

By Rod DREHER

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In the United States, if Americans know anything about the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, it’s that the AfD are a bunch of Nazi-adjacent hooligans who threaten to return Germany to Hitlerism. They know this because that’s what the American media tell them. Very few will bother to go online to find the English-language version of AfD’s party platform. If they did, they would find a wealth of common sense, and proposals that sound like ordinary GOP positions, even before the Trumpening of the Republican Party.

It’s the same thing in Europe, of course. In her speech last week at CPAC Hungary, AfD leader Alice Weidel said that in Germany, “politicians fear us like no other party, and for good reason.” The reason, of course, is that AfD tells the plain truth about the various crises besieging Germany, especially those caused by mass migration and Islamization. The German establishment would rather demonize and suppress all those who notice the fracturing of their country than deal forthrightly with the problems that their own globalist ideology and managerial, authoritarian liberalism have caused.

I don’t know, though, if Europeans understand how truly horrific things are in Germany for AfD politicians and their supporters. Last Friday, I attended a private meeting with some AfD lawmakers and party officials who were in Budapest for CPAC.

It is one thing to read about how the German state labors to marginalize the AfD. It is quite another to hear personal stories of harassment by the state and private institutions from people who, along with family members, are suffering them. The leaked thousand-page report the German domestic intelligence service prepared to justify classifying the AfD as “extremist”—a precursor to an outright ban—features “evidence” like a tweet from an AfD member who had simply said on social media that there is nothing shameful about being a German.

This pathological fear of ordinary humans who think and feel ordinary human things has led Germany to a state of what I call “soft totalitarianism,” and indeed one that is pushing the boundaries of the hard version.

Again, though, the media have no interest in reporting on it, and scarcely more interest in reporting on actual conditions leading populist, nationalist parties like the AfD to gain ground among European peoples.

Earlier this year, Britain’s Centre for Migration Control published a report revealing that foreign nationals are arrested for sex crimes at 3.5 times the rate of native Britons. Forty-eight nationalities present in Britain have higher arrest rates than native Brits, with five Islamic nations leading the way: Albania, Afghanistan, Iraq, Algeria, and Somalia. But the Starmer government seems far more worried about people noticing all this, and thinking bad thoughts about Muslims (“Islamophobia”), than it is about the safety of British women.

Meanwhile, in Paris over the weekend mobs of African and Arab youths carried out two nights of fiery rampages in connection with a French team’s football victory. Two people were killed, and hundreds injured. Diversity was vigorously celebrated, with ethnic youths—one carrying the Palestinian flag—desecrating a statue of Joan of Arc. In a tweet featuring an image of the appalling display, French MEP Marion Maréchal commented, “No one can yet claim that by continuing we will move towards a bright future of peace and national cohesion. The change of trajectory is imperative and urgent.”

Paris, 2025.

À quelques jours de l’anniversaire de sa mort au bûcher, Jeanne d’Arc a-t-elle mérité ça ?

Sans doute ne savent-ils même pas qui est la sainte dont ils profanent ici la statue…

Personne ne peut encore prétendre qu’en continuant nous irons vers des lendemains… pic.twitter.com/9XkTWAem4e

— Marion Maréchal (@MarionMarechal) June 1, 2025

The mob of non-Gauls swarming atop the Joan of Arc statue symbolizes that they own the streets. It happens in less provocative ways. Recently in Brussels, a German friend told me that in her city, young Germans are now arming themselves with knives when they go out at night. They are afraid of migrant knife attacks, and have lost faith that the police can and will defend them. Ownership of the public spaces is now contested in Germany, and it is not at all clear that law-abiding Germans are holding their own.

It is all slouching inexorably towards civil war. David Betz, the civil wars specialist at King’s College London, has been sounding the alarm. Now Betz has published in the authoritative Military Strategy Magazine a second essay on the strategic considerations European leaders must take into account in the face of the mounting civil war risk across Britain and the Continent.

Betz says that at least ten European countries face the prospect of civil war. Britain and France lead the pack, with Germany and Sweden not far behind.

From a strategic perspective, the core problem is the rise of “feral cities,” defined as “a metropolis with a population of more than a million people in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city’s boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system.” These are cities, like Paris, that are home to large and restive populations of migrants, foreigners, and Muslims.

The second factor has to do with the critical infrastructure that makes city life possible in the countryside. Native-born populations who have been driven from the cities by migrants and migrant crime may seek revenge on feral urban populations and the ruling class that permitted this intolerable situation to come about. Concludes Betz:

Putting these factors together allows one to outline the trajectory of the coming civil wars. First, the major cities become ungovernable […]. Second, these feral cities come to be seen by many of those indigenes of the titular nationality now living outside them as effectively having been lost to foreign occupation. They then directly attack the exposed city support systems with a view to causing their collapse through systemic failure.

Do not brush aside events like the desecration of national monuments by thuggish political or ethnic mobs, he warns. Betz writes that governments must now draft plans to protect significant cultural treasures if a general civil war breaks out. As extraordinary as it is to contemplate, they must also develop strategies to protect national nuclear arsenals, as the immediate successors to the Soviets had to do.

And, governments must now establish plans to establish defensible “secure zones” outside the cities, where populations can flee to safety, and some semblance of normal life can carry on during the conflict.

You might be  thinking: This is madness. It can never happen here. To this, Prof. Betz, who studies civil war as his academic specialty, strongly cautions against “normalcy bias.” The well-established indicators of coming civil war are now vividly present in various countries.

History gives us plenty of examples of ruling-class elites who failed to read the signs of the times, and who were swept away in violent social upheavals that they did not see coming. Europe and America—even Trump’s America—is still in the grips of normalcy bias, heavily reinforced by media messaging and state policies.

Then again, history is not fated. We still have agency. But to address the metastasizing crises, you first have to admit that the problems exist.

Perhaps Europeans will choose surrender and submission, as the Western Roman Empire did, or had forced on it by its own feebleness in the face of the barbarian invasions. In which case, it is an open question as to which is the worse outcome: a civil war to save Europe, or no civil war at all?

Simply hoping that it doesn’t come to that is not a plan. So what is the plan? Because what Europe’s ruling class is doing is not working, and in fact is only accelerating a showdown that, if it comes, will quickly grow bloody, and beyond anyone’s ability to control. The persecuted politicians of AfD strike me as German patriots. They are also canaries in the European coal mine.

Original article: The European Conservative