Dickson C. Igwe. Photo: VINO/File

It was a shocking murder in that it was vivid and witnessed by thousands in real time. It is on the internet, which means that hundreds of millions of people have viewed the assassination. This event was also a turning point. It will go down as a very historic event. The murder of Kirk will also become part of the central story of the USA: a story written in the blood and suffering of native Indians, blacks, whites, and migrants, from all corners of the world.

That the USA is a melting pot of races and ethnicities is a valid assertion. However, intolerance and racial strife has been a core feature of American society. Not just in the northern part of the hemisphere but in South and Latin America.

Now this book is on the march towards world war. It is not a narrative hoping for the outbreak of a global catastrophe with the potential of wiping out humanity. It is a warning that ignoring history is never a great idea.

If civil war breaks out in the USA, it will have far-reaching effects. There is an assertion that the USA, divided today on racial and social grounds, is a land where 50% of the population would gladly witness the violent death of the other 50%. Why this level of hate? That is a mystery. That hate has never offered good outcomes is a lesson of history.

Is the USA, the world’s most powerful state, at the edge of the abyss?

Three factors state that it might very well be. The first is the Thucydides Principle. No empire in history has been able to accept the rise of a rival power without conflict. The US Revolutionary War of the 1700s was an example. Pushing the British Empire out of the Americas was the beginning of the rise of the USA.

Britain at first fought against this rising power in its sphere of interest. However, it lost and from then it has all been downhill culminating in the Suez Crisis of 1956.

Today China and Asia are increasingly rivaling US power, especially in economic terms. The spark of war could well be a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Empires also implode. The ingredients of an American implosion have been in the pot from its inception as a slave and plantation economy. Racial intolerance, and racial and ethnic violence, have always been a part of US culture. A powerful economy has kept a lid on that violence.

However, with new rivals on the world stage such as China, and India, the US white working classes are angry at the reality that manufacturing has moved to the east with dire social and economic consequences. Rome destroyed from within. Huge inequalities and the creation of a plutocracy that controls the institutions of power are a factor in the demise of the white working classes in the USA.

Finally, the rise of authoritarians and fascist strongmen has been a precursor to war. Fascist and authoritarian leaders started the First World War. Authoritarians started the Second World War in Europe. A Fascist Dictator in Germany and an imperial culture in Japan marched the world into a war that cost 70 million lives. Both wars were genocidal.

Today half the American population seems comfortable with the leadership of an American Strongman.