Civil war

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

Things fall apart: Ethiopia’s terrifying descent into civil war

From our UK edition

The world’s first conflict triggered by Covid-19 exploded on 4 November in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray. Before your eyes glaze over at news of fresh African horrors — hundreds dead in battles and air strikes, ethnic massacres, civilians fleeing, charities calling for food aid — consider this frightening new reality. For the first time in modern history, wars and insecurity now ravage a continuous line of African states from Mauretania’s Atlantic shores to the Red Sea — a 6,000km Sahelian suicide belt of jihadis, state failure and starvation. Intervene too hard in this mess and you get David Cameron’s ill-conceived 2011 Libyan bombing raids. Gaddafi gets butchered in a storm drain, the arsenals are pillaged and weapons flood the Sahara.

Thursday

Claudia Gold

How the wreck of the White Ship plunged England into chaos

From our UK edition

Never was a monarch so undone by water as Henry I. A fruit of the sea killed him in 1135: he ate too many lampreys, a jawless, parasitic fish that sucks its prey to death. But the tragedy of his reign occurred 15 years earlier. At the most ill-fated party of the Middle Ages, his heir — the 17-year-old William Ætheling (Anglo-Saxon prince) — drowned when the White Ship sank, taking nearly 300 of his friends and relatives with him. The ramifications of his death were seismic, leading to a succession crisis that saw thousands die in a bitter civil war. The author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle famously described this 19-year-war as a time when ‘The earth bore no corn, for the land was all laid waste... and people said that Christ and his saints slept.

Wednesday

Ben Sixsmith

Who’s afraid of the boogaloo?

Joseph Miner, a 29-year-old resident of Queens, New York, fits into what you might imagine the ‘alt-right’ to be. A young man who posted photos of himself performing the Hitler salute alongside jokes about being an ‘incel’, he lived with his parents and posted racial abuse online under the handle ‘souljagoy’. (Get it? It's like Soulja Boy. But he’s not Jewish. Get it?)According to reports, Miner has been arrested for buying illegal weapons from an undercover agent with the aim of taking part in the ‘boogaloo’.Boogaloo? What the hell is that? Boogaloo, it turns out, is a euphemism for civil war, used ironically and unironically online.

boogaloo