Danger in the Military

I have just read this morning that two of the National Guard troops that are supposed to be providing security for Biden’s inauguration have been removed because of their ties to white supremacist groups. This is precisely what I’ve been thinking about lately: the danger to this country that comes not from outside groups like ISIS, but rather from deep within both our military and our local police forces. The PBS Newshour had a segment on precisely this issue last night, and it was not reassuring. The upshot of the piece was that since National Guard commanders do not have as much contact with those under their command as military officials in a regular army outfit might, they wouldn’t be likely to know the background of those who have plans to disrupt something like an inauguration, or guarding a State House. As a result, the higher-ups are very nervous about this inauguration, and the parallel threats to disrupt state capitols around the country. The FBI’s disqualifying of the two guardsmen proves the point; and we can only hope that the FBI has truly vetted all 24,000 soldiers who will remain on duty in DC. 

The larger point, however, and the greater danger comes in the future. Why? Because once the current threat is over, we will still have a very active, and determined group of crazies who will be looking for more opportunities to “liberate” their nation and bring it back under white control—i.e. what they understand by Make America Great Again. And these groups and so-called militias are a) armed to the teeth, and b) actively recruiting current military members to join them, either covertly or overtly. They judge, and they are probably right, that the men who join the all-volunteer military these days are heavily drawn from rural and southern states. That means they are more likely to be sympathetic to white supremacist appeals, if not already actively engaged in, trained in white supremacy and racism. This brings up what I have long considered the defect of the all-volunteer military, which has been the direct outcome of the distaste of well-educated and urban men for military service. This was proven in the Vietnam war era. Indeed, when I was a member of the Army Reserves in late 1959 through 1965, the bulk of my fellow soldiers were serving reluctantly, mainly to avoid the draft. But the presence in these reserve units of many such men who were older and well-educated meant that few of them were susceptible to the foolish rewards or chauvinistic inducements that attracted younger troops. That alone put a damper on calls to spit polish and adopt the “motto of the bayonet” (kill, kill) and so on. It made, in my opinion, for a more balanced and intelligent and thoughtful army, not just in the reserves, but in the regular army as well.

No more. The all-volunteer military attracts mainly high school grads looking for a way to enliven their dull lives, to escape from smalltown or depressed-urban life, and for something to give them a wider perspective and experience (perhaps abroad) that they would never achieve on their own. By this self-selection process, the military now tends to gather inexperienced men (and women) who are more likely to have narrow views of what society should be like, and, at the extreme end, of how whites should be able to regain the privileges they believe they should continue to have by right.

Thus, the military proves to be a prime recruiting ground for militia and white-supremacist groups (they’re often the same) to strengthen their ranks. The fact that those who’ve been in the military are trained in the use of various kinds of weaponry and other ordnance like explosives is an added bonus. The same incentive pertains for local police departments. Former military members are a natural fit for police departments that have increasingly become occupation forces. These departments gladly take advantage of Pentagon sales and donations of military equipment like armored personnel carriers to make them feel safe when engaging in riot control, or hostage situations or civil unrest generally. The end result is that police departments, like the military, find themselves with a good percentage of men who are predisposed to see black or Hispanic men, especially in cities, as the natural enemy, and white militias as more or less like them, and deserving of consideration as normal citizens. This was demonstrated in the recent invasion of the U.S. Capitol, where several instances were documented of Capitol police literally welcoming the invaders into the Capitol, and generously escorting them out when they were done. Not all, certainly; but enough to make the point. 

The other crucial factor in this looming danger is the alarming ease with which citizens in this nation can procure guns, from handguns to the most lethal automatic weapons available. This has been demonstrated with sickening regularity in recent years. Real psychopaths have been able to arm themselves with an arsenal of weapons fit for a war, and massacre civilians almost without limit. And many of the militia types arrested in recent years have been found to prize most of all their cache of weapons, which they always claim they have assembled for “self-defense.” They routinely claim as their most precious right their Second Amendment ‘right to bear arms.’ No other advanced industrial nation allows its citizens this kind of access to lethal weaponry. The fact that the possession of such arsenals is considered “normal” in the United States speaks volumes about both the mental health of this nation as a whole, and the danger such a widespread distribution of heavy weaponry represents to the general welfare. If millions of men armed to the teeth ever manage to assemble with a common purpose, they would present a formidable challenge to any force trying to control them to maintain civil order. And since many of them, with origins in the military or local police forces or both, have been thoroughly trained in the use of these weapons, as well as the optimum tactics for deploying them, the danger they present is only multiplied. 

Is there a solution to this dilemma? I can think of several, but any solution, in my opinion, must begin with getting a lot more information on who these militia groups are, and on the people in the military and the police forces are who have affiliations with these militant groups that espouse white supremacy. What the FBI is allegedly doing with the National Guard deployed for Biden’s inauguration is a good start, and needs to be extended throughout the country. Second, this nation has got to get a grip on the widespread possession of firearms among many of its citizens, and put a limit on what arms a civilian may possess, and the number of weapons which are reasonable for any one person to have. It is insane, first, for the Supreme Court to have interpreted the second Amendment as applying to “all persons,” when its language clearly was meant to apply to “well-regulated militias,” that is, to citizens’ armies organized to protect the nation from outside invaders. Whether or not the genie—well over 300 million weapons in the hands of crazies—can be put back in the bottle is an open question, but the attempt for more reasonable gun laws must be made. Finally, statutes can and should be enacted that can control both the language and the intent of armed groups. Militias that openly announce their intention to foment a civil war or a race war, like the so-called boogaloo movement, cannot be allowed to operate freely. Curbs must be placed on these groups to prevent just what happened in the U.S. Capitol two weeks ago. And anyone who argues that such behavior is protected by either the First or the Second Amendment needs to be disabused of those notions, by pre-emptive action if necessary. The clear and present danger must be faced by authorities like the FBI, acknowledged, and acted upon. Fast. 

Otherwise, this nation is headed for its final days as a free society, as a Republic, and as a functioning democracy. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi 

Using the Military to Uphold the Law

 

The apparent immunity and impunity of the rioters in the national Capitol on January 6 has sparked numerous questions about why the military, and indeed any competent force to prevent entry into the Capitol, remained missing for so long. The National Guard eventually did show up, but it was some three hours after the building was already breached, and damage to people and property had long since been perpetrated. Five people lost their lives, including one Capitol policeman who was apparently struck on the head with a fire extinguisher. Members of Congress, fearing for their own lives (and, apparently, some of them were targeted), had to be rushed out of their offices and chambers and into a secure room. And several members of the Capitol police force were seen not only giving the rioters free entry, but taking selfies with the rioters and helpfully escorting them on their way when they were done. The pleas for National Guard help, both by Capitol police and by Governor Hogan of Maryland (who wanted to activate his State Guard) were refused by the Pentagon until the crisis was basically over. 

This raises the fundamental question: in a situation this threatening, why were military forces—who are trained and equipped to handle events like this—not called in? Why was the reduced Capitol force left to control this situation alone? What is the precedent for calling out the real troops in situations similar, but in many ways less daangerous, than this one? History does, in fact, provide us with many examples of Presidents calling out the military to control precisely this kind of defiance. Looking at some of them may give us a better idea of how this one might have been controlled, and why it was not. 

I was a late teenager when the first of these situations took place in September of 1957, a few years after the landmark Supreme Court decision of 1954, Brown v Board of Education, outlawed racial segregation in public schools. The school board of Topeka, Kansas, and all other schools in all other states, were informed that racially segregating schools, even if the schools designated for blacks were supposedly equal, was unconstitutional. The ruling was understood to apply not only to “separate but equal” schools, but also to many other supposedly ‘separate but equal’ public services as well. These racially segregated public services and schools had been sanctioned in 1896 by the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, thus making the South’s “Jim Crow” laws legal. Brown v Board overturned Plessy and all other laws that pretended that equality under the law was satisfied by “separate but equal” facilities. Brown v Board ruled that they did not, and were not equal at all. As part of the decision, courts and school boards were directed to desegregate schools “with all deliberate speed.”

In 1957, however, even though the Little Rock, Arkansas school board had voted to desegregate its public schools, Governor Orval Faubus refused to implement the order in Little Rock, and especially at Central High School. In refusing the order, he used the ploy of calling out his state National Guard to allegedly protect black students, when in reality the Guard prevented black students from attending Central High School. Tensions rapidly flared, pitting jeering segregationist mobs against the black students who were determined to get their constitutionally-mandated education at Central High School. After several days of a standoff between students trying to enter and the taunting, racist mobs that gathered to oppose them, then-President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10730, which did two things. First, it federalized the Arkansas National Guard, placing it under federal authority. Second, it deployed federal troops—the 101^st Airborne—to Little Rock to enforce the desegregation order. In the face of screaming, spitting crowds of white supremacists, the students, known as the “Little Rock Nine,” were escorted to and from school by armed soldiers. 

In short, in the face of what he considered an insurrection defying a Supreme Court order to desegregate schools, President Eisenhower, a Republican, sent in federal troops to put down the insurrection and enforce the order. Though he withdrew the federal troops fairly quickly, leaving the National Guard to maintain order, the show of force by the ex-Supreme Allied Commander made it clear that the federal government was not about to tolerate resistance to the integration of public schools that had been mandated by the highest court in the land. 

This same determination was exhibited by President Kennedy about five years later, although he made numerous attempts to limit the use of the military until the situation became lethal. The controversy started when James Meredith, a black Air Force veteran, attempted to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Even with more than 120 federal marshals to accompany him, as well as troops from the Border Patrol ordered by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a violent crowd opposed Meredith’s entry. Adding fuel to the flames, Governor Ross Barnett expressed his and Mississippi’s undying resistance to integration:

We will not drink from the cup of genocide... No school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor!

 

When mobs of segregationists swelled into the thousands, President Kennedy ordered in Military Police from the from the 503rd, 716th, and 720th Military Police Battalions, the already- federalized Mississippi National Guard, and elements of the 101^st Airborne Division. By September 30, Meredith, still under federal protection, was allowed to register under escort, and in 1963 became the first black graduate of the University. But not before a third of the federal agents, 166 men, were injured in the melee, and forty federal soldiers and Mississippi National Guardsmen were wounded. In addition, two civilians, one a French journalist, and one a jukebox repairman curious about what was going on, were murdered in execution-style killings (Wikipedia.com).

One other case, also concerning integration, deserves mention. Taking its cue from what had happened in Mississippi, the University of Alabama in June 1963, refused, in defiance of a Federal Court order, to admit two black students—Vivian Malone and James Hood. The segregationist Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, flanked by Alabama state troopers, sought to publicize his defiance by literally standing in the door of the auditorium where registration had to be completed, blocking it to the two black students. President Kennedy, again, acted decisively: he issued Executive Order 11111, which federalized the Alabama National Guard. After having previously ignored the Deputy Attorney General’s order to step aside, Wallace yielded to the National Guard General’s command to obey the court, and in short order, the two students were allowed to complete their registration. 

Wallace, of course, was not done. In September 1963, he again attempted to block school desegregation (his famous motto being “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”) at Tuskegee High School in Macon County. The whole county had been ordered, as the result of a lawsuit, to integrate its schools, and thirteen black students were selected to try to integrate Tuskegee High School on September 2. To prevent this, Governor Wallace, by executive order, had state troopers surround the school, thus preventing the black students from entering the school. 

Once again, President Kennedy refused to treat this lightly, and federalized National Guard troops to enforce desegregation of the school. Governor Wallace was once again forced to yield to the federalized troops, and Tuskegee High School was integrated. Even though throngs of white students withdrew to attend private schools which the Governor himself helped finance, neither they nor the governor could maintain segregated public schools in Alabama.

We see, then, that where Presidents are determined to enforce the law (one of the prime duties of the Executive branch), insurrectionists, regardless of the support they receive from public opinion, cannot defy the considerable power of the federal government. The federal government, that is, always has the option to call on the military—either the federalized National Guard, or the armed troops of a no-nonsense unit like the 101^st Airborne—to back up its rulings with force. Whether or not they understand and respect legal court rulings, or statutes, or the Constitution, rebellious citizens, armed and organized into so-called ‘militias’ or not, understand the power of the U.S Military, and are rarely willing to defy it. 

This military might, and the willingness to use it, is what must be demonstrated (first in the upcoming inauguration of Joe Biden) to the right-wing crazies that Donald Trump has encouraged over the past four years. From his remarks after the Unite-the-Right rally in Charlottesville VA (in which one person was killed and the President saluted the “very fine people” there), to his urging of the heavily-armed Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” in September of this year, to encouraging his minions at the January 6 rally, not just once but several times, to march to the Capitol and fight—the word is repeated several times, as in “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” and, “You have to show strength and you have to be strong”—Donald Trump has given the most radical of his supporters license to be his personal shock troops. And on January 6, this culminated in the President issuing a call to arms to a large crowd, many of whom had already committed themselves, prior to the rally, to violence. That is, the President of the United States was inciting his most rabid supporters, many of them armed, to ‘stop the steal;’ by which he clearly meant for them to stop the United States Congress and its members from doing their constitutionally-mandated job to certify the 2020 electors from all fifty states. And to do so not by simply demonstrating, but to do so with strength, to fight what he repeatedly called an illegal election, to not allow Congress to “take the presidency away from him,” but rather to use force to overturn the most fundamental act in American democracy—the vote in an election that had been validated and certified dozens of times by states and by the courts. 

Thus, rather than use the military to control an unruly mob acting illegally, Donald Trump attempted to use the mob to literally overturn the law. It is a breach, a violation of the most basic kind in a democracy, and as has been said over and over, it cannot, must not be allowed to go unaddressed. It must be aired fully for all to see and understand, and demand, as a consequence, that all those involved be held accountable—beginning with the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.  

Lawrence DiStasi

Invasion at the Capitol

                                    

Like most thinking people in these United States, I was appalled by what took place in our nation’s Capitol yesterday at the hands of rabid Trump supporters inspired by their “heroic” leader, Donald Trump. With four people dead, and many Capitol offices and hallowed halls in shambles, the depradations of these thousands of invaders will surely leave a permanent scar on this nation, and a lingering suspicion that this nation is headed in the fatal direction—down—of most democracies before it. Rather than accept and take part in the peaceful transition of power that George Washington made the hallmark of American democracy, Trump fed his gullible minions a constant diet of lies, conspiracy theories, and incendiary rhetoric about how he actually won the 2020 election in a landslide, but had been robbed of his victory by some vague cabal of the deep state in collusion with every major media outlet and state government (most of them controlled by Republicans). Therefore, his supporters should invade the capitol and put a stop to the validation of the electoral college vote taking place there. And they all believed, and did exactly that. 

The other major event that took place yesterday was the amazing victory of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the Georgia Senate runoff elections. Democrats were hoping and praying that this would be the case, but such an outcome was anything but a sure thing. The President made more than one trip to Georgia to try to build enthusiasm among his base of supporters for a large Republican turnout. He knew the stakes couldn’t be higher: if even one of the Republican candidates won, the Republicans would retain their majority in the Senate, and be able thereby to thwart most of President-elect Biden’s legislative initiatives. If, on the other hand, the Democrats won, Biden would have the luxury of being able to work with majorities in both houses of Congress. With the win by both Democrats, therefore, a sweet double victory was achieved. 

However, that victory hardly had a chance to sink in (it did in my little town, where someone was playing on a car radio, at full volume, “Georgia,” by Ray Charles), before the riot began at the Capitol. I watched most of it on CBS News’ Special Report, and it left a knot in my stomach that has still not entirely dissolved. To see these mostly white guys (and some women, including the Air Force veteran and rabid Trump supporter who was shot dead) pushing back the barriers outside the Capitol, and then overwhelming the unexpectedly-flimsy Capitol police presence to race and climb and otherwise penetrate a building that is normally well-guarded and -protected, many of them armed, most of them carrying flags on poles (often used to punch through windows), was sickening. Then to see them violating offices like that of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, (at least one had his boots up on her desk) and ripping pictures and documents from her office, added insult to injury; which was itself ratcheted up to worse horror as they burst into the House chambers from which most Congressmen and women had to flee to an undisclosed bunker for safety. And the question that kept flashing into my consciousness was: Where is the National Guard? How are these yahoos getting away with this? Where is the 82nd Airborne? If this were a BLM protest (which we saw this summer), or any protest by people of color, how many of these assholes would already have been shot? 

My rage over the kid-glove treatment accorded this horde kept increasing as reporters interviewed many of them, to record them gloating about their victory (it’s a revolution we’ve started), their sense of entitlement (we’re just protesting, which is our right), and their glee at having followed the wishes of their adored commander in chief, Donald Trump. Even when a 6pm to 6am curfew was declared by the DC mayor, they continued to mill around, shouting slogans, and waving their Trump flags, one of which they managed to hang on the Capitol to replace the American flag, even as they shouted, USA! USA! True patriots, all. And the appellation that kept coming to mind was the one Hillary Clinton was excoriated for using in the 2016 election campaign: “deplorables.” Yes; that’s what they were, most of them: losers and abysmally ignorant believers in the bullshit peddled by perhaps the biggest bullshit artist of all time.

But most of that is probably already known to many. What I want to emphasize is that, despite the violation—to the nation, to its institutions, to democratic traditions most of us hold dear, to the sacrosanctity of the Capitol which has never been similarly violated—something great happened yesterday. Donald Trump made the most catastrophic blunder of a presidency that has specialized in blunders. He publicly urged his followers, in a recorded speech at the rally preceding the riot, to “walk to the Capitol (“I’ll walk with you” he promised—which he, characteristically, did not, choosing to be whisked away in his limo to the safety of the White House where he watched it all on TV) and “cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women (the Republican zealots contesting the electors on his behalf), and we are probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them — because you will never take back our country with weakness.” In other words, ‘you will have to be strong, you will have to be determined to bull your way in to stop the validation, you will have to be pushy and threatening and violent.’ And that is exactly what they did. And it’s all on the record. And that record, those words of a President inciting a mob to sedition, finally turned the craven Republicans who had supported this wannabe fascist’s every other disgusting action, every other piece of his inflammatory rhetoric, to turn away. To withdraw their support. To condemn this action and this President’s clear incitement to riot, to, in effect, destroy democracy. As the craven Lindsay Graham said on the Senate floor, “Enough is enough. I’m done.” And the chorus of those who have also had enough continues to grow, several White House officials and Cabinet members already having resigned, and more contemplating an abrupt departure with less than two weeks left to go in Trump’s term of office. In addition, several officials are openly considering invoking the 25^th Amendment to force Trump to leave office over the fear that the most powerful man in the world could do untold damage in his few remaining days, considering his deranged mental state. Whether the heretofore toadying Vice President, Mike Pence, can be persuaded to take or initiate this step remains to be seen. But at least one Republican, Representative Kinzinger, of Illinois, has already called for the enactment of that Amendment. And Trump himself, hearing the revulsion throughout the government and the nation, has just today said publicly that he will oversee a peaceful transition to the new Biden government. It is the first time he has acknowledged that Biden has won, which means acknowledging that he lost. 

What we have, in short, is a kind of revolution, but not the kind that one female supporter (identified as Elizabeth from Knoxville) went on record to proclaim, when asked why she had taken part in the invasion. “This is a revolution,” she said gleefully, as if she had been part of the storming of the Bastille. She was right that it was indeed a revolution—but she seemed not to know that this revolution involved the final downfall and humiliation of both her hero Trump, and Trumpism. He is finished, like most dictators, because of his inability to refrain from embarking on self-destructive, even suicidal missions (like Hitler invading Russia; and it is always puzzling why; and one thought that occurs to me is that these ‘strong men’ never quite believe that they’ve actually pulled off their usurpation, and need to keep pushing to convince themselves that they really have, against all odds, made it to the top.). And having done so, he will never again be able to disturb the body politic and the world. And his banishment from the world stage may, if we are lucky, be cemented by his arrest and trial for countless crimes committed both before and during his presidency (the state of New York is preparing its case against him, which cannot be set aside by presidential pardon), not least of which was the public urging of his minions to sedition on January 6, 2021. 

So my take on yesterday is both dismay at what happened to this nation, and grim satisfaction at what it has relieved us from: the twin plagues of Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority Leader, and Donald Trump as the most unfit, the most ignorant, the most disgraceful President in the history of this republic. And while it is true that we may not be free from the idiots who still make up his army of millions, without their idiot leader to egg them on, the fake courage they’ve displayed to publicly try to take down our institutions may well fade away like fog on a sunny day. All we can do is be vigilant and urge the Biden administration to not, under any circumstances, coddle these white supremacist thugs any longer. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi