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"What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty . . . Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins." -- Rep. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, spoken during floor debate over the Second Amendment
I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people . . . To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them . . . -- George Mason, in debating the ratification of the Constitution before the Virginia Assembly, June 6, 1788.
The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of
age . . . -- Title 10, Section 311 of the U.S. Code
"No free government was ever founded or ever preserved its liberty, without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for the defense of the
state . . . Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen." -- State Gazette (Charleston), September 8, 1788
A well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country . . . -- James Madison |
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MILITIAS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
by Lew Rockwell
A couple of years ago, the Clinton administration and its media echo chamber whipped up a national hysteria about private militias. These men were said to be masquerading as protective forces when they were probably plotting terrorist attacks, or, much worse, fomenting hatred of the government. Better keep close tabs on these guys, the Justice Department said, before the country swarms with armed and dangerous vigilantes with a violent political agenda. No surprise here: George III's propaganda arm would have said the same thing of Vermont's Green Mountain Boys.
During the same period of time, it turns out, the federal government was systematically amassing its own armed militia force, staffed not by unfunded volunteer gun enthusiasts but by trained killers paid out of lavish public funds. Don't be afraid of them, and forget the lessons of Waco, because these Marines, Army Rangers, and Green Berets may soon be coming to your hometown to "protect" you against scary things like poison gas, radioactive material, and mass hysteria. We've got soldiers stationed in a hundred countries, the implied rationale goes, so isn't it about time they were stationed in active duty right here? Talk about bringing the troops home.
These men in black, on direct orders from Washington, have been engaged in surprise military exercises in various parts of the country -- not rural areas where the dangerous private militias are said to lurk -- but in cities and towns where local officials are too intimidated to object. The Pentagon sees this as its new domestic initiative. "Once we had the luxury of fighting our nation's wars on someone else's soil," a participating brigadier general told the New York Times, "That doesn't exist the same way today." (Full article about recent New York drills here.)
As for their weapons, we are not talking about semi-automatic shotguns and the like. The men now "protecting" us have been trained for mass killing. "I went from being a killer to turning around and being a defender," a nuclear weapons specialist told the same reporter. "And I can tell you, I feel a lot better about this, compared to what I used to be doing." Then again, he has to obey orders, and it doesn't help that he is a member of one of 27 units operating under the authority of FEMA and the Pentagon, called the Weapons of Mass Destruction Civilian Support Teams. Don't you feel safe just knowing that?
The Pentagon sees the prospect of domestic terrorism as its new lease on life. And for two years, the Clinton administration has been itching for some sort of domestic calamity to prove to the American people that their instinct against having government troops quartered in their backyard is just silly. The Y2K computer bug didn't pan out for them -- drat! -- and neither did all the trumped up warnings about disasters at Times Square on New Year's Eve. But surely something bad will happen at some point along the way, and the public can be convinced that the military is more necessary than ever.
There's reason to doubt that there's any basis for the hysteria. So far, the government's highly publicized arrests of foreign bomb-throwers have turned up no more than mistaken identities and rushes to judgment on the part of would-be military commandos. In the Waco case, every week there are new revelations on just how abusive the federal government was to that religious community, but no strong evidence that non-government domestic terrorism awaits in absence of a military buildup.
Moreover, even if the threats were real, there is no reason to think that the military wouldn't botch the job just as they have every "protective" mission in memory. The Kosovars, for example, paid heavily for the supposed protection they received from the U.S. military. Every time the government puts its fingers in something -- think of the mass evacuations for last year's East Coast "hurricane" -- it ends up creating more hysteria and disorder.
But the real danger of active duty military goons wandering the street is the loss of liberty. There's only one thing more intimidating than seeing miles of military vehicles clogging the highway into your hometown, and that's watching heavily armed black-suited killers engaging in "exercises" in your downtown. It sends the message that the government is in charge, and everybody had better shape up. And that is precisely the point, after all.
What's most remarkable about this trend is that the political left -- you know, those lovers of peace and opponents of militarism -- have had virtually nothing to say about this trend. The news of another exercise hardly ever makes it to the national news, except on news sites like WorldNetDaily. The country is being systematically militarized without so much as a peep from the flower children.
And notice too that all this is taking place in the midst of a systematic campaign to demonize local police. On the New York campaign trail, Hillary Clinton calls cops on trial "murderers" even before the jury has spoken, a title she would never use for politically correct convicted killers. And the Justice Department is forever casting a moral cloud over local cops and their supposed penchant for racial profiling. But when it comes to the G-men with the biggest guns of all, we are only permitted to think of them as defenders of the public interest. Any questioning of their motives is lunatic paranoia.
Any theories on why we are supposed to despise and fear private militias and hate and resist local cops, even as we are told to cheer when the U.S. military comes to town? The answer is one that the framers (both federalist and anti-federalist) understood: a despotic central government wants to amass unlimited power unto itself, and it does so at the expense of lower orders of government and private associations. Hence, private militias and local police must be regarded as evil and dangerous while the centralized military state's soldiers are seen as sweet protectors.
In the debates over the Constitution, the anti-federalists objected that the proposed document didn't outlaw standing armies. Noah Webster sought to quell the fears of the Pennsylvania anti-federalists with these words: "Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States."
James Madison, writing in Federalist 46, made a similar promise concerning the U.S. Constitution: "Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition more insurmountable than any which a central government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
From the kingdoms of Europe to your hometown.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. He also edits a daily news site, LewRockwell.com |
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