“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”
Have you noticed the mobs?
When you hear the word “militia,” what image is in your mind? Do you imagine a member of the colonial minutemen or the modern Army National Guard? Do you think of Citizens trained by the Army, ready to be called up in case of an emergency?
What about terms like “gang” or “paramilitary.” Probably groups that are anti-government and authority. Civilians who are armed, sometimes heavily, are constituted, organized, and trained outside the official legal statute. In modern times, it is groups such as this that have assumed the label of militia and exasperated extremism in the US.
In an ordered society, the government monopolizes violence. Aggressive violence by one person against another is not tolerated. In a democracy, this violence is at the people’s will, constrained by law. The US military branches under the Department of Defence are constituted by law. Police and Sherrif offices are formed by local law or election. Failures by these organizations must be addressed, or they will lose the people’s trust. This does happen, and each violation is evidence of the need for strict oversight and ethical accountability.
But what happens when the exercise of violence is usurped by those not accountable to the people?
In On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder notes:
“When a pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.”
The Rise of Modern Militias
The present-day manifestation of this relationship has been building on the US side of the southern border, and the “militias” are growing ever more bold. Wired is reporting on the ever more auditions actions by these gangs. And with the election of President-elect Trump, they are eagerly acting out vigilante violence with plans to breach human and civil rights further.
Learning about the Romanian Iron Guard or Hungry’s Arrow Cross parties can help one better understand historical examples of this behavior and its consequences. The link between extremism, authoritarianism, and fascism is direct.
The growth of paramilitary groups in the US is well documented and includes a link to prior service member recruitment, adding a perception of validity to their groups.
What Happens if We Accept the Mob?
Allowing such groups to operate within our borders but extraneous to our laws is unacceptable, even if their stated goals may align with your own. Is it not clear that to allow gangs to posture for and act with or with the threat of violence is to condone terrorism within our country? Are we willing to forgo law and order for expediency and revenge? Are we willing to sacrifice our fellow persons to avoid the uncomfortable realization that we have already allowed accountability lapses?
Vigilant accountability, ethical oversight, and reasonable consequences for those who violate the law support the democratic exercise of lawful violence and ensure the protection of our civil rights. Suppose citizens who want a democratic and fair society do not find it in themselves to match the passion and action of the militant gangs that are already mobilized. In that case, they cannot hope to secure their freedoms.
Passion and Anger
In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert O. Paxton analyzes how passion unconstraining by law erodes civil discourse and enables fascism. He states:
“…fascism is more plausibly linked to a set of “mobilizing passions” that shape fascist action than to a consistent and fully articulated philosophy. At the bottom is a passionate nationalism. Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history as a battle between the good and evil camps, between the pure and the corrupt, in which one’s own community or nation has been the victim. In this Darwinian narrative, the chosen people have been weakened by political parties, social classes, unassimilable minorities, spoiled rentiers, and rationalist thinkers who lack the necessary sense of community. These “mobilizing passions,” mostly taken for granted and not always overtly argued as intellectual propositions, form the emotional lava that set fascism’s foundations:
-a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
-the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;
-the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
-dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
-the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
-the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the groups’ destiny;
-the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;
-the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;
-the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.
…Fascism was an affair of the gut more than the brain, and a study of the roots of fascism that treats only the thinkers and the writers misses the most powerful impulses of all.”
Are you okay with relinquishing the rule of law to a person's whims or the passions of the mob?
Reject militia violence.
Leave a Reply