According to nearly a dozen retired officers and current military lawyers, as well as scholars who teach at West Point and Annapolis, an intense if quiet debate is underway inside the U.S. military community about what orders it would be obliged to obey if President-elect Donald Trump decides to follow through on his previous warnings that he might deploy troops against what he deems domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants.
Archived at https://archive.is/He9O6
Wasn’t that literally the last thing Julius Caesar did immediately before declaring himself emperor for life?
This is an important step in establishing a police state, which will be crucial for when trump doesn’t want to end his term peacefully.
I wonder how many people using social media today have gone back and actually watched the beating of Rodney King.
It is really horrifying. And VHS video recorders are the only reason the police were caught.
There are countess stories like this one that never ended in riot’s. One that comes to mind is Kelly Thomas a mentally I’ll man, schizophrenic if I remember correctly. I remember Thomas cried out for his mother as they beat him to death.
These atrocities sadly are commonplace here.
The constitution is your oath, not the president. Acknowledge that this administration is a domestic threat and deal with it.
The Praetorian Guard killed something like 13 emperors. Food for thought.
In their defense, they killed more terrible emperors than good ones.
Pertinax though… I’ll never forgive them for that. Who knows how the entire world would look now if he’d been emperor for a decade or more…
Please enlighten us, how was or in which sense was pertinente so terrible?
Also installed its own. All power goes both ways.
In any case, even in US history military has been used against US citizens too. Not many things can really be new.
Didn’t you hear? Apparently if we vote for it, a domestic threat is allowed to just walk on in and do his thing.
eyup. surprisingly voting for hitler gets you hitler. I was surprised pikachu as anybody about it.
“There’s a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”
-Commander Adama
Trump literally calls anyone who disagrees with him an “enemy of the state”, so yeah, we’re way past that.
The reason is that one is trained to (supposedly) keep the peace and prevent and investigate crimes. The other is trained to kill people. Military methods are incompatible with effective police work.
Ironically the American military is better at it than the police are. They usually only kill someone if they were being fired at first. It’s called rules of engagement. American police have zero concept of it.
Largely because they’ve spent two decades trying to police Afghanistan.
Wait…which is which?
If that guy truly believes cops “serves and protects the people”…
Then we shouldn’t be listening to anything they have to say.
The guy is a fictional character in a TV show, and he is arguing that his military troops should not be used for police work.
Ah, so it’s not relevant at all because it’s literally not even based on our own universe…
Thanks!
It’s a hypothetical scenario on a military warship in space with refugees in tow.
Also, it’s not even praising the police, just stating its purpose.
it’s not even praising the police, just stating its purpose
Maybe in that universe…
In ours “serve and protect” was never what the police were for, it was just a PR slogan they put in cruisers
That’s what I’m talking about, our universe is not the same, although you seem to not be sure about how our universe works…
If not youd see why the quote isn’t applicable.
You’re so dark and edgy. Do you also use phrases like “the owning class” after reading that summary of Karl Marx that one time?
The US isn’t the entire universe.
It’s not even half of North America.You people are insufferable.
Okay.
Science Fiction is largely used as an allegory to explore the real human condition in a way that is parallel to political and cultural topics of the day without the inherent baggage that people would bring to exploring the real topic.
While the original quote and topic is about deploying a military as a policing force, it actually also holds true in the reverse as well, as policing forces shift towards an adversarial militarization against their community, leading directly to the issues you raised in the first comment about the failure of them to live up to the “protect and serve” motto.
While fictional events aren’t real, they are written by real people with views, desires and goals. Good writers will have internal consistency for their characters and try to ensure their external interactions have the authenticity of the ring of truth, because that’s how people will relate to the characters and story.
Good fiction is just a random meaningless story, it’s a platform for education and safe exploration of the real human condition.
Also, just to add some context for the specific example of Battlestar Galactica: the show premiered in 2004. The 9/11 attacks were still fresh in peoples’ minds. Congress had passed the Patriot Act giving law enforcement and intelligence services new directives to surveil and police US citizens and look for signs of future terrorist plots. We were entrenched in two new wars, and there were lots of protests. There were scandals involving the president and his advisors misleading the public about the nature and quality of intelligence they had.
The plot and themes of B:G were a direct response to all of this. The idea of martial law being declared and rights being suspended was not some far-fetched idea the show writers were playing with. People were really concerned that it might happen to squash public unrest.
Yeah, but in the real America police have literally never had “serve and protect” as part of their duties…
It was just a PR slogan.
Invalidating the whole analogy.
It’s just not relevant, and I’m sorry I can’t communicate that in a way you can grok
Good thing you’ll never read 1984, or animal farm, or brave new world, or anything by P.K. Dick, because, yep, completely irrelevant.
No idea why you would make that assumption…
Or why you think that would be meaningful to the discussion…
Just sounds like a bad attempt at an insult which resulted in demonstrating ignorance. If that was your goal, then well done.
It’s a fictional character from Battlestar Galactica.
On the plus side, it would be the first time in several decades the military is deployed in a terrorist rogue state
But aimed at the wrong people.
Some things never change.
“There was real sensitivity about keeping federal troops away from the front lines,” said Ollivant, who was ordered in by President George H.W. Bush as rioters in central-south LA set fire to buildings, assaulted police and bystanders, pelted cars with rocks and smashed store windows in the aftermath of the videotaped police beating of Rodney King, a Black motorist. “They tried to keep us in support roles, backing up the police.”
Important to note the real reason they kept military and cops “from the front lines” is they kettled Black protestors into Koreatown and then just let the two groups of minorities to fight it out while cops, ambulances, and firefighters were forming a barrier to protect the white neighborhoods.
I stopped reading the article as soon as the author showed they didn’t understand that. It’s been over 30 years, if the author didn’t know by now it’s because they didn’t bother to research what they’re writing about.
I think the senior military types will only talk about this stuff to journalists who have swallowed at least a little bit of American propaganda, but yeah thank you for getting the correct version of history out there
I mean, both explanations can be right. The military leaders could have had severe objections about deploying domestically, because they are well versed in history and understand why that is simply not done here. However, they no doubt understood what the local police were doing, and also looked at that policy as permission to take a back seat and not get more involved in the controversy directly.
What?
The “controversy” was manufactured by authorities…
There was no violence, no looting, no destruction until police attacked the protestors, then they drove them into another minority area after using violence to antagonize them…
Like, this was 30 years ago, lots of people have investigated this by now.
We knew it the year it happened
“In April, for whatever reason, there was no government assistance in this area. For three days we tried to find police officers. There were none,” he said. “There were conscious efforts to move officers from this area to other areas.”
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-09-12-me-298-story.html
Cops are still doing it, when there’s a peaceful protest they instigate violence so they can label protesters as violent looters and use that as an excuse to not listen to their demands.
Everyone who was sent to LA to help with the riots then just stood at the border where “white neighborhoods” started instead of actually going to where the riot was knew what they were doing and why.
It doesn’t take a fucking genius to put it together. Yet the author and some commenters appear to be having a lot of difficulty…
My point is that even now that we know all that stuff happened, that doesn’t mean that the military held back because it was directly complicit. Their justification is a solid one, and backed up by years of military history and tradition in this country. Yes, the justification is convenient, but that doesn’t make it less valid. I would have much preferred that the police did their jobs back then without all the overt racism, but sending the military in to do the police’s job would not have been the correct answer, either.
You seem to be lumping in “cops” and “the military” in the same category, where the whole point of this discussion is that they are not, and if Trump tries to use them in that fashion the military ought to stop him (for as long as they can, until Trump purges all the military leaders who are loyal to the country over him.)
The country is fucked, isn’t it? We’re cooked?
End of the line yes. This is no longer something that is recoverable within a single generation. There’s some hope that our grandchildren or thereabouts can put things right, but I’m halfway through (40’s) and I fully expect every year after this to get objectively worse until I die.
Yes. The US’s peak has come and gone.
Deep fried, even
When military coup? Asking for a friend.
I seriously wonder whether this is the real reason they are putting so much effort into keeping the Classified Documents case report totally secret, without even disclosing it to Congress.
As absurd as the thought that the US military would rise up and depose a duly elected President is, ask yourself under what circumstances might it happen? Perhaps it would happen if it came out that there was incontrovertible proof that duly elected President sold that military’s secrets to foreign parties (or, worse yet, freely gave them away in exchange for compliments, and plauditudes.) And that two (possibly all three) branches of government refuse to do anything about it.
It’s not the most absurd conspiracy theory I’ve heard.
Not until after they purge the “woke” and “DEI” generals first and install their loyalists. Then the executive and military can operate as one.
