Domestic use of military forces is not an uncommon thing around the world.

[kenny blankenship]

44. Military function is best kept separate from domestic police function

Last edited Sun Jun 17, 2012, 01:49 PM - Edit history (2)

for the same reason we keep our military leadership separate from and subordinate to our civilian leadership. If you have trouble figuring out why that is, move someplace where military and police and secret police have fused in a paramilitary soup, or have never been separated, as can be found in many places throughout the third world.
Generally we like to keep military force and police force separate because we like CIVILIAN government. We prefer civilian government to military government. The separation of military and police powers is part of a whole tapestry of institutional choices directed to that end. We have elected Generals to the Presidency several times, to be sure, but we like to keep this sort of thing to a minimum. We don't elect serving military men in uniform, for example.




This is the kind of thing we're trying to keep from happening, Mmmkay? And the best way to do that, according to our national traditions, is to keep civilian functions of the government from being dependent on military institutions and military figures. The way we keep Bonapartism or Franchism down to a minimum (watered down to the level of "I Like Ike&quot is to minimize dependence on the military for day to day operation of government and maintenance of civil order. When people see that the civilian government can't cope day to day without the military carrying out some mission in the homeland, fighting criminal gangs or putting down subversives or whatnot, it will soon be all over for the idea that the elected civilians are actually in charge, or that they should be.

Militaries exist and are trained to kill enemies and to destroy their material capacity for resistance. They do not tend to respect boundaries much in their profession. Boundaries, such as the Cambodian border, or the Pakistani frontier, or "good touch/ bad touch", or the Rhine are strictly for losers, according to military minds - nor do they respect the supposed rights of their enemy, "quaint" conventions of Geneva notwithstanding. They are trained to think of themselves as apart from and above civilians, (The US military is traditionally trained to think of itself as a humble servant of and subordinate to civilian leadership, but with the expansion of Empire that self-image may be changing) The preservation of civilian life is a very low priority for any military, although that's never the sort of thing civilians like to hear from their men in uniform. Military men will sacrifice civilians, even their own, freely for small advantages. A PVT beats a civilian any day. We bombed and shelled thousands of French and Italian cities and towns to turn out the Nazis from "Fortress Europe" - to say nothing of what we did to German and Japanese cities. The first we bombed despite the presence of innocent civilians, the latter we bombed because of the presence of innocent civilians. The men who did that- who carried it out as well as the men who planned it - could not have been allowed to retain a civilian's way of thinking about the value of civilian life. There are rules in warfare against taking civilian life, but if we admit what we know and are speaking candidly about it, the rules are observed in the most minimal way at best. Civilian lives are destroyed wholesale, as a matter of routine and accident. Conspicuous taking of civilian life for the sheer hell of it is what is forbidden, and even sometimes punished. We may also have rules against torture, but wars in which we have not used it would be the exceptions, not the rule. Civilian casualties -so called collateral damages- are meaningful to soldiers mainly to the extent that outcry over civilian deaths may limit the ability to fully prosecute the war. Destroying the village in order to save it makes perfect sense to many military men, in the context of war, dedicated as they are to pursue the destruction of the enemy at any cost including their own lives. The price in civilian lives may be as high as you like, so long as we can point to some phantom "tactical necessity." That is all to say, you don't want to have to rely on people trained to kill the enemy as their guiding mission and as their first response to any given situation as your means of dealing with problems like a pursesnatcher on the loose, or a kid dealing drugs in the highschool parking lot, nor providing security for a political convention. The way of the policeman is supposed to be categorically different from the way of the soldier. The policeman's goal is NOT to kill all the criminals and clusterbomb their hideouts, so that they can no longer wage crime against society. If there is a bank holdup with hostages, you don't want to send in people instructed in the use of "rotational fire", and accustomed to the idea that civilian casualties are just some "shit that happens." And the same thing goes for drug interdiction - which probably is where you and the authoritarian right were headed with this bright idea of using the military as policemen.

The military is simply the wrong instrument for law enforcement - an overly blunt and brutal instrument- for the task of preserving civilian life and civil order.


Making the military and its leadership more important in the day to day life of the Republic is a dangerous mistake. This episode was close enough.