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
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?
Other way around, I believe. Pertinax is commonly pointed to as one of the best potential Emperors, and I think Kyrgizion is saying that Pertinax is one of the few good ones that they killed, not one of the many terrible ones.
STTL, Emperor Pertinax!
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.
As I understand, they’re under no obligation whatsoever to obey jack shit from comrade trump if said jack shit involved orders to turn weapons on Americans on American soil.
And such a request should come with it an immediate impeachment hearing and a tribunal to determine how many years in prison he should get.
Every person in the US military has a right to defy orders they see as inhumane or unethical
Hopefully the US military will honor and protect the US Constitution. If key officers drank the shitty Orang Kool-Aid, then the USA will have become FUBAR (Fucked-up Beyond All Repair).
“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.
I hope Trump is dumb enough to spend years hollowing the military out instead of doing the easy things. All he has to do in red states is convince the governors to use their National Guard. If they’re under state orders there’s no legal conflict. And in blue states he could start giving badges to the Proud Boys or whoever, (literally anyone willing to do his bidding) and set them loose as federal agents.
What the old officer corps is really afraid of here is the destruction of military norms and institutions.
There’s also the police that are basically ready to go now. I wonder how ham the military would let the police and brown shirts go before stepping in. I’m guessing very very ham.
Yup, they’d make temporary on base housing available to soldiers who normally live off base to keep them away from the police in that case. But for the most part the attitude would be, “not my lane, not my problem.”
Also, just to be clear, that temporary housing would be permanent. In the best tradition of governments everywhere.
On the plus side, it would be the first time in several decades the military is deployed in a terrorist rogue state
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.
