The 2nd Amendment (Part 4)
Intro To The Constitution (Part 16)
Previous article in this series: “Well-Regulated”
This one is relatively straight forward, but I wanted to add it to reaffirm in everyone’s mind, that the militia was not simply a backup or alternative military force, but rather was intended to be the primary core of our military power, for a few simple reasons.
First, there are few militaries which can equal the sheer size of a militia, when the militia constitutes the full number of all able-bodied men in the entire population. So, as long as they are well armed & equipped, if nothing else, a militia represents a profound deterrent against foreign invasion. And when a nation is so heavily defended, there is little need for offensive wars, and the culture is liberated to maintain neutrality in the affairs of others.
Second, when the militia is composed of everyone (i.e. normal everyday people), and thus, everyone bears the {burden & danger} of military action personally, it imposes a clarity of mind which deters the reckless hawkishness for war which is common when those demanding it bear little consequence for its waging.
Third, is in the realm of domestic applications of military power. Now, before we get into this, just to be clear, I am not saying that everyone in the military is blindly loyal to the government, and would do horrible things to American citizens if ordered to do so. That’s not what I’m saying. If the point did come where the government ordered the military to act against the people in some severe way, then I’m sure there are quite a few people in the military who would refuse. And in the event of a rebellion against a tyrannical government, I’m sure that many people in the military would defect & join the people. We have seen instances of such things in the past. However, it is also true that there are members of the military who would follow such an order, whether willingly or because their own self-doubt causes them to go along with the group; the Stanley Milgram experiments demonstrate this aspect of human psychology. Such things become much more likely when you combine that with intense cultural division, demonization of the other side, and PSYOPs. Even just plain simple lies. People often underestimate the power that a lie from authority can have; such as telling soldiers that they are being deployed to defend against an invasion, but then dropping them into foreign territory, so they believe they are defending their own homeland, but in reality, they are the ones attempting to conquer. Or what about making up false allegations of heinous crimes against political enemies, and claiming to have abundant evidence. Do cops & foot-soldiers get to inspect all the evidence when their superiors, or even their superiors’ superiors, simply give the command: “this guy did this & this, go kill him or capture him“, etc.? No, of course not. So, ultimately, a large variable in the equation is not even whether or not soldiers would voluntarily facilitate tyranny, but rather: what can you get a good person to do to a stranger, if you lie to them, they believe you, and they have no other context or information?
I am also not claiming that militias are completely immune to such problems, especially if a foreign militia of another State is marched across State lines to be used against the citizens of another State; perhaps even a State that’s far away, which is why the underlying intent was for local militias to be used in local matters. But, once again, this depended on the culture of the people being tight-knight communities, where people actually knew their neighbors, and members of the broader community.
The point here is not in absolutes, but rather in probabilities, and the risk profiles of {[a standing army] vs [a militia]}. When the military force being used against the people is composed entirely of the general population (i.e. your neighbors), the likelihood that they will develop a higher loyalty to the government than to you, is far, far lower. Especially because any tyranny which they facilitate, they will also be subject to themselves, so it is in their own best interest to oppose it. It’s the same principle of a trial-by-jury: the people deciding your fate are not government employees whose daily life is intertwined with (and therefore normalizes) the mechanisms of government, and whose livelihood is doled-out by that very government. Instead, it is people like you; people who live their daily life out in normal society, whose {friends & coworkers} are normal civilians, whose livelihood does not flow from the hand of the government.
If the government starts behaving badly, it is the people inside the government who are perpetrating that bad behavior; therefore, how can you trust them to intervene against themselves to stop it? Since their {[daily life] & occupation} is in the thick of such {policies & behavior}, it is far more likely that such people would become desensitized to it, and simply perceive them as normal, and therefore acceptable. On the other hand, normal civilians like you, in the general population, who are not so intimately tied to the government, who do not make their living from obedience to its authority, who are not immersed in its dealings on a daily basis; people like you, who only deal with the government when it attempts to impose itself on your life, or take something away from you, or forbid you from doing something, or command you to do something. Such members of the general population are much more likely to see the government for what it really is, and more clearly recognize when a law is absurd, or when a military action is going too far. Thus, if the government decides to send troops into an area, to quell dissent, but the people they try to send are just random members of the general population, the likelihood that those men will impose tyrannical acts against their neighbors, the same tyrannical acts which they themselves will be subject to in a mere 3 months, when they rotate back out to civilian life; the likelihood that such an individual would actively take part in facilitating such an oppressive act is far lower than the likelihood that a career {police-officer or soldier} who’s been in the service for decades, would. Now, again, this is not to say that there are zero {cops or soldiers} who would refuse such an order; obviously, there are many, but the question is not if they exist, but rather, what is the probability that {intimately-connected & long-term} government agents would carry out a given action, versus the probability that your neighbors would do the same. And, yet again, another reason why intimate communities need to be restored, to further increase the sense of communal loyalty to one’s neighbors.
But even if you’re utterly convinced that the current government would never do such a thing, and/or that the current military would never go along with such a thing. Okay, but are you sure that the same is true of the future {government & military}? Think about the mindset of a soldier who would refuse such an order. Would it not be someone who has higher loyalty to the country than to the government? Someone who has deeper loyalty to the founding morals of our Constitution & the spirit of the Declaration of Independence? Someone whose loyalty is deeply ingrained for decades of their life. Someone who is independently minded, and is willing to sever their connection with the government, even if it means exiting on bad terms? Does that vaguely make sense? But think about what could possibly change that. What could change the military such that those kinds of people became a smaller & smaller portion of the military, and were replaced by a different mindset. Perhaps one in which people were more concerned with being on good terms with the government than standing by certain ideals; perhaps ideals that are foreign to them. What if such people had no connection to the history of the country nor any allegiance to its founding principles; who didn’t really care about the founding fathers, nor the spirit of the Constitution to which their oath is directed? Does that really sound so impossible?
Think about what has happened in recent years. The government issued mandates to the military which required them to take an experimental vaccine. Now, regardless of how you feel about that vaccine, just think about it in terms of the logical dynamics of what that mandate represented. You don’t have to agree with someone’s beliefs in order to understand how those beliefs would affect their behavior. The country was divided on that vaccine, and many believed it to be either dangerous or at least not proven to be safe, due to the use of novel mRNA technology. Again, for the sake of this discussion, it doesn’t actually matter if that vaccine was safe or not. What matters is that a large portion of the population believed that it wasn’t, or at least that the risk outweighed the benefit. And yet, the government decreed mandates anyway, which those same people deeply believed to be unconstitutional. And again, it doesn’t even matter whether or not they were right; what matters is that they believed they were right. So, what happened? A large number of people in the military were pushed out due to their refusal to accept the vaccine. So, in a way you’re right: they DID refuse what they believed to be an unconstitutional order. So, we’re fine, right? No. Because all of those people who refused and stood their ground and got pushed out of the military, are no longer in the military. Effectively, this event acted as a filter, to remove most of the people who either would refuse such an order, or who had the political beliefs necessary to believe that it was an unconstitutional order in the first place. So, most of the people who are still in the military, either would not refuse such an unconstitutional order, or are of the political orientation as to believe that the government has the right to do such things. But even those people are still American, right? Maybe they lean more towards big government, or have more trust in the system, but they’re still born & raised here. They still have some degree of loyalty to the people, and the culture, right? Sure, but what happens if even they become a minority?
The illegal immigration issue has been a serious problem for decades, but over the last decade or so, it has been getting exponentially worse. Not only are the number of illegal immigrants drastically increasing, but the federal government is actively preventing the States from stemming the tide; in fact, on the contrary, the federal government is actively {encouraging, facilitating, & rewarding} such illegal immigrants. And their latest attempt is something they propagandistically call the “Courage to Serve Act”, which would grant citizenship to illegal immigrants if they serve in the military. Given the massive influx of illegal immigrants, and a guaranteed pardon & citizenship if they just join the military, is it not logical to assume that if this gains traction, it could result in a flood of such illegal immigrants into our military? People who grew up in an entirely different culture, often where government {corruption & tyranny} were considered {normal, expected, & unavoidable}, who have no loyalty to the people of our country, who have no deep understanding of our founding principles, nor loyalty to them. People who are only here in the first place, because they broke our laws in order to get here. And, most importantly, if they join the military under this act, they will be people who have no legal right to be here (i.e. nothing to protect them from being deported), who have already confessed, in writing, to violating our laws (which under normal immigration law is grounds for prison and/or deportation), and whose only chance at being forgiven for that act, and maintaining the right to stay here, is contingent upon them remaining on good terms with the government, and obeying their orders; and yet does not depend AT ALL upon them remaining loyal to the citizens of this country nor its founding principles when they are at odds with the government. How many of those people do you think would refuse an unconstitutional order, or even recognize it in the first place, with sufficient confidence that they’re willing to throw away their future in this country and be deported back to the very place they left, just in order to uphold the founding principles of the very country which will no doubt deport them for doing so?
Illegal Immigration
While we’re on the topic, I’d like to touch on a few other things.
A common objection to the entire illegal immigration issue is one of compassion, claiming that these are good, hard-working people, and they just want a better life. Even if that is true of the majority of illegal immigrants, it doesn’t matter. Being a good, hard-working person, doesn’t give you the right to do whatever you want and be forgiven. It doesn’t give you the right to sneak into another country, in direct violation to their immigration laws, and then demand the right to stay there. Many homeless people are good people too, but that doesn’t mean they can break into my house and claim one of my rooms, just because they want a better life. Many people in the world are good people, but that doesn’t give them the right to force their way into our country and stay here just because the want to. There are plenty of good people in the United States who want to move to other countries. Do they have the right to just move there illegally and demand the right to stay; even demand citizenship, despite the fact that they broke that foreign country’s laws in order to get there?
Another objection is that they contribute to our society. Okay, then why don’t they contribute to their home country? They are decent hard-working people? Good, then they should work hard to improve their own country. The United States didn’t become {prosperous & safe}, because it just fell out of the sky. The citizens of this country upheld {values & principles}, and made choices which facilitated that outcome; they made sacrifices, fought off tyranny, overturned corruption, established better rights, and struggled to build the {economy & infrastructure} over generations. Our ancestors {earned & built} the great country we have today. Why is no one else expected to do the same? The {sacrifices, struggles, & work} of my ancestors are not yours to give away. If these people of the world want a better country, then they should do what we did, and fix their own country.
What is honorable about abandoning your own people in order to jump to the head of the line and steal access to the prosperity which others have built? That doesn’t sound like a good, hard-working person; that sounds like someone who wants a short-cut, and doesn’t care what laws they have to break to get it.
Another deception is to call all of these people “refugees”, as if they were fleeing a genocide or something. They are not. There are plenty of safe countries far closer to these people, but they don’t stop there. Most of these people are traversing dozens of countries, and/or deliberately flying closer to the US, in order to come here. These people are not refugees; they are economic migrants. They have no right to stay here, and we have no obligation to let them.
And even in situations of helping genuine refugees, why does that always mean granting them citizenship? The whole point of refugee status is to protect someone from atrocities in foreign lands. What is it about that process, which means that their harboring here should be permanent? Or that we should grant them a claim on our society, or the authority to influence our laws or culture, or vote for our politicians? Why is it not sufficient to simply give them a green-card, allow them to stay here as a guest, until the situation in their home country resolves or improves, and then send them back? And if the hostile situation outlives them, then they live here the rest of their life, and die with a green-card. How is that not morally sufficient?
There’s one more aspect of the militia’s purpose, which we’ll address in the next article.
Next article in this series: The Militia Mindset & The Biggest Issue With A Standing Army
Citations
This entire Constitution series was written as a single big document over the course of several years; so, all the citations are mixed up together. When I went back to break it up into pieces, I wasn’t confident that I could redistribute all the citations & their reference numbers without screwing something up. So, I decided to leave all the citations together, and post them as the final article in the series.
