The Authoritarian’s Army – Two Steps Closer To A Coup In America?

THE END OF POSSE COMITATUS:
As reported last October by Major Danby in Daily Kos, the rubber stamp 109th Congress gave President Bush the power to:

• – involuntarily take National Guard troops from State A and
• – require them to work in State B for up to a year,
• – in law enforcement rather than just traditional areas like disaster relief,
• – over the objection of both state’s governors

The Daily Kos provides more detail and background, but here are some highlights:

The Fiscal Year 2007 Defense Authorization Bill was envisioned as a bill that would strengthen the National Guard. With a sick sense of irony, the Bush Administration gutted this provision and replaced it with a “body snatcher” provision that represented “a sizable step toward weakening states’ authority over their Guard units.” The provision “mak[es] it easier for the President to declare martial law, stripping state governors of part of their authority over state National Guard units in domestic emergencies.”

So now the President can send troops from Tennessee to quash what he deems a threat to civil order in Oregon, even if the governors of Tennessee and Oregon both object.

This, by the way, is how the Chinese – whose approach to government and party building Bush seems so much to admire – broke up the protests in Tienanmen Square. They brought in troops from the provinces who knew nothing about what the protest was about, but knew that if they were ordered to shoot, they had to shoot.

Such small changes to the law. Such a huge result. Imposition of federal martial law, using state troops, over the objection of the states.

THE CHRISTIANIZED MILITARY:
Add to this, the takeover of our military by unquestioning evangelical officers and we are another step closer to a single-party state run by the Bush/Cheney/Rove/Gonzales team. As documented in a recent interview of Michael L. Weinstein on Los Angeles City Beat, LA City Beat states, “He [Weinstein] found an unconstitutional infiltration of the entire U.S. armed forces by believers of ‘dominionist Christianity,’ who reserve the right to either convert or kill anyone, including American soldiers, who doesn’t believe in what Weinstein calls a ‘weaponized Jesus Christ’ – and use your tax money to do it. ”

Here are a few excerpts of Mr. Wienstein from that interview. Where he uses the phrase dominionist Christians, just substitute right-wing authoritarian.

I’m not a Jewish leader. I’m a civil libertarian. We’re telling the military: Look, you’re going to be at least as constrained as the shift manager at McDonald’s or KFC or Starbucks. If you want to see a Fortune 500 CEO brought to his or her knees, just have the most junior person at the mailroom claim, “Hey, I’m being evangelized in the workplace.” That’s a killer lawsuit under Title 7 of the U.S. Code. But in the U.S. military, that’s not just your shift manager; that’s your military superior.

We now have 737 U.S. military installations scattered around the world as we garrison the globe in 132 countries. And in every one of them, we have this Christian Taliban. It’s the Officers Christian Fellowship for the officers, and the Christian Military Fellowship for the enlisted. And they have a tripartite goal – a goal that they view as much more critically important than merely the oath that they all swore to protect and to serve the Constitution: Number one, they want to see a “spiritually transformed military”; number two, with “ambassadors for Christ in uniform”; and number three, “empowered by the Holy Spirit.”

Our founding fathers were well aware that, in Europe, most of the tyrannies had been conducted by men of the cloth who were also men in political power, so in Clause 3 of Article 6 of the Constitution, they stuck in the phrase that we will never have a religion test for any position in the federal government. Oh, I guess except the U.S. Air force, the Marines, the Navy and the Army, which will hold a Geiger counter up to anyone on planet earth and if it says, “Oh, we think you’re unchurched,” then you better be prepared to be evangelized. There’s no difference between them and Sharia – Islamic law – or Wahabiist Islam.

There’s over 100 of the largest evangelical organizations in Colorado Springs. It’s like the Vatican. I saw the flyer for one of their brown-bag lunches. It said, “Do not take this flyer down. This is an officially sponsored Air Force Academy activity in conjunction with the Christian Leadership Ministries.” This was attended by scores of senior officers and senior civilian people. Today’s luncheon topic, and I quote: “Why we cannot let you have your God while we have ours.”

This is all part of a passion play, now. Commanders in the field are censoring the soldiers’ DVD libraries, leaving only the movies that have appropriate Christian content. Battle staff meetings are being diverted into evangelical prayer sessions. I had a Captain JAG tell me that he recently tried to stand up to the colonel to refuse this, but the colonel grabbed him by the lapels of his battledress uniform in front of all the troops, and said, “Boy, we’re here to do two things: spread the gospel of American democracy and spread the gospel of our lord Jesus Christ. And if you don’t like it, I’ll send you home now.”

For more information on the Christianization of our military refer to Military Religious Freedom Foundation

AN ATTEMPTED COUP IN 1933:
If all this sounds a little far fetched, let’s look back at a possible coup attempt by the American Liberty League (ALL), composed of members of the DuPont family, as well as leaders of U.S. Steel, General Motors, Standard Oil, Chase National Bank, and Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Their plan was to push President Franklin Roosevelt aside and replace him with a “Secretary of General Affairs.”

In 1934, the Congressional McCormack-Dickstein Committee looked into the allegations by Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler that ALL attempted to recruit him to serve as the leader of a plot and to assume and wield power once the coup was successful. In their final report, the Congressional committee supported Butler’s allegations on the existence of the plot, but no prosecutions or further investigations followed ….

For more detail on this event, read, on-line, The Plot to Seize the White House by Jules Archer. The book concluded with:

In 1964 Speaker of the House John W. McCormack referred to the plot in his speech before the Democratic convention in Atlantic City, when he warned against right-wing extremists in the Barry Goldwater camp. But he did not give any details, and only a knowledgeable handful of Americans understood the full implications of what he was talking about.

The conspiracy unquestionably inspired the novel Seven Days in May, made into a successful film, which portrayed a Fascist plot by high-placed American conspirators to capture the White House and establish a military dictatorship under the pretext of saving the nation from communism[terrorism]. Few of the millions of Americans who read the novel or saw the film suspected that it had a solid basis in fact.

It would seem time that school textbooks in America were revised to acknowledge our debt to the almost forgotten hero who thwarted the conspiracy to end democratic government in America.

If we remember Major General Smedley Darlington Butler for nothing else, we owe him an eternal debt of gratitude for spurning the chance to become dictator of the United States-and for making damned sure no one else did either.

IS ANOTHER COUP ATTEMPT IN OUR NEAR FUTURE?
Imagine now a national incident that would provide President Bush, or some future authoritarian Republican president, with the opportunity to declare an national emergency. It would be so easy now with a spineless Congress, politicized executive and righteous judiciary. Imagine any authoritarian as president with all the enabling changes in our laws, directing our own Christian military to enforce whatever he commands. Anyone who objected could be declared an “enemy combatant” and put out of the way without legal recourse. Imagine a minority of Christianists taking away all hope of the majority for a more pluralist, diverse and inclusive society. Imagine a president-for-life who spends trillions of dollars we have borrowed from other countries to rid the world of terrorists, which will, instead, grow in numbers. Image how you would feel if we let this happen. If all future elections become a fraud where only the votes of members of the Republican party are actually counted. Imagine the suspension of a national presidential election because of the next 9/11 and the beginning of the American Dictatorship to protect us from all enemies of the hijacked Republican Party.