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Mercenary Private Armies The Sure Precursors
Of Anarchy or Totalitarianism
England:
Private Mercenaries
Produce
Anarchy
At the
death of Edward III, England was catapulted into
a very fluid state. The Black Death had wiped out
a third of the population. The military victories
at Crecy and Poitiers won with the new weapon
– the longbow – had left a vast number
of soldiers available for hire. Society was in
ferment. Economics was in shambles. There was a
great light that shone across the darkness of
England: the rise of Wycliff and the Lollards
spreading the gospel among the common man. The
Feudal Age was breaking up. Private mercenary
armies began appearing.
Crown Employs
Wage-earning
Soldiers;
Private Armies Appear
Winston
Churchill in his magnificent The Birth of
Britain describes for us the situation:
“In the economic and social sphere there
arose a vast tumult. The Black Death had
struck a world already in movement. Ever since
the Crown had introduced the custom of
employing wage-earning soldiers instead of the
feudal levy the landed tie had been
dissolving. Why should the noble or knight follow
the example of his liege lord? Covenants in which
a small landowner undertook to serve a powerful
neighbor, ‘except against the King,’
became common. The restriction would not always
be observed. The old bonds of mutual loyalty were
disappearing, and in their place grew private
armies, the hired defenders of property, the
sure precursors of anarchy.”
Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of
Britain. New York: Bantam, 1956, p. 269.
The
Peasants’ Revolt
“The
country was full of broken soldiers, disbanded
from the war, and all knew about the long-bow and
its power to kill nobles, however exalted and
well armed. The preaching of revolutionary
ideas was widespread…The rapid, time-enforced
framework of medieval England trembled to its
foundations…
“…All
this rolled forward in England to terrifying
rebellion of 1381. It was a social upheaval,
spontaneous and widespread, arising in various
parts of the country from the same causes, and
united by the same sentiments.”
–Churchill, Birth of Britain, 271.
“The
revolt…struck with lasting awe the
imagination of its contemporaries.”
Churchill, 274.
Anarchy or
Totalitarianism
Independent
military/security contractors, depending upon
whether they are not organized or are organized,
can either produce anarchy or totalitarianism.
Russia: Almost
800,000 Private
Security
Men in Russia Produce
Totalitarianism
After
the breakup of the Soviet Union about 1990, “Hundreds
of private security firms staffed by KGB veterans
sprang up around the country and most of them,
though not all, kept their ties to their alma
mater. According to Igor
Goloshchapov, a former KGB Special Forces
commando who is now a spokesman for almost 800,000
private security men,
In the
1990s we had one objective: to survive and
preserve our skills. We did not consider
ourselves to be separate from those who stayed in
the FSB [successor to the KGB]. We shared
everything with them and we saw our work as
just another form of serving the interests of the
state. We knew that there would come a
moment when we would be called upon.
FSB Called
Upon to Control Russia
“That
moment came on New Year’s Eve 1999, when Mr.
Yeltsin resigned and, despite his views about the
KG, handed over the reins of power to Mr. Putin,
the man he had put in charge of the FSB in 1998
and made prime minister a year later.”
–The Economist, ‘The Making of a
Neo-KGB State.” August 25th
– 31st 2007, p.26. (emphasis mine).
FSB Runs
Russia
Today,
according to research by Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a
sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences,
75% of the offices of Russia’s government
are filled by FSB men and their affiliates. [Economist,
25]. FSB men run the big companies, the
state-run oil company, the air-defense rockets,
and Aeroflot, the national airline, the aircraft-industry
monopoly, law enforcement agencies, ministries of
economy, transport, natural resources, telecomm,
culture, and banks. Russia is a neo-KGB state.
“The
security service men present themselves as a
tight brotherhood entitled to break any laws for
the sake of their mission.” –Economist,
op, cit., 28. New laws, “one aimed at
‘extremism,” gives the FSB and other
agencies ample scope to pursue anyone who acts or
speaks against the Kremlin. It has already been
invoked…” –Economist, 28.
While
America has about 180,000 Independent Military
Contractors/Security men in Iraq, Russia has
almost 800,000 private security men. It is
a global phenomenon. Security men, organized
by state intelligence, can take over the modern
state, making it totalitarian.
The
Threat to Constitution Rights Posed By
Mercenary Armies
Rome and
America Utilize Private
Forces To Solve The Problem of
Controlling an Angry, Abused
Population
Michael
RatnerCenter for Constitutional Rights states:
“Private , president of the forces are
almost a necessity for a United States bent on
retaining its declining empireThink about Rome
and its increasing need of mercenaries. . LikewiseUnited
States. Controlling an angry, abused ,
here at home in the population with a
police force bound to obey the Constitution can
be difficultsolve this
‘problem.’”-private
forces can
–Blackwater,
xxiv. [emphasis mine].
Praetorian
Guard Operates
Outside
All Law
Thus
an extremely powerful praetorian guard has been
created that for all practical purposes
operates outside of all law, military and
civilian, and is only beholden to whomever it
contracts its services to.
After
Hurricane Katrina, Blackwater beat most federal
agencies, when “hundreds of heavily armed
Blackwater mercenaries-some fresh from deployment
in Iraq-fanned out into the disaster zone. Within
a week they were officially hired by the
Department of Homeland Security to operate in the
U.S. Gulf, billing the federal government $950 a
day per Blackwater soldier. In less than a year,
the company has raked in more than $70 million in
federal hurricane-related contracts-about $243,000
a day. The company saw Katrina as another moment
of great opportunity and soon began applying
for permits to contract its forces out to local
governments in all fifty states. Blackwater
executives met with California Governor Arnold
Schwarzeneggar about deploying there in the
aftermath of an earthquake or another
disaster…Critics see the deployment of
Blackwater’s forces domestically as a
dangerous precedent that could undermine U.S.
democracy. ‘Their actions may not be
subject to constitutional limitations that apply
to both federal and state officials and employees-including
First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights to be
free from illegal searches and seizures. Unlike
police officers, they are not trained in
protecting constitutional rights,’ says
CCR’s Michael Ratner. ‘These kind of
paramilitary groups bring to mind Nazi Party
brownshirts, functioning as an
extrajudical enforcement mechanism that can and
does operate outside the law. The use
of these paramilitary groups is an extremely
dangerous threat to our rights.’”
–Blackwater, xxv.
Iraqi Death
Squads
Not only are there US,
South African, and British mercenary armies now
in Iraq, but also there is a covert program now
that is training Iraqi death squads along the
lines of El Salvador and its death squads of the
1980s. It is called “the Salvador option.”
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