Coup du Jour: The Militarization of Daily Life

Guatemala City, August 8, 1983: Troops Seize the Presidential Palace

“Is today a patriotic holiday of some kind?”

My inquiry had been provoked by the abundance of armed soldiers being ferried through the streets of Guatemala City. My friend, a native Guatemalteco, shook his head, a puzzled frown creasing his features.

“Then why are there so many troops on the streets?” I persisted, directing his attention to the grim-faced, uniformed figures visible beyond the windows of our “Chicken Bus.” It was Monday morning, August 8, 1983, and the two of us were taking a break from our missionary labors to shop for necessities downtown. The concentration of military personnel – and the visible agitation of my native-born friend -- increased as we approached the City Center.

About an hour later, we were intercepted by another missionary while returning to the bus stop.

“The government was overthrown in a coup this morning,” he informed us in a voice drawn taut with urgency. “We're supposed to go back to our apartments, lock the doors, and wait until we're told it's safe to come out.”

Shocked but not entirely surprised, I turned to a third missionary who had joined us in our shopping excursion, a young man from Blackfoot, Idaho, whose reaction to the news was more surprising that the coup itself.

“Cool!” he yelped, pumping a fist in the air.

Like any other 20-year-old male, I was a shameless adrenaline junkie, but my response was rather more subdued. 

After returning to our apartment in the suburbs, we turned on the radio and television, both of which were playing a continuous program of music interrupted each hour by a brief speech from Gen. Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores, the figurehead of the officers' putsch that ousted President Efrain Rios-Montt, an erratic general who had been in power for about a year and a half following a previous coup.

Several weeks earlier, Rios-Montt had declared a state of emergency, accusing the military and the media of plotting against him. 

“They are using methods of manipulation to provoke the public against me,” he raved in a televised speech that was broadcast repeatedly in the weeks leading up to the coup, “but I'm still here.” 

Rios-Montt had a mock-Evangelical speaking style that was long on dramatic poses and pauses, longer still on frantic verbal effusions, and all but devoid of substance. Some Guatemalans took to calling him “El Pajaro Loco” -- “Crazy Bird,” the local name for the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker. In retrospect he more closely resembled a well-groomed version of El Guapo, the Bandit Chieftain from Three Amigos. 

Rios-Montt's abhorrence for Communism was genuine, and nearly as passionate as his contempt for individual liberty. His message to Guatemala’s rural peasantry was simple: “If you are with us, we'll feed you; if you're not, we'll kill you.” 

By all accounts, Rios-Montt displayed Caligulan capriciousness in defining who was “with” or “against” him, and his zeal to kill those perceived as enemies of the state was limitless. He presided over the most sanguinary years of Guatemala’s decades-long civil war, a period in which the army routinely slaughtered entire villages of Maya Indians.
 

The CIA giveth, and the CIA taketh away, so when Rios-Montt became a liability to his patron he was quietly removed from office. The military faction that collaborated in the coup did so because they were fixated on efficiency, not freedom. The military seized control over the country out of concern that Rios-Montt had mishandled the counter-insurgency campaign.

 For two days following the August 1983 coup, we were confined to our apartments with little more to do than read and listen to military helicopters churning overhead. Eventually we were given the all-clear, but like everybody else in the country we went about our business with a greatly enhanced sense of wariness. 

Once the generals were in undisguised control the violence abated somewhat – although Guatemaltecos found it disconcerting to see dead bodies occasionally materialize on the streets without warning. 

A few weeks after the coup, I was transferred to a small town called La Democracia, which was soon selected to host a counter-insurgency command post. Without notice or explanation the army descended on the town, setting up checkpoints and appropriating a large building as its operations center. Within a few weeks the army had extended its operations into the nearby town of Siquinala, where I would eventually have the stimulating experience of being threatened by a soldier who pointed a U.S.-purchased M16 at my chest.

Memories of my time living under undisguised martial law were summoned by the recent spectacle in Livingston, Illinois, where a military raid was conducted to arrest a solitary man suspected of possessing child pornography. Agents from the Department of Homeland Security, backed by SWAT teams, a Blackhawk helicopter, and officers from several local jurisdictions converged on the home of 34-year-old Robert Godsey, who offered no resistance as he was arrested and his computers were seized. 

Without permission or explanation, the raiders set up a “staging area” on the grounds of the A.R. Graiff Elementary School, displaying the same arrogant indifference to the locals that had radiated from the Guatemalan Army as it seized control of streets and buildings in La Democracia and Siquinala. 

“It’s better to be over-prepared,” smirked Jim Porter of the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Illinois in response to questions about wildly disproportionate use of force. Dutifully regurgitating pre-digested soundbites Porter insisted that the most important consideration for the raiders is to be prepared for what they “reasonably expect might happen.” And since their indoctrination describes the public as an undifferentiated mass of menace, and their role as subduing any potential resistance, rather than protecting property rights, their default setting is “overkill.” 

This obsession with “force protection” – or, as it is commonly called, “officer safety” – is the primary driver behind the 124 SWAT raids that occur, on average, every day in the United States. These are not “paramilitary” raids; they are fully realized military operations carried out with financial support from Washington and material assistance from the Pentagon. The only significant difference between counter-insurgency operations overseas and the ones conducted domestically is the fact that military personnel operate under more restrictive rules of engagement than police officers. 

The SWAT concept itself could be considered a domestic variant of the “Counter-terror teams” assembled by the CIA as part of the murderous “Phoenix Program” in Vietnam. Amid mounting – and overdue, but welcome -- public antipathy toward police militarization, the Homeland Security apparatus has ramped up its longstanding campaign to collect information on activists and commentators who promote “anti-police” attitudes – another homefront adaptation of counter-insurgency methods. 

In 2008, total government spending on “police protection” was $76 billion – nearly half of all “criminal justice”-related expenditures. In the following year the Obama administration poured additional billions of dollars into the Justice Department’s Byrne Memorial Grant program. That program is one of the chief federal funding arteries for “local” police departments – and perhaps the most significant tool the Feds have employed to mobilize police departments and sheriff’s offices in the “war on drugs.” 

The foregoing happened before the most recent push to provide every police agency with surplus war-fighting vehicles – even if their officers patrol tiny rural villages in which crime is all but nonexistent. Of course, the same was true of La Democracia and Siquinala before the Guatemala army showed up to “pacify” them. 

Unlike Guatemala, the United States has not witnessed an overt military coup, yet our society is more pervasively militarized than that country was when I lived there decades ago, at the nadir of a long and brutal civil war. The welcome news is that our rulers haven’t rolled up a comparable body count. The ominous news is that they’re just getting started. 

Listen to, or download, the most recent Freedom Zealot Podcast here.

Please follow me on Twitter.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Suffering in the Service of Official Lies: The Agony of Alexis Carey

Alexis Carey suffers from Dravet Syndrome, a form of epilepsy that has left the nine-year-old unable to speak or use the bathroom. She is subject to violent seizures that can last an hour or longer. No relief is provided by any of the FDA-approved medications available. When Alexis succumbs to a seizure – she sometimes endures sixty episodes a month – her parents, Michael and Clare, can do little more than act as witnesses to their daughter’s agony. Dravet-induced seizures can cause permanent brain damage, and many children thus afflicted don't reach adulthood.

If the Careys lived in Utah, Alexis would have access to cannabidiol (CBD), an orally administered oil (sometimes called “Charlotte's Web”) that has been very effective in treating Dravet's Syndrome and a number of other illnesses, including some forms of cancer. However, the family resides in Idaho, where CBD is illegal because it is derived from the evil communist demon weed called marijuana.

CBD has a very low THC content, which means that it has no psychoactive effects. But this matters not to the Gem State's noble defenders of public virtue: On February 20, 2013, the Idaho State Senate’s State Affairs Committee unanimously approved a measure resolving never to permit legalization of marijuana for any reason, and a second resolution petitioning the White House to carry out stern and strict enforcement of all federal anti-marijuana statutes. The first was later approved by the full Legislature, but the latter was voted down.

Alexis's parents have lobbied the state Legislature to enact an exception for CBD use in treatment of Dravet Syndrome. Although some legislators expressed sympathy, no tangible progress was made, which means that the family cannot expect relief until sometime next year, at best. In the meantime, Alexis’s condition will continue to deteriorate.

In desperation, Michael and Clare have considered moving to Colorado, where CBD is readily available. Rather than being forced into exile, they have contemplated the possibility of driving to Colorado and returning with a load of Charlotte's Web. Given the opportunistic ruthlessness with which Idaho State Police troopers enforce – and exploit -- the state's marijuana ban, this would very likely mean that they would be intercepted at the border and face both imprisonment and the loss of everything they own through the state-licensed larceny called “asset forfeiture.”

“Would a prosecutor even take a case like that, and say `I'm going to prosecute you for having hemp oil with 0.3 percent THC in it?'” mused Clare in an interview with BSU's Public Radio affiliate.

The living answer to that question is Monte Stiles, retired federal prosecutor and ideological architect of Idaho's draconian anti-marijuana campaign. He is precisely the kind of self-enraptured world-improver who would be willing to turn parents into felons and paupers because they seek to treat their incurably sick little girl with a substance that is banned by the State for no rational reason.

 Stiles combines the destructive, dictatorial sanctimony of Savonarola with the pathological implacability of Javert. He sincerely believes himself to be the divinely commissioned tutor to the public, defender of “the children,” and scourge of the “New Barons of Pot.” In his wisdom – and who are we to challenge it? – it is necessary that Alexis and others like her suffer, rather than using treatments that would undermine the state-imposed orthodoxy that “marijuana is a crude street drug” with no beneficial uses.

Stiles lectures a captive audience of schoolchildren in Twin Falls.

Left untreated, Alexis's Dravet Syndrome will leave the child's tiny body wracked with painful convulsions. For Stiles and his allies, this is simply the price that must be paid in order to hold at bay what he calls the “Trojan horse of marijuana as `medicine.'”

Stiles spent 28 years as a federal prosecutor, all but four of them focusing on drug prohibition efforts. Since retiring from that post he has tirelessly promoted prohibition both here and abroad. Despite the fact that he has no medical credentials, Stiles pontificates that there is no “acceptable” medical use for marijuana, and that the “end game” of any effort to establish medical exceptions is decriminalization of “the recreational use of everything.”

This was essentially the state of affairs in the 19^th century, when Stiles’ devout Mormon forebears fortified themselves with stimulant-rich “Mormon Tea,” cannabis and heroin were prominently listed ingredients in widely used cough syrup preparations, and cocaine – which was advertised as a topical analgesic for teething pains – could be purchased at the local apothecary.  

If Stiles were still in office, he not only would prosecute Michael and Clare for bringing CBD back from Colorado, he would seize their bank accounts, their home, and their property, and use his influence to arrange for the same penalties to be imposed on their suppliers in Colorado and anybody who did business with them.

“The saddest part of this story [the rapid normalization of marijuana use] is the fact that our federal government has always had the ability to shut this down,” wrote Stiles in a January 2013 op-ed column. “As a federal drug prosecutor for almost 25 years, I know that we didn't have to endure a decade or more of so-called `medicinal' marijuana before the pretense was dropped and full legalization efforts began. For the price of a postage stamp and some paper, the federal government could send a notice of forfeiture to marijuana landlords. This would be most effective in states like Arizona and New Jersey where only one dispensary exists....”

Stiles no longer has the power to dispossess people by decree, but he continues his relentless evangelism on behalf of prohibition. He was most likely the ghostwriter of a January 2013 letter to the White House on behalf of the Association of Idaho Cities demanding that the Obama administration crack down on state-level efforts to decriminalize the use of 

marijuana. The AIC condemned legalization of marijuana as “a disaster for our country and the worldwide war against drugs” and urged action “to enforce federal drug laws in all states and uphold international treaties relating to the control of illegal drugs in the world.”

That letter, which provided the template for the state legislature’s subsequent anti-marijuana resolutions, could be construed as an act of treason in the strict constitutional sense of the expression. Article III, section 3 of the U.S. Constitution defines “Treason against the united States” – note the plural – as “levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies….” The signatories of the AIC’s letter to the White House, and the legislative Quislings who called for a federal anti-marijuana crack-down, were urging Obama to take violent action against states that have exercised their reserved powers under the Tenth Amendment to opt out of the marijuana prohibition regime. This would be done, furthermore, to enforce the UN’s 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs – an anti-constitutional pact enacted by an unaccountable foreign assembly.

Only the sacred cause of drug prohibition could inspire Idaho’s Republican-dominated political establishment to beg Barack Obama to use whatever means he deems necessary to enforce UN-mandated “international law.”

While Idaho government’s anti-marijuana zealotry is globalist – in effect, if not in intent – Stiles’s vision of a “drug-free society” can be accurately described as communist. Not Marxist, mind you; he doesn’t present a theory of class struggle that conduces toward the final victory of the proletariat. What Stiles proposes is the organization of society into “planned communities” administered by visionaries like himself.

In February 2013, the same month that the incomparably righteous Idaho Legislature enacted its “Prohibition now – prohibition forever!” resolution, Stiles produced a detailed manifesto entitled “The Path: A Vision for American's [sic] Future.” Displaying the monomania of an instinctive totalitarian, Stiles outlines a planned community in which the central organizing principle is an abhorrence of all government-banned substances.

“The Path provides leaders with the opportunity to say, `This is the way. Let’s go there together,’” exhorts Stiles. He then outlines the “Seven Significant Steps” that we must follow under the diligent oversight of our inspired rulers. Of course, seeking to establish a “drug-free” community is an undertaking as senseless as trying to overtake the horizon – but for those who seek the power to “improve” other people through the threat and exercise of violence, it’s the journey that matters, not the destination.

The “planned community” limned by Stiles is a bizarre Landru-cult, minus the annual catharsis of state-licensed hedonism. Imagine Mao's Cultural Revolution filtered through Ned Flanders’s aesthetic lens, with the role of Red Guards played by a hyper-authoritarian faction of Up With People, and you’ll get a rough idea of what Stiles has in mind. 

Planned communities: Young Pioneers in Soviet Russia...

Like Barack Obama, Stiles fancies himself a revolutionary “community organizer,” calling for the creation of “Community coalitions … formed around 12 community sectors, including schools, businesses, churches, youth organizations, parents, and civic organizations.” This would allow a targeted city to qualify for subsidies through the Federal Drug Free Community Grants Program – and that’s when the fun will really begin.

“Leaders” will be identified, a community “kickoff” event will be held, “community sectors” will be enlisted to “gather data” – that is, collect intelligence on suspected deviants. Inmates of the local government schools would endure daily agitprop barrages and be expected to take part in liturgies of conformity. School hallways would teem with “law enforcement resource officers” empowered to carry out “suspicion-based drug testing” of students.

Similar policies would be imposed in the workplace, in the churches, in civic organizations, and anywhere else people might repair in search of a brief respite from the relentless attentions of their archons. Citizens would be expected to offer public ritual denunciations of “the notion that your state should surrender to the drug culture by normalizing substance abuse – in any form.”

According to Marx’s manifesto, communism is distilled into a single principle: “The abolition of private property.” Through the practice of “asset forfeiture,” American police departments have been immeasurably more effective in establishing communism than Leon Trotsky’s Red Army ever was. Not surprisingly, in Stiles’ pseudo-puritanical dystopia the police would have free rein “to effectively investigate, seize, and forfeit the drug-related assets of drug traffickers” and devote a portion of the plundered proceeds to “drug education efforts” to explain “why drug education and enforcement is important to everyone.”

Totalitarian blueprints demand ideological regimentation of family life, and “The Path” is no exception. Parents would be required to harangue their children “at least once a week” regarding the “values and expectations” of the community. 

...Idaho "Drug-Free Youth" at a rally on the Capitol steps.

Here Stiles neglected an opportunity to tout the accomplishments of an Idaho parent who exhausted himself in the prohibitionist crusade: Former state DARE coordinator Larry McGhee, a 30-year law enforcement veteran who devoted most of his career to combating drug use. 

During that time, as it happened, McGhee’s daughter and grand-daughter both became drug addicts, but somehow this didn’t impeach his credibility as a state-commissioned moral scold. His family’s tragic experience underscores the fact that it’s impossible to create a “drug-free” world– but Stiles, who worked closely with McGhee, simply will not abandon that pretense, or the conceit that children should be treated as community property.

The very existence of the “drug culture” -- which apparently includes everybody who is not a prohibitionist fanatic – means that “children are being deprived of their right to `life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Stiles insists.

The “right” of children to live in a “drug-free community” must be the “first priority,” Stiles decrees. In his ideal “community,” the rights of parents would be contingent upon their compliance with prohibitionist priorities.  

Given the priorities expressed in “The Path,” it’s reasonable to conclude that if Stiles were still a federal prosecutor, and Alexis Carey’s parents obtained CBD to treat her Dravet Syndrome, he would not only seek their imprisonment and impoverishment, he would most likely try to terminate their parental rights and dispatch their suffering daughter into the foster care system. This would be justified by the necessity of preserving her “right” to endure a brief and pain-saturated existence as a member of a “drug-free community.”

Dum spiro, pugno!

High Priestess Ginsburg Rebukes the Heathen

What happens when sloganeering replaces thought.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg professes to be offended by the idea that a commercial enterprise can claim protection under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. She is just as adamant in her insistence that an equally abstract entity called the “government” has “interests” that justify imposing on the property rights of private business owners.

“The exercise of religion is characteristic of natural persons, not artificial legal entities,” Ginsburg complained in her dissent in the Court’s recent Hobby Lobby ruling.  In defense of that proposition she cites John Marshall’s description of a corporation as “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.” In similar fashion, she quotes John Paul Stevens’ observation that corporations “have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.”

Ginsburg appears to be a chromosome-level statist, which is why she doesn’t understand that this descriptive language also applies to the fictive entity called “government.” It, too, is an invisible, impersonal abstraction existing only in the minds of those who believe in it. The “government” has no body, parts, or passions. It has no hands save those that are raised by believers in violence against the infidels, and (to paraphrase Nietzsche) no wealth save that which was stolen in its name.

The substantive difference between a business enterprise and a “government” is that the former is an association of people who engage in commerce, rather than coercion. Absent the cooperation of those calling themselves the government, a corporation cannot compel anybody to purchase their services. The majority in the Hobby Lobby ruling tentatively suggested that there are limits on the government’s supposed authority to compel people to purchase services on behalf of others – a development Ginsburg treats as a portent of impending anarchy. We should only be so lucky.

Throughout her puerile and petulant dissent, Ginsburg piously invokes what she calls the “compelling interest” of the government in forcing private business owners to underwrite the purchase of contraceptives by their female employees. 

She doesn’t explain how an impalpable construct with no tangible form or individual will can be “compelled” by anything. What she, and people of her persuasion, mean when they employ that phrase is that those who act in the name of the “government” can claim an interest in compelling others to behave in certain ways.

According to Ginsburg, the question that defines this controversy is not “By what authority does the government compel?” but rather “By what right does anyone claim an exemption?”

 The majority decision held that under the so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the federal government is required to accommodate the religious convictions of business owners who do not want to be compelled to underwrite specific forms of birth control – in this case, four of sixteen FDA-approved methods that can reasonably be construed as abortifacients.

Giving voice to the totalitarian left – those who believe that government powers, exercised by the “right” people, should be illimitable – Ginsburg protests that this exemption opens the “floodgates” to supposed social horrors of every kind.

“Hobby Lobby and Conestoga [a company that joined in the lawsuit] surely do not stand alone as commercial enterprises seeking exemptions from generally applicable laws on the basis of their religious beliefs,” she writes, reeling off a series of previous rulings against business owners who were found in violation of anti-discrimination statutes. The list included a restaurant owner from Georgia who refused to accept black customers in the 1960s, and the more recent case of New Mexico wedding photographer Elane Huguenin, who was punished for refusing to provide her services to a same-sex couple.

According to Ginsburg and the professional collectivist hysterics who pretend to believe her, the federal government's claimed power to compel Christian employers to underwrite the purchase of abortion pills for their female employees is the only thing preventing the imposition of a totalitarian theocracy, or large-scale reversion to Jim Crow.

“Would the exemption the Court holds RFRA demands for employers with religiously grounded objections to the use of certain contraceptives extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions … antidepressants … medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin .. and vaccinations?” Ginsburg continues. By granting any religious exceptions to what she insists is a “neutral, generally applicable law,” the majority “has ventured into a minefield” in which they will have to assess the merits of each claimed religious exemption.

 

Collectivist tolerance on display.

This makes sense only if we ignore the only “neutral, generally applicable law” that exists – the law of non-aggression against property rights. Ginsburg is a collectivist by inclination, so it’s not surprising that her dissent ignores the question of property rights entirely: In what sense did Hobby Lobby’s corporate policy violate the property rights of their female employees?

“No doubt the Greens and Hahns” – the family owners of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga, respectively – “and all who share their beliefs may decline to acquire for themselves the contraceptives in question,” Ginsburg sneers, condescension coloring every syllable. “But that choice may not be imposed on employees who hold other beliefs.” She does not deign to explain how declining to subsidize another person’s choices amounts to an “imposition” – or why those acting in the name of the formless, disincarnate “government” can impose upon employers to provide such subsidies.

 “Working for Hobby Lobby or Conestoga … should not deprive employees of the preventive care available to workers at the shop next door,” Ginsburg decrees. She neither addresses nor seems to contemplate this question: If such care is all-important, why would women seeking it choose to work at Hobby Lobby, rather than “the shop next door”? One answer is that Hobby Lobby is a growing company whose owners offer very generous compensation – more than double the minimum wage – in an economy that has been made sick unto death through the ministrations of the “government” before which Ginsburg and her ilk would force us to genuflect.

When Hobby Lobby’s female employees are paid, their wages become their property and can be spent on any birth control method they desire, without restrictions or impositions of any kind from the company’s owners. Those working at the “shop next door,” on the other hand, might very well receive full coverage -- until the business that employs them suffocates beneath the unbearable weight of the government’s regulatory mandates. But sacrifices of that kind are necessary to propitiate the omniprovident entity called “Government,” as Ginsburg and other priests and priestess of its cult will patiently explain to individualist heathen.

Listen to or download the most recent Freedom Zealot Podcast here. 

Please follow me on Twitter.

Dum spiro, pugno!