Consider the Trump Administration's eagerness to "dominate the [domestic] battlespace" — while holding a Bible aloft

© 2020 Peter Free

 

03 June 2020

 

 

The Trump-Barr-Esper totalitarian show

 

During the George Floyd protests against decades and decades of police-implemented murders of minority citizens:

 

 

American leadership has decided that militarizing the US response

 

(to this allegedly intolerable disorder)

 

should take the form of

 

essentially calling for

 

and

 

implementing still more

 

of

 

the same kinds of death-dealing

 

that are being protested.

 

 

President Trump wants to distribute active duty military troops across the nation

 

And in strategic justification for this un-Constitutional idiocy — Secretary of Defense Mark Esper observed that:

 

 

"The sooner that you mass and dominate the battlespace the sooner this dissipates and we can get back to the right normal,”

 

Esper said during the conversation, which was later leaked to the media.

 

© 2020 Mark Perry, Military Officers And Vets Uncomfortable With Trump’s Domestic ‘Battlespace’, American Conservative (03 June 2020)

 

 

Whereupon . . .

 

. . . our fascistically inclined Attorney General enthusiastically hopped in.

 

Eager to help Trump announce this boldly totalitarian plan, Bill Barr directed the violently anti-constitutional clearing of a peaceful George Floyd protest in the District of Columbia's Lafayette Square.

 

 

And finally thereupon

 

President Trump waved a Bible aloft — in front of St. John's Episcopal Church — after having television-proclaimed himself to be a "law and order" president.

 

The New American Reich had (very arguably) just been announced.

 

 

Simultaneously

 

And very unfortunately for the American military's historically non-political tradition, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — Mark Milley — was photographed as part of this ambling parade of notables toward Lafayette Square.

 

One could thus infer that the Joint Chiefs — and presumably the entire US military establishment — supported the President's Constitution-flouting use of active duty troops on US soil.

 

 

Notice the contrasting symbolism

 

Lafayette Square is named for the American Revolution's (French) hero, the Marquis de Lafayette.

 

This is the man who helped Americans free themselves from the British Monarchy. And who went on to revolt again in Freedom's favor in 1789 and 1830 France.

 

A more consistent and honorable proponent of Liberty, one is unlikely to find.

 

The Marquis de Lafayette is the startlingly complete antithesis to Trump and Crew.

 

 

And a metaphor not too far

 

The shadows of Hitler, Stalin and Mao have all come back — encapsulated in Donald Trump's "morbidly obese" form.

 

And the American military — in the forms of Secretary of Defense Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Milley — are apparently willing to support such a reincarnation of those Evilities' totalitarian purpose.

 

 

This historically astonishing situation is . . .

 

. . . a nightmare that would have America's Founders rising from their graves in unanimously Constitution-reminding protest:

 

 

First, the President bombastically informs us that he is going to use the active duty US military to crush rioters, during our nation's George Floyd 'disorder'. This misuse of American troops constituting a clear violation of the Constitution's fundamental intent.

 

Then, you have the US President waving a Bible overhead, at an Episcopal Church — in a nation that constitutionally separates Church and State — in purported Godly support of his previous policy pronouncement.

 

Roughly simultaneously, to make matters worse, Secretary of Defense Esper is leaked opining that America is a "battlespace" and that the Administration needs to "dominate" it.

 

Words from which one can reasonably hypothesize that Secretary Esper visualizes imposing Gestapo and SS iron-fisted-ness upon the American people.

 

 

 

 

In very short sum

 

We have one American tyrant-wannabe after another blatantly violating their professional oaths to uphold the US Constitution.

 

Consider here, for example, Bill Barr's shocking legal obtuseness.

 

When he ordered the violently implemented clearing of a peaceful Washington DC protest — so as to enable President Trump's nauseating display of theatrically enacted Angel of the Social Order showboating — AG Barr went so far over any conceivably lawful American constitutional line, that he revealed himself to be an implacable enemy of the Liberty-protecting spirit of our two most fundamental Founding Documents — the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

 

Constitutionally-protected Principles of Freedom were so clearly embodied in the Lafayette Square circumstances, that not even a second year law student could have missed them.

 

That a US attorney general would ignore those principles — so as to effectuate an absurdly Mussolini-like photo opportunity for President Toddling Donny's narcissistic self — cannot, under any logic, be excused.

 

And then, WTF is wrong with Secretary Esper?

 

 

The US is an uninvaded "battlespace"?

 

"Dominate" our own citizens?

 

 

What kind of portrait of We the People — whom Esper's apparently sorry ass is supposedly serving — has he painted inside his egregiously anti-democratic head?

 

As for Chairman (4 star) Mark Milley:

 

 

Had he forgotten his own Constitutional oath — as he 'manfully' sauntered through AG Barr's illegally cleared location for the purpose of participating in President Trump's dictatorial enactment of Evangelical Authoritarianism?

 

 

No American 4 star should ever allow himself to be used as a symbolic cudgel against America's founding document.

 

Princeton University and the Naval War College taught you better than that, General.

 

Ignorance of the President's purpose (at Lafayette Square) is not an excuse.

 

After more than three years of seeing our militant 'Moron in Chief' perform, General Milley should have been on his honor-bound guard.

 

 

The moral? — AG Barr and President Trump are fatly embodied manifestations of the Totalitarian Impulse on American soil

 

United States military leaders should — as a matter of their most fundamental Constitutional duty — explicitly oppose assisting these Wannabe Tyrants in their Liberty-crushing endeavors.

 

Given the Great American Plutocracy's complete abandonment of Liberty principles, Military Folk are the only remaining defense against the United States becoming yet another totalitarian abomination on this planet.

 

How sad, historically speaking, is this?

 

The Marquis de Lafayette would be incensed at what his Liberty-gaining efforts have squalidly been reduced to in Fallen Amerika.

 

As an American patriot, so am I.