Amid much whooping and clapping
Should Michael Flynn be court-martialed for advocating a coup? Not quite, legally speaking. (Morally speaking he should be court-martialed and then pushed into a deep mud puddle.)
Flynn made the comment at a QAnon-themed conference in Texas this past weekend. After Flynn delivered a speech to the group, a man in the audience rose and said, “I’m a simple Marine. I want to know why what happened in Minimar [he was referring to the February military coup in Myanmar] can’t happen here.” Amid much whooping and clapping from the crowd, Flynn replied, “No reason. I mean, it should happen”—i.e., a coup should happen here. (Flynn has since denied saying this, but the videotape clearly shows he did.)
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The First Amendment protects free speech, but the Uniform Code of Military Justice—which applies to retired and active-duty personnel of the U.S. armed forces—doesn’t always. Rep. Elaine Luria, a retired Navy commander who is now vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said that Flynn’s comments “border on sedition” and that he should be tried in a military court.
But Fred Kaplan explains why the law doesn’t quite agree.
Still, Flynn poses a problem, especially at a time when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, himself a retired Army general, is trying to purge the ranks of political extremists and aspiring insurrectionists. One thing that Austin, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, military commanders, and any other officer in the public eye should do is to shun and shame Michael Flynn—denounce him, hold him up as a poster boy for bad behavior, turn the sorry, sordid devolution of his career into a case study of a path not to take.
Former colleagues of Flynn say that his dismissal from DIA—a move ordered by the secretary of defense and director of national intelligence at the time (Robert Gates and James Clapper)—embittered him and made him ripe for recruitment by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Flynn made his pivot, leading the anti-Hillary chant of “Lock her up!” from the podium at the 2016 Republican National Convention—and has been plunging ever since. His indictment during the Mueller investigation triggered his dive into out-and-out conspiracy-mongering, especially after he was persuaded to retract his guilty plea—at which point he stopped cooperating with the authorities and started adopting slogans of QAnon and talking with alarming casualness about the possibilities—and appeal—of martial law to preserve or restore Trump’s presidency.
Flynn wants to be the face of an insurgent military cabal. The legal military authorities can’t toss him in the brig, and they shouldn’t turn him into a martyr in any case. But they need to counter, quash, ridicule, and otherwise nip his dark ambitions in the bud. They need to make clear, to one and all, that every moral and legal tenet of the U.S. armed forces, every idea animating American democracy, holds Michael Flynn in contempt.
Get busy on that then.
Yeah, but will they?
Flynn is the latest to open this: history’s can of worms. The novelist Norman Mailer said once that in his opinion the defaul condition of humanity was fascism. On that I disagree; it is feudalism IMHO.
Trouble is that, apart from certain other problems, feudalism and fascism both degenerate rapidly into corruption and a diversion of resources to private ends, as in the downfall of the Third Reich in Germany. This diversion in turn stimulates either internal collapse (eg Pinochet’s regime in Chile; Peron’s in Argentina) or popular revolution (eg Batista’s military dictatorship in Cuba.)
The only political order consistent with a genuine free market in goods and services is modern representative democracy: with all its problems. Churchill once defined the Westminster system as the ‘least worst system of government yet devised.’ If I remember correctly.
Someone else (I think it was the great Russian general Rodion Tukhachesky, speaking before Stalin had him shot) suggested that the best way to defend a nation is through the creation of popular militias.
A standing army is a Frankenstein monster. Flynn is just the latest confirmation of that sad fact.
Omar: And yet, for the moment (and it will be a long moment), the most successful economic model in the world today seems to be Chinese. Not a democratic example for sure.
Otherwise, I agree with your trenchant analysis.
Brian:
The Chinese Communist Party has a tiger by the tail. Theyused the army to carry out the 1989 Beijing massacre, thereby making a mockery of the idea of the ‘Peoples’ Republic’ of China. The regime will probably be OK as long as the leadership 1. can buy the Chinese masses off with consumerism and 2. the armed forces do not split.
To carry out the Beijing massacre, they avoided using locally-based troops, and instead used regiments from the provinces. IMHO they showed a weakness there.
Franco used that approach. In his time members of he Guardia Civil never served in their home areas. They were sent off to places where they had no inhibitions about oppressing the local people.
“The new Civil War approaches.” Brian M, May 10, 2021
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2021/slaveowners-holiday/
Flynn wants to be the face of an insurgent military cabal.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2021/amid-much-whooping-and-clapping/
It’s interesting to assess the feasibility (not probability) in the context of recent advances in technology.
In 2019 drones were used to successfully attack a refinery in the Persian gulf.
An Iranian nuclear scientist was killed by remote control in 2021.
Azerbaijan used money from Caspian oil to buy drones from Turkey that completely outflanked Armenia’s ‘conventional’ army in 2020. (Turkey has some history with Armenia.) Materiel acquired by Turkey from, in part, Israel (IAI Harop, stealth with small profile), Canada (L3Harris-Wescam ISTAR surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance) and Russia (obsolete AN-2Ms cleverly sacrificed strategically as Trojan horses). AI will continue to outwit human military (https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2020-08-07).
Not everyone is scrupulous about issuing or observing end-use certificates.
The U.S. has become militarized domestically.
The National Guard deployed the Avenger missile system in response to the domestic threat from protestors (and Amy Goodman) at Standing Rock. Municipal police have acquired military grade equipment, evident in part during BLM demonstrations. Private armies are available (TigerSwan, Xe Services (Blackwater) …). “Police Drones Are Starting to Think for Themselves” (Cade Metz, New York Times, Dec. 5, 2020).
This is a natural consequence of Pentagon budgets.
When will the militias–Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Boogaloo (Propublica, April 13, 2021), Base, Wolverine Watchmen, ad nauseum–discover you can control a fleet of semi-autonomous drones without GPS from a mobile phone ()?
Tactically, execution is frustrated by pervasive surveillance (Snowden et al; IMSI, IntelCenter, ABIS, Palantir …) and legal actions against encrypted communications (e.g. Sky ECC).
Concerns about secrecy aside, financing a civil war should not be a problem looking at the profiles of the “replacement” and “stop the steal” crowd (Roger Stone; Nicholas Powers, “The ZIP Codes of the Trump Loyalists Who Attacked the Capitol May Surprise You”, Truthout April 23, 2021; Robert A. Pape, https://youtu.be/dskVval50AE, May 6, 2021; https://youtu.be/Bscyfd6Njto Jan 18, 2021).
Prof. Carol Anderson’s astute observation, “you know, if you’ve always been privileged, equality begins to look like oppression”, become manifest. Uncertainty generates fear (Kruglanski). Fukuyama argues thymos is the seat of identity politics—a phrase typically associated with the Left but which he applies more broadly—and thymos accounts for the increasingly bitter fragmentation of countries around the world into hostile camps.
Brian @ 3, when you say economic model, which one do you mean? China has changed its economic model at least twice and arguably three times since the communist party took charge. The strict command economy post revolution certainly raised an impressive number of people out of grinding poverty and quite a number into middle class. The overlay of private enterprise on top of a modified command economy enabled well connected individuals to become fabulously wealthy, while lifting even more people into the middle class and creating a runaway consumer economy.
It’s all very smoke and mirror though, as economies tend to be. Whether the current flavour of private enterprise mixed with state command will prove more resilient than economic models used in western democracies long term is, I think, a very open question.