📖 Rule by Militia

🔶️ Militias are often taken as a sign of weak or absent government, the result of renegade actors operating in the wake of state collapse. Such a narrative could be told through a roll call of fallen dictators—from Mohamed Siad Barre in Somalia through to Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya—whose removal seemed to result in the death of the state and the emergence of militias that pick over its carcass. But these lapsarian lessons about the evils that befall a society after state collapse occlude more than they reveal. The reality is that many militias active around the globe today were created by states. In the aftermath of the economic crises of the 1980s, governments wracked by debt found militias an efficient way of managing restive populations.

🔶️ For much of European history, militias and other nonstate military actors played a part in state policy. Feudal military mobilization, for example, largely relied on assembling coalitions of aristocratic houses and their levies. When this system broke down, it was replaced by a marketplace for mercenaries in which access to force depended on capital reserves. By the eighteenth century, half the Prussian army was comprised of hired troops, and all the European states except Switzerland relied on foreign fighters. These mercenaries were sometimes drawn from private armies. Just as often, European rulers would hire out their own forces to other sovereigns.

🔶️ The state itself was just one of many forms of military power that vied with each other, none of them necessarily more legitimate than any other. If the state won, it was because, as Charles Tilly puts it in his famous article on state- and war-making, “small groups of power-hungry men fought off numerous rivals and great popular resistance in the pursuit of their own ends, and inadvertently promoted the formation of national states.” In this telling, Weber’s legitimation of state violence was the winner’s prize bestowed on the most distinguished group of bandits. The state became the form that seized the mode of predation.

🔶️ The second key characteristic of the contemporary militia is thus that it exists—much like the mercantile companies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe—as a military force, political organ, and business all at the same time. Their control of real estate, banking, and commercial services ensures their autonomy from the state. It also occludes the role of global commodity markets, which have obscurity built into them, in enabling militia economies. A U.S. Government Accountability Office review of conflict minerals (which include tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold) from 2022 determined that half the companies surveyed couldn’t determine where the minerals they used came from, at all.

🔶️ Within the nation-state system, as Amitav Ghosh once suggested, there are increasingly two classes of country. In one class, borders are believed in, the state promises to offer at least a vestige of security, and governments have the capacity to act relatively autonomously from the ethnic and economic forces that constitute them. In the other class of country, the state is a fiction insisted upon by the international community. State-building efforts in these countries have only led to more power being vested in rentier elites, dependent on resources from elsewhere, who have fractured the nations over which they rule.

🔶️ Changing this dynamic is not easy. What is certain is that the liberal dream of a Weberian state will offer no solutions; the theater of state-building has clearly run its course. Any alternative would need to attend to the supply chains and international commodity markets that enable rule by militia. Rather than propping up fictional governments, the international community could focus on the real motor of militia membership: a growing surplus of young women and men thrown off by the global economy which cannot be absorbed by the countries they live in unless massive economic transformations take place at a planetary scale.

📎 Boston Review

📖 👮‍♂️ 🇺🇸 In 2016, the police said, "we give up." This is why they want gun control. | 9mmSMG

"If they come out after us, bring extra body bags. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword" -John Joe Gray

🔶️ January 2016 - TRINIDAD, Texas – After almost 15 years, what is believed to be the longest armed standoff in American history quietly came to a peaceful close earlier this week.

🔶️ John Joe Gray was arrested in 1999 for assaulting a state trooper during a traffic stop. Gray said it was his God-given right to carry the pistol he had that day, without a concealed handgun license. When the trooper tried to arrest him, Gray got into a scuffle with the officer and bit him.

🔶️ Gray was eventually charged with assaulting a public servant, but he refused to return to court, and instead, armed himself at home.

🔶️ "If they come out after us, bring extra body bags. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword," Gray told ABC News in a 2000 interview.

🔶️ Since the felony charge in 1999, Gray has never left his 47-acres along the banks of the Trinity River between Tool and Trinidad, Texas.

🔶️ Instead, Gray, his children, grandchildren, and friends patrol their property with pistols and rifles and refuse to let strangers inside.

🔶️ National Geographic said it took a crew two years to earn the family’s trust recently.

🔶️ "We've never shot no one yet,” Gray told National Geographic. “But they know, if they come on us, they'll be surprised what's going to happen to them."

🔶️ The felony charge of assaulting a peace officer was actually dismissed in December 2014, when the district attorney left office.

🔶️ Sheriff Nutt said he’s glad the district attorney decided to drop charges.

🔶️ "Yeah. It takes pressure off people. And it may take pressure off them," the sheriff said. “There's always been the potential for something bad happening.”

🔶️ Nutt said he didn't go get Gray because deputies could have died.

"It wasn't worth it,” the sheriff said.

📎 9mmSMG

— The Phenomenon of Paramilitarization of politics (Parapolitics, as the Colombians would call it) as a reaction/consequence of the failure of the democratic process to resolve internal issues is certainly something "interesting" to be analyzed.

Such phenomenon, seen at multiple points in history, so to speak, the paramilitirization of political factions, obviously, doesn't occur without the creation of Parallel States, that is, the Creation of Autonomous Zones (officially or not) depending on how severe the situation escalated

For example, we can take Zionist Militias with the Kibbutz, Colombia's AUC and the Lebanese areas under the administration of Phalangist Militias as examples of Right-wing Parapolitics Autonomous Zones, meanwhile we can have the infamous Trade Union Militias and the CNT of Catalonia of the Spanish Civil War and the Zapapista rebels in Mexico and the ELN in Colombia as Examples of Left Wing Autonomous Zones.

🇺🇸 🦅 Nothing more starkly divides Americans than guns. Handing gun owners their wet dream (second only to red dawn), does nothing but energize the militant right and convert others to join them. 

The firearm manufacturing base is in red states where we're already seeing companies cut off blue states from supply, including law enforcement and state agents. Blue State locals have also refused gun grabs outside of major cities.

There is a surge in first-time gun owners spurred by the common threat environment in America today. Something akin to South Africa, where the population lives in different centuries simultaneously.

Arresting peaceful Americans won't suppress them, it just creates more men with nothing left to lose.

💬 How the AR-15 became America’s most popular and deadly weapon

📌 Los Angeles Times

✅ New Right News

🇺🇸 From the article:
There were about 400,000 AR-15-style guns prior to 1994; today there are 20 million in America. Given that growth, the authors scoff at the Biden administration reviving talk of a ban.

“How are we going to solve the problem?”

“It’s just not feasible unless you’re going to go house to house,” said McWhirter.

🇺🇸 Roughly 1 in 20 Americans own an AR-15 rifle as firearm’s popularity explodes despite role in mass killings

Originally intended for military use, AR-15-style rifles have surged in popularity over the last two decades

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/ar15-rifle-nashville-school-shooting-b2310833.html