Defending the Constitution
A sergeant of the US Marine Corps pens a short but devastating article directed at those elements of the extreme right currently spouting overheated rhetoric about armed rebellion and civil war. He throws a much-needed splash of cold reality on such fantasies:
.....this government of ours is a democracy. We vote for our representatives, and they vote in our interests. Sometimes, the votes don't go our way. That's life, better luck next time. Exhaust your legislative options, and then focus on gaining the required votes and/or seats to achieve your desired legislative vote next election time. That's the way things work. But the SECOND you start committing acts of violence and vandalism, then you've usurped that Constitution. You in a way have assaulted it. And then you and I (I being every servicemember who has sworn to defend said Constitution) will have a MAJOR PROBLEM.....
.....Now I'd like to disperse a myth here - many of you think that US military would not fight civilians. I can't speak for all, but in my case - the moment you declare civil war, you're no longer civilians. The moment you attack the constitution, you're now enemies of that constitution. And I swore to defend and support and if necessary give my life for that Constitution and utilize every tool, technique, and weapon at my disposal to do so. And trust me, I'm not alone.....I would never want to receive a frag order to Maryland, or North Dakota, or Texas, but it is an order I will follow no matter how much it pains me to do so.
Read the whole thing. Then send it to your local teabaggers.
Update: The article has disappeared from its original location at the Newsvine link above. The complete text is here, here, here, and here, and doubtless other places as well.
Update 2: Google cached version is here.
.....this government of ours is a democracy. We vote for our representatives, and they vote in our interests. Sometimes, the votes don't go our way. That's life, better luck next time. Exhaust your legislative options, and then focus on gaining the required votes and/or seats to achieve your desired legislative vote next election time. That's the way things work. But the SECOND you start committing acts of violence and vandalism, then you've usurped that Constitution. You in a way have assaulted it. And then you and I (I being every servicemember who has sworn to defend said Constitution) will have a MAJOR PROBLEM.....
.....Now I'd like to disperse a myth here - many of you think that US military would not fight civilians. I can't speak for all, but in my case - the moment you declare civil war, you're no longer civilians. The moment you attack the constitution, you're now enemies of that constitution. And I swore to defend and support and if necessary give my life for that Constitution and utilize every tool, technique, and weapon at my disposal to do so. And trust me, I'm not alone.....I would never want to receive a frag order to Maryland, or North Dakota, or Texas, but it is an order I will follow no matter how much it pains me to do so.
Read the whole thing. Then send it to your local teabaggers.
Update: The article has disappeared from its original location at the Newsvine link above. The complete text is here, here, here, and here, and doubtless other places as well.
Update 2: Google cached version is here.
posted by Infidel753 at 6:56 AM
22 Comments:
My, I like this. I'm going to link it from my FB.
Oops - sorry to leave you out of the loop but decided to link directly to the original.
Anyone who's served in the military would find this quite unsurprising. A GI defending the constitution...
TNLib: It's best to link to the original, I think. Makes it easier for anyone who's interested to read the whole piece.
SF: It doesn't surprise me either, and I doubt it would surprise most people. My impression of the military has always been that they're extremely professional and reliable. It does seem like some of the nuts who are talking armed "resistance" could use a reminder, though. Apparently Sergeant C thought so too.
"It does seem like some of the nuts who are talking armed "resistance" could use a reminder, though."
We agree on that!
Michael Medved absolutely shreds people who call his show talking crap like that. I love his question: Which one would you shoot first? A policeman? A soldier?
Doesn't sound very patriotic to me...
Infidel
I actually read this in the middle of the night. I then read comments about it from the teabaggers. They just don't get it. They are deaf, dumb and blind to the real world. I'm just not good enough to change their minds or even to get them to consider another view. Getting frustrated here. I have to find another way to spark a thought in their head. They actually turned against this soldier and called him a traitor.
Later
They called him a traitor?! Good grief, these people's brains are completely fried. I didn't even look at the comments on Sgt. C's article. Maybe I should take a look.
I hope, when it came right down to it, that even nuts like this would find they couldn't shoot an American soldier or policeman. It's getting hard to know how far they would go, though.
Very well said! It's sad that our minority party prefers bullets to ballots.
Silverfiddle, my hat is off to Medved.
What a great find, lets all use it one way another.
Powerful.
Article deleted by the author.
Whoa. Just ... whoa.
*brb, going to go root around the google cache*
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:christopher-calbat.newsvine.com/_news/2010/03/26/4073188-an-article-i-wish-i-would-never-have-to-write-to-those-calling-for-a-civil-war-this-marine-wants-you-to-stop-and-think
Most of the commenters are very supportive, but there are some scary individuals in there too, and (as we know), these scary folks have already considered this possibility, and they have weapons and "hidey-holes" in the woods.
Geesh.
**technical note** to get to pages that have been deleted, there is a handy bookmarklet for that. Go here: http://rentzsch.com/notes/googleCacheHacking scroll down to the thing that says "update #3", there's a link that says "Google Cache Lookerupper". Click and drag that link to your browser's bookmarks bar. If you come to something that's recently deleted, just hit that bookmark, and it'll take you to the cached page.
Yes, I see it's gone. Curious. Well, I had no difficulty finding three other places where the complete text is posted, and I'm sure there are others out there.
GL: Thanks, I'll take a look at that. None of the re-posts I found included the original's comment thread as well.
Me again -- I wanted to post the google-cached version on FB, and it won't let me.
"Warning: This Message Contains Blocked Content
Some content in this message has been reported as abusive by Facebook users."
Again, whoa.
"Reported as abusive"? Does that just mean somebody was offended by it? Anyway, I added your link to the main post.
I can't believe he had to take the piece down! Goodness gracious...
Well, we don't know why it was taken down. Someone might have ordered him to, or he might just have done it himself -- some of the comments were pretty disgusting (see the Google cache link -- it includes the comments thread). Could even be some kind of technical glitch. I assume the explanation will come out eventually -- the disappearance of the article turns it into a bigger story.
The thing that was considered offensive was the Google cache link -- which is odd, maybe a glitch, maybe Google cache links in general are banned? But that doesn't make sense either, cached pages aren't just for when something is deleted, there's nothing inherently evil about the cache.
I doubt that he was ordered to pull that post, it's not like he was revealing confidential information, or misrepresenting anything about the Corps. The cache might not have captured all the comments, though, and if at some point it devolved into some sort of home-address-posting, family-threatening mayhem, or perhaps even people talking about committing violence against Marines, he may have just decided to put a stop to it.
I think the most disturbing comments were from people who seemed to be under the impression that since the Marines defend against "enemies foreign and domestic," that they should be taking action against our Constitutionally elected representatives. That's beyond delusional -- it's beyond beyond. Who in their right mind would think that the Marines would be in the business of acting on political disagreement from the minority?
Do ya'll even know what a "frag order" is? For those who don't it's not even an order from chain of command. Chain of command would never order a "frag". It's against military law just like any other capital crime. It's where a bunch of soldiers, sailors, marines etc get together, decide they don't like how their Sgt., Lt. Capt., Major or whatever is running things so they lob a grenade into his/her tent with the intent of killing them or they manage a stray bullet on the firing range or in the field. This "marine" made sense until he got to the part where he said that. Then he lost it and showed his real attitude as far as I'm concerned. He's not about protecting the Constitution, even with all his "patriotic" words...he's all about macho. I was in the Navy during Viet Nam. I guarantee you that I have never met a Vet who would even think about getting a "frag order" to fire on civilians....like this punk!
GL: We've always had certain fringe elements who decided that whatever they didn't like was unconstitutional on the basis of some convoluted argument (that the income tax is unconstitutional, for example) and that they and everyone else thus had a right and duty to resist it even if their opinion was not shared by anybody who actually understands how the laws and Constitution work. In this case, it's fueled by demagogues; most people don't know much about the rules and procedures used in Congress, so it's easy to portray the rather oridinary procedures used to pass HCR as being unusual or even unconstitutional.
Sgt. C did address this issue in response to some of the comments, pointing out that evaluating whether the President's actions are Constitutional or not isn't the military's job -- it's Congress's job. If every individual soldier had to stop and evaluate every order and disobey it if he thought it might be unconstitutional, the military could not function.
Ms. Onymous: I know of that usage of the word "frag", but of course a "frag order" to a geographical area wouldn't make much sense if the word was being used in that way, so I assume Sgt. C was using "frag order" with a different meaning -- a lot of military terminology I'm not familiar with. In the comments thread on the original article he responded to a couple of people who tried to nit-pick him about use of terminology. The overall point of his article is still valid. Also, your own credibility is not enhanced by referring to a Marine sergeant as "punk".
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