Mercenary Private Armies The Sure Precursors
Of Anarchy or Totalitarianism

England: Private Mercenaries

Produce Anarchy

At the death of Edward III, England was catapulted into a very fluid state. The Black Death had wiped out a third of the population. The military victories at Crecy and Poitiers won with the new weapon – the longbow – had left a vast number of soldiers available for hire. Society was in ferment. Economics was in shambles. There was a great light that shone across the darkness of England: the rise of Wycliff and the Lollards spreading the gospel among the common man. The Feudal Age was breaking up. Private mercenary armies began appearing.

 

Crown Employs Wage-earning

Soldiers; Private Armies Appear

Winston Churchill in his magnificent The Birth of Britain describes for us the situation: “In the economic and social sphere there arose a vast tumult.  The Black Death had struck a world already in movement. Ever since the Crown had introduced the custom of employing wage-earning soldiers instead of the feudal levy the landed tie had been dissolving. Why should the noble or knight follow the example of his liege lord? Covenants in which a small landowner undertook to serve a powerful neighbor, ‘except against the King,’ became common. The restriction would not always be observed. The old bonds of mutual loyalty were disappearing, and in their place grew private armies, the hired defenders of property, the sure precursors of anarchy.” Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain. New York: Bantam, 1956, p. 269.

 

The Peasants’ Revolt

“The country was full of broken soldiers, disbanded from the war, and all knew about the long-bow and its power to kill nobles, however exalted and well armed. The preaching of revolutionary ideas was widespread…The rapid, time-enforced framework of medieval England trembled to its foundations…

 

“…All this rolled forward in England to terrifying rebellion of 1381. It was a social upheaval, spontaneous and widespread, arising in various parts of the country from the same causes, and united by the same sentiments.” –Churchill, Birth of Britain, 271.

 

“The revolt…struck with lasting awe the imagination of its contemporaries.” Churchill, 274.

 

Anarchy or Totalitarianism

Independent military/security contractors, depending upon whether they are not organized or are organized, can either produce anarchy or totalitarianism.

Russia: Almost 800,000 Private

Security Men in Russia Produce

Totalitarianism

 

After the breakup of the Soviet Union about 1990, “Hundreds of private security firms staffed by KGB veterans sprang up around the country and most of them, though not all, kept their ties to their alma mater. According to Igor Goloshchapov, a former KGB Special Forces commando who is now a spokesman for almost 800,000 private security men,

 

In the 1990s we had one objective: to survive and preserve our skills. We did not consider ourselves to be separate from those who stayed in the FSB [successor to the KGB]. We shared everything with them and we saw our work as just another form of serving the interests of the state. We knew that there would come a moment when we would be called upon.

 

FSB Called Upon to Control Russia

“That moment came on New Year’s Eve 1999, when Mr. Yeltsin resigned and, despite his views about the KG, handed over the reins of power to Mr. Putin, the man he had put in charge of the FSB in 1998 and made prime minister a year later.” –The Economist, ‘The Making of a Neo-KGB State.” August 25^th – 31^st 2007, p.26. (emphasis mine).

 

FSB Runs Russia

Today, according to research by Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, 75% of the offices of Russia’s government are filled by FSB men and their affiliates. [Economist, 25].  FSB men run the big companies, the state-run oil company, the air-defense rockets, and Aeroflot, the national airline, the aircraft-industry monopoly, law enforcement agencies, ministries of economy, transport, natural resources, telecomm, culture, and banks. Russia is a neo-KGB state.

 

“The security service men present themselves as a tight brotherhood entitled to break any laws for the sake of their mission.” –Economist, op, cit., 28. New laws, “one aimed at ‘extremism,” gives the FSB and other agencies ample scope to pursue anyone who acts or speaks against the Kremlin. It has already been invoked…” –Economist, 28.

 

While America has about 180,000 Independent Military Contractors/Security men in Iraq, Russia has almost 800,000 private security men. It is a global phenomenon. Security men, organized by state intelligence, can take over the modern state, making it totalitarian.

 

The Threat to Constitution Rights Posed By
Mercenary Armies

Rome and America Utilize Private
Forces To Solve The Problem of
Controlling an Angry, Abused
Population

Michael RatnerCenter for Constitutional Rights states: “Private , president of the forces are almost a necessity for a United States bent on retaining its declining empireThink about Rome and its increasing need of mercenaries. . LikewiseUnited States. Controlling an angry, abused , here at home in the population with a police force bound to obey the Constitution can be difficultsolve this ‘problem.’”-private forces can

 –Blackwater, xxiv. [emphasis mine].

Praetorian Guard Operates

Outside All Law

Thus an extremely powerful praetorian guard has been created that for all practical purposes operates outside of all law, military and civilian, and is only beholden to whomever it contracts its services to.

 

After Hurricane Katrina, Blackwater beat most federal agencies, when “hundreds of heavily armed Blackwater mercenaries-some fresh from deployment in Iraq-fanned out into the disaster zone. Within a week they were officially hired by the Department of Homeland Security to operate in the U.S. Gulf, billing the federal government $950 a day per Blackwater soldier. In less than a year, the company has raked in more than $70 million in federal hurricane-related contracts-about $243,000 a day. The company saw Katrina as another moment of great opportunity and soon began applying for permits to contract its forces out to local governments in all fifty states. Blackwater executives met with California Governor Arnold Schwarzeneggar about deploying there in the aftermath of an earthquake or another disaster…Critics see the deployment of Blackwater’s forces domestically as a dangerous precedent that could undermine U.S. democracy. ‘Their actions may not be subject to constitutional limitations that apply to both federal and state officials and employees-including First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights to be free from illegal searches and seizures. Unlike police officers, they are not trained in protecting constitutional rights,’ says CCR’s Michael Ratner. ‘These kind of paramilitary groups bring to mind Nazi Party brownshirts, functioning as  an extrajudical enforcement mechanism that can and does operate outside the law. The use of these paramilitary groups is an extremely dangerous threat to our rights.’” –Blackwater, xxv.

Iraqi Death Squads

Not only are there US, South African, and British mercenary armies now in Iraq, but also there is a covert program now that is training Iraqi death squads along the lines of El Salvador and its death squads of the 1980s. It is called “the Salvador option.”

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