There is an important thing to note about South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s recent declaration of martial law: It’s really no different in principle from President-elect Trump’s plans to declare a “national emergency.” The only difference is the extent of power.
Yoon Suk Yeol’s martial-law declaration, much like Hitler’s Enabling Act, enabled him to ignore the nation’s constitution and the South Korean congress and to use his military to rule the nation by decree through the exercise of omnipotent powers. It would have, for example, enabled the military to arrest, incarcerate, and torture people without a warrant and without probable cause that they had committed a crime.
Trump will use his “national-emergency” declaration to justify his use of the U.S. military to wage his war on illegal immigrants, including his plan to ferret out and deport millions of illegal immigrants, and to amplify the drug-war police state and the immigration police state that have long existed along the border.
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In other words, Yoon’s declaration gave him omnipotent, dictatorial power. Trump’s declaration will give him expanded powers but not omnipotent power. Both declarations, of course, involve the use of the military.
As I have long emphasized, “emergencies” are the time-honored way for rulers to exercise dictatorial powers. In an “emergency,” the people become afraid. Their fear causes them to be willing — even eager — to trade away their liberty to be kept “safe” by their rulers.
Rulers fully understand this phenomenon and use it to their advantage. That’s why the Framers and our American ancestors did not include an “emergency” exception to the restrictions on power in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They knew that if they included such an exception, it would essentially nullify the protections in those two documents.
A good example of this phenomenon was what happened after the 9/11 attacks. Americans were frightened to death. They were certain that the terrorists and the Muslims were coming to get them. There were widespread lamentations that Sharia law was going to be established in cities all across America. Thus, Americans were willing and eager to surrender their liberties in the guise of being kept safe. That’s what the USA PATRIOT Act, mass secret surveillance, Homeland Security, the TSA, and other such “we-will-keep-you-safe” measures were all about.
Trump’s upcoming “national emergency” will be based on what he calls the migrant “invasion” of America. During his recent campaign for president, Trump made it clear that America has been “invaded” by millions of illegal immigrants and is now being “occupied” by a vast army of illegal immigrants, one that consists of murderers, rapists, robbers, drug traffickers, thieves, and even Mexicans who would love nothing more than to return the lands that the U.S. stole from Mexico in the Mexican War.
Therefore, Trump argues, what’s an army for if it’s not to defend the nation from “invasion” and “occupation.” There is only one thing to do, they say: declare a “national emergency” and deploy the military to fight the “enemy” right here at home.
Once again, just like after 9/11, there are millions of Americans who buy into this nonsense and who enthusiastically support Trump’s destruction of our rights and liberties, in the hope that Trump and his army will keep them “safe” from the “illegals.” The notion that Trump and the military pose any threat to the freedom and well-being of the American people does not even enter their minds. Their mindset is solely focused on being kept “safe” through the “defeat” of the (unarmed) “enemy” forces inside our nation.
One of the revealing aspects of this “invasion emergency” is that Trump isn’t encouraging the citizenry to take up arms and kill illegal immigrants. That’s how you know that it’s not a real invasion and that Trump is simply using the “invasion” rubric as a ruse to acquire powers that he wouldn’t ordinarily be permitted to acquire. In fact, the way that one can tell that this is just a great big power grab is that if a citizen were to shoot and kill one of these “invaders,” the authorities would indict, prosecute, convict, and punish him for murder — and rightly so.
Fortunately for the South Korean people, the congress in that country put a stop to Yoon Suk Yeol’s dictatorial power grab. The problem for the American people is that if Trump were to declare an even bigger power grab than he is already planning, there is no reasonable possibility that the U.S. Congress would do anything to stop him. That’s because the U.S. Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, is now effectively owned and controlled by the military-industrial complex. Moreover, the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary have long made it clear that they will not interfere with any operation involving “national security” and the national-security establishment.
The American people would be wise to ponder the sentiments of the Founding Fathers, the Framers, and the Americans who founded our nation, especially their sentiments regarding standing armies, and most especially their conviction that the greatest threat to their freedom and well-being lies not with some foreign “invaders” but rather with their very own government.
