- 08 Jun 2020 04:06
#15098475
The crackdown on protesters in Washington last week was of particular concern, said James G. Stavridis, a retired Navy admiral and a former supreme allied commander at NATO.“It rang echoes of what the founders feared more than anything, which was the use of armed active-duty military against citizens.”
Martin E. Dempsey, a retired Army general who was the Joint Chiefs chairman during the Obama administration, criticized the Trump administration’s comparisons of the demonstrations to battlegrounds as “inflammatory language” that could damage the military’s relationship with the public.
Mr. Dempsey said he entered the military at the end of the Vietnam War. “It took us awhile to actually regain the trust of the American people.”
Colin L. Powell, a retired Army general who was the first African-American national security adviser, Joint Chiefs chairman and secretary of state, called Mr. Trump’s actions “dangerous for our democracy” and “dangerous for our country.”
“We have a military to fight our enemies, not our own people,” Mike Mullen, a retired Navy admiral who was the top military adviser to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told “Fox News Sunday.”
It was a winning strategy to crow about a border wall with Mexico, but it’s a loser — and a sign of pure cowardice — to build one around your own White House.
"Society in those days was a perfectly competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine." Virginia Woolf 1897