{"id":57017,"date":"2016-01-12T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2016-01-12T18:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=57017"},"modified":"2016-01-12T12:11:47","modified_gmt":"2016-01-12T18:11:47","slug":"why-we-fight-part-ii-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=57017","title":{"rendered":"Why We Fight, Part II: Enemies Foreign And Domestic"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Charles C.W. Cooke’s fantastic piece in National Review last week on the power of emotion in the gun debate<\/a>, he made an excellent point; facts and statistics aren’t enough. \u00a0 This series is about making the case not in terms of statistics, but in terms of grabbing you in the freaking liver.<\/p>\n

Den Velregulerede Hjemmev\u00e6rnet<\/strong>: \u00a0In 1940, the Nazis conquered Denmark<\/a> in less time than it takes to play an NFL football game. \u00a0 \u00a0One of the flattest, most featureless places in all of Europe, Denmark was a terrible place to try to form a resistance movement; it had no mountains like Norway, Yugoslavia or Greece or southern France; no wooded highlands like Poland; no forests like Russia or Ukraine; not even swamps like Belarus or urban warrens like Warsaw or Paris. \u00a0Like the Netherlands, the prospect of guerilla warfare in Denmark was about as appetizing as doing it in North Dakota, only with a tiny fraction of the space.<\/p>\n

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The foothills of the Stordenbjarl mountains, the most rugged geographic feature in central Denmark. Kidding. It’s a typical lane in rural Denmark. Quick, all you infantrymen out there; there’s an enemy column on the way. What do you do?<\/p><\/div>\n

And yet the Danes resisted, passively and actively<\/a>, occasionally to earth-shaking effect<\/a>. \u00a0 Fighting against many brutal handicaps, the Danes spawned a ferocious and cunning resistance<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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British cavalrymen meeting with Danish resistance fighters near the end of the war.<\/p><\/div>\n

And at the end of the war, when Denmark’s various constituencies gathered to reconstitute the Danish nation, the men and women who had fought in\u00a0the Resistance had a seat at the table.<\/p>\n

It was more than a token seat, and they weren’t there to make nice; the Resistance was intensely angry at King Christian X for surrendering the nation with only a token fight. \u00a0Christian had had his reasons, of course; Denmark was nearly demilitarized in 1940, and had few features other than the water between its islands to stop a modern military; Christian, seeing the foregone conclusion, wanted to spare the Danes the bloodbath\u00a0that Europe had watched the Poles suffer seven months earlier.<\/p>\n

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Danish resistance fighters, in action against German holdouts in Copenhagen, 1945.<\/p><\/div>\n

The former guerillas\u00a0saw the results; trading freedom for security still left the Danes dispossessed in their own land.<\/p>\n

And so when Denmark restructured itself in 1946, it rebuilt its military around four basic branches; the traditional Army, Navy, Air Force…<\/p>\n

…and a fourth branch, the\u00a0Hjemmev\u00e6rnet<\/em>, or Home Guard. \u00a0The branch specifically traced its roots to the resistance, alone among Europe’s militaries (although infantry regiments in the Netherlands and Belgium \u00a0trace their lineages to their various resistance movements). \u00a0And among the missions stated in the Home Guard’s charter, other than the obvious stuff about defending the nation from invasion and serving as the nucleus of a guerrilla movement against any future occupiers, was to prevent any future Danish government from betraying the nation and its people.<\/p>\n

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Mary – the Danish Crown Princess – in Home Guard marksmanship training.<\/p><\/div>\n

To serve, in short, as a “well-regulated militia” for “the protection of the free state”.<\/p>\n

No, they weren’t lifting the Second Amendment; the\u00a0Hjemmev\u00e6rnet’s<\/em> charter existed for purely Danish reasons. \u00a0 And since the end of the Cold War, that particular proviso in the\u00a0Hjemmev\u00e6rnet’s\u00a0<\/em>DNA has been shuffled further and further to the back of the political stove. \u00a0For the past two decades, that aspect of the Home Guard has gotten less and less emphasis.<\/p>\n

But it existed for reasons that resonate with many other societies.<\/p>\n

Israel, surrounded and outnumbered 100-1 by people that vowed to drive them into the sea (and most of them still do), has armed nearly every able-bodied member of their population.<\/p>\n

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Israeli reservists, present and future.<\/p><\/div>\n

And those citizens\u00a0are indeed part of a national military, rather than a decentralized “militia” – but a military constituted on the ideal that it’s the citizen’s responsibility to defend the freedom (and, in Israel’s case, sanctuary) they have. \u00a0Military service is an intrinsic part of Israeli civic duty.<\/p>\n

The Israeli system (as well as that of Singapore and Finland) was borrowed from Switzerland, where most adult men (and since 1972, many women) have kept their service (and non-service<\/a>) weapons at home, entirely to deter invastion from the nations that surround them.<\/p>\n

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Swiss beginning their National Service hitch.<\/p><\/div>\n

They’re on friendly terms today – but 75 years ago, they were not.<\/p>\n

Norway has a similar Home Guard – the vast bulk of the strength of Norway’s military. \u00a0And while they don’t have the same constitutional internal focus as Denmark’s (Norway’s monarchy escaped the Nazis and fought without cease until liberation), Norway’s post-war constitution not only specifically directed the military to disobey any orders from the monarchy, administration or parliament that would betray Norwegian sovereignty, but the posted the specific provision and directive<\/a>\u00a0in every Norwegian military office, barracks and installation until long after the Cold War ended.<\/p>\n

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Norwegian Home Guard on maneuvers<\/p><\/div>\n

In other words, each of these nations, and peoples, discovered a few key points about their freedom, independence and sovereignty:<\/p>\n