Nothing may better show the need for a comprehensive draft rather than depending on an all volunteer force than Justine Sharrock’s Mother Jones reporting on a cluster of “patriots,” who are serving or have served in the military but are contemplating resistance to the government: in a word, treason.

The Oath Keepers are the latest in American political hysteria. This latest form (see everything from the Salem Witch Trials to Joe McCarthy’s red scare) is mostly summed as a reaction to BGT (“Big Government Take-over”), or the alleged threat of tyranny coming from a president who is viewed as illegitimate because he has no U.S. birth certificate.  Another option is to label his program propping up run-amok capitalism “socialist” despite the fact that President Obama received more money from Wall Street as a presidential candidate than any of his opponents in the 2008 presidential campaign.

However, what makes this remarkable is the following, as written by Justine Sharrock in the Mother Jones article:

[W]hat makes Oath Keepers unique is that its core membership consists of men and women in uniform, including soldiers, police, and veterans. At regular ceremonies in every state, members reaffirm their official oaths of service, pledging to protect the Constitution—but then they go a step further, vowing to disobey "unconstitutional" orders from what they view as an increasingly tyrannical government.

Does the Department of Justice know anything about this? Does Congress?

So, while it may undermine good order and discipline to allow gays not to hide their sexual orientation in the military, it’s okay for other military personnel who have sworn an oath to the country to openly express that they would not obey an order from the Commander in Chief, the president of the United States? That sounds like real good order.

So, what would constitute the “legal” or “ethical” basis for Oath Keepers to resist “unconstitutional orders”? Well, according to Sharrock:

[Stewart Rhodes, the group’s founder] laid out 10 orders an Oath Keeper should not obey, including conducting warrantless searches, holding American citizens as enemy combatants or subjecting them to military tribunals (a true Oath Keeper would have refused to hold José Padilla in a military brig), imposing martial law, blockading US cities, forcing citizens into detention camps ("tyrannical governments eventually and invariably put people in camps"), and cooperating with foreign troops should the government ask them to intervene on US soil. In Rhodes' view, each individual Oath Keeper must determine where to draw the line.

Now, this is where you don’t have the liberty to make such a decision: in the military.  You don’t get to pick and chose “where to draw the line.” You have to obey orders, and while there is some justification for disobeying an “illegal order,” if hauled before a court martial, an Oath Keeper better have a damn tight justification for disobeying a superior’s order.

But if you closely examine Rhodes do’s and don’ts, they all tend to be about Oath Keepers acting on American soil, within the “Homeland,” and not in troubled foreign lands such as Iraq or Afghanistan.

Hence, the Keepers are basically reacting to the classic paranoid style of American politics: the enemy within. Barack Hussein Obama, the right’s designated enemy, will find “some pretext—a pandemic, a natural disaster, a terror attack—to impose martial law, ban interstate travel, and begin detaining citizens en masse.” 

And remember, these “pretexts” are all legitimate functions of government: galvanizing the forces of government to deal with a crisis or issue beyond the ordinary scope of individuals, municipalities and states. But in the view of Oath Keepers, this is about Obama using his power to enforce “tyranny” (while he can hardly get most aspects of his domestic agenda passed). Still, the suspicion is that Obama is coming for you and will take away your freedom, your God, and your guns.

Reading and listening to Americans bellyaching about the alleged tyranny of their own government, one recalls what Samuel Johnson once remarked about the hypocrisy of American colonists: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Increasingly, hatred and suspicion of government is becoming more and more mainstreamed as the country’s unemployment figure hovers around ten percent. It is especially problematic for a violence-prone society such as the United States to have millions of unemployed men (the demographic that has borne the brunt of the Great Recession) out of work, attending Tea Parties and Oath Keepers rallies.

As Bob Dylan once sang: “The riot squad is restless/They need some place to go.”