STATUS: Mostly incomplete.
Chapter 4 -- Develop a Paramilitary Force

    A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

        Second Amendment

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MUSSOLINI'S THUGS

Mussolini, among the dictators of his era, practically invented the strategic use of thugs: As Parliament resisted involving Italy in World War I, pre-war, proto-Fascist thugs organized street violence, attacks on newspapers, street demonstrations, and other violence. Finally, when the thugs menaced members of the political leadership themselves, Parliament caved to their wishes.[17] (Hitler picked up this intimidation scenario as well, at one point lining the halls of the working Reichstag with Brownshirts.)

By the 1922 March on Rome, Mussolini's thugs were more sophisticated and better-trained: men dressed identically in black pants and black shirts, recruited from the ranks of World War I veterans and organized into networks by Mussolini's central command. These Arditi did the strategic work of smashing newspaper offices, torching farmhouses, beating workers, and sexually assaulting women in the countryside. They "softened up" the population so that people were scared to resist Mussolini's forces.


== NAZI THUGS ==

The violence of orchestrated gangs, just like their sophistication, tends to escalate over time as well. In Germany, after World War I, political parties allied themselves with armed, uniformed paramilitary groups.  Their task was to march, harass members of opposing groups, and beat them--sometimes to kill them.

In 1920 the Party's paramilitary arm was founded and named the "Gymnastics and Sports Section." Their uniform was brown shirts, riding breeches, and boots. These paramilitaries roamed Munich's streets, assaulting their perceived enemies and harassing Jews. By 1921 the Free Corps, a right-wing group, was taken on board. The group was rechristened "the Storm Division," or SA, that same year. Hermann Goering led the SA by 1923. That year the storm troopers began creating a decade-long strategy of terror. These thugs would intimidate German citizens more and more directly and formally, evolving from a ragged assortment of civilians to a highly disciplined paramilitary arm of Nazi control.[18] By 1927, this thug caste was a force for the Party to direct overtly. Joseph Goebbels, now regional leader of Berlin, staged SA-led brawls in meeting-halls and in the streets. By 1929, Hitler, Goebbels, and the regional leaders of the party made a practice of hinting to the SA about what kind of violence was expected, and the SA would deliver. This strategy let the Nazi leadership remain free of legal responsibility for the violence, and it reassured middle-class law-abiding citizens that Hitler himself and his colleagues really were not to blame for this savagery.[18] The random bullies had become a parallel army.

In 1938, Nazi gangs were unleashed to wreak the chaos of Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass: they destroyed Jewish businesses and terrified German Jews. Joseph Weinberg was a twenty-four-year-old business student from Stuttgart whose mother had run a market stall: "The next morning I went to the Markthalle with my mother and sister," he recounted. "When we walked upstairs, all the doors were ripped out; all the food was smashed together and lying in the center of the store and the money and everything was taken away. All we had--butter, flour, herring, everything--was piled up there. My mother, of course, cried and...cried. There was nothing we could do."[20]

Thugs are the advance men of every dictatorial ascendancy, and thug violence is the advance work.

In our nation's past, police action in the United States that has directed violence at citizens has backfired: Southern Civil Rights protesters in the 1960s won more public support with every image of water hoses and snarling dogs trained against them. When members of the National Guard fired on student protesters at Kent State University in 1970, killing four and wounding nine, the image helped turn the tide against the Vietnam War. There has been state violence in the United States against protesters and voters before: The possibility of it exists here just as it does in any nation.

But our laws have driven such violence back again. And we haven't had members of a mercenary army on our streets since we won our independence.