• tenacious_mucus
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      1 year ago

      Not the full military, per say- National Guard is controlled by each State’s Governor, but can still be called on and used on the Federal level. This was a State level issue. Not always for “defensive” issues either, usually humanitarian, etc.

      I’m not advocating one way or another on the WHY they are there, just pointing out that those armored vehicles are NOT police.

      • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        thank you for the insight. In my country Germany it is prohibited to use the military in the interior, except for relief in natural catastrophes. Unfortunately this is something where the right wing nut jobs love to “open the debate” every decade or so.

        • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Technically that’s true here too.

          The national guard is normally used in disaster relief, like floods. But the Governor is like a tiny president, (sorta, kinda) and as such has some powers over the military force from their state (hand waving a lot here).

          As such they can declare a protest or other interior event a “disaster” or public safety risk, and temporarily deploy national guard to support.

          If I remember correctly, the guard have to abide by additional federal military rules, compared to state employees, so they are usually carefully used. and again I might be wrong but if the state deploys em, the state pays em,… Not the federal government

          • tenacious_mucus
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            1 year ago

            Ya, i think you’re pretty much correct here.

            Also to add, the National Guard members are also much better trained and expected to hold much higher standards because they are still a hand/finger of the trained military…so, just because they are told to show up anywhere (example this picture) doesn’t mean they all got itchy trigger fingers and things could go bad real fast; to compare to most other events with other uniform types we hear about all the time….

        • lexihexi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 year ago

          Don’t know if that is still holding up, but the German ministry of defence put terrorist attacks on the same list as natural disasters in their „Weißbuch“ around 2016. So theoretically we could have, what for historical reason we should never see again: The military enforcing inland. And while in Bavaria climate crisis protesters are held in detention under anti terror law, the picture discussed here could become reality in Germany faster than we might think.