Word: militiaization
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...weeks he had been living in the tranquil priory of Saint-Francois in Nice. Then one morning last week, police swooped down and arrested Paul Touvier, 74, the intelligence chief of the Lyons militia during the Nazi Occupation. Twice after World War II, Touvier was sentenced to death for collaborating with the Nazis and torturing and executing French Resistance members. He escaped and stayed hidden until the statute of limitations expired in 1967. In 1971 Touvier received a presidential pardon. Two years later Touvier was charged again, this time with crimes against humanity, to which the statute does not apply...
Aoun's bold moves to assert his authority triggered the new fighting. In March, Aoun's 20,000-man army took on the Muslims, imposing a sea blockade of five of their illegal ports, used mainly for smuggling drugs and guns. Druse warlord Walid Jumblatt's militia and 40,000 Syrian troops responded with continuous bombardments of Christian neighborhoods. Aoun's forces hit back in kind...
Party lines, like glaciers, do move. But for Soviet artists, glasnost seems more like a whirlpool of possibilities, most of them still anxiously hypothetical. The artists have had to learn not to be optimists. Fifteen years ago, Leonid Brezhnev's officials sent plainclothes militia and bulldozers to break up and bury an outdoor show of unofficial art in Sokolniki, a park on the outskirts of Moscow. This goons' picnic would not be repeated today. The socialist realist line, imposed by Stalin after 1929 and kept to the end of Brezhnev's reign, held that a work of art should fulfill...
...answer, in part, goes back to the famous Second Amendment of the American Constitution, which the N.R.A. keeps brandishing like Holy Writ. "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," it reads, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed...
...Founding Fathers, in their wisdom -- and more pointedly, their experience -- distrusted standing armies. They associated British ones with tyranny and lacked the money and manpower to create their own. Without a citizens' militia, the Revolution would have failed. Does the Constitution let you have the second half of the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, without the first part, the intended use of those arms in the exercises and, when necessary, the campaigns of a citizens' militia to which the gun owner belongs -- as in Switzerland today? That is still very much a subject for legal debate...