Are there any significant militias whose objective is to try to make the world a better place? For example, they might try to assassinate a tyrannical leader in one country, then attempt to rescue a political prisoner in another country and so on.
So…I’m interested specifically in examples where their scope is bigger than one individual conflict.
And…I do realize that this is a somewhat daft question…that the distinction between good militia, bad militia and terrorist organisation is subjective. But I’m just interested to see what kind of examples people give.
All of them has as their objective to make the world a better place. The problem is just that different groups disagree as to what constitutes “better”. And if the question is which of them are right, that’s not a matter for GQ.
I would dispute that. Just as individuals can perform actions that they themselves consider immoral, so too can organisations.
No. What I’m getting at is, are there significant armed organizations that attempt actions such as assassinating tyrannical leaders and freeing political prisoners, hostages etc?
If the “significant” tag alone is sufficient to make this an IMHO question, then fair enough.
What is a “militia” for the purposes of this discussion? Non-government-supported military groups?
I don’t think Al Qaeda see themselves as the bad men. I think they see themselves as fighting for the cause of goodness and right via striking against enemies of Islam and against imperialist westernism. Their goal is to make the world a better place, by their own definition of better.
Many “freedom fighter” groups and whatnot are formed specifically to deal with local political matters, and so are not concerned with world matters as a whole, but dealing with their local political strife. Because it takes an extraordinary set of circumstances to motivate a group of people to form a military-type organization to take action on a grand scale. That’s not something your average comfortable farmer or business person or suburban family is going to take up.
You seem to be trying to posit an A-Team like group running around “righting wrongs” and whatnot but are not funded by a government.
Even your stereotypical American “militia group” of neoNazi/skinheads is typically a group founded on the principles of mutual defense against tyranny and invasion/attack by some perceived outside threat group. “Those evil Jews and Mud races” kind of arguments, while vile, cast themselves as heros from within their perspective.
Maintaining a military force (even groups as small as a platoon or squad) is incredibly expensive. Even if they were willing to work for free (and able to somehow feed and house themselves on their own), they still need weaponry and equipment equal to whatever opposition they’ll face during a mission. They need a time and space to train, medical care, transportation to and from mission sites, and protection from revenge-seekers after a mission is completed.
Getting that level of funding without serious moral strings attached is highly unlikely. (Think the IRA may have accomplished something like that, but not most people agree they were just another breed of terrorists.)
I’m sure a lot of people would donate to such a group though. Heck, if it was a serious outfit (with successful missions under their belt, even if 9/10 fail), and were good at leaving no paper trail of where their funding came from, I’d imagine a number of governments and organisations would give support, as well as individuals.
My point is that the terms are too vague to make anything meaningful.
“Militia” is undefined enough that the United States National Guard qualifies, and so does three yokels who sit in a treehouse and share stories while drinking beer and cleaning their rifles. I suppose the Unabomer wouldn’t qualify because he acted in solo, but if he’d had a [del]Padawan[/del] partner/trainee/acolyte, they could have called themselves the Montana Free Range Militia or some such.
And second, the objective “try to make the world a better place” is so vague as to be completely meaningless. There are very few groups that define themselves like the infamous P.A.G.A.N. (People Against Goodness and Normalcy) a la Dragnet. Most groups who take up arms do so in the name of accomplishing some greater good, even if they elect violent means to achieve it.
Abortion protesters who kill abortion doctors claim they are acting “to make the world a better place”. The infamous Kmer Rouge were acting to recreate their society in the manner they thought better. The IRA did not see themselves as terrorists. They saw themselves as liberators from oppression. A guy blowing up a cafe in Israel sees himself as making the world a better place.
I think one could argue that the United States is the biggest example of what you’re looking for. Through CIA and military action, we’ve done things from staging coups, rescuing hostages, killing pirates, hunting down terrorists, arming “resistance fighters” to overthrow their “oppressive” (Communist) governments, sent disaster relief to other countries…