Blackwater - the Freikorps of our time?

Accusations against Blackwater continue to grow, and news continues to filter out that they operate with little oversight and no accountability.

I started thinking that they were similar to the German SS - Schutzstaffel - in their security and paramilitary organization, but as I did a little research, Blackwater seems to be more consistent with Germany's Freikorps. (Ironically, the Freikorps eventually morphed into the SA - Stormtroopers aka Brown Shirts - which was superseded by the SS.)

The Freikorps were originally small groups of loosely-organized volunteer military units, akin to the militias/minutemen of the US Revolution. But after WWI, the name Freikorps came to represent 'veterans [who] felt disconnected from civilian life, and joined a Freikorps in search of stability within a military structure...[Others] angry at their sudden, apparently inexplicable defeat, joined up in an effort to put down Communist uprisings or exact some form of revenge'

They were supported by Germany's Minister of Defense, and used by the German government to crush rebellions. The Freikorps, with a force of 30,000, outnumbered the Germany Army by more than three to one when they collectively defeated and annexed the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919.

The anger and desire for revenge from the 'inexplicable defeat' is often referred to as 'Stab-in-the-back legend' - and this social myth is as alive today in the United States as it was in pre-WWII Germany. To paraphrase, it attributes defeat to a number of domestic factors instead of failed militarist geostrategy. Proponents claim that the public had failed to respond to its "patriotic calling" at the most crucial of times and some had even intentionally "sabotaged the war effort."

Sound familiar? Well, in the US, right-wing conservatives have been trotting out this stabbed-in-the-back fallacy for more than 50 years, even going so far as to retroactively apply it to the Conference of Yalta.

So now we have FISA violations and trumped-up terror threats, Gitmo and Blackwater operating outside of accepted American practices, and lastly, the Keyboard Kommandos, who live and fight vicariously through those items, and claim that anyone who tells the truth is stabbing America in the back.

The world has travelled this path before; it does not lead to a good place.