Against Military Coup Quotes

I also fear an attack directly upon us which shall be considerably aided by the French colonists! I therefore support your plan to act first and stage a preemptive strike against the French by launching “Operation Bright Moon”, which is now the code name for the Japanese coup d ětat which will disarm the Vichy French Forces by or during the 9th of March 1945!”   (A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two)

Resistane violence may help unite the putschists' basic supporters and military forces against the ‪anti coup‬ defenders

Since 1973, the year of the military coup that changed so many things, situating has become a little more complex because in the first three minutes of conversation you also have to guess whether the person you’re speaking to was for or against the dictatorship.

The bankers and merchants of Bengal who sustained Siraj ud-Daula’s regime had finally turned against him and united with the disaffected parts of his own military; now they sought to bring in the mercenary troops of the East India Company to help depose him. This was something quite new in Indian history: a group of Indian financiers plotting with an international trading corporation to use its own private security force to overthrow a regime they saw threatening the income they earned from trade.60 This was not part of any imperial masterplan. In fact, the EIC men on the ground were ignoring their strict instructions from London, which were only to repulse French attacks and avoid potentially ruinous wars with their Mughal hosts. But seeing opportunities for personal enrichment as well as political and economic gain for the Company, they dressed up the conspiracy in colours that they knew would appeal to their masters and presented the coup as if it were primarily aimed at excluding the French from Bengal for ever.*

But first Hitler, taken in by Mussolini’s mythmaking, attempted a “march” of his own. On November 8, 1923, during a nationalist rally in a Munich beer hall, the Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler attempted to kidnap the leaders of the Bavarian government and force them to support a coup d’état against the federal government in Berlin. He believed that if he took control of Munich and declared a new national government, the Bavarian civil and military leaders would be forced by public opinion to support him. He was equally convinced that the local army authorities would not oppose the Nazi coup because the World War I hero General Ludendorff was marching beside him. Hitler underestimated military fidelity to the chain of command. The conservative Bavarian minister-president Gustav von Kahr gave orders to stop Hitler’s coup, by force if necessary. The police fired on the Nazi marchers on November 9 as they approached a major square (possibly returning a first shot from Hitler’s side). Fourteen putschists and four policemen were killed. Hitler was arrested and imprisoned,8 along with other Nazis and their sympathizers. The august General Ludendorff was released on his own recognizance. Hitler’s “Beer Hall Putsch” was thus put down so ignominiously by the conservative rulers of Bavaria that he resolved never again to try to gain power through force. That meant remaining at least superficially within constitutional legality, though the Nazis never gave up the selective violence that was central to the party’s appeal, or hints about wider aims after power.

German voters never gave the Nazis a majority of the popular vote, as is still sometimes alleged. As we saw in the last chapter, the Nazis did indeed become the largest party in the German Reichstag in the parliamentary election of July 31, 1932, with 37.2 percent of the vote. They then slipped back to 33.1 percent in the parliamentary election of November 6, 1932. In the parliamentary election of March 6, 1933, with Hitler as chancellor and the Nazi Party in command of all the resources of the German state, its score was a more significant but still insufficient 43.9 percent. More than one German in two voted against Nazi candidates in that election, in the teeth of intimidation by Storm Troopers. The Italian Fascist Party won 35 out of 535 seats, in the one free parliamentary election in which it participated, on May 15, 1921. At the other extreme, neither Hitler nor Mussolini arrived in office by a coup d’état. Neither took the helm by force, even if both had used force before power in order to destabilize the existing regime, and both were to use force again, after power, in order to transform their governments into dictatorships (as we will see shortly). Even the most scrupulous authors refer to their “seizure of power,” but that phrase better describes what the two fascist leaders did after reaching office than how they got into office. Both Mussolini and Hitler were invited to take office as head of government by a head of state in the legitimate exercise of his official functions, on the advice of civilian and military counselors. Both thus became heads of government in what appeared, at least on the surface, to be legitimate exercises of constitutional authority by King Victor Emmanuel III and President Hindenburg. Both these appointments were made, it must be added at once, under conditions of extreme crisis, which the fascists had abetted. Indeed no insurrectionary coup against an established state has ever so far brought fascists to power. Authoritarian dictatorships have several times crushed such attempts.

At this point, it may be of value to revisit the United States involvement in the rise of the “Colonels in Greece” and the Juntas in Latin America. Just after WWII, Britain and the United States intervened in the Greek civil war on behalf of the fascists against the Greek left which had successfully ousted the Nazis from Greece—a formidable feat given that Britain had intervened during WWII against the left-wing guerillas. With the help of Britain and the United States, the fascists prevailed in the post-WWII civil war in Greece and “instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency (KYP in Greek),”8 just as it had helped create the repressive SAVAK in Iran. The fascist government erected a statue of Harry S. Truman in Athens as thanks for the United States’ role in the coup under his leadership. This statue has been blown up, rebuilt, and blown up again several times. And then, much to the chagrin of both Britain and America, democracy broke out again in Greece—the country which, as we all know, invented democracy—when liberal George Papandreou was elected in 1964. Just before the 1967 elections which Papandreou was sure to win again, a joint effort of Britain, the CIA, Greek Military, KYP and US military stationed in Greece brought about a military coup which brought the fascists back to power. And, as with the Shah in Iran, the new rightist government immediately instituted “martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, and killing, the victims totaling 8,000 in the first month. … Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine.”9 Sound familiar?

When the British ploy to pressure the Shah into fast action on the dismissal of Mossadeq did not work, officials from Whitehall consulted Ann Lambton, by then a professor of Persian Studies in London and a sage on British foreign policy in Iran. Her advice was clear, categorical, and drastic: find a way to remove Mossadeq from power forcefully. He is a demagogue, she said, and the only way Britain would retain its influence in Iran would be through his removal. She also believed that the British government must ultimately handle this matter alone, as in her mind the United States had “neither the experience, nor the psychological” depth to understand Iran—a sentiment much shared in those days by British officials.44 She introduced government officials to Robin Zaehner, a professor-spy, who could help plan and implement her proposed coup against Mossadeq. If Zaehner was one of the British masters of conspiracy against Mossadeq, then the three Rashidian brothers were Zaehner’s chief instruments of mischief. No sooner had Mossadeq come to power than the brothers began to receive large funds from the British to “maintain their agents.” 45 In June 1951, when British efforts to convince the Shah to fire Mossadeq failed, they threatened to attack Iran and take over the oil region of the country: in the words of the Foreign Secretary, “to cow the insolent natives.” 46 The operation, aptly called “Buccaneer,” entailed sending a number of British warships to the waters off the coast of the oil-rich region of Khuzestan and authorized “the use of force, if necessary.” 47 Encouraged by the Truman administration’s strong opposition to the idea of a military solution, the Shah told the British Ambassador that “I will personally lead my soldiers into battle against you if you attack Iran.

Coup" is a benign term for what is in effect the double crimes of treason against the state, and mutiny against the military hierarchy. Treason is the gravest offence that a citizen can commit against his or her country, and mutiny is correspondingly the most serious offence that a military officer can commit

The imperial Russian government's ineffectiveness in World War I had forced the tsar to abdicate in 1917. Following the February Revolution in that year the Provisional Government replaced the tsarist regime, but as a result of the October Revolution the Bolsheviks seized power, executing the tsar and his family, and the Russian Empire collapsed. The Ukrainian Central Rada, or governing council, proclaimed Ukraine an autonomous republic, but meanwhile the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, still at war with Russia, drove out the Russian army and occupied Ukraine. The Germans supported a coup led by Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky (1873-1945), who in April 1918 declared himself the Hetman of All Ukraine, a position he held until the following December, when, following the end of the war and the withdrawal of the German army, he was deposed and fled. It is here, in December 1918, that the novel White Guard begins, in a Ukraine damaged by World War I and engulfed in the Russian Civil War, with all of its confusion, violence, and chaos. As the novel unfolds, the Germans have mostly withdrawn and the hetman, essentially a German puppet, is under siege by Ukrainian nationalist and socialist forces led by Semyon Vasilievich Petlyura (1879-1926), who fought unsuccessfully for Ukraine's independence following the Revolution of 1917. Petlyura's nationalism made him an enemy of the Bolsheviks, and his socialist ideas made him an enemy of the Whites, who were opposed to the Communists. The Russian forces (both political and military) who became known as the Whites fought against the Red Army in the Civil War from 1918 to 1921. Their military arm was known as the White Army, or White Guard. Ideologically quite diverse, the Whites were not so much a single army as a confederation of counterrevolutionary forces loosely united by their anti-bolshevism, and to a lesser extent by the idea of preserving and restoring the Russian monarchy and Russian Empire, as well as by their anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism. After the events described in the novel, the Soviet army recaptured Ukraine, driving Petlyura out, and held Kiev in 1919 from February 6 until August 31. From August 31 until about December 16, forces under Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872-1947), a general in the imperial Russian army before the Revolution and one of the leaders of the Whites in the Civil War, were in charge. Then, from December 16 the Soviet government was back in the city until May 6, 1920, when it was occupied by the Poles, who on June 11 were forced out by the Red Army. Three centers of power, revealing the basic vectors of all the coups, had taken shape in Kiev: the military district headquarters (which included counterrevolutionaries, monarchists, and White Guards), the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (Bolsheviks and other Communists), and the Ukrainian Central Rada (national-ist, independence-oriented, and Petlyurist).

For example, say that a Third World country undergoes a spontaneous, country-wide, mass noncooperation campaign against its dictator, lasting weeks or even months. Tens of thousands march in the streets, newspapers and radio stations defy the censors, whole cities are shut down for days at a time as people go on strike. Noted citizens call for the dictator’s resignation, no one follows his orders, he has completely lost control. Finally, four or five military officers, carrying out the obvious will of the people, march nearly unopposed into the presidential palace, arrest the dictator, and escort him out of office. Chances are that our news media and history books will thereafter attribute the dictator’s downfall, purely and simply, to “a military coup.

The diverse characters in the book become enmeshed in the struggle and the tension between them builds increasingly from page to page…” – Enrico Downer, author of There Once Was a Little England. “Ken Puddicombe’s JUNTA is an atypical novel set against a backdrop of a military coup in a Caribbean state.

Humanitarian, but hardly controversial; the Count was a secret opponent of the regime, with form to prove it. In January 1939, as Major von Schwerin, he had approached the British Military Attaché in Berlin, Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong, with a deal. If Chamberlain abandoned his policy of appeasement and opposed Hitler, his friends in the army were willing to mount a coup against the Nazis. Lamentably this excellent opportunity was ignored by the Foreign Office. Meanwhile, by 1944 Strong had become Eisenhower’s chief of intelligence.14

The vote only empowers you to represent abilities, whereas the beauty of work and actuality of capability qualify you as a true leader; otherwise, the majority vote is just a power game, not insight.” Ziauddin Khawaja, known as Ziauddin Butt, in the military coup against the elected Prime Minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, on October 12, 1999, under secret and mutual interests, assured the four corps commanders of that time of their loyalty to the army and in favor of General Musharraf. Military treachery was preferred over democratic values and the constitutional protection of the elected Prime Minister. If General Butt was a patriot, the worst general in history, Musharraf, would never have dared to hand over our beloved country to foreign forces. Every general tries to be a patriot and a hero after retirement. As many generals as there were in Pakistan and they broke, abrogated, or suspended the constitution from any angle, they were and are complete traitors to the Pakistani state, nation, and constitution, but also to the morale of the great forces, along with the traitorous judges of the judiciary, who participated equally. Not repeating such factors is a nation’s survival; otherwise, there will be no uniforms and no freedom. Staying within every institution’s limits is patriotism; give exemplary proof of your patriotism, and you are all subservient to the Constitution and those elected under the Constitution. Your oath is your declaration of respect and protection of democratic values; its violation is treason against the country and nation. On the other hand, Pakistani political parties and their leadership do not qualify in the context of politics since, if they are in power or opposition, they seek favor from the Armed Forces for their democratic dictatorship. The honest fact is that Pakistanis neither wanted nor wished to establish real democratic values and their enforcement. Lawmakers are unqualified and incapable of fulfilling the context of the Constitution, which is the essence of a pure and honest democracy with fair and transparent elections as per the will of voters, which never happened in Pakistan. Examples are visible and open to the world, even though no one feels sorry or ashamed for such an immoral, illegitimate, and unconstitutional mindset and trend of the Pakistani leadership of all political parties. Huge and widespread corruption is a threat to the Pakistani economy and people’s prosperity. IMF support and other benefits go into the hands of corrupt officials instead of prioritizing the well-being of society or individuals. Imposing taxes without prosperity in society and for people who already live below the poverty line is economic violence, not a beneficial impact. The fact is bare that the establishment misuses leaders and leaders misuse the establishment, which has become a national trend; consequently, state, nation, and constitution remain football for them, and they have been playing it for more than seven decades, losing the resources of land and people for their conflicts of interest. I can only suggest that you stop such a game before you defeat yourself.

General Curtis E. LeMay, a legendary fighter pilot who’d implemented the carpet bombing of Japan during World War II. A notorious hawk, LeMay had served as chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he’d tried to organize a coup against Kennedy among the Joint Chiefs of Staff; he wanted to force the military to flout the president’s orders and bomb the Soviet missile bases they’d found in Cuba.

Nasser’s new order appeared to be on the way when military officers, pledging “loyalty” to him, seized power in a coup in Syria. This led, in 1958, to a “merger” of Egypt and Syria into what was supposed to be a single country, the United Arab Republic. But then in 1961 other officers seized power in Damascus and promptly withdrew Syria from the new “state.” The following year, Nasser sent troops to intervene in the civil war in Yemen, expecting a quick victory that would expand his reach. Instead it turned into a long battle against royalist guerrillas and a proxy war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Iran joined with Saudi Arabia to support the guerrillas in resisting the Egyptian forces, one result of which was the establishment of an Iran-Arab Friendship Society, with offices both in Tehran and Riyadh. Nasser would end up calling Yemen his “Vietnam,” a political quagmire that added to the economic woes of the grossly mismanaged Egyptian economy.

Democracy in the Middle East would require the departure of Israeli forces from the occupied territories and the recognition of the political rights of the Kurdish people. It would also mean reducing the role of the large oil corporations that, for fifty years, have been robbing the resources of those countries, while influencing their political life in a direct and authoritarian manner—starting with the CIA-sponsored military coup against Premier Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953, after he tried to nationalize the Iranian oil industry.

Time ran out on Hamilton’s military ambitions. By February 1800, Congress halted enlistments for the new army that he was assembling and that had monopolized his valuable time. That same month, Americans learned that Napoleon Bonaparte had eliminated the Directory in November and pronounced himself first consul, in precisely the turn to despotism that Hamilton had long prophesied for France. The fulfillment of his prediction, however, left him stranded in an awkward situation. Napoleon’s coup marked the end of the French Revolution and thereby weakened the case for military preparations against a country that the Federalists had identified with Jacobinism.52 Hamilton saw his vision of a brand-new army evaporate:

...fascism was a latecomer among political movements. It was simply inconceivable before a number of basic preconditions had been put in place. One necessary precondition was mass politics. As a mass movement directed against the Left, fascism could not really exist before the citizenry had become involved in politics. Some of the first switches on the tracks leading to fascism were thrown with the first enduring European experiments with manhood suffrage following the revolutions of 1848. Up to that time, both conservatives and liberals had generally tried to limit the electorate to the wealthy and the educated—“responsible” citizens, capable of choosing among issues of broad principle. After the revolutions of 1848, while most conservatives and cautious liberals were trying to restore limits to the right to vote, a few bold and innovative conservative politicians chose instead to gamble on accepting a mass electorate and trying to manage it. The adventurer Louis Napoleon was elected president of the Second French Republic in December 1848 by manhood suffrage, using simple imagery and what is called today “name recognition” (his uncle was the world-shaking Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte). Confronted with a liberal (in the nineteenth century meaning of the term) legislature that tried in 1850 to disenfranchise poor and itinerant citizens, President Louis Napoleon boldly championed manhood suffrage. Even after he had made himself Emperor Napoleon III in a military coup d’état in December 1851, he let all male citizens vote for a phantom parliament. Against the liberals’ preference for a restricted, educated electorate, the emperor pioneered the skillful use of simple slogans and symbols to appeal to the poor and little educated.

Three months earlier, a coup d’état had taken place in which the Greek military junta seized power, established a dictatorship and immediately curtailed press freedom and an array of civil liberties. Political parties and demonstrations were banned, surveillance was widespread, and police brutality became commonplace. More than six thousand suspected communists and political activists were imprisoned or exiled, and torture was routinely used against opponents of the state. Oddly, however, the junta continued to allow its citizens access to Western films and music. Tourism was encouraged, a vibrant holiday destination nightlife developed, and a hippie colony on the island of Crete was left undisturbed. The Beatles either chose to overlook the actions of the police state they were thinking of entering, or were naive about the suffering of the Greek people.