The Pete Quiñones Show - Pete Reads 'Coup D'état' by Edward N. Luttwak - Part 2 w/ John Fieldhouse, Christopher Sandbatch and Dark Enlightenment

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

83 MinutesPG-13Pete continues his reading of Edward N. Luttwak's "Coup D'état." In this episode he welcomes John Fieldhouse, Chistopher Sandbatch and Dark Enlightenment to comment on the middle section of chapter 2.DE's Telegram ChannelSandbatch's SubstackSandbatch on TwitterAntelope Hill - Promo code "peteq" for 5% off - https://antelopehillpublishing.com/FoxnSons Coffee - Promo code "peter" for 18% off - https://www.foxnsons.com/Coup d'ÉtatPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Keep it to yourself. If you want to support the show and get the episodes early and ad free, head on over to freemam Beyond the Wall.com forward slash support. There's a few ways you can support me there. One, there's a direct link to my website. Two, there's subscribe star. Three, there's Patreon. Four, there's substack.

And now I've introduced Gumroad, because, I know that a lot of our guys are on Gumroad, and they are against censorship. So if you head over to Gumroad and you subscribe through there, you'll get the episodes early and ad-free, and you'll get an invite into the Telegram group. So I really appreciate all the support everyone's giving me, and I hope to expand the show even more than it already has. Thank you so much. I want to welcome everyone back to part two of my reading of Kudetatai. by Edward Luttwack. John is returning from the intro episode.

How are you doing, John? Well, sir. And first time on the show, Christopher Sandbatch. How are you doing, Christopher? I feel like I just won a game show. I feel like I've known you. I actually, we've been in the same room before, and I was just like... We were at the OGC conference.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't think I got a chance to meet you because that was just... It was a strange weekend for me for all kinds of reasons, but I was sort of out of sorts and attending to myself mostly. But I've wanted to come on. I wanted to find some reason to come on for a while, and I'm really glad that not only did it happen, but it happened with Edward Lutvach,

which was like a, using a strangely influential figure in like my whole cloud of thought. And like he's like one of the ones that doesn't quite make sense, if you know anything about me. But he's certainly my favorite of the neocons. He's a very strange individual.

And this is a really fun book to talk about. He's a weird neocon that actually deals with paleocons and our guys. So it's part of what makes him really weird. Yeah, I think, John, you had mentioned that you had mentioned Lafayette Lee had interviewed him, I think, for IM 1776. And then I reached out to Lafayette and I'm going to record part three with him on this. Yeah, the long painful chapter, so I appreciate that. Yeah, but the world gets really small too.

He is the reason I got published and I am in the recent I am 1776 edition. So this is good. Definitely, definitely some cross-pollination occurring here. I have like, it's weird, I have my past and my present, my future, all in one stream. John has a lot of podcasting together. Yeah, I was just going to say before we started recording, one of the big things lookbacks actually never. look back's actually known for is he's a guy who basically got martin varevel to publish for non-academic audiences which is how most of us got to know him and uh anyways van crevold he's a

he's a dutch israeli historian i think he was actually born in a concentration camp he's the guy who actually did an autobiography of hitler that uh last i checked is illegal to sell in germany but uh anyways van crevold is actually one of the world's leading historians one the world's leading theorists on insurgency. So yeah, LutFag is a big part of how people like him came to the awareness of the military and the public. All right. Well, so where am I at? We're at we just got Daryl Cooper and I did the part where basically they explain Italy and talk about how Berlusconi was able to even though there was grass. and all sorts of stuff still going on. Give the Italian government some stability for,

for, you know, 12 to 15 years, which in Italian history, that's a couple centuries, I think. I can't be the only one who knows a joke about how, if you hate the Italian government, wait five years. The saying is it changes like the weather. Yeah. Only ever gets worse, too. Italy is like, I'm not talking about Italy, the culture.

region, but Italy as a nation-stay. I did. We did a myth the 20th century on that one time. Great book called The Failure of Italian Nationhood. Italy as a modern country, just gets started off at the top and it's just been cruising downhill since. You know the joke about movies like American movies, why do the Romans always have British accents? And the answer is because nobody believes the Italians ever ruled the world. You do this is a true thing. Every time I, some of those people ask me to like speak real Latin, like, like speak Latin like a Latin person. And I'll be like, that's just Italian.

I'm like, yeah, think about it. All right. So the way this is going to work, I'm going to start reading. And either one of you, wait until I get to the end of a sentence or something like that, interrupt and comment on anything. That's what you're here for. I'm going to read this and for you guys to comment on it. So with that, I'm going to start at the preconditions of the coup in Chapter 2. So in 1958, France was a country where the dialogue between the government and the people had temporarily broken down.

But much of the world's population lives in countries where a dialogue cannot take place at all. If we draw up a list of those countries that have experienced coups, we shall see that. We shall see that, though their ethnic and historical backgrounds differ very considerably, they share certain social and economic characteristics. By isolating these factors, we can develop a set of indicators that, when applied to the basic socioeconomic data of a country, will show whether it will make a good target for a coup. And before I move on, let's just remind everybody what the title of Chapter 2 is. is when is a coup d'etat possible. All right, so moving on. Economic backwardness.

In countries without a developed economy and the prosperity that accompanies that the general condition of the population is characterized by disease, illiteracy, high birth and death rates, and periodic hunger. Average citizens in this state of deprivation are virtually cut off from the wider society, outside their village and clan. They have little to sell. They have little with which to buy. They cannot read the forms, signposts, and newspapers

through which society speaks. They cannot write, nor can they afford to travel, so that a cousin living as a city dweller might as well be on the moon. They have no way of knowing whether a particular tax is legal or merely the exaction of the village bureaucrat. No way of knowing about the social and economic realities

to condition the policies that they are asked to applaud. Their only source of contact with the outside world are mass media that may be governmental for all they know, but in any case, they do know from past experience that mass media are invariably biased in some way and may be outright deceitful. Not to cut in too soon, but yeah, I agree for the most part with him. This is probably a good example of something from the original version,

that again when you revise the 2016 version you probably didn't revise it enough and I think for the most part these things are generally true but the reality is by the 2010s literacy is much more widespread today though they may not be much more than basically literate enumerate but thanks to the inter oh you call yeah the internet revolution the fact that large parts of the third world people have smartphones even in places where you would think they have a hard time getting electricity continuously. So, yeah, many of the issues about travel remain, but the ability to actually communicate, you know, outside of your, you know, your local physical environment is not quite as bad as it used to be. Well, you know, okay, look, now,

because I was, you know, thinking about this, and I was like, wow, this is remarkably prescient. And I, you know, I think you're right. I think this is one, I wasn't to point out this Texas originally from like 19, 28 or something like that. Okay. Yeah.

Like one of the like really interesting things about 1968 is it and I'll probably sprinkle this in as it comes along. We actually have indication of Lutvot coming from what is a right wing perspective. It's an undeniably right in perspective, but not as like what decidedly right wing as contemporary political like analysis is going to be. But he's actually showing the early stages of a time. He's actually showing like what incredible literacy. with the contemporary historical literature

coming out of Germany, specifically Germany at the time. And if we, like, if you can take the setup here, so what is the, he's setting up the conceptual framework of a coup. He's like, these are the things, you know, if you imagine like coup as like a bubble, like you'm sure you've seen like graph representations of like flow charts and that sort of thing. He's doing this thing where he's imagining a coup as, you know,

a conceptual event that occurs and he's outlining, you know, the places where this can happen. He says, okay, and he starts by pointing out, he says, okay, this can happen in first world countries. If these, if he's, you know, very elastic conditions of modernity that we've erected breakdown, okay? And when he does this, he's also giving a nod to contemporary,

contemporary RAND Corporation research on, on really the conditions of the third world. And the third world is frequently characterized as not having the social elasticity, of the developed economies. And at the time, this is really interesting. But you talk about like editing it down somewhat. I think this is really interesting because I'm looking at it.

And he's, you know, he's describing to me the way a citizen in Topeka, Kansas, might feel about the messaging that they receive. Now, you're right, they can travel a little bit better, but in a lot of cases, they don't. Literacy is theoretically higher, but it's the quality of information is low and, you know, almost, the signal almost gets totally swamp in, again, what we were referring to is, like, media, the Gazette Press, the government press, or the, you know, state-controlled media.

And they don't know, they don't have any way to validate this information, but they do know that, you know, the media tends to, you know, tends to distort the way they're operating, you know, the message they give. So actually, you're right, it probably could be edited down some, but there's a remarkably impression interior critique here. So like, you know, we're looking at, so France breaks down in 1958. We are right now, you know, I think according to his standard here, we're looking at, you know, an America in which, you know, one of these preconditions of the coup is satisfied. That was a lot of talking at once. Ready for huge savings?

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It's a Black Friday secret. Keep it to yourself. No, that's fun. No, it made a lot of sense, and that added a lot to it. So I'll continue and feel free to interrupt anytime. You're not interrupting too soon. That's what you guys are here for. So moving on.

The complexity of the outside world and the mistrust that it inspires are such that the defenseless and insecure villagers retreat into the safe and well-known world of the family, clan, and tribe. They know that the traditional chiefs of tribe and clan prey on their very limited wealth, and they often know that their mutual interests are diametrically opposed. Nevertheless, the tribe and clan represent a source of guidance and security that the state is too remote and too mysterious to offer. The city dweller has escaped the crushing embrace of traditional society, but not the effects of ignorance and insecurity. In such conditions, most people are politely passive, and their relationship with the political leadership is one way only. The leadership speaks to them, lectures them, and rouses hopes or fears, but never listens.

The bureaucracy taxes them, bullies them, may take their sons away to serve in the army, and can take their labor for the roads, but gives very little in return. At best, in honest regimes, a dam or highway is being built somewhere far away from their village. Such projects will not bring them any direct benefit, will not lift them from their misery, but at least they are a consolation, a hope of a better future for their sons. Elsewhere, the poor are even denied the consolation of hope. Their taxes have been spent on palaces, weapons, imported champagne, and all the other bizarre and whimsical things that politicians and their wives absolutely need. The urban poor, living by expedients, barely surviving in the

day-to-day struggle for the necessities of life, are treated to the spectacle. of the cocktail parties, limousines, and grandiose villas of the ruling elite. Yeah, I was just going to say one of the things we sometimes forget about as Americans and living in a country that has the wealthiest people in the world is we tend to assume that in the developed nation that the wealth disparity is largest there. And the reality is very often it's in the developing world because places like Brazil or India, to a good example, both of those countries have people who are definitely in the global 1%. both those countries still literally have Stone Age tribes in places.

So it is really hard for an American to understand just how much the disparity is in the real world. Yeah, this is another one of those things where, like, we've had this thing where people have been referring to the Donald, the Joe Biden, Kamala Harris thing as a coup. I would have, and I just finished pushing, you know, a sort of contemporary example, but I would point out that like places where coups, tend to happen are places where things are much, much worse than they appear even in the United States. We're just like knocking on the door of like the kind of inequality that's being, you know, the kind of inequality that's being spoken out here. We may be on the slippery slope to it, but we're, you know, we're by no means there. Venezuela is a much better. And of course,

there's stuff going on in Venezuela, right? Venezuela is a perfect example of the kind of place where this sort of thing happens. We're saying it's bad, but it's going to get a lot worse. This is the optimistic version of me. All right, moving on. The mass of the people is politically passive, but it is a passivity of enforced silence, not inertia. All the time the terrible anger caused by deprivation and injustice is there, and at times it explodes.

The mob may not have a clear political purpose, but its actions do have political consequences. The 1952 coup in Egypt, which led to the end of King Farouk's white telephone, phony European monarchy, and the rise of the Nasser regime, followed over 70 years by the presidencies of Anwar Sadat and then Haseemubarak was preceded by one of these sudden explosions. Black Saturday, as it became known, January 26, 1952, was the appointed date of an organized demonstration against the presence and activities of the British forces in the Canal Zone. The poor of the city streamed out from their hovels and joined the procession,

among them the agitators of the Muslim Brotherhood, who incited the crowd to arson and violence against the infidel and all his sinful doings. The agitators succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The poor seized the opportunity to destroy the facilities of the rich, hotels, department stores, Cairo's aristocratic turf club, and the liquor stores and fashion shops in the center of the city, which was given the appearance of a battlefield in one short day. Only the wealthy suffered, as these were places that had always been closed to the poor. The organizers of the original demonstration had no wish to destroy their own favorite gathering places.

The nationalist did not want to deprive Egypt of the 12,000 dwellings and businesses that were destroyed. They spoke of anarchy, intrigue, and madness. For the poor, however, it was a general election. Without voting rights, they resorted to voting with fire. Apart from the violent... Yeah, I was just going to say the expression of like voting with fire or a coup as a poor man's voting or election or, you know, revolts as things as like democracy and action is actually something you hear a lot

in the developing world. Like, anyways, for Daryl, I'm doing a big project on Liberia. And that's one of the weird things is like every time there was a government overthrown. Most of the people who were interviewed said, yeah, we think of that as our way of actually being involved in the government. So just for context sake. Yeah, it's like it's real important to realize that like democracy, I always like to whenever we refer to protecting our democracy, but you know, our democracy is not necessarily somebody else's democracy. And like in the in the purest sense of the word, and again,

Lupac is coming out of this like really very continental tradition. He makes up, you know, he truck big business in explaining continental theorists to American, to American policy intellectuals, really, who may not have much of a continental background. And his, you know, his concept of democracy, and I think actually the American government has really kind of gotten on to this concept of democracy. But, you know, in the classical enlightenment sense, a coup is every bit as democratic as an election, if, you know, if there is either like a Napoleonic surge of energy behind, you know, the, the action. This is one of those times where I, like, I rarely, like, you know, get down in the trenches.

I actually sort of agree with the CIA. I mean, really what we're talking about here is, and Lubach's being a little tongue in cheek. He knows, for instance, that this is, the United States government has already, even by the time he wrote this, he knew the United States government was backing the Egyptians. But he is, you know, but he is very, you know, very precise in his, in his sort of terminology, where he says, you know, this could be democratic, you know, that's the, and this is the, this is the definition of democratic that frequently, you know, surges every time the United States wants to go intervene somewhere. And look back in a real offense is, you know, one of the

guys who rides that, rides that concept of democracy. to influence the American government. For sake of context, three years before he wrote, this is when the U.S. government indirectly assisted in the coup in South Vietnam. Yeah, yeah. When our first Catholic president resulted in the first Catholic president of Vietnam paying. All right, I'm going to move on. Apart from the violent and inarticulate action of the mob in response to some simple and dramatic issue,

there is no arguing with the power of the state. There is no interest in and scrutiny of the day-to-day activities of government and bureaucracy. Thus, if the bureaucracy issues orders, they are either obeyed or evaded, but never challenged or examined. All power, all participation, is in the hands of the small, educated elite. They are literate, even educated, more certainly well-fed, and, therefore, radically different from the vast majority of the countrymen. The masses recognize this and accept the elites monopoly of power. Unless some unbearable exaction leads to desperate revolt, they will accept its policies. Equally, they will accept a change in government, whether legal or otherwise. After all, it is merely another lot of them

taking over. Thus, after a coup, the village police officer comes to read out a proclamation. The radio says that the old government was corrupt and that the new one will provide food, health, schooling, and sometimes even glory. The majority of the people will neither believe nor disbelieve these promises or accusations, but merely feel that it is all happening somewhere else far away. This lack of reaction from the people is all the coup needs to stay in power. The, again, just more for anecdote, but the best example I've had was dealing with the Iraqi population as an advisor. And about six months in, my colonel told us, is like, you have to basically understand that the average Iraqi soldier looks at officers and the American advisors, like they're

magic. So until you understand that, it's really hard to really understand the level of deference they have and why. I'm curious as either of you all are familiar with James C. Scott, who, by the way, just died if you are familiar with him. You just died. Are either of you all familiar with James C. Scott's work? I have a documentary on Amazon. I did a bunch of a few years ago, and we actually, James C. Scott, interviewed for like the first seven minutes of it.

Oh, really? That's super cool. Because I was pointing out that really, you know, I talked about the sort of graph representation of knowledge a little while ago. But there's another sense in which, like, what we're referring to here is James C. Scott's, you know, concept of state legibility.

and if you map these concepts over what he's talking about. What he's talking about here is that remember we talk about this isolated citizen who is sort of cut off. To them, what he's talking about here is that these citizens depend, the coup depends on the citizenry, just sort of assuming status quo zero legibility from their government. This is what it mean when we say it's happening far off. It's like sort of zoomed out to my like sort of conceptual blob background.

It's like, okay, there's a state somewhere. But we don't really have any concept of what it's doing. And at this point, we don't really care. This is the, you know, this is the tacit acceptance that he's sort of talking about, you know, from, you know, from the non-state actors who are being pressed down on by the coup. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive by design. They move you even before you drive.

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distinctive by design they move you even before you drive the new cupra plug-in hybrid range for mentor leon and terramar now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro search cupra and discover our latest offers cupra design that moves finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from vows wagon financial services arland limited subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. All right, moving on. The lower levels of the bureaucracy will react, or rather fail to react, in a similar manner and for similar reasons. Their own lack of political sophistication will mean that the policies and

legitimacy of the old government were much less important to them than they were to their immediate superiors. The bosses give the orders, can promote or demote, and above all, are the source of that power and prestige that makes them village demigods. After the coup, the man who sits at district headquarters will still be obeyed, whether he is the man who was there before or not, so long as he can pay the salaries and has links to the political stratosphere in the capital city. For the senior bureaucrats, army, and police officers, the coup will be a mixture of dangers and opportunities. Some will be too comprised with the old regime to merely ride out the crisis, and so they will either flee, fight the coup, or step forward as supporters of the new regime in order to gain

the rewards of early loyalty. The course of action followed by this group will depend on their individual assessments of the balance of forces on the two sides, but for the greater number of those who are not too deeply committed, the coup will offer opportunities rather than dangers. They can accept the coup and, being collectively indispensable, negotiate for even better salaries and positions. They can create or join a focus of opposition, or, as in Nigeria in 1966, they can take advantage of the temporary state of instability

and stage a counter-coup, seizing power on their own account. much of the planning and execution of a coup will be directed at influencing the decision of the elite in a favorable manner. Nevertheless, if in an undeveloped environment, in an undeveloped environment, the elite choose to oppose the coup, they will have to do so as political rivals. They would not be able to appeal to some general principle of legality as in politically sophisticated countries because no such principle is generally accepted. So instead of operating for the sake of legitimacy, they would be fighting the planners of the coup as straight political opponents on the same plane. This would have the effect of bringing over to the coup their political and ethnic opponents. In any case, fighting the coup would mean facing organized forces with improvised ones and under conditions of isolation from the masses,

who, as we have seen, will almost always be neutral. The point that a coup tends to become a tribal conflict in some sense really can't be over-emphasized. So many recent coups are essentially break up either on religious or ethnic lines. And the weird part is as an American, that's not always clear because very often they operate through political parties that have a nominally or nominally have, you know, a modern ideology. but, you know, it's essentially it's where group X participates versus group Y. You know, the one this reminds me of, and I'm just sitting here listening, the one this reminds me, and I could just hate to hit all of the alarm buttons, but this reminds me of the one that really the way we saw,

oh, that character who's the president of Ukraine elected. Like, you know, we really saw this happen. Yeah, I was trying to avoid filters. I'm really, really. I mean, we hit all of them anyway. But the, because this is really a sense, like, you know, this was the argument that the Russians were making was that, you know, his Zelensky's election was a coup. And I think, you know, we have a great data set.

It's always incredible to remember that this was written before the dirty wars in Latin America in the 1970s. It was written before Portuguese decolonization before the Bush Wars in Africa. And it pretty accurately predicts the way the sort of, you know, the way the coup tends to process. But the, I think that this instance is one, because the United States, when the United States chooses to oppose a coup, or whenever near-peer actors choose to oppose a coup, they often do so through these kind of like, the cultural elites, is what you would call them in, you know, in the country. And this is really what we saw happen, I think, in Ukraine, what sort of directly leads to this factional, this regional conflict is, you know, ethnic polarization around these like folk heroes who are suddenly, who were in this case elevated to like sort of elite, you know, semi-elite status by a third party and also by their own, you know, internal, internal schematics. But this is essentially what it looks like when a coup is contested, you know, and, like, fighting over the same plane is something that everyone in modern. politics actually really likes to not have happened. Whenever, you know, body counts get really large.

But I think that's a really good way of looking at, you know, the section that we just read it. That's what happened in Ukraine. More positive. Moving on. Go ahead. No, I just said more positivity. It just said. As the coup will not usually represent a threat to most of the elite,

the choices between the great dangers of opposition and the safety of inaction. All that is required in order to support the coup is simply to do nothing, and this is what will usually be done. Thus, at all levels, the most likely course of action following a coup is acceptance, by the masses and the lower bureaucracy because their interests are not tied with either side, and by the upper levels of the bureaucracy because of the great dangers of any opposition conducted in isolation. This lack of reaction is the key to the victory of the coup, and it contrasts, with the spontaneous reaction that would take place in politically sophisticated societies. In totalitarian states, the midnight arrests and the control over all associations, however non-political,

are part of the general tactic of insulating the individual who seeks to oppose the regime. In underdeveloped areas, the opposition is isolated from the masses almost automatically by the effect of social conditions. Our first precondition of the coup, therefore, is. The social and economic conditions of the target country must be such as to confine political participation to a small fraction of the population. I think that's really one of the most insightful points in this chapter. It's also, in many ways, one of the hardest ones necessarily, I would say to measure in the real world

essentially every government today claims to be democracy. But as Chris said, you know, our democracy may not be another democracy. So, yeah, could this apply to the United States? But we essentially said no, at least not right now. But I think all of us agree that participation politically de facto participation is significantly less than when it's purported to be. But first of all, what is this, the Blues Brothers or something? And the second of all, like that I like that.

This question of whether it unite, I mean, I think this is what the prescient, the prescient question, why does text remain so like, like, so captivating is because like we're just literally, look at the last three weeks, there are serious ways. So there's no way to slice this around. And I actually think this is one of the things that's really. really interesting that's changed since Lutvacarothus, Texas, because we're still looking at what are essentially, you know, we're still looking third to third generation politics, and we're thinking about a coup as a thing that singularly happens in a country and that it happens to people

in a country. But, you know, if, if you abstract these, if you abstract these criteria and ask the question, can two of them be happening in the same country at the same time? And, you know, can this happen in a first world country? Are the things that are happening in the United States reminiscent of a coup? I mean, president, former president almost shot. Another one just got, and another one just got jerked out, you know, jerked off his platform. Do these still? Well, there's three going on right now. I mean, you're completely correct. It reference those two things. But remember that the Supreme Court just overthrew the Chevron Doctrine. And that's a, you know, that's a coup of the, Mike Lee was, Senator Mike Lee was just on, Tucker.

On Tucker. And he was talking about the administrative state, right? And the Chevron doctrine effectively is what makes it so that we live in the administrative state and is the undergirding. So we've got, you know, multiple things going on in the air at the same time. And John and Chris, it's a pleasure to talk to you guys. I don't think I've been on with you before. But it's, this is. This is. This is Dark Enlightenment, everybody. Good talk. Thanks to Pete for having me on. But we have not just this, but the global government system, right? There were effectively coups, media coups in the UK and France.

You know, all within the last month. I mean, month and a half. Like, this is, it's insane. Into our last discussion with... Ready for huge savings. We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items

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Rugby on Sports Extra from Sky, they've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed I usually use for the legal bit at the end. Here goes. This winter sports extra is jampacked with rugby. For the first time we've got every Champions Cup match exclusively live, plus action from the URC, the Challenge Cup and much more. Thus the URC and all the best European rugby all in the same place. Get more exclusively live tournaments than ever before on Sports Extra. Jampack with rugby. Phew, that is a lot of rugby. Get Sports Extra on Sky for 15 euro a month for 12 months. Search Sports Extra. New Sports Extra customers only. Standard pressing applies after 12 months, for the terms apply. Pete, last week, it's like we said before, I'm not willing to call what happened a coup, but it's like, man, we have most of the symptoms described in what a coup. So it's like we're in a weird new situation that we don't really have a term for right now.

Hey, Dee, how are you? Interesting times. Interesting times. Yeah. Well, I'm going to start reading again, but I feel like I should be singing an 80s song. All right, let's do this. By participation, we do not mean an active and prominent role in national politics, but merely a general understanding of the basis of political life commonly found among the masses in economically developed societies. This precondition also implies that, apart from the highest levels, the bureaucracy operates in an unresponsive and mechanical manner because of its undereducated staff. More generally, the economic precondition excludes, excludes the possible. of a system of local government, that is representative local government. It is true that in

underdeveloped areas, there is often a system of local government based on traditional chiefs. Of their two possible roles, however, neither usually functions as a representative one. They are either individually powerful in their own right, which means, in effect, that the commoner is subjected to dual control, or if their power is collapsed, that they are are a little more than somewhat old-fashioned civil servants. Neither of these roles allows the commoner to participate in the small politics of the village or town in the manner of his Western counterpart. Thus, in an economically backward environment, the diffusion of power, which is characteristic of sophisticated democracies, cannot take place. There is either rigid,

centralized rule or, as a transitional phase, a degree of power, for individual regions that makes them de facto independent states, as was the case in northern Nigeria before the coup. Everybody knows that it is easier to grab something concrete than something vague. Talking loosely, power in the centralized state run by a narrow elite is like a well-guarded treasure. Power in a sophisticated democracy is like a free-floating atmosphere, and who can seize that? This does not necessarily mean that, A, all underdeveloped countries are ipso facto invo facto vulnerable to a coup, nor B, that the developed areas are never good coup territory. It does mean, however, that only the intervention of special circumstances will prevent a well-planned

coup from succeeding in economically backward countries, while only exceptional circumstances will allow it to succeed in the developed areas. No comments? Just go on. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things, like I said, is we're in sort of new territory, so so far it seems to be true of it, but we're in the process of sort of validating that in real life. All right. New heading, political independence. It is impossible to seize power within a state if the major source of political power is not there to be seized. The 1956 Hungarian Revolution for a example was totally successful, and its leaders quickly found themselves in control of all the traditional instruments of power, the armed forces, police, radio, and communications facilities.

The one thing that could not be seized in the streets of Budapest happened to be the major source of power for the previous regime, the presence of the Soviet army in and around Hungary. This sounds just like January 6th, right? Power of the American regime, like it's been obvious for those of us who've been paying attention. that you know Joe Biden hasn't been making its own decisions for many many years so who do you hold responsible right like they you know those people I think that they were just misguided kind of naive idiots but if they really tried to like force Congress they they could have but it didn't matter because the Congress isn't in power no that you know in their period

democracy or representative republic or whatever we are this week you know who is that's a very salient question and i think something worth asking but it's it's very obviously not it's an interesting transposition of this idea of the soviet army to you know because initially you're going to want to think that these look different that these like look like different things it's like okay so the american army is surrounding the american American capital and, you know, X, Y, Z happened. But, you know, essentially this is more or less the same thing. And, you know, if anything is possible to say the Soviets were a little kinder to, you know,

their subjects by at least offering the warning of there being a different uniform, you know, covering the tanks outside of Buddha. That identified themselves. Yeah. And now it's even, all of these things, you know, they were laid out clearly in black and white in the 1960s. And like everywhere that we're reading through this, I find them being true. I find that the truths are there, but they, you know, dimensions have changed. Bits have been camouflaged and, you know, resources, different skill points, different skill points have been allocated.

You know, there's always, like all of this stuff is still very applicable. You have to get to turn a few, turn a few logs over. now to find to maybe find them. On the many days of Christmas, the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee, a visit filled with festivity. Experience a story of Ireland's most iconic beer in a stunning Christmas setting at the Guinness Storehouse.

Enjoy seven floors of interactive exhibitions and finish your visit with breathtaking views of Dublin City from the home of Guinness. Live entertainment, great memories and the gravity bar. My goodness, it's Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at Guinness Storehouse.com. Get the facts. Be Drinkaware. Visit drinkaware.com. Have you recently purchased a new vehicle from Frankine Volkswagen?

If so, you may be at risk for an exciting condition known as New Car Joy. Symptoms may include spontaneous smiling, sudden increases in confidence and uncontrollable urges to take the scenic route. If you experience any of these symptoms, don't worry. The only known treatment is enjoying your new vehicle. Side effects may also include great value and exceptional customer service. Talk to a friendly professional at Frankine Volkswagen today. and see if upgrading your car is the right prescription for you. There's so much rugby on sports extra from Sky.

They've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed I usually use for the legal bit at the end. Here goes. This winter sports extra is jam-packed with rugby. For the first time we've met every Champions Cup match exclusively live, plus action from the URC, the Challenge Cup and much more. Thus the URC and all the best European rugby all in the same place. Get more exclusively live tournaments than ever before on Sports Extra. Jampack with rugby.

Phew, that is a lot of rugby. Get Sports Extra on Sky for 15 euro a month for 12 months. Search Sports Extra. New Sports Extra customer only. Standard Pressing applies after 12 months, further terms apply. All right, moving on. These armed forces vastly superior to the Hungarian army, were a greater source of power to a Kremlin-backed government

than any element within the country. The control of the Red Army was in Moscow. Thus, the Hungarian Revolution would only have succeeded if it had been carried out in Moscow, not Budapest. Under such conditions, a coup can only work with the approval of the greater ally. The first coup in Vietnam, which overthrew the unpopular president,

why do I want to say didn't do nothing? No den DM. What is it? No din DM or Ziam. No den DM. No den DM. And as even less popular brother, No din knew,

was carried out by individuals who appreciated the realities of power. When the Catholic DM went on a political offensive against the dissident Buddhist orders, the long-suffering generals decided to act. They sounded out at the opinion of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and asked through an intermediary whether the Americans would report to DM possible consultations on eventual changes in the prevailing political structures.

When after considerable debate between the CIA, the embassy, the White House, and the Pentagon, the U.S. authorities informed the plotters that they would not be reported to DM. The following sequence of events took place. May, 1963, beginning of intensified conflict between Buddhists and DM. May through September, 1963, internal American debate on whether the Buddhists are neutralists to be opposed or nationalists to be supported. The final conclusion reached was that the Hinajana Buddhists were bad, and the Mahayana Buddhists were good.

October, 1963. Stand still of all economic aid to Vietnam, i.e. to DM's regime. October 22nd, 1963. End of direct aid by CIA to No Den New Special Forces. These forces were the main source of direct power to the regime, entirely financed and equipped by the CIA. November 1st through 2nd, 1963, coup occurs, resulting in the debts of Diem and No Din Niu.

The Viet Cong accused the generals and their frontman, Duong von Min, of being stooges of the Americans, but in their dealings with the U.S. authorities, they were merely being realistic. They saw that whatever power there was to be seized depended on the Americans. Seizing Saigon's fixtures and fittings without U.S. support would have been seizing an empty symbol. South Vietnam in 1963 was a clear case of

dependence. Such cases are rare, unlike regimes that exist in the gray area between full independence and some degree of dependence. Former French colonies in West Africa are the most persistent examples of such dependence because the presence of the former mother country is very real and very effective. Instead of large and expensive armies, there are military and economic advisors. There is economic aid, and above all, there's a tight web of long-established dependence in non-political spheres. Thus, schooling follows patterns originally established in colonial days, and the organization of the professions follows the metropolitan system.

This is very important where the ruling elite is composed largely of lawyers whose whole raison d'etra is based on the use of a particular procedure and code of law. Trade is often tied largely. You want to say something? Well, like, our entire system is based off of the idea that violence isn't on the table. That's the best liberal, essentially, I mean, a good short definition of liberalism, which is basically how we've been taken, um, taken over by lawyers because lawyers, the whole idea is like, we're going to take this off the table and then we're going to argue.

So we're going to restrict the domain and the conflict to, like, essentially, essentially a pill, and then, like, wonder how you end up with, you know, 100,000-page Federal Register. Well, it's because, like, the loggers and the farmers who are having their livelihoods destroyed can't, like, walk up to the dude who's destroying their livelihood and be, like, knock it off, or I'm going to, you know, remove some of your molars.

Which is why we have to bring back trial-bya-combat, starting with traffic court. Yeah, and I... John, you ain't know better than I, but the South Asian reference here. I believe the president that was referenced in Vietnam was actually his brother was a Catholic Archbishop, the Archbishop Tuk of Hui, who separate discussion. But this is, again, how like the past. power in Vietnam, right, was French institutionally and Catholic religiously.

And so they're trying to, like, controlling, you know, you can control Vietnam from Paris, or you could control Vietnam from elsewhere. At least they could when the French were still there, but until they couldn't was which DM found out. But yeah, so yeah, they were, again, in many cases, right, the reality is the rest of the world outside of North America, your religion is much about your ethnicity as anything since, you know, that's your tribal church. However, do you find your ethnicity? So, yeah, South Vietnam, like most places, you know, the Catholics were essentially a separate ethnic group, and many of them were actually from those families that traditionally had been

more Confucian because they had been in the Imperial Bureau. bureaucracy or whatnot and then we're yeah that that's where the took family was yeah and and and he talks about west africa and and and you know with niger in the news right like um what's her name the prime minister of italy maloney has talked about this uh that like france ended formal rule over west africa um but it never really went away i mean i have friends in lots of countries in the Foreign Legion and he was in Africa shooting Africans on behalf of French corporations as like a year and a half ago yeah I mean and because all of the you know the people who own the rubber

plantations the people who own the companies that make these places work and um I don't know if little X gotten into the whole like resource economy trap yet but If, you know, as in some places in Sierra Leone or I forget where, during the Ebola outbreak, like 10 years ago, I want to say it was Liberia. But effectively, the management of the Firestone Rubber Plantation Company, or the Firestone Tire Rubber Plantation Company, or the Firestone Tire Rubber Plantation. effectively became sovereign and like squished the Ebola outbreak. I want to say it was Liberia, but I know I'm wrong. Oh, okay, right. But the Liberian government had nothing to do with any of the response.

It was all like Firestone. Yeah, the Firestone plantation is something like 20% of the entire landmass of the country. And part of what makes a Liberian government legitimate is there the people who back up firestones. claim so that firestone backs up there claim well they actually all the outside markets from that it's like the taylor guitar company uh actually owning like i think it's really having a massive uh influence in the the government of sierra leone because the martin guitar company uses more ebony lumber than any other entity in the world and like this country in Africa is the only source of it. So like this company is not important in the United States.

These big guitars have like this like seat on all of these important national councils in Africa. Yeah. Never go to where it's going. But trade is often tied largely to the ex-colonial power because of the hold of inherited tastes, habits, and the fact that trade links are typically based on established relationships and communications. This level of influence has often sufficed to prevent, oppose, or consolidate a coup. Back in 1964, a few companies of British Marine Commandos quickly crushed mutinies in the three ex-British East African countries of Kenya, Tanganyika, as it then was, and Uganda. Almost 50 years later, a few companies of French troops inserted in January 2013 defeated the Islamist in insurgents who were conquering the vastness of Mali.

Although the French have generally opted for neutrality in the face of African coups, intervening only now and then, they have retained in Africa or in rapidly, or in rapidly deployable form of force of several thousand air-transportable troops with efficient, albeit light weapons. Ireland's largest award-winning light show experience is back. Wonderlights is now open in three spectacular locations, Malahide Castle and Gardens, and Marley Park in Dublin and Photo House in Cork. Follow the enchanting walking trail that will captivate all ages,

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They may not sound like a large force, but it is huge when compared to the efficient bits of local armies whose troops are worthless for the most part, so that French interventions have usually been decisive. A very specialized type of dependence is a byproduct of modern technology and is found outside the ex-colonial sphere. This is the heavy mortgage placed on political independence by the acquisition of sophisticated weapons, particularly combat aircraft. The jet fighter...

Real quick. I did some research some years ago before Scandinavians joined NATO like Sweden and I want to say Sweden, Denmark and Finland by themselves had more combat aircraft than all of sub-Saharan Africa except South Africa. You know, wait, hold on. I want to get in on this one too

because I was actually talking about this British even before you asked me to come on the show I was talking about the British doing this here. Okay. And one of the things is really interesting about the way, you know, these former colonial empires, theoretically former colonial empires, have, like, kind of managed. So this is a sense in which the coup is an institutional, it's institutionally accepted in like a possible latter-day form of colonialism, I think it's worth pointing out. So what happens with the British and the Mao Mao's is that there's a, you know,

a virulent, of course the British Empire is collapsing at this point. This is like what we're talking about, the three former British companies, like British East Africa has collapsed between 1950s or so and 1962. So it's like lower the flies out there in former British East Africa. But the British have this very special approach. They did a wonderful. They did a wonderful job detailing the French method. The French, you know, arguably still have the closest this functioning thing to a former colon, you know, European colonial empire. The British have their own little special twist on it. And like one of the things they do is that they decide, they kind of sheave the sword

very early on. And they did this in Ireland. They've done. They did this in Africa where they decide that actually, you know, the economic ties are the most important aspect of, you know, of the colonial relationship. And so whenever the Mao-Mows or somebody like that gets really big, the British actually developed this strategy where they trust fall into one of the, into their, you know, their particular choice of replacement government. And then they substantiate it. And they use essentially the Bank of England to backstop their, you know, their new chosen elite.

And so that's, you know, that's, you know, that's, you know, that's an element of how the, you know, the former colon. country is operating. France is a little bit more direct, you know, and we see the fallout of French intervention a little bit more, I think. But like, that's, that's, that's what's going on with the British. Lufat also, he doesn't quite go so far as to say this. This is like when it's simply, this book gets like touted as something that's been used as a manual before. Well, you know, okay, let's ask, you know, possibly ask the question, on whose behalf is Edward moved by writing this book. You know?

At the time he wrote this, he was working as a consultant for the oil company. Yeah, he was worried as an oil consultant in London. He was like, oh, it was very literally participating in this kind of latter-day colonialism, you know, to a certain extent. Yeah. The only thing I was going to add to that is the British military colonialism post-World War II mostly takes the form of training and training support. through different armies. Like a lot of these countries, like you said, most of these countries,

their armies maybe a few thousand men total. So basically they'll export all of their officer training to sandhurst and whatnot. So that's one of the biggest way they keep, you know, their side in power and or a countercoup from happening. And one of the things that you can usually tell just anecdotally from a British territory after independence, when they really break with Britain proper is usually they start training their own officers. and they will change their rank insignia at some point. And literally, you can tell the point when South Africa had a falling out with the UK, this is when they changed their rank insignia to be different than the rest of the Commonwealth.

So that's just a weird, you know, surface symptom. The jet fighter is the crucial case because, unlike ships are armored vehicles, jet fighters can confer an absolute advantage. Better training and morale can often overcome even a sharp equipment inferiority in ground combat, but not in the air. There's so much rugby on sports extra from Sky, they've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed

I usually use for the legal bit at the end. Here goes. This winter sports extra is jam-packed with rugby. For the first time we've met every Champions Cup match exclusively live, plus action from the URC, the Challenge Cup, and much more. Thus the URC and all the best European rugby all in the same place. Get more exclusively live tournaments

than ever before on Sports Extra. Jampack with rugby. Phew, that is a lot of rugby. Get Sports Extra on Sky for 15 euro a month for 12 months. Search Sports Extra. New sports extra customers only. Standard pricing applies after 12 months further terms apply. On the many days of Christmas, the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee.

A visit filled with festivity. Experience a story of Ireland's most iconic beer in a stunning Christmas setting at the Guinness Storehouse. Enjoy seven floors of interactive exhibitions and finish your visit with brett taken views of Dublin City from the home of Guinness. Live entertainment, great memories and the gravity bar. My goodness, it's Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at Guinness Storehouse.com. Get the facts. Be Drinkaware. Visit Drinkaware.aer. Therefore, it is vitally important for any country to match its potential rivals combat aircraft.

The political problem arises because, A, only a few countries make advanced combat aircraft. B, these aircraft need a continual supply of replacement parts. And C, there is a long gestation period between the original order and the time when training is sufficient for operational use. Thus, if a country wants to acquire jet fighters, it has to be reasonably friendly with one of six countries, Sweden, the United States, France, the UK, China, or Russia. Once a deal is made, it will need to stay friendly. Otherwise, the flow of spare parts and ancillary equipment will stop. And so the initial purchase is followed by years of dependence.

Jet fighters don't grow in economically backward countries where the whole industrial base is lacking. The constant updating of electronics, air-to-air missiles, radar equipment, and the like must therefore rely on imports. Both sides of the bargain recognize as dependence, and the supply of sophisticated weapons is usually aligned with general trade, ideological ties, and political links. I'll go you one further, Pete. I mean, like, all this is obviously true, but jet fighters do not land on lousy runways. I mean, some do. It's a got a V-TOL.

Like, you know, a C-130 can land on relatively bad. In order to have a runway that functions to land a F-16, an F-A-18, or any modern fighter aircraft or strike fighter or whatever, you have to have an astonishing amount of infrastructure. structure ability. I'll get into it at some other time because this is not the topic, but just getting the runway right is hard. Which makes them dependent a lot of times on American construction companies. Places like Bechtel or I forget what the British equivalent is, but like there'll be, you know, yeah, you're just just building stuff all over Africa because

no one else is to build a military airfield is really difficult and that's just the airfield that's not refueling facilities um that's not a tank farmer no one blows up that's not um you know storage storage and transport of fuel that's not uh maintenance on the aircraft that's not i mean there's a lot of things that can go wrong before you even get the plane off the ground let alone fight the the aircraft and then landed successfully and rearm it and fight it again. These are very, very complicated processes and they're hard. So like you let's look, I've got an anecdote at this one actually. This is sort of interesting, but first I wanted to point out that, you know, again,

1968, this is this is a relatively black and white world, but one of the developments in modernity and over the course of the last 40 years has been the development of this kind of intermediate class of state. So like, you know, he gets these six countries. He's used Sweden, the United States, France, United Kingdom, China, or Russia. Interestingly, Germany is not mentioned. Germany is not a country at the time that's making. Or Japan.

Yeah, or Japan. And these are both countries that are building, that are building advanced weaponry now. But there is a third class of country that has also sort of developed. And I, anybody on the internet who's aware of the existence of Pakistani AK-47s knows, this is what I'm talking about, which is like this existence of this kind of, like, liminal junk state that is rich enough to like scam or can actually, can actually colonize to one extent or another, these large, these, you know, these more powerful states. They can send refugees. They can send, you know, they can send refugees to the United States to Sweden, to Russia. And they can, you know,

establish channels of capital movement that allow them to, you know, acquire occasional parts shipments, large quantities of ammunition, et cetera, and so on and so forth. And to this point, I would plan, because every, I think I've talked about this point out, I do have, I have like this weird janky K Street background. And one of the, uh, one of the, one of the, one of the parties that I tangentially ended up representing, I never did any work on this account, but it was the Sierra Leone the opposition so it's francophone africa opposition and i remember one time sitting with the consultant but i was working for and he got a phone call from africa and it sounded like there was machine gun fire in the background it was like it's like what movie did i stumble into and this was an urgent

request from like an african an ongoing african coup you can't even if you look this up there were you know this was this was like a coup that occurred in francophone africa like right around 2021 or something like that and the leader of this coup was on needed the like in the midst of this the one of the things he needed to do was talk to his like retained lobbyists in the united states to request oh i think it was a one-and-half million AK-47 rounds okay so like there are only a certain number of places you can go to to get that stuff and that severely constricts like We think of this coup as a thing that can happen anywhere. But actually, the thing, the supply chains, the supply lines that are needed to create this very, you know, this phenomenon that seems, this concept that seems random, that starts to look more and more planned, more and more schematically planned, the more we look at this.

You know, okay, so like there are, you know, there are mechanisms in the United States government for generating, or, you know, for at least in a soft way generating these coups. It's like, oh, you get, can you get me a million and a half AK-47, right? You can hold the United States is probably the United States and Russia are probably the only two countries in the world you can get that. In Ukraine, but two of the three are now out of them. Yeah. I would say incidentally a huge amount of the international arms arms industry involved Ukrainian selling stuff produced in Russia, which, you know, that's why it's now hard to get ammo for legal A case. Yeah, the supply of surplus guns all dried up because there was all in these huge warehouses in Ukraine.

Yeah, the ammo's probably still there. The problem is the poor to access, you know. At what point is the degree of dependence sufficient to affect the feasibility of the coup? Consider the following timetable of relations between the Soviet Union and Egypt from 1955 to 1967. 1995 Czech arms deal. That was the first arms supply contract between the Soviet Union and any Arab state. It was of great political importance for Egypt because it broke the Western arms monopoly, and signified true independence. Effect? The commitment of future foreign currency earnings

and the need to keep on friendly terms with the only possible supplier of spare parts. 1956, Suez-Sinai War. The Egyptian defeat in the Sinai resulted in the loss of much equipment. It was quickly replaced by the Soviet Union and with better weapons. Effect. The commitment to the USSR was reinforced and financial indebtedness

increased. 1962 revolution in civil war in in Yemen. After the death of Yemen's king, Ahmad in Yahya, and the subsequent revolution, Egypt sided with Republicans and Saudi Arabia sided with the royalists of the ensuing civil war, in the ensuing civil war. Egyptian troops in increasing numbers were sent to the, to support the Republicans. effect. Soviet help was needed to keep 30,000 to 50,000 troops in Yemen.

Moral and monetary debt increased. 1966 final break with the United States, end of U.S. wheat shipments. The shortfall in food supplies could not be covered by Egypt's hard currency purchases in the world market. Effect. Soviet food aid was initiated making Egypt dependent on the USSR for a significant portion of its supplies. 1967 June 16th. Still to this day, Egypt is dependent on grain exports from Ukraine and Russia.

Not only that, all of East Africa is. If you remember when the Ukraine war started, there was political instability in Uganda and Kenya, because that's where that entire red winter wheat crop goes, is to feed East Africa. So it's like, again, you know, we're actually working inside a conceptual framework framework, you know, a historiographical framework, in fact, that's called, Blue

Fike is one of the developers of it with what's called World Systems Theory. It's actually just one that I'm with one of my formal fields. And you know, world systems theory is this idea that, you know, like, we no longer have separated spheres of influence. It's like, it's like the whole world, the whole world is this inflated balloon and if you press down on it anywhere, like the water that you displaced inside that balloon has to pop up somewhere else. You press down one place and another place pops up. And that's, you know, that's what's going on here. 1967 June, six-day war, Egyptian defeat in the Sinai. Israeli sources estimated that 80%

of Egypt's Soviet-supplied military equipment was destroyed or captured. Effect. As a condition for the re-equipment of Egyptian forces, the USSR required the close supervision of army training, a voice in the selection of senior military personnel, and the reorganization of intelligence services. Thus, after 12 years, a limited relationship designed to free Egypt of its dependence on the West for arms supplies escalated to a much greater degree of dependence on the USSR. Egypt became dependent on the Soviet goodwill for arms, wheat, and general economic aid. The Soviet Navy was granted shore facilities in Alexandria and Port Saeed, and there were several hundred Russian instructors in the Egyptian armed forces.

Was that enough to allow the Soviet Union to oppose or reverse a coup? At the very least, the Soviet embassy in Cairo could have acted as a focus of counter-coup activity, coordinating the many Egyptians then committed to the Soviet presence, and it could certainly regulate the flow of aid supplies. After a coup, the USSR could have punished a non-cooperative new regime by cutting off all aid. When countries fall into such a position of direct material dependence, coup planning must include immediate post-coup foreign policy planning. If the political orientation of the coup is opposed to the greater power,

then the coup may well fail unless the correlation can be considered, the coloration can be concealed. The second precondition of the coup, therefore, is, the target state must be substantially independent, and the influence of foreign powers in its internal political life must be relatively limited. Is there anywhere where that's the case? Outlier countries like Singapore.

I mean, they still have Western intervention, but there's a reason why they essentially, they essentially, despite being so small and so technology driven and so other industries focused, they're able to produce everything they need militarily, and most countries can't do that. Aren't countries like that, like them and like Switzerland, because they're banking countries, really? Aren't they? That helps.

I mean, having money is, I mean, the whole issue, right, is material. resources are the sinews of war. I mean, you need, you need resources in order to put weapons together. So in both those cases, that's true. The fact that they both have high IQ populations with a, you know, an ethnic plurality that's able to dominate the state, well, you know, not alienating minorities has a lot to do with it. So the thing is Switzerland is full of Swiss and Singapore is full of Singaporeans of the various ethnicities in most countries aren't. And that's, that's another big reason it's where they haven't been able to. Have you recently purchased a new vehicle from Frankine Volkswagen?

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It is the cliche that countries are interdependent rather than independent. Domestic political issues have international implications, while foreign political developments have domestic repercussions. The commercial, cultural, and military ties that link countries give each country a measure of influence in the affairs of other countries and even the most powerful can be so influenced. Thus, in the period preceding the U.S. intervention in the Second World War, British influenced and German influenced political groupings and pressure groups

were operating within American domestic politics, just as today the parties in the various Middle Eastern conflicts try to exert pressure on U.S. foreign policymakers, both directly and through their respective lobbies. Interesting, he doesn't name any of those groups. I wonder why. If even a superpower... Go the Armenians.

The Armenians in Los Angeles. If even a superpower can be influenced by such weak powers, then any definition of independence must be as loose as such realities. Nevertheless, some more definite guidelines can be formulated. A, a coup is not worth attempting if a great power has significant military forces in the country concerned. Thus, for example, no coup could have been possible in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion. In 2015, by contrast, if the Iraqi army were effective at all, it could attempt a coup. True, if the foreign troops were kept in places physically remote from the political center

and or if the pre-cue regime was moving toward an unfriendly position vis-a-vis the great power, the rule does not hold. B, the coup must seek the endorsement of the great power if large numbers of that powers nationals are serving as military or civilian advisors. Part of this section, and I don't know how much of that is unchanged from 1968 or whatnot, is understand this is basically a direct accusation towards the U.S. military establishment towards the coup against DM in Vietnam, which is, Part of why it's interesting is because Lookback is basically willing to talk about the elephant in the room. Whereas understand from a historical perspective, right, any historian who has any access to U.S. military archives has consistently said for the 50 plus years that the U.S. military was completely uninvolved, despite the fact there were advisors in most of those units. Whereas lots of advisors or lots of historians who weren't directly, you know, did. didn't directly have access to those, those archives, many of them who essentially, you know,

made themselves persona non grata after they left the military. Those are the guys who said, no, it looks very clearly like that happened even though we don't have hard proof. So yeah, look like is essentially, you know, pointing out what everybody knows but is unwilling to say. And again, to bring up Tucker, like the notion that this, you can do this stuff abroad and it doesn't come home, right? the same folks who orchestrated DM getting shot in the head, probably orchestrated

Kennedy, both Kennedy's getting shot in the head and organized the, you know, the soft coup of Richard Nixon where like all of a sudden like six guys that just so happened to be former CIA commit this crime and pin it on you and then you've got to resign because why was H.W. Bush and Dallas in 1963? There's always consequences. World system theory, like Chris said earlier. The collapsing world system.

That's the point we're at now. So pre-feudalism. I mean, that's what terrifies me. And I see a lot of it. I see a lot of it. and the work we just raised. Like, oh, okay. So the United States, which used to, you know,

the United States in London, which used to be the place where you sat around and write about these sort of things. Now it's the place you do, you know? Yeah, do it confidently. The application of these guidelines will no doubt exclude some otherwise potentially suitable targets, though at present it is only an African states with a French garrison that the rule applies.

I think we'll stop right there. I'll give you guys the floor to comment on anything you want. I mean, my biggest thing, like I said, why I recommended this book is ultimately, if we're serious about the real world, we need to look at what real world power politics looks like. And obviously, I don't think anybody should go out and use this as a manual for a coup, mostly because all the examples I know of are cases that failed and the guys were shot. So let's not do that. But again, if we want to understand

the world power politics, we need to actually spend the time of work looking at sources like that. You know, the reason it interests me, and I actually, you know, just to actually pull this up, I think I do still have it somewhere. I first became aware of

Lou Buck, whenever he was when he was being interviewed by the Guardian for a piece, kind of a famous guardian feature, probably it's probably buried before. It's called the Machiavelli of Maryland. And, you know, it points out, it's tempting to imagine Lutvok as a man exiled to the wrong place in time whose fate like a character in Nabokov has been reduced from old world brilliance to something less grand than 21st century America. It's not hard at all to picture him conniving at the Congress of Vienna for plotting murders in the Medici court.

He has the air of the seasoned counselor to the prince who is dispatched to deal with Mongols and returns alone on horseback clutching some advantageous terms on parchment. But that's not necessarily really the case with him. What I think is really interesting about him, he was the introduction. He was my introduction into this world, was the way he context, like he's a very good entry point for orientation to the way historians, expert, defense intellectuals,

these are very good introduction to the deliminal space where these things, these entities cross over. Okay, so like, you know, Martin Van Craveld is another example. So there's a whole slew of these guys. Fernand Bratel, Manuel Wallerstein, Edward Wutvach. Who is that? I'm sorry to see it with John Boyd. Yeah, Boyd, who's the mathematician?

The guy. Oh, uh, Talib. Oh, no, but, okay, Talib, Talib, Talib is, he's, he's mixed in with all of these guys, but there's that one mathematician that, I can never remember his name, but he's the fractal guy. And if you go back to the beginning of this chapter, he remembers he says, he's talking about conditions. He says, okay, if you're planning a coup, there's a certain set of data legibilities you have to establish. Are the conditions in place, you know, are they proper? And this is one of these things that is such a departure from the way geopolitics, from the way history, from the way

state policy was conceived before World War II. So like, you know, whenever you're talking about, there's an extent, there's an argument where, you know, whenever we're talking about this, whenever we're talking about, what are the preconditions for a coup? We're talking about like the beginnings of a corporate Memphis flow chart that, you know, some like, you know, somebody in Washington, D.C. uses today to decide whether or not, you know, it's advantageous to an regime change in Columbia this week versus next week, you know, okay. Things were moving, things are moving very slow in those days because they don't have computers yet they don't even have Microsoft Excel or anything like that they don't have really good ways of you know automated

data aggregation but this is the beginning of this very sort of what we would call today data-driven approach to policy humanities geopolitics and so on and so forth that has you know erupted in the last couple of years through large language models and you know neural networks and graph theory this is so this is some of these interesting things where like like luthak is telling you you know within from within 20 years of you know the creation of the first computer how these computers can be used to you know optimize your chances of a coup so like these are the things where this book is presented tongue in cheap tongue in cheek but that's really the operative that's really the stuff that made it so operative in the 1960s like there are people who did you know multiple matrix algebra

you know, like, to essentially plot. Like, we've got this matrices for the food production. We've got this matrices for this. We have this matrices for that. And, you know, out pops the yes or no, right? There's an algorithm. Yeah, that's exactly what's going on here. This is like what this text is.

It's, I mean, it's tongue and cheap, but it's an algorithmic, it's an algorithmic approach to enacting regime change. You know, and it's a very, it's a very primitive one. And it's a very brutal one and it's very effective one. And that's what makes it so interesting. It's almost sort of the conceptual framework so they could actually do that in the future. I mean, it's like you have to have an idea of what you're trying to accomplish. Right, right, right, exactly.

Yeah, and I was going to say another thing that really impresses me is, again, all the things historically that were used to talk about political theory and diplomatic history and whatnot is, most of those tend to ignore the states of exception. right they'll talk about it from a historical perspective but they don't generally try to employ any kind of systemic thinking you know any kind of conceptual models to states of exception because they're exceptions and just the fact he's willing to systematically look at a coup a type of state of exception just uh you know it's he's trying or he's willing to talk about the things that um that nobody was willing to talk about and weren't even willing to spend the time thinking about in a systemic way Well, right. Yeah. I mean, in terms of complexity theory, what he's doing here is he's modeling, he's, he's, he's on one hand, he's modeling a schematic for creating a feedback loop in this exception condition that we call the coup. But then on the other hand, you know, he's also, he's also, he's also delving into the, you know, the feedback loop of the coup itself. And he's saying, you could, you can take this book and you can do two things with it. You can go enact a coup with it, but you also shore up your own regime. regime against the coup. You know, this is also where this is also where game theory starts to enter into the real, you know, calculus of policy.

And eventually he's treating a coup like a game. Okay, you know, these are the conditions in which this is the right move. And that's fascinating to me. Yeah, I've said it's very German in a way, just because the, I mean, the Germans were some of the first modern Westerners to actually use games of some sort, order to simulate, you know, military actions before strategic planning or for strategic planning. And that's something that the Anglosphere never really caught on to until post-World War II. So, yeah, yeah.

Two things real quick. And then I have obviously much less value to say than you guys on this one. But, you know, the purpose of an infinite game, the only success condition of an infinite game, which is to say, wielding power over time is to survive to continue to play the next round. And Ludovox is admitting that this is the case. And to talk about Schmidt here for a second, like, what he's effectively talking about is sovereignty and who's wielding it. And it might be Firestone Tire, it might be Pete, I know you're old enough to remember the senator from Washington Henry Jackson, Henry Scoop Jackson, and he was affectionately known as the senator from Boeing, right?

Because for a long time, like Boeing was effectively sovereign in the state of Washington. You know, that's been displaced by Microsoft and other things. But, right, if we, you've had, you know, AAA is America's one great contribution to the spiritual patrimony of mankind. And like the first thing you have to do, right, is admit you have a problem. And if you're talking about the sovereignty of the people or democracy or, you know, the republic or the constitution or whatever, like, no, no, no, no, no, do, no. Boeing and Pfizer and Citibank are in charge. The people have Jack to do with it. And the second you accept that, then you can operate in the real world and maybe get them.

done maybe not yeah and and two again the original purpose of just the nature of power politics that doesn't mean that we should behave amorally or immorally but we have to understand these things from a non-moral perspective in order to effectively behave moral in the real world good stuff I really appreciate you guys joining me um does anybody have anything to plug oh I just fired at the substack again I'm all over the place. So I publish everything on Twitter and on substack and then I go all over the place. But yeah, I mean, I'm on Twitter. You're following me. Follow me. Yeah, and subscribe for my substack. I don't have anything at the moment. If anybody actually likes me and doesn't hate me as a guest,

you know, tell Pete. I think me and Chris are supposed to do some stuff with Darrell Cooper in the future. But that's, that's, oh my God. You know, there's, I have like a little gremlin. fan who goes by JJ and he is obsessed with Daryl Cooper and he's like he's like somewhere in Virginia doing like like little like cartwheels over the idea of me of finally doing something with Daryl Cooper that would be I'd I'd stab someone I like to get on with Daryl I'd greatly admire him so no I just the usual stuff Pete thanks All right. Well, I will sign off now and I'll tell everyone that if you do find yourself in the middle of a coup, likes being described. Pray help from above. Take care. Good night.