The Pete Quiñones Show - Pete Reads 'Coup D'état' by Edward N. Luttwak with Guests - Complete Part 1 of 2

Episode Date: October 5, 2025

6 Hours and 6 MinutesPG-13Here is part 1 of the complete recording of 'Coup D'état' by Edward N. Luttwak.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 Twitter Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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from Volkswagen Financial Services, Ireland 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. ESB transformed how the country powered itself once. And now we're doing it again. Working with businesses all across Ireland,

helping them reduce their energy costs, reach their sustainability goals, and future-proof their operations. Because this is not just for us. for us. It's for future us. To find out more, contact our smart energy services team at ESB.aE forward slash smart energy. I want to welcome everyone to my seventh reading, which is Kudaita by Help Me Out. How do we pronounce his last name, John? I've heard Lutfok or Lutwack.

You'd probably say Lutfok if you were actually a German speaker, but he's lived in the U.S. in Great Britain for 50-something years now. So let's go with Lutvac or Lutvac. All right. All right. Yeah. And I am here for this, what we will call Part Zero, with John Fieldhouse.

How are you doing, John? Doing well, sir. How are you doing? Doing good. Why don't you tell everybody a little bit how much ever you're willing to tell everybody about yourself? Yeah. So just a real background to the reader or the listener who doesn't know me at all. I'm John Fieldhouse. My background to the extent I'm willing to talk about it. I was an Army officer for a number of years. I was medically retired. Thanks to the beauty of the GI Bill as well as a bunch of reforms pushed through during the Trump administration. I got to double dick with separate programs on top of the GI Bill, as well as the whole student loan forgiveness for disabled veterans that Trump pushed through. So long story short, when I got out of the Army, like most people, I did contracting at various times, which is an on-again, office again thing. So you always got downtime built in between contracts.

So because of the different benefits, I would go to college in between because not only do they pay for school, they also pay me to go to school, which is a salary. when you're in between jobs. It's also really cool because sometimes I would make more money going to schools than my day job, which not to brag or anything, but it was a situation where I end up going a lot longer and a lot further in school than what I would have, or somebody like me would go at any other time in history. So I end up gathering some master's degrees and finishing a doctorate and organizational theory, which kind of got me into, which along the way got me into,

the issue of how does the leadership and management of insurgencies and military coups and counterinsurgencies, how do those things work? Partly just because, again, organizational theory tends to be run through business schools, which means you tend to get people riding and talking about the same five businesses over and over again, and I like Apple and I like Steve's jobs, but I don't really want to talk about them anymore. So I was the weirdo in, you know, departments run through the business. business school where I would do, you know, research projects and dissertations on things like

Hezbo Law and how do you build an effective military when you have to completely break it down after it's lost a war and rebuilt it because those are the things that interest me, which is kind of how I got onto the academic subject that we're going to talk about, sir. Awesome. Awesome. All right. So the book is called Kudaita, was it through your education that found out about this book. When did this book come on your radar? Oh, Christopher Sandbatch a number of years ago actually turned it turned me onto it. It was during my academic career. So that's one of the things I picked up. But yeah, he talked about this is, again, a manual or it's written sort of as a tongue-in-chief manual. The author originally called it a cookbook on how does a military

coup function from the view inside out. And that's part of what it turned me on. Apparently, the Netflix special and How Do You Do a Coup was largely built upon this series. There was a TV movie, the Canadian TV movie, done in like 78 called PowerPlay, which is basically taking the textbook script, this textbook script, and building a movie off of it. And it's just one of those interesting things out there. if I'm, I know I'm rambling, sorry. No, that's fine.

That's fine. So can you help? I'm going to read this all the way through on the subsequent episodes. And so I guess probably a great thing to do to start would be to give a like a broad overview of it. So where do you want to start as far as that goes? Yeah. So anyways, when I originally reached out to you, because I've, got lots of great ideas but have done no work for you so i thought i time to actually help you

some of these and this is probably like the third book i pitched you but uh we're speaking what is it it's 24th july 2024 it's a couple weeks after the attempted assassination of trump in um Pennsylvania. And I remember your live stream that you had the weekend or the week Monday after that where you made the point that look, a lot of people are getting wrapped around the axle with, you know, six-dimensional chess ideas about, is this a coup or not? And my pitch was we should, you should go read this book because, you know, this is what a real coup looks like. And we should take the time to actually look at what the actual exercise of power politics looks like in the real world. And I actually have a conceptual framework before we actually start discussing, you know,

you know, all kinds of minor details that we can't now. Well, I mean, historically, when you look at a coup, you'd have a, you'd have a palace coup. A palace coup to me seems to be a, as far as knowing the target and knowing what you have to do, seems to be a whole lot easier than one that would be I mean the managerial hell that we live in right now I assume

yeah and those are things that actually his first actually his first two chapters get into this a lot so yeah historically you tended to have palace coups which generally meant that the military and or the elected and or the appointed government of a monarchial state

forces a current monoccur to abdicate and usually forces their son, sometimes their daughter, to go and take over so that they would have a more compliant or more cooperative figurehead ruler on their behalf. I mean, recent examples of that, I think the two big examples that stand out is, number one, the show, or excuse me, the coup against Mossadegh in Iran and the 50s, in which his father, I don't know if his father was removed or the allies or he was, or Reza Shah was in charge at that point. But anyways, they wanted to remove Mosaddegh, the elected prime minister. And they wanted the younger Shaw, Reza Shah, Palavi, to take over and essentially run as an actual executive monarch, an actual monarch that actually is in charge of the government.

And the other big example would probably be the Meiji Restoration when a bunch of samurai kidnapped the Emperor of Japan in order to force the country to modernize. So those are the two biggest examples. As far as managerial states, that is exactly the issue. One of the things that Lutwack talks about is for a coup to actually happen

to actually be effective, you need to have enough machinery estate, enough modern machinery estate, that there's something there to actually grab onto, to hold on to it to actually run a government combined with it not being so modernized, so managerial that it's impersonal, which could result in a situation where the coup, a new system, a new regime takes over the government,

but nobody listens to them. So, yeah, that is kind of the issue. Can a coup happen in a managerial state? I think the very short answer is what we solved this previous weekend with President Biden saying he's not going to run for office anymore. I'm not saying that as a coup, but all of the symptoms, all of what we're seeing from it,

looks exactly like what, what, like, would say a modern coup would look like. So I think it's interesting that we, we look at a managerial coup, we look at a modern coup, and it's so modern that it manifests itself

onto a social media platform. Yeah. And one of the things that when we get into reading, so this book was originally published in, was it 1968, and then the second edition was published in 2016. And one of the things that what says in the revised update to the revised version is, one of the things he had to take into account was just how much expanded, how much broader communications technology is,

because you pointed out back in 1968, most African countries, if you wanted a coup, you had to take over one radio station or network of radio stations, and even the smallest country today probably has a dozen different radio stations. And now, thanks to podcasting and digital pseudo-radio systems, you effectively have infinite number of systems to the point that you, you know, an effective coup looks like, something like what Egypt went through with the Arab Spring where they had to shut up all

internet to the country at one point. So yeah, it's gotten to the point that social media is the high ground, which is obviously are, it's very much obviously why Congress and the establishment left has tried to use all social media to suppress any ideas, any thought, anything on the spectrum they see as outside of the allowable opinion. What does what does Lutweck say about economics? Because

when you look at where we are right now, you listen to the White House and it's a great, we're in the greatest economy of all time. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th

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and future-proof their operations. Because this is not a business. not just for us. It's for future us. To find out more, contact our smart energy services team at esb.a.e. forward slash smart energy. You look at prices, a little different story. You look at housing, different story. Anyone with their eyes open, any real person who doesn't live, you know, within 50 miles of the beltway, probably things, or 50 miles, or a couple miles of New York City, thinks it's a different story. I would think that if you said that you need some, you need it to be functioning in order for a coup to, to be successful, you'd need some kind of economic prosperity, or at least

economic competence, which it doesn't seem we have at this time. And that's another interesting thing. And that's like the second big point he makes in the, his revised version was corruption, corruption being the second issue. He said the most important thing, and this is something he faulted himself for not sitting in 1968, is obviously there isn't a whole lot of financial difference between what an Army colonel and a president makes in most third world countries. You know, the actual official salary, there's not that much difference. And we talk about maybe the president of the United States has a half million dollar salary. he's also working significantly more than, you know,

than probably what a half million dollar salary is. And more importantly, if you're a coup can fail, if at that point, you have to have something significantly more than just salary because, you know, losing a coup means death. And if you're not killed, you're probably going to spend the rest of your life in prison. You're probably going to have the majority of your assets confiscated. You're probably going to lose everything and probably be sent into, international exile.

So his point is corruption. There has to be a means and a source of something that the ruling class can take control of, take possession and there has to be some means in that society in which they're able to get away

with that. One of the most obvious examples is in many we'd say third world or developing country, especially African countries, right, is most aid is funneled through a central government at some point, which means that the people connected to the ruling regime skim some amount off the top. So that's the most obvious way. I would argue that in the American system, a huge part of that has to be, you know, one thing is obviously the whole speaking circuit that we have after leaving office where, you know, we're either as speakers or as lobbyists, you know,

people will make more money in the first couple of years after leaving office than they did often the rest of their life up to their point, meaning there may not necessarily be corruption while you're in office in the American model, but there's, you know, the corruption kicks in once you leave office. The other thing is campaign donations where if you have campaign donations, you sponsor a whole industry of consultants and advertisers and whatnot, which means that a lot of the energy surrounding every campaign for major office is actually who gets the money that comes from a campaign directly or indirectly. So one of the things that came up in the last week is who were the Democrats going to pick

as their option if they had Biden stepped down. And several of us, I think Orton McIntyre said at first that, well, Kamal Harris is the only person who gets to spend the donations they have so far, which means it's almost certainly going to be heard because win or lose, you know, every person attached to the Democratic Party as an employee or contractor, you know, they want to get paid and taking away their meal ticket matters more to them

than whether or not they win or lose this contract, or win or lose this election, excuse me. So, yeah, the economic aspect, does it have to be prosperous? you can make the case that if it's very prosperous, it's probably harder to have a coup, but yeah, you need to have some distinction between the elites and those lower on the scale,

meaning you have some concentration of what wealth there is, and there has to be some means of corruption, some means to skimming off in order to enrich yourself, which creates incentives for people lower in the political chain to take power, if that makes sense. Well, let me give you an example and try to apply it to what you just said. When BLM was taking donations, especially in 2020, they had a button on their website, you pressed it.

It basically took you through to Act Blue. So all this money is going to Act Blue. So tie that into what do you see there that would, that ties into what everything you just said. I mean, it's more or less an example of what this Lutback described happening in the United States of America. And again, I'm not accusing there, anybody of having coups or attempted coups in the United States of America.

But I am saying that we fundamentally see the same symptoms. And in this case, yeah, that looks exactly like a symptom. of what corruption looks like in a third world country. Why did he write this book? Why does he say he wrote this? Because this, I mean, obviously this book is, it's been, I mean, he talks about how it's been translated into 19 different languages.

Like, it was almost immediately. Yeah, one second. Yeah, that's an interesting case. looking back not to digress or just to digress for a short second Lufig Lutvac was born in Romania. He is Jewish.

His family left because of the Soviet invasion bouncing around Europe. He went to secondary school in the UK. He went to university and he was working as a consultant for the oil industry when he first wrote this book. He was only 26

at the time. That's a good question. and he doesn't explicitly say, and none of the biographers I've read have explicitly said, I think to some degree it happens to be somebody who comes from like a real politic background, meaning they have a background in what real world exercise of power looks like. And if you're sitting in a classroom and you're studying abstract theory, very often if you're just a normal or a person like that who has an interest in what the real world looks like, very often you want to actually write and study about things that actually matter.

So I think that's partially what he got into it. Because you later on went back to London School of Economics to get advanced degrees and to build this consulting firm. I think part of it, like I said, is just interest in the exercise of power and the desire to actually look at abstract things he was learning in school and actually apply them to the world of the world. So that's not too much of a digression. No, I mean, it's interesting because when you look, when you think of somebody who's 26 years old and, I mean, educated and intelligent, to write a handbook on how to, who's never served in government, to write a handbook as such, it seemed, it has to appear odd to people, almost like he was handed a bunch of information that he put together, that there was, how could he possibly know all of this?

I mean, how do you think somebody puts together this kind? You know, it's like when I read Imperium Bayaki, I think 20 people wrote it. I mean, it's like, I mean, I know one guy wrote it, but it appears like 20 people wrote this thing because there's so much in there. You're like, how, how does a human being do this? So, I mean, I ask the same question about a 26-year-old. Yeah. In this case, you know, part of this I can just provide anecdotal information. which is, again, like sitting in class, studying something and being bored shitless of the examples you have

and actually having, you know, real-world work that you've engaged in in the past and wanting to actually apply that material to it. How did you get the material? Again, it was a lot harder to research things in 1968 than it is now. But if you are working for a consulting firm or working in a major industry that has lots of resources, and is connected to those engaged in real world research. It's completely doable, even if, and like the Yaki example, right, no matter what you're reading as a final product, even if there's only one author,

understand that obviously there are lots of people involved directly or indirectly in the research, right? I promise you Yaki had some research assistance to some degree at some point. And I know that because professionally, one of the things I've done over the years is research. search and been a research assistant is not to mention obviously you have all the people collecting primary sources and whatnot um it requires a really good nose for research and investigation of what you want to look at and understanding and a familiarity with the topic to know where you're

going to go and look for answers and a huge amount of patience to sit through lots of primary sources and read things that are you're looking for needles and haystacks you're looking for a lot of for little key details and large materials so it requires the ability to sit for long periods and sift through things. Exactly the kind of thing like Thomas 777 has talked

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So you're asking, is it possible for something to do? something like this. Yeah, it's completely possible. And like I said, I'm sure he had assistance at some degree. And he definitely was relying on primary sources. But like I said, intellectual interest, boredom with what, you know, it's being written on topics at that time and a nose for where to find research. Yeah, research and just a lot of time and energy to sit down and do those things. So yeah, at 26, he's exceptional. I have no doubt that he did this, that Whitbag actually did this book. But yeah, those are sort of the combination of things. And it's when you're 26 and you're trying to make a lot of money

since most people don't have a lot of money at that point. And your country was, or your family was kicked out of a country because of World War II, you probably don't have a lot of money. The willingness to go and do this research when you could be working overtime for other projects. So, you know, those rare combination of traits. Let me ask you this, with your background,

of the military contracting. And I know that you, you're friends with people who work for like DOD. When a book like this comes out, what is the reaction from power? Keep in mind, I'm much lower rungs of power. So I'm not going to pretend that I'm connected to anybody who really makes decisions right now.

Of course. Speaking of the current day military and civil servants, Today, the reaction normally is no reaction. They won't know about it, period, mostly because they lack intellectual curiosity. I know this is insulting to our people, but one of the best things I've ever heard about Americans and intellectual curiosity is just to understand

that what the average American doesn't know about the rest of the world is what makes them the average American. And I didn't say that. Originally, that comes from Tommy Boy. So that's part of it. But understand that the people in charge today, for a number of reasons, are not exactly in charge of the military, are not exactly what we would think of as masters of the universe. So they have, for the most part, the same lack of intellectual curiosity. And to the extent they have it, they tend to mostly have it for the formally digested material, meaning the stuff that's already in a preexisting manual as opposed to hours.

site information. So yeah, my long-winded answer is, for the most part, nobody responds to shit because they're not even going to know about it. Yeah, just look at this work, and I think of a bunch of coup d'etas that happened in Africa since it was written, since this was written. And you know, you wonder, hey, were they, was this book an inspiration? Were they able to, you know, because, I mean, we may not be curious anymore. That doesn't mean somebody, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, well, it's allegedly it's been found in the remains of the leaders of multiple failed coups. So, what was it, Algeria or Morocco?

Anyways, in the intro to 2016 version, Lutback says it explicitly. one of the the officers who attempted a coup against the king they actually found a heavily annotated version

in his possession and my understanding is it's been found in the possession on multiple failed coup plotters in Africa since then keep in mind

that what we find out after a failed coup you know depending on who they were aligned with very often that's what's put out by the American media which is very often, you know, direct propaganda from the U.S. government.

So is that true? Who knows? But, yeah, I would say there are multiple real world examples that we can reasonably understand that this manual was used. Why did you recommend that I read this? I mean, I had been looking at reading this. I've known about this book for a while. I've been thinking about reading this on the show. I completely there's so many books that I've thought about reading on the show and I've completely

forgot about and as soon as you brought it up I was like yeah okay I need to do this why'd you why'd you bring it up at this time uh mostly because like I said uh and a lot of our guys and you know God bless our guys there are guys um after the attempted assassination on Trump like I said they were engaged in conspiracy theories and I'm not opposed to conspiracy theories per se because again anytime people are colluding for nefarious reasons by high and closed doors is a conspiracy

you know conspiracy is a term of law so it's not like it means it does not mean fake it means collusion and a theory just means a conceptual model to explain something when you don't have all the information but they were engaged in conspiracy theorizing without you know a reasonable

understanding of power like you said there are people who they immediately thought there were so many plans within plans that this was done by Trump or this was done by I've had multiple people tell me this was done by people in Israeli

lobby to ensure Trump was in power so that he would pick JD Bant so we would go to the war with Iran and those are that chain of events is potential and you know it is a real risk I will admit but you know there's no way that any of those things could be centrally planned at one

level. And the best comment on that was Morgas said the other day that we need to be careful to not assume that the powers running the world are omnipotent, you know, masters of the universe that always have the answers. Because if they did and if they couldn't, and if they were always guaranteed success, there would be no reason to oppose them because they're going to win regardless. We need to have a reasonable understanding of power. And like I said, the best place to start with it would be, you know, the manual written on how you would pull a, you know, a coup off. And actually, my thought was once we've done the real work of looking at how this would look in the real world, then we can start examining events based on the evidence we had at that point,

which are the evidence we have, which at this, that point the other week was next to nothing. Well, one of the points you made there about their omnipotence, seeming omnipotence is something that I've been saying is like one person, the same person will say that we're in the middle of a competency crisis and the government's incompetent and this is incompetent. And, but the Jews are in charge of everything and they have total control of everything. But they have what total control over an incompetent society, an incompetent system. And then somebody will say, well, that's the op. The op is the incompetence.

And it's just like, how do you argue? How do you argue with somebody who's just like, I mean, has put the Jewish, you know, I was put Jewish people, Jewish power on a pedestal so high that it's like, well, what are you planning on doing about it? Screaming on Twitter? Yeah. Yeah. And I make the point.

If somebody is going to continue to hold a perspective regardless of any evidence one way or the other, at that point, you're not discussing or debating or exploring politics. What you're doing is explaining metaphysics, right? They're telling you what their religious beliefs are. And if somebody tells me that a political outcome is guaranteed one way or the other, and I mean like long-term politics is guaranteed one way or the other no matter what happens or what intervention or what human action takes place, at that point you're not discussing politics or actions, a state of war. What you're doing is you're engaging in eschatology, which there's a time in place, obviously, for metaphysics in eschatology, but not when we're discussing. the exercise of power. And, you know, again, I repeat myself that if you think things are guaranteed at that level, then, you know, why are we opposed?

Obviously, it's the will of God at that point, which I don't believe what we're going through is. And absolutely, the issue of the competency crisis, which is just getting bigger, is one of the defining issues of a civilization and decline. I mean, Spengler wrote a huge part of the client of the West on that. Numerous theorists have written about that in both small and large scale downfalls of institutions. And if we don't acknowledge that competency and the breakdown of effective bureaucracies, that those things happen, then we're not, again, we're not doing politics at that point. We're just intellectually masturbating.

what do you think happened from the evidence you've seen coming out and everything what do you think happened on july 13th which one was that that was we talked about when trump's attempted assassination yeah i will say i've somewhat revised things based upon evidence as it comes out because again i want to start off pointing out that uh they're saying that the first reports of an incident are usually wrong um because again and fog of war issues, the people on the site, even when they're completely loyal and plugged in and competent, they report as they see them, which is always an incomplete picture, right? By definition, the enemy is not telling you what they do until they're shooting at you normally or acting against you.

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Trading is Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. So, in confidence, you know, the breakdown in competency is definitely. an issue. And again, I'm not saying that, or I'd make the point that I'm not necessarily saying that the use of women in a security force is always bad, but more than one person has pointed out that the percentage of women in the Secret Service is so small that the idea that you would have three women on the same protective service detail at the same time is mathematically impossible, which tends to say either there was intentional intervention to make that happen or there's just a breakdown of supervision, which I think there was a breakdown of supervision.

The fact that, you know, the rooftop in question was outside of the perimeter, despite being there, the kind of thing that just standing on the objective and looking at would tell you that there is something very wrong tells me that the person in charge was an idiot, mostly because I think if you were going to, again, engaging in speculation, if I were. actually going to assassinate the president, I wouldn't do it on a rooftop in broad daylight. You want to have the person hypothetically have something that looks like an illness or an accident. That's how you assassinate somebody and get away with it because, you know, acts of violence are obvious and I always have a repercussion and tend to make the target side coalesce around an alternative leader, meaning it tends to harden the loyalty of your opposition.

So I don't think, again, anybody in establishment planned on assassinating Trump. At the same time, I obviously don't think that Trump or his side took, made a stage an attempted assassination because we talk about the fact that if he had been one inch in the other direction, the bullet would have killed him. You can't thread the needle, so to speak, with firearms in that way. that's not how guns work. So I don't think anybody would intentionally put themselves in that situation. So I absolutely do not think this was an intentional assassination by any, excuse me, intentional act by anybody on either side, the spectrum, either the establishment or his side. I do think it was a breakdown that allowed this to happen.

As far as the issue, whether or not this person was radicalized, the guy who actually fired the weapon, we don't know any information, and I hesitate to say anything about that because we have no concrete details at any point, and the total lack of concrete details forthcoming from anybody, the fact that was at the last two days, the head of the Secret Service, was there were hearings on Congress, and her answer to everything was I have to refer you to the FBI. I get tells me that there is an intentional cover-up of the investigation that's taking place, which again is what a, um,

an organization in decline because of competency. That's how they behave. Did I answer your question? I'm sorry. I'm rambling. No, that's fine. You,

the, um, you know, what I would say is if somebody wanted, if somebody wanted a, you know, pop his melon on live TV, they would have popped his mel on live TV.

Yeah. I mean, it just... Yeah, and again, if I'm opposed to him and I want to eliminate him, I'm not going to shoot him. You know, he's in his 70s, a random heart attack in the engineered. You know, an illness that, you know, suddenly drives him into sepsis, look, people are going to be skeptical, but it's easier to engineer. And I'm just saying that looking at what we know about assassination of programs, especially from What came out from, you know, the KGB after the Soviet archives were opened to the West is those are the things that were sometimes done when they wanted to assassinate Soviet dissidents. So if a competent actor would have done this in a much better way, is my point.

And again, you wouldn't even need guns. You could engineer access to them and make it look like an accident. Right. I think that's why some people are like, oh, this has to be staged in order to do this. And so there was no bullet and it was, yeah, I mean, it's just, I can't deal with it anymore. Exactly, right. Real politics. I'm interested in real politics.

I'm not interested in that. Exactly, right. And the fact that they killed one supporter, wounded two other, we don't even know the two wounded people are. We just know they were close and they were hit in the general vicinity. So this is not example of a good. stage film production or, you know, media production. So they would have done a better job in that regard if somebody in Trump's camp we're going to do this.

And again, as you said, Rail Politic, this whole project I recommended, because again, that's like, let's do the work of actually looking at what the exercise of real power looks like instead of... Ready for huge savings? Well, mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Lidl items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast.

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Well, I think it's time to wrap up. Is there anything else you wanted to add to this before the next episode when I start doing the reading? No, I mean, the big thing is just letting the reader know that the 2016 edition, which you can buy or pirate lots of places is. Get a copy and I would recommend they go and just read through the 2016 introduction. And you can go in Google Lukewax biography and the background of this book beforehand. Just an idea of what you're going into before you go in there.

And again, Lutveck is not our guy, but he is a professional. He wrote on this topic. And again, we're trying to do the real world of real work of understanding what rail politics looks like. And, you know, you can do it for free. John, I appreciate you coming on this show. Hopefully, sometime you can come on in the future. And maybe we'll just talk about, like, random shit. Yeah.

Yeah, that'd be cool. And definitely. And let me know. All right, no problem. Take care. You too, sir. Bye. I want to welcome everyone to part one, the official part one, first part of my reading of Kudaita.

And I have a special guest here, Daryl Cooper. How you doing, Darrow? Doing great, man. It's always good to be on. Yeah, yeah. So tell me, I asked John when I had him on before, when did Quditabai Lutbuk, come on to your radar? I think I read this book of maybe, gosh, it must have been 15 years ago now. Yeah, around 2009, 2010.

And I was reading a lot of that kind of stuff. I was reading a lot of Peterdale Scott and, you know, reading a lot about just like the Banana Award, just all the 20th century kind of Cold War stuff. And I read through it back then. But I'll tell you, it's one of those books that I think the last 15 years that have passed since that time have really given the book a new flavor in a way because, you know, I read it back then and I enjoyed it. I've been rereading it because we're going to talk about it.

And I've been getting a lot more out of it. There's a lot more to draw on for sure. So I'm looking forward to it. Cool. So what we're going to do is the preface to the first edition is one page. I'll read it and then skip to the first chapter. If there's anything you want to comment in on here on the preface, just let me know. All right.

Let's go. This is a handbook. It is therefore not concerned with the theoretical analysis of the Kuditaa, but rather with the formulation of the techniques which can be employed to seize power within a state. It can be compared to a cookery book in the sense that it aims at enabling any layperson equipped with enthusiasm and the right ingredients to carry out his own coup. Only a knowledge of the rules is required. Two words of caution.

In the first place, in order to carry out a successful coup, certain preconditions must be present, just as in cooking boule-a-base, one needs the right sorts of fish to start with. Second, readers should be aware that the penalty of failure is far greater than having to eat out of a tin. The rewards, too, are greater. It may be objected that, should such a handbook be inadequate or misleading, the readers will be subject to great dangers, while if it is an efficient guide to the problems, it may lead to upheavils and disturbance My defense is that coups are already common, and if, as a result of this book, a greater number of people learn how to carry them out, this is merely a step towards the democratization of the coup, a fact that all persons of liberal sentiments should applaud. Finally, it should be noted that the techniques here discussed are politically neutral and concerned only with the objective of seizing control of the state and not at all with subsequent policies.

Let's jump into chapter one. Let's do it. All right. Chapter one, what is Akuta Ta? I got a couple quotes here. I shall be sorry to commence the era of peace by a kudata such as that I had in contemplation. Duke of Wellington, 1811. No other way of salvation remained except for the Army's intervention.

Constantine Collius, April 21st, 1967, Athens. All right. Starting with the text. Though the term coup d'etat has been used for more than three centuries, the feasibility of the coup derives from a comparatively recent development, the rise of the modern state with its professional bureaucracy and standing armed forces. The power of the modern state largely depends on this permanent machinery, which, with its archives, files, records, and officials can follow intimately,

and, if it so desires, control the activities of less. organizations and individuals. Totalitarian states merely use more fully the detailed and comprehensive information available to most states. However, however, democratic, the instrument is largely the same, though it is used differently. Right off the bat when you start reading this, it really seems like he's describing the managerial state, right? What has existed since, let's call it the late 20s to early 30s?

You're muted? Yeah, I forgot about that. There's like a Weberian aspect to it too, right? Like Max Weber describes three forms of like organizational or political authority. You got like the charismatic or the traditional or the legal rational. And that's what he's talking about here. And, and, you know, for Lutwock, the coup is really only possible with the legal rational. When you get that distinction between the political authority and the state machinery where there's sort of two distinct things. And you can swap people. out at the top and they are conferred genuine power from their position, you know, in a, in a traditional authority structure, which is just basically like a patronage system, everything from, you know, say Saudi Arabia today to feudal systems in the past, you know, these things were built on organic relationships. Like that's what the system of power represented was the totality of these organic relationships. And a coup you can't really pull off a coup unless you're maybe, you know, a brother taking out the,

you know, the crown prince and taking his place or something like that. But that's about it. And same with charismatic authority where leader, you know, leadership sort of coalesces around the person of a single charismatic individual. A lot of times you don't have much of an organization to go with that. The organization is, you know, the gathering of people around the man. and it's very hard to pull off a coup in that environment. Once the legal rational system gets in place, though, and especially once it gains a sort of autonomy and self-awareness of itself as a class and as a function, it starts to learn how to defend itself,

and it'll start to fend off challenges from charismatic leaders or traditionalist, you know, patronage type type. networks. And, you know, and it's only that type that, yeah, that you can run a coup against. All right. Onward. The growth of modern state bureaucracies has two implications that are crucial for the feasibility of the coup. The emergence of clear distinctions between the permanent machinery of state and the political leadership and the fact that state bureaucracies have structured hierarchies with definite chains of command. The distinction between the bureaucratic as an employee of the state and as a personal servant of the ruler is a new one,

and both the British and the American system show residual features of the earlier structure. The importance of this development lies in the fact that if the bureaucrats are linked to the leadership and a legal seizure of power must take the form of a palace revolution, which essentially concerns the manipulation of the person of the ruler. That ruler may be forced to accept new policies or new advisors, or may be killed or held captive. But whatever happens, the palace revolution can only be conducted from the inside and by insiders. An insider might be the commander of the palace guard as in ancient Rome or the Ethiopia of the 1960s, and if the dynastic system is preserved, the aim is to replace the unwanted ruler with a more malleable descendants.

The coup is a much more democratic affair. It can be conducted from the outside and operates in the area outside the government, but within the state. the area formed by the permanent professional civil service, the armed forces, and the police. The aim is to detach the permanent employees of the state from the political leadership, and usually this cannot be done if the two are linked by political, ethnic, or traditional loyalties. I don't know that people saw, like when you read that last paragraph, how clearly you can see what he talks about with, the aim is to detach to permanent employees, which we would call the deep state now from the

political leadership. And usually this cannot be done. I don't know that when he wrote this, it was even sure Ernam had written the managerial revolution 30 years, 33 years earlier, or 30 years earlier. But I don't know that that was. Ready for huge savings? Well, mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th, Because the Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items, all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself.

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by the Central Bank of Ireland. As widely understood as it is now, the fact that we're basically run by managerialism. Yeah, and it's interesting, given that the people who kind of put over that revolution were quite explicit about their goal in doing that, in detaching political authority and government machinery, right? If you go back to like the late 1800s, most American cities, local and even state governments, which the federal government was much smaller and weaker back then. So that meant most of government in America, you know, it was run by ethnic patronage networks

that sort of emerged more or less organically as a way of organizing people for political activity. And the progressive movement was a very explicit, you know, the good government movement, a very explicit sort of attack on those patronage networks. And, you know, you can take that all the way up to like Colonel House's book or all the way eventually in the apotheosis, obviously, in the New Deal Revolution when that all really came together. And they're quite explicit about it, but for some reason, yeah, it's something that's been lost a bit today.

You know, when you, when we were kids, we watched Schoolhouse Rye, they had that little commercial, you know, where there's like the piece of paper and he's like, hey, folks, I'm a bill. And here's how I get past. There's three branches of government and so forth. And like, you know, and this is how your government works. And that, you know, that's not how the government works at all, right? I mean, the government, 99% of the government and certainly all of the functional parts of the government, the ones that actually take action, it's this unelected bureaucracy that that's purpose is to be completely detached from political authority, which is to say, you know, in an ideal world, or if our system worked the way it was supposed to,

which is to say that it's detached from accountability from the population. All right. Onward. In the last dynasty of Imperial China, as in present-day African states, it was primarily an ethnic bond that secured the loyalty of the state apparatus. The Manchu dynasty was careful to follow native Chinese customs, and it employed Han Chinese in the civil service at all levels. But the crucial posts in the high magistracy and the army were filled by the descendants of the Jurchans who had entered China with their chiefs, the founders of the dynasty. Similarly, African rulers typically appoint members of their own tribe to the key posts in the armed forces, police, and security services. When a party machine controls civil service appointments, either as part of a more general totalitarian control or because of a very long period in office, as in post-war Italy till the late

1980s, political associates are appointed to the senior levels of the bureaucracy, partly in order to protect the regime and partly to ensure the sympathetic execution of policies. In the communist countries of yesterday year, all senior jobs were, of course, held by party. apparatchiks. Saudi Arabia provides an instance of traditional bonds. In this case, the lack of modern know-how on the part of the traditional tribal affiliates of the Royal House has meant that what could not be done individually has been done organizationally. The modern army, manned by some hundred thousand unreliable city dwellers, is outnumbered by the 125,000 or so enrolled in the white army of the Bedouin, or at least nominally Bedouin, followers of the Saudis.

officially known as the Haras Alwatshani, Guard of the Homeland, or National Guard, the so-called White Army. It includes a tribal militia of some 25,000 officially designated the Imam Muhammad bin Saud-mechanized brigade, based in the capital of Riyadh, and plainly meant as an anti-coup force.

Have you been to Saudi? I have been to Riyadh once, and other than that, I got stuck on a tarmac and a helicopter in 120-degree heat for about eight hours one time. All right, I'll keep going. Such ethnic or traditional bonds between the political leadership and the heads of the bureaucracy and the armed forces are not typical of the modern state, while looser class or ethnic affiliations will tend to embrace groups large enough to be successfully infiltrated by the planners, the coup. As a direct consequence of its sheer size, in order to achieve even a minimum of efficiency, the state bureaucracy has to divide its work into clear-cut areas of competence, which are assigned to different departments. Within each department, there must be an accepted chain of command,

and standard procedures have to be followed. Thus, a given piece of information or a given order is followed up in a stereotyped manner, and if the order comes from the appropriate source, at the appropriate level, it is carried out. In the more critical parts of the state apparatus, the armed forces, the police, and the security services, all these characteristics are intensified with an even greater degree of discipline and rigidity. The apparatus of the state is, therefore,

to some extent, a machine that will normally behave in a fairly predictable and automatic manner. What happens if it stops operating in a predictable and automatic manner. Well, I mean, I think what Lubbock's saying here is that, you know, he's pointing out that I think he's probably setting up to defend his thesis that you can actually speak, for lack of a better word, like scientifically about these processes. You know, that this is something that these are systems that have certain rules and laws

and guidelines that they run by. And so you can actually speak about them in general terms. but what happens if they start if they stop reacting in a predictable manner I mean at that point you're very very very close to the edge you know the whole

the whole purpose of the I mean if you think about like the base level of all government right and maybe this has something to do with Weber's traditional you know patrimony based system of

authority but at the bottom of it is whoever can provide physical security and whoever can distribute resources that people need to live or secure and distribute those resources, then that's going to, that's the government in time. Like it might not be today, but eventually if the government that you think you have can't do those things, then that's not going to be the government for long. You know, you see this with like terrorist organ, I mean, we had to come to terms with this, like in Iraq, for example, When we went into Iraq, people really did go in with all of these, you know, for all the cynicism of the neocons and everything, like these people when they, you know, they really had sort of siop themselves into believing that, you know, the people of the world are just Americans in embryo. And as soon as they're given the opportunity, we get rid of Saddam Hussein or whoever, then they're going to throw roses at our feet and be happy to become, because they were thinking of, you know, Poland in 19. You know, Czechoslovakia in 1989. Like you just take that boot off their neck and they want to wear blue jeans and basically be Americans. Like if they're given the opportunity. And they really did sigh off themselves into believing that to a degree. But then once we got in there, we had to deal with the reality, which the terrorist organization, the insurgents understood much better than we did at first, which was, you know, they knew that if they could prove that the Americans could not protect you, could not protect you, could not.

provide physical security and that the Americans weren't able to ensure that you and your family could eat or have water, then we weren't going to be governing that country for very long, you know, and the people who are capable of turning those things, the violence spigot or the resource spigot on and off, if the insurgents through violence could make that be them, then they would, you know, replace us and they understood that. We had to kind of, we had to kind of adapt to that. And we got to the point once you got up to like 06, 07, where we did kind of just accept that. You know, Petraeus went out with like hundreds of millions of dollars and just started paying off tribal cheeks. Not so much so that, you know, it wasn't so that they could go stuff it

in their Swiss bank account and flee the country if things go bad later on. It was so that we were conferring upon them the legitimacy they needed as distributors of resources. you know, they could actually give their people things that they needed while we provided physical security to actually get them on our side. You know, that's like really the fundamental kind of base level of all government. And so at that, I mean, in that sense, if it starts acting unpredictably at that point, then you're already in a period of, you know, of severe breakdown. Yeah, I remember a couple of years ago, my friend Rachel and I were discussing texting back and asking about, well, if everything collapsed, who's in charge?

And she said, well, obviously, whoever can feed you. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, I think if you go back, even to just the origins of human government, you know, once you get past the sort of band level of organization, you know, where the guy in charge is your grandfather or whatever. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear.

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Have your say online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash northwest. You see this, I mean, it's built into our myths. You see it in history where we have access. to it is that the basic form of government is a warrior and his friends. You know, if you're a farmer and you're out here and you have a bunch of lions terrorizing your livestock and, you know, threatening your children when they go outside, and it's a pack of lions and you're a farmer,

you know, in the days before firearms, you know, that's a real problem for you. In fact, that's like a, that's a life or death problem for you, not just whether or not you get killed by a lion, but whether you can actually do the things you need to do to eat. And so a guy shows up on a horse with six of his friends and says, where are the lions? They're that way. And he goes and kills those lions. That dude's in charge.

And you're fine with that, you know. And that's a legitimate basis of human government in a lot of ways. All right. A coup operates by taking advantage of this machine-like behavior, both during and after the takeover. During the coup, because it uses. as parts of the state apparatus to seize the controlling levers over the rest, and afterward, because the value of the levers depends on the degree to which the state really functions as a machine.

We will see that some states are so well organized that the machine is sufficiently sophisticated to exercise discretion, according to a given conception of what is proper and what is not, in the orders that it executes. This is the case in the most advanced countries, and in such circumstances, a coup is very difficult to carry out. In a few states, the bureaucracy is so small that the apparatus is too simple and too intimately linked with the leadership to allow room for a coup, as is still the case, perhaps, in the ex-British protectorates of southern Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland. Fortunately, most states are between those two extremes, with bureaucratic machines both large and unsophisticated and thus highly vulnerable to those who can identify and seize the right levers.

One of the most striking developments of the 20th century was the great decline in general political stability. Since the French Revolution, governments have been overthrown at an increasing pace. In the 19th century, the French experienced two revolutions and two regimes collapsed following the military defeat. In 1958, the change of regime that brought Charles de Gaulle to enduring power was a blend of those elements. People everywhere have followed the French example, and the lifespan of regimes has tended to decrease while the lifespan of their subjects has increased. This contrasts sharply with the relative attachment to the system of constitutional monarchy displayed in the 19th century, When Greeks, Bulgarians, and Romanians secured their freedom from the Turkish colonial system, they immediately went over to Germany in order to shop around for a suitable royal family.

Crowns, flags, and decorations were designed and purchased from reputable English suppliers. Royal palaces were built, and where possible, hunting lodges, royal mistresses, and a local aristocracy were provided as fringe benefits. 20th century peoples have, on the other hand, showed a marked lack of interest in monarchies in their paraphernalia. When the British kindly provided them with a proper royal family, unhappy Iraqis made numerous efforts to dispense with it before finally succeeding by massacre in 1958. Military and other right-wing forces have, meanwhile, tried to keep up with violent mass movements, using their own illegal methods to seize power and overthrow regimes. Why did the regimes of the 20th century prove to be so fragile? It is, after all, paradoxical that this fragility increased

while the established procedures for securing changes in government were becoming more flexible. The political scientist will reply that although the procedures became more flexible, the pressures for change were also becoming stronger, and the increase in flexibility did not keep up with the increased social and economic stresses. violent meth you want to say something yeah i actually wanted to go back a little bit to i was thinking about when he was talking about you know that you have to kind of have this goldilocks bureaucracy right this goldilocks state where it is developed enough that it's worth taking the reins of you know that if you that if you get the control of it then you actually have power that it you know

it's developed enough for that, but that it's not so mature that it can exercise self-will, you know, if it doesn't like who the leader is or what the leader wants to do. And, you know, there's a sense in which, like, if you think of like the National Socialist Revolution in Germany, you know, obviously that wasn't a coup or coup d'a or anything, but it really was like a, I mean, it was a revolution in the system of government there for sure that, that, if you were to go back, you know, before that, well, it was something that like, it like not understanding this, the, this part, I think kind of led to, it was part of what led to the conflict, uh, that eventually emerged between, uh, the regime, uh, and the sort

of the old school, hardcore revolutionaries of like the essay, for example, right? Because once Hitler got into power, he had to, he had to deal with the fact, that this machinery existed, that he was now at the controls of that he had to compromise with on some level, you know, because it was developed enough to resist anything he wanted to do if he couldn't co-opt it like that. And he had to make certain compromises to accommodate it. And, you know, the Ernst Roams of the world and stuff, these were hardcore, like, street revolutionaries, and they didn't like that. And you see that in a lot of these revolutions. And it's why, you know, in revolutions all over the world throughout the 20th century, the first thing that happens is the revolutionary sees control, the government.

And the second thing that happens is most of the revolutionaries get killed off by the boss, you know. Yeah. And if you study, you know, if you study the rise of the national socialist and they're taking power, it's pretty clear why. you know, Thomas went over that. We did a whole episode on that. And, you know, he just liked that from a real politic standpoint. It's like, yeah, these are the guys who brought you here.

But, I mean, some of these guys just, they weren't going to be along for the ride. And they were not going to let go on their own. Yeah. This is a total off-topic digression real quick. But I'm just going to throw it out there in case you have anybody who wants to pick this one up. Like, if I was, if I had any talent, as a fiction writer, like as a novelist.

You know the book I would write. I would love to read a book that is about, it's a biography or a mini biography of the period of Hitler's life from the rise to power, like through the 20s, you know, from the putch and on its way up, all the way up and ends in 1934 when he had to kill Rome and a lot of these essay guys and just the inner turmoil that he had to have gone through,

you know, having to take out so many of the people who had, you know, been, who had ridden with him up to that point and been through everything with him and coming to the conclusion and having to carry out something that, you know, that was necessary, but maybe very distasteful to him. I think that would be a great story. Yeah, I think most people,

most people hear that story just think he was an absolute madman and don't take consideration you know what he thought what he believed was coming and what needed and you know what the what the fight was actually going to be and well yeah well let's go let's go on we get detoured on that one for a while all right violent methods are generally used when legal methods of securing a governmental change are useless because they are either too rigid, as in the case of ruling monarchies where the ruler actually controls policy formation, or not rigid enough. It was once remarked, for example, that the throne of Russia was, until the 17th century, neither hereditary nor elective, but occupative. The long series of

abdications forced by the great boyar landlords and the Strzzi, the Kremlin palace guards, had weakened the hereditary principle so that whoever took the throne became czar. Precedents by birth counted for little. Some contemporary republics have ended up in this position, which comes about when a long series of illegal seizures of power leads to a decay of the legal and political structures needed to produce new governments. Thus, Syria went through more than a dozen coups before the Assad family dynasty was established

by Hafez al-Assad's 1970 coup and the provisions for all open general elections written in the Haurani constitution could no longer be applied because the necessary supervisory machinery decayed and disappeared. Assuming, however, that there is an established procedure for changing the leadership,

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electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash northwest. What we call them depends on what side we are on, but skipping some of the details, we use one of the following terms. All right, so a bunch of listed terms here, though, with brief explanations. Revolution. Oh, sorry. I was just going to jump in real quick and say, like, you know, there's a like the obvious geopolitical reason that the post-colonial states in the 20th century were the places where coup you know coups happened more than any other places one part of it's geopolitical and it's obvious right that was the those were the places that were up for grabs in the cold war right

and so they had both sides sort of vying for them but also from like a luke walk perspective you know it's interesting because they those were like those were the countries that kind of fit the model that he's talking about here the best in the sense that you had these, say, in Africa, you had these countries that really were only countries because the French and the British drew some lines on a map, right? That's why it's a country. That has a state machinery that is somewhat well developed because it was either left in place or put in place as the colonizers were leaving. And so there's this machinery that can kind of run the country, can kind of defend itself against interlopers and so forth that exists. And whoever controls it, you know, is sort of in charge. But there's no, you know, the population itself is just broken up into tribes. They don't identify with each other.

There's no nation underlying this thing. In other words, the power structure doesn't actually represent any organic power. It's just this thing that's there that sort of, that's sort of, that's sort of, posed on people. It's not, it's not representative of anything that really, like, on the ground, right? Like, if you look at Afghanistan, for example, you know, there are people who are, I mean, call them geniuses or anything. There's people with basic common sense who back in 2001 were saying this is a, this is just never going to work in the long term for the very simple reason that the Northern Alliance, all these people that like we're going over there and wanting to, to ally with,

that these people, it's a big coalition of all the different minorities. groups in Afghanistan. And you want to bring this coalition together. They have nothing in common. They really don't have anything that they share other than their opposition to the posthum majority. And so it's going to make them completely dependent on the United States occupation forces. And once that occupation forces leave, whether it's now, whether it's in 100 years,

those people are going to scatter to the winds because the real power, the organic power in this country is the posthum majority that is organized under the Taliban. And, you know, and that's real power. Whether or not they are represented in the government or not, usually, you know, reality wins out. And so you have a lot of these African countries and other post-colonial countries that had that state machinery with nothing underneath it. And even a place like Liberia, Liberia is actually a great example because it was never a colony. You know, it was like you had essentially like Monrovia was like a city state where you know a bunch of former American slaves had gone to had gone to live and they never really even left

Monrovia or the immediate environs of Monrovia much they didn't go out to the hinterlands you know or anything but then once the French and the British really started to get on their colonization spree in Africa we started putting pressure on the the Americo Liberians in Monrovia we're like you need to become a country you can't just be a city state. We need you to form the country of Liberia and we're going to define its borders so that we can say to the French and British, like, you can't come in here. You have to stay out of this area. And so they did. And they went and they created a quote unquote country of Liberia with a government of Liberia, you know, and they created a sort of national quote unquote

police force that went out and found which tribal authorities and chiefs could be co-opted, getting rid of the ones that couldn't and then reinforcing the co-opted one's authority with the national security forces. But it was always just very, very, very, very inorganic. You know, it never had any purchase like on the ground in most of the country. It was something that existed on paper to a large degree. And you saw in the 20th century that, you know, with the slightest push, a place like that comes apart. All right. First one, revolution. The action is conducted, initially at any rate, by uncoordinated popular masses, and it aims at changing the social and political structures, as well as the personalities and the

leadership. The term revolution has gained a certain popularity, and many coups are graced with it because of the implication that it was the people, rather than a few plotters who did the whole thing. Thus, the obscure aims Abed Abid al-Karim Qasim had a in mind when he overthrew the Iraqi regime of King Faisal, the second, and Prime Minister Nourri Essaid, are locally known as the sacred principles of the July 14th revolution. Next one is Civil War. Civil War is outright warfare between elements of the armed forces and or the population at large. The term is perpetually unfashionable. Whenever there is a civil

war, all sides typically deny its existence, variously passing it off as an international war, such as the war between the states or of the Confederacy, or more often as a foreign aggression, though in Franco's Spain, the Civil War of 1936 to 1939, was always La Cruisaida, the crusade. Pronunci mi a siamiento. This is an essentially Spanish and South American version of the military. coup d'etat, but many recent African coups have also taken this particular form. In its original 19th century Spanish version, it was a highly ritualized process. First came to the Troubos, literally the works, in which the opinions of army officers were

sounded. The next step was the compromisos in which commitments were made and rewards promised, then came the call for action, and finally the appeal to the troops to follow their officers and rebellion against the government. The pronunciamanto was often a liberal rather than a reactionary phenomenon, and the theoretical purpose of the takeover was to ascertain the national will, a typical liberal concept. Later, as the army became increasingly right-wing, while Spanish governments became less so,

the theory shifted from the neoliberal national will to the neo-conservative real-will theory. The latter postulates that the existence of a national essence, a sort of permanent spiritual structure, which the wishes of the majority may not always express. The army was entrusted with the interpretation and preservation of this essential Spain and the obligation to protect it against the government and, if need be, against the people. The pronunciamiento was organized and led by a particular army leader, but it was carried out in the name of the entire officer corps, unlike the Putsch, which is carried out by a faction within the army, or the coup, which can also be executed by civilians using some army units. The pronunciamiento leads to a takeover by the army as a whole.

Many African takeovers in which the army had participated as a whole, were therefore very similar to the classic pronunciamiento. What do you, how do you, this was written before, before Chile, 1973. How would, how would that be, how would that even fit into that? Yeah, I think it would fit in to what he's saying, you know, in the sense of representing at least the majority of the armed forces. You know, it's another interesting example is like, when, um, Cece and Egypt throughout the Muslim Brotherhood.

And, you know, you saw in that situation, I mean, in a way, you could say that wasn't, it wasn't quite a coup in the sense that what was really happening was the real power in the, in the country was revealing itself, you know, that the, that the deep state there was always in charge election or no election. And it was, it was making that clear. but still like that's how it played out but it but when that happened you know sure Mubarak was in jail and everything but if you looked at it I mean every time Cici was on stage like he was on camera somewhere it's just nothing but four stars flanking them on either side and if you look at something like the 20 was it 15 or 16 attempt against Erdogan and I remember when they first went on the the people who were pushing the putch or coup, whatever you want to call. I guess this would be a putch in loot walks terms.

And I remember watching it and seeing like, I think there was like a two star on stage talking. But then there was like a couple of kernels. And then there was like a captain on stage. I'm like, if you got a captain on stage for your coup, like it's over. This is not going to work. There's just no, he should be like getting coffee for somebody for all the four stars that are out.

This is not going to work. And sure enough, it didn't work. All right, let's move on to the putch. Employers, did you know, you can now reward you and your staff with up to 1,500 euro and gift cards annually, completely tax-free. And even better, you can spread it over five different occasions. Now's the perfect time to try Options Card. Options Card is Ireland's brand-new, multi-choice employee gift card,

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electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4. Northwest. Essentially, a wartime or immediately post-war phenomenon, a putch is attempted by a formal body within the armed forces under its appointment, under its appointed leadership, excuse me. The Cornylov putch is a clear example. Lavere Cornelove, a general in charge of an army group in northern Russia, attempted to seize the then-Petrograd, St. Peter's, in order to establish a fighting regime that would prosecute the war. Had he succeeded, the city would perhaps have borne his name instead of Lenin, as it did until 1991. Liberation. A state may be said by supporters of the change to be liberated when its government is

overthrown by foreign military or diplomatic intervention. A classic case of this was the installation of the communist leadership in Romania in 1947. The USSR forced to then King Michael to accept a new cabinet by threatening direct military force by the Soviet army. You ever read what Evela had to say about the Iron Guard? No, I've read a lot of Evela, but I can't remember anything about that. It's like a 10-page article, and he said that if anybody was going to defeat Bolshevism in Europe, it would have been, it would have been the Romanian Iron Guard. It would have been Corgiano and the Romanian Iron Guard.

He said, just because not only a nationalistic feeling, but also the Orthodox, the Orthodox feeling. And then just a, they had recognized the influence of certain groups in Bolshevism very early on and were, and we're writing about it. Yeah, and maybe that's why, you know, the Legionnaires probably. got it worse than just about every other anti-communist group in Europe, you know, in Peteschi prison and some of the other places. Oh, man. All right. Let me keep telling you.

I don't want to talk about that. It makes it. It makes me ill. War of National Liberation, Insurgency, etc. In this form of internal conflict, the aim of the initiating party is not to seize power within the state, but rather to set up a rival state structure. This can be politically, ethnically, or religious. based, as with the Taliban, whose aim is in Afghanistan wholly converted to their own

Daobandi or Wahhabi Islam, which contrives to be both the official state religion of Saudi Arabia and a rigorously fanatical ideology that denies any legitimacy whatsoever to any other form of Islam, let alone non-Muslim faiths. As for secessionist insurgencies, they are necessarily ethnically based. Though ethnicity can be all in the mind, as with the Eritreans and Ethiopians, as with the Kurds of Iraq, as well as Iran and Turkey, the Somalis of Kenya and Ethiopia, the Karen people in Burma, and formerly the Nagas of India. All right. The definition of the coup d'etat. I'm going to get a drink real quick. Akutatah involves some elements of all these different methods by which power can be seized, but unlike most of them, the kudatah. is not assisted by the intervention of the masses or by any large-scale form of combat by military

forces. The assistance of these forms of direct force would no doubt make it easier to seize power, but it would be unrealistic to think that they would be available to the organizers of a coup. Because we will not be in charge of the armed forces, we cannot hope to start planning of a coup with sizable military units already under our control, nor will the pre-coup government usually allow us to carry out the propaganda and organization necessary to make effective use of the broad masses of the people. A second distinguishing feature of a coup is that it does not imply any particular political orientation. Revolutions are usually leftist, while the push and the pronunciamiento are usually initiated by right-wing forces.

A coup, however, is politically neutral, and there is no presumption that any particular policies will be followed after the seizure of power. It is true that many coups have been of a decidedly right-wing character, but there is nothing inevitable about that. If a coup does not make use of the masses or of warfare, what instrument of power will enable it to seize control of the state? The short answer is that power will come from the state itself. The long answer makes up the bulk of this book. The following is our formal and functional definition of a coup. A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder. And there's a footnotes for chapter one.

Start chapter two and see how far we get. No, whenever you need to break off, just let me know. Chapter 2. When is a coup d'etat possible? Quoting, The Bolsheviks have no right to wait for the Congress of Soviets. They must take power immediately. Victory is assured, and there are nine chances out of ten that it will be bloodless. To wait is a crime against the revolution. That's Vladimir, Ilyov, Lennon, October, 1917.

The process of decolonization that started soon after the end of the second one, World War, first doubled and then more than tripled the number of independent states so that the opportunities open to us have expanded in a most gratifying manner. We have to recognize, however, that not all states make good targets for our attentions. There is nothing to prevent us from carrying out a coup in, say, the United Kingdom, but we would probably be unable to stay in power for more than a short time. The public and the bureaucracy have a basic understanding of the nature and legal basis of the government, and they would react in order to restore a legitimate leadership. This reaction renders any initial success of the coup meaningless, and it would arise even though

the pre-coup government may have been unpopular, and the new faces may be attractive. The reaction would arise from the fact that a significant part of the population takes an active interest in political life and regularly participates in it. This implies a recognition that that the power of the government derives from its legitimate origin, and even those who have no reason to support the old guard, have many good reasons to support the principle of legitimacy. I guess that's really important when you have so many people, a good percentage of your population who's actually employed by the government

or living off of its teeth. Yeah, it is, and I think you see exactly what he's talking about in how the way a lot of conservatives in the United States today, you know, they can be locked up for 15 years for trespassing in the capital. They can be spied on for their political activity, whatever, all of these things. And they still will fall back on a constitution, you know, and it's because they do. And that's, look, that's a noble impulse. You know, I mean, it's a sense that they have that,

You know, we have this bulwark that if we give up, you know, we give that up, then there's going to be real chaos in the other side of it. And so we have to suffer what we must in order to sustain it. But that's that, you know, principle of legitimacy. The people hold on to long after it really has any reality to it. We are all familiar with the periodic surveys, which show that, say, 20% of the sample failed to correctly name the prime minister. and we know that a large part of the population has only the vagus contact with politics. Nevertheless, in most developed countries, those who do take an active interest in politics form, in absolute terms, a very large group. Controversial policy decisions stimulate and bring to the surface this participation.

Pressure groups are formed, letters are sent to the press, and the politicians, petitions and demonstrations are organized, and this adds up to a continuing dialogue between the rulers and the ruled. I automatically think of Uncle Ted over socialization when I read those two paragraphs right there. This dialogue does not depend necessarily on the existence of a formally democratic political system, even in one party states where power is in the hands of a few self-appointed leaders, a muted but nevertheless active dialogue can take place. The higher organizations of the party can discuss party decisions and in time of relative relaxation. The discussions extend to the larger numbers in the lower echelons

and to publications reflecting different currents, though only within the wider framework of the accepted ideology and the broad policy decisions of the leadership. The value of the dialogue from that takes place in non-democratic states. Let me repeat that again. The value of the dialogue that takes place in non-democratic states varies greatly. In the former Yugoslavia, for example, the Communist Party contrived. Okay, so I'm assuming this is, these are updates that he wrote in the, he wrote in the new edition. I think what is it, the 2016 edition? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, 2016, yeah. In the former Yugoslavia, for example, the Communist Party contrived to remain in control for decades, while nevertheless functioning to an increasing extent as a

semi-open forum for increasingly free, increasingly wide-ranging debates on major political issues. The press, though, unable to assert truly independent opinions, at least echo those debates. In the process, while there was still no democracy, the population evolved from subjection to participation, learning to scrutinize and question orders instead of simply obeying them so that they were increasingly likely to resist a coup. In the Arab world, by contrast, the nominal ruling parties that functioned from the 1960s, the Arab Socialist Union of Egypt and the Ba'ath Party of Syria and Iraq, very soon degenerated into mere rubber stamps for the ruling dictators, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Havez al-Assad, and Saddam Hussein.

As time went on, their pretended deference to party councils dissolved, but all along they made every significant decision by themselves, while the parties could only cheer them on. When the question came up of whether Egypt's ASU-dominated National Assembly would accept Nasser's withdrawal of his resignation following the June 1967 debacle known as the Six-Day War, an observer pointed out that the Assembly will jolly do what it is told. You won't comment on that at all? I think it's safe to say that that was an English observer. With the Yugoslav Communist Party, the ASU and the Rolling Bath Party now but a memory,

the very greatest of questions across the entire horizon of global politics is, of course, the future of the Zhang Guo, the Communist Party of China. Can't help you. Yeah, the Communist Party of China. Until the 2012 appointment of Xi Jinping as Party General Central. Secretary, President of the People's Republic of China, and the chairman of the Central Military Commission, significantly the most powerful of all three. The party's future seemed quite predictable.

It was becoming a holding company for all the public wealth and much of the private wealth of China, whereby officials continued to receive their modest salaries that did not exceed R&B 11,385, or basically $1,554 U.S. dollars per month in 2015, even in the very highest rank. Meanwhile, the party officials collected large amounts of bribes, ensuring a degree of affluence, even at the village level, rising to sometimes very great wealth at the top. As a faithful fan of Beijing's top discos, I grew accustomed to seeing the young sons of party officials driving up in their Ferraris and Lamborghinis. A little aside there by Ludvok.

Yeah, a lot of those young sons of party officials who were driving Ferraris and Lamborghinis are the people we call political prisoners in China right now that Xi had locked up for corruption. So, you know, that previous part you read too, it's like, you know, it's an interesting point because, you know, it kind of, it speaks to the fact, like we have this bias over here in most of the West.

I mean, definitely in America, that representative government, you know, the people being, gaining, having representation is synonymous with democracy. And I think that, you know, if you really think about it for more than two seconds, you know, we can see that there are functional democratic systems like ours, like so many in Europe, that don't represent their people at all that everybody's very unsatisfied with and they go their own way. but that even in one party states or dictatorial states, that there are other means of allowing people to dialogue with the government and express their needs and their interests. There are other ways to do it other than mass democracy. And I think, you know, there have been plenty of examples of governments throughout the 20th century.

Usually, you know, they didn't last too long, partly because we placed them in the crosshairs for one reason or another, who managed to represent. their people and involve them in the participation of their own governance without having everybody go to the polls every two or four years. All right. Moving on. We're going to finish up this section before he breaks off into, um, employers. Did you know, you can now reward you and your staff with up to 1,500 euro and gift cards annually, completely tax-free and even better.

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Before he breaks off, starts breaking off down like he did in the last section where he's doing revolution and he was doing, and we'll just finish this and I'll let you go. All right. But the continued transformation of the communist. Party of China into a mega corporation manned by the ambitious, duly rewarded with increasingly overt payoffs, was interrupted by the decision of Xi Jinping's high party colleagues to elevate him to a seat of unprecedented power. They did so most likely because they feared that the party's further degeneration into an open, corrupt enterprise would lead to an outright collapse. The problem with

bribes is that their distribution is very uneven, generating corrosive resentments and embarrassing leaks. As a result, Xi Jinping is left with the pretty problem of finding a substitute for both a putrefying ideology and the lost incentive of corruption with only Han nationalism ready at hand. Still for the time

being, the Communist Party persists as does subjection rather than citizenship. I think that's actually pretty insightful, I think. I think that's a pretty clear description of what's happening, right? Yeah.

Yeah. A running dialogue between rulers and the rule that precludes any coup can only exist if there is large enough section of society that is sufficiently literate, well-fed, and secure enough to talk back. Even then, certain conditions can lead to a deterioration of the relationship, and this sometimes generates sufficient apathy or outright distrust of the regime to make a coup possible. The events of 1958 in France were marked by a formal adherence to the then-constitutional rules, but were, nevertheless, analogous to a coup.

Twenty years of warfare, which had included the unanimous defeat of 1940, the German occupation, the installation of the authoritarian Vichy regime, and from 1946, long and losing continual wars in Indochina and Algeria, had thoroughly undermined the country's democratic consensus. The continual changes of government had dissipated the interest and respect of most voters and left the bureaucracy leaderless because the complex business of the ministries could not be mastered by ministers who were only in power for months or weeks. The French army was left to fight the bitter Algerian war with little guidance from Paris authorities because, more often than not, the ministries were too busy fighting for their survival

and the Assembly to worry about the other bloodier war. The cost of the Algerian war in both money and lives antagonized to general public from both the Army and the government, and many of the French felt a growing fear and distrust of the Army's leadership, whose national sentiments and martial ideology seemed alien to many of them and against the spirit of the times. While the structures of political life under the Fourth Republic were falling apart, Charles de Gaulle, the grand heroic figure long-in-simulated retirement,

gradually emerged as the only alternative to the chaos that threatened. When the army in Algeria appeared to be on the verge of truly drastic action, and yet another government was on the verge of collapse, de Gaulle was recalled. He was able to impose his own terms. On May 29, 1958, when René Cote, the last president of the Fourth Republic, called on him to form a government, which was invested on June 1st, De Gaulle was given extraordinary powers to rule by decree for six months and to write a new constitution.

Under the terms of this constitution, presented for consultation in mid-August and approved by referendum in September, elections were held in which de Gaul's newly formed union for the new republic, UNR party, won a majority. On December 21st, DeGal became the first president of the 5th Republic. He was an American-style president with wide executive powers, but without an American-style Congress to restrain them. By 1958, France had become politically inert and therefore ripe for a coup. The circumstances were unique, of course, but while the political structures of all highly developed countries

may seem too resilient to make them suitable targets, if acute enough, even temporary factors can weaken them fatally. Of those temporary factors, the most common are A, severe and prolonged economic crisis with large-scale unemployment and runaway inflation. B, a long and unsuccessful war or a major defeat, whether military or diplomatic. C. Chronic instability under a multi-party system.

Italy is an interesting example of an economically developed socially dynamic, but politically fragile country. Between 1948 and circa 1990, end of the Cold War, the persistence of a large communist party that opposed Italy's alignment with the West, if less vehemently after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, forced the moderate majority to keep voting for the increasingly corrupt democracia Christiana, D.C., which itself ruled with the smaller, but even more corrupt socialist party, its leader Matino Kratzi would die of fugitive outlaw in Tunisia.

Because even the two parties did not attain a parliamentary majority, every government required a broader coalition whose formation amounted to an intricate puzzle. The D.C. was the largest party, but with only 30% of the votes, it could not rule alone. Even with the socialists, it only reached a 40% mark. If it brought in the two small left-of-center parties, the social Democrats and the Republicans, the right-of-center parties, including the MSI neo-fascists, would not join in. But if the latter were invited to join the coalition, the left would break away and no government could be formed. In the end, of course, votes were procured one way or another, mostly by handing over control of parts of the vast array of state-owned businesses, everything from oil and gas to ice cream, in exchange for parliamentary

support. The votes, however, did not stay bought for long, and coalitions had short lives. Between 1945 and 1994, there were 33 governments until the 1994 election victory of the television and advertising tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, whose brand new party, Forza Italia, was originally formed by its own employees and the Milan's football team fan club. Do you remember that? Oh, yeah, I remember. Italian politics, you know, my buddy Danieli Bilelli, he doesn't follow. I mean, he's, you know, he's been in America for a long time, but he still can talk about it. And he knows the 20th century pretty well.

And he starts describing telling me stories, just, you know, different eras in the 20th century. And I just get lost immediately because it's just, like he said, it's like a new government. Every two years, different players. It's very hard to follow. I did two hours on the years of lead. And it was, I mean, you're jumping from governments to government while you're, while you're explaining exactly what they were doing. Yeah, yeah.

And all of these countries in Italy is obviously such a perfect example of this. You know, they're countries that are battlegrounds in the Cold War. And so they're facing like forces of destabilization from the outside that are kind of amorphous and hard to identify, but often, you know, very, very powerful, whether you want to talk about, you know, Gladio and the Soviet control, the Communist Party there. You know, that's what you've seen in a lot of these countries, is that a lot of the chaos and instability is caused because they're being bribed for. While the D.C. was unable to modernize Italy's increasingly outdated state institutions,

it nevertheless presided over decades of economic growth. The combination of communist and Catholic anti-capitalism made it impossible to introduce either American-style higher-and-fire labor flexibility or German-style economic discipline enforced by sophisticated trade unionists, but the D.C. had its own remedy. Every time wage rates were pushed too high, it devalued the lira to restore the competitiveness of Italian exports. Equally, the inability to make the state efficient was offset by the lax enforcement of tax collection, thus Italian entrepreneurs ill-served by an inefficient state, only had to pretend that they were paying their taxes.

First one and then the other of these practices came to an end once Italy adopted the common European currency, the euro, in 1999, prohibiting competitive devaluations, and since then its economy has stagnated with little or no growth and chronically high unemployment. Politically, on the other hand, Berlusconi's combination of A, economic power, his enterprises could offer very many, jobs, consultancies, and contracts, B, media influence through the control of publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, and three television channels, and C, of course, electoral power through the votes he won by vigorous and well-organized campaigning, ensured his political preponderance from 1994 until 2011, even went out of office. As of 2015, the government of Matteo Renzi is sustained by a parliamentary majority that still requires Berlusconi's votes. You know, it's interesting that it looks like you're about to hit the end of the section.

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Berlusconi's leading role in Italy's public life over more than 20 years has coexisted with the most blatant conflicts of interest. He was operating state-regulated businesses, a long series of trials for tax evasion and vote buying, and numerous personal scandals arising from his delight in cavorting with young or very young or very young prostitutes. Hence, his prominence in Italian politics is quite enough to describe the country's political order as fragile. He could not have survived in a fully functioning democracy that requires of its leader some semblance of discretion in their personal conduct and the careful concealment of significant conflicts of interest. Yeah, I was going to say in the case of DeGal, and even Berlusconi, I think you can speak of in the same way.

You have two countries, you had two countries where, to go back to Max Weber's terms, where that legal rational authority system is breaking down or becoming decrepit and having to turn back to a charismatic leader who can come in and actually be the organizing principle for the state, because, you know, the machinery itself is, is too gummed up. I think both of those, I mean, especially DeGall, you know, where they were very aware of the fact that they were, they were reaching this, this point of crisis in the government. And they, they turned to him almost in a, you know, Paraclean sort of Sinan sort of Sinan type, type of way to be the guy who has the weight who can come in and be that guy. And Berlusconi wasn't quite that direct, but, you know, just the fact that he stayed in power as long as he did in a system that had previously been so unstable and just changing out all the time, it kind of shows you that he played that role as well.

You know, you see that very often where, I mean, you see that in a person like Putin, right, for example. You know, people in the United States who watch regime media, you know, often have this idea of Putin in all dictators, really, and even like historical monarchs or whatever. But they have this idea that, you know, these are like God emperors who can just, you know, order the

top generals of the army to be tortured and executed with their families and nothing will happen because they're in charge and obviously that's that's never been reality it's not reality you look at somebody like Putin why is Putin there Putin is there because he's the only person in

Russia who all the different power centers all the different interest groups that have and can wield organized power he's the only person that they actually trust to mediate and arbitrate their, you know, their conflicts of interest and their disputes. And they know that if they get rid of that guy, you know, maybe I want to take his place.

You know, I'm from this interest group or that power center and I want to be Putin. I want to take his place. But I know that if I get up there, I'm not going to have the buy-in of all of these people and my power is not going to last. And so, you know, that's the source of like real sustainable power in a person like that. It doesn't, you know, you can exercise all the force you want. But unless you're, I wouldn't even say unless, because I was going to cite Stalin, but that's not even really true. Like, you can exercise all the force you want.

If you're not able to occupy that central position as the one that's recognized as like, if we get rid of that person, then we're all going to fall into chaos, then you're not going to sustain your power. Well, let me conclude by asking you a question. So say there is this, we're looking at an election this year, and one side has this plan, let's call it Project 2025. And anyone who, someone may have looked at it and been like, huh, this looks like it wants to dismantle the administrative state. with dismantling the administrative state in the United States and giving the power back to the three branches of government and basically like return, even returning the power of the presidency to FDR levels, would that be considered a coup? I think Lute Walk would say no. But the sort of the level of almost. The level of extraordinary action that would really be necessary to carry that out would meet the threshold.

You know what I mean? Like it's something that would face so much resistance that you would have to be willing to override, you know, technical rules and legal boundaries in order to carry it out. And so in that sense, you know, I suppose you could call it a coup, you know. It's an illegal seizure of power, illegal exercise of power for the purpose of transferring. the center of gravity in the government from from one place to another so i guess you could maybe say that cool and by saying that i'm totally okay with it and they should do it by the way yeah i'm 100 percent i mean i of of course you can be so black pill to the point where it's just like just get some of it done please i mean i'll be happy with some of it but you know really um

i think as jarvin has said over and over again if you're going to cross the Rubicon, you can't wait on the other side. And you can't, you can't, you can't wade in the water on the other side. And if you do climb onto the shore, you can't set up camp there. You have to keep going. And the only way you're going to dismantle the administrative state is to keep going. So, yeah. Never take the black pill.

Despair is a sin. Oh, yeah, man. Tell everybody where they can find your work. I have a podcast, the Martyr Made podcast. If you like really a long-form deep-dive historical podcast, then that's the one for you. I do another one with my friend Jocko Willink called The Unravelling, where we talk more about contemporary and sort of more recent historical stuff, 20th century things, stuff like that. And I've got a substack. If you really, really like those things, you can come support me at Martyrmaid atsubstack.com.

I appreciate it. Always good, Pete. Keep pushing boundaries. Later, brother. I want to welcome everyone back to part two of my reading of Kudaita by Edward Lutwak. 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 he's 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, yeah. I don't, I don't think I got a chance to meet you because I was just, it was a strange weekend for me for all kinds of reasons, but I was sort of out of sorts and attending 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, you know, not only did it happen, but it happened with Edward Lutbach, which is like a usually like 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 like he's certainly my favorite of the neocons he's a very strange individual and like this is a really fun book to talk about he's a weird neocon that actually deals with paleo cons 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 I

am 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. But the world gets really small, too. Lee is the reason I got published in the recent IM 1776 edition. So this is 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 look back is actually known for is he's a guy who basically got Martin

very prevalent to publish for non-academic audiences, which is how most of us got to know him. And anyways, Van Kreveld, 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, last I checked, is illegal to sell in Germany. But anyways, Van Kruveld is actually one of the world's leading historians, the world's leading theorists on insurgency. So yeah, Lutvag 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 graft 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 to wait five years. The saying is it changes like the weather.

Yeah. It only ever gets worse, too. Italy is like, I'm not talking about Italy in the cultural region, but Italy as a nation state. I did, we did in the midst of 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 then. Inflation pushes up building costs, so it's important to review your home insurance cover

to make sure you have the right cover for your needs. Underinsurance happens where there's a difference between the value of your cover and the cost of repairing damage or replacing contents. It's a risk you can avoid. Review your home insurance policy regularly. For more, visit Understandinginsurance.I.E. forward slash under insurance. Brought to you by Insurance Ireland.

Airgrid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable,

sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash northwest. 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 speak Latin like a Latin person.

And they'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. 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 deceit. full. 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 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 outside of your local physical environment is not quite as bad as it used to be. Well, you know, okay, look, now, because I was... I was 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 text is originally from like 1968 or something like that. Yeah. Like one of the like really interesting things about 1968 is it, and I'll probably sprinkle

this end as it comes along. We actually have indication of LuftVat coming from what is a right wing perspective. It's an undeniably right wing perspective, but not as like what decidedly right wing is contemporary political, like, analysis is going to be. But he's actually showing the early stages of a time. He's actually showing, like, incredible literacy with the contemporary historical literature, uh, literature is coming out of, specifically Germany at the time. And if we, like, if we can take the setup here, so what is the, he's setting up the

conceptual framework of a coup. He says, like, these are the, 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 brand 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, you know, he's, you know, he's describing to me the way a citizen in Topeka, Kansas might feel about the, the messaging that they received. 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 lower and, you know, almost, the signal almost gets totally swamped in, again, what we're 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 distort the way they're operating, you know, the message they give. So 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. No, that's fun. No, that made a lot of sense and that added a lot to it. So I'll continue and feel free to interrupt any time. 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. 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, that 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 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, I mean, 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, Camilla Harris thing is 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.

Inflation pushes up building costs. So it's important to review your home insurance cover to make sure you have the right cover for your needs. Under insurance happens where there's a difference between the value of your cover and the cost of repairing damage or replacing contents. It's a risk you can avoid. review your home insurance policy regularly. For more, visit Understandinginsurance.I.E. forward slash underinsurance. Brought to you by Insurance Ireland.

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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 injustices 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 Nassau 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 dwellers. wellings 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. Anyways, for Darrell, 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 whenever we refer to protecting our democracy, but, you know, our democracy is not necessarily somebody else's democracy. And like 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 trucked 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 caught 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, like, a Napoleonic surge of energy behind, you know, the action. This is one of those times where I rarely, like, you know, get down in the trenches and I actually sort of agree with the CIA. I mean, really what we're talking about here is, and Levox 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 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. When our first Catholic president resulted in the first Catholic president of Vietnam being. 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 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 their 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 a little. 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 an 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's interviewed for like the first seven minutes of it. Oh, really? That's, yeah, that's super cool.

I was pointing out that really, you know, I talked about the, you know, 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 you, if you map these concepts over what he's talking about, what he's talking about here is that you, remember, we talk about this isolated citizen, like, you know, is sort of cut off. to them what he's talking about here is depends that these citizens depend the coup depends on the citizenry just sort of assuming status quo zero legibility from their government you know this is what it mean 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 this is the

the tacit acceptance that he's sort of talking about, you know, from, you know, from, from the non-state actors who are being pressed down on by the... 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 importance of 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. 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 burr. My goodness, it's Christmas. at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at ginnestorehouse.com. Get the facts. Be Drinkaware.

Visit drinkaware.com. Air grid. Operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable, electrical. supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash northwest. Nevertheless, if 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 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 was just sitting here listening, the one this reminds me, and I could say 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 don't know, 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, 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 1970, it was written before Portuguese decolonization before the Bush Wars in Africa. And it pretty accurately predicts the way the sort of.

of the way the coup tends to process. But 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, which you would call them in the country. And this is really what we saw happen, I think, in Ukraine, sort of directly leads to this factional, this regional conflict.

is, you know, ethnic polarization around these, like, folk heroes who were 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, you know, 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, this 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

confined 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... 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 ginnestorehouse.com. Get the facts. Be drinkaware. Visit drinkaware.aer. Air grid. Operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash northwest.

The hardest ones would necessarily, 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? 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 me. First of all, what is this, what is this, the Blues Brothers or something? And the second of all, like that, this question of whether it be nice, I mean, I think this is what the prescient, the prescient question of 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 interesting that's changed since Lutvacorotha's text. is because we're still looking at what are essentially, you know, we're still looking 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 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, the 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 to 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 undergruding. 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 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. And to our last discussion with 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 the possibility 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, they 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. There is either. The diffusion of, 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 and 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 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 economic, economically backward countries, while only exceptional circumstances will allow it to succeed in the developed areas. No comments? Just go on. 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 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, 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 could have but it didn't matter because the Congress isn't in power no that

you know interpeerative 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 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, 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, always, like all of this stuff is still very applicable. Do you have to get to turn a few logs over now to find, to maybe find them? 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 ZM.

No den DM. No den DM. And as even less popular brother, No den 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. On the many days of Christmas, the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee,

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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 Diem. 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 Hindayana, Buddhists were bad and the Mahayana Buddhists were good. October 1963,

standstill of all economic aid to Vietnam, i.e. to DM's regime. October 22nd, 1963, end of direct aid by CIA to no 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 DM and No Din Nu. The Viet Cong accused the generals and their frontman,

Duong von Min, of being stuages 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 dependents 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 large. You want to say something? Well, like our entire system is based off of the idea that violence is on the table. That's essentially, I mean, a good short definition of liberalism, which is basically how we've been taken over by lawyers, because lawyers' 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 a pill pole 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 the 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 by combat starting with traffic court. Yeah, and I, John, you might 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 Hue, who separate discussion, separate discussion. But this is, again, how, like, the 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 bureaucracy or whatnot. Yeah, that's where the Tuk family was. Yeah.

And he talks about West Africa. And, you know, with Niger in the news, right? Like, what's her name? The Prime Minister of Italy, Maloney, has talked about this. That, like, France ended formal rule over West Africa. But it never really went away. I mean, I had friends 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. 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 I don't know if Littlewax gotten into the whole 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 the management of the firestone rubber plantation company or the firestone tire rubber plantation effectively became sovereign and like squashed the Ebola outbreak I want to say it was Liberia but I know Liberia oh okay right but the librarian government had nothing to do with any of the response it was all like fire

Yeah, the Firestone plantation is something like 20% of the entire landmass of the country. And part of what makes the Liberian government legitimate is there the people who back up Firestone's claim. Or Firestone backs up there, Kalame. Well, they actually sold the outside from that. It's like the Taylor Guitar Company actually owning, like I think it's really having a massive, uh, influence in 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 even important in the United States. This is the many guitars

have like this like seat on all of these important national councils in Africa. Yeah. Never know where it's going. Trade is oftentimes. 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 Commando's quickly crushed mutinies in the three ex-British East African countries of Kenya,

Tanganika, as it then was, and Uganda. Almost 50 years later, a few companies of French troops inserted in January 2013 defeated the Islamist 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 deported. pliable form of force of several thousand air transportable troops with efficient, albeit light weapons. They may not like a large, 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

year. Okay. And one of the things is real 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-Mouths

is that there's a virulent, of course, the British Empire is collapsing at this point. This is like what we were talking about, the three former British companies, British East Africa has collapsed between 1956 or so and 1962. So it's like, Laura the flies out there in former British East Africa. But the British have this very special approach. They did a wonderful,

they did this wonderful job detailing the French method. The French, you know, arguably still have the closest functioning thing to a former Colombian, 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 decided, they kind of sheath 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, 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 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 colonial 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 what's going on with the British. Leufeck also, he doesn't quite go so far as to say this. This is like one of his thing. This book gets, like, touted to say. 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 Rupak 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, okay, you know, he 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 U.K. This is when they changed their rank insignia to be different than the rest of the Commonwealth.

So it's just a weird, you know, surface symptom. The jet fighter is the crucial case because, unlike ships or 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. 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 this 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 good at a T-130. Like, you know, a C-130 can land on,

on relatively bad in order to have a runway that functions to land a f-16 an f-18 or any any like modern fighter aircraft or strike fighter or whatever you have to have an astonishing amount of infrastructure 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 bridge equivalent is, but there'll be... Hellapurton. Yeah.

You're 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. that's not a tank farmer and no one blows up. That's not storage and transport of fuel.

That's not maintenance on the aircraft. There's a lot of things that can go wrong before you even get the plane off the ground, let alone fight the aircraft and then land it successfully and rearm it and fight it again. These are very, very complicated

processes and they're hard. So, like, let's, I've got an anecdote about 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 states. So, like, you know, he gets these six countries. He's unique 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 anybody on the internet who's aware of the existence of Pakistani AK-47s knows 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 so forth. To this point, I will point out because 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, 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 opposition. So it's Francophone Africa opposition. And I remember one time sitting with the consultant, but I was working before.

He got a phone call from Africa. And it sounded like there was machine gun fire in the background. It was like, it was like, what movie does stumble into? And this was an urgent record. request from like an after an ongoing African coup you didn't look this up there were you know this was this was this was like a coup that occurred in Francophone Africa like right 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 a half million AK-40 seven rounds. Okay. So like there are only, like there's only a certain number of places you can go to

to get that stuff and that severely constricts. So do we think of this too of the thing that can happen anywhere? But actually the thing, the supply changes, 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, can you get, you get me a million and a half, AK-47 rounds. You can, the United States is probably the United States and Russia, probably the only two countries in the world you can get that time. 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 for two. in Russia, which, you know, that's why it's now hard to get ammo for legal AKs. 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 axis, 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. 1955, 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-S-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 and Civil War in Yemen After the death of Yemen's king Ahmad in Yakhya'i 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 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, 6. 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, you know, again, you know, we're actually working inside a conceptual framework, you know, a historiographical framework, in fact, that's called, Bluebeck is one of the developers of it with It was 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, really, like, we no longer have separated spheres of influence. It's like, it's like this, like the whole world, the whole world is this inflated balloon.

And if you press down on it anywhere, like the water that you displace inside that balloon has to pop up somewhere else. And, you know, you press down one place and another place pops up. And that's, you know, that's, 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. 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 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 or the sinews of war. I mean, 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 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 and most countries aren't. And that's another big reason that's why they haven't been able to. It is the cliche that countries are interdependent rather than independent. it. 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 tried to exert pressure on U.S. foreign policy makers 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-coup 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 look back 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, didn't directly have access to those archives, many of them who essentially, you know, made themselves persiaires. and 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 like the same folks who orchestrated dm getting shot in the head probably orchestrated kennedy both kennedy's getting shot in the head and organize 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 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 it terrifies me and I see a lot of it I see a lot of it in the work we just raised

like oh okay so the United States which used to you know United States in London which used to be the place where you sat around and write about these sort of things now'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 and 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 actually, you know, just to actually pull this up, I think I do still have it somewhere. Right. First became aware of Lutbuck, whenever he was, it was, when he was being interviewed by the Guardian for a piece, it's kind of a famous guardian feature, probably heard it before. It's called the Machiavelli of Maryland. And, you know, it points out, it's tempting to imagine Lutbuck as a man exiled to the wrong place in time whose fate like a character, Nabokov, has been reduced from old world brilliance to something less grand in 21st century America. It's not hard at all to picture him conniving at the

Congress of Vienna were 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, was the introduction. Who's my introduction into this world? was is 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. There's Fernand Bradale. Manuel Wallerstein, Edward Wutvach, who is that... I'm sorry to see it with John Boyd. Yeah, who's the mathematician, the fractal guy?

Oh, uh, Taleb? You know, no, but, okay, Talib, Taleb is, he's, he's, he's, he's mixed in with all of these guys, but there's that, it's that one mathematician that, I can never remember his name, but he's the fractal guy. And what, if you, like,

go back to the beginning of this chapter, you'll, remember, 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, 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 are 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, Lutthak 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, you know, chances of a coup. So, like, you know, these are the things where this book is presented tongue in cheap, tongue in cheap, 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. 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. 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, you know, he's trying, he's willing to talk about the things 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 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 delving into the, you know, the feedback loop of the coup itself. And he's saying, 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 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'd say 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 in 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. 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 LudoBox is admitting that this is the case. and, you know, to talk about Schmidt here for a second, like, what he's effectively talking about is, is sovereignty and who's wheeling 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 patrimary 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, 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 two, again, the original purpose is just the nature of power politics. It 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. Does anybody have anything to plug? Oh, I just fired up the substack again. I'm all over the place, though. 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 Daryl Cooper in the future.

That's, oh my God. You know, 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 like somewhere in Virginia doing like like little like car wheels 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. I want to welcome everyone back to part three of my reading of Edward Lut-Fox Qudet-Tah.

Lathiae. Lathiae, is here with me. How are you doing, Lafayette? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on, Pete. Yeah, I mean, the reason I asked you to come on and do this reading with me is because I know that you, you interviewed Litvak in the last couple of years. So what I've asked everybody so far is when did you first learn about this book? How did it come on your radar and, you know, just general little introduction of why you think it's important. Sure. I've had the privilege of reading a lot of Lutwok's work since before I kind of came on to. the online scene. So when I was in the military, I was in a certain capacity in the military

in which this type of book would have a lot more currency. So somebody recommended it to me. It was like an officer. I was just an enlisted guy. And so I went and hunted down the book. I got a 1969 copy of the book and took it with me on a deployment. And I was actually down in an area that suffered from coups. And so I thought it would be relevant. And it just blew me away. And from that point on, starting with this book, it always kind of put Lutwak on my radar. I was just going to say, too, with the, sorry, I should have said this, but the interview with Lutwak was also really interesting. It was kind of a privilege.

I interviewed him for I'm 1776, and just we had a very lengthy conversation. I couldn't put it all into the interview, but I was very impressed. I don't agree with everything that Lutwok kind of puts out there, but he's one of those like Beltway rebels that I've always had a great deal of admiration for just the way his mind works and how he solves problems. So yeah, it was a good experience. All right. So, yeah, let's do this. I'm going to start with the section in chapter two on organic unity. Stop me anytime. Organic unity. In looking at the political consequences of economic backwardness, we saw that the crucial factor was the concentration of all power in the hands of small elite.

Conversely, in sophisticated political settings, power is diffuse and therefore difficult to seize in a coup. We now face another possible obstacle to a coup. Power may be in the hands of sectional political forces, which use the government as a front, or of regional forces whose dependence on the supposed political center is only theoretical. In both these cases, the problem lies in the fact that the seizure of the supposed political center will not win the battle. The sources of political power may be in other centers that may be too difficult or too numerous to seize. And so the realities of power are in conflict with the theoretical structure of the state, just as in those cases where the political unit is not truly

independent. Here, power exists within the country, but it is not where it's supposed to be because the political entity is not really organic. Yeah, I was- I wanted to kind of stop there just for a second. I think this is really important, especially for people that are exploring some of these ideas for the first time, is that there is a real bifurcation of the theoretical and then the actual real political centers of power. And we can see that in our own country.

I think these things were largely invisible to us probably 40 years ago. you know, America as a concept seemed very, you know, was very different then, right, to us. And as things had started to fracture and decay, we're able to see where these two things diverge, that the schoolhouse rock theoretical centers of power that we believed and grew up with are not necessarily the real centers of power. And so when we even talk, I mean, coup, word like coup might be a little bit, might be like a little strong for what some of the things we're working towards, for others maybe not. But, when we talk about being able to fight back to seize power in some way,

often we see a lot of people guided by ideology, which tends to cling to the theoretical a lot more than the real. And that can be a major problem in a sophisticated political regime like this one or other countries in the West. The managerial regime does a really good job of doing that, right? convincing the masses that it's actually very simplistic. We have this ideology and we're operating inside this box. And, you know, if we go outside the box, we have to, it's only for an emergency. And, yeah, I think that's very clearly a tool that they use.

And that's, you know, something I've been talking, I talk a lot about ever since I, you know, stop being a libertarian is that libertarianism is a, perfect example. Conservatism is an example of this ideology that is sold to you by a regime that is neither. Maybe we'll use certain pieces of both to trick you into thinking that this is what it is. But in essence, basically what you are is you're in a managerial system where the power is spread out, and finding the head of the snake is almost impossible. Yeah, that's exactly right. And kind of even just going further with that a little bit is that, you know,

from like a libertarian perspective, and I spent time, I was always like probably a conservative, but I was very friendly to libertarian ideas. But it was like the idea of where does power lie? There's kind of for Americans, it's like there's a public private separation that we see theoretically. But then you can look at recent events and then dispel yourself of that idea. when you see that, you know, America has, I guess we've had 11 intelligence agencies colluding with social media companies.

So now we see you have a private public, right? And you see, and when you dive into those details, you see the work of NGOs, of nonprofits, alongside formalized tech companies and then intelligence agencies, it's really difficult to distinguish where the public ends and the private begins. And I think that this is a very important distinction as we go through and start analyzing, like, how is power diffused and then how is power seized or exercised? So, yeah, I completely agree with that. Onward. Sectional interests. This is the age of giant, globalized business enterprises. The same factors that led to the unprecedented prosperity of modern industrial, post-industrial remains a mere designer's pose. economies have always systematically favored larger business organizations over their smaller competitors. Mass production and mass distribution are not diminished by the study, by the steady advance of online customization and both imply large business units. Where the advantages of large-scale production are particularly great, as in the automobile, chemical and energy industries, only the very largest enterprise can survive.

Elsewhere, even if there is no such economic imperative, the giant corporation has developed because of the economies of large-scale marketing or simply because of the natural dynamics of accumulation. The same is definitely true of the newer breed of information, technology, and online service enterprises. In every industrial developed economy, there are such giant firms that have been able to grow sufficiently to emerge from the rest of their industry, to become one of its focal points. This position gives them a great deal of power because their managerial decisions can affect the entire national economy, especially, of course,

when they are monopolies or near enough. There are many more monopolies in smaller economies. Indeed, some consist of monopolies to a large extent with the resulting high cost inflicted on hapless consumers. But even in the world's largest economy, the passenger airliner industry is monopolized by Boeing with predictable results. Unshakeable complacency, mostly, even after disastrous managerial errors.

I'm sure this is him part of his update in 2016 and was an impression about this. Absolutely. Yeah, it's interesting that this kind of dovetails in with what we were discussing before is that we, the inclination, right, the what has been sold to us, with the idea of globalization is that it will introduce greater competition, which, you know, the byproduct of which would be theoretically more innovation, more diversity among in the economy that exists, more opportunity, so on and so forth, right? We've heard these arguments made for decades. But you see that this, we're, that it's completely opposite. You know, the idea that globalization

will actually prevent monopolies. It's the, in practice, it's absolutely the opposite. of that. And I think a really important thing that he brings up here is that these major decisions made by giants among giants will affect the entire national economy. And so if you still believe in things like representative government that they exist or they function or any kind of democratic pressure from your single individual constituents, ask yourself what kind of political system or lawmakers, policymakers, government officials would allow these companies to be treated exactly the same as other players within your economy if decisions that they make can shape the entire national economy. And realistically, the logical conclusion is, no, you cannot be treated the same.

And so this is yet another example of how we, a lot of people are starting to change how they look at these things diverging between the rhetoric and the theory with what it is in practice. It's interesting. I agree with you how Lutwak was able to see this at a time when these kinds of conversations, I mean, he published this in like the late 60s during a time of incredible growth. The United States had a huge global footprint and there were decisions that were being made that would shape the country for decades to come that he was able to see that it isn't quite what it seems and that in practice, the influence of these firms will have over not just the economy of a country, but the political system, we're just enormous. Reading on. Why should Boeing bother, given that it has no competition aside from Airbus, the heavily bureaucratized multinational consortium on the other side of the pond?

Together, the two form the most comfortably lethargic of duopolys, hence the sad lack of innovation, as the same basic pre-1950 tubular design remains in use in the 21st century instead of more efficient aerodynamic forms. However damaging it is economically, and the United States suffers greatly from Boeing's domination of an entire industry, monopolies are all the more powerful because of their very defect. In the context of the Kudatah, however, the power of giant corporations is just one more element within the business community as a whole, and this, in turn, is just one of the forces competing in the political life of the nation. The corporation may be a giant, but in advanced economies, it is a giant among many. The opposite is true in economically less developed countries,

If the availability of mineral and hydrocarbon deposits leads to the development of industry, then, because of the nature of those sectors, there will be one large firm rather than many small ones. There is, by definition, little or no other industry. The tax revenues will be small except for the company's taxes, and there will be very few jobs, except for the company's jobs. If there are roads and railways, they will have been built by the company as company transport facilities. most of the schools and hospitals will be company welfare services, company housing may dwarf nearby towns, and company security guards may be better equipped than the national police.

When the state is poor and fragile, the rich and well-organized mining company will be the great power in the land, whether it seeks or eschews this power. In fact, it will almost always be forced to intervene in politics, if only to preserve the status quo. When the company does act, it has a wide range of different weapons it can use, and it can use them at many different levels. The company can slow the flow of tax income to the state by transferring production to some other country in which it operates. It can boost a particular politician by giving real or sinecure jobs to his supporters.

It can buy or bribe the press and generally exercise the power it derives from being very rich among the very poor. One thing I want to bring up to for listeners who are trying to wrap their heads around this, it's really hard to leave maybe the American context, is you can look back in American history. There was a really great, actually an episode, I think, of the Martyr Made podcast when he explores how this same process played out in Appalachia with the mining towns and the company towns, the influence that the company had in their local area, that you have kind of a group with people who had maybe their ancestors had settled that land. They literally lived off the land in Appalachia and through the mining coming in, introduced a completely different way of life,

essentially either employed those people under very difficult conditions or it forced them out. And through that, there was a lot of political turmoil that invited the wrath of the state and the national government. And so if it's difficult to kind of understand how this works by trying to escape like an American context because we're in a much more, I guess, advanced stage, you could say. This played out here in America many times over. And the most obvious example would be what happened with coal mining, coal mining, specifically in Appalachia. That we saw this same thing happen in the way that Lutwok talks about the influence and relationship between the company and the importance of being able to. to introduce infrastructure, take care of all the most basic needs of employees to keep the line moving,

and then also be able to control the political apparatus as well. This isn't just something that happens in Latin America, African countries. This happened here in the United States. All right. Nor is it an improvement to replace wicked foreign exploitation with domestic exploiters, whether local tycoons who will invariably get away with more tax cheating, or the officials placed in control of nationalized enterprises. State-owned then becomes employee-owned,

with the executives in charge taking everything for themselves and favored employees, including investment essential to keep the business going, or with the union bosses in charge doing the same thing. Worst of all, they may simply and openly distribute all profits to all employees, including themselves, again leaving little or nothing for investment. This has been the fate of the potentially very great Mexican Pemex, Venezuelan PDVSA, and to some degree Brazilian Petrobras, state-owned oil companies. What an industrial empire can do when set in a backward environment was illustrated by the Katanga secession

in the early 1960s. All right, there's some names here. There's a name here that I'm going to, I'm going to just stumble over, so please forget me. When the Congolese political leader, Moisei Kepende Shombay, 1919 to 1969, launched his independent Katanga Republic, he had only the meager resources of a provincial governor of the Congolese Republic. Yet, as the secession proceeded, Shumbe, a question. wired a veritable army with some combat jets, artillery, armored cars, and even well-organized propaganda bureaus in London and New York. Perhaps most important, he was able to recruit and pay handsomely

competent mercenary soldiers, any number of whom could seemingly drive off any number of regular Congolese soldiers. Shombay's Katanga had only one major source of wealth, the mining industry owned by the Union Minier, part of the interrelated mining groups operating at the time in the Copper Belt and South Africa. It was evident all along that Schombay was financed by the Union Minier and acted largely as an agent for the company. But even the Union, were you going to say something? I was just going to say real quick, if anybody wants a good recommendation on a book, if you're starting to learn about Katanga for the first time, there's a really interesting book called Katanga,

The Untold Story of U and Betrayal. It's kind of a difficult book to find, but it discusses how Katanga came to be and then how it was basically forced under the control of a communist state, which was Central Congo, by the United Nations. And so it kind of adds like a little bit of context to what we're talking about that might be pretty poignant for the subject of coup d'et talk. But sorry, I didn't mean to stop you. No worries. But even the union

minuet was operating in what was a relatively unfavorable environment. The Congo is a very large country, 11th in the world, and there were other mineral deposits worked by other companies with different interests to protect. The typical large-scale enterprises operate in countries where it is the only major industry. Thus, Aramco, the oil company-owned. by Saudi Arabia's ruling family is still by far the largest industrial organization in the country. Its company towns built to house employees dwarf other towns in the area in importance and facilities, and its earnings constitute a very large part of all government revenue. The Saudi regime has always been efficient at retaining political control over what was,

until recently, a loose coalition of tribes. the old desert warrior and founder of the kingdom, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, was a past master of controlling the tribes, and until it was nationalized and became family-owned, he treated Aramco as just another tribe, albeit a particularly powerful one. A standard nationalist accusation against the large-scale foreign enterprise is that it functions as a state within the state, and that it exercises, and that it exercises. political power either through its direct influence over the country's government or by using the leverage of its home country on the host country. For decades, the banana-growing United Fruit Company was accused of exercising power in Central America through corrupt local cliques, while the oil companies in the Middle East were accused of using both tactics. A much less plausible accusation against foreign companies was that they engaged in covert activities against the state, sabotage and espionage among them.

Just why they should undertake such activities was not explained, but the accusations were widely believed. When Brigadier General Husni al-Zahim seized power in Syria in 1949 by Kudaita, one of its first actions was to limit the freedom of action of the Iraq Petroleum Company whose pipeline crossed Syria. IPC was informed that was informed that was informed that, was informed that A, its aircraft would have to obtain official permits for each flight, B, the company's security guards would be replaced by public security forces, and C, company personnel would need official permits to travel in border zones. However, unfounded the accused allegations of complicity and espionage, which were the supposed reason for the new rules, it should be noted

that such restrictions, except for the last one, are commonplace in developed countries. Yeah, this is a really important thing to take note of. Because typically in coup d'etat, like a coup d'etat in a developing country, typically where, you know, what Lutoc would describe is a, where the system of government is very fragile. This, one of those, you'll see it's a very commonplace accusation made usually by the leaders of a coup d'etat that, that the foreign influences or the companies or whatever it is, that there is some kind of covert activity. Usually they use this often as leverage specifically with the local population or to justify actions that go beyond what their explicit powers are. And so you'll see this over and over again. If you visit Latin American countries, especially the older generation, go to Brazil.

So if you go to Brazil and you're an American, there are some areas where people will come up and ask you if you are part of the CIA. There's a deep memory of these things. Some of it is real, but there is a lot of it that when seizing power or when there was dramatic regime change, that often, you know, espionage and covert operations are cited as the reason for doing so. And it can be very difficult to distinguish what is real and what is not. Okay. Moving on. Even if the foreign company has no desire to interfere in the political life of the host country, it may be forced to do so merely in order to protect its installations and personnel.

Typically, this is the case when the company is operating in areas that are not under the effective control of the Dejure government, especially remote areas inhabited by minority groups, or controlled by local insurgents, which may be one and the same. Thus, the French rubber plantations that persisted in South Vietnam, even in war, were accused of financing the Viet Cong. But there was no reason to impute sinister motives, because the official government, which also collects taxes, was unable to guarantee their safety. The French plantations were simply paying their taxes to de facto government. This remains a common practice in conflict areas. Much of the money that the United States and other governments spend on road building in Afghanistan was, of course, simply stolen.

Some legally, as the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, awarded contracts to very expensive general contractors who applied a hefty override before hiring subcontractors who, in turn, did the same before hiring sub-subcontractors. Of the part that did reach the mostly Turkish contractors who actually build roads, a significant proportion once its Taliban insurgents, as well as local Banjou. detos, with both not interfering playing a dual role as paid security guards. In this way,

a kilometer of the simplest asphalt road in Afghanistan ended up costing as much as a kilometer of high-speed four-lane highway in Europe. Much more economically, much more economically usually, oil companies have routinely paid off those who introduced themselves properly by, say, perforating a pipeline or blowing it up in just one short segment to make their needs perfectly clear. It matters not if they plan, if they are plain banditos or grace themselves with a revolutionary or religious appellation. Now that sundry murderers call themselves the party of God, Hezbollah, there is an understandable nostalgia for the days of the popular fronts for the liberation of this or that, which competed with the popular and democratic funds for the liberal,

of and their splinter groups, which naturally call themselves the United Front for the liberation of. I wanted to just throw in one more thing here. I think the reader should return always to the United States and try to see where there are similarities. I know we're dealing with a very complex political system and country versus maybe more fragile one. But something to think about is what we have seen in this country, you might not see

active banditos or, you know, a Maoist like terrorists or whatever, quite the same. But, you know, we did see a massive sea change in corporate sentiment towards BLM and the 2020 riots. And I think this kind of returns us to that question about what is theoretical, what is practical, where, and obviously they're going to intersect, right? There are definitely true believers within corporate America, within government. But there's also the idea of looking at how, in a complex system, how terrorizing or bullying these corporations around or threatening their resources and their reach, how that can influence them. And so I think that that's an important thing to look at here in the United States and ask yourself, how many of these, like do we see parallels between the

massive sea change in sentiment and corporate support for groups like BLM at the time we're burning down cities and then, you know, 25 deaths and billions of dollars of damage? Many ordinary Americans were asking themselves how this could happen. How could these big corporations that's ostensibly believe in capitalism, why they would move so quickly to support BLM? But I think that some parallels here are definitely real and don't just extend to fragile states dealing with terrorist problems or militia groups. Well, I think a lot of that also has to do with the sympathies of the bondholders on most companies. the convertible.

Yeah, I definitely agree with you. I also think there's kind of a, there's always, you know, the forecasting of strategic is like, where is the country and its sentiment's moving? And I definitely believe that there are people out there who believe in this stuff,

who, you know, however crazy it is. And I think there's also probably like a subtle understanding that this does, these kinds of actions, control the population. It keeps the population from being able to exercise their own influence as voters, as citizens. And if you constantly have the citizens of a country dealing with this

type of problem that's really unsolvable, you can continue to do what you want to do. Onward. In the good old days of gunboats and plumes vice-fries, the British oil company in Persia originally named Anglo-Persia and later Anglo-Iranian, before becoming clean as British Petroleum, illustrated very well the phenomenon of a business enterprise forced to intervene in the domestic affairs of the home host country under the impellent pressure of local political realities. Anglo-Persian received its concession from Shah Mosafer al-Din

of the Khahar dynasty head of the modestly titled Sublime Government of Iran in 1901, but soon discovered that the Tehran government had very little control of the southwestern and coastal Kuzestan region, where the company was actually exploring and later producing oil. A local potentate, the sheikh of Mohamara, controlled the western part of Kuzestan at the head of the Persian Gulf, and the chiefs, cons, of the nomadic or better transhumans, Bactiari tribes, controlled eastern Kusestan.

Both the Sheikh and the Khans were nominally subject to the Tehran government, but in fact, independence. The company had to accept political realities. To protect the safety of its installations, it paid off the Sheik, a properly dignified extortionist. The British government, however, tried to write regularize the situation by supporting the autonomy of the sheikh against the central government, and the company, being closely associated with the British government,

identified itself with the autonomy of the sheik. When the energetic cavalry officer Reza Khan took power eventually as a new Shah, and restored the authority of the central government, the British company found itself penalized for its support of the sheik. The relationship between the company and the Bakhtiari cons was even more complicated. The company realized that its wells and pipelines could only be protected by coming to an arrangement with the local de facto power. This time, however, instead of one sheikh, there were many different cons, all involved in contentious tribal politics, whose chronic, sometimes violent, instability prejudiced the security that the company was trying to buy. The natural solution was adopted. The company, together with British consular

authorities, entered into tribal politics in order to promote a paramount chief who would clarify and stabilize the situation. The feuds among the cons, however, were never concluded, and the tribal politics of the company were brought to an end only when the central government of Reza Palavi finally disarmed the cons and gained control of the entire two. territory. Thus, the company, merely in order to protect its installations and to avoid paying double taxation to two rival authorities, had to enter politics at three different levels. It operated A, in tribal politics to promote and maintain the power of the paramount chief of the Bactiari, B, in national politics to preserve the autonomy of the sheikh of

Mahamara against the central government, and C, in international politics to detail. the sheikdom from Persia, acting in association with the British consular authorities in the Gulf. What action must be taken by the planners of the coup in the event of the presence of such sub-states in the target country? In a few extreme cases, their consent may be necessary. They tend to have their ears to the ground and will probably be aware of the imminent coup before the official intelligence outfits. This consent can be obtained by a suitable mixture of threats and promises, and in this case, promises do not always have to be kept. Elsewhere, they will act as just one more factor with which the coup has to deal, but increasingly, after the political education they have received at the hands of nationalist forces everywhere, foreign business interests have learned that neutrality is sweet. Yeah, this goes back to the idea that we can't really separate public, private, and view companies or entities like that as being completely independent and detached from political realities.

In many of these places, they have to become major players. If you look at a big, complex country like the United States, you have to ask yourself, at a certain size or scale, can a company remain entirely independent? And unfortunately, like most Americans, we just haven't really been very, like we talk about it, but I don't think we realize how much this influences politics here and abroad. And so the idea that these companies can just remain completely independent players, neutral, obviously neutrality in a stable system is desirable. But there are certain situations and places where that's impossible. And so decisions will often be made by companies, by locals or when there's regime change. And we tend to look at these things through the prism of strictly ideology because it's the only way we can really make sense of things we don't understand. But there is a much deeper reality here and it's played out so many times in world history.

New heading. Regional entities. The essence of the coup is the seizure of power within the main decision making center of the state and through this the acquisition of control over the nation as a whole. We have seen that in some cases the decision-making process is too diffused through the entire state bureaucracy and the country at large. In other cases, the supposed political center is controlled by another foreign center or by sectional forces independent of the whole state machinery. A similar problem arises when powers in the hands of regional or ethnic blocks, which either used the supposed political center as an agency for their own policies or ignore the claims of the state. center and regard themselves as independent. Practically every Afro-Asian state has border areas, typically mountainous, swampy, and

otherwise inaccessible, which are inhabited by minority tribes. The control exercised by the government in these areas is often only theoretical. Where this sort of de facto autonomy extends to major population centers, the problem of the lack of organic disunity arises. It is, however, of no importance for the coup if the organic unit is in itself large. The new regime can deal with local autonomies when it has seized power. Sometimes, however, the local units are so powerful that they control the center or else the center rules only the immediate suburbs of the capital city.

This was often the case in the ex-Belgian Congo in the period 1960 to 1964, following independence and the mutiny of the force public. Though the Congolese Republic was constitutionally a unitary state, not a federal one, it quickly lost control of most of the provinces, which behaved as if they were independent entities. Within each province, local factions were in conflict, and the central government's faction tended to be one of the weakest. Do you mind if I step in for a minute, Pete, on this? it might make

Congo is kind of a tough situation in the 60s. Most people don't really know much about it. Very worthwhile to study. But a good example of a similar situation is Afghanistan. And I think that this type of analysis, the treatment of Congo is a good way to look at why Afghanistan was such a failure for what our purported goals were there. It was almost the exact same situation

where you have provinces that are mostly controlled by local factions. There's a huge ethnic and regional powers that are separated from the central government that often were autonomous, independent. And so what's interesting is just consider what kind of news you'd be getting from Afghanistan. You'd hear about attacks and so on. But most Americans couldn't tell the difference between the different tribes and different ethnic groups in the region. They didn't really understand how the central government was incredibly weak and ineffective, lots of corruption. And then we would see displays. of things like voting and we'd see all these people walk around with their blue thumbs and to an

American that would seem like progress but if you were in Afghanistan you would see that that really meant almost nothing even if these places were going through the motions the central government was never really viewed as anything legitimate or real in the lives of most afghans unless they were maybe closer to the center of power and so i think many americans were really shocked by the collapse of Afghanistan, but people who have been there, spent some time there, could anticipate that something like this, if it was going to collapse and fail, that it would look just like what played out. All right. This is a timeline of, this is the political situation in the South Kassai province of the Congo, 1960 and 1961. The following groupings were contending for the control of the

province, A, the traditional chiefs, forces available tribal warriors. B, the South Kauci separatist led by the self-described king, Albert Kulongi. Forces available, well equipped, if undisciplined troops led by Belgian officers, nominally ex-Belgian Belgians. C. The central government. Forces available. Young and inexperienced administrators would lose control over small and far-from-combative National Army, ANC, units in the eastern part of the province. D. The mining company for Menyed resources available, financial support, and air transport occasionally made available to Kalongist and other groups. The situation in Katanga was even more unfavorable to the central government, while the northwest and the Stanleyville area were in the hands of the Gazenga forces. Much of the rest of the country could not be reached by government officials because of the break.

down in law and order, along with the disruption of transportation facilities. Thus, a successful coup in the Congolese capital of Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, would only have one control of a very small fraction of the Great Congolese Republic. Several different coups would have been needed in the various de facto capitals, Stanleyville, Elizabethville, Luluburg, org, etc., in order to control the whole country. Federal states represent the overt and constitutional recognition that regions have a local power base and are, therefore, granted a corresponding measure of local autonomy. In confederations, the power of the center comes from the voluntary union of the regions, and until the central institution develops its own sources of power and authority, it is the regions that rule, using the center only as an agency for their common policies. The United States was the product of a voluntary union of diverse states, and until the growth of presidential authority in the course of the 19th century, the government in Washington was little more than an agency that served the states in the regulation of foreign commerce and for the common defense.

Thus, a coup staged in Washington in, say, 1800 would have seized very little. By 1900, however, the growth of the federal powers was such that a coup could ensure considerable control. over much of the country. The Russian Federation, Canada, India, and Germany are all federal states, but the effective degree of autonomy of each component state or province varies greatly. From very little in Putin's Russia, even though governors are now again elected, to the broad autonomy of Canadian provinces. The fact that constitutionally, the Russian republics are supposed to be fully autonomous

and even entitled to secede from the Federation, is another example of the perpetual contrast between theoretical structures and political realities. The inherent dynamics of power are inimical to federal systems, which are forever centralizing in less and less federal fashion, or else decentralizing with or without a consensual agreement, or orderly an agreed process in a way that can easily evolve into outright separatism. That is what is happening now in both the United Kingdom, which was always more accurately the United Kingdoms, and in Spain,

not a gathering of kingdoms under one crown is in the British case, but with regional autonomy is only recently recognized. In each case, separatism has become a political, a major political force in one of the parts, Scotland and Catalonia, respectively, which may well be independent states in the future. I really between theoretical structures and politically and a coup d'etat, does this matter, but even with,

exercising power when Americans saw what was going on with Texas and the border. You know, there's kind of this like old desire to see the states stand up against the federal government and exercise some kind of upward pressure to change policy. I don't think that that's a bad idea when I say this, but I think that it often the way that these kinds of pressure campaigns from a more decentralized units, the way they're perceived by us is a little bit outdated. It takes a lot of work. And this is kind of the question is in the United States, and we're just talking theory here, if the United States had experienced a coup d'etat, how would a successful coup d'etat look? And, you know, like Lutuat brings up earlier, is a coup d'etat

in 1800 would have probably been, even though it could have been more successful at taking over the national government, probably wouldn't have been successful at taking over the country. And then in 1900, it would have been a lot harder to take over the central government. And then on top of that, you're left with the same problem of being unable to really administer power to the states. And so, you know, what does it look like in 2024 is I think we're seeing that even the political machinery, even if you're trying to account for that in the United States, it's so much more complex and deep than I think we even know that, you know, I, I hear this a lot from other people when they get really frustrated. I think they imagine that the only way to fix things politically is to get a mass movement in the streets and to pressure and scare the national government.

And I think that if you look at the way Lutok's analyzing this and you try to analyze our situation the same way, that would be a very, that would be a very dumb idea. And that would not change the political status quo. And so I think it's important to look and make that distinction between the political realities in this day and age versus what they were in the past and then what they were theoretically. Yeah, I asked Cooper. I said if Project 2025 is, their main goal is to dismantle the administrative state. Would he consider that to be a coup? And he said, not by Lutwock standards, but by his standards, yeah, dismantling the administrative state and giving the power back to the,

the executive and the legislative would certainly be a coup. Yeah, I tend to agree with Cooper on that. And I also think, like, what would it look like? Let's say that you throw like an Eric Prince into like a deputy position and he takes like an agency and he strips it down so we don't dismantle it entirely, but you take just one federal agency and you essentially just strip it down to 100 people versus 15,000, right? that would that would be a major difference it would change things it probably won't go down in the history books as a coup but considering the status quo we're living under it would feel like a coup

yeah all right onward the idea that political power should be concentrated in one controlling center for the nation as a whole derives from the presupposition that the interests of each region are best served by decision-making international framework this presumption interestingly enough is usually accepted only after the destruction of the local power structures. Thus, it is agreed by most inhabitants of England, if not Scotland, and France, that major political decisions ought to be made in London and Paris rather than on a local level. But this intellectual recognition followed, rather than preceded, the crushing of the barons and of the independent states of Burgundy, province, Anjou, and Wales. In many underdeveloped areas, the power

of local barons is still very real and local movements based on linguistic or ethnic affiliations are actively attempting to gain either greater autonomy or else full de facto independence. As of 2015, the central governments of India, Kenya, Mali, Myanmar, Pakistan, and China are all experiencing violent conflicts with separatist elements. Among all such instances where local populations do not accept the superiority of centralized decision-making, We have to differentiate between the very possible implications for the coup. A, if the regions are the real center of power, the coup must either confine itself to one region or extend to all of them. The supposed center must be just one more target area.

This extends and complicates the coup, while the weakness of the coup's forces in each single capital may invite countercoup activity. B, if one or two regions dominate the whole country. This was the situation in Nigeria before the momentous coup of January 15, 1966. The northern region, ruled by the traditional Fulani and Hausa Emirs, was the largest region by far. Its ruler, the Sardana of Sukoto, Amadu Bello, was in full control of its internal politics, whereas the situation in the other regions was, more fluid and more democratic. Thus, Ahmadou Bello, in association with political forces in one other region, dominated the whole federation.

The young Igbo soldier officers who carried out the first coup, therefore, had to allocate as much of their efforts to Bello and his capital as to the federal capital and the federal leadership. In the event, they killed both the federal prime minister, Abu Bakar, Tafir, al-Far. Balewa and Bello, but they were overextended so that Major General Johnson Thomas Umanakwey Aroonzi, the senior officer of the army acting with the police and bureaucracy staged a counter coup and seized power on his accounts. The existence of national forces strong enough to control the supposed center may make a coup

impossible. If the regional or ethnic block is organized along tribal lines, the structures of its leadership will be too firm and intimate for a coup to function from within. There has never been a coup in Lebanon, for example, because it is based on such an arrangement. The Shia, Maronite Christian, Sunni Muslim, and Druze blocks are all mutually hostile, but they recognize the fact that no single group can hope to dominate all the others, not even Hezbollah, now the strong. Now the strongest by far. Thus, the Beirut government functions as a common clearinghouse for these policies that are accepted by each ethnic bloc. If one carried out a coup in Beirut, it would immediately lead to the collapse of the system, since each group, backed by their own armed forces, would seize

power in their own region. The coup would therefore only capture parts of Beirut and suburbs. It would probably be unable to retain control beyond that area. Lebanon provides an extreme example of the role of ethnic and regional forces in a coup. In each individual instance, there will be a particular balance of power between the respective regions as well as between each of the regions in the center. The effects of the coup would have to be allocated so as to deal with each ethnic and regional block on the basis of an estimate of its role in the particular balance of forces. In a few cases, a coup may be impossible because the nature and extent of regional power is such as to require resources beyond those likely to be available. Elsewhere, it will be just one more obstacle to

overcome. The third precondition of the coup, therefore, is the target state must have a political center. If there are several centers, these must be identifiable, and they must be politically, rather than ethnically, structured. If the state is controlled by a non-politically organized unit, the coup can only be carried out with his consent or neutrality. Pete, I just wanted to bring up one thing is, as the reader is listening to this, is to try to look again at the United States and ask yourself, what is the political center in America? Are there multiple centers? And then finally, the idea of do we have a politically organized state or is it ethnically structured?

Now, maybe the center of power might be politically-shundated. structured and our states formally are politically structured, but we're seeing the emergence of ethnic structures as well within government and right well within our country. And so there's something interesting here that we're in a state of transition. You know, you look at like an example, extreme example would be something like Dearborn, Michigan, that there's not only a political structure, but there has become like a ethno-religious structure as well to that place. And when we look at these new waves of immigration, but we're not just dealing with like, last, Latin American countries. We're now dealing with populations in which an more ethno or religious

governance, even if it's like the de facto rather than the de jure, is becoming present in this country. And so I just think it's something interesting to keep your eye on. And we can't really rely on the old assumptions that we might have had about our society 30 years ago. Well, that's just returning to the past, right? I mean, the E. Michael Jones talks about how this country's pretty much always been a struggle between Protestant Catholic and Jewish interests. Yeah, no, I think, you know, I think that's a great point because I've long kind of felt that we are reverting towards a mean if we take our history, all 400 years of our history, and we look at that, that really the mean that we're playing, like seeing, we're living in

the end of an aberration in a way, even in the history of the world. And we are reverting towards a mean, which is really interesting when we talk about things like national symbols and what we wish to accomplish politically, you know, that's something that gets kind of lost because of the way we might have grown up. But it's definitely real. So I tend to agree with that. All right. Moving on, I'm going to finish up right now. Ethnically structured is a rather awkward phrase. It is intended to cover social groups whose leadership is evolved by clear cut and well-established usually hereditary procedures. If a particular traditional leadership controls a state, we cannot seize power by carrying out a coup in the state's controlling center, nor can we penetrate the

traditional leadership because we would be excluded automatically as usurpers and outsiders. In Burundi, for example, the traditional Watutsi hierarchy controlled the state. In order to seize power in Burundi, it would have been necessary to penetrate the hierarchy, but this would only be possible if A, we were Watutsi, and B, we belong to the aristocracy, though in that regard, there has been a diffusion of power. In Rwanda, power was also controlled by traditional Watutsi chiefs who had subjected the Bahutu majority. Then there was a revolution, and the leadership became Bahutsu political rather than Watutsi traditional, until the former launched a genocidal campaign, followed in turn by a Watsutsutsi Reconquest whose leadership is not traditional. A coup would, therefore, be possible.

If a political entity is actually controlled by a group that is not structured politically, then obviously political methods cannot be used to seize power. This is the case of a country dominated by a business unit. Imagine, for example, that Wall Street did. control the United States in the sense that the president and Congress acted as its stooges. If that were the case, power could not be seized in Washington. Returning to reality, Katanga in the early 1960s and the Central American Banana Republics of the 1950s were examples of states whose real centers were politically impenetrable because they were not there in the first place.

And that is the end of chapter two. And that's where we'll end. And any closing thoughts? Yeah, I just love the idea of asking ourselves, what is politically impenetrable here in the United States? And with the growth of globalization, foreign interests being very much involved in our politics, how do you change that? Is it a matter of just flipping a congressman to support you and to support the country as its own independent entity?

Or how do you resolve those problems? What is politically impenetrable? I think it's really important. think to ask. But thank you for having me on, Pete. I really appreciate it. No, no. Thank you. Thank you for coming on. And do you have anything to promote? Yeah, we did just have, speaking of Project 2025, I am 1776, of which I'm an editor, just published an interview with Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation and amongst other things, including the assassination attempt and the work they've been doing. We talked a little bit about

Project 2025. So feel free to go check it out. Let me ask you a question. What people will say is, is that if Project 2025 is looking to dismantle, the administrative state is looking to give the power back to, basically to bring us back to where we once were in this country when it comes to how we're governed, how can we trust the Heritage Foundation when they're just a part of the machine. That's a question I hear all the time when I'm talking about Project 2025. Yeah, I think it's a great question. I mean, I don't have any special insight necessarily, have my own thoughts. I'm kind of conflicted on this subject, to be honest. But I think that's a very valid concern.

I tend to take anyone or anything that comes from the D.C. Beltway and usually employees, no offense to anybody, but like nerds, to do things politically like this. I always am a little skeptical. I do say what I've seen them do. I've been fairly impressed by many of the things I've seen and their plan. But I do think for those of us that are outside the center of power, it's really important to be, you know, show some scruples,

be very skeptical of plans that would take the country back, but they're, you know, kind of coming from the same crowd that took us to the place we're at in the first place. So that means no reflection. on heritage. I don't really have an opinion. I've seen a lot of good stuff that they've done, but I think people have a reason to always be skeptical about things. Well, then someone can come back and always say, well, you know, Caesar was an insider, Pinochet was an insider, Franco was an insider, you know, it's always an insider that actually makes change. Yeah, I mean, that's a great point.

I mean, Napoleon was a Jacobin at one time because anybody who was any planning to do anything had to be a Jacobin, you know, I think, I think there's a danger on the right where we worry about certain kinds of purity when it comes to opportunity. And there are people that are just ambitious. And then there are people who do have principles, but recognize the landscape and they have to play with the cards that they're dealt. I think that this goes back to what Lutwok is talking about is like, if you're going to change things, you're not going to really, and I don't mean no disrespect to those of us on the periphery, but, you know, real change is going to happen on inside. Doesn't mean you have to be on the inside, but you have to be close to it, right? You have to

understand it. I don't really believe in peasant rebellions. I think they're important because they can apply upward pressure and galvanize people like a Caesar, but they're not going to win on their own terms. 100% agree. And I just want to apologize if my audio has some kind of noise on it today in the background. My power kept going out and I have an electric generator running in the room and it just sounds like snow. So if that came through, I apologize, but I appreciate everybody tuning in. And thanks, Lafayette. I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you so much. I want to welcome everyone back to part four of my reading of Kuday Ta by Edward Lutwack. And John Fieldhouse is back. How you doing, John? Doing well today, sir.

Cool. Well, no introduction needed. I'm just going to jump right in. Start reading and stop me whenever you want to. Sounds good. All right. Chapter 3, the strategy of the coup d'etat. Dean Atchison used to tell a story about Chief Justice Taff relating a conversation he had just had with an eminent man about the machinery of government. And you know, Taff said with wonder in his voice, he really did believe that it is machinery. So quote, Roger Hilsman from the book to move a nation. Under totalitarian conditions, knowledge of the labyrinth of transmission belts of the machinery of government equal supreme power. Hannah Arendt, and in quotations, Mr. Ludwack, wrote, wrong as usual. in the origins of totalitarianism.

It's a nice little piece of humor there. The first one's definitely good. I mean, there's, you know, it's sort of like the Supreme boomer con insult that it's true of most people in general is that we seem to confuse the way things are supposed to work with how they do in practice.

Yep, 100%. All right, start reading the text. Overtrowing governments is not easy. The government will not only be protected by the professional defenses of the state, the armed forces, the police, and the security services, but it will also be supported by a whole range of political forces. In a sophisticated and democratic society, these forces will include political parties, sectional interests, and regional, ethnic, and religious groupings. Their interaction and mutual opposition results in a particular balance of

forces that the government in some way represents. In less sophisticated societies, there may be a narrower range of such forces, but there will almost always be some political groups that support the status quo, and therefore the government. If those who carry out the coup appear to shatter such a powerful structure merely by seizing a few buildings and arresting some political figures, it is because their crucial achievement passes unnoticed. This is the dangerous and elaborate process by which the armed forces and the other means of coercion are neutralized before the coup, and the political forces are temporarily forced into passivity. If we were revolutionary seeking to change a structure of society,

our aim would be to destroy the power of some of the political forces. The long and often bloody process of revolutionary attrition can achieve this. Our purpose, however, is quite different. We want to seize power within the present system, and we shall only stay in power if we embody some new status quo supported by those very forces that a revolution may seek to destroy. destroy. Should we want to achieve fundamental social change, we can do so after we have become the government. This is perhaps a more efficient method, and certainly a less painful one,

than that of classic revolution. Though we will try to avoid all conflict with the political forces, some of them will almost certainly oppose a coup. But this opposition will largely subside when we have substituted our new status quo for the old one and can enforce it by our control of the state bureaucracy and security forces. A period of transition such as this, which comes after we have emerged into the open, and before we are vested with the authority of the state, is the most critical phase of the coup. We shall then be carrying out the dual task of imposing our control in the machinery of the state, while simultaneously using it to impose our control on the country at large. Any resistance to the coup and the one will simulate further resistance in the other.

If a chain reaction develops, the coup could be defeated. I was going to go and said that, yeah, I just didn't want it because we're on a roll there. Yeah, that's probably the most relevant thing, I think, for any student of just the, what a coup looks like in practice and historically. We tend to think that the goal is to go and destroy all those forces immediately in the process of taking the palace or whatever that's the actual symbol of power. And he's making it real clear. It's like, no, don't confuse what has to happen later with what has to be done in order

to gain the power. It's very easy for laymen to always think that, you know, wars are always about fighting. And we're not talking about war. We're talking about a related thing. And I think that, no, the goal like Sun Suisse is the actually impose your will there with the least amount of fighting since, you know, violence involves costs. So I just found that to be a very insightful couple of paragraphs. Moving on.

Our strategy, therefore, must be guided by two principal considerations, the need for maximum speed in the transitional phase, and the need to fully neutralize the opposition both before and immediately after the coup. If in the operation phase of the coup, we are at any stage delayed, then our essential weakness, will emerge, we will likely acquire a political coloration, and this, in turn, will lead to a concentration of those forces that oppose the tendency we represent, or our thought to represent. As long as the execution of the coup is rapid, and we are cloaked in anonymity, no particular

political faction will have a motive or an opportunity to oppose us. After all, we could be their potential allies. In any case, a delay will cost us our principal advantage, the voluntary neutrality of the wait and see elements, and the involuntary neutrality of those forces that require time to concentrate and deploy for action. Surprise is your friend. The need for maximum speed means that the many separate operations of the coup must be carried out almost simultaneously, necessarily requiring the efforts of a large number of people. Therefore, assuming that we start the planning of the coup with only a small

group of political associates, most of the personnel we will need must be recruited. Furthermore, our recruits must have the training and equipment that will enable them to take swift and determined action. There will usually be only one source of such recruits, the armed forces of the state itself. Would you say also retired military? Yeah, especially in our scenario, if something more like that we're at, Something like this, what happened? Yeah, well, it's people who can actually be that the security force, the force of the state. So, so right, Tyrese hypothetically, can be very useful?

The question is, can you arm them, organize them, and put them in the right places quickly enough without it becoming obvious what you're doing? Right. Understood. Because ethnic minorities are often both anti-government and warlike, some may believe they are the ideal recruits for a coup. That has been true of the Aloit's and Druze in Syria, the Kurds of Iraq, and the Shans in Burma. But in most cases, a coup identified with minorities is likely to arouse nationalist reactions on the part of the majority peoples. Since the centers of government are usually located in the majority areas, their opposition would be a further important obstacle for us. Another possible substance...

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to call it. But yeah, one of the best parts this next chapter so is when he actually talks about the concept of martial minorities, which is something that you won't see in any real politic discussion anymore, which is horribly politically incorrect, and it's great. It's just a really good understanding of which groups can be loyal and which groups are irrelevant. Another possible substitute for the subversion of the forces of the state is the organization of a party militia. when there is a combination of political freedom with an ineffectual maintenance of law and order, such militias are sometimes formed in order to protect party activities.

In Weimar Germany, for example, apart from the Nazi Stumab, I can never pronounce this name, Sturmobterlung, Sturmobterlung, assault detachments or brown shirts, there were party militias of the social Democrats, communists, and the right-wing nationalist party. similar organizations black shirts green shirts red shirts and in the middle east silver shirts spread in many countries in the wake of fascist and nazi successes in spite of their military bearing uniforms and often extensive weaponry in almost every instance of confrontation between such militias and the forces of the state the former were defeated thus when the nazis tried to use the embryonic brown shirts in the 1920 through 23 Munich coup attempt, they were easily overpowered by the police and Hitler was himself arrested. His subsequent rise to power was achieved by political means, not by the efforts of the brown shirts.

He does a good job of pointing out that, again, we tend to ignore the fact that during Weimar, Germany, just about every political party that mattered had militias, to include guys who were basically moderate liberals had their own party militias. So when people talk about the brown shirts as if that was the only armed or only political militia there, it's like, no, everybody had a militia in the Vimar era. Oh, yeah. I mean, the KPD, they would face off in the streets. Famously.

The right front fighters. In any case, in order to organize and equip a party militia, two scarce resources are needed, money and the freedom to do so. Recruiting forces from those maintained by the state requires neither. Therefore, while a whole range of forces will be needed, will need to be neutralized, a distinctive approach must be used with the means of coercion of the state. In dealing with the armed forces to police and the security services, we will have to subvert some forces while neutralizing the rest.

By contrast, in the case of the political forces, the objective will be limited to their neutralization. Because of their capacity for direct intervention, the armed forces and the other means of, coercion of the state must be fully neutralized before the actual coup starts. The political forces usually can be dealt with immediately after the coup. In some situations, however, the political forces may have an immediate impact on the course of events and must, therefore, be dealt with prior to the coup.

This is an interesting paragraph because the attempted coup in the Soviet Union against Gorbachev, what was that, 89 or whatever, um, In the republished version of Jerry Pornel's, there will be war. He actually has a good preference before the old preference. And he points out that that coup failed fundamentally because they hadn't fully subverted all the military forces that were needed to suppress things inside Moscow proper. And Jerry Pornel talks about explicitly that the battalion that was sent to go in arrest Boris Yeltsin, A bunch that battalion, excuse me, a bunch of the officers. We're talking lieutenants and captains got together with the colonel and told him,

you know, sir, we are going to do this job, but you really owe it to this man to go in there, talk to him face to face before we take him out in handcuffs, which that colonel did. In any ways, you know, the colonel goes in there, comes out like an hour and half later, and he just, you orders his troops to turn around, and he goes, no, we're with Yeltsin now. And Pornel points out that that was probably the most, I don't know, it's a world-changing example of just initiative by small, you know, junior officers in the last 30 years or whatever. Because literally a coup, which, you know, its failure brought down the Soviet Union, it happened just because a bunch of lieutenants and captains told a lieutenant colonel,

this is how we need to do things. And that colonel allowed himself to be convinced. So, yeah, that's a good example of the military, not being properly severed. and a neutral political movement, because Yeltsin was no longer a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the fact that he hadn't been neutralized meant that the coup failed. In Russia, during the period of instability that followed the first bourgeois February 1917 revolution, the railway men's union emerged as a major source of direct power. Vichchal, the all-Russian executive committee of the Union of Railroad employees, played a decisive role in the defeat of General Kornelov's Putsch by simply refusing to work the railroads that were to carry the soldiers to Petrograd. Later, when Alexander Kerenzky, the Russian provisional government's minister chairman, fled the city following Lenin's October coup and took refuge with Commander Pieter Krasnof's army contingent, Vichel, threatened to call a general strike,

i.e. to leave Krasniews troops stranded, unless Kerenzky negotiated peacefully with the Bolsheviks. Since the Bolsheviks had no intention of negotiating seriously, this amounted to a request for unconditional surrender. In the peculiar conditions of Russia in 1917, the railways and those who controlled them were of crucial importance to the military and to the planners of any coup, unless their forces were already in Petrograd, still then Russia's capital city. Elsewhere, other political forces have the power to exert similar pressures. In poor countries, where the majority of city dwellers can only buy food on a day-to-day basis, well-organized shopkeepers can bring great pressure to bear on the government by refusing to open

their shops. Where there is a strong trade union movement, strikes can impede the vital process of establishing the authority of the new government immediately after the coup. Religious and ethnic leaders, for their part, can use the structures of their communities to organize mass demonstrations against a new regime. Therefore, we must identify and evaluate such political forces, and if necessary, their leading personalities and coordinating bodies must be neutralized before the coup. Other political forces lacking such direct power will also have to be dealt with. But this will be part of the process of conciliation and accommodation that follows the coup. This is, I mean, it's just one long paragraph, but I think he really does explain more than anywhere, all the complexity that would go into doing it, just because it's one of those things when you war game it out,

all the things that are essential, you know, political actors and a capital. There's a lot of there, and it's not something that the average, military officer is going to know off their top their head, and it's not necessarily something that, you know, one staff can tell you immediately. So just planning for this becomes a very detailed process like any other kind of military operation, if it's done properly, which is also the Achilles heel. The process of preparing for this also every step of the way means there's opportunities for things to be late. Neutralizing the defenses of the state. One of the outstanding features of modern states is their extensive and diversified security system. This is a consequence of the general breakdown in external security and internal stability

experienced in many areas of the world in the last two or three generations. Every state maintains armed forces, a police force, and some kind of intelligence organization at the very least. many states find it necessary to have paramilitary gendarmes in addition to several police forces, duplicate security services, and other variations on the theme. Yeah, I'll just take a second because this is part of what I was saying. This section, you could tell that Lutvac, it's not particularly well updated. Yeah, so it's not the most updated section. So, yeah, when I talk about gendarme, gendarmerie is, or gendarmes, just the name for the individuals.

He calls a paramilitary. A gendarme is actually a fully militarized police force that's part of the armed forces that actually enforces law in the civilian populace. We don't really have many examples of those in the English-speaking world. Because, again, these are fully militarized, same personnel system as the military that does. And it's not like just internal military policing. It's policing on the population. In the American context, the only real example of a gendarmerie we have is the U.S. Coast Guard, right?

And that's just the fact of both military and law enforcement. But again, they only do things on, you know, within 12 miles of the U.S. coastline and certain navigable waterways. The English-speaking world never really had John Demerese because inherited from the British tradition, we don't like the idea of armies of occupation, especially against themselves, which is part of why the British Army wasn't allowed to use red or green. Or, excuse me, British police originally weren't allowed to use red or green for their own police uniform. originally where the blue police uniforms came from, except for Ireland, where the Royal Irish Constabulary was almost a borderline constabulary. Like I said, the French Ander Marie, the Italians have the carabinari, the Spanish have the Guardia Civil. And in all those countries,

these are fully militarized. I keep stressing, these are military personnel who enforce law in the population, usually in addition to the regular population that does things in a civil areas in a lot of places like France and yeah Spain in like extremely rural areas the Jean-Dermarie's actually have responsibility just because there's not really anybody to nobody wants to be a cop

in the middle of nowhere so nobody's going to sign up for that so the military the military eyes police do that in the former Soviet or former Soviet spear they usually called those internal troops and the the minister of interior the MBD had separate militarized units, KGB also had separate militarized units, who's, again, their jobs are primarily to enforce things internally as opposed to externally. He'll talk about

these being run by the Ministry of Defense. That was the way it was originally up until like the 80s, most of the countries that had Jean-Dar-Marie's, their commissioned officers were actually trained at the same academies as Army officers. There was actually a move away from that, like in the late 90s, early 2000s, where again, they deploy overseas. part of the the militaries of these respected countries. Like I dealt a little bit of Carabin area in Iraq, but again, their primary, when they're in the host countries, doing things internally, they've actually in the last few decades largely been taken over by the Ministry of Interior. And again, Ministry of Interior, everywhere except for the

United States, the Interior Department actually is responsible for internal security. So they have the police, they have immigration and customs, they have, you know, domestic counterintelligence, The British called that the Home Secretary of the Home Office and the United States. The Homeland Security kind of sort of functions like that. The other thing I was going to say before we get into it is he talks about like municipal police departments. Basically everywhere in the EU except for Britain in a couple rare, which isn't in the EU anymore, obviously, in a couple rare exceptions, they don't really have municipal police departments anymore. One of the things that came out of the EU attempts to harmonize laws is basically the last the municipal departments were either absorbed into the national police or in the case of federal states like Germany. The individual was a Bundes or what they go, Bundeslander, the federal states actually own the police.

So yeah, that's just something to understand just because like I said, he did not do the best job updating the Department of Security Forces. In the pre-1914 world, states were not noticeably less aggressive than they are in the present-day international society, but the lack of off-rail transport and residual attachment to diplomatic convention resulted in a certain span of time between hostility and hostilities. The modern pattern of military operations, a surprise attack on undeclared war, has as natural consequence the military peace. Instead of small professional armies acting as cadres for wartime expansion, many states attempt to maintain permanent armies capable of immediate defense, and therefore offense. In countries of Muslim populations, local or immigrant, the rise of Islamist insurgent and terrorist movements has led to an expansion of internal security forces. Paramilitary and undercover police outfits have become common in many states, including democratic ones. In the 1930s, the United States had fewer than 300,000 troops in its armed forces.

The only significant intelligence operation was a small and supremely efficient U.S. Navy code-breaking outfit, while internal security forces were limited to the Treasury's Secret Service that was mostly active against currency foragers, though it supplied the presidential bodyguard and the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose high ambitions were constrained by small budgets. In 2015, the U.S. Marine Corps alone had some 184,000 men and women in uniform, while the entire uniform military establishment has a population of some 1.4 million, even after many large reductions, thereby still outnumbering the total population of some 70 UN member states. Moreover, while the armed forces have greatly diminished in numbers since the end of the Cold War, notwithstanding all subsequent intervention wars, the intelligence wars, the intelligence. community has grown enormously into a many-headed bureaucratic monster, largely because each intelligence failure caused by gross errors and uses Congress to give even more money to those who

fail instead of the opposite. I am old enough to have heard Secretary of State Dean Atchison deplore the State Department's failure to retain the intelligence function within its purview in the formative years of 1945 to 1947 when the abolition of the wartime standalone Office of Strategic services OSS was followed by the formation of the very small and improvised central intelligence agency with some OSS people as a temporary expedient. At that time, the State Department could have easily absorbed that orphaned entity, but the career foreign service officers of those days disliked its ex-OSS emigre breed Jewish intellectuals and assorted tough guys and, therefore, allowed the rise of the Central Intelligence Agency as an entirely independent agency, which over the years

has gained ever greater funding, regardless of its abysmal performance, and has become a powerful competitor in the policymaking process. Look at that lays out the part that it's not so much that they were Jewish intellectuals as the fact that their immigrants were communists. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty well known. I mean, all you have to do is look at who was being targeted.

by organizations like Hewak. Yeah, one of the easiest examples, too, is the international brigades, the Spanish communist international brigades, which you talked about in the last book, a number of people from Americans from those brigades actually involved in the OSS, involved in early intelligence operations. So it's, yeah, that was one of the weirdest things about the early CIA is, yeah, you had a lot of guys from skull and bones, you know, old wafts. But like I said, you also had outright commies, which maybe they needed their skill sets,

but that should tell you everything about who was there in the beginning. Worse still, the CIA itself failed to live up to its name from the start because the Army, Navy, and the Air Force retained their own separate intelligence organizations. The subsequent merging of those organizations beginning in the mid-1960s did not ensure centralization either because its instrument, the Defense Intelligence Agency did not include the codebreakers, a handful of talents pre-1941, in the thousands by 1945, and later embodied into the immense National Security Agency NSA, whose ambition to intercept any and every electromagnetic transmission,

including the idle chatter of infants with cell phones, was merely dented by the revelations of Edward Snowden, the most patriotic of traitors. But the Hydra has many more heads. 19 of them at the last count, though there may be more. We got to say, no, the, well, yeah, I guess. One of the things that's pointed out, the Central Intelligence Agency, the head of the CIA, traditionally was not called the head of the CIA.

He was called the director of Central Intelligence. When they created the Office of National Intelligence, it was changed to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. But the point is, originally the CIA, again, there was the turf battle whether or not the different militaries and the State Department were going to continue to have intelligence capacities, which all of them do to some degree. But it was sort of understood that the CIA was going to serve as, through the intelligence community, basically a collector, but an aggregator that would, you know, aggrate all the different

material into one place before it was disseminated to the president or the rest of the executive branch. And as Lefeck said, that basically never happened, which basically again, it created number one, it begs the question why exactly we had the CIA if it doesn't do what we said it was going to do. But every time we allow the expansion of the intelligence community, as it says, 19 agencies and counting, we haven't provided a better way of aggregating and disseminating this information. So yeah, we've got all these people collecting. But if you can't make sense of it and you can't get to the source or the people who need that information, and why are you doing that? And that's the professional issue with American intelligence.

Is it just so many special interest groups controlling and having a say that it's just competition? I mean, well, that's part of it. I think part of it is we have this allergy that we're not willing to disband and eliminate federal agencies, even when we want to replace it with something new. Very often we'll aggregate things like, you know, immigration and customs were turned into ice but we weren't willing to just destroy something and

start over because unless you do that you're just perpetuating the the legacy problems and whatever organization so yeah most armies that are militaries that had like severe setbacks and then bounce back it's usually because they did massive reorganizations in which they just completely disassembled intelligence and security agencies that weren't working starting over. Germany being a great example, but even Canada, right? Canada's got like its third intelligence agency because the military did it, then the RC&P, the Mounties did it, then they said, no, we need our own intelligence agency. So they proved that you can, you know, a first world, democratic, liberal state can take apart something and rebuild it. And we're just not willing

to do that. All right. Number one, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Zodianai, an additional bureaucratic and would-be analytical echelon established after the 9-11 intelligence debacle and given the impossible task of coordinating the work of the remaining 18 entities and the even more impossible task of fusing their intelligence into a coherent whole. Two, the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, whose thousands of employees include very few people who know any foreign languages other than in Spanish, perhaps. even fewer people who know any useful language, and very few undercover operators, the so-called

Knox non-official cover, as opposed to general purpose analysts and an infinity of managers, very few of whom have any field experience other than service and foreign stations, i.e., offices within U.S. embassies abroad. The overall results is to CIA operatives do not emulate their British and Israeli counterparts by infiltrating terrorist organizations. Indeed, they have so little field experience of any kind that most of the CIA employees killed overseas were the victims of their own an experience or those of their managers safely at home. The frequency of its drastic reorganizations, the 2015 version is labeled from the ground up, shows that the CIA leaders are aware of its incompetence, but to gain quality by cutting

it down to a small number of truly expert experts and truly operational operatives goes against a bureaucratic logic of unceasing growth, managerialism. Yeah. Like I said, you have to be willing to take something apart and replace it. And the American way has largely been, it's performative. We're pretending to transfer something, and we just relabel would already exist it before. And the same shit happens over and over again. Three, the very much larger NSA with the world's largest,

gathering of computers and an ever-growing number of linguists who can translate an ever-shinking proportion of all communications intercepted. It also intercepts and analyzes missile telemetry, radar emissions, etc. 4. The Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence OICI of the U.S. Department of Energy, responsible for all nuclear-related information, with a major role in monitoring the nuclear activities of Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan. This role, however, is impeded by the CIA's inability to insert its own agents, even in the proximity of installations, let alone inside them, very understandably in the case of fully closed North Korea, not so in the other cases.

Five, six, and seven, the separate intelligence organizations under the colossal U.S. Department of Homeland Security hurriedly established after the 9-11 attacks by merging by merging very diverse agencies, which included the U.S. Secret Service, to repress counterfeiting, as well as for presidential protection, the intelligence units of the border and custom services, the U.S. Coast Guard intelligence, the Office of Homeland Security Investigations, and so on. Eight, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, INR, of the U.S. Department of State, the smallest, cheapest, and most useful of the lot. The Office of Terror, nine, the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence of the U.S. Treasury Department.

10, the Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA of the U.S. Department of Defense. 11, the national... I was going to say about 10, the DIA. I have still never had anybody explain to me what they actually do as distinct from every other intelligence. I mean, I've had, you know, special forces, yeah, special operations officers. I've had military intelligence officers. I've had people who worked in the various intelligence agencies, and none of them can really explain what the DIA does

and how it's distinct from every other agency. Because, again, the DIA doesn't necessarily involve the tactical level, meaning the actual intelligence that is part of various military units. So, again, I'm not really sure what they do, and nobody's been able to explain to me. 11. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, NGA. 12. the National Reconnaissance Office NRO, which operates satellites.

13. The U.S. Military Cyber Command, a specified command. 14. The U.S. Air Force Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency, ISR. 15. The National Air and Space Intelligence Center, NASIC. 16. The U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command. com. 17, the National Ground Intelligence Center, NGIC, part of the U.S. Army, yet national. 18, the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, MCIA. And then 19, the U.S. Navy Department's Office of Naval Intelligence, ONI.

That's probably one of the older ones, isn't it? Yeah, like you said earlier, Naval Intelligence with the Code Breakers, is the oldest intelligence agency of the U.S. military and it's like the only real intelligence assets that the United States military had other than the FBI going into World War II. So again, not to talk about any conspiracy theories or all the things that happened around the Pearl Harbor attacks, but it, you know, I've always thought that the fact that the U.S. never bothered with intelligence probably had a huge contributor to that problem. Of course, now we have a bunch of the Finally,

do less. Say that again. I'm sorry to step on you. Yeah, I was saying, but now we have 22 something agencies, but they seem to be doing even worse off, so maybe I'm wrong there. Finally, under the Department of Defense, 20, the FBI's national security branch, and 21, the Office of National Security Intelligence, ONSI, of the Drug Enforcement Agency, DEA.

The nominally highest-ranking ODNI was established under the Intellectual. Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 in the futile hope of coordinating all these separate intelligence organizations and fusing the knowledge scattered in a huge number of separate brains sitting in separate buildings. The much more economical alternative of unifying them instead was not even considered because to cut down and consolidate when against the post-disaster mood of doing more rather than less. That more is less when it comes to intelligence will no doubt be recognized one day. One peculiarity...

I was saying, always be careful, the guy who wants to help all the time. One peculiarity is that the U.S. Congress specifically legislated a strong suggestion that the director should be an off-duty military officer. It is desirable that either the director or the principal deputy director of national intelligence, not both, should be an active-duty commissioned officer in the armed force. That, no doubt, was meant to stop presidents from appointing their unqualified friends and campaign contributors to the job, regardless of qualifications, as they do with ambassadors. Or, like, FEMA, if you remember, when Hurricane Katrina happened. I think the guy who was running FEMA had, like, formerly been a caterer.

Yeah, it, I mean, that's always the issue, right? I mean, we have senior executive service in the various agencies. We got people who come up from the civil service, and we have people who are appointed. And, yeah, there's always that problem with the appointees. Of course, the civil service is, there's so many problems with the civil service. To begin with the fact, we're effectively using the same portal that we recruit people for the post office in order to do intelligence collections. And so it's as bad as the appointees are, I'm not sure the civil servants are that much better. Hey, let's not knock people who work at the post office.

I mean, the president of Somalia used to work there. Is he still the president of Somalia? Well, one of the warlords used to be a U.S. Marine. Muhammad Farrow-I-D.'s son. Involved in the invasion at that time. And ID took over his clans militia. But, yeah. Yeah, I forget what his name was.

Something ID. President of Somalia worked at the, yeah, he worked. It's a post office in Buffalo, New York. Yeah. So. That made them qualify. I don't like to knock people at the post office, but, again, the demands that go into that are a lot different than running national security, and we effectively use the same personal system to recruit everybody. Yeah.

Now, we'll have the post office around here. Good people. All right. Another peculiarity is that the DNI may not serve concurrently as director of the CIA of the CIA of, position theoretically greatly diminished by the very existence of the DNI. So far, however, it is the CIA director who continues to visit the White House most often, even though the president's daily brief has been produced by a joint group and not just a CIA since February 15, 2014. In any case, the greatest limitation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is

the Defense Department's continuing control of the three intelligence organizations that have by far the largest budgets, the NSA, the NRO, and the NGA, and of all military intelligence activities, except for U.S. Coast Guard intelligence, which comes under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. An American John R. Murray. It said it's an American John Donner-Marie, just like I said earlier. Ah. Okay.

All right. New section. Nothing can remedy the confusions, gaps, and disjunctions caused by the French fragmentation of information flows into so many different organizations, certainly not the ever-growing new bureaucracy of the Director of National Intelligence. Indeed, at six centers and 15 offices so far are further fragmentation knowledge so that more data equals less intelligence, i.e. knowledge both useful and timely. That's pretty much the issue everywhere with intelligence. It's the issue in the private sector,

is, yeah, you can have an ever-growing amount of data, but knowing what the data means in a timely manner is forever the issue. And like I said, it's just a perpetual issue that I don't know there's a perfect solution to. Contrary to popular legend, and contrary to the 2015 U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Torture Report, the CIA has never been an excessively independent, let alone a rogue entity. An excessive independence is not the problem of any other U.S. intelligence organization either. The problem, rather, is their persistent failure to perform effectively because their people

will not go where the vital information might be found, not even these days, to join the Islamic State, which takes in all comers as volunteers with no way in investigating them. Well, why would you want to join an Israeli? Never mind. That too. Of course, how do we know that they don't? I mean, again, undercover operations are by death. definition secret. So clearly the attempt to obtain all knowledge from overhead images and

electronic intercepts alone is less and less successful as adversaries design their activities around their limitations. Even fledgling terrorists now understand the needs to stay away from cell phones and to use the internet without being caught while Chinese and Russians who cannot hide their aircraft and submarines can nevertheless operate them evasively. no state has been able to emulate such a luxuriant growth, not even the Soviet Union in the 1970s, when its military expenditures were growing without limit and wrecking the economy,

and not even today's China, which gets by with military intelligence services and the Ministry of State Security, Zhongwa, Remnin, I'm... I don't speak. Cantonese. Yeah, I'm not doing that. Ministry of State Security,

is what the Soviets called the KGB originally are committee of state security. So they copied that acronym into Cantonese, which I don't speak. Okay. Albeit abundantly manned and well funded, its sin is an overreliance on ethnic Chinese agents in place, which exposes all overseas Chinese insensitive positions to inevitable suspicion. Without being able to keep up with the United States, most states have done their very best. even a medium no i was just gonna say it's sort of an

darrell's talked about it on his show several times that there's been several intelligence breaches in the u.s. military and u.s. government by um chinese intelligence and every time it's involved somebody was ethnic chinese they may not have been from the PRC but they were ethnic chinese um in any other country in the world like he said it's kind of obvious where their spies come from except for the united states where you know It may be illegal to point that out.

So we keep getting caught by that. Yeah, I can think two groups right off the bat. It's just like, oh, well. That's the other group. And you can't say it either time. Yep. Even a medium-sized country like Italy with no hostile neighbors of any military consequence found it necessary to maintain substantial internal security

and foreign intelligence services, even before the advent of post-9-11 Islamic terrorism, which also occupies the attention of the national police publica secueira Reza. Public security whatever in transit. Yeah, yeah.

And the paramilitary carabinet. That's their gendarmerie. Ah, okay. Uniquely an independent service in Italy on par within Navy, etc. More embattled states enroll large parts of the entire population

in various kinds of defense and security forces. Israel used to be surrounded by declared enemies. It now has allies on two sides. With no natural defenses, very little strategic depth, and no protection from any military alliance, it's an extreme case. Even in 1967, when it only had the population of a medium-sized city, it has almost tripled since. Israel was able to field more than 250,000 men and women in the June 1967 war. This paragraph is really dated.

Yeah. I mean, who are the allies on two sides? Tell me, these allies you speak of. From the point of view of the coup planners, the size and power of the armed forces, police, and security agencies is both a great obstacle and a great help. On the one hand, as Leon Trotsky pointed out long ago, the technological improvement of weapons, means of transport, and communications has widened the capability gap between organized military forces

and civilians equipped with improvised weapons. Trotsky noted that, while the French mobs of 1789 could rush positions defended by infantry soldiers with their one-shot muzzle loaders, in 1917, a Russian mob, however large and determined, would be cut down by modern automatic weapons. By modern, he meant the clumsy,

very heavy, water-cooled Maxim machine gun on his tripod. Today, every single soldier on mob control can be armed with an automatic weapon with a similar rate of fire or a greater rate of fire. Yeah. Well, we also train people not to use automatic weapons, their individual weapon. But yeah, that's a great example, right?

Historically, when you had to reload weapons to include cannons, you know, it was always the danger you could be out, or, you know, rushed by a larger mob. But if you can keep shooting, it becomes a lot harder to rush them. Yeah, England did a good job of that in India. On the other hand, the increase in the size of uninformed forces and their technological evolution have improved the characteristics of the state security apparatus as a recruitment ground for the coup. The modern army or security force is usually too large to be a coherent social unit bound by traditional loyalties.

The need for technically minded personnel has broken the barriers that often limited recruitment to particular social groups within each country. tribesmen and Bedouin may be politically reliable as well as picturesque, but they are often technically inadequate as pilots, tank crews, or even to staff a modern police force. That's also one of the reasons why successful multicultural societies, you know, Singapore being the great example, a lot of times don't have volunteers, armies, volunteer militaries, and actively work against that because in the case of Singapore,

for only certain people in certain ethnic groups, and it wasn't the Chinese plurality, and it definitely wasn't the majority of them who are a hawka Chinese. So the big risk is anytime you have a post-colonial, multicultural society is an all-voluntary army can usually become an ethnic mafia. So as they said, that's one of the reasons

why many states even have they have very little immediate security concerns. There's not an immediate enemy on their border. that they keep a draft and keep a large army is because they want that diversity in order to make it harder to Plotico, which is also essentially the same strategy that, fuck, Amazon is used to prevent, what do you call it, unionization in some of the shops. If there's a different culture, even if you speak the same language, it becomes a lot harder to organize. Sorry for my swear.

That's fine. I think he says tribesmen and Bedouins here often technically inadequate as I mean even Saudis I mean when they started bombing when they started bombing Yemen they had to be guided by Americans in in the jump they are they have huge problems because even as late as I knew people say early 2000 late 90s who had been embedded with the ira or with the the Saudi army so you have was it the Royal Guard the National Guard who are supposed to protect the royal family, and they're mostly from a certain a couple of different tribes and ethnic groups. But the military at the whole, they had huge problems

into the 2000s with illiteracy. And again, you can only train somebody so much if they're illiterate. You know, you actually have to read instructions on bomb sites and things like that, especially since you're not going to keep all that in your head all the time. So, yeah, many of these armies, that, yeah, they recruit from politically reliable ethnic groups. But that doesn't mean that they're selecting, you know, for, you know, meritocratic skill. And the big problem is, again, people in the hills do not necessarily have the best education in the world. And I say that somebody's families from Appalachianism.

It's just another form of it. Just more tribal. The fact that the personnel of the state's, security system are both numerous and diverse means that we, the planners of the queue, will be able to infiltrate the system. In doing so, we will have the dual task of turning a few of its component units into active participants of the coup while neutralizing the others. This does not mean that we have to fight them, but merely that we have to prevent their possible intervention against us for the limited span of the coup. Whether the purpose of our infiltration...

Yeah, sorry, but I was just going to say that that last last Last point is probably the most important thing to understand, right? Possible intervention doesn't mean we got to fight them. We have to take them out of action hypothetically when you're planning this. So what can you do to take a force out of action? Hopefully without fighting them, because that way you don't damage them and you don't create internal animosity. You also don't damage your own infrastructure, your own armed forces, which you're going

to need in the future. Whether the purpose of our infiltration and subversion of the defenses of the state is to turn the unit concerned into an active participant of the coup, or whether it is merely defensive, the methods to be followed will depend on the character of each particular organization. The raw material for our efforts is the whole spectrum of the coercive forces of the state, and as these vary substantially in their equipment, deployment, and psychological outlook, we shall examine them separately. I think this is probably a good place to stop.

Yeah. We're at, like, 50 minutes. Yeah. Yeah, and I can come back next time unless you got somebody lined up. But yeah, like I said, the big thing that can't. That would be right. I was saying I don't have anybody lined up. Yeah, and like I said, one of the big things that just popped out is some of this is really dated like the Israel, having friends at all sides.

But yeah, there's very much the, again, when he talks about, you know, paramultary police. know the actual gendarms are actually, John-Marie, are actually militarized, and they're usually a dual force, which is make them so unique, and something we don't generally have in the Coast Guard, in the American context. But it also illustrates the point he made in earlier chapters of how to prevent a coup, many countries have dual-purpose security forces,

you know, different organizations that do the same functions under separate commands in order to make it harder to infiltrate them and have a coup. So that's, like I said, that is, you know, something we see in a lot of places. Also, the fact that, like you said, the issue about force diversity in a military, and again, to make it less of a, you know, a loyalist faction of one specific group in the country. But, yeah, it makes it easier to infiltrate it also potentially makes it harder to subvert. Meaning, yeah, you can get guys in there, but it doesn't mean you necessarily can have them

take control of an organization or subvert an organization. Cool. Well, I mean, I appreciate everything. And yeah, let's do this. Let's pick this up again later in the week if that's okay. Let me just do a quick plug. Thomas and I watched the 1979 Mel Gibson Mad Max. And we commented on it and I put it up on Gumroad if you want to check it out. Free Man Beyond the Wall.com forward slash movies. All the movies that Thomas and I have reviewed are there. And you can see the other ones as well. Taxi driver seems to be the one that right now, everybody has, anybody who's watched it, you know,

it's like that's the one that most people have went and got. Yeah, I still need to go see the one you did on Red Dawn, the guy you requested. All right, John, I appreciate it. Talk to you later.

I want to welcome everyone back to part five of my reading of Kudetah by Edward Lutwak. John's back. How you doing, John? Doing well, sir, and hopefully I'm coming in clear now. You sound good. I just want to remind everybody that Thomas and I do movie reviews. The latest one is the 1979 Mel Gibson movie Mad Max. If you go over to freeman Beyond the Wall.com forward slash movies,

there are links to, there are links there where you can pick them up. All right, that's it. So let's get going. Did you want to clear a couple things up from the last episode before we even get started? Yeah, the first off was the, I gave the wrong date for the coup against Gorbachev, which was in reality in 91 as opposed to 89. And the other comment I made about local law enforcement, basically being a municipal-sized law enforcement being a thing in the past in the EU. Apparently the last couple of years, it's actually started to come. back because France actually authorized laws in like 22 to allow local police again, and they've actually had some of the first cities, townships actually established some of the first local police departments in at least 30-something years. Do you know if they're just basically arms of the larger regime, or are they more localized or you didn't look into it?

Well, in the case of France, they have the same uniform, same rank structure, same pay structure. everywhere for all local police departments and probably same training. So, yeah, essentially they're the central state. So essentially, let's whoever the manager or mayor is of the local township to have his own security force in their very limited situations under zone control. Okay. All right, we're going to pick up right where we left off. Stop me anytime.

New heading, neutralizing the armed forces. In June, 1967, the Israeli. having defeated the other Arab armies, were turning to deal with Syria. The head of Syria's ruling junta, National Revolutionary Council, Salad Jadid, kept the two best brigades of the Syrian army in the barracks at Ahams and Damascus. Syria's war minister and the country's future leader, Hafez al-Assad, praise be his name, begged Yadid to allow him to send the 5th and 70th brigades to the front, but Hadid, after physically assaulting him, pointed out that, though the brigades

might save a few square miles of territory, to send them to the front, would jeopardize the survival of the regime. The leftist Ba'ath government was not popular with any important section of the population, and the two brigades were the main supports of the regime. Though hardly patriotic, Hadid or Jadid was at least realistic. When he had taken power in February 1966, he had done so by means of the two crucial brigades whose officers were politically and ethnically allied to him and which displaced the previous strongman Hafez

from power when his brigades happened to be away from Damascus or were infiltrated by Jadid's men. Everywhere in the world, while the number of doctors, teachers, and engineers was only slowly, was increasing slowly, the numerical strength of armies expanded rapidly after 1950, and only declined again when the Cold War ended in 1990, give or take a year. It is interesting to note that while technical improvements in, say, agriculture have allowed a diminishing number of farmers to produce ever larger amounts of food, armies needed an ever larger labor force,

during the 40-year period, even though their productivity, or rather destructivity, per head, also increased very rapidly. A modern platoon of 30 men has several times the effective firepower of its 1945 counterpart. It is doubtful whether farming techniques have improved to the same extent. The effectiveness of modern soldiers, with their rapid transport, reliable communications, and efficient weapons, mean that even one single formation loyal to the regime could intervene and defeat the coup. If, as is likely, our forces are small and the mass of the people and the rest of the state's forces are neutral. Our investigation of the armed forces of the proposed target state must, therefore, be a complete one.

We cannot leave out any force capable of intervention, however small. This, I mean, these for a few paragraphs, rather, it's an interesting case. I don't disagree with look back so much as I wonder if you would still take away the same conclusions since yeah, we've got more firepower in smaller units and there's still the potential for, you know, small units to radically change things because, you know, the Soviet coup is a good example, that battalion effectively ended the entire coup against Gorbachev. But I wonder if that, or I wonder in light of all the things we know in the last few decades, he would have the same conclusions, rather. You would think if he did, he may have updated them in 2016. Interesting. All right. Though most states have naval and air forces as well as armies, we shall concentrate our attention on the latter because the procedures to be followed are usually the same for all three services and because, with some exceptions, only land forces will be important from the point of view of the coup.

It is, of course, possible to use fighter bombers to take out a presidential palace instead of sending a team to arrest the occupant. This was done in the 1963 Iraqi coup, but it is a rather extreme way of playing the game. Although the ratio of firepower achieved per person subverted is very high indeed, tactical bombing of one's future capital city and prospective post-coup residence is not calculated to inspire confidence in the new government. It doesn't make any sense to break the thing you're fighting over. In certain geographical settings, however, the transport element of naval and air forces make them even more important than the army, as, for example, in the case of Indonesia. With major population centers scattered over two large islands and hundreds of small ones, and with the very limited road facilities on the lesser islands, a unit of naval marines or paratroopers, will be more effective than some much larger army unit located in the wrong place. place. When the communist attempted Cucum Revolution unfolded in Indonesia on September 30th, 1965, the military commanders were able to use their control of air transport to great advantage.

Though communist infiltrated army units were very powerful, they were in the wrong place. While many sat in the Borneo jungles, the anti-communist paratroopers and Marines took over Jakarta and eventually the country. Yeah, that's, you know, one of the perpetual issues of modern wars, firepower is great, mass is great. Being able to put it where you need it is not always the same thing as having a lot of it. Armies are divided into certain traditional formations that vary from country to country, such as divisions, brigades, regiments, battalions, companies, and platoons. Beyond this formal structure, however, the focus of decision-making is usually concentrated at one or two particular levels.

It is very important for us to identify which level of command is the important one and then concentrate our efforts on it. Table 3.1 illustrates several possible alternatives that we may face, though in order to achieve infiltration in depth, we may, in fact, have to operate on many levels below the real center.

Operating above it would be pointless. I'm going to finish reading before we look at the table. Yeah, I would just summarize the table. We'll be here all day. Yeah, there we go. in A, in table 3.1, the operational echelon is the battalion. If there are persons holding the rank of divisional commanders, they will probably be officers who have been eliminated from the real chain of command

and giving gaudy uniforms and exalted ranks as a sweetener. If in this case we were to subvert a brigade or divisional commander, and he would then issue orders on our behalf to the battalion, the latter, used to receiving its orders from the G.H. would probably query or report the order. Thus, apart from mere ineffectiveness, there could also be a further risk in operating at the wrong echelon. In B, where almost every echelon is operational,

we can subvert the control mechanism at almost any level, and orders given on our behalf will be obeyed at each lower level. In C, again, we can operate at all levels, except those of division and battalion. Yeah, I know this can come across is very confusing to those who are outside the military. But again, like any other organization in the world, we have defined chain of command. And most armies, you have a semi-fractal structure where you repeat, usually base 3 or base 5 from platoons, the company, battalions on up. So depending on, you may have one structure that is how you organize, which primarily exists for accountability in garrison and training.

But some of those echelons may largely be bypassed depending on how you fight. And again, that a lot of times depends on the individual military in question. So I don't, the principle matters and is relevant universally, but I couldn't tell you which countries necessarily follow one versus the other model according to how he's defining them. Though it may seem that the location of the main focus of control and communications is an arbitrary one, in reality, it depends on very firm psychological and technical factors. Unless the standard of training and motivation is high enough, soldiers have to be welded into great uniform blocks under the firm control of their superiors because they have neither the discipline nor the capability to fight as individuals. Even highly motivated soldiers cannot be allowed to operate far from the concentration of troops,

unless they are linked by an efficient system of communications that enables them to receive new orders and to report on their situations. In general, the easier the terrain, the lower the degree of discipline and efficiency, the larger the size of the unit that will be allowed to operate independently. Conversely, the more sophisticated the troops and equipment, and the closer the terrain, as in jungles or swamps, the smaller the unit operating on its own. The two extremes came face-to-face in the Sinai in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war,

when the Egyptian army was organized into three large block, under rigid HQ control and incapable of independent action. The Israelis, on the other hand, operated in many small brigade-sized groups, which concentrated for mass and separated to infiltrate in a fluid and flexible manner. In the 1973 war, Egyptian forces were much better trained, and their leadership was much more determined, but their command system was still very rigid, and they were again outmaneuvered. For the coup, it means that if orders are properly issued,

they will be obeyed uncritically, and that is how General Abdul Fattah Saeed, Hussein Khalil al-Sisi, became Egypt's ruler in 2013. That last sentence is the key part. It's important that the orders are delivered in a manner that's organic, because if they're artificial, everybody's going to immediately stop and ask why, to include people who are maybe on your side. When we have determined which is a true operational echelon in the various formations of the country concerned, we can go on to the next stage, namely, identifying which formations have the capability to intervene for or against the coup. We shall follow two main criteria, the nature of the unit concerned, and the location of the particular unit. These were explored in a case study of the Portuguese armed forces chosen because they are representative of many others. New heading, the Portuguese Armed Forces in 1967. The Salazar regime in Portugal was based on a partnership between the landowner and classes, the newer industrial and business elite, and the bureaucratic middle class,

which staffed the civil service and the officer level of the armed forces. As in Spain, Air Force and Navy officers tended to be rather less conservative than army officers. Also, as in Spain, the two services were deliberately kept thin in number and resources. Army. The total strength was about 120,000 men distributed as follows, excluding administrative personnel. Infantry division with some medium tanks, partially used as a training formation, added about one half of its theoretical establishment. Of the total number of soldiers in the unit, only about 2,000 had any motor transport, apart from the small number equipment armored vehicles. At any one time, many of the troops were new conscripts with little training or discipline.

location central Portugal. That issue about organic motor transportation is a huge issue. There's a keep in mind, maneuver units, combat units don't necessarily own their own transportation assets. So putting them somewhere requires significantly more coordination than just giving an order to those units. And, you know, every time you give an order, it's the opportunity for something to be leaked. 2. Infantry Division. This formation was usually much below strength with perhaps 3,000 soldiers with some degree of training. Transport, however, was sufficient for perhaps half this number, location,

northern Portugal. Rest of the Army, the largest number of troops around 100,000 with the highest degree of training, and with the best equipment, were then spread over Portugal's African territories, Angola, Mozambique, and Portuguese Guinea. Navy. Though the Portuguese had a great naval tradition, and though the overseas provinces would justify a larger Navy, for which the U.S. military assistance program could have partially paid, for the reason suggested above it has been kept relatively weak. One destroyer, 14 smaller combat ships, three submarines, and 36 other vessels. Of greater interest to us, 12 support ships, four landing craft,

and half a battalion of Marines of the Corpo de Fusolieros, because of the distance of the African provinces, even if the Navy were particularly loyal to the regime, it could not have brought over many troops from Africa. The Fusilieros themselves were then mostly in distant waters, and in any case, their number was hardly significant. Yeah, for comparison to the U.S., we're talking about colonies that are basically equivalent to the distance between Argentina and Georgia or Tennessee

in the United States. All right. Air Force, about 14,000 troops. It was then equipped with a variety of old American and Italian aircraft. It's 3,000 paratroopers were then stationed in the African provinces, now the independent states of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea, Bissau, Bissau, while the transport wing could carry back to Portugal only about 1,000 men every 24 hours. And it's not just the ability to carry, but, you know, the rate that you can carry,

and that's a good point because an effective coup, generally, you want to do it in about a day. It's important that you get in there, establish control, and you basically, in the course of two days, you know, it becomes the new status quo. Well, if it takes you so many days to go and transport that many people, and it's going to become really obvious removing that many people fairly quickly, you know, the whole element of surprise is taken away. In the case of Portugal, therefore, although the armed force is numbered about 150,000, a small fraction of this total could be relevant in the event of a coup.

Most of them would be prevented from intervening physically in the Lisbon area because of their location and their lack of suitable transport. Others would only be able to intervene ineffectually since their training and equipment was unsuitable. Thus, out of the entire armed forces, only three or four battalions, perhaps four thousand individuals, had an effective intervention capability. The small size of this force reduced the possibility that the coup would be, would be defeated, but it would also have limited out potential area of recruitment. If the Air Force or Navy did bring back to Portugal some of the troops station in Africa, we would be the government by the time of their arrival.

Therefore, they would be under our orders. If we should fail to impose our authority by then, the coup would have failed anyway, and their arrival would not change matters. Unless that is, we had first subverted the troops in Africa, which would be a rather torturous way of going about things. This suggests a principal criteria by which we separate out the forces relevant to the coup, whether military or not. The forces relevant to a coup are those whose locations and or equipment enables them to

intervene in its locale, usually the capital city, within the 12 to 24-hour block of time that precedes the establishment of its control over the machinery of government, infiltrating the armed forces. Our initial survey of the armed forces of the target country will have isolated two items of information crucial to the planning of the coup. A, the nature and composition of the units that have an intervention capability. B, the real operational echelon within them. These data are illustrated in table 3.2.

Up to this point, we have been thinking in terms of formal military units, but we must not We must now carry our analysis further in order to identify the key individuals within each particular unit. If we were dealing with a primitive military organization, we could readily isolate those who effectively lead the unit concerned. In the tribal war ban, for example, there will be a few obvious leader types, distinguished by their appearance and less obviously by their descent or personal repute. The other warriors will only be functionally different from each other. because of their individual strength or dexterity. In modern military organizations, it is otherwise.

The efficiency of the organization depends on the use of many different types of weapons and other facilities handled by specialized personnel. In each situation, there will be an appropriate mix of these, and the system, therefore, depends on two kinds of individuals, the technicians and those who coordinate them, the leaders. This is, I would say, one of the places I have. have issues, we'll look back just because I don't think he ever effectively defines what he means as a technician or gives the example. I mean, leaders, we understand as commissioned officers,

probably not commission officers in a British-American or German type structure. And the U.S. military has a concept called technicians, which are warrant officers, which is something American-style warrant officers are different than what the rest of that will cause a warrant officer. But I don't think he ever defines what a technician is. Our next problem, therefore, is to identify the key individuals within those units of the armed forces that are capable of intervening for or against us during the coup. As we have already determined the operational echelon within each particular formation and thus implicitly identified the leaders, we can now turn to identification of the technicians. Who they are will depend on the nature of the organization and the tasks to be carried out.

if, for example, during the course of the coup, the government calls on the help of force. See, in our notational table 3.2, its arrival in the capital could be prevented with the cooperation of just one of these groups. The force operating the communication system between the political leadership and force. The pilots and or ground staff or the air transport squadron. The guard force at the airport or airports. The control tower personnel at either airport, especially in difficult. flying conditions. In general, the more... Go ahead. Sorry, yeah, I think, I'm assuming those are what he means by technicians in this

case, but yeah, that's always the great example. And again, every military will have a doctrine about how it's supposed to fight, which is not necessarily the same as how things work in reality. And especially in staff functions, it's always really important to know because, again, we tend to define clearly all the manager roles within a staff, it doesn't necessarily mean it works that way in practice. So that requires a lot more specific knowledge of a very specific type of organization. In general, the more sophisticated the organization, the greater its efficiency, but also its vulnerability. Either force A or force B in Table 3.2 could, for example, operates successfully even if quite a few of its personnel were not cooperating with the leadership.

For these forces, losing the cooperation of 10% of their personnel would mean losing approximately 10% of their effectiveness. In the case of force C, however, the loss of perhaps 1% of its men could lead to a total loss of effectiveness for some particular tasks, such as intervening in the capital city. This indicates that when we are trying to neutralize a formation of the armed forces, we should do so through the cooperation of technicians rather than leaders, because the former or both more effective individually and easier and safer to recruit. The second role, other things being equal, is that we should choose for neutralization those units with the most complex organization while choosing the simplest ones for incorporation. This will both reduce our vulnerability from a sudden defection and minimize the total number of people who must ultimately be recruited.

Before we go on to approach and persuade the key individuals to join us, thus giving us effective control of their units, we must have collected sufficient information on the armed forces to know. A, which of the military units could intervene at the time and place of the coup? B, the real command structure within the relevant units and who the leaders are. C, the technical structure of the units, and who the technicians are. That C is probably the most important, because, again, if you could knock out transportation, with, again, you know, in 3.2, the C being an example that were wise, an air traffic, or excuse me,

entry to air transport to move them, you know, conceivably taking away fuel or taking away air traffic control could keep them from getting off the ground. So that's just a simple example of how you can neutralize a unit. To incorporate a unit, we will need the active cooperation of a number of its leaders. And in the case of a technically simple unit, the defection of some technicians will not matter greatly. if in otherwise well-infiltrated units some of the leaders should remain loyal to the pro-coup regime,

this should not prove to be a major obstacle. Whether we concentrate on leaders or on technicians will depend on the particular structure of the effective forces of intervention and on the particular political climate. If there is a sharp political division between the troops and their officers, we may be able to incorporate units without the cooperation of any formal leaders at all. The problem of identifying the unofficial leaders will, however, be a very difficult one. In any case, there is no reason to believe that we are planning the coup at a time when such a division has hardened. The technical structures, however, are more stable, and one of our principal considerations will be to avoid being dependent on too many links in the technical chain.

Table 3.3 shows our optimum strategy in infiltrating a typical set of potential intervention forces. Of course, in countries prone to coups, those who order these things are aware of their vulnerability to the defection of parts or their armed forces. It is quite likely, therefore, that the Easy Battalion, number one, has been carefully chosen for its reliability, and its commanders are trusted associates of the ruling group. If this is the case, we may have to work on Battalion. Number 3. What we must not do is to rely on battalion number 2 because a defection from our cause or even a few of its technicians will have dramatic consequences. Until we actually start to collect information about the individuals and make the first approaches, we may not know which units are politically tied to the regime. More generally, we will not know what our ultimate recruitment prospects look like in each unit.

though we will have a rough classification in mind when dividing the units into potential allies and potential neutrals, we should keep the distinction flexible. As we build up a picture of the recruitment potential in each unit, we will concentrate our efforts on the units to be incorporated. The reliability of a unit allied to the coup will be increased if we infiltrate it in depth, but there is little point in over-infiltrating a unit that will eventually be neutralized. Every approach to an individual will involve an element of risk. Every increase in the number of those who know that something is up will reduce our overall security level. We must therefore avoid over-recruitment. If we go to an Army officer and ask him to join in a projected coup, he will be faced, unless he is total loyalist, with a set of options that offer both dangers and opportunities.

The proposition could be a plant of the security authorities, to determine one's loyalty to the regime. Alternately, the proposition could be genuine, but part of an insecure and inefficient plot. Finally, the proposition could come from a team that has every chance of success. Should the proposal be a plant, accepting it could lead to an officer's loss of job

and much more. On the other hand, reporting it might gain the officer of the rewards of loyalty. Should it be a genuine proposal, the officer has the uncertain prospect of benefiting after a coup as against the certain prospect of benefiting immediately from reporting it. The natural thing for someone in this position to do, therefore, is to report it. The whole technique of the approach is designed to defeat this logic. Apart from the rewards of being part of the

successful coup, which can be portrayed as being significantly greater than the rewards of loyalty, there is another factor operating in our favor. This is that the person to whom an approach is reported may actually be a supporter of the coup. We must emphasize, therefore, these two points as much as possible, while underplaying the risk element. But hopefully our potential recruits will be motivated by some considerations beyond greed and fear, with other interests and affiliations entering their choice. Links of friendship with the planners of the coup and a shared political outlook will be important, but usually the crucial considerations will be family, clan, and ethnic links with those planning the coup.

In most economically backward countries, different ethnic groups retain their identity, and mass education and mass communications have not broken down traditional rivalries and suspicions among them. In any case, the first steps toward economic progress usually reinforces these conflicts, and we may often find that the ethnic links

are far more important than more recent political affiliations. On that note, I was going to say, there's a tendency for Americans to think that tribal affiliation and minor ethnic group, or we think of as minor ethnic group and religious denomination, there's tendency as Americans to think they're irrelevant or just superficial details, and most of the rest of the world still cares, and in many cases these are things they will kill and die for. For example, when no factories were being built,

there could be no regional conflicts on where to build them. When civil service jobs were all given to citizens of the imperial power, there could be little conflict between ethnic groups on the fair allocation of jobs. Conflicts over jobs or the location of factories are necessarily more intense than the old conflicts over land. While before, only the geographical fringes of the tribe were in contact with the rival. Now each tribe fights the other on the national stage. Although a conflict over land can reach a compromise with some middle line, A factory has to be located either in area A or an area B.

The alternative, of course, is to put it on the border of the two provinces, even though this location is usually far from roads and other facilities. It is sometimes done. This is an important paragraph because I think it essentially explains why mass immigration is occurring today. Because, again, if you have a distinction between citizens and non-citizens, or at least some vestigial difference, you know, suddenly loyalty to one political party or another depends on which one's going to treat you as a member of the in-group or the out-group. Yeah, agreed. As old conflicts widened in scope

and intensity, the instinctual solidarity of the ethnic groups hardens. African tribalism is merely an extreme case of a very general phenomenon. For example, sophisticated and utterly unreligious Jews will happen to marry other Jews, though they may regard themselves as thoroughly assimilated. there was still a Czechoslovakia and communist to boot, despite Czech and Slovak protestations of national unity, capital investments had to be assigned carefully to each area on an exact percentage basis, and conflict over this was one of the factors that brought down the government of Anitin Novotny, the great survivalist, in 1968. In fact, all over the communist eastern Europe of those days, the old rivalries and enmities were just below the surface and the new

socialist national policies of the later 1960s and 1970s vigorously revived them. So for people who think that a lot of communism was just, you know, we're so ideological that we hate this person. No, that's an opportunity for one group to attack another. Yeah. And like I said, many parts of the Middle East politics are essentially that. Yeah, these ideologies exist, but it's no action. accident that ideological lines are also tribal lines of one sort of another. For instance,

you know, bathism, both Iraq and Syria, was very popular among Arab-speaking Christians. In Romania, almost half a million Germans and a million and a half Hungarians felt that they were not getting a fair deal. Meanwhile, in Yugoslavia, the Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians, Macedonians and Slovenians, were all involved in a complex ballasting act that ultimately broke down in a bloody civil war. In many places, ethnic divisions are complicated by superimposed religious conflicts. The Igbo-Nation in Nigeria, for example, has been an endemic conflict with the Muslim northerners for a very long time, but the introduction of Christianity among them has meant that the old Igbo-Hausa conflict has been intensified by an endemic.

newer Muslim, Christian one. I thought Christians weren't violent. I thought those. Yeah, well, most people outside of the modern West will fight when they're violated. Yeah. We will try to make the fullest use of the ethnic matrix without aligning our coup with any particular ethnic faction. In terms of petty tactics, we will match each potential recruit with a recruiter who

shares the same affiliation and, if necessary, the image of the coup will be presented in a similar vein. But we must also take account of a special factor that can be considered a post-colonial phenomenon. Colonial regimes develop the habit of recruiting army personnel from among minority ethnic groups. Groups that were reputed to be more warlike or even more important could be trusted to join in the repression of the majority group with enthusiasm. Yeah, I was going to say before you go and that was my whole point about a post-colonial multicultural society there's a danger

of a volunteer army becoming an ethnic mafia, which is why places like Singapore insists on ruthlessly enforcing universal manhood and military conscription no matter how much people don't want it. After independence, these minorities naturally regressed

in terms of political power and social position, but they still staffed much of the armed forces. This has led to the strange spectacle of minorities acting as the official protectors of the very regime that is exerting the pressure on them. Much like America. Yeah, I was just going to say, I was waiting for you to say it. Yeah, I mean, a huge amount of American history has been about a Scots-Irish minority along with, you know, other people from the South and Midwest being the bulk of the military forces. Well, we increasingly have a changing ruling class.

that sees us as the enemy. The Alohites and Druze of Syria were in the position once the French departed in 1945, and it is hardly surprising that disaffected officers of the two groups played a prominent role in most of the many coups that followed independence. In many parts of Africa, the majority peoples are the reputedly soft coastal tribes, who have captured the political leadership because of superior numbers in education, while much of the army is made up of members of smaller tribes of the interior. Originally, this resulted from the superficial ethnographic theory that the British learned in India and the French learned in Algeria,

but which, in African conditions, was little less than absurd. As soon as the officers of the colonial country landed in a new territory, they set about finding the hills, or at least the bush, the more primitive interior. Once there, they tried to recreate their semi-homosexualizing, relationship with the Wiley Pathan or Lafier Kabail, Kabail, by recruiting the supposedly tough hillmen into the army. The Athanas are the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Kabir are the Berbers of North Africa, and I have no idea why he's arguing this is a

sexualized relationship. It seems like he's using it as a metaphor for something, but I don't get. Yeah, I'm not even sure what. Without setting the stage for an intertribal civil war, there is every incentive to make use of this factor. To the extent that there is an effective political life, however, the ideological outlook of the potential recruit will also be important. As far as we are concerned, combining all ranges of the political spectrum against a right

or left extreme will give the most suitable political cover to our coup. The regime of Abda al-Karim Qasim in Iraq, which lasted for five years as a pure balancing act, was finally brought down in 1963 when the moderate nationalist Abda al-Salem Arif persuaded all political factions from left-wing bat to right-wing conservatives to combine against the supposed communist penetration in the government. if there is no extreme faction available where you say something I was just going to say the table 3 to point four and there's no reason for us to read it verbatim

but it's just some really interesting cases specifically in the 11th of the Druze and Alloids and just as an aside it's interesting because he's talked primarily about Syria but both those ethnic groups expand into Lebanon and even into Israel And one of the weird aspects of the Israeli military is Druze, especially, I don't know so much about the Hallowaits actually make up a disproportionate compared to their size portion of the regular army, to the point that the Israeli army actually disbanded their Drew's unit and integrated those men into Jewish units, just because a huge number of them were actually becoming officers and regular army infantry units. and they thought it made more sense to actually train them in Jewish units to begin with. If there is no extreme faction available, we will have to be content with the petty tactics

of claiming political kinship with potential recruits. But apart from the virtues of honesty, there is a need for consistency. A systematic presentation of the coup in terms of divergent political lines may eventually lead to our undoing. The film Spy Games, there's a line that says any time you tell the target, a lie, you have to treat that as the truth from then on out. So one of the points that, like, case officers, people running spies make is you should, the version of the truth you're going with should be as close to what's actually true as possible just because it becomes much easier to keep the story correct when you're telling the truth.

Yeah, just simply it's easier to remember the truth than it is a lie. Exactly. Finding out the ethnic group to which a particular officer, longs is relatively easy. Finding out about his political outlook is more difficult. But the hardest thing of all will be the determining whether he is personally alienated from the higher military leadership. Only the family and the closest friends of an officer will know whether he feels that his superiors are treating him unfairly or running things badly, to the extent that he would welcome a radical change in the whole regime. Unless we have a direct line to the individual concerned,

we will have to use outside information to undermine his inner feelings. A standard intelligence procedure is to follow the career pattern of officers in order to find out which ones have been passed over for promotions, assuming all things being equal, that they will make good prospects for recruitment. In many countries, promotions within the armed forces are announced in official gazettes, and starting from a particular class at the military academy, one can follow the career of each officer from their graduations of the press, In some countries where promotions are not published for security reasons, one can carry out the

exercise by using back copies of the telephone directory if they still exist, where their names will be printed along with their changing ranks. In places where neither telephone directories nor official gazettes are good sources of information, we could use more desperate expedients, getting an old boy from the relevant years to circulate proposals for a reunion, or building up many biographies from personal acquaintances by whatever means, our aim would be to trace a reasonably accurate career history for each graduating class from the Military Academy. The competitive position of each officer will be established as of the others of his year rather than the other officers of the formation in which he serves.

Table 3.5 presents the information in the appropriate framework. The seven lieutenants will probably make eager recruits for anything that will disturb and rearrange the order, but their low rank may be a correct assessment of their abilities, in which case their help may be a liability. More generally and more usefully, we know that the captains and majors in our table may well be less enthusiastic about the regime than the colonels, while the two brigadiers, if not actually appointed for their political reliability,

have probably become staunch supporters, whoever gave them their exalted jobs so the table just uh shows the number of lieutenants captains major's colonels brigadiers and from yeah from a single hypothetical military academy class which is correct one reason when the u.s military usually has an or with few exceptions has an up and out system where if you're passed over twice for promotion you were forced out of the military turn. Ethnic affiliation, political outlook and career patterns will all serve as guides to the likely reaction of the potential recruit when the approach is made. There are, however, two points that we have to bear in mind, the first not only organizational, but deeply human. While alienated

personnel will make good recruits, we must remember that we need people who will not only cooperate personally, as in the case of the technicians, but also bring the units they command over to the coup. Thus, while the leaders we recruit could and should be estranged from the superior hierarchy, they must not be outsider figures who are not trusted by their fellow officers and men. There will often be a danger of attracting the inefficient, the unpopular, and corrupt when trying to recruit the disaffected. If we allow our coup to be assisted by such individuals, we will be endangering the security of the coup and discouraging the recruitment of the better elements and most important of all, we may find that our leader recruits will fail to bring

their units with them. I have a friend who was a head hunter and just find people to plug into corporate positions. He became my friend because he actually recruited me. And what he told me was the reason he liked me is because the first time he approached me, I blew him off. Yeah. I told him to go to hell. Yeah, I'm like, who are you, you weirdo?

Yeah. He said, the people who are too eager, like, oh, I need to hear what you, you know, what you're going to say is either they're totally sick of their job and you have to ask why or the people in their job are sick of them and they want to get out of there. Yeah. It's, yeah. I agree. All right. Nor can we ever lose sight of the basic unpredictability of human behavior. We have so far been trying to establish which links could override the loyalty of army personnel to their superiors, and of these affiliations, the strongest may be expected to be a family link.

We should not, however, place total reliance on this factor. Despite the Arab proverb that states, I and my brother against my cousin, I and my cousin against the world, we should remember the out-off family history in Iraq between 1958 and 1966. there's a table here. I'll just read the first part of it. President Abdel Raman Rahman-Araf was chosen in April 1966 as a compromised candidate by the army after the accidental death of his brother, Abda al-Salem, previous dictator of Iraq. The career pattern of the two brothers shows that while both were prominent army leaders, one did not always cooperate with the other. So. Yeah, very much so. And just because somebody is, good at their job does not necessarily mean they're going to get promoted in any organization.

So, competence. There's someone like me who would repeatedly turn down promotions. Exactly, which doesn't happen in the U.S. military. But yeah, lots of organizations. Exactly. And people get promoted too fast and lots of organizations are just that. They're people who are willing to leave their environment. Because if you're in a really good environment, really good circumstances,

stance, even if they're going to promote you, why would you take it because you're giving up what you enjoy for something that may or may not happen? The relationship between the brothers illustrates the difficulty of predicting human behavior. Between 1958 and 1962, one brother was in prison under a suspended death sentence, while the other was in charge of a force that could probably have moved on the capital at any time. The bath leader, mindful of this precedent, allowed Abdel Rahman to remain in charge of the important armored units near Baghdad and this was their undoing. There was a period of that.

No, I was just going to say that's really important because it was the three to X six. The point is the guy who was the original leader who was seen as the important one is the guy who was, you know, sentenced to death for treason awaiting execution, whereas the other guy, Abdul Rahman looks on paper. He is by every estimate to be the more successful person because he's, you know, successful and kept getting promoted, but the, uh, this is a good example, right? Some organizations, if you're the actual innovative person, you will be the person who's marginalized. So that's something you have to be aware of.

There was a period immediately after the first coup in 1963 when the position of the presidential brother was weak and the Ba'ath party militia totally untrained but heavily armed could have been used to remove the military brother from his command. The Ba'ath leaders, however, assumed that Abdel Rahman would not cooperate with his brother and would behave as he did in 1958 to 1962. But this time he behaved differently, in spite of the fact that he was helping a brother who needed much help, who needed help much less badly than in 1958 to 1962 when he was captive and under a death sentence, or perhaps because of this. Despite such instances of human unpredictability and bearing in mind the

individuality of our prospective recruits, we can nevertheless use the information we have collected to rank the leaders in terms of their probable response. Having established a career histories in ethnic and political affiliations of possible recruits, we can proceed to weigh our prospects, as illustrated in Table 3.7. In evaluating the information, we must, of course, bear in mind that the importance to be attached to each factor will differ from one environment to another. In Latin America, for example, the social racial background would also have to be added, while in Western Europe and North America,

political allegiance would be paramount. Ethnic affiliation, if any, would be less important. Rather dated paragraph. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even if he, I can't believe he would do that in the revised version, considering what 2015 rock. Yeah, so, yeah, well, he kept in mind the 2016 edition was probably finished editing or writing it in 2015.

15 or so. So it's probably dated information even by 2016 election. Thus out of 15 potential recruits, we see that number three is the only totally good prospect from the point of view of the factors here take it into consideration. Number five is a totally bad one and probably dangerous to approach at all. The others, however, will be somewhere in the middle. And he's just laid out of a battalion here and, um, possible officers with numbers, their political views, ethnic affiliations, career pattern, whether they would approach yes, no, or doubtful. Yeah.

Once we have repeated the procedure followed in the case of battalion number one, covering all the other formations of the armed forces with an effective intervention capability, we will know the overall recruitment prospects of each unit and within them of each individual. We will never be able to achieve 100% coverage. In some cases where the armed forces are very large in relation to our resources or frequently redeployed, our coverage may be very incomplete. This will not matter greatly if the unknown units can be neutralized technically. If, however, their intervention capability does not depend on elaborate and vulnerable facilities, then the coup may be jeopardized. We will not, however, depend on incorporation and neutralization procedures alone.

and we will also be able to isolate physically those units that appear on the scene unexpectedly, as well as those we have not been able to infiltrate at all. Before looking at the problems involved in the third and least desirable of our methods of dealing with armed depression, we must turn our attention to the subversion of individuals in the units where we do have the requisite information. I was just going to say that's a really long paragraph that it basically says. if we don't know whether something is reliable or not, we treat it as unreliable. Which is a smart, which is just a smart thing to do at that point. Yeah, we in doubt don't touch it.

Yep. Just checking one thing real quick. Trying to see where our next break is. Okay. A few more pages. All right. As soon as we emerge from the close scrutiny of the planning and information stage, the danger factor in our activities will increase very sharply. As we have pointed out earlier, each single individual

we approach will be a potential informer who, by telling the authorities about our efforts, could lead to the collapse of the coup. The most dangerous person to approach will be the first in each particular formation, because until we have that person's cooperation, we will not have a really intimate source of information about the unit and its members. Our first recruit must, therefore, be a long-standing member of that particular formation, and, if it all, all possible, a senior officer, or even the commander. Once we have chosen our first recruit, the initial step will be to arrange a meeting and sound him out in vague and generalized terms about the possibilities of achieving political

reform. These soundings must be conducted by someone who fulfills certain exacting qualifications. He or she must be a trusted associate of high caliber, but not in the inner group planning the coup. In other words, the person must be valuable and expendable. must be both valuable and expendable. This is an ideal that we can only try to approximate, but it could be fatal to expose a member of the inner group

to the possibility of being portrayed by the authorities. In the coup country par excellence, Syria, political leaders used to go around the barracks canvassing for armed support, but the special conditions of Syrian political life were not likely to be reproduced elsewhere. Once a potential recruit has been brought to the state, when the possibility of a coup has been openly discussed, he should be told three things about the coup. A, the ostensible, if not actual political aim, B, that we have already recruited other individuals in units, and C, the nature of the task that he will be asked to perform. Everything we say or arranged to be said to the potential recruit will have to be studied carefully, and we will work on the assumption that every recruit may be a double,

who is working for the security services. We will not, of course, identify our coup with any particular party whose policies would be known, nor with any particular political faction whose leading personalities will be known. We will instead state the aim of the coup in terms of political attitude rather than in terms of policies or personalities, because the latter are necessarily more specific and therefore liable to evoke specific opposition. The attitude we project must be calculated carefully. It should reflect current preoccupations in the target country, imply solutions to the problems felt to exist,

and mirror the general political beliefs of the majority of its people. Yeah, I was going to say, the only, obviously we don't have coups in the American tradition, but this idea of the approach of being all things, all people, or at least to a broad swath of people, the only person politically that is anything that resembles that in American politics, it's probably Trump. And I obviously don't think he's part of a coup and obviously he has a position and a political party.

But that goes to some lengths, I think, to understand why the establishment sees him as such a hostile outsider. In Latin America, the attitude presents it may, for example, imply that the sacred trust of the armed forces requires interventions to clear the mess made by the politicians in order to achieve social, national progress. while respecting property rights, property rights, individual rights. If the pre-cue government is itself the product of a seizure of power, then the aims of the coup can be presented purely in terms of restoring normal political life, or if we are, is that Utre, Utre, leftist? I suppose. I don't speak much French. We can speak about the need to restore democracy.

Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Making up slogans may seem to be an easy game. Is he given a lot of way there by saying that? Well, again, I've never heard him talk about Trump at all, but my previous comment about how he kind of resembles that, or at least sort of sets off the spidey sense as a word,

you know, kind of explains why the talk about our democracy has become universal. Making up slogans may seem to be an easy game, but in fact our slogans will have to be calculated carefully to satisfy a political optimum. We must, for example, avoid being specific. At the same time, though, if the attitude we present is too general, it will simulate the suspicions of the shrewder of our listeners while failing to fire the enthusiasm of the more idealistic ones. We must also remember that the armed forces of many countries

are often politically and psychologically at a tune with civilian society, and that they could have distinct and perhaps antagonistic preoccupations and beliefs. As citizens, army officers may share beliefs that there ought to be economies in government expenditure, but simultaneously feel that the armed forces are being starved of funds. Where the social status of military personnel has suffered a decline because of defeat in battle, or just a long peace, we will always emphasize the need to restore the defendant, of the society to their proper place within it. In presenting the aims of the coup to potential recruits,

we should exercise a measure of flexibility in order to reach a good fit with what we know to be their beliefs. We cannot, however, run the risk of being exposed as being grossly inconsistent. Whether we hold the views that will make up our image does not matter at all as long as the other conditions are satisfied. It is, incidentally, polite to indicate that the coup is only being carried out with extreme reluctance and that we appreciate that this

reluctance is shared by our recruit. Once the idea of the coup has gained a measure of acceptance in the mind of our potential recruit, we should define the coup in terms of his role within it. This will not only, this will not imply that we will reveal any of the operational details, but we should make it quite clear that, A, his role will not be limited to a few specific actions. his role will be limited to a few specific actions. B, almost everybody in his unit is already with us, and C, therefore, his role will be a safe one. When and only when the recruit becomes actual rather than potential, we can reveal to him the nature of his actual task. This will be described in the greatest possible detail, but not so as to enable the recruit to work out the implications of the task he is asked to perform.

If, for example, the recruit in question is destined to use his unit to provide muscle for a roadblock team, he will be told what equipment his men should have, how many will be required, and how he will receive the go-ahead signal. He will not be told the date of the coup, the place where the roadblock will be, or what the other teams will be doing. Information is the greatest asset we have, and much of our advantage in the planning stage will derive from the fact that, while we know a great deal about the defenses of the state, those who control them know very little about us. We must make every effort to avoid giving any information beyond what is actually required. In any case, while a recruit may feel that he ought to know more about the coup because he agrees to participate in it, he will also feel more secure if we show concretely that the operation is being run with great caution and therefore is secure.

After successfully recruiting the first few people in each unit, the others will be much easier to persuade. There will also be more people to do the persuading because this is the purpose to which we will put our first recruits in the interval between their initial recruitment and the actual coup. Also, a snowball or hopefully an avalanche effect will be generated by the first recruits who will gradually create a climate in which it will be easy to recruit further. After the approach and persuasion of the key individuals has begun to give its results, we will be able to identify the units that will eventually be used as active participants in the coup. These will be a small part of the armed forces as a whole, but hopefully the only part that will be able to play an active role in time and place of the coup. We will concentrate our further efforts on them because their infiltration in depth will be a value

to us, whereas the over-neutralization of the other forces will merely involve further risk. Ideally, we will have neutralized all those formations that we have not incorporated, but this is not likely to be the case. The methods that we will follow to isolate those formations that we have not been able to penetrate will be discussed in Chapter 4. The degree of success required of our infiltration program before we can proceed to the operational phase will depend on the military, political, and geographical factors involved. The same degree of penetration may ensure success in one country while being inadequate in another. In our 1967 Portuguese example,

because of the extensive deployment of the active troops in the remote African provinces, along with the lack of training and mechanization of the troop station in Portugal, we could have gone ahead with minimal penetration. It's going to skip over that table. Yeah, I mean, the big takeaway is he only needed 3,000 active participants

and to neutralize another 12,000 people. And that's out of an army of 150,000. So, you know, distance matters. This was an extreme example of a small and poor country trying against all Oz and its African empire to the bitter end and therefore leaving only a very small force in its own metropolitan territory. The degree of incorporation achieved here is only about 2%. Yet the coup would not find any military opposition in its way unless it failed to impose

its authority within the time required to bring the troops station in the African provinces into Lisbon. If, however, we take the case of a developed country with good transport links and with no overseas commitments for its troops, the same percentage of incorporation and active neutralization that in the Portuguese case would guarantee success would lead to a certain failure, as illustrated in Table 3.9. Because there is nothing that we can do to prevent the large forces capable of intervention from doing so, we would almost certainly fail unless we were the higher leadership of the armed forces. Most situations will be between the two extremes, with a small percentage of the armed forces incorporated, a larger percentage neutralized by our efforts, and a very small percentage

to be isolated by severing communication and transport facilities from the outside. Apart from the military forces, the government will also be defended by police forces and their paramilitary extensions. And we now turn to the problem of their neutralization. That's the end of the section. Table 3-9 is infiltration of armed forces in Germany. And what is this? Is this Bundes Republic?

Yeah, it says notional, so it would have been the Bundes Republic at some point. Yeah. Which keep in mind, there's a huge difference between, you know, the 70s and 80s when they still had universal mainhood conscription. and today where they don't. Yeah, keep in mind today, the Bunsvier has fewer tanks than the Swiss Army. Yeah, I don't know that. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things, because of the amount of equipment they've transferred to Ukraine and haven't maintained.

And again, keep in mind that Switzerland is a mountainous country where tanks only have so much utility. Well, that's it for this section. Still got more of this chapter to go. Yeah, we got another, let me look how many we got. 20 pages. Yeah. Like I said, this chapter is painful. And that's with us skipping over huge portions of it and summarizing.

Yeah. Yeah, there's still 20 pages left in this chapter. Yeah. The big takeaway being that coups are incredibly complicated, and that's why most of them fail. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I appreciate you dropping in.

And hopefully you can come back for another section. Definitely. He'll probably have to write a few days before we do more in this chapter. Yeah, believe me, I'm taking the weekend. All right, John. Thank you. Yes, sir.