Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to part six of
my reading of Coude Ta by Edward Lutwach. John Field
houses back, and we're going to jump right in. Stop
me anytime, John, Here we go.
Speaker 2: We'll do.
Speaker 1: Neutralizing the police. The flags and uniforms of the military
forces of different countries are very different, but their structure
and organization tend to be similar because they reflect the
universality of modern technology. The tactical implications of weapons and
ancillary equipment impose a certain uniformity on military organization. This
has enabled us to study their infiltration in terms that
are generally applicable. Police forces, however, are shaped by local,
social and political conditions and are therefore very diverse. Police
officers can be armed very heavily or not at all.
They can be concentrated in mobile and hard hitting units
or dispersed in small groups. They can be controlled by
the Ministry of Defense and thus have a military training
and outlook, or by the local community and be extremely
civilian minded. Though their structure is so diverse, police forces
resemble each other in the purposes. They serve the prevention
and detection of crime and the maintenance of public order,
which is The task of separate paramilitary forces in some
countries where there are no such forces, is secured by
concentrating and deploying ordinary police taken from their other work.
Police work also includes an intelligent element. Information is gathered
informally by the entire police apparatus and their informers, but
there will usually be a special section of the police
whose only function is in this area. The intelligence aspect
of police work will be effectively neutralized by our general
defensive effort VIASA of the security services, which is discussed
in the next section. Paramilitary forces do not exist in
the United Kingdom, where there are provisions for the army
to act in support of the civil power, or in
the United States, where the part time soldiers of each
state's National Guard can be called out instead, but such
forces are extensively employed in many other countries. In France,
for example, there is a civilian police force, the Police Nationale,
but there is also a paramilitary force, the Gendarmerie, that
normally acts as the rural police. The Gendarmerie is controlled
by the Ministry of Defense and its officers are integrated
in the ranks of the armed forces. Its members receive
light infantry training as well as police training. It numbers
about ninety thousand men and women and is organized into
departmental forces that are scattered in small groups all over
the countryside, as well as mobile groups concentrated in large
units legions. We can ignore the departmental forces because they
would probably be unable to intervene within the short time
frame of a coup, but the mobile unit, each of
which consists of seven squadrons of truck gendarme and one
armored car squadron, represent a formidable force that would have
to be neutralized or isolated.
Speaker 3: I was just going to say, yeah, there are a
bunch of things that are kind of obsolete or a
lot of stuff that's obsoleting the section. But we talked
about the first two times we discussed this chapter.
Speaker 1: The mobile Gendarmerie live in military type barracks and are
equipped with submachine guns and heavier infantry weapons. They're armored
cars thirteen ton wheeled vehicles with forty milimeters armor can
only be stopped with standard anti tank weaponry. Officially, the Gendarmerie,
unlike the other two police forces, has no intelligence service,
but during the Algerian War, a security section was set
up and as bureaucratic organizations often do, has survived the
demise of its original function. The Police Nationale, which carries
out police work and population centers of more than ten
thousand inhabitants, is largely composed of units of actives and
a massive ordinary police officers. It is, but it also
has a paramilitary force of its own, the Campagne Republican
Day Security CRS. It numbers about thirteen thoy five hundred
trained and equip like the mobile units of the Gendarmeri,
minus the armored cars. The CRS is staffed with personnel
who have been carefully select screened politically, and it is
headed by an assistant director of the Ministry of the Interior.
The Police Nationale also has an intelligence service that concentrates
on the more sophisticated forms of crime, an a counter
intelligence service that also carries out political work and the
surveillance of aliens. Both intelligence organizations operate all over France.
Speaker 3: Yeah, France is a weird case where the two police
forces duplicate themselves. You see that a lot in the
former Soviet bloc, but it's a rare case of a
Western European power that does that, and one of the
reasons done for that is the Police Nacio now, who
are officially civilian, despite having the same rank structure, is
a unionized force and therefore has been connected to leftist
politics in France historically, whereas the Jean de Marie come
from the same population that would do the professional military,
so they tended to be much more loyal or much
more connected to the regular army, which in France, which
has a history, a modern recent history of coups, that
was always a big issue. So it's just one of
the weird issues you deal with in France that you
see in lots of other countries that you generally don't
see in the excuse we don't see in Western Europe
or North America.
Speaker 1: That's really interesting. Thank you all. Police work in the
Department de la Sainne, the Paris area is the exclusive
province of the Prefecteur de Police now part of the
Police Nationale, which has been made internationally famous by one
of the fictional inspectors novelists Georges Simon name's Jules Madre.
The prefecture has influenced the organization of police forces in
many countries in Southern Europe and the Middle East, and
we will study it in greater detail than other French
police forces. Anatomy of a police force the Paris Prefectur
is that the way it's pronounced the Prefectur.
Speaker 2: I mean I speak extremely little French.
Speaker 1: So I think, okay, okay. It is our hope that
the police of the capital city, which is the localiba Coup,
will be less powerful than the Paris Prefecteur. It consists
of about thirty four thousand officers and is organized in
several directorates, of which the following concern us directly. The
Police Municipal is the largest directorate and controls the familiar
uniform flicks with their largely symbolic pistols and their much
used trunctions. They are dispersed in twenty districts in the
city and twenty six suburban ones. Their standards of training
and discipline have varied over the years, but their capacity
for individual brutality does not add up to an effective
intervention capability in the event of a major disturbance. They
are deployed in columns of civilian type buses that could
be stopped by suitable roadblocks. Their training and mentality will
probably make them neutrals. If we can prevent their concentrated deployment.
Speaker 3: These are just the general standard patrol officers we think of,
and I think the best American comparison would be like
the New York Police Department, if they just separated out
patrol from detectives and all their specialty functions.
Speaker 1: The Police Judiciaire is the Paris investigated police and one
of the global pioneers of scientific detection. Apart from the
incidental intelligence aspect of their work, we can ignore this directorate.
Speaker 3: This is just like if they had pulled NYPD, you
just put all their detectives under one command.
Speaker 1: See. The Intelligence Service, like its counterparts in the Police Nationale,
is mainly concerned with sophisticated crime, drugs, vice, and high
class gambling, but it also has a political section that
carries out surveillance work nowadays focused on Islamic terrorism. As
in the case of the other security agencies. We will
cover the appropriate defensive tactics in the next section.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is kind of like the national security part
of the FBI. One of the issues even in the
West right, most countries in the world other than the
United States will have something that's more or less a
political police force slash domestic counterintelligence agency. That's part of
their standard law enforcement.
Speaker 1: Aliens. Director out is a small group mainly concerned with
the bureaucratic routines of issuing and checking residents permits. It
exercises general surveillance over transient foreigners. The fiches you fill
in at the hotel are collected by the Directorate and
over the more sensitive immigrant communities. Its work will only
affect us if we have some connection with foreign elements,
particularly those foreign communities that have a history of political
activity in its more violent forms. Wonder if they've grown
since he revised this, or if they've been eliminated altogether.
Speaker 3: Well, EU is weird, right, because you don't have any
internal borders, but the thanks to the airplanes, you can
theoretically enter anywhere anyways. Most domestic law enforcement agencies in
the world have a some kind of an immigration department
that on top of whatever the national immigration agency is.
So yet when we talk about, you know, sanctuary cities
and whether or not local cops should be allowed to
enforce immigration laws and say, you know, bullshit, that's what
the entire world is. Places like Japan, it used to
be every year, if you had a permanent residence permit,
you actually had to go and meet with a detective
where they sat down and confirmed all your stuff or
else you would have your your visas revoked. So yeah,
the rest of the world has always enforced immigration laws,
though Europe not so much.
Speaker 2: Since you know, two thousand.
Speaker 1: Or so, that's actually one hundred percent correct about Japan.
I know a couple of people who have lived there,
Americans there. E Safety of the President is a directorate
concern with the physical protection of the president, but it
also carries out a preventative intelligence function. Following the repeated
assassination attempts organized by the Organization of American States OAS
and its affiliated organizations in the early nineteen sixties, this
section of the prefecture was reinforced with carefully screened personnel
taken from the entire security apparatus, and a tradition of
very careful personnel selection persists. The security system of the
Lys Palace would be a serious obstacle to its seizure
during a coup, and this is.
Speaker 3: True in most countries, whoever their executive security service, and
like the UK, is a really weird example that the
people who guard the royal family and guard the Prime
Minister are actually part of the London metro Politan Police
because Britain has never had a national police force, so
this is pretty standard for most.
Speaker 1: Of the world. Okay, and f the Guard Republican, they're
controlled by the prefectur This is part of the Gendarmerie
and is equipped with light infantry, weapons and a variety
of transport equipment. It provides the horse helmeted and plumed
presidential guard on ceremonial occasions, but it's two regiments are
hard hitting mobile forces whose neutralization would be an essential
requirement in the events of a coup.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I apologize for not muting myself earlier. Yeah, this
unit is again it's part of the gen d'armerie, even
though it's controlled by the local prefecture. The best way
to understand these is they're like the Old Guard or
the Marine Corps regiment that both do presidential guard duties,
ceremonial honor guard duties, and just like the US where
both those units actually have a real life security function
other than parades, but that's a primary duties like parades
and anyways, very often if there's an emergency, they can
be mobilized for public order additional stuff. Again, because these
are the Gendarmerie. They're part of the regular military. That
has historically been an issue in French politics because again,
what was it the attempted puts against de Gaulle where
the paratroopers were actually near the president's residents at that time.
The reason they finally surrendered is it was a unit
of gendarmes that came out and surrounded them, because those
soldiers had pretty much made it clear that if it
was civilian police, they had no problem killing civilian police,
but they weren't willing to fight other soldiers who some
of them had even served within the past. So again,
the French balance between two police force exists for a reason.
Speaker 1: The existence of separate police organizations is one of the
problems of neutralizing this part of the security apparatus. And Britain,
the division is largely territorial at its purpose is to
give the local interest and measure of control over the
police force, but there are also specialized forces that reflect
functional divisions. Apart from the county base police long since
amalgamated into larger groups, there are the following independent police forces,
the Admiralty Constabulary, Air Ministry Constabulary, Atomic Energy Authority Constabulary,
five independent harbor police Forces, British Transport Commissioned Police, Civil
Aviation Constabulary, Ministry of Defense Constabulary.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and again because Britain, at least in England and
Wales right most of the county, most of the police
are county or city based except for these, and again
these are especially things. A lot of it has to
do with the fact that these specially agencies, they're allowed
to carry weapons as a routine part of their duty.
Everybody is a certified firearms officer because things like nuclear
power plants and military bases you need people with guns
to guard them. One of the things he doesn't really
mention that has changed since then is like Scotland actually
amalgamated all their police forces into one police force since then,
and Northern Ireland, the Royal Circumstabulator was replaced with the
Police Service in Northern Ireland, which I don't think anybody
understood that military people were going to pronounce that acronymics penis,
so they transferred their police services too. So yeah, England
and Wales proper they have this weird patwork system though
even on the backward back in excuse me, most of
their training has been consolidated and the Home Secretary controls
so much of how organizations are funded that they're not
really local other than the cosmetics of their organization.
Speaker 1: All these police forces are strictly confined in their operations
to the installations they protect, but similar organizations in other
countries where bureaucratic propensities are subject to weaker controls, have
shown a remarkable ability to grow and diversify. Though the
French police system is particularly extensive, it's basic feature are
shared by police forces in most of Africa, Asia and
the Middle East. The paramilitary element is usually present in
the form of a field force attached to the regular police,
or else in the form of armored car units. The
riot control element is reproduced in the special squads of
Middle Eastern police forces, which can be very effective in
spite of their small size. Whereas in most parts of
Asia a serious insurgency situation has been experienced, this common
pattern has been distorted by the proliferation of ad hoc
police forces that carry out combined internal security and administrative functions.
South Vietnam was once the extreme example, with no fewer
than five different security organizations with police functions. If the
British police system can be said to be divided into
largely territorial units, and the French one into largely functional ones.
In the United States, the division is largely constitutional, except
for the specialized work of the police agencies attached to
various apartments of the federal government. Only the FBI, the DEA,
and Bureau of our Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have
nationwide jurisdictions, and then only for certain crimes legally defined
as federal. Most ordinary police work is carried out by
purely independent local forces maintained that the municipal, county, or
state level. The fragmentation of the system means that the
police as such would have a very limited intervention potential,
in spite of its extensive stock of weaponry and communication equipment.
There is, of course, the National Guard, but this has
not so far been organized in a manner that would
give it a real intervention capability. In America's riots, the
guard forces routinely failed to perform efficiently, even against untrained civilians.
Speaker 3: The strategy I'm sorry you have saying that the National
Guard with take sessions in their military police units. Virtually
nobody has any kind of public order training.
Speaker 1: The strategy of the coup with respect to the police
system of our target country will therefore have to be
as diversified as its component parts. The paramilitary element. Paramilitary
forces are usually able to perform a military as well
as a police function. This versatility has resulted in their
rapid growth, partly because they may be a genuinely economical
way of improving the security system in general, and partly
because funds are often easier to secure for them than
for the regular police. An opposition party or public opinion
which may resist an increase in the police budget, can
often be persuaded to allocate funds for the Ministry of Defense,
and paramilitary forces are usually under its administrative control. In
the newly independent countries, the paramilitary element of the police
can be a very serious obstacle to the coup because
while the army is often a recent post colonial development,
the police and its paramilitary units are usually old established organizations.
This means that the police can be can be larger
than the army and also sometimes superior in the quality
of training and equipment. If this is the case, it
will not be possible to control the paramilitary units by
using the part of the army we have incorporated against them. Fortunately,
governments have striven to increase the size of their armed
forces in a great many countries. In post colonial settings,
the unfavorable for US balance of strength between the army
and the paramilitary police was usually reversed within a few
years of independence. This is perhaps one of the explanations
for the sudden spate of coups in Africa in the
course of nineteen sixty six to nineteen sixty seven, which
came after a phase of very rapid expansion in the
armed forces. It is interesting to note that while the
ruthless oppression of the colonial powers was often carried out
by means of a village constabulary with few military pretensions,
the new era of freedom often required the creation of
heavily armed paramilitary police forces. In Ghana, for example, the gut.
Speaker 3: Now I was just saying, this is just a really
good example of what needs to be understood anytimes the
establishment left talks about colonialism and oppression.
Speaker 1: In Ghana, for example, the police system was expanded after
independence in nineteen fifty seven, and armored car units were
added to the already existing mobile police. The communication system
of the police was made independent of civilian services and
the escort police, which used to be a fezzed and
barefooted force of amiable illiterates was turned into an effective
riot breaking unit. If the paramilitary police is large, as
compared to those units of the armed forces that we
can incorporate, it will be necessary to repeat the whole
analysis and infiltration procedure within it. We may indeed be
able to concentrate on the paramilitary police and content ourselves
would neutralize in the army by technical means. Normally, however,
the balance of forces between the means of coercion of
the state will not require this, and we will be
able to isolate the police for the duration of the
coup by using the army. The first step in our
neutralization of these forces is to establish the size, deployment,
and organization of the paramilitary police. This is usually easier
than in the case of the army, because, unlike the latter,
paramilitary forces are usually stationed in permanent barracks. Next, we
will try to find out their degree of attachment to
the present regime, but this will not involve the sort
of sort of study in depth we made of the army,
and it will only be a matter of finding out
about their corporate rather than individual outlook. The mentality of
the paramilitary police may be bureaucratic, i e. Concerned with
jobs and career, as in the case of the Italian
publica Sokuuras and it's paramilitary units. If this is the case,
a minimal degree of intervention can be expected. On the
other hand, their mentality may be parallel to that of
the army i e. With loyalty and honor as well
as jobson's careers, or reflect a political association, as was
the case of the Soviet Union's KGB or Haites Tontan
Marcos of the Duvalier era era. If the equipment, deployment
and mentality of the paramilitary polices such as to make
them an effective intervention force, we will have to control
them in the same manner as the hardcore loyalist forces
of the army. The ways and means of this forcible
isolation will be discussed in Chapter five. Usually, however, we
will find the paramilitary police force is essentially bureaucratic, and therefore,
in spite of its impressive military bearing and equipment, it
will not intervene against the armed support of a coup.
I have been unable to find a single case in
the last twenty years of a paramilitary police force that
had actually defended its political masters during a coup, though
there are several cases of their intervention on behalf of
the coup, the.
Speaker 2: Jean dere marie protecting the Gauls.
Speaker 1: From the examples, the rural police. In poorer countries, this
element of the police force is numerically the strongest. This
is only to be expected since most of the population
of such countries live in villages and works in agriculture.
In spite of its large size, this part of the
police will almost never have an intervention potential against a coup.
They are often commanded by retired non commissioned officers, fully
integrated in the rural society in which they live, and
even where there are provisions for their mobilization and concentrated use,
they are unlikely to be assembled, equipped and prepared in
time to intervene against us. Whether the rural police officer
is a guard champetree with an ancient pistol inscribe le Lois,
or a Middle Eastern zaptier who plays the village boss,
he will hardly want to rush to a remote capital
city to protect an equally remote government. The urban and
national police, though this part of the police force be
considerably less dispersed than the village based rural police, its
main components will be just as ineffective against the coup.
The personnel of the urban police will fall into three
broad categories, crime, detection and investigation, normal surveillance and traffic duties.
The detective element will be small, very bureaucratic minded, and
apart from its incidental intelligence aspect, it can be ignored
by us. The uniform police, which carries out all the
usual surveillance duties, will be more numerous, but though they
may be useful as a riot breaking force when suitably concentrated,
they are unlikely to act against armed opponents in a
major political crisis. The municipal police, largely concerned with traffic duties,
will usually be staffed by middle aged men of retiring
disposition with small and rusty pistols. There have, been, however, exceptions,
such as the Spanish Policia Armada e del Trafico of
the Franco regime, whose personnel were politically screened and which
were equipped with adequate transportation and telecommunications to inter being
in major political disturbances. Well, I mean that makes sense.
Speaker 3: I mean it's you have to love a man who
made sure even his meters mads loyal was an elite.
Speaker 2: Loyal force ready to defeat the communists.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's I have no I'm not shocked
at all to learn this, and I had never learned
this before. So yeah.
Speaker 3: Part of what goes along when in cases like the
Franco example is it's used in part as a way
when you demobilize long term professionals or you want to
take like you said, NCOs who would be retirement age,
who you want to keep in the system. Some way,
it becomes a place where you can put loyal people
where they're not really out to pastor they're still doing
work for community, but they're not, you know, just completely
disconnected for the system.
Speaker 1: A detailed analysis of our target country's police system will
probably reveal a problem of composition. After dividing the police
force into so called hard and soft forces, we may
find sizeable hard subdivisions within the soft elements. Our brief
survey has shown that only a small part of the
police force is likely be able to intervene against us,
and of this a yet smaller part is likely to
do so with any enthusiasm. The natural inclination of the
police will be to ride out the crisis, and as individuals,
to avoid endangering their positions because of their possible future employers.
The coup may well be planned as a military operation,
but it will not unless partially or totally unsuccessful, involve
any actual fighting. Thus, the fact that the police are
not heavily armed does not fundamentally explain their low intervention
capability as compared to the army. The real difference between
the two is in their degree of integration in the
civil society. While the army can develop a corporate ideology
and mentality that is divergent or even opposed to the
civilian one, the police are usually too intimately involved in
civilian life to do so. This can be either an
advantage or an obstacle from our point of view. On
the one hand, the eccentricity of the army will mean
that a regime can retain its appeace in the closed
world of the military barracks after losing it in society
at large. This might interfere with our recruiting, but it
could work the other way, i e. We may find
that the army is fundamentally opposed to a government that
much civilian opinion accepts recruiting our forces among the police
will almost always be more difficult than in the army. First,
the lower level of automatic discipline will mean that recruiting
an officer may not only may not bring over the
officers men as well. Further, the fact that police live
among the public will mean the internal dynamics generated in
the closed world of a military unit would be dissipated
in this more open environment, and the snowball effect that
would bring entire units overs us after a limited degree
of infiltration will not operate. All these factors point in
the same direction. The low degree of intervention capability for
us as well as against US, and the difficulty of
incorporation both indicate that while the army should be penetrated,
the police force can be dealt with defensively after the
coup neutralized in the security agencies. The security agencies of
our target country can be numerically the smallest of the
professional defenses of the state, but often also the most dangerous.
Unlike the armed forces and the police, the security agencies
will be actively trying to identify and defeat threats posed
by groups such as ours. Unlike the armed forces and police,
their organizations, deployment, and personnel cannot usually be studied with
precision from the outside, and even their existence may not
be known to us. Almost every state has some sort
of secret service. Many have several such organizations that operate
both within and outside the national territory, and which we
have so far described with the blanket term of security agencies.
Our first task is to try to identify them more precisely.
Speaker 3: Yeah, before you go on, I was just to say
this section is a good example of why anytime there's
a massive political opposition ors something that looks poised to
take over administration of a state, you see bureaucratic and
rhetorical argument about why people are doing that. You know,
anytime there's any effort by the Trump administration to change
anything with intelligence or yeah, security agencies, they always accused
him of wanting to be Hitler. Never mind that, you know,
the left talks, you know, so much about how they've
spread the EI programs through the c Yeah, through the
CIA and other agencies. So yeah, obviously we're probably not
going to be doing a whop anytime too. But this,
you know, gives us an important lens to look through
just the all the rhetor that's associated with any kind
of change in these organizations that we see right now.
Speaker 1: It is well known that the bureaucratic animal and its
natural state, has certain characteristic patterns of behavior. It grows
in size and extends its sphere of action until checked
by some outside force. This role is usually played by
the financial bureaucracy, which fulfills its instincts by opposing the
growth of all other bureaucratic organizations. Equally important as a
limiting factor is the concerted pressure of individual bureaucracies, each
of which is fighting to preserve and extend its territory.
The cumulative effect of these pressures is to limit, to
some extent, the growth of the bureaucracy as a whole.
Perhaps without them, all the inhabitants of developed countries would
by now be employed by the state bureaucracy. These pressures
operate weekly or not at all. In the case of
the security services, their budgets are usually secret, so they
cannot easily be scrutinized, let alone reduced. Other bureaucratic organizations
cannot prevent them from poaching in their territories because their
activities may go undetected, and thus cannot be declared off limits. Finally,
the relative prestige of undercover operations of all kinds allows
them to break rules other bureaucrats must obey, and to
operate in all areas of social activity. The results of
this freedom is predictable. In many countries, security agencies have
grown in a more dynamic and disorderly fashion than the
rest of the bureaucracy, and tend to have overlapping spheres
of activity. Before a zoologist studies animals, heat or she
classifies them and tries to relate them to the nearest
known species, we will not follow this procedure. Both than
functional terms, which are generally applicable to all countries, and
in organizational terms, which are peculiar to each one. The
pure intelligence function this classification covers the collection and analysis
of published and unpublished information of all kinds, and because
of the high degree of specialized knowledge often required, many
different bodies can enter into this field, which is the
most crowded of the whole sector. Tactical military intelligence, which
answers the question what is the opposition doing, may be
collected by separate agencies working for the separate branches of
the armed forces in traditionally seafaring nations. Naval intelligence is
often the largest and most developed service. Strategic information, which
answers the question what is the opposition? Planning may be
the province of separate and competing agencies run by the
General Staff, the Defense Ministry, and the Ministry in charge
of Foreign Affairs. Scientific information may be collected by the
administrative entity in charge of science, and also by specialized
bodies in charge of particular sectors, including atomic energy, peronautics,
and telecommunications. Economic intelligence is one of the worst areas
of duplication, with demographic, energy and agriculture authorities operating alongside
the entity in charge of Economic affairs. In general, political
intelligence may be handled by the Foreign Affairs Ministry openly
through the Diplomatic Service, and also covertly by a separate agency,
the counter intelligence function. This covers the prevention of the
activities listed above, and may be carried out by both
generalized and specialized bodies. The military may run their own agency,
and the police of each branch of the armed forces
may and may do the same. The Ministry of Interior
will almost always have a spycatching service, like the Secret Service,
popularly MI five of the British Home Office and particular
bodies will have a service to protect their installations, but
these rarely go beyond the ordinary police stage. From our
point of view, this sector will be the most important.
We may, if we fail to preserve our security position,
come into contact with a the police agencies such as
Special Branch of the United Kingdom or the FBI in
the United States, be the separate ministerial body or c
the military agencies. Much of our planning infiltration work will
be indistinguishable from that which could be carried out by
foreign intelligence service. Therefore, it will enter into the territory
of the counter intelligence agencies.
Speaker 2: Which is why they talk about us as if we are.
Speaker 4: The key.
Speaker 1: The counter espionage function. This is the most subtle and
sophisticated of all the functions. It covers deliberate contacts with
opposition intelligence services in order to feed them disinformation and
penetrate or even disrupt their organization. It is unlikely that
more than one agency carries out this work because it
requires an extremely precise control over operations. The agency may
be a subsection of any of those mentioned above, but
in order to function efficiently, it must be able to
exercise some form of control over all competing agencies, especially
over counter intelligence, which relates to counter espionage as a
butcher does to a surgeon.
Speaker 3: This is one of the routine complaints about the United
States is we don't necessarily do counterintelligence counter espionage very well,
to the point that the CIA routinely stumbles over the
FBI and the different military services.
Speaker 1: Internal political security this is another sensitive area from our
point of view. Its specific function is the prevention of
exactly what we aim to do, overthrow the government. In
many countries there is a political police with it both
unin form, with both uniformed and covert agents, and it
may be controlled by the bureaucracy of the Ministry of
the Interior or by the inner political leadership, either directly
or in one party states through the party. Elsewhere, in
more or less democratic regimes, the police have a political department,
as in France, Italy and Germany, and its primary function
is the surveillance of extremist groups. In military dictatorships, the
territory of military intelligence often extends to this area. In
some countries, the agency in charge of the physical protection
of the higher leadership may be running an information service
as well as providing the bodyguards.
Speaker 3: These exist in basically all modern states. Don't think just
because we're in the West they don't have them. Now Germany, famously,
the federal government along with all the states, have counterintelligence
agencies that basically exist to hunt down the neo Nazis.
Never mind the last ones are pushing one hundred. So yeah,
these exist everywhere, even though they're not advertised and it
doesn't seem like something Western democracy would have.
Speaker 1: Internal intelligence, this function is carried out by the information
services attached to the police and paramilitary forces of the state. Thus,
in Italy, apart from the police public it is which
has a political squad, the paramilitary.
Speaker 2: Carab Carbinary, it just means.
Speaker 1: Carbonary has an internal security information service that is also
responsible for military counter intelligence, but primarily operates internally these days,
mostly against Islamic terrorism. Our behavior in the midst of
this bureaucratic jungle will be purely defensive unless we have
a direct line to one or another of the security agencies.
Speaker 3: If.
Speaker 1: If that is the case, the security agency concern would
provide an ideal cover for all our activities. Failing such
a fortunate coincidence, we will not try to create a
direct line by infiltrating any security service, because if we
do so, there will be the very great danger that
they will use they will use any contact in order
to infiltrate us. This is a standard procedure for the
security services to follow, and the elementary defensive techniques used
when infiltrating the armed forces cut out one way communication
will probably fail to work in their case. In order
to run a secure operation, we will follow rules that
derive from the basic assumption that all information about our
activities is a source of danger as soon as it
exists outside the minds of our inner group. From this
all the standard procedures emerged. No information will be communicated
except verbally. No information will be communicated except on a
need to know basis. All communication links from inner to
affiliated members must be on a way a one way basis.
No activity should be carried out by an inner member
if an outer member can do the job. These rules
are simple and well known. The problem is to keep
to them under the pressure of work and emotions it generates.
The most sensitive of our activities will be the approach
and persuasion of new affiliates to the coup and the
nature of the security agencies can add an extra measure
of danger. In many countries, some of the security agencies
are hidden with in totally unexciting administrative bodies, where as
in the case of the US Treasury Secret Service, this
reflects an administrative convenience. The fact is well known Elsewhere, However,
the department within a department system is deliberate. Consequently, we
may unwillingly try to infiltrate a safe department and discover
that we are dealing with a security agency. All we
can do is to list some of the places where
it seems natural for security services to exist, Census and
cartography services, central bank, anti counterfeiting agencies, post office departments,
press bureaus, customs and immigration departments, and the taxation authorities.
It must not be thought, however, that our entire operation
will automatically collapse if it is penetrated by a security agency.
Speaker 3: Just on the note about security agencies being stuffed inside
of you know, normal agencies. One of the weirdest examples
I can think of is at one point Swiss intelligence
agency was run by their post office.
Speaker 1: Well that makes sense, I mean nobody would accept expect that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and if it's a country that has universal manhood
conscription if everybody is a soldier, it's not hard to
find competent people with you know, that kind of leadership
to be in another agency.
Speaker 1: That makes sense. If we have followed the security procedures,
the chances are that only a small part of our
total effort will be identified, and therefore its ultimate purpose
may not be discovered. Even if it has discovered that
a coup is being planned, the security agency may wait
before taking any action in order to capture all the planners,
and this could be too late. As soon as our
teams are on the road actually executing the coup, it
will be too late for the security services to oppose
us on the information side. While they're fighting, power will
usually be unimportant as compared to the army units we
have incorporated. Finally, political security agencies are necessarily sensitive to
political trends, and they may decide to join the group
planning a coup if they know that it is well
organized and ready to seize power. All right, that's the
end of chapter.
Speaker 2: Three, and that was a really painful chapter.
Speaker 1: Well thanks for joining me on this one. I really
appreciate it because I know you, I know you have
to run, so yeah, yeah, take care of yourself. Thanks,
thanks much, I appreciate it. Letter. I want to welcome
everyone to part seven of my reading of Kudeta by
Edward look Weck. Christopher Sandbatch is back. How are you doing,
mister Sandbatch?
Speaker 5: Pretty good. It's like I'm like, I'm like the I've
been this place since the beginning of time almost, I'm
like the Warren z Vin of the of like the
right wing ecosystem. He used to go to Letterman and
like he would he would play a letterman when Paul
Shaper would like, wanted the night off or something. You
can't get anybody else, Go get Sandbatch.
Speaker 1: That's funny that I you were my specific choice for this.
All right, So all right, I'm gonna start reading Chapter four.
Cut me off at any time to comment however you wish, ready, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
all right. Chapter four the planning of the Kudeta. Even barricades,
apparently a mechanical element of the uprising, are of significance
in reality, above all, as a moral force. Love Davidovich Bronstein,
otherwise known as Leon Trotsky, he took the He took
the name of the warden of the jail he was
sent to in Siberia.
Speaker 5: If I remember correctly, Is that how that when they
all of the old Bolsheviks had like they had like
they had twitter handles basically.
Speaker 1: Well, there was a reason.
Speaker 5: But yeah, Afrigot Trotsky was one of them. I forgot,
like I forgot that wasn't his real name, all right.
Speaker 1: In the early morning of April twenty third, nineteen sixty one,
elements of the first Foreign Legion parachute Regiment seized the
key points of the city of Algiers in the name
of General Maurice is that Chalet, Andre Zeller, Edmond Edmund
Zuhad and Raoul Salon. The four generals, because of their
personal prestige and their position in the French hierarchy, quickly
asserted their control over the local military command and started
to extend their authority over all the armed forces in Algeria.
At this time, the Gaul's government was in the process
of opening negotiations with the Algerian nationalists, and the generals
were determined to replace him with the leader who would
carry the war to a victorious conclusion. The French armed
forces in Algeria were much more powerful than those stationed
in France and Germany, and the four generals were hopeful
that once their allegiance was assured, they would find it
easy to take effective control of the French government, after
all Degall himself had.
Speaker 5: Now, okay, you get it there now, because I feel
like people might need to know what the hell is
going on in France right now, because this seems like
awfully late in the timeline for like, you know, quadrumvirates
of generals to be forming in the African provinces, which
is what's happening here, you know, and this is France's
form of This is France's own personal struggle with with
decolonization that's playing out in front of us right now.
And so what's happening is that that home support in
France because of really because of the rise of an
intellectual movement called the New Left and student and largely
driven in the back of student activism. And you know,
whatever those influences are, you can think of how you
figure out what they are yourself. But there's a massive
anti colonial movement afoot in you know, France himself, and
Charles de Gaull is in charge of the country, but
you know, he's like he's his return to power is
incredibly dramatic, and we're about to hear that story, but
just to just to let everybody know that's like things like,
this is a Western country in the nineteen sixties. Yeah,
France was really wild for a while, and this is
their this is their decolonization event that happens. If there's
a movie based on this. What's the name of it?
I can't remember, al like Algerias.
Speaker 4: Oh Battle of Algiers, that's it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm writing that down. Well, okay, all right onward.
After all, de gall himself had come to power after
a similar episode in May nineteen fifty eight, and there
seemed to be no obstacle to a successful second edition
of the famous Today Mai. When the four generals made
their declaration over Algiers radio, the first fourteenth and eighteenth
Colonial parachute Regiments rallied to the coup. A few entry units,
some of the Marines, and much of the air force
remained loyal to the Gaul. As in May nineteen fifty eight,
they had remained loyal to the Fourth Republic, but most
of the armed forces in Algeria were a tenti stee
wait and see is the attitude that usually favors a coup,
and when General Henri de Pouli withdrew his headquarters in
Algeria from r to Lemsen to avoid having to choose
between fighting and joining the coup. He was objectively favoring
the coup. The four generals seem to be on the
verge of victory. The determined pied noirs population of Algeria
was one hundred percent behind them. The powerful parachute units
gave them a hard hitting force of intervention, and the
bulk of the armed forces were either for them or neutral.
Even the forces loyal to Degaul's government did nothing to
actively oppose the coup.
Speaker 5: All right, So, like, let's talk about what happened here
real quick. So, like, what he's done here, since this
is Lufak, he's setting up the game conditions that he's
going to be playing around when for the rest of
this chapter he's talking about this is the point in
the flow chart. Is kind of joking. He's trolling you
a little bit that it comes so late in the
actual and so late in the actual book. You would
think maybe the chapter says, so do use it? Do
you need to plan it? Who is maybe the first chapter?
But no, it's the fourth one here and this is
the real the issue. The to the game situation he's
setting up here for us is he's given us a
classical setup. Okay, this is like, you know, imagine the
chess game. He's describing a chess game for us according
to all previous and at the time, according to at
the time, according to all previous previous classical formula, you know,
formulations of politics. You have enough information right here to
determine whether or not you should do a coup.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 5: And so he's and for the purposes of opening of
his like opening barrage in this chapter, he's chosen to
set up two separate instances of this like terribly classical
game like I used to phrase quadrum quadrum for a
reason like this has been described to us like given
describes the doubt, decline and follow the Roman Empire. These
are Roman conditions are in play, Okay, And he's like
setting up this idea. So he's setting up this equivalence here.
So if you're these four generals, and again, the political
conditions here are there's a movement at home in favor
of decolonizing. But the like the French hard right, and
this is where like the actual new French hard right
has kind of been born.
Speaker 1: But the.
Speaker 5: French hard right is most of the military structure, and
the military structure in France is way bigger politically than
most people probably think it is. And they have chosen,
you know, a pro to take a pro imperial stance,
and they've actually done a coup in Algeria. So this
is this is what's going on. They're they're trying, and
their play is this thing that happened in nineteen fifty
eight that brought Charles de gaul back to power. You know,
DeGaulle had been in power in World War Two and
he's out for a while and then he gets brought
back to power in this very similar like sort of situation,
you know. And so the thing so what Luke is
here saying, He's like, He's like, okay, So these situations
looked similar enough on their face that this coup probably
should have worked, you know. But okay now, but back out.
Speaker 1: No problem, all right. While the leaders of the coups
started to gather support, the French Defense minister was on
a visit to Morocco, Maurice Papon, the head of the
Paris Police, was on vacation. Michel de Bey, the Prime Minister,
and chief firefighter of the regime was ill, and Degal
himself was entertaining The visiting President of Senegal, Leopold S.
Sangor other ministers were on visits to Algiers itself and
were promptly captured and held in confinement together with other
representatives of the president. Everything pointed to an early victory
of the coup, and yet a few days later General
Chalais was being flown to Paris for eventual trial and imprisonment.
Celen and the others were fleeing to the interior on
their way to exile and capture, and the first Foreign
Legion parachute Regiment drove back to their barracks singing Edith
Piaff's no I regret nothing, though their officers were under
arrest and their unit was to be to be disbanded.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I had nothing to add to that except just
like just pause for a minute to meyer how metal
that sentences, Like that whole paragraph is like I can't
I can't stand when people get like get really pissy
about France and like France says the most insane shit imaginable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when people start talking about, oh, oh I bought
a French I bought a French war rifle only dropped once.
It's like yeah, okay, yeah, keep going, yeah, all right.
Why did the coup fail? Perhaps the main reason was
that the four generals had utterly neglected the political forces
and had allowed the immediate power of the armed forces
to obscure the somewhat less immediate but ultimately decisive role
that they could play. In the Gauless coup of me
in nineteen fifty eight. The action of the military and
the population of Algiers had been supported by the Gauleist
infiltration of the civil service and by the steady corrosion
of the will of other political groups to oppose the
dissolution of the Fourth Republic. This time, the generals had
simply ignored the civilians to Gaulwin on television and asked
for help from the population at large. Francie Francis ade
Mois Deborah, who followed Debaert, who followed him on the screen,
was more specific go to the airports, convinced the soldiers
who are misled. He also started to arm a militia
drawn from the Gauleist party. More important, the trade union
organizations of the Communists CGT, the Christian Democrats, CFTC and
the Force Auverre all rallied around the government, while most
political parties did the same. The left wing Catholic movement
started to organize sit down strikes among the national servicemen
in Algeria, and in general, most organized forces of French
society intervened and refused to accept the authority of the coup.
Speaker 5: All right, so like here, what's going on lately?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Here, what's going on is like he's introducing we've okay,
so we've established this coup doesn't work. It's like, okay,
what was the tell? Okay? And he says, all right,
this is a very like in this style of scholarship,
this is really it does. It goes all the way
back to Machiavelli. Actually, it's like, well, i'll tell you what.
Here's what I didn't tell you already, and then surrenders
another piece of information. He goes, all right, so we
know that there was infiltration on the part on the
part of the Degaullists in nineteen fifty eight, and these
four generals have just ignored that conclusion, you know. Okay,
So the thing that we're meant to the thing that's
meant to happen here is we're meant to be totally
actually snapped out of what would be considered classical analysis
at this point. Okay, so this is like those rules
don't work anymore, and this is actually this is one
of the reasons Lukevax has been able to get away
with being such a rock stars, because he represents this
turn in this field at a time when this is
becoming a dominant paradigm across like any sort of like
intellectual field, like the rise of game theory and uncertainty,
the big thing of the biggest thing in the twentieth century.
I just want to say, up until now, we've looked
at you know, we've looked at everything in terms of
like some sort of like Newtonian mechanical system. But we
actually need a relative okay, you know, because it's okay,
these conditions are not objective. There's stuff. There is stuff there.
What you call unknown unknowns is what you know, Lukefax's
friend and compatriot Donald Rumsfeldt would later call them. So
he's introducing the unknown unknowns and he's telling us, now
it's like, okay, well, actually, this civilian population that is
so scorning so frequently it does actually matter and this
is how okay, now I'm sorry, I'll put back out.
Speaker 1: No apology necessary. We need we need the we need
the commentary on this. Yeah, it's heavy.
Speaker 5: It's heavy. This is a really heavy and actually what's
really interesting is, you know a lot of times you
could there's a tendency to want to read these books
like they're like they're just military manuals or something like this,
But this is actually one of these chapters that you
can translate over directly into thought very well, like and
this is sort of like one of these art of
warst style books that like investors will tell you is
adaptable across domains because they're so methodologically flexible. Here and
he's doing a lot of really fancy stuff really fast,
and you know, just teasing it out it's helpful to
some people. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The effect of this refusal was decisive. The larger
part of the wait and see element in the armed
forces stopped waiting and declared its support for de gaul
and this was the end of the coup. We will
only be able to avoid a repetition of the crucial
eraror made by the generals if we can neutralize the
political forces as effectively as to military ones. Immediate political
power is always concentrated in the country's government, but in
every country and under all political systems, there will be
groups outside the government and even outside formal politics, which
also have political power. Their source of strength can be
their ability to influence particular groups of voters, as in
democratic societies, or their control over certain organizations important to
the country's political life. Whether these groups, which we have
called the political forces, are pressure groups, political parties, or
other associations does not greatly matter. What is of importance
is their ability to participate in the formation of governments
and later to influence the decision those governments. The nature
of the force got.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so the group. When he's talking here again, you
have to remember Luke Bak as a neo Kon, So
you're like listening, this is like Confessions of a Neo Kon.
Hitman is like, really, what this book is, you know,
to one extent or another, and what Luke Bak is
writing here, he's talking really out of a British context.
He's speaking to an American audience where he's he's always
addressing himself to Americans in some way, but really he's
talking about the he's talking about the British colonial experience
in like it's very late stages, especially in the Middle East.
We're going to get it for it's just to set
everything up. This is what we're really going to get
into here, because is when he's referring to this adberative
form of empire. Now that you know, like he was,
he was able to make classical pronouncements and classical allusions
to the you know, sort of French conditions because the
French were two in quadrun foric things well into the
late twentieth century. Now we're going into a weirder place,
and this is the space that is the British Empire,
which has this kind of incredibly aberrant historical development complex
that makes it a little more complicated. And this is
a very normal thing to do in this tradition Havebri
Moss famously does it as well, and Habro Moss is
one of these guys that's in.
Speaker 4: With lupek Ha Moss.
Speaker 5: We could always call it the special case of the
British Empire.
Speaker 1: The nature of the force is important in the political
life of a particular country, will reflect the structure of
its society and economy and It will also depend on
the particular context of decision making. See table for one
for an American example. If, for example, we were asked
to list the most important forces in British political life,
we could produce the following rather conventional list. The major
political parties, the regional parties, the major unions, the Confederation
of British Industry, the senior civil service, academic complex, the
city and its corporations, and the press.
Speaker 5: It's worth pointing out here that like when he uses this,
he's falling back on the bridges. The British example is
actually simpler than the American one, I guess is like
in Britain in nineteen sixty one, these are relatively big categories.
He's drawn some pretty large mark up blankets. He have
the pit political parties, the major unions, the Confederation of
British Industry. These are these seem hokey now, but this
is a time, like you go, look at the American
way more complicated, but you know, this is a time
of the Confederation of British Industry. It's still a thing
that exists, which is kind of interesting to know. There's
no such structure in the American system. But yeah, go ahead, what.
Speaker 1: Does he say here about the American system? He says,
officially in America, the President and White House staff, the
Department of State, depending on the CIA, a supplier of information,
the key congressional committees, unofficial politicians with significant Jewish populations,
and these naturally follow a visible pro Israel line on
congressional voting and make appropriate speeches. Pro Zionist organizations of
American Jewry, anti Zionist organizations, including those with a Jewish identity.
That's a great one.
Speaker 4: You have to remember. This book is fun.
Speaker 5: He's having fun with it, you know, he's just pissed
off in somebody.
Speaker 1: And the last one he says is think tanks and
lobbies with a special interest in Arab or Middle East studies.
They usually identify with Arab views and seek a sympathetic
hearing of Arab claims.
Speaker 5: Now, dude, you know this right here? Okay, I just
it's sort of sand Bat just that list that he
just gets you look at people are always asking me with
the with the core of sand Batchism is that last
one is the probably one of the key if such
a thing exists. Sand Batch's points, think tanks and lobbies, Okay,
with you know, interest special interested in Arab or Middle
Eastern studies. I just went on the OGC podcast and
did the history of Stanford University, because that is one
thing that's really unique to America, to American political systems,
is how important specific industry is, specific universities and think
tanks are in specific fields. So it makes us weird.
There's like complicated sub domains and everything. But yeah, I
keep going.
Speaker 1: Back to the British. But if we were asked to
isolate the groups that would matter in foreign policy decision
about say the Middle East, we would come up with
quite a different list. The two major British and part
British oil companies, the Foreign Office, academic Arabist Group, British
defense industry exporters.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like, what do you talk about here? If you like,
just again to re orient there's a piece of my
blog about this actually where called the only two Empires
that have ever mattered is about British and British and
Russian machinations that were going on in the late twentieth
century and you know Iran mostly. But that's what he's
talking about here, and this is where the this is
the origin of the American boondoggle in the Middle East.
This is the two major British and part British. Its
talk about VP, who is like running coups out of Iran. Okay,
so like what's happened what we're talking about here is like, okay,
we had this list of things that everybody recognizes, like
and Jurgen Habermas, you know in his like you know,
classical little Frankft, you know, Frankfurt School. Everybody's happy, and
we have a Republic of Letters world. That first list
of things is what contain is what's going on in
the colonies, in the colony in the Nimbi's in the
Nimbi's mind, that's what it looks like. And the second
list of people that gets left off of it, that's
the group of people that's do an untold horrible shit.
And he's also this is also in a sense you
have to read this book as his resume to those
groups asking them to hire him. So there's you know.
Speaker 1: I mean everything that went down with Iran, I mean
you can go before before BP went there, I mean
the Reuter's family was given minds with precious minerals there
to watch over. And while they have a while they
have an international press uh, while they own the international press,
so they can basically control anything. But they're also controlling
these minerals, these rich mineral deposits all over the Middle East,
I mean, especially in Iran. It's it's it's that history
is nuts.
Speaker 5: I think it's a lot with Lawrence of Arabia, but
also like the Great Train Robbery at the same time.
Speaker 1: All right, In a sophisticated society, with its complex industrial
and social structure, there are hundreds of organizations that, regardless
of their primary purpose, also act as pressure groups and
attempts to influence political decison in a manner that serves
their members' interests. These organizations will reflect in their divergent
attitudes the diversity of a complex society. In economically backward countries, however,
the structure of society is simpler, and any conflict of interests,
though just as strong, is played out in a much
smaller arena and with fewer participants. In Sub Saharan Africa,
with few exceptions, religious groups are generally fragmented and apolitical,
and where the local business community is still relatively small
and weak, the major political forces are limited to a
few groupings. Tribal and other ethnic groups trade unions, students
and graduates, associated students and graduates, associations, civil service officials
and officers of the armed forces, the activists of the
ruling political party.
Speaker 5: It's kind of funny here he's low low key trolling again,
he's trolling a specific audience here, he's like pointing out.
He's like, actually, these companies, these countries you call economically backwards,
are the ones that more resemble the classical sphere that
you're like always stammering on about. It was just kind
of funny.
Speaker 1: Also, he's highlighting this these five things as African African
sub Saharan Africans, and it's basically every Central American country
as well. Yeah, in much of West Africa, one would
have to add the local market traders association and in
immediate sub Saharan areas, the traditional Muslim leadership structures. In Asia,
religious groups in their leaders would have to be added
to the lists, and in some countries such as Taiwan, Thailand,
South Korea and Hong Kong, the local business class will
be of importance. Missing from all the lists are the
are the foreign business interests, which may play an important
role but which represent a special problem. Already dealt with
in Chapter two. Whatever groups dominate the political scene of
our country in normal times, the special circumstances of the
coup will mean that only a few elements among them
will be important to us. Political forces can intervene against
the coup in two ways. A they can rally and
deploy the masses and some or some part of them
against the new government. Or B they can manipulate technical
facilities under their control in order to oppose the consolidation
of our power. When he says manipulate technical facilities, what
is uh, what jumps into your mind there?
Speaker 5: Well, I mean obvious when he's using the way A
really good example of the way. Again, whether or you
believe they are is and everything, but the media in
this country right now believe they're responding to a coup
in the form of Donald Trump, and the way they
have behaved the last couple of weeks is an excellent
example of the of technical technical technical facilities under the
control of the regime like they have, like they've been
spinning absolutely off the charts insane shit, just because it's
an institution that they have control of and perceive it
as a weapon that can be used. Right now, it's
the most obvious example of one that I can think of.
Speaker 1: The action of individual political, religious, ethnic, and intellectual leaders
who could use the framework of their part of your
community against us is an example of the first kind
of intervention. A strike of the staff of the radio
and television services and is an example of the second.
A general strike would in effect combine both kinds of intervention,
neutralizing the political force is one general Politics, like economics,
has its infrastructure. Just as industry and commerce require a
background of facilities such as roads, ports, and energy sources,
direct political action requires certain technical facilities.
Speaker 5: Now it's really important. This is a way, this is
a really important sentence right here, because this is what
he's doing, excepting here that I mean when you talk
about when I was talking earlier about getting out of
the classical world entirely, this is what he's doing here.
He's saying all of that stuff, all that theory. He's like, no,
and he's like these people have like at the you
some the cup is where you know, where the rubber
actually meets the road. These people have names houses and
are like real existing entities that have variables, a whole
different set of variables than you know uh, than than
theoretical ones do He's like no, no, like that really
matters anymore. We need what we need roads ports and
energy sources. And this is like, you know, this is
what we talked about. The neutralized political force with the
material control is what we're about to get into.
Speaker 1: The mobilization of French public opinion that took place during
the attempted coup and Algiers, and was the principal cause
of its failure, could not have taken place without the
use of a whole range of technical facilities. The government
appealed to public opinion by means of the mass communications media,
chiefly the radio and television services. Today, of course, it
would primarily use social media. The trade unions and others
and other organized bodies coordinated the agitation of their members
by means of their network of branches connected to the
central headquarters by means of the public telecommunications facilities. Finally,
the mass demonstrations could not have taken place without the
use of public and private transport. Our general neutralization of
the political forces will be conducted in terms of this infrastructure.
We will seize and hold such facilities as we require
for our own purposes. While temporarily putting the others out
of action. If the means of communication and the transport
system are under our control or at any rate do
not function, the potential threat posed by the political forces
will be largely neutralized. The leaders of the pre coup
government will be arrested since they are part of the infrastructure,
and they would probably be the major sources of inspiration
of any opposition to the coup.
Speaker 5: Okay, this is going to stop a point out again,
how actually aggressive this is. Okay, this is one of
the things that makes the loots wise, the loots back
gain incredibly famous. So again, it we're continuing to discard
sort of classical thinking or classical thinking. May the game
of classical thinking might put you in a position where
you say, okay, we need to either concentrate on destroying,
on disabling opposition architecture or building our own architecture. And
he this game over and says, no, you actually have
to attack on two fronts. You have to destroy that,
you have to destroy your incapacitate theirs, but also seize
as much of it for you as you possibly can.
So like, this is incrazy. He's he's prescribing attack harder
than anyone has ever suggested attack before. Even even someone
like Napoleon would not have would would not have done
this regularly.
Speaker 1: Okay, let me see where was uh? Okay. We will
neutralize some political forces, in particular by identifying and isolating
their leadership and by disrupting their organizations. This will only
be necessary for those forces sufficiently resilient and sufficiently militant
to intervene against us, even though the infrastructure has been neutralized.
Both forms of neutralization will involve the selection of certain
objectives that will be seized or put out of action
by teams formed out of those forces of the state
which we have fully verted or, in our terminology incorporated. Yeah,
can't help but chuckle. Unless our target country is particularly
small and its physical and political structure is particularly simple,
its system of government will be complex, its physical facilities
will be extensive, and its political forces will be many
in number, while their intervention capabilities will be difficult to forecast.
We will therefore start by analyzing the governmental leadership in
order to determine which personalities must be isolated for the
duration of the active phase of the coup and which
can be safely ignored. You say, have procedure.
Speaker 5: Like you said, this is what we're doing is also
building a program, is what it.
Speaker 1: Is, you know, right, And he's using terms like isolated
or you know, a personality must be isolated or can
be safely ignored. Just that's a huge contrast there, especially
when you know what isolated means. Next, we will study
the physical facilities and select those most likely to be
relevant during the coup in order to plan their seizure
or neutralization. Finally, I mean the seizure or neutralization. I
mean neutualization could mean a lot of things.
Speaker 4: Right, you think of.
Speaker 5: Blowing up a natural gas tank in the parking garage.
Everything you see happening in Gaza is because both sides
have a copy of this book, you know.
Speaker 1: Finally, we will investigate the nature of those political forces
that could still retain a degree of intervention capability after
our general measures have been implemented, in order to prepare
for their individual neutralization. Personalities in the government, however bloodless
are coup, however progress of in liberal our aims, we
will still have to arrest certain individuals during and immediately
after its execution. Of these the most important group will
be formed by the leading figures of the pre coup regime,
or in other words, the leaders of the government and
their close associates, whether they are formally politicians or not.
The members of a cabinet will form a fairly large
group from ten to fifty people. Adding their associates and
intimate advisors who could organize opposition against us, we could
easily reach a figure four or five times that number.
Apart from being uncomfortably large, this will also be an
especially determined and dangerous group. The personal repute, presence, and
authority of its members might enable them to rally against us.
The disorganized forces of the state or the unorganized masses
could also enable them to impose their will on the
team sent to capture them, turning there would be captors
into their allies. General Calais, for example, was regarded as
the patron by the NCOs of the French army in Algeria,
and even after the total failure of his attempted coup,
the Paris government could not entrust him to a military
escort on his way to France and arrest. The government
instead had to use the CRS, whose members had never
experienced his personal authority. After all, if a young soldier
acting outside his familiar role is facing a political personality
whose whole behavior is calculated to make people obey him.
It is difficult to be absolutely certain that he will
carry out his orders and not the counter orders he
may be given.
Speaker 5: This one seems treating pre boiler plates a.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know.
Speaker 1: The large number of separate targets, along with the possibility
of radiation effects, indicates that the team sent to arrest
them should be large and particularly well chosen. Since our
resources will be limited, we will have to concentrate our
efforts on the most important figures within the group, leaving
the others to be picked up later, when our means
will have been expanded by the allegiance of the wait
and see element. We cannot arrest all those who may
constitute an eventual danger, but we must make sure that
we do arrest the really dangerous figures, that is, the
key figures within the leadership, who may or may not
be the first in the formal order of precedence. The
formal structure of most modern governments falls into two broad categories.
The presidential type, in which the head of state is
also the main decision maker, as in the United states France,
the Russian Federation in most African states, and the prime
ministerial type, where the head of the state has largely
symbolic or ceremonial duties and the real decision making duties
are carried out at a theoretically lower level, as in Britain,
India and most of Europe. A third altar form.
Speaker 5: Just to point out what he's doing here now is
actually just that he's prescribing a network attack. This is good.
Then he's one of the fIF he works with Rand Corporation,
and this is like one of the things that they've
really pioneer is all that social media research. It's like
finally like trickled down to the Caladi demographic. They like
were the pioneers of it in the late nineteen sixties,
and so essentially what they're talking about, it's like you
we just we just pointed out this is the sampling
set problem.
Speaker 4: We just pointed out.
Speaker 5: That there's going to be there's like a thousand people
that you have to nail down in like Djibouti if
you want to do a coup there, and like unfortunately
they're also going to be the thousand most difficult people
to get so like your chances realistically are. It's like
this is like trying to sample is like trying to
get a good sample with Pennsylvania voters in you know,
for twenty twenty four, for the twenty twenty four election.
We don't have any way of knowing what the hell
is going on out there. We don't have really good
sources of information, but like we do know that we
have enough that we can maybe figure out which nodes
we can attack discreetly to minimize the probability of the
others being able to form, you know, to act as
a coherent network. So it's a game theory that he's
setting up here.
Speaker 1: A third alternative form, which is not a structure at all,
but rather a denial of one, is the strong man
form of government. The strong man may not be a
top minister and may hold no official position at all,
but actually rules by using the formal body of politicians
as a screen. This type of regime evolves when the
fabric of the state has been weakened to such an
extent that only the actual leader of some part of
the armed forces or police can control the situation and
remain in power. A person even minimally acceptable as a
political leader can take over the formal posts as well,
becoming the visible head of the government nasar in Egypt.
Raise Ashah, the father of the President Shah of Persia,
both accomplished this after a short period of transition. But
there can sometimes be racial or religious reasons that bar
the strong man from an official position. The man who
controls the bayonets may be totally unacceptable as a public figure,
but he can still rule indirectly by manipulating the official
leaders he keeps under control by the ultimate sanction of force.
Speaker 5: This charge you're about to read was one of the
more confusing charts that I've actually like every across planet.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I'm going to read this chart.
If people can pick up the book and read it,
I don't think. I don't think it helps us.
Speaker 5: Stream shot. Yeah, it's just his shorthand or stuff. Seventeenth
century England. All right, couragey.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: When in early nineteen sixty six, the Syrian government of
the moderate wing of the Bath Party, headed by Michel
Aflac sala Bitar and the army leader Hafiz, was overthrown
by an extreme left faction of the party. The new
leadership found out that though it controlled the army and
the country, it could not rule openly. The army officers
who led this latest coup were too young, too unknown,
and above all, they were Alloites sala Jadid. Their leader
was a dark, brooding figure who inspired fear and hatred
among the small part of the public that knew of him,
and of all the communities of Syria, the Alloites were
among the least prestigious. In colonial times, the French had
recruited most of their forces of repression the Troupe, especially
the specially especially ad Levent, from the minority communities, chiefly
the Alohites, and they had given the Alloyite area in
northern Syria a form of autonomy in order so the
nationalists claimed to break up Syrian national unity. After independence,
the Sunni majority community regarded the Alloites as renegades, and
public opinion would only have accepted an Allo white head
of state with difficulty.
Speaker 4: Do you ask you a.
Speaker 5: Question, what is an Alite? I don't even know. This
is like a perfect.
Speaker 1: Time, Okay, so it's yeah, no one knows. It's really odd.
They're okay, they're technically Muslim who seem to be closer
to Christianity than they are Judaism.
Speaker 5: Okay, so they're like syncretics of some sort. It's a
religious group, not an ethnic group.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, yeah, it's what's his name? I mean I
saw it as an Alo white. Yeah, but he's actually
really good in his country about protecting Christians and Jews,
so it's yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 5: I just didn't know what one is. I'm like, is
it like, it's just it's been a placeholder in my head,
like when he's a little graft gad. It's like, Okay,
I know he's an Alo White, and I don't know
what the hell it is.
Speaker 1: I looked it up once and it was confusing to me.
It's like trying to look, uh, trying to look up
the what's that spiritual sect of Islam Sufi? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
it's like I don't know what. I don't know what's
going on. I just i'd have to read. I'd have
to read a book about it instead of looking at
like Wikipedia and a couple of articles. Yeah, and maybe
I probably still wouldn't understand, all right. Saljadd overcame this
problem by appointing a full set of cabinet ministers carefully
chosen so as to balance the various communities while retaining
the real decision making power within a separate body, the
National Revolutionary Council, headed by himself. Thus, though Syria had
a president Neuridin al Atasi, a Prime minister Josef Zwayang,
and a foreign minister Ibrahim Maku, all major political decisions
were made by Jadid. The ministers would go on state visits,
make the public speeches, and appear in all ceremonial occasions,
but power was not in their hands. The Asad's father
and son followed this model, faithfully placing Sunnis in the
nominally important positions by keeping the key positions for Aloites, Drews,
and Ismaili's. I don't know what those three are. I've
never looked. I mean, I've looked up Alloites. I've never
bothered looking up Drews. Ismali's sounds that. That sounds like
a slur.
Speaker 2: Again.
Speaker 5: The good thing is is that as long as you
can follow the like the like language that he's using,
he could be he could be using the dungeons and
dragons gain as an example. And it's and that's kind
of how I'm reading it. I'm like, oh, druis. Yeah,
of course, yeah, neutral, good, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Sometimes socialist countries were formally ruled by party governments, but
they tended to break down into one of two other types.
In its original form, real political power was concentrated in
the hands of the Central Committee and some other higher
party council. Once the purely ceremonial figures have been excluded,
the number of people still to be dealt with will
be reduced, and by applying our time spend criterion, we
can reduce their numbers still further. The Minister of Economic
Planning may be a crucial figure in the government. His
position as a technocrat may be unassailable, but he may
be unable to rally public opinion against us to assert
his authority over the armed forces.
Speaker 5: That's the same reason. Who is that German guy, the
one the Nazi, the architect Nazi that was the same
the one that came to wrote all those write all
those books. He was the really like the the like
senior Nazi management. Yeah yeah, a yeah, yeah, this is
like what they're talking about with them. He's like, yeah,
this guy's this is and again I like to talk
about this all the time. I use this, I do
exactly what he's doing here all the time, all those
articles I write about, like dimensionalization and that sort of thing,
I have another one come out of it. Exactly this
right now is like when you're modeling this situation in
your head to make this decision, should you do a coup?
When you remember that, like, it's not just you don't
just have space to take to take into consideration, you
have time as well. So it's like, Okay, you don't
want to spend a lot of time chasing down Albert
spirit that still got if Himmler is still on the board,
So you need to be strategic about who you take out.
You know what's going on here. There's like and you
know the time span, the time span this is happening
in Albert Spear is not that important. Let him go
write books in.
Speaker 1: English trying to remember where I was. I'll just start
from the beginning of the paragraph. Once the purely ceremonial
figures have been excluded, the number of people still to
be dealt with will be reduced, and by applying our
time span criterion, we can reduce the number still further.
The Minister of Economic Planning may be a crucial figure
in the government. His position as a technocrat may be unassailable,
but he may be unable to rally public opinion against
us or to assert his authority over the armed forces.
The dramatic nature of the coup will reduce political life
to its ultimate rationale, sheer force, and we will concentrate
on these figures in the government who could deploy it.
The obvious personalities therefore will be a the Minister of
the Interior and his associates, who control the police force.
B the Minister of Defense and his associates who control
the armed forces. C the party leaders if there is
a party militia. D the Prime Minister or other central
figure who coordinates all these. We must remember that, for
various reasons, figures in the government may not always be
what they appear to be. We may discover that the
apparently innocuous Minister of Education controls an important student's militia,
or the Minister of Labor a powerful workers militia. More important,
the effective power may be held by an inner association
of a particular group of ministers, who between them control
the means of coercion of the state. Thus, the government
of Czechoslovakia between the elections of May nineteen forty six
and the final Communists takeover in February nineteen forty eight
was a coalition of all democratic parties, but the Communist
ministers within it effectively monopolize the control of the means
of coercion, the police and the security Service. The existence
of a group of associates whose alliance transcends the formal
order of government is illustrated in figure four point two.
In this particular case, out of the eighteen or so
members of the government, the prime Minister, the ministers of Defense,
Labor and Education, and the under secretaries of State for
the Army and police actually hold the reigns of power,
though of course they need not be especially cohesive at
any particular time. The process of selections so far discussed
should result in the classification of the personalities of the
pre coup regime into three categories. Have this chart as President,
head of State, Prime Minister, Minister of Defense, and then
it's just showing it's spreading out and showing who the
Minister of Education possibly what is it possibly? Who they could?
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's worth playing and it's worth pointing out
here this is not meant to be deterministic. Chart Here
like there's and I think a lot of like political
movements with this is an important This is one of
the art of war lessons you take because when you're
looking at a chart like this, you have to remember
that chart may not reflect the chart that you would
need to build. So he's like sort of giving you
an example of a of a workflow, but don't you
would be very you may not necessarily be taken under
advisement to repeat his exactly because you have to go.
You know, your situation on the ground is going to change.
But it's like, you know, yeah, an essential you know,
so you have to establish a work It's really what
you're talking.
Speaker 6: About here is establishing a workflow from in the most
boiled down possible way. And he said, you have to
have a system for figuring out whenever this it's been
a trustless.
Speaker 5: System to us. To be a fail proof. Just be
very simple machine that you know, triages and eliminates and
or neutralizes these figures.
Speaker 1: Okay, er the ceremonial figures, they will not be arrested.
If the head of state is generally popular, he or
she should be used as a symbol of continuity, who
will help us to establish our legitimacy, provided he or
she can safely can be safely manipulated and made to
play this role. The other lesser ceremonial figures can simply
be ignored. The Inner Council and the controllers of the
means of coercion. This small group must be sequestered and
held in isolation until our authority is safely established. Apart
from the service, ministers, etc. Any government leader who is
personally particularly popular should be included in this category. The
other ministers and top civil servants. This larger group should
be subdivided into priority groups, to be dealt with as
and when our resources expand or become available when other
more urgent tasks have been carried out personalities outside the government.
The political weight of an individual in any large scale
political community will usually only be important within the framework
of an organization which he heads or manipulates. It is
sometimes possible for an individual to achieve political importance by
becoming identified with an ideology or an attitude in which
some significant part of the public believes co suit. The
leader of the Hungarian nationalist movement in the eighteen forty
eight eighteen forty nine revolution was a poet by profession
and had no party machine behind him, but he did
have considerable power because the masses in the cities at
any rate identified his person with Hungarian nationalism.
Speaker 5: You know, it's wild. I was literally this is I
think so similarly to Luke pak whenever he started this
that I was thinking, we're going to go grab coast
to the very example here. But this is one of
these things that is this is very cool. You know
that he's that he's doing here is that within the
is that he's establishing. And if you look at the
name of the section, his personality he's not talking about.
He doesn't say persons. He talks about personalities, which is
this more abstract thing that's harder to nail down. So
you know, this is why kous tend to be so brutal,
and this is why they is because you have to
not only you did only you have to only you
not only have to kill the person, you have to
kill them brutally that the personality dies as well. So
we're and we're theorizing about this a more abstract thing
called a persona than we are about persons themselves that
have a lot more interesting characteristics that we probably don't
have time to get into. But that is just something
I absolutely had to point out.
Speaker 1: Gandhi, who operated largely outside the congress party machine, also
achieved personal power because too many, because too many Indians.
He was the too many Indians. He was the embodiment
of nationalism. The remoteness of the examples indicates that such
figures are very rare, and if we do have them
in our target area, they should be treated as ceremonial figures.
Physical facilities mass media. Regardless of the pervasive reach of
interpersonal social media and of the Internet in general, unless
blocked by effective firewalls, control over the mass media emanating
from the political center will still be our most important
weapon in establishing our authority after the coup. The seizure
of the main means of mass communication will thus be
a task of crucial importance. One though only one of
the causes of the failure the Greek King's counter coup
in late nineteen sixty seven, was this inability to communicate
with the masses literally and otherwise. When Radio Larisa broadcasts
the King's mess Radio Larisa broadcast the King's messages, it
only reached a fraction of the populace. The transmitter was
weak in the wavelength unusual. Instead of the booming voice
of authority, the declaration took the form of a weak
appeal for help. We must must not make a similar mistake.
He points out here. You want to say something, No,
just kiggling.
Speaker 5: He's a funny guy. He's a funny guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he has a table short table here. Mass communications
in the Middle East and North Africa mid nineteen sixty seven.
Estimated circulation of daily newspapers one point five million. Estimated
number of television sets one million, estimated number of radio
sets seven million. Because of the short timeframe for the
coup and because of the likely social background of our
target country, the press need not be a primary target.
We will establish our authority over it after the coup.
As with other aspects of the nation's life, Inevitably, the
press can only play a marginal role in countries where
illiterasly is widespread and in other In any case, it
is the radio and television services that are mainly associated
with the voice of the government. The approximate comparative data
for the Arab world in Table four point three illustrates
the importance of the different media in one part. In
one part of the Third World. Even these figures understated
the contemporary importance of radios and television sets, because while
the press figures refer to circulation i e. Estimated number
of readers rather than copies sold, the radios and television
sets reach a much wider public, even among the poorest groups,
since every cafe has one, and anyone who's traveled in
a country knows exactly what that lasts, traveled in a
poor country.
Speaker 5: He's been incredibly romantic here as well. This is like
like what he's like conjuring up some like like like change,
bond tiering, saticism, and it works for nobody. This is
the reason nobody, nobody can do this like him. He's
the only guy, the guy for that.
Speaker 1: I've been in some really nice cafes and really poor countries,
and there really is a romantic There really is a romanticism,
two of them, especially during the winter in Eastern Europe.
There are two problems associated with the radio and television facilities.
From our point of view, A, there will often be
many different broadcasting services and associated facilities, and B they
are particularly difficult to seize in some countries where the
internal security position is precarious. The governmental radio is heavily guarded.
But even where there is not the case, these facilities
are difficult to seize because their staff have a uniquely
extensive way of raising the alarm. As for the duplication
of broadcasting facilities, even Haiti, a very small and extremely
backward country, had eight different radio stations even back in
nineteen sixty seven, and they were controlled by independent networks.
I bet that is at a date. Yeah, I doubt
they have eighteen right now. Our objective is not merely
to control, but also to monopolize the flow of information. Therefore,
we must deal with every single facility. This would be
difficult and would also lead to a dispersal of our
forces if we tried to seize and hold every facility.
Our strategy will therefore be to seize and hold just
one facility, the one most closely associated with the voice
of authority, while neutralizing the others. This is best done
with the cooperation of some technical member of their staff
who would be able to sabotage a facility from the inside.
A single cooperative technician will be able to temporarily put
out of action a radio station that would otherwise require
a full scale assault team. If we aren't able to
recruit an internal saboteur, the next best alternative will be
external sabotage. There's no need to cause any extensive damage
since it will usually be possible to remove or destroy
a small but essential part of the transmitter or transmitterors,
thus effectively neutralized in the facility. The one broadcasting facility
which we do have to seize and hold will present
a special problem. On the one hand, our need for
the facility is absolute. On the other, because is it
is such an obvious target, then will certainly.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you have to attack the gut star. It is
what happened. They know that's the thing, every like it was.
All the rest of this is just talk around that
we know that's the thing you've got to get. You know.
Speaker 1: This means that the team assigned to this target will
have to be adequately staffed and equipped, and in order
to obviate the need for the cooperation of the facilities,
personnel should also include a skeleton technical staff. Appendix be
on the military aspects of the coup deals inter alia
with the composition of the various teams. Telecommunications, in spite
of the advent of the Internet and social media, technical
progress has, on balance, evolved in our favor because all
the communications between our own teams can be carried out
by cheap, reliable, and secure two way radios now universally available.
We must, however, deny the opposition the use of their
own communication systems. By doing so, we will paralyze their
reaction and prevent them from deploying against us such forces
as they still control. As Fig. Four point three shows,
the neutralization of the telecommunication facilities will be complicated by
their multiplicity, and it will be essential to achieve full coverage.
Only power cuts can reduce Internet communications, and that too
only gradually, though any specific social network can be blocked.
The Left Socialist revolutionary coup against the Bolsheviks in July
nineteen eighteen failed partly because it failed to comprehend the
need for monopoly of all telecommunications. The Left Socialist revolutionaries
that infiltrated a group of the Cheka, the main instrument
of Bolshevik power, and various army detachments. With these, they
arrested the head of the Czecha, Felix Zarinski, and seized
many public buildings in the Moscow Telegraph Office. They failed, however,
to seize the telephone office as that telegraph office. I'm sorry.
They seized the public buildings, as many public buildings and
the Moscow Telegraph office. They failed, however, to seize the
telephone office as well. And while they were sending cables
all over Russia asking for generalized political support, Lenin used
the telephone service to mobilize as fighting forces with these
coup was quickly crushed. This people are just gonna have
to go, gonna have to look at this chart themselves.
Speaker 5: I I spend all day looking at charts that look
exactly like that, and I was like, oh man, I'm
not at work right now. I can't do it.
Speaker 1: Internal security authorities are aware of the need for efficient communications,
and apart from the facilities illustrated in Fig. Four point three,
there may also be independent networks for the exclusive use
of the security forces. The French Janda Marie has a
system of regional links which bypasses the public telephone and
cable wires, and even in smaller countries such as Ghana,
the police force has long had a fully independent system.
In the United States, there is no national police nor
a national police network as such, but the Department of
Defense maintains a national wide, an international system that is
largely a single network in the world and connects every
US military installation with every other throughout the world. We cannot,
of course, hope to seize every two ways set in
the hands of the police and the military authorities, but
we should neutralize by external or internal sabotage those facilities
which can be identified and located. There's no need to
seize and hold any of these facilities. Therefore, it will
simply be a matter of penetrating the central organization of
each communication system for the brief period requires to sabotage
as operations, though again internal sabotage will be easier and safer.
Let's leave it right there. We're right at about an hour.
Because i'm city entry.
Speaker 5: One of the things that just always amazes me is
how I don't know how good of a sample I am.
Speaker 6: But like sometimes when I get like I said, he
and I think so similarly that like I was like, okay,
we're going to talk about coasts now, and of course
he didn't immediately did.
Speaker 5: But the way, I'm not sure how exposed like even
most like sort of non normy audiences are to this
sort of thinking. I think at this point it's pretty saturated,
you know, but like I some of the stuff that
he talks about now, like he's in this last actually
essentially describing cyber attacks. It's like you need to like
the ideal situation is you just disrupt communications for two hours,
you know, you push some bad code to you know,
to cloud fare and but boom, the whole thing's over
and then everything is right back to normal. You know.
It's it's interesting that you know, he's so famous for
writing this because like that's so foundational to me, just
like Okay, yeah, that's the way, that's the.
Speaker 4: Way you do that.
Speaker 2: M h.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I still yeah, yeah, I still think that like most people,
most people who would try to read this would go
right over their head. Yeah, I'm all about all about
trying get like like like multi dimensional thinking.
Speaker 5: This is really what Luke Back is talking And like
I said, this is one of the chapters you can
apply to a lot of things. You just think about
things like Okay, what instead of like how you know,
let's say like like what do I need to do
to like what do I need to do to make money?
Or whatever? You think it like, you think of it like, okay,
what dimensions do I have control of currently that can
be rearranged to like to produce you know, profit, just
like little mind tricks that you can do with yourself.
And like he's introducing people to this kind of thinking
in this book. It's about you know, nominally running a
coup as well. That's one of the didactic dimensions of it.
And that's the coolest one, I think. And so yeah,
this has been fun.
Speaker 1: Cool. Well, I'm I still have a lot more to read.
Hopefully you can come back and pick up some more
and share some knowledge with us. Oh yeah, uh well
your plug your stuff again. I'm pretty sure I put
it in the show notes of the last thing, and
I'll make sure to do that again.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, well right right now, I think I just
have the substack, but I think I think I might.
I'm gonna have some more interesting stuff coming out. I'm
actually gonna start doing like a weird thing. I'm gonna
start doing like like kind of some basic but maybe
not so basic, because there's just gonna be additive in
a lot of ways. I'm gonna start doing some some
digital humanities like AI natural language processing projects and show
you know, show do some informatics about them and you know.
The reason why, and I'll say it on this show,
is because I was learning all of this stuff and
I get absolutely sick of dealing with like YouTube videos
by people who's dial like I can't understand. So I'm like,
let's just get like a video where there's like a
white dude just being a normal white dude talking about
how to do some of the stuff people might be
interested in, you know, like I'm gonna call it like
AI for Chuds or something like that.
Speaker 1: I don't know, you don't want to listen to them
no more aid like this.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, I used to teach geography. I used
to teach geometry to I mean kids that it was
actually kids at are really good school. But the way
I would teach geometry to them though, is look like
nothing but word problems. So we would be like, so
this is how we're going to figure out how many
times the British, the English archers at Agiancore could have
shot before the French Knights, you know, get to them
in that sort of thing. So like I would do
stuff like that. We look at like I have this
really juicy data set of UH sales at the New
Orleans slave market that I've been like wanting to crack
open for years. It's just been like sitting in my cellar.
I think that's one of the ones I'm going to
look at. So if you like that kind of I
don't know. I don't know how much people like the
graph content from me, but like, this is a great cause.
It's all I've been talking about for the last hour.
This is a great place to plug that. So I
mean to do that is one thing.
Speaker 1: No problem. All right, Christopher, thank you, have a good night.
Speaker 4: All right, you too.
Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to part eight of
my reading of Kuda by Edward Wack. John Fieldhouse is back.
How are you doing, John Dean? Well, sir, all right,
I'm going to get into it. Just start reading. Uh,
Sandy and I left off at city entry exit road link.
So here we go. During the active phase of the coup,
the unexpected arrival of even a small contention of loyalist
or uninfiltrated forces could seriously endanger our whole effort. When
a government discovers that troops of its own arm its
own armed forces, are taking part in a coup in
the capital city, its logical reaction maybe to call on
troops station elsewhere in the hope that the infiltration of
the armed forces is limited to those in the capital city.
As it is not easy to infiltrate forces in the
entire national territory, the government's hope may be not be unfounded.
We will attack the mechanism that could lead to the
arrival of the loyalist troops in the capital city. At
each separate level, we will arrest those who would call
them in, we will disrupt the telecommunications needed to reach them,
and we will also try to isolate identified loyalist forces
by direct, though purely defensive military means. We must also
prevent the intervention of these forces by controlling the last level,
the perimeter of the capital city and scene of the coup.
There's a figure here of physical targets of the coup
and check it out on the video.
Speaker 3: If the got no nothing, I was just going to say,
the biggest issue is something like this is just controlling
main choke points there. You don't have to control every
inch of the road. If you can control the choke points.
Speaker 1: If the loyalist forces are to intervene in time, they
will have to move rapidly. This will require the use
of either the major roads or alternatively air transport. If
we can set up efficient, defensive roadblocks at the appropriate places,
we should be able to deny their entry into the
capital city for the short period required, that is, until
we have established ourselves as the government and received the
allegiance of the bulk of the state bureaucracy and military forces. Thus,
by the time the forces of intervention have reached the
scene of the action, they will be isolated. They will
be isolated band of rebels. The most suitable places to
block a road with a small number of men and
limited equipment, as well as the techniques and implications of such,
are discussed in Appendix B and also in Chapter five,
where we deal with the direct neutralization of the identified
loyalist forces. Fig. Four point four illustrates the locations that
would be chosen in a particular synthetic example. But our
control of the physical access to the capital city will
also serve other purposes. It will be one of the
ways in which we will establish the physical presence of
the new regime, and it will also allow us to
prevent the escape of government leaders and other personalities we
have been unable to arrest. One of the dangers we
will face will be the revitalization of counter coup opposition,
which could result if a major governmental figure escapes from
the capital city and joins loyalist elements outside it. After
all the efforts we have made to neutralize such forces
by internal means and by interference with their transport and communications,
our whole work could be endangered. The loyalist forces could
fail to reach the capital, but the political leadership could
reach them. The means at our disposal will not be
sufficient to hermetically seal the entire capital city, though of
course much will depend on its location and spatial spread. Brazilia,
though open on all sides, would be easy to seal
off simply by closing the airport, because distances preclude rapid
road movements from two other major centers of the country. Helsinki,
on the other hand, would be spatially convenient because, though
not remote from the rest of the country, it is
surrounded by the sea and lake, so that a number
of roadblocks would effectively seal it focal traffic points. The
site of tanks in the main squares of the capital
city has become a symbol of the coup, but is
also an expression of a very real practical requirement the
need to establish a physical presence in the center of
the political activity. Every capital city has an area that
is the local equivalent of Whitehall in the United Kingdom
or Pennsylvania Avenue Blocks near the White House in the
United States, where the main political administrative facilities are concentrated.
We will select and defend certain positions around and within
this area, and by doing so, we will achieve a
variety of aims. A. The positions will form a ring
around the main area within which our active teams will operate,
so as to protect them from any hostile forces that
may have penetrated the capital city. B they will assist
in establishing our authority by giving visual evidence of our power.
And C they will filter movement to and from the area,
thus enabling us to capture those whom we have been
unable to arrest directly. Another figure with showing how you
would do that. And this looks like a pretty urban area,
or its designed to be. It looks like there's an
airport right here on the outskirts. Yeah, a coastal city.
Speaker 2: Which many most capitals in the world are yep.
Speaker 1: In order to achieve these difficult objectives, our blocking positions
must be individually strong, otherwise they will tempt any extent
loyalist forces into a counter attack. In any case, unless
adequately staffed, they will be unable to act as efficient
filters to individual movements. We must therefore resist temptations to
secure every important location by blocking positions that are individually weak.
As only a few of the possible locations will in
fact be covered, it is essential to select them with
special care. Focal traffic points will be easier to select
in a coastal or raverne city where a definite shape
has been imposed on the capital city and on the
traffic flows within it. This is illustrated in Fig. Four
point five. In each particular case, the area which is
the center of political and bureaucratic activity will be well
known to the local inhabitants. Therefore, it will be a
matter of selecting a perimeter of straight and fairly broad
streets at the intersection of which we will establish our
blocking positions. The avenues in boulevards of Paris or ideal
from this point of view airports and other transport facilities.
One of the classic moves in the period immediately following
the coup is the closure of airports in the cancellation
of all flights. This is part of the general tax,
which aims at freezing the situation by preventing the uncontrolled
flow of people information. There will also be other more
specific objectives. By closing the airport, we will prevent the
escape of those governmental leaders whom we have been unable
to arrest. We will also prevent any inflow of loyalist
forces into the area of the capital city. Because of
the short time frame in which secut takes place, air
transport will be of very great importance. Either we or
the government could tip the balance of forces by flying
in quite small contingents of our respective supporters. The size
of the forces that can be moved by air may
well be very small, but in the context of the
delicate balance of the active phase of the coup, that
could still play a decisive role. Air transport is, however,
very vulnerable insofar as it still relies on long and
interrupted landing strips. Therefore, if at all possible, we should
avoid having to rely on it to the extent that
we are into tenant of support arriving by air. We
should prevent the use of all airfields in and around
the area of the capital city. Some of these airfields
will be military ones, but even if they are not,
they may still be heavily guarded. This could be a
serious obstacle if the government still controls significant military forces
outside the capital city, and if transport planes are available
to bring them in. Seizing a defended airfield will certainly
be difficult, but denying the use of one is very easy.
A few vehicles parked on the runway, either by covert
means or with a little cooperation from the inside, and
covered by a small fire team to prevent them from
being moved, will suffice to neutralize an entire airport. A
few warning shots from suitable positions could also prevent any
landings taking place.
Speaker 3: Just a great point, I mean force is less important
than the ability to implement force.
Speaker 1: Yes, now, most people don't understand that the difference between
force and violence, and there are distinct differences when used
properly and when used strategically.
Speaker 3: And like you said, if you park something on the runway,
the runway is out of use, which is even better
than blowing it up, because now you can use in
the future.
Speaker 1: Other organized forms of transport will only rarely be important
in modern conditions. In many undeveloped countries, railways play a
very marginal role in the transport structure. Even where they
are important economically, they will often be removed from the
main population centers, having been built to connect mines and
plantations with deep sea ports as part of the colonial
export economy, rather than as links between the main population
centers in Europe. In those parts of Latin America where
this is not the case, railways will still be unimportant
from our point of view because of the time element.
In any case, railways are extremely easy to neutralize. In
the nineteen twenty six Coup and Poland stage by Joseph
Pizil pills sub Ski Joseph Pilzutski, thank you, a great
deal of the action revolved around the railway system, but
railborn troops never arrived in time to decide the issue.
Both sides found it easy to prevent the others movements,
though not to ensure their own. Where As in Ethiopia
the railways are important, or rather the single addaset Ababa
Djibouti railway line is important. Technical neutralization should be used.
Yeah railways really yeah no.
Speaker 3: The big problem with the railway is, you know, anywhere
along the line. Somebody can take it out of action
by just taking a couple of links out. And nobody
in the world has enough personnel to guard every single
inch of railway.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And also, well, the good thing about doing that
too is it's not hard to build. I mean, if
you start taking out runways, it's a lot easier to
put rail back in that it is to rebuild a runway.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and a lot of times you don't even have
to take off or takeout pieces of railway. You just
have to There are technical means for blocking certain areas,
and if you control those key choke points, you know
you control everything.
Speaker 1: Yep. Railways rely on a technical chain system par excellence,
and if a single section of rail or signals is sabotaged,
the whole system will temporarily stop. The gap between two
sections of rail is easily crossed, but probably there will
be no rolling stock on the other side public buildings.
The needs to provide the bureaucracy and the masses with
visual evidence of the reality and power of the coup
is one of the continuing elements in our analysis. Otherwise
this will be the least defined in the coherent of
our groups of targets. The buildings we will have to
seize and include the residences of these government leaders whom
we have selected for arrest, and those buildings that house
facilities we require, such as radio tell as the radio
television builduilding. In the first case, it will be a
matter of a brief penetration to achieve capture or arrest.
In the second, however, we will have to seize and
occupy the building, and perhaps resist attempts to make made
to recapture it. But there will be other official buildings
we will also have to occupy or at any rate
control the access to those can only be loosely defined
as those buildings whose possession is associated with the possession
of political power, so.
Speaker 3: Things like the internal security forces, the Ministry of Interior.
Speaker 1: Most countries have some form of elected assembly of parliament
or its local equivalent, but in many of them political
power emanates from the palace of the president or other ruler,
or the central committee of the party. We should not
be deceived by constitutional fictions, and after spending so much
effort distinguishing between effective political power and its symbols, we
will not make the mistake of using our scarce resources
on the latter.
Speaker 3: Yet one of the best example the in the recent
past is Liberia, because Liberia when it was actually still
controlled by America Liberians, the actual descendants of American slaves
who are.
Speaker 2: Sent back there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they had a constitutional government which was essentially copied
off of the United States. But the reality is a
huge amount of the power in the country was exercised
through the Grand Lodge of the Freemasons, which we all
immediately would question that as a conspiracy theory, but the
reality is it worked as the fraternity for American Liberians
that could be kept away from outside view of the
rest of the world. So capturing that building and eliminating
its ability to be used was essential for natives in
order to take away or yeah, take away the organizing
ability of the American Liberians.
Speaker 1: Nevertheless, there will be certain symbolic buildings which could play
an important role in the crucial transitional phase of the coup.
Their possession by one side or the other will act
as the signal to the masses and the rank and
file of the bureaucracy in the confused period whereas unclear
which side is in control. Does that sound like something
that they like? The Alcazar and Toledo. Why Franco was
so held bents on making sure that it was preserved.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, that's definitely part of it, right, I've
bean you know, the worst place you could probably get
political quotes from is a Game of Thrones. But was
a Tyrian used to always say, political power, you know,
exists where people believe it exists.
Speaker 1: So yeah, our possession of those symbols will then give
us the allegiance of those who were waiting to choose
one side or the other. Thus, though useless indirect material terms,
it may be worthwhile to seize those buildings which have
a symbolic value. In the Ghanakup of nineteen sixty six
that brought down the Kumwah regime, the very efficient and
practical minded leaders of the coup felt it necessary to
fight their way into the presidential residence flag Staff House.
Though it contained neither Kuma himself nor any important technical facilities,
they realize that though it was an empty symbol park salons,
its possession was essential to secure the support of the
acre masses, who naturally associated the control of political power
with that particular building. Fortunately, by the very nature of
such symbols, there will be one or at most two
such symbolic buildings whose possessions will be an essential requirement.
Apart from the purely symbolic buildings, there will be others
whose possession is highly desirable. These are the administrative headquarters
of the army, police and security services. Thus, in each case,
the group of targets will include the following a. The
seat of effective political power. This could be the royal
or presidential palace, or the building of the elected Assembly
or of the party presidentium, presidium or central Committee.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in the case of the modern world, usually identify
that place because it has the most communications running in
and out of it, which obviously won't necessarily be visible
to the public as a whole, but in the planning
stage you're going to see that through a variety of things,
just like electromagnetic traffic or you know who's wired the
most into the communications.
Speaker 4: That were.
Speaker 1: The main administrative buildings, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry
of the Interior, Police and military headquarters if separate see
symbolic buildings. Often the appropriate building will fall into one
or another of the classifications above, where however, there is
a cultural lag between the development of the country's political
life and the traditional attitudes, the masses will still associate
political power with an obsolete building. The coup will be
practically over in its active phase by the time the
citizenry wakes up and starts to investigate the possession of buildings,
symbolic or otherwise. We can therefore postpone the occupation of
some of these targets to the later stages, since in
direct practical terms, other targets will be more important or
at any rate, more urgent. The best way of dealing
with the symbolic and administrative targets will be to use
them as assembly points for those teams which have already
completed their primary mission.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Part of why, sorry, part of why it's important to
point this out is because again, a coup, an active coup,
is going to minimize the amount of communications that are
done in the red right, the amount of communications that
the opposition of the public and see.
Speaker 2: So using a.
Speaker 3: Symbolic building as a rallying point after you've accomplished one
phase is a is a great way to you know,
minimize communications beforehand and during it when you're actively you know,
doing things and you don't want your communications are still
in danger of being intercepted it's a way of you know,
setting a pre made rallying point where people are going
to show up as soon as they've accomplished that their
earlier phase, the earlier missions, and you can go and
assign them to future missions again without compromising yourself, for
without doing your communications in someplace where the enemy can intercept.
Speaker 1: New heading neutralizing the political forces to particular groups, which
organized groups will be sufficiently strong to oppose us, even
if the voice of the government is silent and the
capital city is visibly in our hands. Not many, But
we must remember that even one well organized demonstration or
a well timed strike could pose a serious threat to
the coup in a delicate transitional phase, and so it
is essential to identify such groups and, once identified, to
neutralize them before the coup. Once it is known that
a coup has taken place, the leaders of the militant
organization or organizations concerned will immediately prepare for action. They
themselves will then be more difficult to arrest, and their
organizations will be halfway underground. In countries where political conflict
is limited to the verbal dimension, this kind of dramatic
and rapid response to political change will be unknown, but
elsewhere where political conflicts can be violent, where all organized forces,
whether primarily political or not, can be drawn into them
this type of response. This type of response is more
or less automatic. Islamist militias in the Middle East and
trade union movements in Southern Europe have little in common
except a their ability to respond in this way, and
b that even without the weaponry that some of them have,
they could be a real threat to the coup. We
will conduct our analysis in terms of those three types
of political forces, because their feature will largely subsume those
of other kinds of organized groups, which may be relevant
in particular countries in the United States or the United Kingdom,
for example, whether where neither trade unions, nor religious groups
nor political parties are sufficiently militant to oppose a coup
after it has ceased its initial targets. The groups which
may have this capability, such as paramat military movements of
the paranoid right, will be organized in a manner that
includes features of all three.
Speaker 2: It feels good to be a hero in their story.
Speaker 1: One of the points we must bear in mind is
that not all the organized groups considered important in normal
political life will also be important in the highly restricted
and spasmodic politics of the coup. Conversely, groups which in
ordinary political life are of little are of very limited
importance could emerge as real threats if, for example, we
failed to neutralize the organization of, say, the National Rifle
Association in the United States or the National Union of
Students in the United Kingdom. Their reaction, however in effectual
per se, could still endanger the coup by slowing down
the process of political stabilization, and as much as they
could provoke conflicts that might reopen the whole issue, Other
more prudent groups would then re examine the possibility of
challenging our position, while the use of violence to stop
the agitation of the groups we have overlooked could lead
to further opposition, since the side effects of the violence
would increase the awareness of and hostility to the coup.
The easiest way to get the national Rifle associations to
stand down in the event of a coup is just
like start spouting boomerisms. Yeah, just like throw some boomer
slogans at them.
Speaker 2: Or incorporate them in some way.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I mean you're gonna have to You're gonna
have to convince them that this is you know, the
you know, the solutions in nineteen eighty four or seventeen
seventy six or some shit like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then you can always hypothetically mobile call for
them to assemble in different places and you don't. You
can neutralize them just by giving them tasks that are
outside of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, seriously, I hear you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, no, I agree. I'm just I started thinking
what those tasks might be and I started laughing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, make them guard inland port just because the
corp of Engineers stopped dredging most inland waterways in the
US like twenty or thirty years ago, so a lot
of them can't really be used anymore. So it looks important,
but you know, they're not really used for anything.
Speaker 1: Finally, there are certain political forces which must not be neutralized.
Apart from those groups that have agreed to support us,
these are those groups that are generally regarded as extremists
but whose effective powers are limited. By allowing them nice
to be included, by allowing them a certain freedom of action,
we will give them an opportunity to oppose us, and
their opposition will have two favorable byproducts. We will be
able to gain the support of those political forces which
fear them more than us, We will be able to
step forward and fight other groups after having associated with
them associated them with the extremists in question. This can, however,
be dangerous games to play. In the confused and dramatic
situation of the coup, the extremists could gain in power
and political support, and it is possible that the time
we have allowed them to discredit the opposition will work
in their favor. Religious organizations. In economically developed countries, religious
organizations no longer have much political power, though they may
still be important social force, which immediately meant NGOs.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, no, I'm sorry you were saying, sir.
Speaker 1: No, I was just saying, he says that they no
longer have much political power. Well, the ones they do
want political power now just become NGOs, and they do
and they actually do have some political power.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And there's also a reason why the I think the
establishment left us so fearful of the Mormons. You know,
we may have serious theological criticisms of them and find
them rather milk toast, but it's easily it's easy to
conceive how in a circumstance like this they could be
an important counter force.
Speaker 1: The leaders of religious groups can be influential in social
and to a degree, political life, but the allegiance of
the believers is rarely expressed by direct and forceful action
in the political field. In economically backward countries and in
those whose development is limited or very recent. It is otherwise,
where the newer technology of humans has only been recently
applied or not at all, the older technology of God
is still in paramount important still of paramount importance.
Speaker 3: Oh if somebody of one specific ethnosectarian group could make
that claim.
Speaker 1: This can be a source of very considerable political power
to the organizations identified with the appropriate beliefs and able
to channel the sentiment of the believers. Leaving aside local
cults which are too fragmented to be important in terms
of national politics, and which in any case tend to
be a political we see that even universal religions will
differ in their degree of political involvement. The role of
the Catholic Church in Italy since the Second World War
illustrates the power that can be accumulated by a well
organized religious group, even when operating in circumstance is considered
unfavorable from the religious point of view. Though most male
Italians seldom or never go to church, Italian women are
keen and regular churchgoers. Italy being a democratic country where
women have the vote, it is obvious that if the
organized church is willing to direct its followers to vote
for a particular party, that party will gain the bulk
of the women's vote before it even opens its electoral campaigns.
Until the late nineteen sixties, the church was generally willing
to give such specific directions, and one particular party used
to benefit, the Democracia Christiania DC. Aided by its assured
majority of the female vote, the DC ruled Italy alone
in various coalitions from nineteen forty eight until it's nine
nineteen ninety to nineteen ninety one collapse under the attack
of investigative magistrates. Corruption accumulates when there is no alter
alternation of moderate ruling parties, long precluded in Italy by
the weight of the Communist Party. Corruption accumulates when there
is no altruism moderate ruling parties thinking of looked coued.
Speaker 2: But that would be one of many cases probably of that.
Speaker 3: I think we've seen in the last two years that
in the UK that's very much a case with the
Conservatives and Tories, and.
Speaker 1: It did so largely because of the support it received
from the Catholic Church. It is hardly surprising, then, that
the Church was able to dominate the DC, and that
through the DC, it influenced every aspect of Italian national life.
After nineteen ninety one, however, Italy discovered that no other
political grouping could replicate the DC's successes in steering the
Italian economy. The post DC technocrats made the fatal mistake
of taking the muddled Italian economy into the all too
clear waters of the Euro After nineteen ninety four, Berlusconi
arrived to teach the Italians that there was something worse
than corruption, i e. Institutional paralysis to persists while the
supreme leader looks after his own business and his own
fulfilled personal life. Hence, Italy underwent the socially tragic consequences
of prolonged economic stagnation and chronic youth unemployment, which posts
Berlosconi leaders have failed to remedy as of twenty fifteen.
Speaker 3: The sentence where eats like it's written by somebody who's
extremely jealous.
Speaker 1: Or I mean has was Berlusconi particularly critical of a
certain group.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and again, I don't know enough about Italian politics
to make any judgment one way or the other.
Speaker 1: But just wait five minutes and it'll change. So this
is no vague influence exercise on a plane of generalized authority,
but rather a constant supervision of political activity conducted at
the provincial level by the bishops and at the national
level by the Pope and his associates. It's really weird
that Litwock is just going on about the Catholic Church.
I have no idea why he would bring them up.
At each level of the state bureaucracy, the Church directly
or indirectly exercises its influence on civil service jobs and promotions,
on the allocation of investment funds, and of the various
kinds of government grants, on administrative decisions dealing with zoning
and building regulations. This influence has brought it rearwards. While
the facilities of the state bureaucracy have steadily deteriorated compared
with the dynamic private and semi state sector, the Catholic
Church's educational and religious facilities have steadily expanded. Money to build,
and the permissions required to do so have never been lacking.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: On that note, I think one of the interesting looks
just that the role of the Italian Yeah, the Catholic
Church and Italian politics, these of all things that HBO
series is The Young Pope and the New Pope, is
that they actually look explicitly at the kind of damage
to the internal status quo of the Italian states, that
Italian state that an actual conservative pope could actually wreek
on them.
Speaker 1: I need to watch those. I haven't watched them them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a I do.
Speaker 3: It's a rare case of like a mainstream, you know,
fiction series on Christianity.
Speaker 2: It's actually really good.
Speaker 1: If we failed to neutralize the organization of the Church
in Italy, it could inspire and coordinate opposition to us
through its capillary network of parish churches. Parishioners are used
used to hearing political messages from the pulpit, priests used
to receiving detailed political briefs from the bishop, and the
latter receive their instructions from the Vatican. Our neutralization of
the telecommunications facility will not prevent the flow of instructions.
The Vatican maintains its own radio station and this could
be used to contact directly the organization through out the country.
Speaker 3: There's a reason why so many NGOs are now called Catholic,
at least in their title, despite having non Catholics running them.
Speaker 1: Isn't it insane that you can just start an NGO
and call it Catholic and like then you look at
the board of directors and every single one of them
is of a certain tribe.
Speaker 2: Non Catholic, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, non Catholic. Yeah yeah, let's call that. Let's call
it that. Yeah. The Catholic Church plays a similar role
in certain other countries, where it has a ninety nine
point nine percent nominal membership in the status of the
national religion, but the stronger state structure of Spain and Portugal,
let alone France, has denied at the preeminent position it
has in Italy. The intervention of the Church would however,
be a powerful factor in much of the Catholic world,
including South America, especially if the motive behind the coup
is identified as being anti clerical.
Speaker 3: Which has a long history of happening in Latin America,
like you know the Mexican coups in the early twentieth.
Speaker 1: Century, assassinating priests and El salvad or things like that.
I mean yes, yeah. Islam, which has the comprehensive nature
of a religion, a political system and a civilization, is
much decayed culturally. Is much decayed culturally, But the doctors
of Al Azar University in Cairo, one of the main
theological institutions of the Muslim world, are periodically prompted by
the rule of the day, into openly political declarations. No
single leader in Islam has the authority of a pope,
but in each country, local religious leaders can still be important.
Even before its abrupt disappearance, the once very noisy theater
of Arab socialism did not impair in any way the
position of Islam, and governments that followed an extremely left
wing line in all foreign and some domestic matters were
still unwilling or unable to challenge the status of Islam
as the state religion. When such a course was tentatively
suggested by an obscure member of the nominally Baptist, hence
nominally secular Syrian government, the leadership was forced to denounce
them officially. Whether this resilience means that the Islamic leadership
of particular countries could function as an active political forces
another matter. The structures of Islam as an organized religion
are fossilized. The fluid and dynamic Islam of its early
days of conquest has been replaced by a dogmatic and
extremely conservative set of beliefs whose inflexibility is the major
cause of the present travails of the Muslim world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just for the in American or Western audience, it's
it's really important to understand that within Islam there's a
huge difference in administration between Suis and Shiites, and Sunnis
are essentially congregationalists, which means, you know, every mosque is
essentially autonomous in terms of its hierarchy, whereas she Heites
actually have you know, a defined clerical authority. So it's
something more like more like the Catholic Church than Protestantanism
in terms of how it's wrong.
Speaker 1: When he says the fluid and dynamic Islam of its
early days of conquest, I'm wondering if he's referring specifically
to like seven eleven Spain through seven eleven through fourteen
ninety two Spain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I imagine he did.
Speaker 3: Which you know, we know about one specific group that
tend to do very well under early Islam, but the
reality is other groups I mean there were no shores
of Christians and Zoroastrians who were elevated to an extremely
high level. And yeah, they had huge limitations on their
political rights, but they were also exempt for military service,
which meant that they weren't the people dying for their state.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, something that I've said recently is that
you know, from studying that period seven eleven so fourteen
ninety two in Spain, I as a Christian, you would
feel more safe at that time in Spain under Moorish
rule than you would feel now under the regime that
we're under right.
Speaker 3: Now, Yeah, ironically right, I mean, Muslims are much less
of a threat in an Islamic state than they are
in the West yeap.
Speaker 1: By contrast, there has been a great deal of fluidity
and dynamism in the more or less violent Islamist movements
that exist outside official or traditional religious institutions, ranging from
the historic nineteen twenty eight Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt al
Ikwan al Muslimun, which spread to Syria in the nineteen sixties,
and the Jahadi movements of Pakistan that spread to Afghanistan
after nineteen seventy nine, including Al Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda,
which for a while had global pretensions, to the newest
the Islamic state Daolat al Islamia, which as of twenty
fifteen boasted of its own caliph. I eve the sole
legitimate ruler of all Muslim nations everywhere and of any
territories ever ruled by Muslims, such as Spain's and Andalucia.
Speaker 3: I want to remind everybody that the fact that the
is ri Isis's head called himself caliph is a lot
like the mayor of Orange County, California calling himself the
head of Christendom. It's it's a very pompous title that
nobody in the world outside of you know his direct
immediate support, and that's actually thought meant anything.
Speaker 1: And I would also like to remind people that Isis,
when they bombed Israel ten years ago, took out very
publicly to apologize. What the Jahadi groups have in common
are for rather odd characteristics. First, for reasons that are
not easy to explain. They are utterly obsessed with the
role of women in society, and rather the importance of
their exclusion from society and their reduction to a status
not far from that of valuable domestic animals, a status
limited to procreation as a cowca cattle rancher. I get
the point, and the servile service of their husbands in
and out of bed. Some groups are less restrictive, but
none of the Jahati movements afford females any political role whatsoever.
They can fight, but only as suicide bombers. None allow
women to be educated beyond some capacity for reading the
Quran if that, and none believe that an unmarried woman
can have any professional existence of any sort, or even
drive a car. The widows might take in laundry and such.
Speaker 3: I don't deny his point about the sexi aggregation among
most Islamist groups, but I think it's more accurate to
say that it's a reaction to the West and the
transformation of gender relations in the West in the last century.
Speaker 2: Anything inherent in.
Speaker 1: Islam absolutely, and I'm not going to argue with them
at all about restricting women from voting. Second, the jihadi
groups always speak in the name of Islam, period, but
they only act for Sunni Islam habitually, persecuting or simply
killing any non Sunni Muslim who falls into their hands.
Whether the twelve Vershia of Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Syria,
the fivers I Edi Shia of Yemen or the seven
er Ishmali Shia scattered worldwide, but also president Syria in
that regard, While Iran's great Satan is the United States,
as indeed it is for the Ayatolas who must rule
incurably pro American educated elites, for the jahadis the great
Satan is Iran, not an unhappy conjunction, and as much
as it sets equally murderous Shia Hezbalah and Sunni Jihadis
against each other.
Speaker 3: Now understanding this point, we can see why it's so
ironic that the neocons have always gone other way to
identify Sunni and she Had groups together, despite the fact
they hate each other even and more than they hate us.
And it shows the other strategic incompetence of trying to
equate those two groups when the last twenty something years
there could have been some made at reproach mont with
groups like our countries like Iran, in order to en
this threat and achieve some kind of lasting peace.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, the redirection in Iraq was basically, we
need to stop empowering Shia and we're by doing that,
we're going to empower Sunnis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in that whole issue.
Speaker 3: I mean, Scott Horten's talked about at length and he's he's.
Speaker 2: Demonstrated right under the Hussein regime.
Speaker 3: So the Bath Party in Iraq was largely a vehicle
for Sunni rule as opposed to what it was in.
Speaker 2: Syria.
Speaker 3: But at the same time, you know, there's some amount
of Shias who were co opped into the Bath Party.
Speaker 2: There was some amount of of.
Speaker 3: What do you call it, Kurtish groups that were you know,
co opted despite being non Arabs. So yeah, it essentially
or essentially required the Sunni majority or Suning minority rather
to actually hold the political power in Iraq, and once
we eliminated them destroy the Bath Party. You know that Metashias,
who are the majority at least in the part below quirderstand,
are going to win in any democratic relation or any
democratic situation, which turn brought Iraq into alignment with Iran,
which is why how we end up in a situation
where the government bought backed Iraqi official government militia. The
head of that was assassinated under Trump, you know, and
this is somebody that was empowered by US, So it's
the pure asinine incompetence of America's policy in the Middle East.
Speaker 1: Third, the jihadi groups are of course and Western and
reject Western artifacts, clothing, et cetera, as well as Western ideas,
but they are keen and sometimes talented emulators of Western
media techniques. Fourth, the Jahades consistently attract volunteers who are
notably more committed and therefore potentially more effective than the
salaried soldiers and police who confront them across the Muslim world,
And because of their skill in utilizing Western media techniques,
members of the Jahati movement are able to attract volunteers
from the West who bring their valuable Western skills with them.
The leader of the nine to eleven attack on New York,
for instance, was a German engineer of Egyptian origin.
Speaker 4: Yea.
Speaker 3: Again, one of the things that I think our establishment,
especially the media, fails to recognize is that people in
the world, many of them, actually believe in the religions
and are willing to kill and die for them. And
it's not just a you know, a window dressing that
you know, the establishment assumes it is for everyone.
Speaker 1: Sandy and I were the other night we're trying to
figure something out. Maybe you can help with it. Do
you know what an Can you describe exactly what an
Alohite is?
Speaker 4: Okay?
Speaker 2: Yeah? In fact, yeah, here's a good point. And depending
on how long.
Speaker 3: It takes me explained, all right, it is an endogamous
ethnosectarian group in the Levant that is nominally Schiai Muslim.
Speaker 5: All right.
Speaker 3: When I say endogamous, it means that it originated in
one ethnic group of people who founded was it all
news Ariah, which I think I'm mispronouncing it, but that
was the name of the religious leader out of Iraq
who formed this group century years ago. Endogamous means it's
descended from those people. Unlike the Druids, which are another
endogamous group in the area. I think the Alo Whites
actually allow some amount of integration and conversion and the
children of mixed marriages to actually integrate in the community.
But again it's an endogamous community. It has what are
called esoteric elements, which means that they have the outer
form of the religion and then fully initiated members of
the religion get further secret knowledge as part of it,
which is something that historically saw in many religious movements,
so the outward ward facing part of the religion is
essentially si idislm Inner movement, as far as we can tell,
is probably some remnant of occulted Christianity with Gnosisicism, with
maybe even Hinduism or Buddhism because they believe in reincarnation
and things like that. So again, this is essentially a
ethno religious tribal group, much like certain other groups in
the region that has a close society that in which
it's not just a matter being born into the group
because that's a prerequisite, but you actually have to be
initiated into inner circle in order to become a religious
excuse me, a leader within that community, which means you
have a.
Speaker 2: Group that's forced to deal with everybody, usually.
Speaker 3: On asymmetric terms, meaning other people have more power than them,
so they have to navigate their way historically, but it
has a reinforcing discipline function that requires them to, you know,
commit their loyalty to the organization and its movement and
its ideas in order to to you know, become a
leader in that community, which means it you know, it's
forced to both deal with the outside world while maintaining
cohesive and I know I'm rambling here, but yeah, so
that religious ethnic community exists primarily in the Levant. So
in Syria, there are small numbers of them in Lebanon.
There are even some in Israel in the goal On Heights,
some of whom even have Israeli citizenship.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that answers your question or not.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it does, he asked the question, and I from
my study, I just said it's Scheite Muslim. But it
seemed like there was like they were closer to Christianity
than probably anything else as far as.
Speaker 2: We can tell.
Speaker 3: And again that's one second. Sorry, but so yeah, as
far as we can tell, part of the problem is
because it's a closed esoteric religion, we only have a
vague idea of what the inner teachings of the movement
are because they're not communicated to outsiders, and like any
other esoteric movement, when it when somebody spills the beans,
it's not really clear if they're telling the truth or
just making shit up.
Speaker 2: So yeah, we only have a vague idea of what
it is.
Speaker 1: All right, we only got a few more pages here
and then we'll get out of here on this little
part right here, the political sterility of official Islam in
recent times has meant that though it has been used
by governments to propagate their political initiatives, Islamic leaders have
only spoken out in response to direct attacks on religious orthodoxy. Consequently,
unless our coup has a definite anti Islamic coloring, religious
leaders in Muslim countries will not initiate any action against us. Clearly,
we must prevent our opponents from supposing from imposing such
a coloring on our coup. Back in the nineteen sixties
and nineteen seventies, in the intermittent political warfare between Arab
socialists and the monarchies, while the latter was accused of
being tools of the Zionist imperialist oil monopolies, the former
were accused of wanting to eradicate Islam with their godless beliefs. Actually,
even the self styled progressives did not dream of challenging Islam.
These days, with Arab socialism long dead, the competition of
rulers with ultra Islamist chihadis has resulted in the further
Islamization of the Arab world. Such a phenomenon is equally
present in Turkey, but for a very different reason. The
downfall of the military based and fiercely secular establishment has
allowed the village Islam of the unwashed Anatolian masses its
democratic expression, and what they want is a decidedly illiberal
return to Ottoman practice is starting with headdresses on all women.
This is a regression that the loudly Islamist Justice and
Development Party, I'm not going to pronounce that it's AKP,
has been happy to deliver, along with frenetic mosque building,
even on previously strictly secular university campuses and sundi Islamic
policies on all matters, starting with foreign policy. Yeah, the
Turkish ak.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not to inter with that. It's a good time interrupt. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So the Kamalis regime named for Kamal added Turk, who
basically transformed the remnant of the old Ottoman Empire into
modern state of Turkey as a republic, a secular republic.
There were some very key rules that were enforced.
Speaker 2: Number one.
Speaker 3: Basically religious institutions. Number one, they had to be approved
by the state. Number two could not have any direct
involvement in the state. They essentially practiced the French concept
of leaeste, which means more than just secularization, and it
means basically the non are it basically forbids the public
integration of religion into civil and political life outside of
the religious institution, which is why in France so often
they have public debates about head scars and things, because
it's for a long time it was actually illegal in
France even to wear a clerical collar outside of church
if you're a priest, because you cannot wear or have
any kind of public influence of religion in the civil
and political life. So that was the thing that happened
in Turkey, like he said, until very recently with the
end of the political influence of the military on politics.
At the same time, the akap is kind of interesting
because and I'm not approving of it anyway, but it's
not quite as as Lomist as we would think, right.
It's it's essentially like a Turkish identitarian political movement in
which Islam is a key weight or key aspect of
the society, the same way that like you know, our
Catholic myths is essential to being Spanish, despite the fact that,
like you know, we said that Catholic Church can not
have a big political role in or Spanish society. So
building moss again, even in you know, public universities, which
to us that may seem weird right now, but keep
in mind most old universities in the US had chapels
on them, even though they've probably have been secularized at
this point. Head scars are also a really weird aspect
of Turkish culture because it's as much are seen as
much as a political social choice by women as anything,
because wearing a headscarf for a woman is sort of
a way of thumbing their nose at modern liberal culture
by saying that no religion is important to them. And
I understand it doesn't necessarily mean that they're like the
semi chattel relationship that we think of in Isis.
Speaker 2: It doesn't mean that at all.
Speaker 3: And again I'm not approving of the AKAP, but he's
basically glossing over a huge amount of nuance in Turkey,
where there is a lot of nuance in the real world.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 1: The Turkish AKP semi literate leaders seem to honestly believe
that democracy means the absolute rule of the majority, forgetting
the bits about the consent of the minority, individual rights,
the rule of law, and so on.
Speaker 2: There we go, conveniently believe in those things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they have ruled accordingly with just over fifty percent
of the vote, utterly ignoring acute secular unhappiness as well
as this as the substantial fifteen to twenty percent minority
of Alabus whose faith is entirely too moderate for the akp.
Speaker 3: Akp, a Turkish descended ethno sectarian group that is twelve
or Shiite but essentially preserves a form of Zoroastrianism within Islam.
And they're another one of those really cool but really
weird shite minority groups.
Speaker 1: Has pronounced alevis.
Speaker 2: I've heard it pronounced a levee in English.
Speaker 3: My understanding is in Turkey aloi and a levy are
pronounced the same way, but they consciously spell them differently
and pronounce it just to make it clear that they're
not talking about the Alowites.
Speaker 1: Okay. Hinduism is another faith that has no central institutions
or hierarchies. Indeed, it is a gathering of many diverse
cults to share the same library of ancient texts, some
magnificent and the same cast of godly characters, each emphasizing
this or that text or God, and which was only
represented as a unitary religion under British rule. None of
this prevents parties and politicians from trying to harness Hindu
sentiments for their own advantage, and there are organized Hindu
militant groups, including some that repudiate the serene tolerance of
most Hindus by murdering Christian missionaries and organizing anti Muslim rine.
The banning of cowslaughter attracts more mainstream support, and it
has been legislated in several jurisdictions. US hamburger chains, serve
chicken in India, or simply go vegetarian. But if we
stay well clear of cows and temples, we can ignore
Hinduism as a factor. An extreme example of the potentialities
of a dynamic religious leadership was the mainline Buddhist movement
of Vietnam as it then was, before its political identity
was obliterated by the Northern Communist conquest of nineteen seventy five.
The almost continual warfare of its last fifteen years, along
with the politically destructive effect of the DM regime and
its military successors, resulted in the collapse of the social
and political structures of the country, while its economy was
reduced to localize subsistence subsistence agricate culture, allied with urban
dependence on US AID and US military spending. Precarious conditions
weakened more modern economic, political, and social movements, allowing older
groupings based on religious affiliations to emerge as the only
valid civilian political forces in Vietnamese society, apart from the
Buddhist movement led by the Monk Tik Tree Quang and
other re regional leaders. By early nineteen sixty eight, on
the eve of the momentous offensive by the Viet Kang
and the North Vietnamese that ultimately induced the United States
to abandon Vietnam, the following array of religious and political
groups could be found in the country. Do you know
how to pronounce this? How is it? How is how?
Speaker 2: It's usually yeah?
Speaker 1: Ho how Ho how? A reform Buddhist sect with a
large following in the Southern Delta part of the country.
Their leadership was politically oriented and, except for strictly local alliances,
was anti Viet Kang. They had acquired the rudiments of
an armed militia.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The Hoau were important because they didn't believe in monasticism.
Because most Buddhists Sicts believe the only people who are
going to reach Nirvana are actual monks. And again the
whole how had their own militia that the South Vietnamese
government had to deal with.
Speaker 1: Cow Die an important Buddhist sect with a history of
political participation.
Speaker 2: They're not Buddhists.
Speaker 3: They're basically a mixture of like French existentialism, Catholicism in Buddhism,
as well as a bunch of traditions within Vietnamese folk religion.
And basically they're important. Is the Communists didn't like them
because they are a very cohesive subgroup within society and
they have a tradition of their own militias.
Speaker 1: Is this pronounced Benjuin?
Speaker 2: I think Benjuin or something like that.
Speaker 1: Benin a small but very active part sect and part
secret society, and its main area of strength was in
the Saigon region, and before the DM regime displaced them,
the Benjuin were said to own both they these police
force and its underworld. The sect had been influenced by
the Chinese secret societies from across the river in Cholan,
Saigon's vast Chinatown, and the effect of the report of
the repression at the hands of DM was to drive
it underground rather than destroy it.
Speaker 3: Essentially, these were the Vietnamese branch of Catholic excuse me,
Vietnamese branch of Chinese triads, and the triads actually have
a religious orientation or religious origin, which again makes it
really hard to infiltrate them.
Speaker 1: That's really interesting. I'd like to learn more about the.
Speaker 3: Ye I was saying within Chinese society. The actual history
of like as good theological religions, those that actually believe
in like some.
Speaker 2: Kind of into the world is just absolutely engrossing.
Speaker 1: Catholics. Until DM's fall, the substantial Catholic minority was able
to dominate the Buddhist majority. Many of the South Vietnamese
Catholic for refugees from the North and as such fiercely
anti communists. Moreover, under the French, many Catholics that cooperated
actively with the colonial power and served in the French
armed forces. As the South became increasingly weak in the
prospect of a conquest by the North approach, the Catholic
community reached a desperate impasse. Their activity against any pro
Viet Kang or just pro peace coup would have been
immediate and probably very effective.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like we talked before when Dark Enlightenment was on.
Many of the Catholics in Vietnam, they actually originated from
civil service families.
Speaker 2: A lot of these that had been like.
Speaker 3: Traditionally Confucian, So yeah, they have a strong history in
the government. Many of them were even from North Vietnam.
You know, they dominated the ZM regime. And even when
there was the military coup in South Vietnam and they
started purging everybody connected with DM, they ended up having
huge numbers of Catholics left in the command structure just
because they were the competent pace. And again, the Catholic
Buddhist divide is just so huge in Vietnamese culture. It's
like if you ever have or ever live in a
city in the US with a large Vietnamese immigrant population,
the joke is you will always see an intersection to
Vietnamese restaurants facing each other, and without a doubt, it
will always be one Catholic and one Buddhist restaurant. And
that's just divide in their culture.
Speaker 1: Wow, all these religious groups could have intervened against a coup.
Their meeting places could have been used to assemble and
shelter out opponents. The priestid could have inspired and coordinated
mass agitation against us. Finally, their direct influence on the
army and bureaucratic rank and file could have been used
to resist the imposition of our authority. The religious groups
that can be important in particular countries will differ doctrinally,
but they will tend to be sufficiently similar organizationally to
permit us to rely on the same general method of neutralization.
Their access to internet social media must of course be
impeded if blocked. If they operate private broadcasting facilities such
as the Vatican Radio or the small radio stations of
American missionary sex in many parts of the world, we
will put them temporarily out of action. Religious meeting places
should not be closed by administrative orders, which are liable
to foment rather than stifle opposition, but access to them
can be impeded or even barred by incidental roadblocks.
Speaker 3: Which is part of why when the Communists controlled Central Asia,
they always limited the ability of individual mosques to organize events,
but they never made any kind of effort to close
permanently or ban those mosques.
Speaker 1: The leadership of religious organizations presents a special problem when
it comes to neutralization because of their particular psychological role
in the minds of their more committed followers. It will
usually be extremely unwise to arrest the hierarch the hierarchic leadership,
as well as any prominent preachers, who will in any
case be stripped of their social media access. Fortunately, the
actual decision makers within religious organizations will often be younger
men who are not in the public eye, but who
are the key figures from our point of view. If
the real decision makers are not also the hierarchical leaders,
we will arrest them. But if the two roles are
embodied in the same person or persons, we will not.
In concrete terms, a trity Kwang who was very much
an effective decision maker in South Vietnam but not formally
in the higher leadership, could have been and should have
been arrested. But a pope who is both representational and
the effective leader cannot be arrested without stimulating a great
deal of opposition, the impact of which will outweigh any
advantage to be gained from the arrest.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: One of the things you see in all kinds of
religious and civil institutions is as people live longer, very
often the titular leader, the person who's officially in charge
is not necessarily the person running things behind the scenes
wouldn't have in the past. Now the official leader very
often has final authority, but it doesn't mean that the
person running around taking care of finances or you know,
logistics and making sure people at remote sites get fed.
So yeah, you have to be reasonably young and somebody
willing to show up every day in work long hours
in order to do.
Speaker 2: Those kind of things.
Speaker 3: So yeah, the older the population, the more likely that
is that a formal leader will also have you know,
unofficial leaders behind the scenes who are doing most of the.
Speaker 2: Day to day work.
Speaker 1: Okay, the less than two pages left that I might
need your help with pronunciation here if you can. In
Jahadi movements, the military, political, and religious leadership is usually
embodied in the same person, evoking the Caliphate, which Muslims
of all stripes, even the most moderate, must view as
their ideal of governance for the Umah, the planetary community
of all Muslims and the and indeed for all humans
once following entarily converted in due course or killed of
Starbury pagan but modern advocates of a revival of the
Caliphate they amount to a substantial semi public movement in
many countries hardly ever, refer back to the famous caliphates
of history from the splendiferous Umyad that Umayad defeated by
the longer lasting Abbasid, which were then distinguished by the.
Speaker 2: God Uh and Obbosid.
Speaker 1: Umaiyad and longer lasting Obbosid who were later estinguished by
the Mongols in twelve fifty eight, or the Egypt or
the Egypt based and tolerant Shiamid Fasimid is that Fatimid.
Speaker 2: The claiming descent from Mom's daughter because he never had
his son.
Speaker 1: Okay between or the Ottoman that lingered till nineteen twenty four,
let alone the extent and genuinely moderate Amadia Kaliphate that
most Muslim condemned is heretical.
Speaker 2: Pronounces Amadia Amidia.
Speaker 1: Instead, supporters of the caliphate wax lyrical about the rule
of Muhammad's first four rightly guided successors, the al Kulafa
al rashidund yeah something like that, who followed one another
after his death in six point thirty two. Unable to
assume Mohammad's prophetic role, his best placed followers took control
of his movement as his successors or Kulafa. Hence the
English Caliphate in greatly celebrating the Rashidun as modern Muslims
afflicted by afflicted by the contemporary difficulties of the Muslim
world are wont to do. The violent instability of the
institution is disregarded, no doubt, because they celebrate. They celebrate
are the colossal victories over the infidels who now very
regularly defeat them, undermining Islam's central promise of victory. But
from the very start the institution was violently unstable. The
first caliph, Abu Bakir Sadik, had had to fight tribal
secessionism throughout his short reign to impose his rule. His
struggle was further intensified by the very first Shia, the
partisans of al ib Abi Talib Mohammed's son in law.
There was also a bitter property dispute over the date
palm orchards of Fardakh. Abu Abu Bakir died. What do
you say, No, I just.
Speaker 3: Think the property dispute, being essential to is says a
lot about humanity as a whole.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Abu Bakhar died of illness, a privilege denied to
the second caliph umar in al Khatib, killed by a
resentful Persian soldier, or the third Uthman ibn Afan, lynched
in his own house in Medina, or the fourth and
last Ali ibn Abi Thalib Mohammad's son in law, who
was assassinated by a more extreme extremist of the Karazite Sek,
which demanded unending war against all non Muslim and denounced
all who disagreed as apostates deserving of death. Muhammad had
done the same, sending assassins to be head apostates and
irreverent poets. Muslim violence around the world is therefore perfectly
traditional and allows us, as coup planners, presumably Muslims in
a Muslim target country, to act accordingly. The patron saint
of modern shihadis Sayid Katub.
Speaker 2: Katub I think Kutub.
Speaker 1: Was hanged by the Egyptian military dictator Gamal abdel Nasser,
who nevertheless remained wildly popular as of twenty fifteen. The
contemporary military dictator of Egypt, a fine fellow by all accounts,
has procured that sentences against the leaders of the Ikwuan
the Muslim brotherhood without losing his considerable popularity. Hence, any
Muslim religious leader who crosses our path can be straightforwardly eliminated.
So long as our Muslim credentials are solid. It helps
to have a dark spot on the forehead left by
the bruising of enthusiastic worship and bowing down to the ground.
Speaker 3: That's one of many reasons why the the Alla white
leaders in Syria go out of their way to emphasize
their religion as a type of Islam, because they were
the only people to actually suppress the Muslim brotherhood.
Speaker 1: All right, that's where where this is a good natural
stopping point. So thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, and
you're gonna be you'll be out of h at a
range for a little while. Yeah, we'll see if if
still doing this when you get back.
Speaker 2: Yeah time.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, yeah, I appreciate it, and take care.
Have we good weekend, Thanks sir. I want to welcome
everyone back to part nine of my reading of Kude
Toad by Edward Lutwak. Christopher Sanbatch's back. How are you doing, Christopher?
Speaker 5: Yeah, pretty good, pretty good. I've survived my encounter with
all three hundred thousand people that want to let me
know how ugly lam Hoff is, I've never been pounced
so hard. Do you know Davis that runs the pamphleteer
up in Nashville. He was like, yeah, He's like I
just like, I've never seen a post that had three
hundred thousand likes and three hundred thousand views and one
hundred likes.
Speaker 1: Oh it was. I mean, I watched it from afar
because I'm like, if I get involved in this, it'll
I'm going to be sucked into those sand batch vourtext
and I don't need that at this point.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's exactly right. Some days you just have to
say not to sand Badge.
Speaker 1: All right, we're finishing off chapter four hearing and it
owns chapter five, so I'll start reading. Stop whenever. All right.
Political parties, unlike the other groups that constitute a potential
source of opposition to the coup, political parties are our
direct competitors in the sense of their primary purpose, like
our own, is the accumulation of political power. This will
not necessarily make them the main or even a significant,
potential threat to us, but it will mean that their
response to the coup will be particular, particularly prompt. Whether
this response will be verbal and purely declatory or perhaps
more direct and effective, will depend on a variety of factors,
including the nature of their leadership, organization, and membership. Because
political parties are as diverse as the countries within which
they compete for power, we will classify them in certain
categories as a prelude to examining the methods of their
individual neutralization.
Speaker 5: Before he gets into this, because this is actually one
of my like keystone issues, I just want to point
because I always like to go into this and I'll
do this, I'll do the whole spiel somewhere else one day.
But I always like to point out in the United
States that the political parties are not actually constructed similarly.
The only thing they really have in common is that
there's series five twenty seven organizations that put candidates up
for office. Other than that, they're like in the United States.
In the anglosphere, they're like corporations, and they could pretty
much operate however they want to with their own biolaws
and do whatever they want to do. But I've also
worked and I've also worked with African and South American
political parties before, and you know, Americans are used to
a certain amount of asymmetry and but it's like enough
that we don't even we argue amongst ourselves whether or
not it even exists.
Speaker 4: You know, both parties are the same as them or whatever.
Speaker 5: It is astonishing if you ever deal with third world
countries or second world countries, how actually diverse the party
representation is, like, I mean, like any you can go
right now and over to like Chad, Like look at
the country, Chad, and like look at all the political
parties there. There's gonna be the ten communist ones, but
they're going to be really interesting, and they're all going
to have their own little.
Speaker 4: Niche issue, you know.
Speaker 5: So this is what he's doing, is he's laying these
out for us. Some of these will be familiar, though.
Speaker 1: Right machine parties, where politics is a business like any other, parties,
take the form of an association whose purpose is the
procurement of votes in exchange for specific and material rewards.
The local boss secures votes for the party at election
time in exchange for cash and or bureaucratic jobs for
himself or his nominees. The deputies in the assembly then
deliver their votes to the government in exchange for definite favors,
some of which are retained and some of which are
passed down to those who secured their election. The Machine
Party can flourish in societies as different as early twentieth
century America, Egypt between the Wars and present days South America.
Speaker 5: Well, it just to point out here also one of
the things he doesn't he's he hasn't gotten that I
can't remember if he does get into it. But again,
this is actually where I worked. This is the kind
of wet work I was doing on K Streets, That's
what I call it. But I was like working for
this like flea by consultancy on K Street that did
things like represent Third World parties. Okay, so like really,
not only does this all happen, an astonishing amount of
it actually happens in the United States, like like these
like like these countries like Niger or Chad or somewhere
like that. They will have both the opposition and the
ruling party, will have separate lobbyists, and they'll have separate
personnel staffing in Washington, d C. And they actually do
an astonishing amount of their internal politicking in the you know,
the overall imperial capital. So when you're thinking about this,
it's not spatially limited necessarily to the countries in which
it's happening. This could be happening in London, this could
be happening in America, happening in all three.
Speaker 1: Already. It needs two main ingredients, an elective parliamentary democracy
and a socially backward electorate. That's such a great sentence.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In the United States at the beginning of the century,
the immigrant communities were largely composed of Eastern and Southern
Europeans whose mother countries were economically and often politically unsophisticated. Thus,
the newly arrived immigrants lacked the political awareness required to
obtain direct concessions from the government in the shape of
social welfare legislations or labor codes. They soon learned, however,
to obtain indirect favors by proposing their support to the
local ward organization of the party, i e. If the
votes were delivered on election day and the candidate elected,
rewards would be eventually received in return. Machine parties do
not distribute their rewards as widely as the old municipal
machines in the United States. That is so because such
parties participate participate in the amplio crassia jobs for the
boys politics, which dominates political societies in which industry and
commerce are undeveloped. In such societies, politics and its associated
jobs in the state bureaucracy are the main avenues of
middle class advancement, if not enterprise. And the Party is
the vehicle with legal training for the middle class activity
of office hunting.
Speaker 5: Okay, Now, this is going to be a long one
because I have to the first thing we have to
do is point out the dazzling Miltonian satanic performance that
we thought is putting on here.
Speaker 4: As a literary figure.
Speaker 5: He's doing something which is very He's echoing a historical
narrative that is very interesting because he's functionally again we
remember him as a defense intellectual. He is suddenly mirroring
what we refer to as the narrative of the Anglo
American wasp establishment. Okay, that is about as clear an
outline of Anglo American establishment wasp historiography as you can
find anywhere, you know, Like, Okay, we had these people
from Southern Europe and ay all, and this is I mean,
this is the tricky thing here is this is how
Lukefax's own people arrived here. So he's writing this book
for this audience as though he's one of them. But
he's explaining what his people did to the United States. Okay,
is what's going on here? And it's one of the things.
I'm just like every time he does this, I'm Florida.
Speaker 4: I'm like, I just is, Who's it.
Speaker 5: I don't know how many people are in on this joke,
but just from a writing perspective, you could understand how
he actually managed to make a career out of.
Speaker 4: This book, because it is. It has lots of twists
and terns.
Speaker 1: All right. Machine parties have their rationale and the contrast
between constitutional structures and the social order. In countries that
are both poor and democratic, their whole manner of operation
revolves around the exchange of votes for rewards at every level.
In other words, it requires the functioning of the parliamentary
apparatus with its periodic elections. In the event of a coup,
this institutional framework would be frozen and the machine made powerless.
Even if the machine has a base of mass support,
its leadership being coalition of local power, structures without a
national presence will not be able to mobilize it. We
will therefore ignore the machine parties and will not need
to take any particular action in their regard you.
Speaker 5: Now we get a staff because this is like, Okay,
what he's just laid out for you, right there is
the strategy of the Democratic Party in the year twenty
twenty four. He has every single one of the adjectives
and the nouns that he's used leading up to this,
leading up, leading up to the end of the end
of the section is in fact these words. If you
could make a word cloud of the way people in
coastal cities look at the inner provinces of the American Empire,
that is precisely how they look at And most of
many of them have this book from undergrad in the
back of their mind whenever they think about the sort
of wrote politics of Middle America, and that it's actually
true to a certain degree that most red state American
precincts are in fact run by the political machine.
Speaker 4: That is the Republican Party.
Speaker 5: So, I mean, we're really familiar with looking at the
black vote, you know, I know, the good old boys
are really fond of saying the black vote is delivered
by machine, so on and so forth. The Republican vote
is also delivered by machine. It's just a machine. So
vast and the individual pieces of it are so like
inconsequential that it never gets categorized as a machine politics
because it's uniformly the entire sec opposition party in the
United States.
Speaker 4: All right, that's.
Speaker 1: No insurrectional parties. Such parties may or may not participate
in open political life if it exists in our target country.
But the primary purpose of insurrectional parties is to destroy
the system rather than to work it. Like the Bolsheviks
before nineteen seventeen, these parties live a semi legal existence,
with a cellular organization and underground mentality, and frequently a
paramilitary element. Such parties are characterized by their adherence to
a set of definite ideological beliefs, a rigidly centralized organization,
and their preoccupation with the use of direct methods to
achieve political ends. Yeah, you're really shocked when you read
this that he actually brings up the Bolsheviks and not
that other group that you would think that he would pick.
He would choose.
Speaker 4: Oh, no, he's one of them.
Speaker 5: He's like a deep, deep, deep Nazi, if that's what
you're talking about, Like there's like this is like this
is he's definitely.
Speaker 1: If he's a neo conon a Zionist.
Speaker 5: Then yeah, you know that gets into the real tricky
internal politics of like the relationship between you know, Central
Europe and he is he's like one of these figures
out of like almost like the spy who came in
from the cold or some other like Jean Lecaerr novel
where he's like this like marooned orphan figure that gets
like tossed. He's essentially from the same milieu as George Soros.
He just came out on the other side. You know,
he's like he's the anti He came out anti Communists
because I guess it's I think it was America or
the maybe the Greeks or somebody that scooped him up,
and so he grew up in the West and he's
a and he's a like the only thing Edward Luvac
wants to do is kill Muslims. And what is the
other thing Neokons do? Oh yeah, no, Kamis. But like
like he's got like he has the Zionist bloodlust for
the destruction of.
Speaker 4: The Mohammedan, of the Mohammedan Empire or whatever.
Speaker 5: But then he also is a like raging anti communist,
and you know, during the nineteen seventies, those two strains
came together and formed a seam for these people to
pour into. You know, the the neocons that are on
one hand, because this is when the Black Party, this is.
These are the in fact, these are the parties he
knows best, because these are the ones he's talking about.
Speaker 4: These are the ones that he manipulates and that we
actually don't really have a corollary too in the United States, Like.
Speaker 5: There's not no matter how hard MSNBC wants to mean this,
there's no corollary to ISIS or the color parties in
the United States right now. But these are the ones
he knows really well because these two things that he
knows how to do, which is like like destroy Muslim
countries and philosophically opposed communism. The Middle East of the
nineteen seventies was the place to do that, you know,
and these were these were the types of parties. And
now you know, I used to hang out with these
guys like would do this stuff and they would, you know,
they talk about these are like the days of like
black helicopters and like the Special Forces looking like dads
on like you know, there's summer vacation.
Speaker 4: But that's what these guys used to do, and they
used to use.
Speaker 5: Parties, but this was their favorite kind of work, the
insurrectionary party.
Speaker 1: In the social and economic conditions of Western Europe and
North America, insurrection parties are insignificant numerically, and they're challenge
to the system. Usually unfolds in an atmosphere of unreality,
though from time to time they can gather a mass
following among certain sectors of the population which are outside
the mainstream of national life. The yeah the Black Power
movement in the United States, for example, had all the
traits of an insurrectional party, but only operated among the
black communities in areas whose social and economic conditions were
those of an economically backward society. In the Third World, however,
the constant pressure of economic deprivation can generate a revolutionary
mentality among wide sections of the population, which insurrectional parties
try to channel and exploit. Their organization, however, is often
inadequate to the task. Insurrectional parties can oppose us in
three main ways. A through the agitation of the masses
to the extent that they have a mass following. B
by direct means such as assassination and sabotage c by
syndicalist agitation.
Speaker 4: It's so specific.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Insurrectional parties usually have an authoritarian leadership structure. Much
of their strength and the confused circumstances that would follow
a coup would derive from the coherence of a centralized leadership.
With that in mind, we should make every effort to
identify and isolate their key decision makers. The emphasis on
party discipline and the habit of making of waiting for
directives from the higher leadership when there are many insurrectional
parties powerless once the leadership has ceased to function, the
social pressures that act as a source of strength of
an insurrectional party may lead to its revival, but this
would not take place in the short period of time
that concerns us. I guess this what really makes the
makes the argument for professional soldiers.
Speaker 5: Oh you see, I like, I'm wondering if this is
a portion that he added in the like in the
updated edition, because if like, I don't know what year
the United States stopped arming, you know, Sama bin Laden.
But this is the reason they like to use these
insurrectionary parties. Is that section that he just outlined, which
is usually if you cut the head off, the whole
thing goes away, so you only have to keep guys
near one guy. So whenever this political party, when this
card that you have in your deck is you know,
has expired or it's no longer useful, you just shoot
the guy that you've been propping up the whole time.
That's how you at how the US. The United States
ran quite a bit of its foreign policy in Asia
for the second happen that we probably still do it,
but I can't. You don't have eyes on that the.
Speaker 4: The real like sort of dangerous thing.
Speaker 5: That's like what happens if we cut the head off
and it does eventually grow back, and he goes, this
won't happen for a long time. How long about twenty
years for al Qaeda to emerge after we after we
tried to you know, scuttle it.
Speaker 1: Oh man, Yeah, I mean that's really Also when he's
talking about hero is that if you if you think
you have a movement within a society, and you think
it's a political movement and it's run by one person,
and there's just one person you're looking to, and there's
no obvious second in command, there's no one there to
step up. If that one person gets taken out, you
don't have a movement.
Speaker 5: Right exactly what you do it. I would compare strong,
compare harshly with the Bolsheviks, who did not operate this way. Actually,
so like the Bolsheviks are this weird asterisks because they
really were a kind of cybernetic entity where if somebody
had managed to off Lenen, you know, there's like there's
there's a whole group of people that get called the
old Bolsheviks that theoretically we're all interchangeable with one another,
you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the social pressures that act as a source sources
of strength of an instructional party may lead to its revival,
but this would not take place in the show period
of time that concerns us. The vulnerability of insurrectional parties
was strikingly demonstrated in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood,
a major force in each Egyptian political life after the war.
Its large mass following in network, its network of economic
and educational activities, and its paramilitary youth groups gave it
a great deal of direct power. Its effectiveness, however, derived
largely from the coherent leadership of its founder, Shikasan Albana,
and the movement rapidly declined after his death in unexplained
circumstances just after the failed coup of late nineteen forty eight.
Where necessary, therefore, the committee or personal leadership of the
insurrectional Party should be arrested and held in isolation for
the duration of the coup. Because of the emphasis on
party discipline, the Beheaded Movement will probably abstain from action
in the short but critical period following our seizure of
power power of bureaucratic parties.
Speaker 4: And interesting.
Speaker 5: Before you get started, Yeah, this one's sort of interesting
because what he's doing here is it's actually collapsing to uh,
you know, I'm actually trying to think about how you
would you know, model it onto logically right now the
way you would just because what he's doing is taking
a structure that we would normally conceive of is differing
structures and he's actually.
Speaker 4: Bundling them all into one, into one subclass of political
party here.
Speaker 5: So like what and one interesting things he's doing here
is he's actually he's he's removing the the really removing
the connection between you know, the people and the parties
that are represented. So now he's now he's treating, you know,
the bureaucracy as its own. You know, abstract class is
what he's doing here. And this is you know, this
is another one of these things. It starts to get
it starts to get really big in the nineteen sixties
and it becomes increasingly important for you know, world systems analysis,
geopolitical analysis, and pretty much everything. You know, this is
one of these you know, concept splitting is what I
call it. You have to kind of if you want
to understand the world after nineteen sixty, you got to
grap what's going on here, all right.
Speaker 1: Parabierancratic parties in one party state such as China, most notably,
the party itself has lost its major role of securing
the allegiance of the masses. Because it is a monopoly.
The party is also in danger of appearing superfluous. But
like any other bureaucratic organization, the party can survive the
loss of its primary function, either as a system as
filiation or as an ancillary or supervisor of the administ
traded bureaucracy of the state. African parties formed during the
political struggles which preceded independence tended to legislate their monopoly
of power as soon as they had attained it. Some
like the Tanzania and African National Union c A ANDU,
have turned into constructive galvanizers of the communal and state
development programs. Others, like Macuma's old party in Ghana, become
adjuncts to the personal leadership and a system of outdoor
relief for his activist followers. The majority, however, until swept
away by the military dictatorships, have acted as the principal
agent in the main local industry politics.
Speaker 5: This also, by the way, this is me as really
my formal field of expertise. Actually, like it seems buried
in the rubble compared to what I actually do now,
But it's actually the antepelops out And it's like the
situation you describe actually describes Southern politics, possibly up to
the present, and to such an extent that I tell
people frequently that Southerners in a sense, or even Americans,
because Americans don't really have politics the way we do,
where like every interaction with the Southerner is a political action,
you know. It's it's like our notre like cultural shared
ethno ethno language is politics. Like it's the sort of
comparison that I've made before. I'm not as happy with
the comparisons they used to be, but that's just something
I thought was interesting here.
Speaker 1: The para bureaucratic party treats the state bureaucracy as to subordinate.
It investigates its activities, reports on its behavior to the
higher leadership, and often demands special privileges and concessions. These
parties do not have a mass following except within the
framework of normal political life, when they can be relied
upon to produce demonstrates for this or that stand of
the leadership. As soon as the hold of the leadership
is strength is threatened. As soon as the police apparatus
no longer acts as its muscle, the power bureaucratic party dissolves. Therefore,
we can ignore it in the active stage of the coup. However,
its secondary function, that of intelligence and security, will be important,
and we will be dealt with as part of the
general defensive measures towards such organizations. Parties in developed countries,
whether it is a two party system as in much
of the Anglo Saxon world, where parties are in effect
coalitions of pressure groups, or whether they are class or
religion based parties of much of continental Europe, the major
political parties in developed in democratic countries will not present
a direct threat to the coup. Though such parties have
mass supported election time, neither they nor their followers are
versed in the techniques of mass agitation. The comparative stability
of political life has deprived them of the experience required
to employ direct methods, and the whole climate of their
operation revolves around the concept of periodic elections. Even where
there are still nominally revolutionary parties, as in France and Italy,
two or more decades of parliamentary life have reduced their
affinity and revolutionary methods.
Speaker 5: Now Here, here we have the actually, this is the
you know the ichor and break the neo cons right here.
This is one of the assumptions that turned out to
be wrong, and it's why there's not very many of
them left because they didn't. They didn't they actually believed
their own bullshit about you know this, you know of
the Democrat party doesn't have the ability to deploy mass agitations.
It doesn't understand how to use political party political power properly.
So this was a real, this is a real, actual
domestic home front assumption of the neocons that ended up
being wrong.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I think of if they really wanted to,
if the Democrats really wanted to unleash say like anti file,
Black Lives Matter or something like that, and unleash it
in a way that would cause revolutionary change, that would
be in the kind of violence we're talking about here,
the court systems would basically not be would probably not
be functioning, so you know, crazy white guys with guns
could actually fight back, and they would. They wouldn't have
the support of the state, but they wouldn't have the
state breathing down their neck with DA's looking to throw
them in jail.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, it's a seriously ugly situation. It like
like like.
Speaker 5: Should that's This is actually the reason why the Democrats,
I mean, I'm a registered Democrats. The reason why the
Democrats make me more nervous right now than the Republicans
do is that, you know, I sort of perceived that
you nineties is at this like particular catastrophic point in
its history, and that like anyone getting really jumpy will
cause problems, and the Republicans, I like, I can't can't
get anything together.
Speaker 4: Let's just go with them, We'll.
Speaker 5: Just get We'll get four years of relative boringness from
the Republicans. I don't know the Democrats are. They're like,
I'm afraid they'll push the advantage and like create some
situation like that out of like a dude frying a
turkey on Thanksgiving or something.
Speaker 1: I have a tendency to believe. I think Charles Haywood
describes it this way, that the regime right now is
like one hundred foot one hundred foot tall toddler with
a butcher knife. Yeah that's definitely. Yeah, it's like really dangerous,
but all it needs to do is step in a
ditch and it basically it's out of commission.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that's that's true. That's it.
Speaker 5: The you know, the international situation is everybody else is
also like everyone else is equally eggshell. Then. But I
also would point at Haywood is the guy who is
making He's like he's going from shampoo magnet to like,
you know, right wing genius, specifically because he's the guy
that has managed to turn a message, like create a
message out of what I just said, which is this
was one of the new kinds assumptions that turned out
not to be true.
Speaker 4: It's like that's his whole that's his whole stick, all right.
Speaker 1: You're right, Yeah, probably, I keep going, yeah yeah. The
apparatus of the party, with its branches and local organizers,
can however, allow them to perform a role of information
gathering and coordination which could be potentially dangerous. Even though
their leadership may not take any action, the apparatus can
still serve as the framework for anti coup agitation. Coup
agitation period closing administratively, the network of branches should be
sufficient to neutralize this particular threat. The only serious threat
from this direction will come from the trade union movements
affiliated with the mass parties of the left. Their experience
of industrial agitation has provided a natural training for mass
intervention against the coup. But this will be dealt with separately. Below.
This sounds like that. That part sounds like he wrote
it in the sixties. That doesn't sound like ye from
the Gonna be part, right, I was gonna put that
as well.
Speaker 5: He's like literally talking about long shoreman Steve ADOR's and
this is that old left you know. Actually low the
day was of all people pointed out this yesterday that
had like most of us been around at that point,
we would have been hanging out with the longshoremen in
the like communist unions just because they were cooler. Like
this is like the early beat, dude, like the early
beat generating, which is kind of like one of my
hobby horses.
Speaker 4: They were around at the tail end. So this is
the very.
Speaker 5: Tail end of like the like actual influence of the
wobblies and in the Democratic Party, and before the unions
turned into fronts for the mob. I mean they kind
of already were, but before it got decadent, when like
the unions could still deliver actual muscle.
Speaker 1: Already. Next section deal with the trade unions. Wherever there
is a significant degree of industrial development, and in many
countries where there is not, trade unions are a major
political force. I guess we'll just have a little history here.
I mean, my my my dad was ut T h
his his stepdad was teamsters. So really stories growth, that's.
Speaker 5: A that's an aspect, that's the aspect of the American
experience that fascinates me because I mean I am like
from like as like stale whitebred wasp family as you
can get, you know, and like I like always look
when I meet other people, I'm always amazed, And that
is one of the that's like one of the like
lineages of American that I think is super cool, but
like it's so foreign to me, it's amazing.
Speaker 1: I have stories I'll tell you privately because if I
told them public and no one would believe them. Yeah, yeah,
the stories that I was told, no one will believe them.
But all right. Because of their experience with industrial agitation,
which can be readily applied to political purposes, the responsive
trade unions to the coup could constitute a serious danger
to us. The mass following of trade unions, unlike that
at political parties, is in continuous session. Polling foods are
only open once every five years, but factories work all
year round. The immediacy of the threat presented by trade
unions will depend on their size, cohesion, and degree of militancy.
The fragmented syndicalism of the United Kingdom, with its purely
electoral politics, would not, for example, add up to the
threat of, say, the Italian movement, with its centralization and
long history of political strikes. So question, could one of
the purposes of moving manufacturing off off continent be to
just break up the the power of trade unions.
Speaker 5: That's that was certainly a theory that was floated at
the time, and there were a lot of Jimmy Carter
voters that thought that was what was going on.
Speaker 4: This is like that's a total, totally a thing.
Speaker 5: Whether or not it happened, I don't know, Like this
is like okay, once you get to this point. This
is like one of the reasons why I like like
have to give like like serious conspiracy theories, theory, serious
conspiracy theorists like a glass of sweet tea and like
sit sit on porch with them at the barbecue, because
I'll sit there and listen to them and I'll be like, yeah,
it's true, man, it's true. It's because like almost everything
is true to one degree or another, Like.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they were because of that para bureaucratic party, the
thing we call the deep state, where all these federal
agencies in the hive mind in DC are working at
cross odds and not really.
Speaker 5: Ever sharing information. But like I don't know if you
know this about like federal agencies, like they don't do
much data sharing. They never had, they still don't, they
have not you know, they they don't like the you know,
state doesn't really talk to DoD so on and so forth.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of like Paara, you know, there's a lot.
Speaker 5: Of room for these you know groups to maneuver around
and and any of them deciding to get that.
Speaker 4: You know, we need to get this industrial muscle offshore.
Speaker 5: That makes kind of sense because in the nineteen seventies
we were getting very nervous about the the effectiveness in
particularly Zapatista governments, for us to do something like offload
with So we get rid of our communist labor movements
and we go down there and we established free trade
movements and get cheap labor. Yeah, so I had never
thought about that, but it lines up perfectly.
Speaker 4: That's totally what happened.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're gonna finish up this chapter and just end
it because we won't start chapter five. And plus I
gotta I just got a message, I gotta go do something,
so at the time to finish us up, all right.
The experience of Bolivia after it's April nineteen fifty two revolution,
which up ended the social order, illustrates how a single
trade union and its activities can dominate a country's political life.
Bolivia was the poorest country in all of Latin America,
with an economy characterized by subsistence farming and the activities
of the large tin industry before the revolution and the
nationalization of the mines owned by the Patino Adamayo and
hook Child Hawkschild family. That one of those doesn't seem
like the other. The miners had had worked in physical
and economic conditions of extreme harshness. Following their emancipation, they
naturally wanted to achieve immediate and substantial improvements in these
conditions and comable The State ten Mining Organization started immediate reforms.
It was soon discovered, however, that the geological and economic
conditions of the industry required an increase in productivity, which
could only be achieved by introducing much new machinery and
reducing the labor force. As the only source of capital
was the United was the United States, the miners leaders
opposed to reforms on the dual plank of no yankee
or junkie read yankee capitalism and no redundancies. Such problems
are familiar. Yes, I'm on that. I love.
Speaker 5: I just love Latin American politics, like like genuinely like
when boliviate when Venezuela was threatening to invade that French
colony last year, I got like I got genuinely romantic
in the for the you know, the Venezuelan National Cause.
For a minute, they.
Speaker 4: Cracked me up.
Speaker 5: I feel like, if like, if like everything goes I'm
I'm thinking about moving to El Salbad, where it's like,
let's just do it, just go full Banana Republic.
Speaker 1: Well, get down there before it gets starts getting expensive.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's true. Mexico. Yeah, Mexico City is already bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Such problems are familiar from nearer home. But the
crucial difference was that the miners were also an army.
They had been armed by the middle class leaders of
the Revolutionary Movemento Nationalista Revolutionario Party m n R in
order to act as a counterweight to the old army
dominated by associates of the mind owners. The revolutions disbanded
the army so that the miners could not only exert
political and economic pressures, but also more direct military methods.
Until the m n R leadership found a counterweight in
the unions organized against the peasant farmers the Indian company Compassinos,
who were also armed, the miners had things pretty much
their way, led by militants of the Katavi Siglo Vente Mines.
Speaker 5: Of wonder, the moans that it's the Vatican Bank. Eventually,
you know, that's literally all of this is going on.
Speaker 1: The miners imposed the control of Kamabal and therefore on
the country which depends on it as the major source
of foreign exchange. Certainly, no coup could have held on
to power without the miners consent, and had the central
institutions in La Pause been seized, the real power base
in the mines would still have been under the control
of the union leaders even without the special circumstances that
existed in Bolivia. Trade unions will often be a major
political force, especially in terms of the situation immediately following
a coup, but much will depend on the particular organizational
structure of the trade unions, and crucially on the degree
of effective centralization and the nature of their political affiliations.
In the United Kingdom, with as much weakened trade unions,
their main focus of decision making is the executive of
individual unions, but in some of them it can easily
shift to the shop floor. Apart from this fragmentation, which
would at least impair the speed of reaction to a coup,
the largely mainstream politics of British labor would not be
a suitable framework for direct measures.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like there's nothing in the there's also whether there's
nothing in the UK that can move on. This is
the reason why they have so many problems right now.
The only INTI see the inside the UK that can
move can mobilize enough people at one time to be
politically effected as Muslims. And that's the reason why like
it's become terror island now is because the only literally,
the only group that can exert any kind of like
coherence is the like is the migrant one. So I
you know, game over. Sorry, had a good run and
alienated a third of the audience.
Speaker 1: Sorry about that. Yeah, I mean that's definitely from the
outside looking in, definitely looks that.
Speaker 4: Way, and it's just not good.
Speaker 1: And France and Italy, the trade union movement is not
divided on craft lines, as in Britain, or on industrial
lines as in the United States and much of northern Europe,
but on political lines. Individual industrial unions are affiliated with
central organizations, which in turn are associated with political parties.
In both countries, the largest organization was long controlled by
the country's Communist party, with smaller Social democratic and Catholic
trade union organizations affiliated to the respective parties. The communist
labor organizations CGL in Italy and CGT in France expressed
their militant activism in political and general strikes, but all
that ended long ago with the collapse of the respective
communist parties. Unless our coup is directly linked to them,
the central organizations of French and Italian trade unionism would
react to it, and do so in a predict predictable ways.
Immediately after the coup, they would a try to establish
contact with our democratic forces to form a popular front opposition,
b contact their national network of branches to coordinate a
general strike, and c put into execution their contingency plans
for underground activity and illegal survival. The only tactic which
would present a threat to us is the general strike,
which would be organized with the deliberate intention of confronting
the forces of the coup. Our general measures would affect
the overall performance of this emergency program, but specific action
would be needed as well in order to avoid the
confrontation that the unions would probably seek. Both the CGT
and the CGL have memories of their of the wartime
resistance movements. Both are aware of the destabilizing nature of
open repression, and they would therefore try to provoke us
into using violence.
Speaker 5: That's the form of that's that is, that's gone now,
that's the that's the well, you know argue.
Speaker 4: We still see more of it in France.
Speaker 5: This is the reason why France is by far the
most interesting European countries, because they have they still have
some their part their political party stuff, some backbone, and
they do still have some measure of militancy in their population.
And it's a big country and it's spread out. There's
a lot of reasons, but there's like France's you know, France,
this is now. There's no way to put it. These
conditions have receded significant. There's nobody in the They had
French resistance guys to mobilize back then, you.
Speaker 4: Know, don't have that now.
Speaker 1: Though some form of confrontation may be inevitable, it is
essential to avoid bloodshed because this may well have crucial
negative repercussions among the personnel of the armed forces and
the police. The avoidance of bloodshed intense crowd situations, as
a matter of technique and competent handling of our incorporated
armed and uniformed forces will be essential. The incidents of
Reggio Emilia in Italy in summer of nineteen sixty four,
in which seven people died following a political strike, illustrated
how an incompetent police force can impair the authority of
the government it is trying to protect. If the trade
you us of our target country approximate to Franco Italian
levels of political effectiveness, approximate to Franco Italian levels of
political effectiveness, it will be necessary, assuming that our coup
is not politically linked with them, to identify and arrest
their leaders and close their headquarters in order to impede
the operation of their secondary leadership elsewhere. It will be
a matter of orienting our general measures to deal with
the particular threats which trade union movements could present. And
that is the end of chapter four.
Speaker 5: Now well, not really, well, I'm in the middle of
the Only thing is I think probably most people are
interested in it, probably aware of it, and then they'll
write in some really wonky stuff. It's actually getting psychedelic.
I may even talk about the psychedelics a little bit
on my blog. So like the blog is alive in
case you in case you follow it, go check it.
Out the name of it Ecologica Americana.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I will link to it like I did the
last time. I appreciate it. Not meaning to rush you
off or anything, but I do gotta. I gotta before
someone before someone closes. So thank you, Christopher. I appreciate it.
So the next time, yeah, no problem. Oh yeah, I'm calculating.
I want to welcome everyone back to part ten of
my reading of Kudeta by Edward Luttwach. John field House
is back. How you doing, John?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 2: How you doing, sir?
Speaker 1: Doing good? Took a week off, cleared my head and yeah,
ready to jump back into this one chapter left long chapter.
I think I counted almost fifty pages, so now I'm
able to do it in one sitting. But that's to
start getting going on it, because I'm sure this is
the part everybody has been waiting for, the chapter five,
the execution of the coup.
Speaker 3: Yeah, before before we get into it, I was just
gonna say, look, Wax organization of his chapters doesn't necessarily
make the most sense because the strategy in preparation chapters
obviously overlap, and a bunch of the execution stuff he's
alreadys talked about.
Speaker 2: But this is short for him anyways. As a chapter.
Speaker 1: All right, all right, Chapter five, the Execution of the Kudeta,
A couple quotes as soon as the moral power of normal,
as soon as the moral power of national representation was destroyed,
a legislative body, whatever it may be, meant no more
to the military than a crowd of five hundred men,
less vigorous and disciplined than a battalion of the same number.
Madame de Stal, referring to Napoleon's coup d'etta, I came
in a tank. I came in on a tank, and
only a tank will evict me. Abu z e ear yaha?
Is that to pronounce that yaha?
Speaker 2: I think it's it's pronounced yahya, which is Arabic for John.
Speaker 1: Okay abuz Zahir yah yah yah Iraqi, Prime Minister, nineteen
sixty eight. All right, Start with the text. The active
phase of a coup is like a military operation, only
more so if the general principle of tactics is the
application of force at the right place. The coup achieves
this with surgical precision by striking at the organizational heart
of the whole state. If speed is very often important
in military operations. In the coup, it is an essential requirement,
but the coup differs from most military operations in one
crucial respect. While in war it is often advantageous to
retain some forces as reserved to be used in later
and possibly more critical phases of the fighting, in a coup,
the principle of total commitment applies. The active stage takes
place in one short period of time, and forces held
back today will be useless tomorrow. All our horses must
be used in our single, decisive engagement. The fact that
the coup has practically no time dimension means that we
will not be able to correct significant errors made during
its execution. In war, tactics can be changed, weapons can
be replaced, plans reshaped, and soldiers retrained on the basis
of combat experience. In the coup, however, there will be
no sufficient time for any feedback mechanism to work. In
this the coup is similar to the most modern form
of warfare, the strategic missile strike, and the time factor
places that entire burden of decision making. In the planning stage.
Every target must be studied in detail before the coup.
The team assigned to seize it must match it in
terms of size and composition. It's every move must be
planned in advance, and no tactical flexibility can be allowed.
With this degree of detailed planning, there will be no
need for any sort of headquarters strung sure in the
active stage of the coup. If there is no scope
for decision making, there is no need for decision makers
and their apparatus. In fact, having a headquarters would be
a serious disadvantage. It would constitute a concrete target for
the opposition, one that would be both vulnerable and easily identified.
As soon as the coup starts, the ruling group will
know that something is happening, but unless coups are very
frequent in the country, they will not know what that
something is. It could be a mutiny, an insurrection, the
opening of a gorilla war, or even the beginning of
an invasion by a foreign power. Yeah, go ahead on
the scope, Yeah please.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So the big thing he's talking about, not much need
for a headquarters. Obviously, you're gonna have somebody in charge
at some level, with subordinates in charge, you know, and
radios and what not to coordinate them. But a lot
of what goes into a headquarters that you don't see
unless you're in one is battle tracking and management type stuff,
and like the American military is and is one of
the worst for just growing and growing its headquarters to
involve more managerial functions there to the point that it
forces every army that interacts with them to basically grow
their staffs to the detriment of the rest of their forces.
And so this chapter so far is in a lot
of ways, it's a lot more important than even it
sounds at first at first glance, because it really shows
how hypothetically an American style army is completely unfit for
this kind of an action.
Speaker 1: All right, All these forms of conflict represent threats of
the regime, but they are all different in terms of
their immediate significance and more important, in terms of the
measures required to meet them. We should avoid taking any
action that will clarify the nature of the threat and
thus reduce the confusion that is left and the defensive
apparatus of the regime. Our teams will emerge from their
bases and proceed to seize the designated targets while operating
as independent units. Their collective purpose and their coordination will
remain unknown, and until it is too late for any
effective opposition. The leaders of the coup will be scattered
among the various teams, each joining the team whose ultimate
target requires his presence. Thus, the spokesman for the coup
will be with the teams that will seize the radio
television stations, and the perspective chief of police will be
with the team whose target is the police headquarters. As
each team will be both small and highly mobile, and
as there will be no functioning headquarters throughout the active
phase of the coup, the opposition will not have any
single target on which to concentrate its forces. In this way,
their numerical superiority will be dissipated, and the smaller forces
of the coup will have local superiority in the area
of each particular target. This will be key to the
victory of the coup.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the big takeaway here is having a headquarters,
having any kind of an organization works both ways. And
anything that you have that is there in order to provide,
you know, very rigid regiment and command and control is
something that's also a target for the enemy to destroy,
no matter who that enemy is. And a long way,
he says, it's important that you allow the enemy to
continue to be confused until you actually take power. It's
since his rule is all wars based on the deception.
Don't let the other guy know what you're doing until
you've done it.
Speaker 1: All right, new heading on the Eve. In chapters two
and three of this book, we surveyed the planning of
the coup in terms of neutralization of the professional defenses
of the state and the selection of those targets that
would assess the neutralization of the political forces. We analyzed
the structure of the armed forces and of other means
of coercion, and we saw that much of the armed forces,
a significant part of the police system, and some of
the security services could not intervene either for or against
us in the event of a coup. This was due
to their remote location dispersed this deplay, or because their
training and equipment was inadequate, unsuitable, and or over specialized.
Then we infiltrated the relatively small part of the apparatus
that did have an intervention capability, so that much of
it was technically neutralized and some of it totally subverted.
This will ensure for us the neutrality of much of
the defenses of the state and the active cooperation of
some of its parts. The infiltration of the army and
police has given us an instrument the units that we
have incorporated and that forms the forces of the coup. Additionally,
we have prepared for the utilization of this instrument by
selecting the targets on which it will be used. We
have identified the physical targets it must be seized and
those that will have to be sabotaged or otherwise interdicted.
And we have selected the leading personalities among the potential opposition,
both in and out of the government, and prepared for
their arrest. But one major task has not been covered
in the planning stage, the forcible isolation of the hardcore
loyalist forces. Hopefully, the strength of those forces we have
been unable to infiltrate, assuming they have an intervention capability,
will not be very great. But even if they are
weaken absolute terms, we dare not ignore them. To do
so would be to invalidate all the measures we have
taken to insulate the capital city and ourselves from the
intervention of hostile forces. The extreme instability of the balance
of forces during the active phase of the coup means
that what in other circumstances would only be a minor
threat could then have disastrous consequences. If the hard core
loyalist forces are large in relation to our own, we
will indeed have to divert a considerable amount of our
forces to their isolation. Though we have been unable to
penetrate these hardcore loyalist forces, two things will probably have
to be achieved. One, their number, quality, and location will
be known to us, and two, our general measures of
neutralization will have reduced their overall effectiveness. Their fighting capability
will not have been eroded, but as Table five to
one illustrates, their intervention against us will be delayed and disrupted.
Table one is the mechanics of intervention of the loyalist forces.
Some of this I believe some of this was covered
in chapter two and three, if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, most of the charts.
Speaker 3: It's just it doesn't make sense to read them out
aloud in a format like but and again it's imperfect.
But he's a love, he's the chess game, the move
and counter move of things that you'll have to deal with.
And again, since we're talking about one internal military, loyalist
generally means any person you haven't infiltrated, so that's the
big issue. It's like all the techniques we've used in
the past and neutralized forces don't work because we weren't
able to get in a position to neutralize them.
Speaker 1: All right, Reading on, our purpose is not to destroy
the loyalist forces militarily. We can deal with their cadres
administratively after the coup, but merely to immobilize them for
a few crucial hours. The tactics that will be used
must be exclusively defensive, a ring of blocking positions around
each concentration of loyalist forces, or, if this is not possible,
a similar ring around the capital city. Thus, though we
will be on the strategic offensive in the sense that
we are the ones who want to change the situation
in general, we will also be on the tactical defensive,
and this will give us important technical and psychological advantages.
By using defended roadblocks to isolate the loyalist forces, we
will put the onus of initiating any fighting on them.
Our forces will be content to wait, and it will
be the loyalist forces that will try to pass through.
Should a column of loyalist forces at the roadblock, their
leaders will be faced by opposition numbers wearing the same
uniform and belonging to the same armed force, perhaps even
to the same regiment. Both sides will state that they
are obeying orders. But interestingly enough, the orders of the
leaders of our forces will probably appear more legitimate than
those of the leaders of the loyalist troops, owing to
our arrests and our interdiction of the physical facilities. The
legitimate orders will probably have taken an unusual form. The
source of the orders to the loyalist troops will probably
be somebody other than the appropriate superior in their high
in the hierarchy, The method used to convey them will
probably be an unusual emergency one, and the actual orders
will likely be indistinguishable in form from ones that might
have been issued by the planners of a coup.
Speaker 3: There's a lot here too that's really intelligent. But as
he said, if part of our goal of infiltration is
taking charge of whoever issues the orders in whatever the
official procedural way is to these different units, if we
can take possession of that, take control of that office,
you know they're not going to have anything that looks
like a proper word or where the guys are actually
attempting the coup will have those and as he said,
it's going to be people exercising initiative on their own
to stop the coup. And depending where you are, lots
of armies don't exactly work around or develop initiative intentionally
in their leadership. You know, there's a reason why coops
frequently work, you know, so smoothly in the Third World,
whereas when it was intended and are attempted in the
Third Reich, the SS was able to break it in
a few hours, partly because they were trained for initiative
and things like that. And to his other point about
using roadblocks to block loyalist forces, the easiest way to
have a roadblock in place is to make it not
look like a roadblock. Everybody understands what construction is. Most
people want to avoid construction. So there are lots of
ways to control an intersection without making it look like
you're intentionally controlling an intersection. And if you can delay
troops for those couple crucial hours, it has the same
effect either way.
Speaker 1: Thus, the officers of the loyalist forces may have received
orders stating move into the city center, hold the parliament
building and the radio station. The leadership may have added
that they would be acting against the forces of a coup,
but even so such orders would have insurrectional undertones. When
army officers find themselves doing unusual things, their natural reaction
is to try and fit them into familiar patterns. The
most familiar pattern of all will be to arrive at
the conclusion that the politicians are guilty of yet another mess.
The most probable course of action will be to request
clarification from their superior officers. It is to be hoped
that these officers will have decided to remain neutral, or
else have been or else have been arrested. In either case,
the clarification will never arrive. If, on the other hand,
the loyalist units decide to force the roadblock, we will
benefit from the tactical advantages of the defensive. These include
the opportunity of choosing the place natural obstructions such as
bridges and tunnels, and the opportunity of deploying and camouflaging
weapons and men. In order to make the fullest use
of both the psychological and the tactical advantages, the blocking
position should have a dual structure, a largely symbolic first
line composed of some suitable physical obstacle such as cross
parked heavy vehicles with a few men bearing orders to
forbid all passage. Beyond this, there will be a second
military line, much stronger numerically, with weapons and men deployed
to repel an eventual assault. The operational detail involved it
is discussed in Appendix B. The idea is not to
ambush the loyalist to inflict maximum damage. On the contrary,
the defenders of the blocking position should inform the income
loyalist forces that there is such a second line of
defense in order to deter them. Because the strength of
a camouflaged force is hard to assess, it can serve
as a deterrent even if it's numerically weak as compared
to the opposition.
Speaker 3: It's got to be restressed so many times that the
goal is not to fight people from your own country.
Speaker 2: The goal is to get their compliance for those few
hours without hurting anybody.
Speaker 1: The situation of each blocking station will require delicate handling,
and it will be necessary that the soldiers on our
side understand that their primary function is to avoid combat
rather than to engage in it successfully. In concrete terms,
their mission will be a delaying of operation rather than
a decisive one, and this will have precise implications in
terms of the weapons and tactics to be employed. Is
that So it seems like if you would have if
there would be inflection ofviolence upon fellows citizens, if you're
if you're teaming up, if you're conspiring with the forces
that may be outside, outside the country, like even like
say a A PMC. Yeah, that they would probably be
ones that you would have to worry about inflecting violence
upon your your fellow your fellow people. You have to
have a talk with them first, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and again that's part of the issue we talked
about in the planning stage is it's you're engaged in
a legal action, so it's really hard to prepare and
to do the necessary training beforehand like you would for
any other military operation. But we want to attempt to
do that to the degree we could. So yeah, outside forces. Yeah,
and again outside forces carry the obvious risk that everybody around,
to include random civilians, knows, hey, that's not our country there,
so it looks like an invasion.
Speaker 2: So as you know, lots of issues.
Speaker 3: If you do you get to use them, which is
why like when the Soviets deposed the Communist regime in
Afghanistan before invading, they had Specinos troops mostly most of
them were ethnic Central Asians, you know, tadjiks and newsbacks
and whatnot, wearing the local uniform so that they didn't
look like a foreign country hypothetically, something like that. Generally,
the kind of troops that you would send in that
situation are probably going to be better trained, better disciplined.
But again, the coordination is always an issue. If you
don't coordinate, that's how you get fratricide in the battlefield.
Speaker 2: That's how you get fratricide in something like this.
Speaker 1: Okay, new heading. Timing, sequence and security. Ideally, the timing
of the coup will be completely flexible so that we
can take advantage of any favorable circumstances that may arise.
The temporary absence of the leadership from the capital city,
for instance, or the outbreak of some coincidental civil disorders.
This flexibility, which would be highly desirable, is only rarely possible, however,
because the infiltration of the army and police will be
a dynamically unstable process. The circle of those who have
decided to join us will grow and continue growing as
a bandwagon. As a bandwagon effect is generated, but unless
the coup materializes, there will eventually be a movement into
neutrality or even opposition.
Speaker 3: I notice that Biden decided to quote. He decided to
quote to cancel his presidential campaign. Where was it during
the weekend where most of his primary staff was out,
And then you know, loyalist than the DNC were around
in order to make the.
Speaker 2: Decision for him.
Speaker 3: So it wasn't necessarily a real coup in the proper sense,
but man, it looks an awful lot like the one.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, the danger of denunciation will also increase as more
and more people become aware that a coup is being planned,
or at any rate, that something is up. The timing
of the coup will therefore be dictated by the progress
of our infiltration of the armed forces and police. As
soon as the satisfactory degree of penetration is achieved, the
coup must be executed. This implies that it will not
be possible to designate a date while in advance of
the coup that can be communicated to the various teams.
This is just as well because it means that the
date cannot be leaked to the security agencies. Actually, it
is quite likely that some information about us will have
reached to security agencies, but this should not affect the outcome.
As the preparations for the coup proceed, more and more
truthful information about our actions will be in circulation, but
it will be increasingly obscured by noise. Another operational sequence
in timing flow chart that there's no way I could
possibly describe.
Speaker 2: It looks like a business process flow chart.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, every move we make will generate information
that could equally reach the security agencies. Eventually reach to
security agencies, but the consequences of misinterpretations of our actions
will generate an equal or greater amount of noise. This
will make it increasingly difficult for the analysts of the
security agencies to identify the nature of the threat, because
their capacity for processing information is not unlimited. This process
is illustrated in Fig. Five to two, in which O
to Z is the normal level of noise received at
all times, to A or says zero to A is
the processing capability what do you think? I don't know, Yeah,
received at all times. I'm going to say zero. Zero
to A is the processing capacity of the analysts at
the security agencies, and X is the point beyond which
the total flow of data exceeds processing capacity, so that
each item of real data is accorded a diminishing amount
of attention. And then we have a graph that people
can they buy the book, they can and they listen
along check it out for themselves.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Bottom line is anytime you communicate at any level from
the perspective of the enemy, the guys listening again and
intercepting intelligence, you know, the question that you have hard information,
then you have the noise that surround you know, which
may or may not be true, which is you know,
rumors and everything else.
Speaker 2: It's like the best.
Speaker 3: Example of that would be like pre nine to eleven,
when you know multiple agencies the FBI and CIA knew
about the guys training at training to become airline pilots
who didn't want to land, which is an important data point. Unfortunately,
it's drowned out with every other, you know, possible threat.
You know a lot of them domestic or at least
allegedly domestic threats that they're more focused on. So that's
always the issue, right is intelligence has a limited ability
to predict to what's happening based upon what they've intercepted
because they're just going through.
Speaker 2: So much shit.
Speaker 1: Even if the security agencies could isolate the real data
from the noise, they will not usually take immediate action.
Their professional instinct will be to try to uncover all
the ramifications of the plot so as to be able
to arrest all its participants. And it may be hoped
that the coup will be executed while the security agencies
are still engaged in their investigations. But their people will
be aware of this timing problem and therefore are quite
likely to respond to a possible threat by going ahead
to arrest those of the planners of the coup that
have been identified that they have identified. This nervousness presents
a special problem. On the eve of the coup, our
final preparations will probably generate a sharp increase in the
total flow of signals received by the security agencies, even
without separating them from noise. The mere increase in the
total flow of information could be interpreted as a danger signal,
as it certainly would be by competent and analysts, and
this might trigger the arrests. In practice.
Speaker 3: No I was going to say, that's always the issue,
and it's one of those things. In hindsight, it's always
twenty twenty that you had a huge spike and noise
before a major event. I know people doing open source
intelligence analysis. All of them said that they had so
much increased activity, like right before the October attacks in Israel.
Speaker 2: But knowing that something was going to happen is not
the same thing.
Speaker 3: As knowing what was going to happen when and wire,
so that's always the game of cat and mouse between
the two sides.
Speaker 1: In practice, it will rarely be possible to achieve total
security within all the forces of the coup, and we
should assume as a working hypothesis that they have in
fact been infiltrated by the security agency. This leads to
the general defensive procedures discussed in chapter three, but it
will also have precise operational implications. A. Each team will
be told well in advance what equipment and tactics will
be required to seize its particular target, but not the
exact designation of the target. B. Each team will only
be told its designated target when it actually receives the
signal to proceed to its seizure. C. Each team will
be alerted individually, which only as much with only as
much advanced warning as it requires to prepare for its
particular task instead of a general ghost signal for all teams,
because the teams will have different starting points and different
targets to go to. The use of any one general
signal would either give insufficient warning to some teams or
an unnecessarily long one to others. The longer the time
between the announcement that the coup is on and its
actual execution, the greater likelihood that information will reach to
security agencies in time to prevent the successful execution of
the coup, because this will be the moment at which
their operatives and our ranks could send out warnings. Yeah.
Speaker 3: The most important takeaway from this is operational security is
important to everything, and the biggest reason why you limit
knowledge on a battlefield based to need to know is
nobody can know torture you for information you don't have.
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense. The problem of warning time and
lead time is illustrated to figure five point five to three.
If we give all our teams a ten hour warning
period by sending out a general call at hour ten,
then team number one will just about recss target in time,
but all the other teams will have received excess warning.
In other words, information will have been distributed before it
was essential to do so. If we give all the
teams a two hour warning period, then excess warning will
be zero. But Team number five will reach its target
several hours before team number one, and those defending it
will probably be on a full alert. The solution appears
to be a simple one. Make warning time equal to
lead time, so that each team is alerted just in
time to allow it to reach its target by the
zero hour.
Speaker 3: This is probably the most important, most important specific requirement
in a hypothetical coup.
Speaker 1: In reality, the problem is more complex. It is not
a matter of simultaneous arrival at the target, but rather
of the simultaneous penetration of the early warning system maintained
by the security agencies of the state. If, for example,
team number two has to cross the entire capital city
to reach its target, the security agency will probably be
alerted as soon as it enters a city, at say
hour two. Thus, by the time team number four reached
its target, the opposition would have had two hours to
prepare for its defense may have had We may have
very little information on the functioning of the security apparatus,
but we can operate on the assumption that a team,
if it is large and or equivalent armor, will be
noticed and reported as soon as it enters the capital city.
We must therefore ensure a the protection of our security
position against an internal threat, which is achieved by minimizing
excess warning time, and b the protection of our security
position against external observation, which is achieved by simultaneous penetration
of the capital city area. Both aims will be achieved
by sending the teams into action at a time corresponding
to their lead times to the capital city boundary or
other applicable perimeter. This is illustrated in figure five to four.
Speaker 3: This whole issue with lead times does become one of
the most challenging thing because, as he said hypothetically or
he said specifically, you don't want to have a headquarters. Unfortunately,
adapt and then issuing issuing orders based upon the appropriate
lead lead time is exactly the kind of thing that
you need a headquarters to do. So it becomes sort
of a command and controlled challenge that I don't think
he really solved, but I think he explains, you know,
absolutely perfectly.
Speaker 1: New heading into action. The actual execution of the coup
will require many different qualities skillful off the cuff diplomacy
at a blocking station confronted by loyalist forces, instant personnel
management at radio and television stations to persuade their technical
staff to cooperate with us, and considerable tactical abilities. In
the case of targets that are heavily defended, our resources
will probably be too limited to form fully specialized teams
out of the pool of those units and individuals that
we have incorporated, but we should nevertheless match broad categories
of targets with appropriate teams. We can distinguish between three
such categories of targets and their corresponding teams new heading
A targets. These are the more heavily protected facilities with
armed guards and strict access pass control, such as the
royal or presidential palace, the central police station, and the
Army HQ. In times of crisis, of course, such facilities
may be provided with full fledged military defenses, and in
many countries the crisis is permanent. Partly in order to
minimize bloodshed, which could have a destabilizing effect on the situation,
and partly in order to reduce the total manpower required.
These targets will have to be seized by sophisticated teams
using various blends of infiltration, diversion, and assault.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so obviously something like the Pentagon is not really feasible,
right You would probably need at least a battalion to
take it, and the fact that we have such a
weird patchwork system for law enforce makes it even harder.
For the sake of comparison, Iraq during the occupation the
mod building and they building Mod's mystery defense, it's the
regular Mois police and John de Marie and whatnot. Each
of those probably had at least a company worth the
troops there. But on top of that all the military
and police personnel and both those buildings carry their side
arm So again it worked both ways, where basically it
was impossible to storm the building without major bloodshed since
literally every person there was armed with a weapon that
they could steer it theoretically use at the same time.
Every so often, you know, there would be a disturbance
in something loud that sounded like a gunshot would go
off and people would start shooting each other in the
halls of the Iraqi Pentagon Iraqi National Police Headquarters, which
this isn't so much relevant to this discussion as an
explanation of what this looks like in real life.
Speaker 1: That will usually be necessary to prepare for a fairly
extensive military operation, and a complex one as well. Unless
we have great numerical superiority in the area of the target,
this should not result in much actual combat. When those
who guard the target in question are confronted by our
extensive preparations, they are unlikely to put up much for
serious resistance. The fact that our general measures of neutralization
have cut off or impeded their contacts with the leadership,
the fact that the clear patriotic issues of international warfare
will be missing in an internal conflict, and the fact
that we will make every effort to allow them to
give in gracefully by simply leaving or giving up their weapons.
We will all militate against a prolonged defense.
Speaker 3: That's part of why a lot of these fairly soft targets.
You want to arrive overwhelming force. It's not to defeat everybody, well,
it is defeatd but not to do it by fighting.
The goal is to make it so they understand that
there is no benefit to fighting, so that they comply
or surrender quickly.
Speaker 1: If we are fortunate enough to have incorporated a very
large number of troops, and especially if they are equipped
with impressive weapons such as armored vehicles, it will be
still less likely that the actual combat will take place.
These targets will nevertheless indirectly present us with a very
serious problem, though it is political rather than military. The
formation of the large teams required by these targets will
raise a delicate issue of the coup within the coup danger.
During the active phase of the coup, the situation will
be confused and extremely unstable, while the other teams will
be too small to attempt their leader into trying to
usurp our control. The operational leaders that the A teams
may well succumb to temptation. The man who leads the
tanks that have just seized a presidential palace may easily
persuade himself that he can also seize power on his
own behalf, and if the A team is sufficiently powerful,
he may do just that. Our satisfaction at having carried
out a coup successfully would be an insufficient reward for
all our efforts unless we also retain power afterwards. It
will be necessary then to adopt measures to prevent the
leaders of these large teams from challenging our position. This
can sometimes be done by forming the A teams from
many small sub units under the overall command of an
inner member of our own group. Where this is gut no.
Speaker 3: I was just gonna say, that's the biggest challenge here
is you can perform the coup successfully and who and
having somebody who you didn't intend to take over take over.
And very often that is the issue, like in Latin
America when you have a hunt that theoretically this council
of officers in charge, but councils don't really rule very well,
especially councils as military leaders. So somebody's going to be
in charge, even if they delegate all their authority.
Speaker 2: And who's that going to be?
Speaker 3: And as far as I can tell from the histories
of coups in process, a lot of times it seems
to be a role of the dice that we're going
to figure out after things happen.
Speaker 1: Where this is not possible, the A teams will have
to be dispersed into smaller groups assigned to secondary targets
as soon as they have fulfilled their primary mission. Thus,
the possible threat presented by the A teams will be
deflected by applying the energies of their leaders to other tasks.
The operational commanders of the A teams will probably need
a certain amount of time to readjust to the fact
that they are no longer isolated individuals engaged on a
dangerous endeavor and to start thinking in more ambitious terms.
Matters should be arranged so that they are deprived of
their large and unified teams before the transition is made
in their minds.
Speaker 3: And again this gets back to the issue that he
talks about. We're going to simplify the planning to what
is absolutely necessary. Outside the core inner circle, nobody's going
to know about the whole plan or the plan as
a whole. And what you actually do the initial coup
is when it suddenly becomes apparent. And as he said,
everybody's going to become ambitious that way and that look
time and that's not necessarily a bad thing, because ambitious
people doing things on behalf of a collective is you know,
how every polity in the history of the world is functioned.
But the issue becomes at that point, how do you
integrate them in the on behalf of what you, as
the coup plotter see as proper, since again you've deposed
whatever the established legal authority was, so doing that a
second time becomes much easier.
Speaker 1: Be targets. These are the technical facilities that will not
usually be heavily guarded, and which in any case we
want to neutralize rather than sees, among them any central
telecommunications facility and radio television stations. Each of those targets
will be assigned to a small team, whose personnel will
include a technician whose presence should help to minimize the
amount of physical damage resulting from sabotage. It is possible
interdict these targets by minor and external sabotage. The B
team may consist of just one or two technically competent operators.
Even if the actual building has to be entered for
a short time, the B team will still be a
small one. In this case, however, it should be overt
and consist of uniformed soldiers or police.
Speaker 3: The most important thing, he says, here technical facilities. It's
things like radio telecommunications. It could be things like you know,
power stations and whatnot. And the most important thing is
you want to control of that, but you don't want
to blow it up because you got to fix the
thing afterwards, and as you said, the goal is to
minimize the size of the team, so we know we
need the technicians in order to take control of it
and make sure things aren't being damaged, and you know,
as much security as they need in order to make
that happen, and not much more, because the bigger you have,
the easier it is to intercept them.
Speaker 1: See targets. These are the individuals we wish to hold
in isolation for the duration of the coup. In the
case of the main leader leaders of the government, the
arrests will be subsumed in the seizure of the presidential
palace in similar a targets. The other sea targets should
not present a penetration problem, but they will present an
evasion problem. A radio station or a royal palace can
be very difficult targets to seize, but at least they
cannot escape or conceal their identity. The personalities whom we
wish to arrest will try to do both. It will
therefore be essential to devote our early attentions to these
targets to ensure that they are seized before they can
evade our teams. This will usually imply that the seed
teams will go into operation marginally earlier than the other teams,
and they can do so without breaking the rules of
simultaneous penetration of the early warning system, because they should
be sufficiently small and dispersed to act covertly.
Speaker 2: And again, and he'll repeat this.
Speaker 3: The goal is to take those people whoever you know,
potential key leaders outside of just the presidential or royal administration,
out of action. The goal is not to hurt them,
at least not at this stage. The goal is not
to kill them. The goal is to take them out
of action where they can't communicate with their organizations, they
can't work against us, and in a very effective coup.
A lot of times you take them into something that
looks a lot like protective custody with them and their
families are taken care of, or suddenly it becomes really
advitatious to cooperate with the people who have you as
a prisoner.
Speaker 1: Because those targets are human, they will be inherently more
problematic than some of our other objectives. The individuals concerned,
apart from escaping or concilling their identity, could also try
to subvert the very teams sent to arrest them. In
the case of particularly charismatic figures, our teams will have
to be formed from especially selective personnel. In some cases,
they may even be necessary to include an inner member
of our group. These SA teams will be small, since
their task will be a matter of entering a private
residence and overpowering one or two guards. The exact size
of each team will depend on the overall balance of
resources and requirements under which we operate, but will rarely
exceed a dozen men or so.
Speaker 3: So a good example of when this wasn't done properly
is like we talked about the preface to the revised
version of There Will Be War by Jerry Pornell. He
talks about that tank battalion that goes to take Geltzen
into captivity, where the commander goes in, you know, talks
to him. An hour later, comes out and he's on
his side, and he turns the tank around. So as
he said, you know, a charismatic person who has some
kind of moral and legal authority can be the guy
who does a coup just by convincing the soldiers who
come to arrest them not to arrest them.
Speaker 1: Once the individuals that formed this group of targets have
been arrested, we will have to ensure that they are
kept under a secure form of control. Our purpose in
arresting them is to prevent them from using their command, authority,
and or personal charisma against us, and this can only
be achieved if we can insulate them from the public
for the whole duration of the coup. Such individuals are
often the only casualties of otherwise bloodless coups because it
is often easier to eliminate them rather than to keep
them as captives. If we do keep them, the ad
hoc person used must be both secret and internally secure.
The liberation of a popular public figure could be a
powerful focus of the counter coup actions on the part
of the opposition, so secrecy will be a more reliable
defense than any physical barrier. While the teams that are
on their way to the respective targets our other allies.
While the teams are on their way to their perspective targets,
our other allies will also come into action. The individuals
we have subverted in various parts of the armed forces
and bureaucracy will carry out their limited missions of technical neutralization,
and the groups as signs of the block positions will
be moving to take up their planned locations designed to
isolate the loyalist forces. In the case of those dispersed
individuals whose contribution will be extremely important though almost totally invisible,
there will be a signaling problem. Since they are scattered
throughout the sensitive parts of the state apparatus, it will
be difficult to reach them individually. Furthermore, they may include
informants of the security agencies, because, unlike the personnel of
the various teams and blocking forces, they have been recruited
as isolated individuals. Hence, the mutual surveillance exercised on our
behalf and the teams will not operate. It would be
dangerous to give them advanced warning of the coup, and
their signals who go into action will have to be
our first broadcast on the radio television station, except in
particular cases where the facility to be neutralized requires early attention.
Our operational control over the various groups cooperating with us
will aim at achieving two objectives. A as always maximum
speed and the execution of the tasks, and b the
use of the absolute minimum of force. This will be
important not only because of the psychological and political factor,
as mentioned previous, but also for a more direct technical reason,
the external uniformity between the two sides of the conflict.
Our teams will of course be nationals of the country
in which the coup is being staged, and most of
them will be soldiers and police officers, wearing the same
uniforms as those of the opposition. The uniformity will give
us a measure of protection, since the loyalist forces will
not readily know who is loyal and who is not. Usually,
it would be a mistake to prejudice the protective cover
by adopting distinctive armbands or other conventional labels, since we
will need all the protection we can get. Thus, as
the teams move around the capital city, probably at night,
they will probably not be fired upon unless they open
fire first. To do so, however, would be sophacific illitate
the work of the opposition, since this will be their
only way of distinguishing between their own forces and ourselves,
and since our teams have always been kept separate, initially
to prevent the penetration of the security agencies, and now
to protect our own position within the forces of the coup,
there will be a danger of conflict between our teams.
The confusion we generate in the minds of the opposition
could therefore exact a price and confusion with our own ranks.
Speaker 3: This may no, I'm saying, fratricide is always the issue,
even in conventional war with the best trained troops, you know,
Mistaking one thing for another thing and shooting your own
guys as a problem. In a case where everybody's wear
in the same uniforms, that's even more of a problem.
And the fact that we're in a situation where firing
our weapons our goal is generally bad. We want to
accomplish things without actually having to fire our weapons. So
these are all concerns.
Speaker 1: This may have serious consequences unless our forces respect the
rule of a minimal and purely defensive use of force.
I'm gonna end it right there for today. I have
a hard out. Anything you want to wrap up on this, No, Like.
Speaker 3: You said, the goal is to avoid fighting. You have
weapons basically to force compliance, and hopefully that works without
having to shoot people.
Speaker 1: Awesome, awesome, thank you, And I hope you'll come back
and finish this with me because thank you. You know
you got me into this, so you're gonna get me
out of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm sorry, all.
Speaker 1: Right, John, Thank you very much, sir. Welcome everyone back
to the finale, part eleven of kude To by Edward
Lutvach and John field House is here to finish it
up with me. How are you doing, John?
Speaker 2: Doing well? I think we're both ready to get this
damn thing over with.
Speaker 1: Yep, let's kill this and uh and move on. All right,
just gonna start reading. Let's go heading the immediate post
coup situation. Once our targets have been seized, the loyalist
forces have been isolated, and the rest of the bureaucracy
and armed forces have been neutralized, the active and more
mechanical phase of the coup will be over, but everything
will still be in the balance. The old regime will
have been deprived of its control over the critical parts
of the mechanism of the state, but we ourselves will
not yet be in control of it, except in a
purely physical sense, and then only in the area of
the capital city. If we can retain our control over
what we have seized, those political forces whose primary requirement
is the preservation of law and order will probably give
us their allegiance. Our objective, therefore is to freeze the
situation so that this process can take place until the
actual execution of the coup. Our aim was to destabilize
the situation afterward, however, all our efforts should be directed
at stabilizing rather restabilizing it. We will be doing this
at three different levels. A among our own forces, where
our aim is to prevent our military or police allies
from usurping our leadership. B within the state bureaucracy whose
allegiance and cooperation we wish to secure, and see with
the public at large, whose accepstance we want to gain.
In each case, we will be using our leverage within
one level in order to control the next one. But
each level will also require separate and particular measures.
Speaker 3: Yeah about that, there's I would say two things. Number one,
traditional military operations, we always say the most dangerous part
when you're conducting a direct attack on an objective is
right after you seized it, because at that point the
adrenalines down, you start having physical fatigue set in, but
you haven't fully consolidated the target, so it's really easy
for somebody else to come along.
Speaker 2: And attack you and drive you off the object tip
at that point.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 2: The second one is.
Speaker 3: I've heard it described anytime you're having a takeover of authority.
The best analogy is probably the Call of the While,
the chapters where Buck takes over a leadership of the pack.
So in the beginning, he's out rightly attacking authority, he's
instigating insurrection, he's trying to create discontent. But once he's
an authority, he has to crush all that preferabiliar with
solt power. But you are now the authority, so you
have to act as an.
Speaker 1: Authority, a among our own forces, where our aim is
to prevent our military or police allies from usurping our leadership.
From your reading of history and looking studying some coups,
how often does that happen?
Speaker 3: I'll keep in mind that coups can be hard to
really analyze because most effective cups you destroy the documents afterwards.
So the lead up is it tends to be conjectured,
and it tends to the materials you have from the
evidence remaining tends to be from Western journalists who not
only are their biased, they're also oblivious to anything that happens.
Speaker 2: In the real world.
Speaker 3: But that tends to be fairly common right, because essentially
you're having a coalition of people who are cooperating to
achieve their objective, and every member that coalition has their
own idea of what should happen afterwards. So I'd say
basically every coup is something like that. The question is
who wins.
Speaker 1: New heading stabilizing our own forces. During the planning stage,
our recruits in the armed forces will be fully conscious
of the fact that the success of the coup and
their own safety depends on the work of coordination that
we perform. Immediately after the coup. However, the only manifestation
of all our efforts will be the direct force that
they themselves control. In these circumstances, they may well be
tempted into trying a coup of their own, and they
could do this by establishing contact with the other military
leaders have recruited so as to secure their agreement to
our exclusion from their leadership. Apart from those dispersal countermeasures
discussed earlier, our only effective defense will be to retain
full control over all horizontal communications, or in other words,
to remain the only contact between each military leader we
have recruited and his colleagues. This can sometimes be done
technically by keeping under our control the actual communication equipment
linking the various units, but this would only be effective
in unusually extensive capital cities and would in any case
break down after a relatively short period of time. Typically,
we will need somewhat more subtle political and psychological methods
to keep the various military leaders we have recruited well
separated from each other. This may involve promises of accelerated
promotions to selected younger officers who could not otherwise expect
very rapid advancement, even within the limited context of those
who have pret anticipated in the coup. It will also
be useful to remind our military and police allies that
their colleagues outside the conspiracy may try to displace them
and block unless they and we form a tight and
mutually supportive group. In general, we should ensure that all
those who could pose an internal threat are kept occupied
on tasks which, whether essential or not, will at least
absorb their energies, and that there are divers and that
there are divisive factors operating between them. As soon as
we begin to receive the allegiance of military and bureaucratic
leaders who we previously outside the conspiracy, who were previously
outside the conspiracy are leveraged with our military and police
recruits will increase very substantially. The problem of retaining control
against such internal threats will therefore be largely short term.
As soon as our position has been established, our best
policy may be to dispose of our dangerous allies by
using all the use methods available for that purpose, diplomatic
posting abroad, nominal end or remote command positions, and promotions
to less vital parts of the state apparatus. Because it
is possible that an embryonic coup within our coup has
existed within our forces from the very beginning, the general
security measures we design to protect ourselves against the penetration
of the security agencies will also serve a useful supplementary function.
They will prevent the lateral spread of the conspiracy. If
our internal security procedures are sufficiently good to prevent all
contact between the separate cells, so that any infiltration by
the security agencies is contained, they will also prevent the
coordination of this inner opposition. It has been calculated that
in a defensive military situation, even if only twenty percent
of the troops of a unit are actively loyal, the
units concerned should operate successfully and perform their assigned function.
Speaker 3: There's a couple things that are really important here. The
first off, he talks about the need to effectively control
lateral communication amongst your coalition immediately afterwards, which I that's
something I wouldn't have thought of, And that's a very
great point because it makes basically you're trying to prevent
your allies from coordinating around you. The downside of that,
the difficult part of that, and again the counterproductive part
of that is effective militaries have huge amounts of lateral communication,
horizontal communications. Very often they will have more communications horizontally
than vertically because junior leaders are trained and empowered. I know,
empowered is a stupid word, but we can say empowered
to exercise initiative in order to achieve their objectives, which
means that by eliminating horizontal communications, no matter how temporarily,
keep in mind, we are also harming our own combat effectiveness.
Speaker 2: So it's something we need to be.
Speaker 3: Very concerned with, and it's part of why he emphasizes
the need to solidate power and move on, because we
don't want to hang out in that situation for very long.
Another thing, he talks about ways you would eliminate either
allies you could become a risk, or other people in
the power structure who become a risk afterwards, and you know,
there's a tendency to immediately think, well, we're gonna have
a purge and when we're gonna kill them all, and
not just morally, it creates huge problems with your legal
structure because it basically undermines any faith in your legal structure,
and it definitely harms you know, the whole you know,
collective cooperation at that point.
Speaker 2: So one of the most effective.
Speaker 3: Ways to purge people, effectively purge people from an organization
after something like that, is to promote them and retire
them and maneuver them in a situation where they can't
do things. You know, most militaries have academic posts, either
at the military academy or higher command schools or sometimes
even teaching at various level of universities where you put
military historians at the end of the career. All those
are great ways where you can promote somebody, you know,
give them a nice cushy assignment into retirement, but while
you know, effectively purging them from the organization. So creativity matters,
and I mean the big takeaway from machiabilis the prince
is you know, sometimes you have to behave altruistically in
order to, you know, get what you want.
Speaker 2: From a power politics.
Speaker 1: Standpoint, stabilizing the bureaucracy, our attitudes towards the second level,
the armed forces and bureaucracy which were not infiltrated before
the coup, will depend partly on the degree of control
that we have over our own incorporated forces. Assuming that
we have a reasonably firm hold over them, we should
not try to extract any early commitment from the majority
of soldiers in bureaucrats, whose first information of our existence
will be the coup itself. Not knowing the extent of
the conspiracy, their principal preoccupation will be the possible danger
of those of their positions in the hierarchy. If most
of the officers of the armed forces or the officials
of a ministry have joined the coup, those who have
not are hardly likely to be rewarded subsequently by rapid promotion.
If the soldiers and bureaucrats realize that the group participating
in the coup was in reality quite small, they would
also realize the strength of their own position. The fact
is that they are collectively indispensable to any government, including
the one to be formed after the coup. In the
period immediately after the coup, however, they will probably see
themselves as isolated individuals whose careers and even lives could
be in danger. This feeling of insecurity may precipitate two
alternate alternative reactions, both extreme. They will either step forward
to assert their loyalty to the leaders of the coup,
or else they will try to foment or join an
opposition against us. Both reactions are undesirable from our point
of view. Assertions of loyalty will usually be worthless because
they are made by men who have just abandoned their
previous and possibly more legitimate masters. Opposition will always be
dangerous and sometimes disastrous. Our policy toward the military and
bureaucratic cadres will be to reduce this sense of insecurity.
We should establish direct communication with as many of the
more senior officers and officials as possible to convey one
principal idea in a forceful and convincing matter manner that
the coup will not threaten their positions in hierarchy, and
the aims of the coup do not include a reshaping
of the existing military or administrative structures. This requirement will
incidentally have technical implications in the planning stage when the
sabotage of the means of communication must be carried out
so as to be easily reversible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was going to say on that regard one
of the interesting things in the NSDAP taking over authority
in Germany, and just because of my research currently was
brought about, or what was brought to my attention is
Reinhard Heydrich was known very much when he was made
head of political police that he largely kept in charge
the technical people, the skilled professional investigators. In those agencies.
He eliminated one or two major leaders, and he eliminated
any person he was seeking as being actively opposed to
the health and well being of the German state. Generally
these are people who are closet undercover communists. But for
the most part he co opted them because he said,
most of these people, even when they were his political enemies,
were German patriots who really wanted the security of Germany.
So if he could actually co opt them, he ensured
that not only did they not become punished as enemies
of the new regime, but he actually gave them a
stake in the new regime, to the point that Hydrich's
inner circle largely consisted of men who didn't join the
SS until he made them join the SS.
Speaker 1: So the information campaign over the mass media will also
reach this narrow but important section of the population, but
it would be highly desirable to have more direct and
confidential means of communication with them. The general political aims
of the coup, as expressed in our pronouncements on the
radio and television, will help to package our tacit deal
with the bureaucrats and soldiers, but its real content will
be the assurance that their careers are not threatened. In
dealing with particular army or police officers who control especially
important forces, or with important bureaucrats, we may well decide
to go further in the sense that an actual exchange
of promises of mutual support may take place. We should, however,
remember that our main strength lies in the fact that
only we have a precise idea of the extent of
our power. It would be unwise to enter into agreements
that show we need support urgently. More generally, any information
that reveals the limits of our capabilities could threaten our position,
which is essentially based on the fact that our inherent
weakness is concealed. Again as a.
Speaker 3: Gut no, I was going to say, like any clandestine
event or activity, just like war itself, the goal is
to know as much about your enemy as possible, while
concealing as much of the facts about your situation from
the enemy as possible.
Speaker 1: Again, as in the case of our incorporated forces, we
should make every effort to prevent communication between the cadres
of the armed forces and bureaucracy outside our group. Such
communication would usually be indispensable to those who may seek
to stage a counter coup. The ignorance of the extent
of the conspiracy will discourage such consultations. It is obviously
dangerous to ask somebody to participate in the opposition to
a group of which he is himself a member. But
we should also interfere with such consultations directly by using
our control of the transport and communications infrastructure. New heading
from power to authority, stabilizing the masses. The masses have
neither the weapons of the military or the administrative facilities
of the bureaucracy, but their attitudes to the new government
established after the coup will ultimately be decisive. Our immediate
aim will be to enforce public order, but our long
term objective is to gain the acceptance of the masses
so that physical coercion will no longer be needed in
order to secure compliance with our orders. In both phases,
we shall use our control over the infrastructure and the
means of coercion. But as the coup recedes in time,
political means will become increasingly important, physical ones less. So
our first measure is to be taken immediately after the
active phase of the coup will be designed to freeze
the situation by imposing physical immobility. A total curfew, the
interruption of all forms of public transport, the closing of
all public buildings and facilities, and the interruption of the
telecommunications service will prevent or at any rate impede active
resistance to us. Organized resistance will be very difficult because
there will be no way of inspiring and coordinating our
our potential opponents. Unorganized resistance is on the part of
a mob, will, on the other hand, be prevented because
the people who might form such a mob would have
to violate the curfew while acting as individuals, and not
many will do this without the protective shelter of anonymity
that only a crowd can provide the impact of our
physical measures will be reduced outside the capital city, but
to the extent that the capital city is to focus
on the national network of transport and communications, both physical
movement and the flow of information will be impeded. The
physical controls will be purely negative and defensive in character,
and our reliance on them could be minimal because their
concommitment commitments effect is to enhance the importance of the
armed forces we have subverted. Our second and far more
flexible instrument will be our control over the means of
mass communications. Their importance will be particularly great because the
flow of all other information, notably social media via the Internet,
will be filtered or blocked by our controls. Moreover, the
confused and dramatic events of the coup will mean that
the radio and television services will have a particularly attentive
and receptive audience. In broadcasting over the radio and television services,
our purpose is not to provide information about the situation,
but rather to affect its development by exploiting our monopoly
of those media. In the context of filtered or blocked
social media, we will have two principal objectives in the
information campaign that will start immediately after the coup, to
discourage resistance to us by emphasizing the strength of our position,
and to dampen the fears that would otherwise give rise
to such resistance. Our first objective will be achieved by
conveying the reality and strength of the coup, instead of
trying to justify it. This will be done by listing
the controls we have imposed, by emphasizing the law and
order that law and order have been fully restored, and
by stating that all resistance has ceased. One of the
major obstacles to active resistance will be the fact that
we have fragmented the opposition so that each individual opponent
would have to operate in isolation, cut off from friends
and associates. In these circumstances, the news of any resistance
against us would act as a powerful stimulant to further
resistance by breaking down this feeling of isolation. We must
make every effort therefore to withhold such news. If there
is in fact some resistance, and if its intensity and
locale are such as to make it difficult to conceal
from particular segments of the public, we should admit its existence,
but we should strongly emphasize that it is isolated, the
product of the obstinacy of a few misguided or dishonest
individuals who are not affiliated with any party or group
or significant membership.
Speaker 3: When you read that, it suddenly becomes clear why that
any kind of mass or any kind of local organization
against any kind of central government bullshit like the school
system in Northern Virginia when they were organizing against transactivists
who were, you know, raping their daughters, or the stuff
that's currently going on in Ihio against Haitian migrants. There's
a reason why they first try to you know, block
any kind of discussion of that and then portray it
in a completely different light. Is they're trying to, above
all else, making sure that people see themselves as iye, isolated.
Speaker 1: Well also that and in the process they're demonizing that
group exact people on the outside.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, probably the biggest form of communication management
information management of your enemies is trying to control and
dictate their morality.
Speaker 1: Yeah. There really is no better example right now going
on than what's going on in Springfield, Ohio. Yeah. When
I was just reading this and I just passed this
along to a friend to try and get some information
on it. Twenty four houses were sold last year three
of them. One was valued at eighteen thousand, another at
twenty four thousand, another forty eight thousand, and each of
these twenty four houses, including those three, were sold for
one point six million dollars apiece.
Speaker 4: Jesus.
Speaker 1: So, I'm at the point where I think even the
migrant situation is there to try to cover up something else.
It's helping, it's a part of it. This is all
a part of something. But apparently there is either some
insane money laundering going on there or something else. And
that's what I'm trying to figure out.
Speaker 3: How this gets in the realm of conspiracy theory, just
because we have no heart evidence, because again they're controlling
what we have access to. But one of the issues
that's been brought up the fact that we essentially we're
not going to have a collapse population wise, but we're
going to have a demographic crunch where you know, our
native population because of birth rates combined with aging, we're
just going to have a contraction in total population.
Speaker 2: Among other things.
Speaker 3: One of the quickest things that affects is housing prices
real estate, both housing prices and commercial. Elon Musk has
pointed out that one of the biggest negative consequences in
terms of the establishment of COVID is suddenly all of
that commercial real estate that banks hold on their balance
sheet as assets is basically valueless or as negative value.
So the process of you know, moving migrants in the US, No,
that doesn't do anything for commercial real estate, but it
can make you know, private real estate, residential real estate
increase in value just because you have you know, suddenly
increased number of people demanding a product in a market
that has limited ability to grow but so fast.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, this is all a you know, when you
look at this, it's Yaki talked about that from his
study of history. It doesn't matter why, but whenever large
groups of foreigners are moved into an existing location that
has a high culture, the existing the existing population stops
their birth rates to climb. Yeah, as like like something metaphysical.
Like it's like it's something metaphysical or there's something happening
there that basically causes that to happen. When people see
this influx and then all of a sudden they stop
having children.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's an interesting point, because that seems to hold
up for whatever reason. When we're done offline at got
a document for suggested next read that deals with this directly.
Speaker 1: Okay, cool, all right, let me uh what, let's finish this.
We can get You and I are definitely You and
I are definitely the rabbit trail kind of people. Yes,
all right. The constant working and the motif of isolation,
the repetition of long and detailed list of the administrative
and physical controls we have imposed, and the emphasis on
the fact that law and order have been re established
should have to effect, should have the effect of making
resistance appear both dangerous and useless. Then he just goes
through a first communicate choice of styles romantic, lyrical, messianic, unprepared, rational, administrative.
It's just different kind of I guess this is different
kind of styles that you would use to communicate with
communicate with the people, to let them know what's going on,
and to seek to get there so you get them
on your side.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what it looks like.
Speaker 3: And again, all the charts he has are worthwhile, but
none of them are really good for reading in this
format for listeners at home, you can get this book
for free any number of places and just look at those.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you're reading along with this one, make sure
to get the updated version. I believe it's twenty sixteen,
because a lot of this is not going to be
in the original version.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the internet was not a big issue in the
nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: Now he wouldn't have been talking about social media Table
five point two. Yep. The second objective of our information
campaign will be to reassure the general public by dispelling
fears that the coup is inspired by foreign and or
extremist elements, and to persuade particular groups that the coup
is not a threat to them. The first aim will
be achieved by manipulating national symbols and by asserting our
belief in the prevailing pieties. In the Arab world, the
new regime will announce its belief in the Arab identity
and Islam. Where the Bath Party was institutionalized, as in Syria,
it would have been necessary to ASTs our loyalty to
the true Bath, not the corrupted one of the deposed dictator.
In Africa, the new regime will announce its intention of
fighting tribalism at home and racialism abroad. In Latin America
we need to secure social justice will be invoked everywhere
in the Third World. Nationalist nationalistic rhetoric will be used
in references made to the glorious people of X and
the glorious land of X, which the last regime has degraded.
Above all, repeated denunciations of neo and not so neo
colonialism are degear. Such denunciations will be particularly important where
there are a large Where there is a large foreign
business enterprise operating in the country in question, the inevitable
suspicions that the coup is a product of the machinations
of the company can only be dispelled by making violent
attacks on it. These being verbal and not unexpected, will
pacify the public without disturbing the business interests, and the
attacks should be all the more violent if these suspicions
are in fact justified. While the religious attitude leads to
the praise of the gods for one's successes and self
blame for one's failures, the nationalistic attitude is to attribute
successes to the nation and to blame foreigners for its failures. Similarly,
the chants in praise of the gods have been replaced
by ritualized curses variously addressed to different groups of foreigners
and their activities. It's really odd that Litvok would be
choosing foreigners as the scapegoat, Isn't it just? There's nothing
personal there right.
Speaker 2: A certain amount of projections going along.
Speaker 1: Thus, for the phrase the imperious, the imperialist neo colonial
power block, read the Americans, or if the or the French,
if it is spoken by Africans of their former colonies. Similarly,
the phrase zionist oil monopolist plotters translates into Jews and Christians.
In the subconscious of the Muslim Arabs who make use
of it.
Speaker 2: It still continues to be true.
Speaker 1: How could you argue there may be a purely ideological
element in these denunciations. But even in the nineteen fifties,
when the American extreme right used to denounce the international
conspiracy of godless communism, it was it is significant that
they stigmatized it as Unamerican rather than anti capitalists. We
shall make use of suitable selection of those unlovely phrases.
Though their meaning has been totally obscured by constant and
deliberate misuse, they will be useful as indicators of our
impeccable nationalism, and if that is not in reality our position,
they will serve to obscure our true policy aims. The
flow of information emanating from all the sources under our
control should be coordinated with our other measures. The impositions
of physical trolls will be announced and explained, and the
political moves to which we now turn will be suitably presented.
Physical coercion will deter or defeat direct opposition, while the
information campaign will lay the basis of our eventual acquisition
of authority. But only political means will secure for us
a base of active support. Where the pre coup regime
was exceptionally brutal, corrupt, or retrograde, the leaders of the
coup will have little trouble in gaining a generalized form
of acceptance. Even then, However, the active support of specific
groups can only be gained by political accommodation, i e.
By sponsoring policies to serve the interests of particular groups,
thus giving them reasons for becoming committed to, or at
least interested in our survival. In some Latin American countries,
for example, we could gain the support of the landless
peasants by announcing our intention of carrying out a program
of agrarian reform. In West Africa, we could announce our
intention of increasing the prices paid to peasant producers by
the cocoa marketing brand. In Greece and Turkey, where there
is a heavy burden of agrarian indebtedness, we could announce
a general cancellation of bank debts. Each of these policy
announcements will bind the interests of a large and politically
powerful group to our government, unless we are overtaken by
other rival announcements. But it will also lead to the
hostility of other groups whose interests are damaged by our
intended policies. In Latin America, where the peasants would be
benefit would benefit, the landlords would lose. In Africa, the
urban population would be the loser. In Greece, the taxpayer
would bear the burden of agricultural debt relief. Thus, the
backing of one interest group will generally have at its
com commit the loss of support of or even actual
hostility from other groups. Clearly it will be a good.
Speaker 2: Hence an effectively anti white Americans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the backing of one interest group. We generally
have at its con commitment the loss is support of
or even hot. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's why that this continued process has been.
Part of this in the last couple of years has
been the intentional purging of anybody who is to the
right of essentially George W. Bush from the American military.
There hasn't been an organized purge, but they're intentionally sidelining
any kind of senior officers who would appear to have.
Speaker 2: That kind of orientation.
Speaker 3: It's a way of furthering, you know, their security because
they know that the American military is historically a very
right wing, at least informally cultural institution, and they know
they're largely opposed to that, so they're trying to remove
an opposing center of power.
Speaker 1: What about NCOs and down right now.
Speaker 3: That becomes an issue. I don't really have a good
feeling on that. Keep in mind, senior NCO is, like
the Serdain major level, basically go through the same level
of review as general officers. Keep in mind, then different
subcomponents of each service are very different. Increasingly, the regular
US Army is a full employment program for black women.
Speaker 1: I will continue and just let that hang. Clearly, it
will be necessary to estimate the net political support that
a given policy announcement will degenerate. This will mean taking
into account not only the political significance of each group,
but also the immediacy of its political power. In the
context of a Latin American post coup situation, for example,
the goodwill of remote and disperse peasants will not help
us much against the immediate and powerful opposition of bureaucratic
and military cadres. If, on the other hand, our short
term position is strong, but we are threatened by the
longer term usurpation of power on the part of our
military allies, our objective will be to create a counterweight
capable eventually of becoming a source of direct strength a
peasant's militia, for example. Thus, whether we opt out for
a left policy of land reform and longer Compassino support
or for our right policy of peasant repression and immediate
landowner support will depend on the balance between the strength
of our short and our long term positions. The almost
mechanical elements that are important in the special climate of
the immediate post coup period will distort the normal balance
between the political forces of the country concerned. If therefore,
our short term position is not fragile, we should repress
the agitation of those forces that possess a disproportion of
strength in the short term, and concentrate instead on cultivating
the support of those groups whose longer term strength is
far greater. An element in our strategy. After the coup
is halfway between the information and the political campaign. The
problem of legitimizing the coup. Clearly, the coup is by
definition illegal, but whether this illegality matters and whether it
is possible to counteract its effects, will depend on the
total political environment of the country in question.
Speaker 3: Reminded that the United States of America as a product
of two coups in a row, the secession from the
United Kingdom followed by the overthrower of the Articles of
Confederation for a constitution, which means if you win very
often you can legitimate legitimate what you've done, and the
fact that it was illegal, nobody's really going to care
about them.
Speaker 1: We have seen in chapter two that in much of
the world, except for the rule of law countries, the
legitimacy or lack of legitimacy of the government will not
matter greatly. For example, as of twenty fifteen, Italy is
ruled by Matteo Renzi's government, whose ministers included young and
attractive female parliamentarians of his own Partito Democratico, as well
as defectors from the forsa Fortza Italia party of Silvi Berlosconi,
who also promoted female parliamentarians so long as they were pretty,
and members of several minor parties, giving Renzi a total
of three hundred and ninety five seats out of six
thirty enough to rule, but all were elected along with
Renzi himself in twenty thirteen, when his party was headed
by Pierre Luigi Bersani, not Renzi. In fact, Renzi only
became the head of government by winning an internal party
primary and then cutting a deal with Berlusconi. Essentially, Italians
ended up being ruled by a politician whom they never
elected except as parliamentarian.
Speaker 3: But good, no, it sounds pretty, you know, pretty appropriate,
pretty much our situation at the moment, since we're probably
about seven percent chance because of fortification. I was just
going to say the fact he keeps harping on the
fact they would only let female parliamentarians in who are attractive,
and that's got to be some Israeli projection, just considering
their successful women politicians have not been.
Speaker 1: Yeah you tell me gold that my ear wasn't a looker.
Speaker 2: It speaks for itself.
Speaker 1: But this in itself generates oppositions to the young and
personal Wrenzi. First, what Renzi did as is allowed by
the constitutional system in place, even though it allows a
post electoral primary that leaves most Italians unrepresented. Besides, in Italy,
legality is in any case optional, especially in politics, with
contempt for the law, much intensified by the transparently politicized
persecution of prosecutions of Italian magistrates who openly consort in
political groupings of their own, notably the left wing Magi Democratica.
As far as we are concerned, Italy is definitely not
a rule of law country, and our illegitimacy will be
easily swallowed if all else is in place. They're never
going to forgive Titus are.
Speaker 3: The Oh well, what I was saying, increasingly the the
United States?
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, so much of this right here. And
even when he goes up here, when he says, you know,
they are never elected and everything, I mean, that's just
the administrative state. It's just different here. It's much bigger
and much more spread out here. And yeah, I know,
a lot of people have tried to describe our government
as being highly centralized, and I think it's just highly decentralized.
You have no idea who's in charge.
Speaker 3: Elements of it are yeah even then right like a
formally hierarchy state. One of the things I've heard those
described as is polyarchies, where yeah, you have a central
authority figure who can over rule a lot of things.
But even if they have the effective ability to make
an exception, understand, the human attention is finite, so they
can only focus energy on so many things at once.
So huge elements of a large bureaucratic state are going
to be effectively decentralized to a lower level, even if
they're authoritarian, just because that's the reality of human concentration.
Speaker 1: One way of legitimizing the post to whop government has
already been mentioned in the discussion of the selection of
the personalities to be arrested the retention of the nominal
head of state where such a constitutional role exists as
our own highly nominal head of state as well, just.
Speaker 3: To point out again, we know about monarchies most of
Western Europe as parliamentary states the monarch's head of state,
but they're not head of government, and the amount of
authority varies from state to state, and you know, so
they're relatives. So we tend to think of as monarchs
as being powerless, even though very often they have more
power than they exercise on a daily basis, which is
why there can be borderline civil wars in the twentieth
century when they actually did what they were allowed to do.
But keep in mind a parliamentary state that's a republic,
you will have a president as head of state along
with a prime minister that's head of government. But in
most of those states, the president is a meaningless title
and usually it's where you put a retired politician who's
you know, lucid enough that he continued to receive you know,
state envoys and stuff and shake hands, but doesn't actually
have to do anything and is very often not allowed
to do anything on a routine basis.
Speaker 1: From what I understand, the British system still allows for
the monarchy to dissolve the parliament. The parliament at any
time and it takes over.
Speaker 3: It does, and well they're required within X number of
days to actually call for an election and to also
put in a cabinet in the interim, so they don't
get to rule.
Speaker 2: By personal rule for more than a couple of weeks.
But yes, they do have the authority.
Speaker 3: Was it Margaret Thatcher, you know famously everybody calls her,
you know, crazy because she asked Queen Elizabeth to do that.
But keep in mind, was it ten twelve years before
that Elizabeth dissolved the parliament in Australia and calls for election.
So it's something that's happened, not in mine, in your lifetime,
definitely in the lifetime of our parents. And again it
depends from monarchy to monarchy, with some of these actually
having huge amounts of authority in the field of where
the military is concerned, to believe.
Speaker 5: It or not.
Speaker 1: In this way, the appearance of continuity will be maintained
and with it an appearance of legitimacy. Where the head
of state is not nominal as in presidential regimes, other
taxics will have to be used, the announcement of forthcoming
elections or ferendum as a sort of expost facto legitimization,
or alternatively, the coup can be openly admitted as an
extra constitutional intervention, but one made against an unconstitutional regime.
Speaker 2: One actuality we have to eliminate in order to preserve democracy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that's basically what this is. I mean,
it's we've seen this. We if we haven't seen this action,
we've definitely seen this rhetoric in our lifetimes.
Speaker 3: I think we've seen everything except for the use of
armed force, sonything. But that last step of a coup
we've seen defact to occur in our lifetimes.
Speaker 1: One illegality will then be represented as being the cause
of the other. But we shall declare that whereas the
illegality of the pre coup regime was voluntary and permanent,
only ours is necessary and temporary. Such techniques, such techniques
will be of limited value in conducting the political processes
required to create a base of active support and to
secure our authority, because everything will depend on the specific
political environment in which we shall be operating. One particular problem, however,
requires further exploration recognition by foreign powers.
Speaker 2: Before we go too far.
Speaker 3: I was going to definitely emphasize the idea that of
a coup expressing itself is necessary and temporary. Interestingly enough,
in effective coups, very often that is the case. One
of the things that's been brought up about military governments
after following a military coup, a coup is effective, very
often one of the first things the military sets about
doing that transfer doesn't happen immediately is going back to
some kind of civilian rule professionally, some kind of semi
democratic constitutional rule.
Speaker 2: Because the act of actually running a.
Speaker 3: State on a day to day basis where you have
to take the best in the brightest side of the
military and put them in charge of things like trash
pick up and making sure that you know, the sanitation
system work. Is it undermines and degrades the ability of
that military to fight because suddenly all of its leadership
is more consumed with things like, you know, making the
mail service run instead of preparing for war in the future.
Speaker 1: All right, So the talking about the problem of recognition
my foreign powers, this is almost always important, but for
the poorest countries who pays real what is that? Are
you familiar with that term? Pays real?
Speaker 2: I pays real. It's a French term. I can look
it up.
Speaker 1: No, it's this is let's see what we can do
it in context. This is almost always important, But for
the poorest countries whose pays reel lies outside their home borders.
It will be a crucial problem, I would assume. Yeah,
let's look that up real quick.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm looking up now, Oh country it was Okay,
that was the name of a newspaper. That was Maral's
newspaper also, but that's probably no what he's referring.
Speaker 1: To real country, legal country.
Speaker 3: Conversely, oh, real country over the legal country.
Speaker 2: I would have to look.
Speaker 3: I'm guessing it's the case of where the cultural and
ethnic and national ties are. Yeah, definition of a you know,
a community may not be co terminous with.
Speaker 2: The state, which is a huge issue at least in
the Western Europe. Definitely huge issue in Africa where.
Speaker 3: Certain ethnic groups like Swedes and Fans cross both borders.
Speaker 2: So the question of.
Speaker 3: You know, one of the issues is you don't necessarily
take control of a people when you take control of
their company country, because you know a huge portion of
their population lives right across the border and has effectively
lived there forever.
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, gotcha. When much of the available disposable funds
come from foreign aid, both official and via non governmental organizations,
and when foreign cadres carry out vital administration, technical, and
sometimes even military functions, the maintenance of good relations with
the particular donor country or country is concerned may well
be a determining factor in our political survival after the coup.
Are they talking about Ukraine here.
Speaker 2: Twenty sixteen? He might be, but that would probably be
too early. Keep in mind, yeah, yeah, is living.
Speaker 3: As a strategic forecast are often the service to the
United States, So he's not necessarily going to be that
blunt about American mistakes.
Speaker 1: Correct Premature recognition by a foreign power, i e. Recognition
granted while the old regime still retains some degree of
control is becoming regarded as a form of aggression in
international law. Beyond that, however, recognition is usually granted even
to very illegitimate governments after a polite interval, if there
are convincing assurances about their continuity in terms of foreign relations.
These assurances are conveyed simply and publicly by formal announcements
stating that membership and alliances and groupings will be maintained,
that foreign agreements and obligations will be respected, and that
legitimate foreign interests in the country concern will not be harmed. Thus,
the leaders of Ghana's well named National Liberation Council, formed
after the overthrow of the historic independence leader Nukuma Kruma
announced that Ghana would retain her membership in the Commonwealth,
the Organization of African Unity, and the United Nations, and
would respect all obligations assumed by Kruma's regime. Similarly, Arab
post coup regimes habitually an anounced that they will remain
in the Arab League, and Latin American regimes pledged to
remain members of the Organization of American States. Far more
important than these declarations is a considerable diplomatic activity that
will take place after the coup, and sometimes even before it.
The purpose of these diplomatic exchanges will be to clarify
the political situation and nowadays to indicate or to dissemble
the ideological orientation of the planners of the coup. Most
countries of the world follow British diplomatic doctrine in granting
recognition to regimes on the basis of their effective control
of their territories, if only after a decent interval. At present,
the rapidly Islamist AKP government of Turkey opposes the overthrow
of Ejis Islamist government by the armed forces, fearing that
Turkey's armed forces might do the same, but does not
withhold recognition.
Speaker 3: Turkey is a history of overthrowing the military overthrowing their government.
Speaker 1: In any case, the doctrine of effective control is as
flexible as deafenie as definitions of control, so that recognition
can sometimes be flexible if the pre coup regime retains
even a tenuous hold over some part of the national territory.
I was going to sit in a good sorry.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: One of the funny examples of this is the Spanish
Civil War. You know most of the world except the
Franco regime as being the legitimate government of Spain within
a couple of years of winning. But if you didn't,
and the communist Republicans of Spain continue to maintain recognized
embassies in foreign countries like Mexico into I don't remember
what it was. It was like twenty or thirty years
after that. I think it was until the sixties in
some places.
Speaker 1: How shocked I am that would have been Mexico.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: After the necessary exchanges of information and assurances, the new
government will usually be recognized. This will occur even if
its illegality as an embarrassment, as in the case of
the United States and Latin American coups, or if its
ideological orientation, it's distasteful, as in the Ghanian and Indonesian
coups were for the Soviet Union at the time. Prolonged
non recognition is a rarity. One example was the widespread
refusal to recognize Madagascar's hot authority de la Transition. I'm
assuming that that's French, but my French pronunciation is just awful.
Speaker 3: The average person Madagascar does not speak proper French anyways.
Speaker 1: Which came to power and Madagascar didn't they dodge a
bullet which time, Yeah, in the nineteen forties, they really
dodged a bullet which came to power by force in
two thousand and nine and did not organize elections till
the end of twenty thirteen. It did, however, restore democratic
rules in twenty fourteen. Diplomatic recognition is one of the
elements in the general process of establishing the authority of
the new government. Until this is achieved, we will have
to rely on the brittle instruments of physical coercion, and
our position will be vulnerable to many threats, including that
of another coup de eta. And that is it, and
it's it's amazing. How if a contry, if there's a
coupdeta in one country, how it's almost like by magic,
they would be very apt to have another one happen
and pretty soon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again that's part of the issue.
Speaker 3: Once you you break the seal, as it were, as
soon as you make it acceptable to have one, you've
made it acceptable to have another one. So that's again
that's a huge part of why legitimizing what you're doing
afterwards is such a go.
Speaker 2: You know, such an important part.
Speaker 3: It also goes further to explaining why in an effective
military coup, you know, they want.
Speaker 2: To get out of the governance business when they can.
Speaker 1: Hm. Well, I appreciate you recommending this and joining me
because I just there's a lot of books that I
can read that I have the I have the knowledge
and the backgrounds and comments upon. But the historical knowledge
that yourself and Darryl for one episode and Lafayette for
one episode brought, but you for all the other episodes,
I think it's invaluable.
Speaker 2: Sin Batch and Dark Enlightenment as well.
Speaker 1: Oh a, Sam Batchan's Dark Enlightenment. Yeah. Yeah, through that episode,
I had a lot of people reach out wanting to
recognizing what was happening and wanted to say hi, just
and that's cool, say that you know, they appreciate you,
appreciate you, each one of you individually.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I appreciate it.
Speaker 3: And like I said in the beginning, I mean, part
of it's just the the fact is it disabled veteran
that they kept paying for college, so I kept going,
especially since very often they paid me more money and
my day, you know, as a stipend than what I
would make my daily pay.
Speaker 2: So I'm glad somebody's getting some value out of my
higher education.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, I appreciate it, and I'll have you
back on real soon to do this again. Good, I
have you back on soon. Have you back on soon
to do something other than a reading. Let's talk about
you know, let's have you back on and talk about
some some real stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Probably have to talk to Thomas and see how much
we can go down rabbit holes at some point.
Speaker 1: All right, John, appreciate it, Thank you, Hey time bro,