Coup D état Quotes

“1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere.

2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times....

3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions.

4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred.

5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth.

It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did it, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult.
It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics at the time.
I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe, the entire government gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“กำลังตำรวจของประเทศ ซึ่งระบอบประชาธิปไตยยังเป็นคำพูดที่ไม่ใช่ความจริงนั้น มักจะมีปรากฎการณ์ว่าเป็นกำลังที่ผู้นำของประเทศนั้นใช้กดขี่ประชาชน หรือคอยสอดส่องความเคลื่อนไหวของประชาชนอยู่เสมอ ในบางประเทศ กำลังตำรวจหน่วยหนึ่งจะมีหน้าที่เฉพาะ และได้รับการฝึกฝนโดยเฉพาะเพื่อคอยควบคุมการเดินขบวนเรียกร้องของประชาชน เพื่อเรียกร้องความเป็นธรรมจากรัฐบาล กำลังตำรวจประเภทนี้มักมีชื่อตรงข้ามกับหน้าทีที่แท้จริงของตน บ้างก็มีชื่อว่า 'หน่วยพิทักษ์สันติราษฎร์' บ้างก็ชื่อ 'หน่วยรักษาความปลอดภัย' จริงอยู่ ในบางประเทศ หน่วยงานนี้ก็มีชื่อตรงไปตรงมาให้เห็นอย่างไม่อ้อมค้อม เช่น 'กองปราบ' เป็นต้น”
― พันศักดิ์ วิญญรัตน์, คู่มือรัฐประหาร

“สำหรับประเทศไทยก็เช่นกัน เมื่อใดที่มีการทำรัฐประหารจะต้องอ้างสถาบันของชาติและการปราบปรามคอมมิวนิสต์เป็นสำคัญ ซึ่งถ้าว่าไปแล้ว คนกรุงเทพฯ ก็ชอบฟังเช่นนั้น ถึงจะไม่เห็นด้วยกับการมีรัฐบาลทหาร แต่มักจะยินยอมเพราะความกลัวปัญหาที่คณะรัฐประหารปลุกผีขึ้นมาใช้”
― พันศักดิ์ วิญญรัตน์, คู่มือรัฐประหาร

“A traitor only becomes one if their plot is discovered. The imposition of guilt means nothing to those who feign loyalty. More skilled conspirators wield treason as a clinical tool of regime change and political expediency. Then, with their own hand writing history, such traitors may wear the clothes of patriots.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Winning a war is the easy part. All it takes is brawn. Maintaining your rule afterward is the real test.”
― Natasha Ngan, Girls of Paper and Fire

“It has already been mentioned that Duke Felmet was one step away from the throne. The step in question was at the top of the flight leading to the Great Hall, down which King Verence had tumbled in the dark only to land, against all laws of probability, on his own dagger.

It had, however, been declared by his own physician to be a case of natural causes. Bentzen had gone to see the man and explained that falling down a flight of steps with a dagger in your back was a disease caused by unwise opening of the mouth.

In fact it had already been caught by several members of the king's own bodyguard who had been a little bit hard of hearing. There had been a minor epidemic.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

“Ils tombèrent dans cette redoutable erreur de prendre l'obéissance du soldat pour le consentement de la nation. Cette confiance-là perd des trônes.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Askerler babamı almak için geldiklerinde annemin Burda dergilerinin model paftalarını gizli planlarmış gibi dikkatle incelemişler, ne olduğunu anlamadıkları için de oracıkta paramparça etmişlerdi. Askerler çok az şey biliyorlardı, bilmedikleri şeyden korkuyor, yok etmek istiyorlardı. Biz askerlerden daha çok şey biliyorduk ve biz de bildiğimiz dünyanın bir an önce yıkılıp gitmesini istiyorduk.”
― Barış Bıçakçı, Sinek Isırıklarının Müellifi

“En Tokio, un funcionario del gobierno le preguntó que haría con respecto a sus malas relaciones con el Congreso peruano. La lacónica respuesta fue:
- Las empeoraré aún más.
Nadie sabría a que se referiría Fujimori hasta semanas mas tarde.”
― José Alejandro Godoy, El último dictador

“Solemnly, for once looking a little awed, a little like a small-town boy on Broadway, Windrip took the oath, administered by the Chief Justice (who disliked him very much indeed) and, edging even closer to the microphone, squawked, "My fellow citizens, as the President of the United States of America, I want to inform you that the real New Deal has started right this minute, and we're all going to enjoy the manifold liberties to which our history entitles us—and have a whale of a good time doing it! I thank you!"

That was his first act as President. His second was to take up residence in the White House, where he sat down in the East Room in his stocking feet and shouted at Lee Sarason, "This is what I've been planning to do now for six years! I bet this is what Lincoln used to do! Now let 'em assassinate me!"

His third, in his role as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, was to order that the Minute Men be recognized as an unpaid but official auxiliary of the Regular Army, subject only to their own officers, to Buzz, and to High Marshal Sarason; and that rifles, bayonets, automatic pistols, and machine guns be instantly issued to them by government arsenals. That was at 4 P.M. Since 3 P.M., all over the country, bands of M.M.'s had been sitting gloating over pistols and guns, twitching with desire to seize them.

Fourth coup was a special message, next morning, to Congress (in session since January fourth, the third having been a Sunday), demanding the instant passage of a bill embodying Point Fifteen of his election platform—that he should have complete control of legislation and execution, and the Supreme Court be rendered incapable of blocking anything that it might amuse him to do.

By Joint Resolution, with less than half an hour of debate, both houses of Congress rejected that demand before 3 P.M., on January twenty-first. Before six, the President had proclaimed that a state of martial law existed during the "present crisis," and more than a hundred Congressmen had been arrested by Minute Men, on direct orders from the President. The Congressmen who were hotheaded enough to resist were cynically charged with "inciting to riot"; they who went quietly were not charged at all. It was blandly explained to the agitated press by Lee Sarason that these latter quiet lads had been so threatened by "irresponsible and seditious elements" that they were merely being safeguarded. Sarason did not use the phrase "protective arrest," which might have suggested things.”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“While entrusting the intellectuals with a critical role in the forthcoming revolution, Bakunin at the same time cautioned them against attempting to seize political power on their own, in the manner of the Jacobins or their eager disciple Auguste Blanqui. On this point Bakunin was most emphatic. The very idea that a tiny band of conspirators could execute a coup d'état for the benefit of the people was, in his derisive words, a "heresy against common sense and historical experience." These strictures were aimed as much at Marx as at Blanqui. For both Marx and Bakunin, the ultimate goal of the revolution was a stateless society of men liberated from the bonds of oppression, a new world in which the free development of each was the condition for the free development of all. But where Marx envisioned an intervening proletarian dictatorship that would eliminate the last vestiges of the bourgeois order, Bakunin was bent on abolishing the state outright. The cardinal error committed by all revolutions of the past, in Bakunin's judgment, was that one government was turned out only to be replaced by another. The true revolution, then, would not capture political power; it would be a social revolution, ridding the world of the state itself.”
― Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists

“We are not lacking in ovservation by which the relation of language to its variable usage can be determined rather precisely. Insight into this relation and the art of applying it belongs to the spirit of the law and the secrete of governing. It is just this relation which makes classical writers. The trouble caused by confounding languages and the blind fatih in certain signs and formulas are at times coup d'état which have them in the kingdong of truth than the most powerful, freshly exhumed word-radical or the unending geealogy of a concept; coup d'état which would never enter the head of a scholarly blatherer and an eloquent journeyman, not even in his most propitious dreams.”
― Johann Georg Hamann, Writings on Philosophy and Language

“It should be remembered that against a dictatorship the objective of the grand strategy is not simply to bring down the dictators but to install a democratic system and make the rise of a new dictatorship impossible. To accomplish these objectives, the chosen means of struggle will need to contribute to a change in the distribution of effective power in the society. Under the dictatorship the population and civil institutions of the society have been too weak, and the government too strong. Without a change in the imbalance, a new set of rulers can, if they wish, be just as dictatorial as the old ones. A 'palace revolution' or a coup d'etat therefore is not welcome.”
― Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy

“It must be remembered that some groups will ignore any constitutional provision in their aim to establish themselves as new dictators. Therefore, a permanent role will exist for the population to apply political defiance and noncooperation against would-be dictators and to preserve democratic structures, rights, and procedures.”
― Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy

“Page 147: Over time, this lack of participation in the military by the white overclass could lead to an increasing divergence between the norms of the civilian and the military elites in the United States, and a declining respect for civilian authority by a heavily middle-class and working-class military. The incidents of insubordination that greeted President Clinton’s attempt to end the ban on homosexual men and women in the military showed the existence of both the cultural gap and the possible consequences.”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

“Page 229:
The great modern fact is the huge standing army that is a severe custodian of the law, is obedient to the orders of a civil authority and has very little political influence, exercising indirectly at best such influence as it has. Virtually invariable as that situation is in countries of European civilization, it represents a most fortunate exception, if it is not absolutely without parallel, in human history. Only a habit of a few generations standing, along with ignorance or forgetfulness of the past, can make such a situation seem normal to those of us who have lived at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and so find it strange when we chance upon exceptions.”
― Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class

“Às 17h38 tocara novamente o telefone do presidente Lyndon Johnson, que continuava em seu rancho do Texas. Era o subsecretário de Estado, George Ball. Na extensão estava o secretário de Estado assistente para Assuntos Interamericanos, Thomas Mann. Ball contou-lhe o que dissera a Gordon. Johnson aprovou: “Acho que devemos tomar todas as medidas que pudermos e estar preparados para fazer tudo que for preciso, exatamente como faríamos no Panamá— desde que seja viável. (...) Eu seria a favor de que a gente se arrisque um pouco”.”
― Elio Gaspari, A Ditadura Envergonhada

“Since the 1950s, several democratically elected socialist governments have nationalized large parts of their extractive sectors and begun to redistribute to the poor and middle class the wealth that had previously hemorrhaged into foreign bank accounts, most notably Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran and Salvador Allende in Chile. But those experiments were interrupted by foreign-sponsored coups d’etat before reaching their potential. Indeed postcolonial independence movements — which so often had the redistribution of unjustly concentrated resources, whether of land or minerals, as their core missions — were consistently undermined through political assassinations, foreign interference, and, more recently, the chains of debt-driven structural adjustment programs (not to mention the corruption of local elites).”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

“You mean to topple whoever finally claims Terra's throne and take it for yourself."

"Who among my brothers is as remotely suited as I for such a position? Horus is already so rank with stolen powers that he burns from the inside out and sees it not. Perturabo might once have had the imagination to make such a leap, but it has been ground out of him. Angron or Mortarion are lords only of corpses and maggots, and as for Konrad and Fulgrim, they are not fit to rule themselves, let alone a galaxy.”
― Graham McNeill, Fury of Magnus

“In mid-1986, Letterman got an unexpected call from Dave Tebet, the Carson Productions executive who worked with “Late Night.” Tebet said that he and Henry Bushkin, Johnny Carson’s extremely powerful attorney, business partner, and author of his 2013 tell-all, wanted to meet with Letterman—by himself, totally confidentially. Letterman was stunned when he heard what they had come to propose: They were offering him the “Tonight ” show; they wanted him to take Johnny Carson’s job. Bushkin, in his role as head of Carson Productions, said that the company intended to maintain ownership of the “Tonight ” show after Johnny stepped down, and now was the time to line up Letterman to slip into Johnny’s chair. The details were vague, and to Letterman they sounded deliberately so. He said he was flattered, he listened politely, but his radar was signaling a warning. Neither man told Letterman how or when this ascension would be accomplished, a problem that started sounding even worse when Bushkin advised Letterman that no one at NBC or anywhere else knew of the plan yet—not even Carson.
Letterman, already nervous, now started to feel as if he were getting close to a fire he didn’t want to be in the same campground with. They asked Letterman not to tell anyone, not even his management. They would get back to him.
The more Letterman thought about it, the more it sounded like a palace coup. His immediate instinct was to stay out of this, because there was going to be warfare of some sort. He feared Carson would interpret this maneuver as plotting and he guessed what might happen next: Johnny’s best friend Bushkin wouldn’t take the fall. Nor would his old crony, Tebet. It would be the punk who got blamed for engineering this.
Letterman broke his promise and called Peter Lassally, Carson’s producer. Lassally was shocked by what he heard. He suspected that Bushkin was involved in all sorts of machinations that never benefited Carson. He thought about telling Johnny, but other attempts to alert the star to questionable activities by Bushkin had been harshly rebuffed. Lassally decided to see what developed and advised Dave to keep Bushkin and Tebet at a distance.
Letterman had a couple of more phone calls from Bushkin and Tebet about the deal; they discussed it with Ron Ellberger, the Indianapolis attorney that Letterman still employed. Tebet blamed the lawyer for muddying up the deal, and eventually said that Carson knew of the plan and had approved of the idea of lining up Letterman for the future.
But Tebet was lying; Carson had never heard a word about it, and when he did—long after the approach had taken place and Bushkin and Tebet were both long gone—Carson exploded with rage at the thought that this plotting had gone on behind his back. He knew exactly what he would have done if he had learned of it at the time: He would have fired Bushkin and Tebet before another day elapsed. Letterman had guessed right in steering clear of the coup. When he learned that Carson hadn’t known what was going on, Letterman was deeply thankful for his cautious instincts.
When the offer from Bushkin melted away, Letterman tried not to give it any second thoughts. Only for the briefest time did he think that he might have walked away from an offer to host the “Tonight” show. The next time, it would not be nearly so easy to take.”
― Bill Carter, The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno & the Network Battle for the Night

“Though the term coup d'état has been used for more than 300 years, the feasibility of the coup derives from a comparatively recent development: the rise of the modern state with its professional bureaucracy and standing armed forces. The power of the modern state largely depends on this permanent machinery which, with its archives, files, records and officials, can follow intimately and, if it so desires, control the activities of lesser organizations and individuals. "Totalitarian" states merely use more fully the detailed and comprehensive information which is available to most states, however "democratic": the instrument is largely the same though it is used differently.

The growth of the modern bureaucracy has two implications which are crucial to the feasibility of the coup: the development of a clear distinction between the permanent machinery of state and the political leadership, and the fact that, like most large organizations, the bureaucracy has a structured hierarchy with definite chains of command. The distinction between the bureaucrat as an employee of the state and as a personal servant of the ruler is a new one, and both the British and the American systems show residual features of the earlier structure.”
― Edward Luttwak, Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook

“You could argue that the killers of JFK learned from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar not to be such overt assassins. The symbolism of the killing was still there but the modus operandi hid the perpetrators. The ultimate coup d'états school their murderous heirs: shed the target's blueprint blood via a covert coup de grâce.”
― Stewart Stafford