Former United States President Donald Trump will hold a news conference this coming Thursday, Jan. 6, exactly one year after the deadly riots at the U.S. Capitol that he was accused of fomenting; and now he will probably commemorate! After all, it was one of the rare attempts at a coup d'etat in the U.S., even though it was downgraded to a coup de grace. As it was a coup nonetheless, it will be immortalized in its own right.
The U.S. has had many coups, both “d’etat” and “de grace,” deadly and nonfatal, real and bogus, in the palace and on the street, but always in an outside country. It had three such experimentations in Turkey – in 1960, 1970 and 1980. With the “post-modern” coup of 1997, and finally, the averted “July 15 coup bid” of 2016, the total comes to five.
Globally, the U.S. has been involved in 72 (in Wikipedia’s cordial but dispassionate wording) “regime changes in foreign countries.” Here we read that “the United States government has participated and interfered, both overtly and covertly, in the replacement of foreign governments." Wikipedia classifies them into six periods showing dates and interventions by countries. I’ll only list the names Wikipedia uses for the periods, which are very telling in their own rights, and the number of coups:
One can write a doctoral dissertation on the relationship between those political eras and the U.S. involvement in "regime changes" in other countries. For instance, how do the Republican and the Democratic administrations fare in coup inducing foreign policies? Or why did the number of U.S.-induced coups skyrocket during the Cold War? Is it because the Cold War era was actually the period when the U.S. headed one pole during the bipolar madness of the world? Why is the post-Cold War number so meager? Is the U.S. really losing its power and influence?
I can leave that to audacious Ph.D. candidates looking for an interesting thesis topic. Now returning to the U.S.’ one and only internal coup trial, let me give my two cents on why our good friends and allies over there should monumentalize this occasion.
As a matter of fact, they are already planning to do it. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced plans to commemorate the Jan. 6 anniversary at the U.S. Capitol. Starting at noon, she’ll have a prayer and a moment of silence on the House floor followed by a "historic perspective" conversation between historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Jon Meacham "to establish and preserve the narrative of Jan. 6.” U.S. President Joe Biden will make a public statement on the anniversary. Some think tanks are planning to have scholarly meetings on what they call “the Jan. 6 insurrection.”
But all these announcements, except probably the speech Trump is going to make, sound so somber. Yes, there are victims from both sides; but only one person was killed by police. Others either died of drug overdoses or of natural causes. Many people were injured, including 138 police officers. (Four officers who responded to the attack committed suicide within seven months.) But still, these people should be considered martyrs of democracy; and the event should be recognized as it should be: a celebration of the parliamentary system.
You still might say that the parliamentary system was not really in danger with a mere scantily clad hundred people forcing their way through doors of the Capitol to a part of the building where members of U.S. Congress were taking shelter, and some of them plundering the senators’ and representatives’ offices and looking for things light in weight but heavy in value like laptop computers! But you never know!
For instance, as the U.S. experiments had shown in Turkey in 1960, a group of 14 low-ranking army officers successfully toppled the government, court-martialed the entire parliament and hung the prime minister and two of his ministers. In later occasions, their U.S. handlers were more careful to increase the number of putschists and make sure they were accompanied by other branches of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK). Yet the last (but not the least) one was executed by a mere military memorandum delivered to the prime minister. So, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), in short, all those who still had fresh memories of Turkish and other regime changes, could not be satisfied with the mere appearance of the group in action. That is why the national guards (paramilitary armed forces the U.S. constitution keeps handy in every state) stormed the Capitol and rescued not only Congress but also the regime.
Imagine should Jacob Chansley, that Arizona man who sported face paint, no shirt and a furry hat with horns, who kept howling as he was storming the Mecca of American democracy, and his fellow stormers overtake the U.S. government!
Therefore, the first anniversary of this sad but devastating event should not be wasted. Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, has gained national notoriety and it should not fall into the crack of what Washington Post reporter Jose A. Del Real calls the “segregated belief of divergent realities.” He knows what he is talking about because he has written 11 conspiracy theories in 11 months! What happened on Jan. 6 was not a page from a conspiracy theory. It was a real attempt to overthrow the government. American people should get rid of the false belief that coups only take place in "underdeveloped democracies."
As this apocalyptic year that started with a coup attempt was coming to close, three retired U.S. generals warned the U.S. military to prepare for a 2024 insurrection. Some people won’t call it that, but Paul D. Eaton, a retired U.S. Army major general and a senior adviser to U.S.-based nonprofit organization VoteVets, also a retired army major general, Antonio M. Taguba, with 34 years of active duty service, and Steven M. Anderson, a retired brigadier general who served in the U.S. Army for 31 years, wrote in their joint Washington Post opinion piece that “We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.”
They are not only thinking about the possibility that people might storm federal buildings, et cetera, but they are concerned with the possibility of the American military supporting them as well. They should know! The two retired major generals and a retired brigadier general, who, among themselves, share a century of service in the U.S. armed forces, must have read reports about those divided militaries supporting overthrowing civilian regimes. There are no textbooks on the organization of coups, but we have watched them happening in Turkey. We have read memoirs of the people in the know who rushed to the U.S. secretaries of states, waving diplomatic cables from Ankara and yelling “Our boys did it!”
The retired generals suggested that the Pentagon should immediately order a civics review for all its members – uniformed and civilian – on the U.S. Constitution and electoral integrity. They must have some sort of oral examination in mind. I am telling them: it won’t work. There were civics courses in Turkish military school, yet they found ways to explain out the rule that civilian authority is supreme over everything else. The most serious coup d'etat against the government of Philippine's President Corazon Aquino was staged in 1989, by members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines; yet the second article of the constitution dictated that “the Philippines is a democratic and republican State. Sovereignty resides in the people. Civilian authority is, at all times, supreme over the military.”
My humble suggestion for how the U.S. military can circumvent coups d’etat at home is to stop fostering them abroad. U.S. diplomats should stop striding around pompously as apostles of democracy while fomenting coups behind closed doors; then, probably, those democratic values may just take root in Washington, too.
