Coup d'état

Coup d'état
A coup d'état, also known as a coup, a putsch, or an overthrow, is the sudden deposition of a government, usually by a small group within the existing state establishment — often the military or secret services — to depose the extant government and replace it with another body, civil or military.

A coup d'état is a the overthrow of a government. This is usually overt, but may also be covert (for example, the assassination of JFK, which was officially blamed on a "lone nut"). Generally it is violent, but sometimes it may involve lawyers rather than soldiers (e.g. the 1975 Australian coup d'état, a "constitutional coup").

Official Narrative

This phrase is mostly applied by the Western commercially-controlled media to small nations in Africa, Asia or South America which undergo a sudden, forceful change of power (for example an assassination of one leader by elements within the military). Western governments are more often the sponsors than the victims of such events.

Problems

Power struggles are usually much more complex events that the commercially-controlled media has time or inclination to communicate. The official narrative about "coups d'état" is systematically oversimplified as a means of obscuring connections to subjects of domestic political significance. The story that "developed" nation states do not tend to have such events misses the facts that in such nations:

1. Modern coups are more stealthy (e.g. using of deep events such as false flag attacks); and crucially
2. Overt power structures such as the national government are often to a large degree subservient to the deep state

Coups in USA

Chris Hedges said that since Ronald Reagan the US has undergone a "corporate coup d'état in slow motion". Amy Baker Benjamin concurs that the USA "was taken over by a group of people with a policy coup. Wolfowitz and Cheney and Rumsfeld and you could name a half dozen other collaborators from the Project for the New American Century. Why General Clark – an unimpeachable witness – was not questioned by the Security Council during its Libya deliberations is a supreme mystery." Kurt Vonnegut also concurred: "I myself feel that our country... might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable".

Mark Gorton, however, rejects the notion of a "coup", understands the last few decades of US political developments instead as a consolidation of the power of the cabal that carried out the JFK Assassination and the Watergate coups.

Examples

Most of the US Efforts to Suppress Democracy since 1945 were carried out secretly, and while the broad outline is often clear early on, the precise date and location of their genesis often remains a matter of debate years or decades after the fact. For an example, some 60 years after the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, the CIA admitted responsibility - but the idea was probably cooked up by the Seven Sisters.

This page will focus on coups in "developed' countries, which receive little attention from the commercially-controlled media and are routinely omitted from the official narrative. Did you ever hear, for example, of the 1933 Business Plot, a planned military coup in the USA foiled by the integrity of General Smedley Butler?

Australia

In 1972, Gough Whitlam became the 21st Prime Minister of Australia. He moved quickly and independently, to abolish royal patronage, move Australia towards the Non-Aligned Movement, support “zones of peace” and oppose the testing of nuclear weapons. He always saw his 1975 dismissal from office by the governor-general of Australia, Sir John Kerr (referred to by CIA agents as "our man Kerr") as a "constitutional coup d'état".

UK

Peter Wright wrote that he was confronted by two of his MI5 colleagues who told him: "Wilson's a bloody menace and it's about time the public knew the truth", and "We'll have him out, this time we'll have him out" and that an MI5 plan to leak damaging information about Wilson was approved by "up to thirty officers". The plan was a 'carbon copy' of the Zinoviev Letter which helped destabilise the first Labour Government in 1924; as the 1974 election approached, MI5 would leak selected details of the intelligence about Labour leaders, especially Wilson, to 'sympathetic' journalists, using their press and the trade union contacts to spread around the idea that Wilson was considered a security risk. The matter was to be raised in Parliament for 'maximum effect'. However Wright declined to let them see the files on Wilson and the plan was never carried out.

Former MI5 officer James Miller stated 13 years after the event that the 1974 Ulster Workers Council Strike had been promoted by MI5 in order to help destabilise Wilson's government.

In July 1987, Labour MP, Ken Livingstone used his maiden speech to raise the allegations of a former Army press officer, Colin Wallace, that the Army press office in Northern Ireland had been used in the 1970s as part of a smear campaign against Harold Wilson and other British and Irish politicians, codenamed Clockwork Orange.

USA

The Business Plot was a coup which was planned in the 1930s but never carried out. Since 1945, the most obvious coup d'état in the USA was the JFK Assassination. The next coup was Watergate, disguised as a political scandal. 9/11 has been termed a coup, but this is something of a misnomer, since it was not a change of leadership.

 

Examples

Page name	Perpetrators	Date	Location	Description
1991 Moscow Coup attempt	1991 Moscow Coup attempt/Perpetrators			An attempted coup
2004 Equatorial Guinea coup d'état attempt	Simon Mann Semantic Objects Mark Thatcher Jeffrey Archer Severo Moto Nick du Toit Ely Calil Crause Steyl Greg Wales		South Africa Equatorial Guinea
2014 Ukraine coup	2014 Ukraine coup/Perpetrators
Australia/1975 coup d'état	Australia/1975 coup d'état/Perpetrators		Australia Canberra	A CIA/MI6-backed covert "constitutional coup" to remove Gough Whitlam whom they saw as a loose cannon.
Bolivia/1980 coup d'état	CIA		Bolivia
Brazil/1964 coup d'état	Brazil/1964 coup d'état/Perpetrators
Chile/1973 coup d'état	CIA Henry Kissinger		Chile
Guatemala/1954 coup d'état	CIA United Fruit		Guatemala	A coup organised by the CIA to protect the profit of United Fruit.
Iran/1953 coup d'état	CIA MI6 Seven Sisters		Iran	The first large scale regime change carried out by the CIA, at the behest of big oil. In 2000, the US state department changed its official narrative by finally admitting responsibility.
Iranian Revolution	Iranian Revolution/Perpetrators
JFK/Assassination	US/Deep state JFK/Assassination/Perpetrators		US Dallas Texas Grassy knoll	The assassination of US President John F. Kennedy. This is the seminal deep political event of modern times. And no, it wasn't a 'lone nut'… There were much bigger motives. The facts remain that JFK was on terrible terms with the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff as-well as every other element of the deep state.
Operation Cage Action Plan	Ergenikon		Turkey
The Business Plot	Gerald MacGuire			A military takeover of the USA which was planned by a cabal of bankers. It was never enacted due to the character of the man they ill advisedly chose to head it, Major General Smedley Butler.
Watergate coup	US/Deep state		Watergate Complex	This is framed by the official narrative as a simple case of political corruption, one which proves that "the system works", since the powerful perpetrator was caught - if not actually brought to justice, since outgoing president Nixon was immediately pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford. In fact it may well have been the outworking of a deeper political power struggle at work.
William McKinley/Assassination	William McKinley/Assassination/Perpetrators		NY Buffalo Milburn House	The Assassination of William McKinley

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Wesley Clark	“And what happened in 9/11 is we didn’t have a strategy, we didn’t have bipartisan agreement, we didn’t have American understanding of it and we had instead a policy coup in this country, a coup, a policy coup. Some hardnosed people took over the direction of American policy and they never bothered to inform the rest of us.”	Wesley Clark	2007
US/Foreign policy	“Anybody who believes that a country's internal democracy is the determining factor in whether the West decides to move for violent regime change in that country, is a complete idiot. Any journalist or politician who makes that claim is more likely to be a complete charlatan than a complete idiot. In recent years, possession of hydrocarbon reserves is very obviously a major factor in western regime change actions.”	Craig Murray	January 2019