Word: coupes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Unlike a revolutionary assault from the outside, Luttwak notes, a coup is an inside job, done by a government's own members. It involves minimal manpower and bloodshed. As in judo, the secret is to use leverage and make a state overthrow itself. Bureaucracy facilitates this by severing the loyalties that once personally bound rulers and their servants. A modern bureaucrat follows impersonal orders; if his immediate boss is subverted, the bureaucrat tends to obey orders blindly, even orders designed to topple his own government...
According to Luttwak, a coup requires three preconditions: 1) a highly centralized government with a seizable seat of power, 2) a passive people not likely to react to a takeover and 3) the assurance that no foreign power will intervene. These prerequisites usually rule out federal nations, healthy democracies and protected client states. Europe, he observes, has had only three successful coups-in Czechoslovakia, Greece and Turkey-during tie past 24 years. By contrast, numerous regimes in Africa and Latin America offer what Luttwak calls "gratifying" opportunities. So does South Viet Nam, provided that the U.S. winks at the plotters...
Luttwak's how-to manual (complete with 13 tactical diagrams) charts every step of a coup, from plot to power. The average coup-once physically launched-takes about 13 hours. The whole art is to analyze all forces that might squelch the coup and, if possible, "neutralize" them beforehand. To block airborne troops, for example, a single bribed technician can silence a key radio-station or airport control tower. Capital cities can be isolated and made safe for coups by parking trucks across the airstrips that link them to the outside...
...After a coup succeeds, the plotters must demobilize their own forces lest the commanders-a treacherous lot by definition-get ideas about a "coup-within-the-coup." The new group should then "freeze" the situation by raising army pay, promoting fellow plotters, barring any flight of refugees, and flooding the radio with calls for sacrifice to cure the alleged sins of the deposed rulers...
...Park Chung Hee in power. Luttwak's little classic explains how so few can fool so many. By revealing the necessary delicacy of timing-a single miscalculation of hours or minutes can send the plotters to their execution-he also shows how easy it is to prevent a coup. In his appendices Luttwak offers other advice for despots eager to cling to their posts. It resembles that given by one of the tyrants of ancient Greece. Asked how it was that he was never troubled by rivals, the tyrant walked into his garden and, without a word, lopped...