A coup d'état (English: /ˌkuːdeɪˈtɑː/, French: [ku deta]; plural: coups d'état; translation: strike (against the) state, literally: strike/blow of state)—also known as a coup, putsch, and overthrow—is the sudden, illegal deposition of a government,^[1][2][3][4] usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to depose the extant government and replace it with another body, civil or military. A coup d'état is considered successful when the usurpers establish their dominance. When the coup neither fails completely nor succeeds, a civil war is a likely consequence.

A coup d'état typically uses the extant government's power to assume political control of the country. In Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook, military historian Edward Luttwak states that "[a] coup consists of the infiltration of a small, but critical, segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder." The armed forces, whether military or paramilitary, are not a defining factor of a coup d'état.

Etymology[link]

Although the coup d'état has featured in politics since antiquity, the phrase is of relatively recent coinage;^[5] the Oxford Dictionary identifies it as a French expression meaning a “stroke of State”. Prof. Thomas Childers, of the University of Pennsylvania, indicates that the English language's lacking a word denoting the sudden, violent change of government derives from England's stable political traditions and institutions. French, German and U.S. history are coloured with such politico-military actions.

Since the unsuccessful coups d'état of Wolfgang Kapp in 1920 (the Kapp Putsch), the Swiss German word Putsch (pronounced [ˈpʊtʃ]; coined for the Züriputsch of 1839) also denotes the same politico-military actions: in Metropolitan France, putsch denoted the 1942 and 1961 anti-government attacks in Algiers, and the 1991 August Putsch in the USSR; the German equivalent is Staatsstreich (the German literal translation of coup d'état), yet a putsch is not always a coup d'état, for example, the Beer Hall Putsch was by politicians without military support.

Usage of the phrase[link]

Linguistically, coup d'état denotes a "stroke of state" (French: coup [stroke] d' [of] État [state]).^[6] Analogously, the looser, quotidian usage means “gaining advantage on a rival”, (intelligence coup, boardroom coup). Politically, a coup d'état is a usually violent political engineering, which affects who rules in the government, without radical changes in the form of the government, the political system. Tactically, a coup d'état involves control, by an active minority of military usurpers, who block the remaining (non-participant) military's possible defence of the attacked government, by either capturing or expelling the politico-military leaders, and seizing physical control of the country's key government offices, communications media, and infrastructure. It is to be noted that in the latest years there has been a broad use of the phrase in mass media, which may contradict the legal definition of coup d'état.

[edit] Pronunciamiento

The Pronunciamiento (Pronouncement) is a Spanish and Latin American type of coup d'état. The coup d'état (called golpe de estado in Spanish) was more common in Spain and South America, while the Pronunciamiento was more common in Central America. The Pronunciamiento is the formal explanation for deposing the regnant government, justifying the installation of the new government that was effected with the golpe de estado. The difference between a coup and a pronunciamento is that in the former, a military faction deposes the civilian government and assumes power, in the latter, the military depose the civil government and install another civil government.^[7]

History[link]

Coups d'état are common in Africa; between 1952 and 2000, thirty-three countries experienced 85 such depositions. Western Africa had most of them, 42; most were against civil regimes; 27 were against military regimes; and only in five were the deposed incumbents killed.^[8] Moreover, as a change-of-government method, the incidence of the coup d'état has declined worldwide, because usually, the threat of one suffices to effect the change of government; the military do not usually assume power, but install a civil leader acceptable to them. The political advantage is the appearance of legitimacy, examples are the collapse of the French Fourth Republic, and the change of government effected in Mauritania, on 3 August 2005, while the president was in Saudi Arabia.

Types[link]

The political scientist Samuel P. Huntington identifies three classes of coup d'état:

• Breakthrough coup d'état: a revolutionary army overthrows a traditional government and creates a new bureaucratic elite. Generally led by mid-level or junior officers. Examples are China in 1911, Bulgaria in 1944, Egypt in 1952, Turkey in 1960, Greece in 1967, Libya in 1969, Portugal in 1974 and Liberia in 1980.
• Guardian coup d'état: the "musical chairs" coup d'état. The stated aim of such a coup is usually improving public order and efficiency, and ending corruption. There usually is no fundamental change to the power structure. Generally, the leaders portray their actions as a temporary and unfortunate necessity. An early example is the coup d'état by consul Sulla, in 88 B.C., against supporters of Marius in Rome, after the latter attempted to strip him of a military command. A contemporary instance is the civilian Prime Minister of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's overthrow by Chief of Army Staff General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in 1977, who cited widespread civil disorder and impending civil war as his justification. In 1999, General Pervez Musharraf overthrew Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on the same grounds. Nations with guardian coups can frequently shift back and forth between civilian and military governments. Example countries include Pakistan, Turkey (1971 and 1980), and Thailand. A bloodless coup usually arises from the Guardian coup d'état.
• Veto coup d'état: occurs when the army vetoes the people's mass participation and social mobilisation in governing themselves. In such a case, the army confronts and suppresses large-scale, broad-based civil opposition, tending to repression and killing, such as the coup d'état in Chile in 1973 against the elected Socialist President Salvador Allende Gossens by the Chilean military. The same happened in Argentina throughout the period 1930–1983. The 20 July 1944 plot by parts of the German military to overthrow the elected National Socialist government of Adolf Hitler in Germany is an example of a failed veto coup d'état.^{[citation needed]}

A coup d'état is typed according to the military rank of the lead usurper.

• The veto coup d'état and the guardian coup d'état are effected by the army's commanding officers.
• The breakthrough coup d'état is effected by junior officers (colonels or lower rank) or non-commissioned officers (sergeants). When junior officers or enlisted men so seize power, the coup d'état is a mutiny with grave implications for the organizational and professional integrity of the military.
• In a bloodless coup d'état, the threat of violence suffices to depose the incumbent. In 1889, Brazil became a republic via bloodless coup; in 1999, Pervez Musharraf assumed power in Pakistan via a bloodless coup; and, in 2006, Sonthi Boonyaratglin assumed power in Thailand as the leader of the Council for Democratic Reform under Constitutional Monarchy.

The self-coup denotes an incumbent government – aided and abetted by the military – assuming extra-constitutional powers. A historical example is President, then Emperor, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte. Modern examples include Alberto Fujimori, in Peru, who, although elected, temporarily suspended the legislature and the judiciary in 1992, becoming an authoritarian ruler, and King Gyanendra's assumption of “emergency powers” in Nepal. Another form of self-coup is when a government, having been defeated in an election, refuses to step down.

Resistance to coups d'état[link]

Many coups d'état, even if initially successful in seizing the main centres of state power, are actively opposed by certain segments of society or by the international community. Opposition can take many different forms, including an attempted counter-coup by sections of the armed forces, international isolation of the new regime, and military intervention.

Sometimes opposition takes the form of civil resistance, in which the coup is met with mass demonstrations from the population generally, and disobedience among civil servants and members of the armed forces. Cases in which civil resistance played a significant part in defeating armed coups d'état include: the Kornilov Putsch in Russia in August 1917; the Kapp Putsch in Berlin in March 1920; and the Generals' Revolt in Algiers in April 1961.^[9] The coup in the Soviet Union on 19–21 August 1991 is another case in which civil resistance was part of an effective opposition to a coup: Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, stood on top of a tank in the centre of Moscow and urged people to refuse co-operation with the coup.

Post-military-coup governments[link]

After the coup d'état, the military face the matter of what type of government to establish. In Latin America, it was common for the post-coup government to be led by a junta, a committee of the chiefs of staff of the armed forces. A common form of African post-coup government is the revolutionary assembly, a quasi-legislative body elected by the army. In Pakistan, the military leader typically assumes the title of chief martial law administrator.

According to Huntington, most leaders of a coup d'état act under the concept of right orders: they believe that the best resolution of the country's problems is merely to issue correct orders. This view of government underestimates the difficulty of implementing government policy, and the degree of political resistance to certain correct orders. It presupposes that everyone who matters in the country shares a single, common interest, and that the only question is how to pursue that single, common interest.

Current leaders who assumed power via coups d'état[link]

Title	Name	Assumed office	Country	Area of the World
Sultan	Qaboos of Oman*	23 July 1970	Oman	Middle East
President	Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo	3 August 1979	Equatorial Guinea	Sub-Saharan Africa
President	Blaise Compaoré	15 October 1987	Burkina Faso	Sub-Saharan Africa
President	Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir	30 June 1989	Sudan	Sub-Saharan Africa
President	Idriss Déby[10][11]	2 December 1990	Chad	Sub-Saharan Africa
President	Yahya Jammeh**	22 July 1994	The Gambia	Sub-Saharan Africa
Emir	Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani*	27 June 1995	Qatar	Middle East
President	François Bozizé**	15 March 2003	Central African Republic	Sub-Saharan Africa
Acting Prime Minister	Frank Bainimarama	5 December 2006	Fiji	South Pacific
President	Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz***	6 August 2008	Mauritania	Saharan Africa
President of the High Transitional Authority	Andry Rajoelina	17 March 2009	Madagascar	Sub-Saharan Africa
Interim President	Dioncounda Traoré****	11 April 2012	Mali	Sub-Saharan Africa
Head of the "military command"	Mamadu Ture Kuruma*****	12 April 2012	Guinea-Bissau	Sub-Saharan Africa

* Monarchs who overthrew their own fathers.

** Both Jammeh and Bozizé were subsequently confirmed in office by apparently free and fair elections.^[12][13] The election confirming Jammeh was marked by repression of the free press and the opposition.^[14] An opposition leader described the outcome as a "sham".^[14]

*** Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz was subsequently confirmed by a narrow margin in the Mauritanian presidential election, 2009, which were regarded as "satisfactory" by international observers.

****Overseeing new elections after the 2012 Malian coup d'état led by Amadou Sanogo forced the previous president to resign, as per the terms of a brokered reconciliation deal.

*****Promised to form a national unity government within days.

Other uses of the term[link]

The term has also been used in a corporate context more specifically as boardroom coup. CEOs that have been sacked by behind-the-scenes maneuvering include Robert Stempel of General Motors^[15][16] and John Akers of IBM, in 1992 and 1993, respectively.^[17][18]

Steve Jobs attempted management coups twice at Apple Inc.; first in 1985 when he unsuccessfully tried to oust John Sculley and then again in 1997 which successfully forced Gil Amelio to resign.^[19][20]

See also[link]

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

External links[link]

Look up coup d'état in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Media related to Coups d'état at Wikimedia Commons

Catherine Austin Fitts is the president of Solari, Inc., the publisher of The Solari Report, managing member of Solari Investment Advisory Services, LLC., and managing member of Sea Lane Advisory Services, LLC.

Background[link]

Fitts served as managing director and member of the board of directors of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co. Inc., as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing^[1] Commissioner at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush Administration, and was the president of Hamilton Securities Group, Inc., an investment bank and financial software developer.

Fitts has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from the Wharton School and studied Mandarin at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She publishes a column, "Mapping the Real Deal," in Scoop in New Zealand.

See also[link]

• Popsicle index, a quality of life measurement she devised

References[link]

External links[link]

• Fitts' Bio from Solari
• http://solari.com/00archive/doc/caf/Business_Week-27Nov1989.pdf

• http://solari.com/00archive/doc/caf/Business_Week_Wonder_Woman_of_Muni_Bonds.pdf

This article about a United States businessperson is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Thierry Meyssan (born 18 May 1957) is a French journalist and political activist.

He is the author of investigations into the extreme right-wing (particularly about the National Front Militias, which are the object of a parliamentary investigation and caused a separation of the extreme right-wing party), as well as into the Catholic Church (Opus Dei, for example).

Meyssan's book 9/11: The Big Lie (L'Effroyable imposture) challenges the official account of events of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Career[link]

In 1994, Meyssan became a staff member of the Parti Radical de Gauche, a center-left political organization, and he participates in the campaign of Bernard Tapie (1994 European elections) and Christiane Taubira (2002 presidential elections).

In 1994, he founded the Voltaire Network and also created Project Ornicar, associations promoting freedom of expression and thinking, of which he is currently president.

From 1996 to 1999, he worked as substitute coordinator of the National Committee of Surveillance against the extreme right, which held weekly meetings with the 45 major political parties, unions and associations belonging to the French left-wing in order to draw up a common response to escalating intolerance.

Between 1999 and 2002, Meyssan replaced Emma Bonino in the leading post of the Anti-prohibitionist Radical Coordination, an international organization aiming to decriminalize drug use as a means to cut organized crime's main source of income.

[edit] Publication of The Big Lie

In 2002, he published the controversial work on the September 11 terrorist attacks—9/11: The Big Lie—in which Meyssan argues that such attacks were organized by a faction of what he calls "the US military industrial complex" in order to impose a military regime. The book was translated into 28 languages;^[1] it was followed by Le Pentagate, a book arguing that the attack against the Pentagon was not carried out by a commercial airliner but a missile.

The central thesis of Le Pentagate, that a Boeing 757 did not hit The Pentagon, has been heavily criticised by other prominent 9/11 conspiracists such as Jim Hoffman.^[2][3][4]

He started a campaign at the United Nations to initiate an international investigation commission to revisit the general consensus regarding the 9/11 attacks, but he was not able to reach his objective. There was little support, except from the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Later activities[link]

In November 2005, Thierry Meyssan presided over the Axis for Peace 2005 Colloquium, which gathered over 130 participants from 37 nations in order to discuss the international situation and call a people’s mobilization in favour of international law and world peace and against the neoconservative trend.^{[citation needed]}

Meyssan is staying in Damascus (Syria). He is a journalist for the Russian weekly magazine Odnako (Однако).^[5]

Other areas of research[link]

Meyssan also believes the Beslan massacre was thought out and perpetrated by the CIA, through the terrorist leader Shamil Basayev, who Meyssan insists was a CIA strawman. The purpose of the massacre in Beslan had been, claims Meyssan, an attempt by the USA to gain control of the resources of the Caspian Sea.^[6]

2011 Libyan civil war[link]

This section requires expansion.

On 22 August 2011, Meyssan while stuck at the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli, reported live, by voice, to the Russian television network Russia Today. He claimed that, contrary to other reports, Gaddafi forces had driven the rebels from most of the city. At the same time he described that he and Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya felt in danger, accusing other CNN and BBC journalists at the hotel of being spies from the CIA and the MI6, who were allegedly giving information on objectives to the NATO and the NTC militias.

Thet same day, Meyssan reported that U.S. agents, disguised as journalists at the Rixos hotel (as he had previously indicated) had marked him for assassination. He then stated that the identities of these spies would be released in due course.^[7] Five countries offered protection to Meissan and Nazemroaya in their embassies, but they were unable to reach any of them, because of the heavy fighting around the hotel and the encirclement of some of that embassies by NTC militias^{[8][dead link][9]}

Works[link]

• La Protection des homosexuels dans le droit européen de Collectif, Projet Ornicar éd. (Paris), 1993, ISBN 2-910209-00-8.
• L'Intégration des transsexuels de Collectif, Projet Ornicar éd. (Paris), 1993, ISBN 2-910209-01-6.
• Charles Millon, le porte-glaive de Collectif, Golias (Lyon), 1999, ISBN 2-911453-39-5.
• L'Énigme Pasqua, Golias (Lyon), 2000, ISBN 2-911453-88-3.
• Terrorisme en soutane : Jean-Paul II contre l'IVG par le Réseau Voltaire pour la liberté d'expression, L'Esprit frappeur (Paris), 2000, ISBN 2-84405-141-3.
• 9/11 The Big Lie, Carnot Publishing (London), 2002, ISBN 1-59209-026-5.
• Pentagate, USA Books (New York), 2002, ISBN 1-59209-028-1.
• Os Senhores da Guerra, Frenesi (Lisboa), 2002, ISBN 972-8351-67-4.
• Foreword (with Jean Ziegler), Le Cartel Bush, Timéli (Genève), 2004, ISBN 2-940342-05-9.
• Politicamente Incorrecto, postface by Fidel Castro, Ciencias sociales (Cuba), 2004, ISBN 959-06-0640-7.
• Foreword (with José Saramago), El Neron del siglo XXI, Apostrofe (Madrid), 2004, ISBN 84-455-0258-1.
• L'Effroyable imposture 1 & Le Pentagate, Nouvelle édition annotée, Demi-lune (Paris), 2007, ISBN 978-2-9525571-6-0.
• Resistere alla menzogna in Zero, Perché la versione ufficiale sull'11/9 è un falso (avec Giulietto Chiesa), Piemme (Milan), 2007, ISBN 978-88-384-6838-4.
• L'Effroyable imposture 2. Manipulations et désinformation, Editions Alphée-Jean-Paul Bertrand (Paris), 2007, ISBN 978-2-7538-0239-1.

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Henley, Jon (April 1, 2002). "US invented air attack on Pentagon, claims French book". The Guardian (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,677112,00.html. Retrieved 2006-03-01. 
• Presentation by Thierry Meyssan under the auspices of the Arab League, Zayed Center, April 8, 2002.
• French author calls for probe into September 11 attacks, Khaleej Times, April 9, 2002.
• James S. Robbins 9/11 Denial. The French bestseller and its company, National Review, April 9, 2002.
• Thierry Meyssan, The "Clash of Civilizations", Voltaire Network, June 4, 2004.
• Did a Plane Hit the Pentagon? French Conspiracy Theorist Claims It Did Not, U.S. Département of State, June 28, 2005.
• Thierry Meyssan, Operation Sarkozy : how the CIA placed one of its agents at the presidency of the French Republic 26 July 2008

External links[link]

• Voltaire Network Official Web Site
• Axis for Peace, Official Web Site
• snopes.com
• Pentagon missile hoax
• The Pentagon No-757-Crash Theory Booby Trap for 9/11 Skeptics