Quotulatiousness

March 28, 2022

Republic to Empire: Catiline, Cicero, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar the Death Spiral

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Update 6 Feb 2024: Dr. Gabb replaced the original part 7 which discussed the cultural impact of Ancient Greece on the rising Roman Republic.

seangabb
Published 20 Feb 2021

In 120 BC, Rome was a republic with touches of democracy. A century later, it was a divine right military dictatorship. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this transformation with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.

Here is the seventh lecture, which discusses the Catiline Conspiracy and the rise and disintegration of the First Triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. There is a digression on Eastern politics and the Parthian Empire.
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May 19, 2020

The Karenist coup

Filed under: Government, Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Neil Smith on our current self-inflicted plight:

We find ourselves here, in this particular time and this particular place in the history of our republic, because of a 239-year-old oversight made by the Founding Fathers, in that the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights (the name itself is a mistake), contain no penalty clause for those — politicians, bureaucrats, policemen — who violate them. I’m not entirely sure it was accidental, but, as a result, they are violated daily, hourly, as a matter of course, and this Corona Virus farce — many others come to mind — is simply the most recent and most preposterous example.

(The name itself is an error because this document is not a mere list of privileges that the government generously lets the people exercise. Quite the opposite, it is a list of things that the government is absolutely forbidden to do It should have been called the “Bill of Limits”. And if the Founders, who had just fought and won a desperate, bloody war against the world’s most brutal and rapacious super-power, hadn’t meant them to be absolute, then why — for all you “living document” idiots out there — would they have even bothered to write them down?)

All over this bruised and battered country, a flock of mean, moronic, petty tyrants have issued illegal orders to those they clearly regard as the peasantry: stay home, avoid your fellow human beings, and above all, shut down the Machinery of Freedom which we know as capitalism. If it’s ever allowed to start up again, it must strictly be on terms that are essentially Marxist in character. No mere individual can ever again scratch his ass without written government approval and permission. In effect, the left has the revolution — as usual, achieved by somebody else — it has wanted for 180 years, since the days of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

What’s more, many otherwise decent and intelligent folks are out there begging for their rulers to let them be free again. I find that repulsive and unAmerican. And to those boobies (including Sean Hannity and Joy Behar) blubbering about patriots bring their weapons to demonstrations, listen up: the Founders meant the government to be intimidated by the people, you hapless buffoons.

My bottom line, here, is that, in the short run, we must free ourselves — now — from what we have to call Faucism. Scientific pleaders like the dictatorial doctor must be made painfully aware that when their pronouncements have clear political and economic consequences, their protests of innocence sound a bit too much like “I was just following orders”.

April 10, 2020

Did the British Engineer the Yugoslavian Coup of March 1941? – WW2 Special Episode

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

World War Two
Published 9 Apr 2020

As Hitler pressured Yugoslavia to join the Axis Powers, Britain tried to gain a Balkan ally. Then Yugoslavia did join then Axis… and then there was an anti-Axis coup in Yugoslavia. But just how much were the British involved in that coup? Let’s find out.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tv

David Stafford, “SOE and British Involvement in the Belgrade Coup d’Etat of March 1941”. In: Slavic Review 36:3 (1977) 399-419, https://www.cambridge.org/core/servic….

Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_t…
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/
Adrien Fillon – https://www.instagram.com/adrien.colo…
Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
Daniel Weiss

Sources:
Istorijski arhiv u Pančevu
IWM HU 55505, D 4311, H 10922
FOTO:FORTEPAN / MZSL/Ofner Károly
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
Portrait of Ronald Ian Campbell, courtesy National Portrait Gallery
Portrait of Frank Nelson, courtesy National Portrait Gallery
Digital Library of Slovenia

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
John Hynynen – “Dark Beginning”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”
Philip Ayers – “Trapped in a Maze”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

August 11, 2018

Post-coup Turkey – every move has served to increase Erdoğan’s hold on power

Filed under: Europe, Middle East — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Austin Bay‘s recent essay for Strategika on the post-coup Turkish political situation and its NATO membership:

Ataturk bequeathed Turkey what his greatest biographer, Andrew Mango, called “the structure of a democracy, not of a dictatorship.” He authored an orientation, not an ideology, creating a political, social, and cultural process that he believed would eventually make Turkey capable of perpetual self‐modernization. Ataturk was a political giant and a superb military commander. Eighty years after his death he remains a cult historical and political figure.

President Erdogan is a canny politician and, to be fair, Turkey’s most significant political figure since Ataturk. The green-eyed monster feeds his inner fire; Recep knows he disappears in Kemal’s giant shadow. Not capable of displacing Ataturk the man, he has chosen to replace Ataturk’s state, first under the guise of extending democracy, now behind the façade of maintaining stability. Erdogan also intends to remain in office over twice as long as Ataturk. Turkey 2034 will be an Erdoganist political construct, not Kemalist.

That last paragraph sketches a novelistic interpretation of Erdoğan’s motives. It expands on the answer I gave at Hoover’s October 2017 Military History and Contemporary Conflict symposium after Barry Strauss asked me what I thought drove Erdoğan — the deep drive that might shed light on his long-term vision for Turkey and help us craft policy responses to his challenge.

Novelistic speculations have numerous weaknesses. However, over the decades Erdoğan has supplied plot points and psychologically-indicative dialog. We are able to assess action through time. Early in his career Erdoğan routinely employed Islamist poetry: “Democracy is merely a train that we ride until we reach our destination. Mosques are our military barracks. Minarets are our spears.” That poetry led to his arrest for sedition. After his release he renounced his piously seditious poetry, claiming his fundamentalist views had fundamentally altered. His sudden commitment to Turkish democracy energized his “moderate Islamist” Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) 2002 victory over a tired and corrupted Republican Peoples Party (CHP). In 2003 the AKP became Turkey’s governing party with Erdoğan serving as prime minister.

First he tested Kemal’s structure, then he began to dismantle it. Erdoğan purged the military of suspected political opponents. A cunning narrative camouflaged his operation. He claimed European Union accession rules demanded he strip the military of its political powers and make certain Kemalist military coups entered history’s dustbin. Sometime in 2008, as Erdoğan began pursuing the Ergenekon conspiracy of “secular fundamentalists” and other secret nationalist vigilante organizations, I finally realized whatever explanation du jour Erdoğan offered for his actions, the dismantling scheme always expanded his personal power and influence.

The bizarre July 2016 coup follows the same pattern. The Turkish people defeated the coup. Ironically, Erdoğan remains in office today because Turkish citizens (across Turkey’s complex political and ethnic spectrum) courageously defended their hard-won democracy — a democracy nine challenging decades in the making. In its aftermath, however, Erdogan used emergency powers to purge Gulenist Islamists and his political opponents. He dismantled elements of the democratic system that saved him and his government.

September 15, 2017

Attempted Military Coup in Russia – The Kornilov Affair I THE GREAT WAR Week 164

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 14 Sep 2017

The situation in Russia further escalates as Lavr Kornilov attempts to gain complete power with a military coup. The result is a disaster for him and thousands of armed Bolsheviks in the streets of Petrograd.

September 8, 2017

Attempted Military Coup in Russia – The Kornilov Affair I THE GREAT WAR Week 163

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Published on 7 Sep 2017

The situation in Russia further escalates as Lavr Kornilov attempts to gain complete power with a military coup. The result is a disaster for him and thousands of armed Bolsheviks in the streets of Petrograd.

July 18, 2016

Edward Luttwak on the Turkish coup attempt

Filed under: Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

If there’s anyone more qualified than Luttwak (author of Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook (1968)) to discuss the recent coup attempt against President Erdoğan and his government, they must have been participants:

Rule No. 2 in planning a successful military coup is that any mobile forces that are not part of the plot — and that certainly includes any fighter jet squadrons — must be immobilized or too remote to intervene. (Which is why Saudi army units, for example, are based far from the capital.) But the Turkish coup plotters failed to ensure these loyal tanks, helicopters, and jets were rendered inert, so instead of being reinforced as events unfolded, the putschists were increasingly opposed. But perhaps that scarcely mattered because they had already violated Rule No. 1, which is to seize the head of the government before doing anything else, or at least to kill him.

The country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was left free to call out his followers to resist the attempted military coup, first by iPhone and then in something resembling a televised press conference at Istanbul’s airport. It was richly ironic that he was speaking under the official portrait of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of Turkey’s modern secular state, because Erdoğan’s overriding aim since entering politics has been to replace it with an Islamic republic by measures across the board: from closing secular high schools so as to drive pupils into Islamic schools to creeping alcohol prohibitions to a frenzied program of mosque-building everywhere — including major ex-church museums and university campuses, where, until recently, headscarves were prohibited.

Televised scenes of the crowds that came out to oppose the coup were extremely revealing: There were only men with mustaches (secular Turks rigorously avoid them) with not one woman in sight. Moreover, their slogans were not patriotic, but Islamic — they kept shouting “Allahu ekber” (the local pronunciation of “akbar”) and breaking out into the Shahada, the declaration of faith.

Richly ironic, too, was the prompt and total support of U.S. President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the European Union’s hapless would-be foreign minister, Federica Mogherini, in the name of “democracy.” Erdogan has been doing everything possible to dismantle Turkey’s fragile democracy: from ordering the arrest of journalists who criticized him, including the outright seizure and closure of the country’s largest newspaper, Zaman, to the very exercise of presidential power, since Turkey is not a presidential republic like the United States or France, but rather a parliamentary republic like Germany or Italy, with a mostly ceremonial president and the real power left to the prime minister. Unable to change the constitution because his Justice and Development Party (AKP) does not have enough votes in parliament, Erdogan instead installed the slavishly obedient (and mustachioed) Binali Yildirim as prime minister — his predecessor, Ahmet Davutoglu, had been very loyal, but not quite a slave — and further subverted the constitutional order by convening cabinet meetings under his own chairmanship in his new 1,000-room palace: a multibillion-dollar, 3.2 million-square-foot monstrosity (the White House is approximately 55,000 square feet), which was built without authorized funding or legal permits in a nature reserve.

July 16, 2016

Did the coup against Erdoğan fail (or was it intended to fail all along)?

Filed under: Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:39

Michael van der Galien on the coup attempt against Turkish president Erdoğan:

It’s a done deal: the military coup has failed. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AK Parti remain in power and vow to take revenge against those behind the coup.

Or, perhaps better said: against those they say are behind it.

Now that the coup has clearly failed, we can conclude that this must have been the most incompetent attempted takeover in Turkey’s troubled history. When part of the military launched their offensive last night (Turkish time), I immediately checked news channels supporting President Erdoğan. Surprisingly, none of them were taken over. The only broadcaster that was taken over was TRT Haber, the state news channel. But NTV and other channels supporting Erdoğan were left alone.

That was remarkable, but what struck me even more was the fact that these channels — especially NTV — were able to talk to the president and the prime minister. That’s strange, to put it mildly. Normally, when the military stages a coup, the civilian rulers are among the first to be arrested. After all, as long as the country’s civilian leadership are free, they can tell forces supportive of them what to do… and they can even tell the people to rise up against the coup.

And that’s exactly what happened. Both Prime Minister Binali Yildirim and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called into news programs and told their supporters to go out on the streets and fight back against the soldiers. A short while later, streets in the big cities (Ankara and Izmir) were flooded with Erdoğan supporters, who even climbed on top of tanks. Fast forward a few hours and it was officially announced that the coup had failed, and that Erdoğan and his AK Party remained in power. About 1500 soldiers were arrested.

As I wrote on Twitter yesterday, there were three options:

  1. The coup was staged by a small group within the military, which would severely limit their ability to strike.
  2. The coup was staged by the entire military, which meant Erdoğan’s chances of surviving politically were extremely small.
  3. The coup was a set-up. Think the Reichstag fire.

The main argument against option number three is that there was some very serious fighting taking place, including massive explosions. Dozens of people have been killed. If this was a fake coup, it probably was the bloodiest one ever. That’s why many people are skeptical about this option, and believe it was just an incompetent attempt at a military takeover.

November 16, 2014

Breaking: Stephen Harper installed in quiet coup by CIA!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:58

It was such a quiet coup that even the media failed to see it! Mark Taliano screams to us Canuckian sheeple that it’s time to wake up!

The biggest threat to Canada’s national security is internal. It is the offshoot of an extraordinarily successful quiet coup that imposed itself on the country with the federal election of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) in 2006, and solidified its impacts with the election of a Conservative majority in 2011.

Author, poet, academic, and former Canadian diplomat Prof. Peter Dale Scott recently disclosed a WikiLeaks cable indicating that the International Republican Institute (IRI), an off-shoot of the CIA, and a subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), helped install Stephen Harper as Canada’s Prime Minister. This was the coup.

Point 12 of the cable explains that “In addition to the campaign schools, IRI will be bringing in consultants who specialize in party renovation to discuss case studies of political parties in Germany, Spain, and Canada which successfully carried out the process”

My GOD! Canadian political parties bringing in American advisors? This must be resisted! We won’t stand for filthy imperialistic Yankee scum polluting our pristine and uncorrupted political sphere!! Oh, wait … Justin has American advisors too? Oh. Move along: nothing to see here. Move along.

Dr. Anthony James Hall, Professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge, in Alberta, explains the genesis of the Harper Conservative assault on the “Red Tory” traditions of Canada’s indigenous conservative party in Flanagan’s Last Stand?:

    The assault by the Harper-Flanagan juggernaut on the generally friendly orientation of Canadian conservatism towards the state, towards Indigenous peoples, and towards the institutions of Crown sovereignty helped clear aside obstacles to the importation from United States of the Republican Party’s jihad on managed capitalism. Flanagan and Harper took charge of the Canadian version of the Reagan Revolution aimed at transforming the social welfare state into the stock market state.

I’d love to say this was just a parody, but I think at least some people on the left really do believe all of this.

February 22, 2014

Ukrainian President flees coup

Filed under: Europe, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

The situation in Ukraine just got more fluid, as President Yanukovych is said to have fled from Kiev and the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament announced a vote to remove him from the presidency. James Marson, Alan Cullison and Alexander Kolyandr report for the Wall Street Journal:

Government authority appeared to melt away Saturday, leaving protesters in control of the capital’s center. President Viktor Yanukovych left the capital for a city in the country’s Russian-speaking east and vowed to remain in power.

In a television interview Saturday afternoon in Kharkiv, Mr. Yanukovych denounced the events in Kiev as a “coup d’etat” that he blamed on “bandits.”

“I have no plans to leave the country and I have no plans to resign. I am the legally elected president and all the international intermediaries I’ve talked to (over the last few days) have given me guarantees of security. We’ll see how those are fulfulled,” Mr. Yanukovych told a small TV station in Kharkiv.

Opposition leader Vitali Klitschko earlier had called on parliament to vote to oust Mr. Yanukovych and announce presidential elections in May, as police withdrew from the center of the capital Saturday.

Ukraine opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko was expected to be released from prison within hours, according to a spokeswoman for the opposition.

Ukraine is divided politically and linguistically on almost the same line:

Ukraine language map

The BBC reports that new elections have been called for May 25:

Ukrainian MPs have voted to oust President Yanukovych and hold early presidential elections on 25 May.

Mr Yanukovych’s spokeswoman said he did not accept the decision.

Earlier on Saturday, protesters walked unchallenged into the president’s office and residential compounds.

Also on Saturday afternoon, prominent opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko was freed from a hospital in the eastern city of Kharkiv where she was being held under prison guard.

A BBC correspondent saw Tymoshenko driven away in a car after leaving the hospital.

MPs had voted to pave the way for her release on Friday. She was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2011 for abuse of power.

Her supporters have always maintained this was simply Mr Yanukovych taking out his most prominent opponent, and her release has always been a key demand of the protest movement.

September 20, 2011

Finnish MP calls for military coup in Greece

Filed under: Europe, Greece, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

I guess somebody felt they needed a bit of international headline stimulant:

Jussi Halla-aho, an MP for the populist True Finns party, wrote on social networking website Facebook on Wednesday that the Greek government should use military force against workers on strike.

“What Greece needs at this particular point in time is a military junta that would not have to worry about its popularity and could use tanks to enforce some order among strikers and rioters,” Halla-aho wrote.

The Facebook entry soon sparked outrage, with Halla-aho removing it and retracting his comment.

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