Why do generals attempting to coup always storm the palace? What happens next? Why do ordinary soldiers follow them? Are they in on the plot?
In: Economics
During the Egyptian uprising in 2011 sometime around that the people of that country stood up and took back their country had a democratic election and the Muslim brotherhood won. USA didn’t like that so they told the Egyptian military which the USA has a close relationship with since it built it from the ground up with Mubarak senior. Some coups are it’s about hegemony and keeping world order and the status quo
You ever see that movie with Tom Hanks and the pirates?
Tom Hanks = President of Country
Pirates = “I’m the president now”
Basically dudes with guns take over. You have less guns, you loose.
As to why ordinary soldiers join the coup, there’s a few reasons. The prominent ones is that their officers have cultivated a local power base where they, not the central government, provides money and food for their troops (and sometimes even the local population). This was really popular with the Romans during their numerous civil wars, but you can also see this in modern coups like in Africa and Latin America.
The second is that a lot of enlisted men don’t have much autonomy. Yes soldiers can resist and not participate in orders that are either illegal or against the state, but when all of your direct superiors are on board there’s a lot of pressure (from both a societal pov and because you’ll be arrested) to follow them. And if pretty much everyone in your regiment is doing the coup you’re going to be doing it too.
Coups are the ultimate example of how “might makes right”. Power is always taken or given by the party that can project the most physical power.
Putin is in power because he figured out how to project strength even if that strength is largely a paper tiger. I’m sure he did his fair share of assassinations, too.
In the US the power is supposedly still with the people so elections happen where they give the power temporarily to this person or party. Part of the purpose of the 2nd amendment is if the government ever becomes tyrannical again, the people would still have the means to overthrow it. That logic is a bit harder to hold in the 21st century, but that was as the original intent.
If you can physically force the seat of government to do your bidding, you become the de facto government. That’s why Jan 6 was so surprising/upsetting — we hadn’t seen that kind of violent effort to overthrow American government since the Civil War. Americans usually only support coups in other countries
In a nutshell: you get the military in your back pocket first, then you kill the man in charge and all his his loyal men. At that point you say “i have all the guns, and now i’m in charge”. And everyone else is like, “i don’t wanna fight the military, so okay, you get to be in charge now”.
Coups are like an extreme office takeover but on a national level. Here’s a simple breakdown:
1. **Plotting**: A group of people, usually military or political insiders, get fed up with the current leadership and secretly plan to take over.
2. **Action**: They strike swiftly, often targeting key locations like government buildings, military bases, and media stations to gain control quickly.
3. **Control**: If they succeed, they announce their victory, often declaring a new leader and trying to get the public and other officials on board.
4. **Stability**: The new leaders then work to solidify their power, dealing with any resistance and trying to get things back to normal—under their rule, of course.
It’s like flipping a board game, grabbing all the pieces, and trying to set it up again before anyone can stop you!
A Coup and a Mutany aren’t that different.
It’s basically a hostile takeover by conspiring against the current leadership, oftentimes secretly.
People get unhappy with the way things are ran, think they can run things better, get busy and organize, then at a certain moment they decide to make a coordinated strike
It’s essentially a very small war with little resistance from the other side. Anyone with some guns could try to take over a country, the big question is whether there’s anyone with a similar number of (or more) guns who is willing and able to try to stop them
If the other side puts up more resistance it may turn into a civil war
But “it’s a tiny war” is the simplest way to think about it – they storm the government buildings, take control, and declare themselves as the new government
Coups are really interesting because they hit at that intersection of the two conceptions we have of power – there is power in terms of force: the threat of violence to get people do what you want, and there is power in terms of legitimacy: getting people to do what you want because you _deserve_ to be listened to.
A coup is using the first to get some of the second. Ideally, you use a short burst of violence to commandeer the institutions of the state, and then everyone goes back to their lives, except you’re in charge now.
Storming the palace hits at both of these conceptions of power. In a practical sense, you have to get rid of the old power structure, and the easiest way to do that is to physically threaten them with violence, and that means you have to be where they are. You need to have guns to their heads making sure they don’t call their friends or make any orders to counter you.
In a more symbolic sense, taking the palace endows you with legitimacy. It’s easier to claim to be the legitimate authority if you have all the trappings of power, and that means the office and the desk and the palace guards.
Why do ordinary soldiers go along? Sometimes they don’t really know anything beforehand. In countries with strong militaries and weak civilian governments, ordinary soldiers are often willing to do what their commanding officers say, even if that means going in to arrest the president. In countries with stronger governments, the ordinary soldier often has something to gain: perhaps the civilian leadership is running the country into the ground. Perversely, sometimes soldiers rise up because civilian leaderships try to treat their people better… by redistributing benefits away from the smaller military class.
What happens after a coup? Assuming you’ve made it into the palace, the president is under guard in some back room, and you’ve secured the key points of the country, it’s time to proclaim your rule and explain what you’ve done. If you’ve shown enough strength, the power brokers will decide it’s not worth fighting you (openly anyway), and you’ve won for now.
If you haven’t, some disgruntled general or politician might openly declare against you, and then it’ll be you fighting off rebels.
A “coup d’etat” is defined as
> a sudden, violent, and unlawful seizure of power from a government
So it needs to change who’s in power, be violent, sudden, and not the previously agreed way that the transfer should happen to count as a coup.
The interesting things about governments is they are made up, and beacuse they are made up there’s no real rules.
Whoever is in change is who we collectively agree is in charge, and that’s all there really is to it.
So you don’t need the army or generals to be on your side for it to work, they just need to not do anything about your sudden rise to power. That might be beacuse they like you more than the last guy, or fear you and your influence.
You also don’t need to storm the palace, but most of the time people won’t agree you are in charge if the last guy is still going around saying they are in charge. The easiest way to handle that is to kill or imprison anyone else who people could say is in charge.
You could do that while they are out and about, but theres also a symbolic gesture in storming the building where they are supposed to rule from.
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