FWIW, bin Laden said shortly after 9/11 that “Americans were in a panic, thinking there was a coup.” A prime case of projection of one’s own thought process or culture/background onto others.
Anyway, I stop digressing.
I didn’t feel I was evading the question. I just feel it wasn’t a coup attempt unless it had some remote possibility of success, which this did not.
If I put a bumper sticker on my car that says “Overthrow the Government” and drive it around town, is that a coup attempt? If I burn a flag in public, is that a coup attempt? If I throw a brick through the window of a federal office building, is that a coup attempt? If I put a bomb in a federal office building and blow it up killing hundreds of federal employees, is that a coup attempt? I’d say no to all of these because none of them have any chance of actually overthrowing the government.
We should call this a terrorist attack, recognize it as a serious crime, and treat the perpetrators appropriately. But we shouldn’t call this a coup attempt because that creates the danger that we won’t be paying attention to genuine coup attempts that don’t look like this.
I disagree. We shouldn’t let the crazy people decide what things are. They would probably tell you they’re all patriots, so should we call them that?
We shouldn’t let people like this impose their false reality on the rest of us. These people are not patriots and what they did was not a coup attempt, even if they believe these things.
By your definition the Beer Hall Putsch wasn’t a coup attempt because it didn’t succeed.
What would a genuine coup look like, if it isn’t a riotous mob spurred into attacking our government at the behest of the outgoing regime, with the specific purpose of preventing a changeover in power? A mob aided by sympathetic members of the government, by police, by military, by insiders at the Capitol giving intelligence to mob leaders and disabling emergency communications?
The moment Trump whipped the mob up for action there was certainly, on the part of Trump and his 140 lackeys inside the building who insisted in objecting, a half-arsed attempt at an autogolpe, at flipping the table and decreeing that Trump has to stay in charge. The rioting mob was in turn both their useful-idiot cannon fodder and their distraction, in the hope that things would devolve into chaos and open up the opportunity to do their takeover.
Simultaneous to that, this was the expression of a more dangerous other trend, in which a huge number of Americans have become convinced that that if the elections and courts don’t let them have their way, then it is a legitimate alternative to threaten physical violence against the institutions of state and the persons in it, and render the country ungovernable unless they do, and they should prepare for action at some unspecified signal point (which they took to be that day and now continue to set for future days). So there has been an attempted coup AND a “first shot” of a not-necessarily-self-contained seditous insurrection, supported by a major faction inside the goverment itself.
These are people who have had it drilled into them that even while Republicans had the presidency and majority, they were being constantly victimized by Liberal “tyranny” and it’s just a matter of time before direct action is needed. Trump and his elder offspring could drop dead while I’m typing this, and those 140 lackeys in Capitol Hill, and the hundreds more in statehouses and sherriff ofices across the continent, will continue to tell that mass of subversives that they do NOT have to abide by any legal, electoral or judiciary result they don’t like, that any sanctions taken against them are an offense to “freedom”, and that it’s the Liberals who want to keep up division and resentment.
That’s not what I said. I didn’t say a coup attempt has to succeed; if it does it’s a coup not a coup attempt. I said a coup attempt has to have a remote chance of succeeding. I’ll admit I don’t know the German political situation in 1923 well enough to say whether the Beer Hall Putsch had any chance of succeeding.
That about sums it up.
Those are free speech.
If you did so with the expectation of changing the government, then yes.
Look, you are a corrections officer, so I assume that you can handle yourself in a fight. I haven’t been in a fight in almost 20 years. If I come at you with a knife, trying to kill you, that would be attempted murder, even though it would have very little chance in succeeding. It would be stupid, and I’d probably end up looking silly, but it certainly would be fair to charge me with what my intent was.
As to your second point, I don’t think that shying away from calling this a coup attempt will do anything of the like. I would say it would be far more likely that if we dismiss this attempt at overthrowing our government, then the next attempt will also have the same excuses as to why it wasn’t a coup as well.
If you will only count it as a coup attempt if it actually is likely to succeed, then you are too late to the party.
I can understand that. But I think we have a fundamental disagreement here in our outlooks.
I would argue those are one and the same coup attempt. Sure, they weren’t completely coordinated together, but one was the impetus for the other. Trump egged them on, but even pretending there was any evidence of voter fraud or that they had any power to invalidate a state’s slate of electors was why these traitors thought they could use this to install Trump as dictator.
Congress had one job–to take on the results of each state’s Electoral College election. They were empowered to evaluate whether or not they legitimately came from the state in question, nothing else. They could decide which one of two slates of electors were official. They were not empowered to disregard the electors and results the states had verified.
To me, it’s all part of one attempt. You had the people in power in Congress trying to create a “legal” way to overthrow the government, making it seem like they had the power to do so. You had Trump creating the illusion that there was something wrong. You had Trump’s makeshift army who were ready to follow demands, and you had Trump again deliberately ordering them and egging them on.
That’s why the smarter Congressional representatives backed down when they saw the coup attempt fail. They knew they’d be seen as part of it, and tried to cover their own asses.
Congress had no power to invalidate votes under the Constitution. That law only allowed them the ability to decide which from multiple slate of electors was the official one from the State. Even if they thought there was fraud, the States clearly didn’t. They certified these results, and only these results. There’s no way it would been allowed to be used to disenfranchise entire states.
Had they not entertained this fictional power, none of this could have happened.
Yes, if there had been a widespread movement throughout the country with actual military and paramilitary support for the rioters in the Capital building, there might have been a chance of success.
As posted above, a coup is a “sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government.”
So no putting “Overthrow the Government” on your car is not a coup because it is not violent. Blowing up a federal building would be a coup if the perpetrators really believed that doing so would be sufficient to bring down the government. Throwing a brick through a window may be a gray area, depending on how the perpetrator thought this action would result in sudden regime change. But an individual jumping over the whitehouse fence armed only with a butter knife in an attempt to assasinate the president, would be an attempted coup, just not one that was worth paying attention to.
In the case of the Capitol attack, many thought that this action would set off the “Storm”
They see The Storm as a day of violent retribution, when Trump’s enemies in the Democratic Party and those they as regard traitors in the Republican Party will face mass executions.
That sounds like a coup to me.
Not really.
I think the idea is that this would come after the executions of Pence, Pelosi, McDonnell, and other traitors to the cause.
If you came at me with a knife, there would be a realistic possibility that you might kill me. That would be a murder attempt.
But if you were locked in your cell and you were attempting to kill me by poking needles into a voodoo doll effigy you had made of me, that would not be a murder attempt. Even if you were a devout believer in voodoo who thought your efforts would kill me.
I tend to feel the opposite way. I feel if society elevates this riot by calling it a coup attempt, we increase the possibility that other groups will follow their example and try to stage their own coups.
If we treat it like what it was, a terrorist attack, I feel we’re not giving other groups any false hopes that they can succeed in overthrowing the government this way.
As I’ve written in this thread, I feel a greater danger is that if we start thinking about a riot by armed men as a coup attempt, we increase the chances that we won’t see the signs of a real coup attempt when it’s carried out by quiet men in suits.
People have mentioned the example of the Beer Hall Putsch. I think we should keep in mind Hitler didn’t get into power because of the Beer Hall Putsch. He got into power because of back room political deals.
I’ve posted this link in a bunch of threads and Riemann even posted this way upthread but perhaps you’ve missed it:
Be sure to check out the pictures of the coup, eh.
The insurgents wanted to interrupt a government function so that the incumbent President would avoid being unseated. That’s the definition of an autogolpe (self-coup).
They didn’t succeed, so it was an attempted coup.
It was spectacularly ill-conceived and wouldn’t have actually resulted in a coup, so from the outside it would be fair to call it a putsch.
But their intent definitely was to attempt a coup, and that’s how they should be judged.
And it’s important to remember, a putsch often leads to a successful coup in a few years. This has to stop now.
Nah. This analogy fails because you’ve made the kid powerless. Give him a loaded pistol, and it fits, and is no longer such a funny and harmless picture.
What if the Vice President and some congress members had been killed? Do you think that there was a remote possibility of that happening? Do you think that there’s a remote possibility that the consequences of that might involve an attempt to further seize power “peacefully” beyond inauguration day by Trump and Republicans?
No, that is basic speech, and I would argue not even specific enough to be incitement.
No, that is also speech, and even less specific than the prior example.
Depends. 1. What is your motive? 2. What is on the other side of the window? 3. What is your plan once you’ve broken through the window?
If you intend to overthrow the government using non-democratic means, they are literally counting the votes on the other side of the window, and your plan is to climb through the window and stop the process, then yes.
Again, depends. If the building is in Oklahoma City and is meant to send a message, I would say it is terrorism. If the building is the United States Capitol Building, the hundreds of federal employees are in the process of counting the vote, and your intent is to slow or stop them from doing that, then yes, it is both terrorism and a coup attempt.
If I go down to my city hall while they are counting votes, bust in with a gun, and force them to declare me mayor what has occured? It would be stupid for sure. It would have no chance of succeeding in the long term, but I would argue it was a coup on the city government. I also think it is terrorism, too.
