Good and Bad Coups

by Norman Berdichevsky (October 2013)

None of these beautiful souls and their predecessors in 1982 carried a sign or uttered a word when Hafez al-Assad (the Father) leveled the city of Hama with artillery barrages resulting in the deaths of somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 to 20,000 people. Neither then did any spokesperson for the invisible, deaf, dumb and blind so-called international community have a word to say about the matter nor did any Western journalists who were denied access to the city for more than a decade.

What has transpired in Syria over the past 30 months never qualified as reason enough to express any sentiment over the deaths of many tens of thousands of civilians, the displacement of two million people and the destruction of any order approaching what can be called civil society. The Syrian embassy has not been protected by any special detachment of police or troops, not in Washington, or Buenos Aires or London or Moscow or Copenhagen or Beijing or anywhere else.

Much more recent and even more dramatically a case in question is the example of Argentinian leader Juan Peron, when he won not just by a bare plurality (the vaunted and worshipped 50.01%) but an absolute majority in three decisive and overwhelming majorities. All three elections 1946, 1953, 1973 were undoubtedly fair and free and yet he was ousted in a coup with the support of not only moderate centrists, liberal and conservative opinion and the press, the Catholic Church but the Navy and Airforce as well in 1955. Only the Army hesitated.

Madres de Plaza de Mayo) during the brief war were exposed to death threats from ordinary people.

The moral of the story (Take note Senators McCain and Graham): There are both good and bad coups.

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