Coup Attempt?

23 February 1981: Antonio Tejero leads a coup d’état against Spain’s government

Some of it may be hyperbole, but I’d say sending 75,000 “troops” to our cities is too dangerous to ignore. We need to take Mr. Trump at his word. This is more “troops” than we currently have in Afghanistan (about 8,000).

This is a planned invasion of U.S. cities controlled by Democrats. This sets up the possibility of intimidation during the November election. I’d consider this a coup attempt.

“Sometimes coups have been executive usurpations: an established head of state (president or prime minister, for example), falsely claiming an emergency, acts to suspend constitutional government and establish a dictatorship.4 Sometimes coups have been led by a dictatorial political party, with or without its own paramilitary forces. Coups may also be initiated by a section of the ruling elite backed by other groups. If the coup is to succeed it is important that non-participants in the coup be supportive, remain passive, or be made ineffective. Because of its minority and conspiratorial nature, a coup is the opposite of a mass popular revolution (although putschists may call their action a “revolution”).”

Gene Sharp, The Anti-Coup, The Albert Einstein Institution. All material is in the public domain.

Urgent: Action Needed. Please Share Widely

Just a reminder: Despite evidence that Mr. Trump is using the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as his personal police force (at the border and on our streets), House Democrats just passed a bill out of committee authorizing continued funding of the DHS.

The bill provided significant leverage for the Democrats to rein in Mr. Trump’s actions. They could have delayed passage of it until Mr. Trump removed his personal police force from American cities. The fact that Democrats refused to act (or not act, in this case) casts doubt on their commitment to civil liberties and addressing the demands to end racist policing.

This article, “Is it Time to Defund the Department of Homeland Security?” notes the bill does contain some border-related restrictions on DHS activities, but progressive Democrats intend to vote against it because continued funding of DHS as it currently operates is unacceptable. Nonetheless, the bill is likely to pass the Democratic-controlled House.

The restrictions on DHS border activities will be stripped away in final bill negotiations between the House and the Republican-controlled Senate.

To borrow a concept from Dr. Snyder’s book On Tyranny, institutions will not save us if we don’t save the institutions. Congress, including Democrats, are failing badly. Institutional inertia is causing them to act as if the situation we are in is normal, so the regular activities of Congress proceed unchanged.

The situation is not normal. We are nearing a coup.We must apply pressure – letters, phone calls, emails, and at town halls meetings – to Congressional delegations (Democrats and Republicans) to let them know they are failing their institutional duty to legislate in the best interests of the country. After that, hit the streets!

INF Treaty

Today in History

From This Day in History

Gorbachev Accepts INF Treaty, 1987

Another semi-personal event: I was stationed at RAF Molesworth during its GLCM years. I deployed in the field as shown in the above right photograph, and I was present when Soviet inspectors performed an initial compliance inspection.

In a dramatic turnaround, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev indicates that he is willing to negotiate a ban on intermediate-range nuclear missiles without conditions. Gorbachev’s decision paved the way for the groundbreaking Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with the United States.

Since coming to power in 1985, Gorbachev had made it clear that he sought a less contentious relationship with the United States. His American counterpart, President Ronald Reagan, was a staunch anticommunist and initially harbored deep suspicions about Gorbachev’s sincerity.

After meeting with Gorbachev in November 1985, however, Reagan came to believe that progress might be made on a number of issues, including arms control. In subsequent summit meetings, the two leaders focused on the so-called intermediate-range nuclear missiles that both nations had massed in Europe and around the world.

In late 1986, it appeared that the two nations were close to an agreement that would eliminate the weapons from Europe. Negotiations stumbled, however, when Gorbachev demanded that the elimination of the missiles be accompanied by U.S. abandonment of its development of the strategic defense initiative (the “Star Wars” plan). The talks broke down while Reagan and Gorbachev traded accusations of bad faith.

On July 22, 1987, Gorbachev dramatically announced that he was ready to discuss the elimination of intermediate-range missiles on a worldwide basis, with no conditions. By dropping his objection to the strategic defense initiative (which was one of Reagan’s pet projects), Gorbachev cleared the way for negotiations, and he and Reagan agreed to meet again.

Gorbachev’s change of mind was the result of a number of factors. His own nation was suffering from serious economic problems and Gorbachev desperately wanted to cut Russia’s military spending. In addition, the growing “no-nukes” movement in Europe was interfering with his ability to conduct diplomatic relations with France, Great Britain, and other western European nations. Finally, Gorbachev seemed to have a sincere personal trust in and friendship with Ronald Reagan, and this feeling was apparently reciprocal.

In December 1987, during a summit in Washington, the two men signed off on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons.

Our Reichstag Fire

The Black Lives Matter demonstrations are our Reichstag Fire. The Trump regime is using them as a “state of exception” to dismantled democratic rule.

The answer is a massive presence in the streets, even in places the Feds haven’t deployed. Only a strong show of ongoing resistance will protect us. Now is not the time to sit on the sidelines and watch. If you’re able-bodied, you need to be in the street.

“The Reichstag Fire was used to create a “state of exception,” as Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s favorite legal scholar, called it. In Schmitt’s terms, a state of exception arises when an emergency, a singular event, shakes up the accepted order of things. This is when the sovereign steps forward and institutes new, extralegal rules. The emergency enables a quantum leap: Having amassed enough power to declare a state of exception, the sovereign then, by that declaration, acquires far greater, unchecked power. That is what makes the change irreversible, and the state of exception permanent.”

Masha Gessen, “Surviving Autocracy,” pp. 10-11.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams Die, 1826

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From This Day in History

On July 4, 1826, former Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who were once fellow Patriots and then adversaries, die on the same day within five hours of each other.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were the last surviving members of the original American revolutionaries who had stood up to the British empire and forged a new political system in the former colonies.However, while they both believed in democracy and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their opinions on how to achieve these ideals diverged over time.

Adams preceded Jefferson as president (1797-1800); it was during this time that their ideas about policy-making became as distinct as their personalities.

The irascible and hot-tempered Adams was a firm believer in a strong centralized government, while the erudite and genteel Jefferson believed federal government should take a more hands-off approach and defer to individual states’ rights.

As Adams’ vice president, Jefferson was so horrified by what he considered to be Adams’ abuse of the presidency–particularly his passage of the restrictive Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798–that he abandoned Adams and Washington for his estate at Monticello.

There, he plotted how to bring his Republican faction back into power in the presidential election of 1800. After an exceptionally bitter campaign, in which both parties engaged in slanderous attacks on each other in print, Jefferson emerged victorious. It appeared the former friends would be eternal enemies.

After serving two presidential terms (1801-1809), Jefferson and Adams each expressed to third parties their respect the other and their desire to renew their friendship. Adams was the first to break the silence; he sent Jefferson a letter dated January 1, 1812, in which he wished Jefferson many happy new years to come.

Jefferson responded with a note in which he fondly recalled when they were fellow laborers in the same cause. The former revolutionaries went on to resume their friendship over 14 years of correspondence during their golden years.

On July 4, 1826, at the age of 90, Adams lay on his deathbed while the country celebrated Independence Day. His last words were, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” He was mistaken: Jefferson had died five hours earlier at Monticello at the age of 83.

U.S. Warship Downs Iranian Passenger Jet

Today in History

From This Day in History, 1988

In the Persian Gulf, the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes shoots down an Iranian passenger jet that it mistakes for a hostile Iranian fighter aircraft.

Two missiles were fired from the American warship—the aircraft was hit, and all 290 people aboard were killed.

The attack came near the end of the Iran-Iraq War, when U.S. vessels were in the gulf defending Kuwaiti oil tankers. Minutes before Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down, the Vincennes had engaged Iranian gunboats that shot at its helicopter.

Iran called the downing of the aircraft a “barbaric massacre,” but U.S. officials defended the action, claiming that the aircraft was outside the commercial jet flight corridor, flying at only 7,800 feet, and was on a descent toward the Vincennes.

However, one month later, U.S. authorities acknowledged that the airbus was in the commercial flight corridor, flying at 12,000 feet, and not descending.

The U.S. Navy report blamed crew error caused by psychological stress on men who were in combat for the first time.

In 1996, the U.S. agreed to pay $62 million in damages to the families of the Iranians killed in the attack.

France Gives the Statue of Liberty to the U.S., 1884

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From This Day in History

In a ceremony held in Paris on July 4, 1884, the completed Statue of Liberty is formally presented to the U.S. ambassador as a commemoration of the friendship between France and the United States.

The idea for the statue was born in 1865, when the French historian and abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye proposed a monument to commemorate the upcoming centennial of U.S. independence (1876), the perseverance of American democracy and the liberation of the nation’s slaves.

By 1870, sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi had come up with sketches of a giant figure of a robed woman holding a torch—possibly based on a statue he had previously proposed for the opening of the Suez Canal.

Bartholdi traveled to the United States in the early 1870s to drum up enthusiasm and raise funds for a proposed Franco-American monument to be located on Bedloe’s Island, in New York’s harbor.

Upon his return to France, he and Laboulaye created the Franco-American Union, which raised some 600,000 francs from the French people.

Work on the statue, formally called “Liberty Enlightening the World,” began in France in 1875. A year later, the completed torch and left forearm went on display in Philadelphia and New York to help with U.S. fundraising for the building of the statue’s giant pedestal.

Constructed of hammered copper sheets formed over a steel framework perfected by engineer Gustave Eiffel (who joined the project in 1879), the completed Statue of Liberty stood just over 151 feet high and weighed 225 tons when it was completed in 1884.

After the July 4 presentation to Ambassador Levi Morton in Paris that year, the statue was disassembled and shipped to New York City, where it would be painstakingly reconstructed.

Meanwhile, publisher Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World had stepped in to help raise funds for the pedestal’s construction, raising more than $100,000 in donations by mid-1885.

In October 1886, the pedestal on Bedloe’s Island was completed, and the Statue of Liberty was formally dedicated in a ceremony presided over by President Grover Cleveland.

Six years later, the inspection station on neighboring Ellis Island opened, welcoming more than 12 million immigrants to the United States between 1892 and 1954.

Above them, the Statue of Liberty brandished her torch, embodying the most famous words from Emma Lazarus’ 1883 poem “The New Colossus,” written to raise funds for the pedestal and later inscribed on a plaque at its base: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

Mutiny on the Amistad

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From This Day in History

Mutiny on the Amistad, 1839

Early in the morning, enslaved Africans on the Cuban schooner Amistad rise up against their captors, killing two crew members and seizing control of the ship, which had been transporting them to a life of slavery on a sugar plantation at Puerto Principe, Cuba.

In 1807, the U.S. Congress joined with Great Britain in abolishing the African slave trade, although the trading of enslaved people within the United States was not prohibited.

Despite the international ban on the importation of enslaved Africans, Cuba continued to transport captive Africans to its sugar plantations until the 1860s, and Brazil to its coffee plantations until the 1850s.

On June 28, 1839, 53 people recently captured in Africa left Havana, Cuba, aboard the Amistad schooner for a sugar plantation at Puerto Principe, Cuba.

Three days later, Sengbe Pieh, a Membe African known as Cinque, freed himself and the other enslaved people and planned a mutiny.

Early in the morning of July 2, in the midst of a storm, the enslaved people rose up against their captors and, using sugar-cane knives found in the hold, killed the captain of the vessel and a crew member. Two other crew members were either thrown overboard or escaped, and Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montes, the two Cubans who had purchased the enslaved people, were captured.

Cinque ordered the Cubans to sail the Amistad east back to Africa. During the day, Ruiz and Montes complied, but at night they would turn the vessel in a northerly direction, toward U.S. waters.

After almost nearly two difficult months at sea, during which time more than a dozen Africans perished, what became known as the “black schooner” was first spotted by American vessels.

On August 26, the USS Washington, a U.S. Navy brig, seized the Amistad off the coast of Long Island and escorted it to New London, Connecticut. Ruiz and Montes were freed, and the Africans were imprisoned pending an investigation of the Amistad revolt.

The two Cubans demanded the return of their supposedly Cuban-born slaves, while the Spanish government called for the Africans’ extradition to Cuba to stand trial for piracy and murder. In opposition to both groups, American abolitionists advocated the return of the illegally bought people to Africa.

The story of the Amistad mutiny garnered widespread attention, and U.S. abolitionists succeeded in winning a trial in a U.S. court. Before a federal district court in Connecticut, Cinque, who was taught English by his new American friends, testified on his own behalf. On January 13, 1840, Judge Andrew Judson ruled that the Africans were illegally enslaved, that they would not be returned to Cuba to stand trial for piracy and murder, and that they should be granted free passage back to Africa.

The Spanish authorities and U.S. President Martin Van Buren appealed the decision, but another federal district court upheld Judson’s findings. President Van Buren, in opposition to the abolitionist faction in Congress, appealed the decision again. On February 22, 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court began hearing the Amistad case. U.S. Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, who had served as the sixth president of the United States from 1825 to 1829, joined the Africans’ defense team.

In Congress, Adams had been an eloquent opponent of slavery, and before the nation’s highest court he presented a coherent argument for the release of Cinque and the 34 other survivors of the Amistad. On March 9, 1841, the Supreme Court ruled, with only one dissent, that the Africans had been illegally enslaved and had thus exercised a natural right to fight for their freedom.

In November, with the financial assistance of their abolitionist allies, the Amistad Africans departed America aboard the Gentleman on a voyage back to West Africa. Some of the Africans helped establish a Christian mission in Sierra Leone, but most, like Cinque, returned to their homelands in the African interior.

One of the survivors, who was a child when taken aboard the Amistad, eventually returned to the United States. Originally named Margru, she studied at Ohio’s integrated and coeducational Oberlin College in the late 1840s before returning to Sierra Leone as evangelical missionary Sara Margru Kinson.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

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From This Day in History

Civil Rights Act Signed, 1964

On July 2, 1964, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs into law the historic Civil Rights Act in a nationally televised ceremony at the White House.

In the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. The 10 years that followed saw great strides for the African American civil rights movement, as non-violent demonstrations won thousands of supporters to the cause.

Memorable landmarks in the struggle included the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955—sparked by the refusal of Alabama resident Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a city bus to a white woman—and the “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. at a rally of hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., in 1963.

As the strength of the civil rights movement grew, John F. Kennedy made passage of a new civil rights bill one of the platforms of his successful 1960 presidential campaign. As Kennedy’s vice president, Johnson served as chairman of the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunities.

After Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Johnson vowed to carry out his proposals for civil rights reform.

The Civil Rights Act fought tough opposition in the House and a lengthy, heated debate in the Senate before being approved in July 1964. For the signing of the historic legislation, Johnson invited hundreds of guests to a televised ceremony in the White House’s East Room.

After using more than 75 pens to sign the bill, he gave them away as mementoes of the historic occasion, in accordance with tradition. One of the first pens went to King, leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who called it one of his most cherished possessions. Johnson gave two more to Senators Hubert Humphrey and Everett McKinley Dirksen, the Democratic and Republican managers of the bill in the Senate.

The most sweeping civil rights legislation passed by Congress since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, the Civil Rights Act prohibited racial discrimination in employment and education and outlawed racial segregation in public places such as schools, buses, parks and swimming pools.

In addition, the bill laid important groundwork for a number of other pieces of legislation—including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which set strict rules for protecting the right of African Americans to vote—that have since been used to enforce equal rights for women as well as all minorities and LGBTQ people.

Chief Tecumseh

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From This Day in History

Chief Tecumseh Urges Native Americans to Unite Against White Settlers

Alarmed by the growing encroachment of whites settlers squatting on Native American lands, the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh calls on all Native peoples to unite and resist.

Born around 1768 near Springfield, Ohio, Tecumseh won early notice as a brave warrior. He fought in battles between the Shawnee and the white Kentuckians, who were invading the Ohio River Valley territory.

After the Americans won several important battles in the mid-1790s, Tecumseh reluctantly relocated westward but remained an implacable foe of the white men and their ways.

By the early 19th century, many Shawnee and other Ohio Valley tribes were becoming increasingly dependent on trading with the Americans for guns, cloth, and metal goods.

Tecumseh spoke out against such dependence and called for a return to traditional Native American ways. He was even more alarmed by the continuing encroachment of white settlers illegally settling on the already diminished government-recognized land holdings of the Shawnee and other tribes.

The American government, however, was reluctant to take action against its own citizens to protect the rights of the Ohio Valley Indians.

On this day in 1809, Tecumseh began a concerted campaign to persuade the tribes of the Old Northwest and Deep South to unite and resist.

Together, Tecumseh argued, the various tribes had enough strength to stop the whites from taking further land.

Heartened by this message of hope, Native Americans from as far away as Florida and Minnesota heeded Tecumseh’s call. By 1810, he had organized the Ohio Valley Confederacy, which united Native peoples from the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Winnebago, Menominee, Ottawa and Wyandot nations.

For several years, Tecumseh’s Indian Confederacy successfully delayed further white settlement in the region. In 1811, however, the future president William Henry Harrison led an attack on the confederacy’s base on the Tippecanoe River.

At the time, Tecumseh was in the South attempting to convince more tribes to join his movement. Although the battle of Tippecanoe was close, Harrison finally won out and destroyed much of Tecumseh’s army.

When the War of 1812 began the following year, Tecumseh immediately marshaled what remained of his army to aid the British. Commissioned a brigadier general, he proved an effective ally and played a key role in the British capture of Detroit and other battles.

When the tide of war turned in the American favor, Tecumseh’s fortunes went down with those of the British. On October 5, 1813, he was killed during Battle of the Thames. His Ohio Valley Confederacy and vision of Native American unity died with him.