When Michel Aflaq founded the ‘’Arab Baath Party,’’ he attributed a message that he called eternal to the “one Arab nation.” Many minds were left perplexed after trying to explain the meaning of that message, or why, among all the peoples of the earth, the Arabs were the ones only with a message.
The founder of the Baath Party, as was his habit, did not provide clear answers, but he did often couple this message with 'a coup.’ He did not necessarily mean a military coup, or at least that’s what he said, claiming that a comprehensive “coup in Arab life” was his goal. It soon became apparent that military coups would be the only real translation of this vague prose. Baathist officers had been the most vigorous putschists in Syria since the mid-fifties, as well as its most successful, both in terms of execution and framing it as a "revolution." In a single year, 1963, Baathist officers took control of both Iraq and Syria through two military coups launched just one month apart.
Indeed, as the decades following Arab independence demonstrated, the message at hand amounted to little more than the military coups that unseated civilian governments in several Arab countries. In fact, among the many calamitous events that have befallen the Arab world, coups remain the most sinister. They were pivotal to laying the foundations for the catastrophes and defeats that followed, spreading the ethos and behavior of police-states, obliterating civil societies, and any social, political, and cultural freedoms that had been in place .
Moreover, the coups’ venom was also made more potent by two factors, one domestic and the other global. Domestically, there is the veiled underlying sectarian or ethnic dimension to the armies’ seizures of power in countries with flimsy social fabrics. As for their global dimension, it is their conjunction, in the fifties, with Soviet expansion going beyond the “socialist bloc” that had been born a decade earlier. The sons of Stalin thereby taught the revolutionary regimes of the Arab world the arts and techniques of censorship and repression, seizing public and private life, and spreading a militaristic consciousness, the need for which stemmed from this bloc having no commodity to export but armaments.
While it is true that the toppled regimes were not of the sort that could always be defended, it is also true that unlike military-security regimes, they were not the sort that close the door to a future shut and confiscate public life. Additionally, the ugly legacy of colonialism, which had been not altogether overcome, and great power competition over spheres of influence, synergized with the extent of the former colonies’ social development, the frailty of their political traditions, and their aging culture, making it difficult (without conspiratorial analysis) to attribute the shortcomings of these civilian regimes to these external causes alone.
But despite what has happened, Arab political thought largely remains extremely friendly to military coups, if not in awe of them, while more than a few of the criticisms made of coups are tinged with congenitally and a degree of munificence and apologia.
Today, as the coup dominos begin to fall on the African continent once again, with the army of Niger turning against its regime following the military coups in Mali and Burkina Faso, many Arab voices are still spreading the military coup message to Africans. Instead of turning their attention to what has befallen us as a result of such coups, and imploring them not to repeat the bitter experiences from which we have yet to recover, we see some among us celebrating, in 2023, what our putschists had exalted decades ago: ending subservience to and dependence on the West, building a bright patriotic future, achieving real independence, annihilating the old reactionary class..., and other slogans that the test of reality has repeatedly shown to be deadly nonsense.
Instead of warning Africans about the ethnic and regionalist dynamics that are at play, as well as Russian expansion, - represented, this time, by the Wagner militia - those among us encouraging this process are applauding the authenticity and liberation that the military’s recent adventures entail. As for drowning in the culture of blood, the swamps of vengeance, and retaliation against a former president or opponents of the coup, it is also cause for optimism regarding the bright future that awaits the Africans and mirrors the bright future that we had been blessed with!
The only message that warrants veneration is one that flips Aflaq’s famous message on its head, that is, for us Arabs to tell others: learn from everything that has befallen since we were gripped by grand illusions, the most important of which was the illusion of having a message propelled by the wings of force and violence. It would be of great benefit to share these sentiments with the seventy million Africans residing in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, who are currently being dragged from a place of poor conditions that could be gradually changed and reformed to a place of absolute misery where there is no path forward.
