When Putsch Comes to Shove

A putsch is a secretly plotted and suddenly executed attempt to overthrow a government. We should be grateful that such a traitorous effort to get rid of duly elected leaders could never happen in America.

Thank goodness we’ve avoided events like the Communist putsch in Czechoslovakia in 1948. That happened when the Czech commies failed to seize power through the electoral process and got peevish. It’s unclear if they desired a people’s revolution or life’s finer pleasures like Soviet Almas caviar and liquidation of their political enemies. There must always be a reckoning.

Czechoslovakia’s elections were scheduled for May 1948. But given the proximity of the Soviet Union and its post-revolution people’s bread lines on the eastern border, the commie candidates were unpopular. In February 1948 they decided to skip the election and seize power by force.

A leader of the putsch was Václav Nosek, the head of the federal police. He had been told to fire the commies on the police payroll but did the opposite and hired more instead. Naturally all of this will sound foreign to Americans, who live in a well-managed country with a non-partisan federal bureaucracy staffed by true patriots. Not one of us would believe our federal police would plot against an elected head of state.

The federal police got help from the defense minister, Ludvík Svoboda, a legitimate military hero who had fought in both world wars. He helped by sitting it out. Svoboda confined the non-Communist commanders, about two-thirds of the total, to quarters and placed the units under Communist command on alert.

They were not needed. The commies had planned ahead. Members of revolutionary “action committees” took to the streets to intimidate normal Czechs who, lacking a Second Amendment, found somewhere else to be. Pro-commie armed militia groups gained control of the newspapers. Mobs looted offices of opposition parties. After federal police seized power in Prague, the putsch was complete.

Czechoslovakia’s enlightened new leaders were not terribly kind toward their deplorables. Like our betters today, that era’s Marxists understood that untermenschen must be held accountable for their offenses. Show trials remind everyone who’s the boss. We are fortunate that those could never happen in America.

A Hoover report describes the Czech commies' regime as “full-scale terror,” adding that its leadership viewed the Catholic Church as “one of its most serious opponents”:

Law 231 of 1948, “for the Protection of the People’s Democratic Republic,” provided a legal fig leaf for the liquidation of opposition. Loss of employment, forcible relocation, assignment to forced labor camps (TNPs), and trials were the lot of thousands. Estimates place the number sentenced to imprisonment at around 230,000, with another 100,000 sent administratively to the TNPs. The use of illegal methods, trials, and terror remained a feature of the regime throughout its existence, but during the first years they reached unusual proportions, leaving no level of society untouched.

Clearly this could never happen here. America in the 21st century is an enlightened nation. We are the land of the free and the home of the brave. We know our military chiefs will follow orders from their commander-in-chief instead of sitting it out if the street commies get frisky during the next few weeks. We are free from the horror of military brass telling their troops not to follow presidential orders.

We know Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian was speaking figuratively when telling Time magazine that there is “work that will need to be done to de-radicalize a generation” of Trump supporters. Ex-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was only wisecracking when endorsing the mass murder of his political enemies. Saying they were “going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution” was merely a joke. Same with that Democrat operative talking up guillotines. What comedians!

That is why we can trust the results of the presidential election as our betters inform us that Joe Biden must be the winner. After all, our legacy media elites have reassured us that they are in charge of this process. They are neutral and unbiased, much like social media companies. Thankfully police are empowered to quell violent protests.

We have veteran election officials who would never award Biden an extra 100,000 votes and claim it was a typo. They would not invalidate ballots because Trump voters used a sharpie or confuse 86 percent with 98 percent in crucial states. Michael Anton’s fears, in an article published two months ago, that the Democrats would “produce enough harvested ballots—lawfully or not—to tip close states” after Election Day will never come to pass.

We should be very grateful that a putsch could never happen in America.