You don’t catch Saddam yaddayaddaing for 2 hours about his Iraqi historical fantasies. He was busy learning to breathe through a pipe with a box fan stuck in it.
I remember reading about Saddam’s takeover of the Ba’ath party. That story was a wild ride.
TLDR: Saddam calls an emergency party conference and has the former president’s secretary stand up and read a “confession”, claiming to be part of a Syrian-backed plot to overthrow the Iraqi government along with a list of names of his “co-conspirators.”
As the name of each "co-conspirator’ is read, guards come in and take them from the room one at a time. 68 people were removed, charged with treason, and convicted. Saddam has 22 of them sentenced to death, gives the others weapons, and orders them to kill the first group.
Voila! Saddam is now dictator for life.
The craziest thing about that is there’s a video documenting the whole thing. It’s on YouTube and well worth watching; probably one of the first, if not the first televised coup.
Saddam nonchalantly smoking a cigar while the auditorium’s mood goes from confused to hysterical is something to behold. Properly chilling.
Found a clip narrated by the much missed Christopher Hitchens: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CR1X3zV6X5Y
I forgot about that part! Saddam had the whole thing taped and distributed copies all over Iraq. We take the ease of media distribution today for granted. Much harder to do in 1979. That was truly some next level bragging. “I’m in charge now. Go fuck yourself.”
That’s a great clip. So immensely chilling to hear the barbaric shit the Ba’ath were capable of. Thank you for sharing the link.
They just don’t make them like they used to
I wanted to do a reverse of this with resistance forces so I could have Ukraine saying “cuz fuck 'em” but I don’t think I actually know of another place that successfully invaded the agressive country’s territory
Theres the Hitler / Napoleon arc of conquering Europe then collapsing and having the allied forces invade and occupy the dictators country.
There’s also the franco-prussian war where Bismarck goaded Louis Napoleon the dictator of France into declaring war and invading Germany. He then stepped two feet in Germany got surrounded and captured and the prussians/Germans marched all the way to Paris.
These were successful invasions though and ended up with the resistance capturing the aggressors capital. It remains to be seen how well this “invasion” will turn out. As it stands the Ukrainian gains are limited and far from Moscow or any other key strategic locations, meanwhile the Russians are advancing, if slowly, on the main front. This seems more like an incursion then an invasion, like the u.s. invading Canada during the revolution / 1812 with no long term occupation as a result.
Yeah, AFAIK if you lost a war badly back in the day you lost territory, it was just expected regardless of the aggressor. This one’s weird mostly just because it’s a country that should have (in conventional combat) rolled over easily, by every possible measure.
In the case of the Franco-Prussian war, you lose so badly that your enemies unite and coronate their new Emperor 16 km from your besieged capital.
That was the franco-prussian war from 1870/71 not the anti-Napoleon one, Germany didn’t become an empire after the letter
Which was discussed in the prior comment. Louis Napoleon got man-handled and France was abke to but up only a token (albeit bloody) resistance against the combined German forces. The German Empire was declared in the Versailles Palace while Paris was under seige during the war. Honestly i would say it was an even more humiliating defeat for France than WW2. All your enemies uniting their countries into one on your own soil while the war is still ongoing is straight up disrespectful. It would be akin to the Potsdsmn conference being held on the deck of the USS Missouri in the middle of Tokyo Bay before the atomic bombings.
Use of “coronate” can only be a nerd trap. Not today Satan!
How. How did I forget about those conquering arcs. Maybe because those were such a larger scale that my brain considered it a different category of “reverse invasion”?
I KNOW I forgot about franco-prussia because of how quick/silly it was.
Israel and Egypt
WWII?
Be better, dictators
Tuckers perpetual “404” face makes me chuckle.
