When is a coup not a coup?

When is a coup not a coup? Answer: when it aligns with US interests – at least as perceived by the government of the day.

Why is the Egyptian coup almost never referred to as such? A democratically elected leader has been ousted by the military. What else does the word coup (as in military coup, or coup d’état) refer to? The fact that he was becoming increasingly unpopular doesn’t enter into the definition. There have been massive anti-government protests in some developed countries, but no one would say that justifies a military take-over.

If this happened in sub-Saharan Africa, you can bet it would be widely condemned, with talk of bringing the conspirators before the International Criminal Court.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. Try putting these words into a search:

Yeltsin Russia Coup

What you get is reports of the 1991 attempt at overturning Gorbachev’s perestroika, which was thwarted by Yeltsin, who heroically confronted the tanks and in effect ended the era of the Soviet police state.

What this search doesn’t pick up is the events of 1993 when Yeltsin was president and the Russian parliament refused to accept his nominee as prime minister, Yegor Gaidar. While it’s true that this parliament was the last elected under the Soviet system, it’s not clear that it was in fact trying to force a return the the old ways but rather trying to ward off “shock therapy” – which subsequently turned out to mean handing substantial parts of the state-owned economy to oligarchs for next to nothing.

Try these search words:

Yeltsin Russia tanks white house

This does bring up the 1993 coup – the one that doesn’t exist according to mainstream media.

If you want to argue that Morsi was a failing president in Egypt, or that the ex-Soviet legislature was not moving with the post-Soviet times, then you can argue for coups in many countries around the world where the government is corrupt, incompetent or broadly suppressing open political debate.

So why are coups bad sometimes, not so bad other times, or don’t exist other times?

Perceived US interests. And I say perceived, because making the rest of the world hate you really is not in your interests.

How to get something lost in the mail

In December 2012, after installing some RAM upgrades I bought for my Mac from a US dealer, I found one was a dud, and organized to send it back (along with a couple of used parts for which they would give me a rebate).

After about a month, I realized my package should have reached its destination. It hadn’t. I contacted the South African Post Office because their tracking site showed it had reached the last step in South Africa in two days. Their customer service person told me I should try to track it in the US. This I thought would go nowhere, but no, the USPS tracking service accepted my South African tracking number.

Now it gets interesting.

The prejudice people in this part of the world have is that it must have been stolen or lost in South Africa. Here’s the log of where it’s been in the US:

So it reached the US within three days of posting. Good so far. But why was it bouncing around between facilities in New York?

I asked the recipient if they could check, and they were told an enquiry had to be initiated from the originating post office. That, I thought would lead nowhere.

Again, I was wrong – at least in getting started. My local post office could not have been more helpful. The postmaster tried to find out more through their internal systems and when he couldn’t, helped me set up an enquiry. Some of the paperwork involved doing an affidavit via my local police station, a reminder of indifference to service from some parts of South African society.

But anyway, my enquiry is in the system. And maybe at some point my package will surface. Or be declared lost so I can claim on the insurance.

Maybe it’s not a huge plus for South Africa to have a friendlier, more efficient postal service than the US. But it’s great to be better sometimes.

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Follow-up

On 30 April, I received notification from the US supplier that the package had arrived, nearly five months after I put it in the mail, and most of that time it was lost somewhere in the US postal system. As if to erase their embarassment, the USPS tracking site now only shows movements in the package’s final days, once it had somehow migrated from New York to Illinois.

Whether it’s been in Illinois or New York all that time or somewhere else will now doubt never be revealed. All I know is the USPS is capable of extreme incompetence. And possibly extreme embarrassment. Sorry USPS goblins: your secret is exposed on this page. Here is the latest tracking information as of 30 April 2013:

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Finale

I visited my local post office and the postmaster checked with his tracking department. They put in three requests spaced roughly a month apart to trace the item. The last on 24 April was a final request that, if not satisfied, would have resulted in paying me compensation (I insured it; it turns out the postal service is very optimistic that things will eventually turn up, and this time they were right). Magically, four days later the item appeared and took one more day to get delivered.