The original Fascist League of North America was established by Dino Bigongiari, Professor of Italian at Columbia University. It was not a very professional operation but was initiated by Italian-Americans, not the fascist government in Rome. 🇮🇹🇺🇸

A challenge with society in general is a facile understanding of the word “coup.” When the population at large thinks of a coup, they imagine a violent military (Chile, 1973) or paramilitary (Cuba, 1959) overthrow of the government.
Coups are often far more complex and nuanced.

So, let’s talk about the autogolpe—the “self coup” (a perfect example of how some words in Spanish are objectively better than their English equivalents). An autogolpe is, at its simplest, when a duly elected leader revolts against his *own* government to consolidate power.

He (it’s always been a “he”) usurps powers that traditionally reside with the legislative and judiciary bodies, and of course, maintains that power beyond his elected term.

This kind of coup requires a lot of prep work. Generally speaking, you can’t just up and announce your takeover overnight. Instead, you have to spend a few years undermining federal institutions so that, when the time comes, they are powerless and/or unwilling to stop you.

How? You start by installing loyalists in key positions and courting *personal* loyalty within your party.
“Oh, everybody does that!”
Not exactly. Key positions in a democracy, for example, require approval from the legislative body.
So you have to work around that.

Remembering Colonel Anil Kaul, VrC (Retd) on his 3rd Death Anniversary.

“It was October 12, 1987, exactly 5:55 pm as I was… coming out of the cupola of my T-72 tank on a steamy evening in an unknown place called Kokkuvil in the Jaffna district of Northern Sri Lanka.+

I froze in that confined space at what I saw. An LTTE militant stood at 60 meters aiming his rocket-propelled gun at my tank.

In a flash he fired. Probably having lost his nerve he aimed too low. The projectile hit the left mudguard of the tank, but for some inexplicable reason+

did not explode. It then hit the side of the main gun and then exploded on top of the turret, all in a fraction of a second. Before I knew, it seemed I had received a straight right punch so to say to my chin. I saw some blood appear on my left hand and there was a sharp drop in+

my eyesight.

Lt Colonel (now Lt Gen) Dalbir Singh, then Commanding Officer of 10 Para Commando, who was standing on the engine deck said to me, “Yaar what a close shave.”

He suddenly saw me and the look on his face told me that something was very very wrong with me. In that+

fraction of a second, as if it was a rewind of my entire life, thoughts raced through my life as to how and when I had landed myself in such a situation…

I asked my gunner to pull out a first field dressing (FFD) which is standard equipment in a first aid box carried in each+

So when it first appeared in Normandy, the Sherman Firefly and it's meaty 17 pounder represented an ideal combo of reliable chassis, great gun and devastating firepower right?

Ummm...

Truth is a bit more complex. /1
#WW2 #SWW #History

Deliveries of Firefly to units only commenced in April 1944,
just a few weeks before Overlord & left minimal time for familiarisation.

Armoured Regiments mostly utilised Fireflies on a basis of 1 per troop of 4 tanks. /2

Finally each armoured regiment troop had access to integral, meaty, anti-tank firepower capable of dealing serious damage to any German AFV likely to be encountered. /3

The dual purpose 75mm gun was quite capable of laying down a reasonable HE shell or AP round for dealing with Panzer III or IV.

Firefly's 17 Pounder had.... problems with HE, but excelled at tank killing. So Tigers and Panthers would need to be wary. /4

Firefly's design history dated back to March 1943 when the General Staff published "Policy on Tanks" which effectively stated the majority of tanks should have a good HE weapon and...

[See image below] /5

There was no stigma around 1982 coup; Kenya was already sliding to the abyss. My fourth thread on Railaphobia in Kikuyuland. LONG THREAD, FREE TO DISCARD

As alluded to in a previous thread, Moi was very popular when he inherited the power from Jomo. He played an important historical role in dismantling Kikuyu hegemony that peaked at Kenyatta’s death. The whole nation supported him thinking it was all driven by national interest

Just that time he was very popular, he made a lot of decisions that laid the ground for his future dictatorship which he was cunningly planning for. Like civil servants’ union and university staff union were proscribed. This time, President's word was law and Moi took advantage

To compensate lack of charisma, Moi resorted to populist roadside decrees that would make people happy. In the process, he was making so many policy decisions at the spur of the moment. Some were so expensive to the country economically and politically

Among such decisions was to ban traditional liquor. The implications were enormous to this day – the gvt spends so much time and resources following up people and pouring liquors. It was a prime opportunity for gvt agencies to meddle in peoples social and economic lives

Why are loops called "loops"?

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Before addressing the question in the title tweet, let me first back up to the origin of the term "quasigroup". The first use of the term was by Ruth Moufang in 1935 in her study of the multiplicative structure of the octonions.

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Moufang defined "quasigroup" in a much narrower sense than we do now. The details are not part of this story, so I'll skip them. What she called quasigroups we now call Moufang loops in her honor.

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The current definition of quasigroup - a set with binary op * s.t. for all a,b, the equations a*x=b, y*a=b have unique solutions x,y - is due to Hausmann & Ore (1937), in the same paper where they introduced the "other" meaning of "groupoid": a set with a binary operation

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It was A.A. Albert (1943) who introduced the term "loop" for a quasigroup with identity element. In his words, "It will be very convenient to have a special name for such quasigroups..." (p.510)

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