On February 9th in 1963, Baghdad Television had one of its largest audiences. The previous day, on Friday the 8th, the transmission had come to an abrupt halt soon after Radio Baghdad had instructed listeners to stop looking at their television sets. By Saturday night, however, Radio Baghdad began to urge their listeners to return their gaze to the evening broadcast. First, they began with a fifteen-minute reading from the Quran accompanied by close-ups of texts and images of mosques. Next, they showed two episodes of the animated series “Felix the Cat.” These were followed by a short, pre-recorded film. The film showed a soldier swinging the head of General Abd-al Karim Qasim from side to side while spitting on his body. The camera then panned to show other bodies slumped on chairs, riddled with bullets. This film was broadcasted five times that evening with intermittent breaks of regular programming. An American diplomat commented that the broadcasting of this short film seemed to be “a substitute for the 1958 practice of dragging bodies through the street” of Prime Minister Nuri as-Said and King Faisal II. The following day, on Sunday, images of the poorest inhabitants of Baghdad were broadcasted in juxtaposition with shots of Qasim’s luxurious office at the Ministry of Defense. Between Friday and Sunday, the new regime had first seized the means of broadcasting, then transported the violence of the coup into the homes of its citizens, and lastly, projected propaganda intended to undermine Qasim’s populist following among underprivileged classes who his administration had patronized with social and economic programs during his tenure. This paper interrogates of how the technology of television broadcasting, which gained mass distribution and popularity in the 1950s, was employed in the service of two violent processes of social transformation: development and revolution.