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Comment by throwaway6734 | Hacker News Reader

>Italy — The CIA corrupts democratic elections in Italy, where Italian communists threaten to win the elections. The CIA buys votes, broadcasts propaganda, threatens and beats up opposition leaders, and infiltrates and disrupts their organizations. It works -- the communists are defeated.

You're welcome Italy

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To this day I wonder why this kind of blatant interference in other countries isn't considered an act of war.

It should be. I also think economic sanctions, when done by a great power or groups of countries, should be considered an act of war.

Strongly agree. The only hope is one day there will be a group of strong nations who will declare that they are not going to respect US sanctions.

If any other country did it, it would be.

You're assuming that the UK, Germany, Israel, Russia, and China are not all doing the same.

There is certainly a power law in play here.

Or the other players work in different ways that are less visible. Cyber espionage and propaganda is enormous, and I think the average American is only slowly beginning to understand the depth of impact of bots, paid trolls, phishing, and direct cyberattacks that our adversaries launch against us. And it's not clear what the goals of these organizations are.

It absolutely is (or incredibly close)

Something can be considered an act of war without leading to a "kinetic" response, much less a full-scale war.

This still happens, especially with Russia. Putin is killing people with chemical weapons in NATO member nations, invading and annexing parts of Ukraine, and performing cyber warfare. All of these things are acts of war...

This exact thinking leads to these bazillion dead and tortured. Better more totalitarianism to prevent an economic model, which could be revoked again in a democracy.

The world welcomes you too.

Assuming you didn't mean /s

Yeah, Italy is today known for its stable, non corrupt, efficient and effective governance...

Imagine how much worse it would've been with a commie government and potentially outside the western sphere of influence

There might be fewer Nazis. What a disaster that would be...

????

Are you going to play ignorant about the fact that the CIA recruited former Nazis to suppress socialist movements in Europe, without the permission of the states they ran this operation in?

What's the relation?

Nazis are terrible but after WW2 they posed significantly less of a threat than Soviet communists.

Soviet and Chinese communists might not have been as evil as Nazis, but they sure were close

The fact that you think it was okay for the US to support former SS officers illegally operating in countries and later used to train South American death squads in torture techniques, all because 'commies are bad', shows how deranged you are.

What the US has done in the name of anticommunism dwarfs any evils done by communism.

Millions of people were killed by communist regimes

Millions of people were killed by fascist regimes. Many, if not most, funded and supplied by the US gov't.

Which of them compare to the atrocities committed by Stalin and mao?

WW2 (Nazis are fascists) Indonesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19... Guatemala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_genocide El Salvador https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_Civil_War Chile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_...

I can go on. And these are just the individual incidents we know about. Who knows how much suffering and death happened as a direct result of the destabilization of the global south.

How did the US aid Nazis during the war?

All of these incidents are bad, but none still compare to the mass deaths under Stalin and Mao

I'm just gonna poke the bear by pointing out that IBM supplied the computers for the holocaust. Just one example of trade...

No one is saying Mao and Stalin were great guys. They're just pointing out that "anyone on the right no matter how terrible" isn't a better choice than "anyone on the left no matter how reasonable". And that's without getting into whether any country should involve itself in other people's elections at all...

Of course there were mal actors but there's a clear difference between the level of support and involvement. Stalin and Maos policies lead to the deaths of tens of millions of people.

My main point with all of this is to put into context how horrifying the threat of the spread of Communism was. I think the actions taken at the time by the CIA need to be viewed through this lens.

Mao and Stalin both managed to elevate the standard of living of their respective nations significantly during their lives. If you had engaged with history instead of VCF propaganda, you would have realised this.

And their policies resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people

It is easy to talk about this over 100 years. But that also conveniently lets us ignore that the US was founded on the backs of chattel slavery. Turns out lots of forms of governments can hurt people. But at least the communists/socialists raised all ships, whereas the racist policies of our 'democratic' government only raised a few.

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There isn't a meaningful consensus on how many people died on their watch, but this claim usually targets the famines of '59-61 (China) and '32-33 (USSR), and casts the blame on the choice each country made to collectivize agriculture. The Chinese famine was the last one it has experienced to date. The only subsequent famine that the USSR underwent were in the 40s, which historians tend to agree was the result of infrastructural damage underwent during WWII. So I mean, yeah, people died on their watch. Probably not as many as you think, though, and certainly fewer than would have died if they continued on as semi-feudal agrarian backwaters.

Dulles brothers laundered money for the nazis during the war. Allen went on to secretly negotiate for surrender of Nazi/SS troops, who were then protected from prosecution and used for Gladio and later ratlined out to South America to train death squads.

To your second point: no. You aren’t the arbiter of what qualifies as an atrocity or not. Go tell the countless people in Latin America that their continued torture and suffering isn’t a big deal, cause hey at least they aren’t in a Russian gulag. You are as deranged as our government if you truly think that.

> The CIA corrupts democratic elections in Italy, where Italian communists threaten to win the elections

Italian here. In a democracy you don't "threaten to win" the elections. You win or not according to the will of the peple.

I never vote Partito Comunista but I'd rather have any party win legitimate elections and have legitimate power until next elections rather than... secret services from another country undermining democracy.

Also CIA did WORSE than beating up people and infiltrating parties: they supported terrorist groups that exploded bombs around Italy in 70 and 80ies.

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