Operation Gladio
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Oktoberfest Bombing München 1980, Operation Gladio
from time to time in german media: the police stopped investigating Neonazi involvement.
I read this mostly in Sueddeutsche Zeitung
> Some of the newly released documents show that between 1949 and 1955, the CIA organized "stay-behind" networks of German agents to provide intelligence from behind enemy lines, should the Soviet Union invade western Germany.
> One network included at least two former Nazi SS members -- Staff Sgt. Heinrich Hoffman and Lt. Col. Hans Rues -- and one was run by Lt. Col. Walter Kopp, a former German army officer referred to by the CIA as an "unreconstructed Nazi." The network was disbanded in 1953 amid political concerns that some members' neo-Nazi sympathies would be exposed in the West German press.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/0...
The CIA has an uncanny talent for arming and training future and former enemies of the US and most of the world.
If you think it's shocking that the US works with fascists, it can only because you know nothing at all about US foreign policy and how it works.
The idea that it's "off the rails" rather than something that repeats so ofte it's not even interesting is _buck wild_ :)
Considering that cynical is a judgment that I don't think is very useful here. It also assumes there is some valid, correct, non-cynical view of the CIA that assumes they don't do this. Which is fantastical, at least as useless a way to approach the world as cynicism.
Living in a dream world not only fails to solve problems, but I have noticed, tends to perpetuate them.
The CIA? More like the USA…
They saved the Soviets from collapse via Lend-Lease. They made communist China a global superpower with decades of outsourced manufacturing.
Policies of Deng Xiaoping in 1980s and 1990s looked much softer and promising than the current regime under Xi Jinping. The Tiananmen Square massacre should have been a warning, though. The Chinese played their growing economy card expertly, even more powerfully than the Japanese in 1960-70s.
I wonder how things might have turned out differently had we not immediately betrayed them after WWII.
Without constant threat of annihilation, they could have diverted funds away from military spending and towards productive uses, possibly also loosening their grip on power. It didn't help that non-authoritarian left governments, sometimes as mild as Bernie Sanders, were easily overthrown by the CIA.
Lol. That's an "interesting" take on history.
I assume the same logic could be applied to the history of the Third Reich too, right?
Yes. Soviets sacrificed dearly to save the world from Nazis and end the Holocaust. That was good.
The US and European powers weren't exactly angels. The Soviets certainly weren't. The Nazis were much worse. Defeating them was good.
And for that matter yes: The Soviets were just as much of a Good Guy as the other Allies. As for the Cold War? They were the lesser evil of the two super powers. But not a Good Guy.
Stalin coopertaed with Hitler a lot. Stalin bought a lot of military technology and outright weapons from Germany (such as cannons). Stalin and Hitler collectively destroyed Poland in 1939, divided the territory, and had a parade where Wermacht and Red Army troops marched together.
At the same time Hitler planned to attack USSR, while USSR secretly planned to attack Hitler.
Before that, Stalin robbed Soviet peasants of the wheat they produced, and sold it all for gold, to buy weapons factories, mostly from the US. In 1933, this resulted in famine in Ukraine and some other parts of USSR (google Holodomor).
No way one could expect Stalin's regime to soften down and become nicer.
Certainly, Soviet soldiers who fought against Hitler, along with other Allied soldiers, fought for good, or at least for a better world. But these same soldiers, who liberated countries like Poland, or Hungary, or half of Germany from Hitler put these lands under control of USSR, not direct, but pretty stifling. They suppresses attempts to get out of Soviet control in Hungary and Checho-Slovakia with tanks soon after.
I hear you on Stalin's crimes. However, we took a very different approach to our colonial power allies. Like Stalin, Churchill too oversaw mass famine in the colonies.
America shouldn’t have allied with either of them. We are complicit to Soviet crimes as a nation.
I’ll take ridiculous oversimplifications for $200
Wtf
did Nazis claim pre-existing enlisted officers (that pre-date the Nazis) as their own?
I mean Erwin Rommel predates the Nazis and was just a professional soldier, but they claimed him as their own, even though he himself always thought them nutjobs, it seems.
Rommel was not a SS member. You can learn more about them here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzstaffel
Germany carried out the holocaust. Sure, the SS is most associated with it, which should not lead to the false conclusion that holocaust was "an SS thing". It was a German thing. Case in point, the Wehrmacht provided large numbers of personnel for the camps and the whole "clean Wehrmacht" idea started out as a defense in the Nuremberg trials (among other popular ideas such as "I just followed orders").
Saying "Germany carried out the holocaust" might be accidentally read as if it was a unified effort. It may not have been.
I believe we should fight to win or lose and give up. Fighting a guerilla war when you country's occupied will not make any difference in the end.
Worse still, these so-called paramilitaries often branched out into crime and human rights abuses. They might even turn against the government that created them.
Oh and maybe manage to keep it secret from the enemy, Germany. JFC sometimes I wonder if there is anything German security services don’t fuck up, the distrust from NATO allies is and was certainly well earned.
Big domino tile: Silvio Berlusconi becomes prime minister of Italy in 1994
Usually one doesn't have to go very deep into secret societies and political ties before landing on the actual and often-memed-about Freemasons. This variant of the story ties nicely with Gladio, Italian intelligence and secret services, politics, far right groups and mysterious deaths in the 70s and 80s. Oh, and of course Silvio Berlusconi.
P2 is the Italian version of the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Not saying it's bollocks, just wanting to point out how widespread it is in Italy, but I don't think it's very well known outside of it.
Then, one can theorize whether there is more about P2 than it has been said or not, especially when it comes to well known politician names, but I wouldn't rule it out as a conspiracy theory: there were official prosecutions, a special commission (whose words incidentally say clearly "[P2] cannot be considered as just another political scandal. This is way different." (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissione_P2)) and special laws that were written/changed for this precise reason.
Then of course when "freemasons" are named, people imagination roams wild, but it was "something" not just pure fantasy/speculation.
I don't see how anyone who laughed and cheered watching the movie Inglourious Basterds (which was undeniably fun) could really object to any similar operation against the vanguard of their communist equivalents. The countries that failed to stop the expansion of that movement are remembered for their killing fields, their famines, their mass executions of people trying to leave, their national bankruptcies, and their meth dealing god emperors.