Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

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If you are wondering how it got so far off the rails, then look no further than the fact that they hired, trained, and equipped former Nazi SS officers. Not Wehrmacht grunts. Nor enlisted SS grunts. But SS officers. Less than three years after the Nuremberg trials. The trials where a sitting Supreme Court justice took time off to act as Chief Prosecutor on behalf of the US to condemn their bosses to death. They did it despite plenty of contemporaneous objections to the contrary.

> 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.

That's nothing, wait until you find out that the Japanese LDP was founded by class A nazi war criminals that the US released from prison :)

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_ :)

I try to look towards the better angels of everyone’s nature. Being jaded and cynical rarely solves problems.

"The CIA can't seem to stop itself from training and supporting fascist movements" is actually a useful pattern to notice if the problem you're trying to solve is "where do these fascist movements keep coming from??"

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.

Optimism of spirit, pessimism of the intellect.

Living in a dream world not only fails to solve problems, but I have noticed, tends to perpetuate them.

As they say: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

There are no good or bad actions, only good or bad teams.

> hired, trained, and equipped former Nazi SS officers

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.

That was the Wehrmacht i.e. the Armed Forces. The SS was the paramilitary organization that carried out the holocaust. They were committed Nazis and acted as bodyguards, the secret police, death camp operators, and slave labor exploiters.

Rommel was not a SS member. You can learn more about them here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzstaffel

> The SS was the paramilitary organization that carried out the holocaust.

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").

anecdote : my German teacher (same age as my mom) was a little girl in rural well off Germany during WW2. She said general people outside cities had no idea about the Nazis and holocaust till they started hearing rumors, about which they were in denial, for a long time...the persistence of the rumors was gradually accepted as a horror.

Saying "Germany carried out the holocaust" might be accidentally read as if it was a unified effort. It may not have been.

FYI: This is a massive and controversial area of scholarly dispute. It's also famous, your average American might well have heard of it. You're expressing something in line with the minority opinion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Wehrmacht_myth#End_of_th...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism_and_the_Wehrmacht

>The CIA has an uncanny talent for arming and training future and former enemies of the US and most of the world.

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.

Preserving Soviet Union was unfortunate, but leaving the whole of Europe and most of Asia to Hitler was even worse. That would put the US homeland in direct danger of a major war.

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.

> Preserving Soviet Union was unfortunate

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.

You seem to misunderstand who controlled USSR then.

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 was thinking about a longer time horizon, after Stalin. Eventually reformers start piping up, as they did in USSR and China. I compare and contrast the effect of the US relationship had on China and the Soviet Union.

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.

>had we not immediately betrayed them after WWII

Lol. That's an "interesting" take on history.

When official history is written by the victors, all other histories become “interesting”.

I see! So the Soviets were actually the good guys? Or at least well-intentioned...

I assume the same logic could be applied to the history of the Third Reich too, right?

Thanks for illustrating my point by assuming that there must necessarily be a Good Guy (who is of course the victor).

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.

> So the Soviets were actually the good guys?

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.

It has never made sense to me why Anglos allied with the Communists. It seems to me the Communists wanted Global Communism, while Hitler wanted a larger Germany.

America shouldn’t have allied with either of them. We are complicit to Soviet crimes as a nation.

A bigger Germany over something like 50 million dead Slavs, Jews and Gypsies - and this is even if they won?

Wtf

> while Hitler wanted a larger Germany.

I’ll take ridiculous oversimplifications for $200

I always thought Lebensraum and Generalplan Ost where mild euphemisms for industrial genocide...but "bigger Germany" makes them sound downright malicious in comparison. All Hitler wanted was a "bigger Germany", nbd. Save for the work of making room through ethnic cleansing.

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