Talking of MK programs, I wanted to emphasize how far these agencies could go awry, see the alleged LSD poisoning of an entire French village in 1951 [1].
That's an intellectual fallacy it's easy to fall prey of: if most cultures and nations have committed heinous acts in their past, one should assume they are still doing terrible things to this day.
MK-ULTRA is dead, but history teaches that one day we'll learn of something even worse that's occurring right under our noses in 2023. It is disingenuous to criticise what the CIA and other three letter agencies have done, while not being totally opposed to their existence to this day. Who knows how they are experimenting with people on US soil, how they are fomenting revolts and financing drug lords in South America today.
Sadly, any such criticism can be easily waved away by calling it a conspiracy theory, which is how they keep operating with impunity. The only difference between an outlandish conspiracy theory and history are the existence of declassified government documents.
Yeah, here's a list, plenty still ongoing: https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrociti...
> In late 2019, CIA agent Anne Sacoolas hit and killed a British teenage pedestrian named Harry Dunn with her car, while she was driving on the wrong side of the road, near the RAF Croughton base in the UK where she and her husband (both CIA agents) worked.
List of atrocities, indeed…
In a couple 100s of years , history will be talked about this era of "Pax Americana" and the lengths that the US Gov went trying to cling to its power.
Is it good, is it bad? Depends on where you are really.
How long after COVID will America fall? China's already brokered peace in the Middle East between our best friend and our worst enemy in the region. The Universe has a sense of humor. Given the historical precedent, will we mark the end of the US empire with China negotiating peace in occupied Ukraine or in occupied Palestine?
I'm clearly the furthest thing from a patriot, but I am fairly certain the history books will place our collapse somewhere between the Soviet Union and the British Empire on the atrocity scale. If we outdo Churchill's genocide in India, it's going to involve nuclear hellfire, and then there won't be any history books to remember it by anyway.
The US did bad things to its own people like bikini atoll and MkUltra and the Tuskegee Experiments. Maybe it even did things like stage 9/11 as a false flag (there were real plans to stage a similar false flag in the 70s to support a war against Cuba) - even if it did, I’m allowed to speculate about it or even claim it to be true online. In China try to mention Tiananmen Square. Even if the US empire is evil, which I think is a bit overly harsh at the general level while agreeing that many of its individual actions have been evil, it’s better than any of the other empires.
If nothing else, it's certainly interesting and unique.
America is the first (and maybe only, ever?) major imperial power that allows such open discussion of its atrocities.
I say this not from the standpoint of defending or attacking America. I just find it fascinating.
Swift's "A Modest Proposal" was from 1729.
America is the first (and maybe only, ever?) major
imperial power that allows such open discussion of
its atrocities.
So it's unclear to me what point you're attempting to make by pointing out a single instance of prior public dissent in the British Empire.
Particularly since Swift's work of satire was not exactly a direct criticism of the British Empire, nor a catalogue of its atrocities.
If you do the minimum feasible amount of research and read the Wikipedia article, you will learn that it was largely a parody of other such popular contemporary treatises, a thing that is easy to miss in 2023 if you aren't familiar with the context in which "A Modest Proposal" was written.
Back to my original post... I certainly don't think America was the first to allow such dissent. I think it is the first to do so on such a scale.
(I also don't necessarily think America allows such dissent for entirely noble purposes. As has been often pointed out, legitimate criticism and evidence often gets lumped in with whackadoo fake conspiracy theories and is therefore discredited by default in the public's mind. The end result is a more effective form of suppression than could be achieved by direct totalitarian repression. The US government will let you talk about the MKUltra experiments or Guantanamo all day long because barely anybody will believe you, or care.)
The US First Amendment is indeed unique, but it came from a tradition[1][2]. And it's not so long ago that US citizens were prosecuted for sedition. And this is not totally unique to the US or Britain[3][4].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato%27s_Letters
[2] - https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/england.asp
> That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal;
> That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament;
[3] - https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/critics-of-empire-978085771177...
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Reform_Association
> In the mid-1890s Edmund Dene Morel was working for Elder Dempster as a shipping clerk based in Antwerp, when he noticed discrepancies between public and private accounts given for the import and export figures relating to shipping from the Congo.[5] Morel deduced from the steady export of firearms and cartridge, against the disproportionate mass imports in rubber, ivory and other lucrative commodities, that no commercial transaction was taking place.[6] He concluded that the use of force was the only explanation: the consistency of the exchange could only be supported by a state-led system of mass exploitation.[7] Resigning from his role in 1901, Morel turned to journalism to investigate and raise awareness about the activities of the Congo Free State authorities, establishing his own journal in early 1903 – the West African Mail.[8]
But we also not free to discuss secrets kept from us. And US is not lenient on whistleblower exposing secret lawbreaking and atrocities.
-Norm McDonald
It had predecessors and parallel programs. Beginning at least as early as the post WWII 1940's.
>MK-ULTRA is dead, but history teaches that one day we'll learn of something even worse that's occurring right under our noses in 2023.
Very astute observations.
What’s striking about these MKUltra type programs is the magnitude of horrible things stemming from a relatively small number of clandestine operatives doing insane experiments on the population.
Based in the article in The Times yesterday, I’d say we can confidently add global pandemic to this list, and a reminder that the US doesn’t have a monopoly on this particularly deranged form of violence.
Up until 2019 I’d say the USA was the worst offender, but let’s hope no one ever catches up to what China did in Wuhan.
A relatively small amount most likely. Maybe on par with the amount that has been caused by yellow journalism (e.g. the Spanish-American war, anti-ethnicity political cartoons). Most of anything "caused" by them is not from them running amok, but from them doing the job they were ordered to do by higher officials.
And, of course, we only rarely see what they prevented from happening.
You have to look into the history of these programs, further, to gain some perspective.
In the grand scheme of American violations of human rights, MK-ULTRA barely even registers. I can think of a dozen worse things we know are happening right now off the top of my head. Trump and Biden's internment camps, the tent cities in every US city, kids as young as 12 working in slaughterhouses, solitary confinement in prisons... I'll spare everyone from this turning into a rant.
Outrage at things in the past is easy, but if we want to really improve the world it may be necessary for smart people to stop refusing to think clearly on current events.
Iraqis lost a lot of blood, not americans. 99% of the people killed were innocent iraqis.
And is it just me or is there a consistency in the tone, among those who make these weird typos?
It's just weird. Also it's early in the morning and I'm a little addled.
I think sometimes the typos are speech-to-text artifacts. For instance "used that" would be phonetically similar to "used at" and I could see that easily tripping up STT. I know people that use STT and don't review the output before sending so I get weird text messages from them from time to time.
It was "and use that f Guantanamo" which is not that difficult to understand if you change "f" for "the F word".
And if I was attempting to bend the narrative, a good tool for that might be a counterargument that, tho apparently strong, is actually weak. Let's not be naive about how this works.
Incredibly embarrassing post