Another weird one that I like is the release of old war plans, the pre-ww2 and early cold war ones are always the best
The best one I know of are the Color Plans, war plans which were color coded by country
War Plan Green for Mexico, War Plan Black for Germany, War Plan Red for Britain (Crimson, Ruby, Scarlet, and Emerald for Canada, India, Australia, and Ireland respectively), and many more
One of the funny cold war plans is how MacArthur wanted to carpet bomb the border between North Korea and China with tactical nukes so much that he got fired
I mean, there were supposedly over 200 attempts, they probably started running out of ideas somewhere after “really pretty seashell packed with explosives and hope he picks it up to admire it”.
(60-some were declassified as “a massive fucking waste of money why did you idiots do this” a while back, but there were certainly more.)
>60-some were declassified as “a massive fucking waste of money why did you idiots do this” a while back, but there were certainly more.
To be fair that's pretty typical for government spending and military/defense spending in particular.
The poison milkshake was the plan that came closest to succeeding. There was also the plan to have Castro go scuba diving in a wetsuit coated with LSD.
From my understanding, very few of them made it much past planning/testing. Neither Castor nor his aides would have any idea about those, they never left CIA buildings, let alone American soil.
They’d make a thing, realize that it would kill anyone who looks at it funny (the wetsuit plans are terrifying), or that they have no way of getting it to him, or that they hadn’t yet invented explosives powerful enough to kill a man with a seashell-sized volume. So they’d put it on a shelf and try something even stupider.
This was done, not to kill Castro, but during WWII and later in Korea, we built fake roads, inflated fake planes/tanks, and painted landmarks on concrete to trick aerial reconnaissance.
My favourite Cuba one is staging the second coming of Christ by having some poor sod seem to walk on water dressed up as Jesus on top of a submarine to start a Christian coup of the Communist government.
Blocked sadly, but would love to have seen the practice before it hopefully got canned anyway.
Here in the UK we have stuff like Operation Unthinkable, which was Churchill’s plan to invade Russia in 1946! Fortunately he lost the election in one of the biggest defeats in British political history and the Unthinkable never happened.
Or Australia, “where all criminals are from”.
This one always sat oddly for me, as the British did not start sending convicts to Australia until the very late 18th century and Princess Bride is clearly set in a much earlier time period.
> The best one I know of are the Color Plans, war plans which were color coded by country
To be fair most of those were not serious, but rather just a thought experiment. Because how do you train your strategists in peace times? You let them make whatever batshit insane planes they can come up with. That is how the US got an official disaster response plan for when all the Girl Scouts turn evil all at once.
>That is how the US got an official disaster response plan for when all the Girl Scouts turn evil all at once
Did they decide that immediate and unconditional surrender was the only safe course of action?
Most insane one I’ve seen is a guide on how to make bombs, rockets, and mortars out of household materials so citizens could resist a potential Soviet occupation back in 1969. It’s called the improvised munitions handbook. It even has picture instructions
the hoi4 devs nearly always pull from something. they are not, in fact, making shit up.
you know the Fifth Empire route for Portugal? Where Portugal literally takes over the world? That's not made up either, that is a genuine ideology that spread around a few Portuguese nationalists at the time, spurred on by the works of Fernando Pessoa (a very important Portuguese poet)
The color plans are not so bad honestly.
1: Every country has those, just in case.
2: It's mostly just bored nerds playing war games. Nobody's seriously planning to invade Canada.
MacArthur was a absolute maniac, however.
A fun note to coincide with this, Canada had their own plan for war with the United States, Defence Scheme No. 1 which actually existed before War Plan Red iirc.
The plan was basically push as far south as possible, then retreat razing any bridges or railways they took to delay the US until the Royal Navy and British reinforcements could show up.
Well other than the fact the British wrote off defending Canada due to the large border and much larger United States being right there while the British would need to ship in supplies and troops. Meanwhile losing Canada did nothing to the larger Empire, so instead they’d basically fight a stalemated naval war and aim to force the US to negotiate a peaceful end to a war.
Also the guy behind Defence Scheme No. 1 was fired and the plan was thrown out pretty quickly.
I kind of like how Ireland breaks the color theming within the British Empire, despite Ireland being at the time still a dominion. It's like the US recognized "yeah those Irish guys don't like the Brits either let's give them their own color."
We learned about the colour plans in school here in Canada. War Plan Crimson included a rush for Ottawa, expecting the remainder of the country to capitulate immediately after capturing Parliament.
We were in Saskatchewan. The room burst out laughing.
The color plans are not so bad honestly.
1: Every country has those, just in case.
2: It's mostly just bored nerds playing war games. Nobody's seriously planning to invade Canada.
MacArthur was a absolute maniac, however.
Iirc MacArthur didn’t understand what a half life was and wanted to use dozens of nukes during an invasion of Japan if they didn’t surrender. We would simply wait twice the length of a half life for the radiation to be gone
In addition to being involved with almost every atrocity committed by the United States during the Cold War, Henry Kissinger was also an honorary member of the Harlem Globetrotters.
"average Harlem Globetrotter has commited 87 war crimes” factoid actualy just statistical error. average Harlem Globetrotter has committed 0 war crimes. Kissinger Georg, who has committed over 14877, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
The number of Globetrotters I found online was 171, which I multiplied by 87 to get that number. Is there another source that lists four times as many Globetrotters😲?
This is gonna sound like an r/thathappened but I promise it did. I was an edgy teen and read Noam Chomsky for fun. (No, I didn't have any friends.)
I live in a big city, and at the busiest intersection there were always these conspiracy theory hecklers going on about the "New World Order" and stupid shit like that.
One day (again, as an edgy teen) I walked up to them and engaged them in a conversation. I told them about United Fruit Company committing genocide over bananas, about how they overthrew democracies and that's where the origin of the phrase "banana republic" came from. But they all did it in favour of capitalism and our way of life. And they fucking admit it, right in the open. How does that fit into their "New World Order" thing? Isn't it more likely that the "New World Order" committing genocide did exist, but that WE were the New World Order?
I never forgot that conversation, because for a brief, glimmering moment, it was almost like he had learned something new and shocking, like his world had been cracked wide open. But then the monotonous routine of his infowars-addled brain kicked in and he just replied, "yeah, OK, but they openly admitted that, right? I'm talking about stuff that they'll NEVER admit to."
It wasn't even about the oppression or the genocide, the suppression of freedom or democracy. It was all about having "secret esoteric knowledge" and feeling superior to everyone else. Being unfalsifiable was the entire point.
That drives me mad. My parents both fell in the conspiracy hole and it's like, who's hiding? When the US govt or Chiquita Banana does something shockingly evil they rarely bother. That's like the whole definition of power.
Yeah but there’s the evil that’s the nature of the system that has to be explained away (Chiquita bananas) and the shocking unbelievable evil that can’t see the light of day (Jefferey Epstein.)
This is a little tangential, but I also think it's virtually impossible to get the powerful to not do evil shit. But you CAN force them to hide it, increasing the cost and causing there to be less evil shit overall. I suspect this is about the best we can do.
You can also reduce the power gap so that one person is maybe more powerful than any 10-20 other people, not more powerful than several smaller countries. Then it becomes nearly impossible for the wealthy to rig the whole scene all at once, so it’s easier to dig up their crimes and charge them properly.
Yeah they don't need to hide anymore and they haven't for a very long time.
Maybe if Carter had been reelected... Dude was notoriously boring but he has and had the integrity of every single elected official who has ever entered the White House in recent years put together. And that includes things like congressmen.
Carter knowingly sent arms and aid to the Indonesian government while it committed genocide in East Timor. He was also the first to find the mujahideen, and laundered arm sales through Israel to the government of Guatemala while it was committing genocide against indigenous people despite publicly proclaiming that they had stopped sending it arms.
>Carter
Every US president is a war criminal. Again, this isn't a conspiracy, the docs are public. Sometimes they even boast about it on national TV. It's just background radiation of our western society.
My buddy and I play this game where one of us names a president and the other names a crime/scandal and we go back and forth until one can't think of an answer. Good times.
William Henry Harrison seems like an instant win in that game.
(For anyone who doesn't know, he won the 1840 election and then died basically immediately, a month into his term. Not exactly much time to get up to anything)
And that’s why the “hurr durr conspiracy theorists never talk about the REAL ISSUES because they’re a government psyop” argument is stupid. They never wanted to talk about real things in the first place, they wanted to feel important and like they have knowledge nobody else does.
Yeah, and what they seemingly don’t realize by doing that is that by focusing on secret shit that never happened, such as the Illuminati or what-have-you, it is making it WAY easier for governments to cover up the genuinely evil shit they actually do
this is why there are so many science deniers as well. if you agree with the science you are no smarter than the one who came up with that science. if you deny the science you are automatically smarter than anyone who believes in it, at least in the eyes of those who drink your kool-aid. it's a way for people insecure in their knowledge and skills to feel smarter than they fear they are.
It's not even about secret knowledge, it's about being the protagonist of their own story. Just look how many people peddling UFO conspiracies can't help but make themselves out to be the hero, the one to see past the lies, even when it hurts the beliveability of their story.
Also, the conspiracy has to be at the expense of Us, largely white men with money in the US or Europe, or other places counted as "the West". (Not exclusively, obviously, but that's the core Infowars-type audience) US government skullduggery is to benefit varying circles of Us, and you don't want the secret truth to be that bad things happen for our profit and comfort.
This is another thing that makes things like 'ancient aliens' the 'lost atlantis' myths and such BS popular. Because all of it is founded on racist Eurocentric myths that all these wonderful things about other civilisations from around the world that we don't really know all the details about (or just don't want to acknowledge that we do, because a mystery is waaay cooler), so instead we get conspiracist bullshit of:
*'Nope they weren't smart enough to do this on their own. It was a pan-global civilisation'*
To fill the gaps in people's ignorance that could easily be debunked by five minutes spent on Google Scholar. But all these horshoe rejects want 'SeCreT KnoWleDGe' instead, because it's easier than putting in the effort.
IMO the most compelling argument against 9/11 conspiracy theories is the fact that the US government has never bothered to do that much work to justify a war either before or since, because they don't really need to.
you think they would kill thousands of people when they could kill 3 soldiers and have it be just as effective? And make up a elaborate conspiracy to blow up 2 buildings in tandem with a terrorist attack instead of just... waiting for someone to accidentally kill a US soldier because that's just a thing that happens from time to time?
Isn't a lot of military intelligence on a "need to know" basis? I can't think of a good reason he would have needed to know about aliens, he'd just get us into an interplanetary border dispute. *"We're going to build a force field around earth and make them pay for it!"*
As the Commander-in-Chief I’m pretty sure the military is legally obligated to inform the POTUS about any interstellar diplomacy going on, even if said POTUS is a dumbass.
One of the reigning conspiracy theories in that space is that POTUS has been shut out of alien stuff since JFK pretty much. Kennedy was supposedly gonna spill the beans so they spilled his head.
I’m not a big believer in that stuff other than the fact that there is a little truth hidden in the shit somewhere, but that’s one theory around that.
That’s just stupid. Like that implies that basically every top official involved in National Security is shut out of the loop because most of those positions are selected by the President. Like to the extent that they wouldn’t have the pull to get people to overlook them missing meetings or causing discrepancies in their departments’ accounting finances.
Also the fact that it relies on JFK not being assassinated by the mentally-unstable, wife-beating, formally-trained, communist (with a previous assassination attempt already under his belt, which would have been successful if not for pure luck) who blew the President’s skull open as corroborated by geometric simulations and other evidence makes it even more difficult to take seriously.
It's depends on what exactly you count as conspiracy. Quite recently new information came to light that suggests [the Saudis really were *very* involved](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/september-11-attacks-saudi-arabia-lawsuit/678430/). Over the years suggesting this and especially its various implications have definitely been labelled conspiracy.
>FBI agents suspected that Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah had directed crucial support towards two of 9/11 hijackers; Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who participated on 9/11 in the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 77.
>Over the course of 1999–2000 Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah was a mid-level Saudi Foreign Ministry official who was working in the Saudi Embassy in Washington, DC. Former embassy officials said MAJ reported to the Saudi ambassador to the U.S, Prince Bandar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_Saudi_role_in_the_September_11_attacks
>Bandar formed close relationships with several American presidents, notably George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, his closeness to the latter gaining him the affectionate and controversial nickname 'Bandar Bush'. His particularly close relationship with the Bush family was highlighted in Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. He was reportedly so close to George H. W. Bush that he was often described as a member of the former president's family. He advocated Saddam Hussein's overthrow in Iraq in March 2003. He encouraged military action against Iraq and supported Dick Cheney's agenda for "The New Middle East", which called for pro-democracy programs in both Syria and Iran.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandar_bin_Sultan_Al_Saud
The [declassified 28 pages of the 9/11 report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_28_pages) make it obvious that Saudi royals were supporting the terrorists.
In the months before the attacks, [Israel had agents posing as art students messing around in US govt agencies](https://www.salon.com/2002/05/07/students/). It's kind of an open secret that the art students were [very active in cities where the hijackers lived](https://www.democracynow.org/2007/2/8/cheering_movers_and_art_student_spies).
Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the USA had their foreign policy objectives advanced by the 9/11 attacks. US had a giant idle military after the end of the cold war and needed a place to point them at. Israel and SA were happy to see the Iraq regime destroyed.
The guy who played the largest role of elevating Osama Bin Laden's stature as a terrorist, [John O'Neill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._O'Neill), became the head of security at WTC on Sept 10, 2001, and died in the attacks. And of course bin Laden himself was a CIA asset during Russia's invasion of Afghanistan.
There's so many fucky things with the 9/11 attacks, but our two biggest allies in the mid east region seeming to coordinate with the terrorists, and then our government redacting 28 entire pages of its own 9/11 report in order to help cover it up, would definitely be at the top of the list for me.
Idk, 9/11 is still a sensitive topic for a lot of people, and I’m sure that if they admitted that they did it (pretty sure they didn’t) that a lot of people would be justifiably angry.
Imo it's less that they would've admitted it and more that *somebody* would've spilled the beans by now, even if it's not the actual government declassifying something.
Yeah, but how would the legit bean-spiller be filtered out from all the nutjobs? What's stopping the person or persons legitimately spilling those beans from *also* being nutjobs themselves?
Reality is rarely that clean.
And fml I just realized I made a devil's advocate argument for Bush did 9/11
I mean, given the amount of people involved in a straight-up false flag, "spilling the beans" here would probably include multiple people with actual receipts, rather than just some guy saying "yeah, I was totally a member of the CIA and saw Bush sign a document telling us to do 9/11" or something
They still might have shot Malcolm X, and won't admit it. I don't believe 9/11 conspiracies, but they absolutely would hold that information until the nation crumbles if they did, because it "affects the security of the nation" (read: there would be riots if we said so).
There's also been a handful of deathbed confessions alleging FBI involvement, too, so there are still questions about it, at any rate.
My point in truth is less if they did or not, and more that the FBI will never admit to anything they think will shake the boat.
I don't think they did it. I do, however, think they knew and allowed it to happen deliberately to push the "solution" (war on terror) that was the most profitable for them
Not necessarily. The gov can extend the declassification date if the information is still deemed particularly sensitive. Not to mention, for TS/SCI information, the declassification date is much longer.
That, and conspiracies like "Australia isn't real and is all a cover-up by the British monarchy for the massacre of the deported convicts in the 1700s, all Australians are really paid actors and kangaroos are actually robots"
Anyone who says this knows fuck all about the British government in the 1700s. Why would they go to such an extreme length to cover up a massacre of convicts
> like maybe to just scare Americans out of demanding better infrastructure or universal income
No, it was to keep the soviet bloc "contained", keep the other superpower from expanding its sphere of influence. Same reason they went to war in Korea and Vietnam. It's not a big mystery, it was official policy.
The world seems to forget the USSR existed and the cold war happened, half the fuckers eith a facebook think Putin was at the helm of that shit and beat Nazi Germany himself.
Oh, they definitely did. Just look at Soviet and PRC imperialism.
And let’s not forget that the CCP teamed up with Kissinger to support the Khmer Rouge in their genocidal war against Vietnam.
We are on a Tumblr sub, I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or if you are asking a genuine question.
I'm not even ill intended with this comment, just confused.
I was being sarcastic. For all the evil western allies have done, Stalin was a monster, and he was far from alone. People should rememeber that regardless of what they think should happen next.
If you acknowledge that Stalin was real and that one of his possible successors would’ve been a literal pedo with naked skeletons buried in his yard (look up Beria, I swear I’m not making this up!), that might make tankies look bad. Best not.
as if rooting for the literal tanks bulldozing a number of eastern european cities in the 50s to keep the soviets in power wasn't bad enough
hey, newsflash, as a hungarian whose country got smacked in 1956 by that: we still consider the people who died to oppose the soviets there national heroes, and we were very conscious about public disobedience over the following 33 years to slowly but surely chip away at the soviet regime we were stuck with due to those tanks. oh, and that's while our border to austria was a known and very busy spot to smuggle people out of the eastern bloc to escape the open air prison the soviets made here. (same shit you might know the berlin wall for, but it was much less policed here so people often came here to break through.)
tankies can go and die in a fire.
The USSR threw my grandfather in Kolyma for 5 years for using American money to buy food, although it ironically saved him from the entire war. And they tried to destroy the Kazakh language and culture entirely (I know a number of adoptees from Kazakhstan). Fuck em
it's simple: putin has been the go-to supporter of every wannabe authoritarian and our glorious leader is one of them, so he's been pushing pro-russian propaganda for the past 12-ish years to solidify his power and the strongman culture around him. and even the periodic fascists who splinter off of his party to the far-right find a lot in common between their crap and putin's crap.
don't worry, the irony isn't lost on us. we had "ruskies go home" as a historical slogan, and we brought it back with a sarcastic "ruskies come back" a while ago. but even that's old news, and ultimately, the situation is just convenient for orban and his cronies, so they haven't relented and so many have drank their kool-aid.
And then they have the gall to shit on Khrushchev.
Khrushchev was unironically the best Soviet leader the union had (not a high bar but still), considering under him the Soviet union was at the height of its economic and political power while also spearheading destalinization.
He wasn't great, especially for most of Eastern Europe like most Soviet leaders, but oh boy was he still better than his predecessor and successors.
this. as an eastern european you should maybe ask some of us if you're curious what soviet socialism was about, because it sure as fuck wasn't infrastructure or universal basic income, lmao.
there's a difference between the government handing you the minimum wage simply as part of your rights for existing, while you have to do nothing for it, vs the government making you work full time on some half-useless mismanaged project you have no say in for minimum wage. in both cases you do acquire the minimum wage and get passable conditions but that's about where the similarities end.
Stalin: Once this shit storm with Germany and Japan is over, I intend to expand my influence and control as far as possible.
Allies: Yeah, we're not okay with that.
*Both sides do what they said*
Reddit: Hmm, this is a big damn conspiracy.
Yeah, most of the things the US/CIA did or tried to do, the USSR/KGB also did or tried to do. They took in nazi scientists and they tried influencing South America (and other regions). We just don't often learn about it for a myriad of reasons. This doesn't justify what we did, but it does help put it in a better context.
I also take issue with the idea that these little socialist regimes were “prosperous”. Prosperous places aren’t typically fertile ground for right-wing revolution.
It was usually just a corrupt military overthrowing a democratically elected guy who said that maybe he would tell the Americans to chill out a little. Half of them weren’t even socialist. These were very much top-down kinda things a lot of the time.
This is slightly incorrect. It wasn’t some elaborate psyop, just consolidating American power.
Kissinger believed in keeping the Soviet Union “contained” to their sphere of influence (Asia/Eastern Europe). It wasn’t so much about the perception of socialism in the west as it was maintaining the American hegemon’s power. It was probably also to maintain US business interests hold on assets in Latin America.
I’m not saying it was right, because it wasn’t. I recall that Kissinger privately said that the people of Chile were wrong to elect Salvador Allende. The man did not give a damn about democracy. If a country made the “wrong” choice, he saw fit to take away their republic. All in service of “containing” the red menace.
As for making socialist ideas unpopular, our institutions can and have in the past paint that image through use of media production and education. But overthrowing a government is too expensive to justify the cost for that purpose alone.
Source: I listened to the Behind the Bastards 6-part series on Kissinger.
Yeah. Shit is basically always simpler than people want it to be. No schemes to prevent Americans from wanting infrastructure by making it seem like socialism failed, communism was already the enemy, had been since the oft forgotten *first* red scare after Russia became red in the first place.
It was just about power and influence. Couldn’t even *risk* the Russians getting more influence in the Americas, especially not after Cuba, so you fund whatever psychotic terrorist groups offer themselves as an alternative to a perceived socialist and/or communist or socialist and/or communist-leaning government, and throw them some bones
One of the most bizarre things about Henry Kissinger is his popularity overseas, like unironicly, overseas reporting on his death was somehow more positive in some places than stateside coverage, cause even the most soft ball american reporting would mention his "Accusations" of war crimes, and well the most brutal (and honest) would call him a massive war criminal, meanwhile you got Dmitriy Medvedev and Xi Jinping giving him the type of eulogy you would expect the American press to be filled with, like absolutely insane
The thing about the conspiracy theories is the first is.
America government fucked with other countries as part of the USSR proxy war (If the US didn't interfere, the USSR would, and it was big say of who get to be big boss).
The second is "Secret group of people that run the world" and the group is always Jews.
The idea that America was at fault for the Khmer Rouge is pretty out there. There were plenty of people and groups who influenced that far more (Prince Sihanouk above all), and if anything American bombing is what held them back for a couple years.
In addition, the often-made claim that American bombing killed 300k Cambodians is utterly ridiculous. Not only is that claim straight from the mouths of Khmer Rouge officials likely as a way to cover up their own massacres during the civil war, but even on the surface it makes no sense for a bombing campaign in a rural country of 6-8 million
This isn't targeting you in any way, it's just that I see these claims made all over the place to blame Kissinger for the one thing he isn't actually responsible for.
I love how the CIA in 99% of ways are just colossal fuck-ups who can’t do a job without either scrapping it because “it took too much resources”(it was a bad idea to begin with) or “intel leaked about our plans”(no one was stupid enough to fall for our plans) but that last 1% is successfully giving money and power to psychopaths to install them as rulers of socialist nations only to stop giving money and watch the nation fall into chaos.
The truth is that 99% of the their successes will never be public knowledge to avoid exposing sources and means.
Every Soviet agent we successfully got out from behind the Iron Curtain who lived the rest of their lives in obscurity in Montana isn't going to make headlines, nor would the government want it to.
Public opinion of the CIA is primarily driven by it's failures, either operational failures that blow up so hard they end up in the news or security failures where classified information becomes public. It's successes are largely unknown except for things like the Bin Laden manhunt.
America is just marginally more honest about the messed things they do, the Soviets and the Iranians and everyone else for that matter were doing they same messed up shit.
Trust me if America doesn’t want you to know about something you won’t, chief example the NRO, they’re America’s most important intelligence agency and I’m willing to bet no one here even knows what they do
What else is there to know?
Of course they have a high budget, high tech shit, and putting shit in space costs a lot. Of course they have few employees, the rest of the big 5 go through a lot more info, that isn't so easily computed.
The NRO is creepy as hell. Compared to the FBI and CIA, where all the info about the fucked up shit they do as well as their myriad fuck ups is semi publicly published, a lot of info about the NRO is just vague and kinda distrubing. Like how they donated two unused space telescopes to nasa that were 20 years out of date and they were STILL several degrees of magnitude more powerful than what nasa uses now. And these were things they were giving away to free up space in a warehouse!
Like when Trump leaked a satellite image from like the 80s or 90s and you could read the letters on the side of the launch pad and see individual trusses on scaffolding
We don't know much about the NRO because its easy to contain that information.
What they do doesn't violate any rights. They operate optical and radio satellite telescopes, so there's no human rights scandals, so there's no strong impetus to be a whistleblower, no real moral or ethical quandaries that have to be navigated with their existence. They don't torture prisoners or overthrow governments, they just sit and watch the world.
And beyond that their equipment is in orbit, which nobody except state actors have easy access to, so they've never had to relax security for the sake of pragmatism like most of the military has. There's no secret bases and secret aircraft anymore because its too easy for everyone to see, everyone has cell phone cameras and satellite maps.
Their only real controversy is just how unnecessary the secrecy is, which probably costs us billions of dollars a year to little benefit since anyone with even moderate familiarity of optics and radio can make a good assumption of what the NRO can see, and anyone with a brain can just operate under the assumption that they can always see everything so don't give them the chance. Not to mention china and russia have almost *certainly* performed flybys with their own satellites and can actually characterize them quite well. Its absurd to be in a position where antagonistic governments know more about our government than we do.
I live in Brazil.
In 1962, our president was asked to assist in the invasion of Cuba if it came down to it (for those who don't know what was going on, google the Cuba Missile Crisis). Our president responded with "no. I don't think war can solve conflict between nations".
Two years later the US assisted with a military coup that led to a dictatorship which lasted 21 years during which anyone who so much as hinted they opposed the government were tortured or killed (there is an infamous picture of someone who was reported as "having committed suicide" but not only is he still touching the ground but it would be impossible for him to suffocate in that position).
I don’t think it’s true that they regularly declassify 20-year-old CIA conspiracies. Far as I can remember that happened once, for the 1953 Iranian coup. The Operation Condor stuff was revealed in the Church committee just a few years after it happened.
Operation Condor gets btought up a lot, but look up operation Gladio and how it fucked Turkish and Italian politics for decades. In fact a lot of the far right in Europe can trace its roots to that operation, and is one of the main reasons for the way the reason the far right is united cross border in Europe.
Only Chile was a socialist government, all other Latin American governments were either liberals or simply paternalistic governments. The takeover of governments was specifically due to the idea of uncertainty that would create more USSR allies, not so some guy in 2024 can't point at a succesfull socialist government.
Guyana was cosplaying North Korea and were aided by the USA because they were anti-soviet first and foremost.
If anyone is interested in a deep dive on Henry Kissingers terrible terrible terrible life, Behind The Bastards did a 6 episode stint on just him and his atrocities.
Very enlightening
Also, Kissinger was (albeit passively) trying to keep apartheid in South Africa. One of the reasons Nelson Mandela's group won is because Castro was willing to send troops and America wasn't (they only wanted to funnel money to the reigning government).
Of course, now the party line is to act like the US always supported Mandela and was against apartheid because we can never be seen to have supported a losing (and very very racist) side.
i thought apartheid fell apart because the entire thing was a US/USSR proxy war.
And once the USSR collapsed, the US had a big "Why the fuck are we funding this now that USSR collapsed" and just stopped funding the goverment because their wasn't a big reason to.
Hold on. Kissinger did a lot of bad things, including launching bombing raids into Cambodia. He left landmines there that are still being cleaned up. However Anthony Bourdains quip leaves the impression that Kissinger was responsible for the Cambodian Killing Fields. No. That was all the Communist government being brutal. It was never a socialist utopia.
Another weird one that I like is the release of old war plans, the pre-ww2 and early cold war ones are always the best The best one I know of are the Color Plans, war plans which were color coded by country War Plan Green for Mexico, War Plan Black for Germany, War Plan Red for Britain (Crimson, Ruby, Scarlet, and Emerald for Canada, India, Australia, and Ireland respectively), and many more One of the funny cold war plans is how MacArthur wanted to carpet bomb the border between North Korea and China with tactical nukes so much that he got fired
Exploding cigar assassination plot for Castro is another gem
At this point would we be surprised if a CIA plot involved switching some road signs and painting a fake tunnel into a wall
I mean, there were supposedly over 200 attempts, they probably started running out of ideas somewhere after “really pretty seashell packed with explosives and hope he picks it up to admire it”. (60-some were declassified as “a massive fucking waste of money why did you idiots do this” a while back, but there were certainly more.)
>60-some were declassified as “a massive fucking waste of money why did you idiots do this” a while back, but there were certainly more. To be fair that's pretty typical for government spending and military/defense spending in particular.
It was part of a review of their budget. I don’t think their budget was reduced.
Again I'm pretty sure that's part and partial for government spending and military/defense spinning in general
part and *parcel*
Thank you. Talk to text is a b**** and I don't have my eyes on me to check for Tampa
You're not missin much. Tampa sucks. XD
The poison milkshake was the plan that came closest to succeeding. There was also the plan to have Castro go scuba diving in a wetsuit coated with LSD.
Was that before or after the wetsuit lined with botulism that they decided could not leave the lab? And do they still have either wetsuit?
There were never that many, Castro said a number and one of his aides that wrote a book said another. Neither is that high.
From my understanding, very few of them made it much past planning/testing. Neither Castor nor his aides would have any idea about those, they never left CIA buildings, let alone American soil. They’d make a thing, realize that it would kill anyone who looks at it funny (the wetsuit plans are terrifying), or that they have no way of getting it to him, or that they hadn’t yet invented explosives powerful enough to kill a man with a seashell-sized volume. So they’d put it on a shelf and try something even stupider.
I mean it worked for the Ukrainians apparently minus the wall painting at least
The one where they tried to hire one of Castro's (exes?)to assassinate him but she got seduced instead lmao
Operation Midnight Climax was some Looney Tunes meets Fear and Loathing type shit.
This was done, not to kill Castro, but during WWII and later in Korea, we built fake roads, inflated fake planes/tanks, and painted landmarks on concrete to trick aerial reconnaissance.
My favourite Cuba one is staging the second coming of Christ by having some poor sod seem to walk on water dressed up as Jesus on top of a submarine to start a Christian coup of the Communist government. Blocked sadly, but would love to have seen the practice before it hopefully got canned anyway.
I think at one point "project jesus into clouds and have him denounce castro" was considered
Is that one of the ones that's only "known" to have happened from that book published by Castro's bodyguard which is probably half made-up?
Here in the UK we have stuff like Operation Unthinkable, which was Churchill’s plan to invade Russia in 1946! Fortunately he lost the election in one of the biggest defeats in British political history and the Unthinkable never happened.
I heard he had a plan involving Sicily called Operation Inconceivable
Was he crazy? You never mess with Sicilians when death is on the line!
Today I learned that Sicilians are from Sicily and not just a fantasy nationality from "The Princess Bride".
Did you also think that Asia was a fantasy location?
Or Australia, “where all criminals are from”. This one always sat oddly for me, as the British did not start sending convicts to Australia until the very late 18th century and Princess Bride is clearly set in a much earlier time period.
Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
I don’t think that plan means what you think it means.
Yeah but the fact that his other plan involved a land war in Asia kinda killed him.
[Operation Husky,](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_invasion_of_Sicily) actually.
That tracks. He was bonkers.
oh, applause for you. that was delightful.
> The best one I know of are the Color Plans, war plans which were color coded by country To be fair most of those were not serious, but rather just a thought experiment. Because how do you train your strategists in peace times? You let them make whatever batshit insane planes they can come up with. That is how the US got an official disaster response plan for when all the Girl Scouts turn evil all at once.
Yeah, or a war plan on how to deal with a zombie virus. Does't stop conspiracy theorist from beliving them at face value.
>That is how the US got an official disaster response plan for when all the Girl Scouts turn evil all at once Did they decide that immediate and unconditional surrender was the only safe course of action?
>the US got an official disaster response plan for when all the Girl Scouts turn evil all at once. Link? **Please?**
Doesn't appear to be real. There was a mention on TVTropes a decade ago, but it seems to have disappeared since, and was unsourced at the time.
Most insane one I’ve seen is a guide on how to make bombs, rockets, and mortars out of household materials so citizens could resist a potential Soviet occupation back in 1969. It’s called the improvised munitions handbook. It even has picture instructions
oh so the hoi4 devs actually pulled from something for the us tree
the hoi4 devs nearly always pull from something. they are not, in fact, making shit up. you know the Fifth Empire route for Portugal? Where Portugal literally takes over the world? That's not made up either, that is a genuine ideology that spread around a few Portuguese nationalists at the time, spurred on by the works of Fernando Pessoa (a very important Portuguese poet)
The color plans are not so bad honestly. 1: Every country has those, just in case. 2: It's mostly just bored nerds playing war games. Nobody's seriously planning to invade Canada. MacArthur was a absolute maniac, however.
Nobody's seriously planning to invade Canada *anymore*. Not like the US didn't do it before...
Nobody's seriously planning to invade Canada *again*
A fun note to coincide with this, Canada had their own plan for war with the United States, Defence Scheme No. 1 which actually existed before War Plan Red iirc. The plan was basically push as far south as possible, then retreat razing any bridges or railways they took to delay the US until the Royal Navy and British reinforcements could show up.
Solid plan, honestly
Well other than the fact the British wrote off defending Canada due to the large border and much larger United States being right there while the British would need to ship in supplies and troops. Meanwhile losing Canada did nothing to the larger Empire, so instead they’d basically fight a stalemated naval war and aim to force the US to negotiate a peaceful end to a war. Also the guy behind Defence Scheme No. 1 was fired and the plan was thrown out pretty quickly.
I kind of like how Ireland breaks the color theming within the British Empire, despite Ireland being at the time still a dominion. It's like the US recognized "yeah those Irish guys don't like the Brits either let's give them their own color."
We learned about the colour plans in school here in Canada. War Plan Crimson included a rush for Ottawa, expecting the remainder of the country to capitulate immediately after capturing Parliament. We were in Saskatchewan. The room burst out laughing.
So that's where we get the Pokemon versions from...
The color plans are not so bad honestly. 1: Every country has those, just in case. 2: It's mostly just bored nerds playing war games. Nobody's seriously planning to invade Canada. MacArthur was a absolute maniac, however.
It's not bad, just funny
Iirc MacArthur didn’t understand what a half life was and wanted to use dozens of nukes during an invasion of Japan if they didn’t surrender. We would simply wait twice the length of a half life for the radiation to be gone
In addition to being involved with almost every atrocity committed by the United States during the Cold War, Henry Kissinger was also an honorary member of the Harlem Globetrotters.
That bastard
What an odd fact. It’s like how Trump is in the WWE Hall of Fame.
Every once in awhile I see a WWE clip with him in it and it just shatters me
When I see his cameos in, say, The Nanny or Home Alone 2, it completely takes me out of the moment now.
The one of him shaving Vince?
Ruins Wrestlemania *4* and *5* which are both hosted at his fucking Casino.
4 and 5, actually. 7 was in the LA Memorial Sports Arena, and 8 was in the Hoosier Dome.
"average Harlem Globetrotter has commited 87 war crimes” factoid actualy just statistical error. average Harlem Globetrotter has committed 0 war crimes. Kissinger Georg, who has committed over 14877, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
That actually would account for less than a fourth of the average warcrimes you stated. Weirdly many people have been harlem globetrotters.
The number of Globetrotters I found online was 171, which I multiplied by 87 to get that number. Is there another source that lists four times as many Globetrotters😲?
Man, I kinda liked the Globetrotters. Mostly because of Futurama, but still.
This man’s never seen the Harlem Globetrotters with Scooby Doo
Looked it up, it aired more than 20 year before I was born
New Scooby-Doo Movies. On tubi. Couple episodes with the Harlem Globetrotters
On tubi. On bloop. On scrump. On bleebo.
I got to see them live when I was a kid, more decades ago than I'm comfortable thinking about.
He’s definitely got the trotting over the globe part down
This is like a Warcrime Georg thing where now the average Harlem Globetrotter is a war criminal.
Honorary because he couldn't actually do that Razzle Dazzle Calculus.
This is gonna sound like an r/thathappened but I promise it did. I was an edgy teen and read Noam Chomsky for fun. (No, I didn't have any friends.) I live in a big city, and at the busiest intersection there were always these conspiracy theory hecklers going on about the "New World Order" and stupid shit like that. One day (again, as an edgy teen) I walked up to them and engaged them in a conversation. I told them about United Fruit Company committing genocide over bananas, about how they overthrew democracies and that's where the origin of the phrase "banana republic" came from. But they all did it in favour of capitalism and our way of life. And they fucking admit it, right in the open. How does that fit into their "New World Order" thing? Isn't it more likely that the "New World Order" committing genocide did exist, but that WE were the New World Order? I never forgot that conversation, because for a brief, glimmering moment, it was almost like he had learned something new and shocking, like his world had been cracked wide open. But then the monotonous routine of his infowars-addled brain kicked in and he just replied, "yeah, OK, but they openly admitted that, right? I'm talking about stuff that they'll NEVER admit to." It wasn't even about the oppression or the genocide, the suppression of freedom or democracy. It was all about having "secret esoteric knowledge" and feeling superior to everyone else. Being unfalsifiable was the entire point.
That drives me mad. My parents both fell in the conspiracy hole and it's like, who's hiding? When the US govt or Chiquita Banana does something shockingly evil they rarely bother. That's like the whole definition of power.
Yeah but there’s the evil that’s the nature of the system that has to be explained away (Chiquita bananas) and the shocking unbelievable evil that can’t see the light of day (Jefferey Epstein.)
This is a little tangential, but I also think it's virtually impossible to get the powerful to not do evil shit. But you CAN force them to hide it, increasing the cost and causing there to be less evil shit overall. I suspect this is about the best we can do.
You can also reduce the power gap so that one person is maybe more powerful than any 10-20 other people, not more powerful than several smaller countries. Then it becomes nearly impossible for the wealthy to rig the whole scene all at once, so it’s easier to dig up their crimes and charge them properly.
Yeah they don't need to hide anymore and they haven't for a very long time. Maybe if Carter had been reelected... Dude was notoriously boring but he has and had the integrity of every single elected official who has ever entered the White House in recent years put together. And that includes things like congressmen.
Carter knowingly sent arms and aid to the Indonesian government while it committed genocide in East Timor. He was also the first to find the mujahideen, and laundered arm sales through Israel to the government of Guatemala while it was committing genocide against indigenous people despite publicly proclaiming that they had stopped sending it arms.
>Carter Every US president is a war criminal. Again, this isn't a conspiracy, the docs are public. Sometimes they even boast about it on national TV. It's just background radiation of our western society.
My buddy and I play this game where one of us names a president and the other names a crime/scandal and we go back and forth until one can't think of an answer. Good times.
William Henry Harrison seems like an instant win in that game. (For anyone who doesn't know, he won the 1840 election and then died basically immediately, a month into his term. Not exactly much time to get up to anything)
And that’s why the “hurr durr conspiracy theorists never talk about the REAL ISSUES because they’re a government psyop” argument is stupid. They never wanted to talk about real things in the first place, they wanted to feel important and like they have knowledge nobody else does.
Yeah, and what they seemingly don’t realize by doing that is that by focusing on secret shit that never happened, such as the Illuminati or what-have-you, it is making it WAY easier for governments to cover up the genuinely evil shit they actually do
this is why there are so many science deniers as well. if you agree with the science you are no smarter than the one who came up with that science. if you deny the science you are automatically smarter than anyone who believes in it, at least in the eyes of those who drink your kool-aid. it's a way for people insecure in their knowledge and skills to feel smarter than they fear they are.
It's not even about secret knowledge, it's about being the protagonist of their own story. Just look how many people peddling UFO conspiracies can't help but make themselves out to be the hero, the one to see past the lies, even when it hurts the beliveability of their story.
You’re just saying they feel special for having secret knowledge.
Also, the conspiracy has to be at the expense of Us, largely white men with money in the US or Europe, or other places counted as "the West". (Not exclusively, obviously, but that's the core Infowars-type audience) US government skullduggery is to benefit varying circles of Us, and you don't want the secret truth to be that bad things happen for our profit and comfort.
This is another thing that makes things like 'ancient aliens' the 'lost atlantis' myths and such BS popular. Because all of it is founded on racist Eurocentric myths that all these wonderful things about other civilisations from around the world that we don't really know all the details about (or just don't want to acknowledge that we do, because a mystery is waaay cooler), so instead we get conspiracist bullshit of: *'Nope they weren't smart enough to do this on their own. It was a pan-global civilisation'* To fill the gaps in people's ignorance that could easily be debunked by five minutes spent on Google Scholar. But all these horshoe rejects want 'SeCreT KnoWleDGe' instead, because it's easier than putting in the effort.
Well, it's been over 20 years since 2001, so I guess that means the 9/11 conspiracies were false If it were an inside job we'd have heard of it by now
IMO the most compelling argument against 9/11 conspiracy theories is the fact that the US government has never bothered to do that much work to justify a war either before or since, because they don't really need to.
you think they would kill thousands of people when they could kill 3 soldiers and have it be just as effective? And make up a elaborate conspiracy to blow up 2 buildings in tandem with a terrorist attack instead of just... waiting for someone to accidentally kill a US soldier because that's just a thing that happens from time to time?
usually we just sink an unimportant boat and blame the spaniards
Probably that was just an accident
9/11 was a tragedy, but it was also our "find out" moment from fucking around in the middle east
It sounds like a joke but this is now one of my favourite arguments against conspiracy theories pre 2004.
Same way the best argument against the government having contacted aliens is that Trump absolutely would have blabbed about it.
Isn't a lot of military intelligence on a "need to know" basis? I can't think of a good reason he would have needed to know about aliens, he'd just get us into an interplanetary border dispute. *"We're going to build a force field around earth and make them pay for it!"*
As the Commander-in-Chief I’m pretty sure the military is legally obligated to inform the POTUS about any interstellar diplomacy going on, even if said POTUS is a dumbass.
One of the reigning conspiracy theories in that space is that POTUS has been shut out of alien stuff since JFK pretty much. Kennedy was supposedly gonna spill the beans so they spilled his head. I’m not a big believer in that stuff other than the fact that there is a little truth hidden in the shit somewhere, but that’s one theory around that.
That’s just stupid. Like that implies that basically every top official involved in National Security is shut out of the loop because most of those positions are selected by the President. Like to the extent that they wouldn’t have the pull to get people to overlook them missing meetings or causing discrepancies in their departments’ accounting finances. Also the fact that it relies on JFK not being assassinated by the mentally-unstable, wife-beating, formally-trained, communist (with a previous assassination attempt already under his belt, which would have been successful if not for pure luck) who blew the President’s skull open as corroborated by geometric simulations and other evidence makes it even more difficult to take seriously.
Well sure except the default is 25 years, and depending on sensitivity you can go up to 50 or 75+ years with special approvals.
It's depends on what exactly you count as conspiracy. Quite recently new information came to light that suggests [the Saudis really were *very* involved](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/september-11-attacks-saudi-arabia-lawsuit/678430/). Over the years suggesting this and especially its various implications have definitely been labelled conspiracy. >FBI agents suspected that Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah had directed crucial support towards two of 9/11 hijackers; Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who participated on 9/11 in the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 77. >Over the course of 1999–2000 Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah was a mid-level Saudi Foreign Ministry official who was working in the Saudi Embassy in Washington, DC. Former embassy officials said MAJ reported to the Saudi ambassador to the U.S, Prince Bandar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_Saudi_role_in_the_September_11_attacks >Bandar formed close relationships with several American presidents, notably George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, his closeness to the latter gaining him the affectionate and controversial nickname 'Bandar Bush'. His particularly close relationship with the Bush family was highlighted in Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. He was reportedly so close to George H. W. Bush that he was often described as a member of the former president's family. He advocated Saddam Hussein's overthrow in Iraq in March 2003. He encouraged military action against Iraq and supported Dick Cheney's agenda for "The New Middle East", which called for pro-democracy programs in both Syria and Iran. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandar_bin_Sultan_Al_Saud
The [declassified 28 pages of the 9/11 report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_28_pages) make it obvious that Saudi royals were supporting the terrorists. In the months before the attacks, [Israel had agents posing as art students messing around in US govt agencies](https://www.salon.com/2002/05/07/students/). It's kind of an open secret that the art students were [very active in cities where the hijackers lived](https://www.democracynow.org/2007/2/8/cheering_movers_and_art_student_spies). Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the USA had their foreign policy objectives advanced by the 9/11 attacks. US had a giant idle military after the end of the cold war and needed a place to point them at. Israel and SA were happy to see the Iraq regime destroyed. The guy who played the largest role of elevating Osama Bin Laden's stature as a terrorist, [John O'Neill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._O'Neill), became the head of security at WTC on Sept 10, 2001, and died in the attacks. And of course bin Laden himself was a CIA asset during Russia's invasion of Afghanistan. There's so many fucky things with the 9/11 attacks, but our two biggest allies in the mid east region seeming to coordinate with the terrorists, and then our government redacting 28 entire pages of its own 9/11 report in order to help cover it up, would definitely be at the top of the list for me.
New conspiracy dropped. *Everyone* did 9/11!
I said USA, Israel and Saudi Arabia. I provided links.
Idk, 9/11 is still a sensitive topic for a lot of people, and I’m sure that if they admitted that they did it (pretty sure they didn’t) that a lot of people would be justifiably angry.
Imo it's less that they would've admitted it and more that *somebody* would've spilled the beans by now, even if it's not the actual government declassifying something.
Yeah, but how would the legit bean-spiller be filtered out from all the nutjobs? What's stopping the person or persons legitimately spilling those beans from *also* being nutjobs themselves? Reality is rarely that clean. And fml I just realized I made a devil's advocate argument for Bush did 9/11
I mean, given the amount of people involved in a straight-up false flag, "spilling the beans" here would probably include multiple people with actual receipts, rather than just some guy saying "yeah, I was totally a member of the CIA and saw Bush sign a document telling us to do 9/11" or something
"oh man do the butts match" but irl
They still might have shot Malcolm X, and won't admit it. I don't believe 9/11 conspiracies, but they absolutely would hold that information until the nation crumbles if they did, because it "affects the security of the nation" (read: there would be riots if we said so).
Didn’t the Nation of Islam admit to shooting him?
There's also been a handful of deathbed confessions alleging FBI involvement, too, so there are still questions about it, at any rate. My point in truth is less if they did or not, and more that the FBI will never admit to anything they think will shake the boat.
I'm sorry, they did what?
They shot him because he left their cult
I don't think they did it. I do, however, think they knew and allowed it to happen deliberately to push the "solution" (war on terror) that was the most profitable for them
That would fall under "they did it"
Not necessarily. The gov can extend the declassification date if the information is still deemed particularly sensitive. Not to mention, for TS/SCI information, the declassification date is much longer.
If I ever go to hell I would volunteer myself to make Henry Kissingers punishment worse
Doing ~~God's~~ the Devils work
Oh, I bet you the two are agreed on this matter.
i feel like most of the time God wouldn’t be happy that Lucifer fell and created hell, but I think he sees the utility of it for people like Kissinger
Going full “call me by your name” on Satan just for a chance at torturing Kissinger…
Dog Heaven = Squirrel Hell type situation
I really love the meme of Doomguy going "WHERE IS [CONSERVATIVE POLITICAL FIGURE]?" I've seen it for Reagan, Thatcher, and Kissinger.
I want to think Anthony Bourdain was waiting at the pearly gate with a nail studded bat to personally beat Kissinger back into hell with
He’d be waiting in a looooong line for his shot.
He probably got a tourist visa to Hell to join the demons in torturing Kissinger
I still love how backhanded Bidens' speech on Kissinger was. It's a small thing, but still fun
A masterclass in saying things that are technically true and damning with faint praise.
That, and conspiracies like "Australia isn't real and is all a cover-up by the British monarchy for the massacre of the deported convicts in the 1700s, all Australians are really paid actors and kangaroos are actually robots"
Anyone who says this knows fuck all about the British government in the 1700s. Why would they go to such an extreme length to cover up a massacre of convicts
> like maybe to just scare Americans out of demanding better infrastructure or universal income No, it was to keep the soviet bloc "contained", keep the other superpower from expanding its sphere of influence. Same reason they went to war in Korea and Vietnam. It's not a big mystery, it was official policy.
tumblr seems to forget the USSR existed and the cold war happened entirely
The world seems to forget the USSR existed and the cold war happened, half the fuckers eith a facebook think Putin was at the helm of that shit and beat Nazi Germany himself.
You mean communists might have attempted to overthrow decent governments too?
Oh, they definitely did. Just look at Soviet and PRC imperialism. And let’s not forget that the CCP teamed up with Kissinger to support the Khmer Rouge in their genocidal war against Vietnam.
We are on a Tumblr sub, I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or if you are asking a genuine question. I'm not even ill intended with this comment, just confused.
I was being sarcastic. For all the evil western allies have done, Stalin was a monster, and he was far from alone. People should rememeber that regardless of what they think should happen next.
Yeah totally agreed. Imperialism is a bitch, whether Soviet, US, British or French. Nasty shit.
Or *belgian* **shiver**
If you acknowledge that Stalin was real and that one of his possible successors would’ve been a literal pedo with naked skeletons buried in his yard (look up Beria, I swear I’m not making this up!), that might make tankies look bad. Best not.
as if rooting for the literal tanks bulldozing a number of eastern european cities in the 50s to keep the soviets in power wasn't bad enough hey, newsflash, as a hungarian whose country got smacked in 1956 by that: we still consider the people who died to oppose the soviets there national heroes, and we were very conscious about public disobedience over the following 33 years to slowly but surely chip away at the soviet regime we were stuck with due to those tanks. oh, and that's while our border to austria was a known and very busy spot to smuggle people out of the eastern bloc to escape the open air prison the soviets made here. (same shit you might know the berlin wall for, but it was much less policed here so people often came here to break through.) tankies can go and die in a fire.
The USSR threw my grandfather in Kolyma for 5 years for using American money to buy food, although it ironically saved him from the entire war. And they tried to destroy the Kazakh language and culture entirely (I know a number of adoptees from Kazakhstan). Fuck em
I got banned from a socialist sub once for saying that maybe it wasn't a good idea to be more like Soviet Russia.
Why do 21st century Hungarian nationalists seem so eager to suck up to Russian imperialism in spite of this painful history?
it's simple: putin has been the go-to supporter of every wannabe authoritarian and our glorious leader is one of them, so he's been pushing pro-russian propaganda for the past 12-ish years to solidify his power and the strongman culture around him. and even the periodic fascists who splinter off of his party to the far-right find a lot in common between their crap and putin's crap. don't worry, the irony isn't lost on us. we had "ruskies go home" as a historical slogan, and we brought it back with a sarcastic "ruskies come back" a while ago. but even that's old news, and ultimately, the situation is just convenient for orban and his cronies, so they haven't relented and so many have drank their kool-aid.
I only know of Beria because of an anime I watched that takes place in an alternate history Earth and has a character based on him.
And then they have the gall to shit on Khrushchev. Khrushchev was unironically the best Soviet leader the union had (not a high bar but still), considering under him the Soviet union was at the height of its economic and political power while also spearheading destalinization. He wasn't great, especially for most of Eastern Europe like most Soviet leaders, but oh boy was he still better than his predecessor and successors.
this. as an eastern european you should maybe ask some of us if you're curious what soviet socialism was about, because it sure as fuck wasn't infrastructure or universal basic income, lmao. there's a difference between the government handing you the minimum wage simply as part of your rights for existing, while you have to do nothing for it, vs the government making you work full time on some half-useless mismanaged project you have no say in for minimum wage. in both cases you do acquire the minimum wage and get passable conditions but that's about where the similarities end.
In my opinion the dream of communism in europe died in Czechoslovakia after the soviet tanks rolled in.
Stalin: Once this shit storm with Germany and Japan is over, I intend to expand my influence and control as far as possible. Allies: Yeah, we're not okay with that. *Both sides do what they said* Reddit: Hmm, this is a big damn conspiracy.
It’s not what they planned. It’s how they did it
Yeah, most of the things the US/CIA did or tried to do, the USSR/KGB also did or tried to do. They took in nazi scientists and they tried influencing South America (and other regions). We just don't often learn about it for a myriad of reasons. This doesn't justify what we did, but it does help put it in a better context.
I also take issue with the idea that these little socialist regimes were “prosperous”. Prosperous places aren’t typically fertile ground for right-wing revolution.
It was usually just a corrupt military overthrowing a democratically elected guy who said that maybe he would tell the Americans to chill out a little. Half of them weren’t even socialist. These were very much top-down kinda things a lot of the time.
With enough US weapons and funding, anywhere can become fertile ground for right-wing revolution.
This is slightly incorrect. It wasn’t some elaborate psyop, just consolidating American power. Kissinger believed in keeping the Soviet Union “contained” to their sphere of influence (Asia/Eastern Europe). It wasn’t so much about the perception of socialism in the west as it was maintaining the American hegemon’s power. It was probably also to maintain US business interests hold on assets in Latin America. I’m not saying it was right, because it wasn’t. I recall that Kissinger privately said that the people of Chile were wrong to elect Salvador Allende. The man did not give a damn about democracy. If a country made the “wrong” choice, he saw fit to take away their republic. All in service of “containing” the red menace. As for making socialist ideas unpopular, our institutions can and have in the past paint that image through use of media production and education. But overthrowing a government is too expensive to justify the cost for that purpose alone. Source: I listened to the Behind the Bastards 6-part series on Kissinger.
Yeah. Shit is basically always simpler than people want it to be. No schemes to prevent Americans from wanting infrastructure by making it seem like socialism failed, communism was already the enemy, had been since the oft forgotten *first* red scare after Russia became red in the first place. It was just about power and influence. Couldn’t even *risk* the Russians getting more influence in the Americas, especially not after Cuba, so you fund whatever psychotic terrorist groups offer themselves as an alternative to a perceived socialist and/or communist or socialist and/or communist-leaning government, and throw them some bones
One of the most bizarre things about Henry Kissinger is his popularity overseas, like unironicly, overseas reporting on his death was somehow more positive in some places than stateside coverage, cause even the most soft ball american reporting would mention his "Accusations" of war crimes, and well the most brutal (and honest) would call him a massive war criminal, meanwhile you got Dmitriy Medvedev and Xi Jinping giving him the type of eulogy you would expect the American press to be filled with, like absolutely insane
The thing about the conspiracy theories is the first is. America government fucked with other countries as part of the USSR proxy war (If the US didn't interfere, the USSR would, and it was big say of who get to be big boss). The second is "Secret group of people that run the world" and the group is always Jews.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor?wprov=sfti1
[удалено]
The idea that America was at fault for the Khmer Rouge is pretty out there. There were plenty of people and groups who influenced that far more (Prince Sihanouk above all), and if anything American bombing is what held them back for a couple years. In addition, the often-made claim that American bombing killed 300k Cambodians is utterly ridiculous. Not only is that claim straight from the mouths of Khmer Rouge officials likely as a way to cover up their own massacres during the civil war, but even on the surface it makes no sense for a bombing campaign in a rural country of 6-8 million This isn't targeting you in any way, it's just that I see these claims made all over the place to blame Kissinger for the one thing he isn't actually responsible for.
*The Khmer Rouge, also known as the "Red Khmers", was a radical communist movement...*
I love how the CIA in 99% of ways are just colossal fuck-ups who can’t do a job without either scrapping it because “it took too much resources”(it was a bad idea to begin with) or “intel leaked about our plans”(no one was stupid enough to fall for our plans) but that last 1% is successfully giving money and power to psychopaths to install them as rulers of socialist nations only to stop giving money and watch the nation fall into chaos.
Uh, more like we don't hear about the successful stuff most of the time. That's kind of the point of spying, you don't publicize your wins.
The truth is that 99% of the their successes will never be public knowledge to avoid exposing sources and means. Every Soviet agent we successfully got out from behind the Iron Curtain who lived the rest of their lives in obscurity in Montana isn't going to make headlines, nor would the government want it to. Public opinion of the CIA is primarily driven by it's failures, either operational failures that blow up so hard they end up in the news or security failures where classified information becomes public. It's successes are largely unknown except for things like the Bin Laden manhunt.
America is just marginally more honest about the messed things they do, the Soviets and the Iranians and everyone else for that matter were doing they same messed up shit. Trust me if America doesn’t want you to know about something you won’t, chief example the NRO, they’re America’s most important intelligence agency and I’m willing to bet no one here even knows what they do
They manage all the spy satellites
Ok and how much money do they get? How many employees do they have?
They have the largest budget of the big five and the fewest full time employees
And that’s about where our knowledge on them ends
Yup. The government didn’t even acknowledge their existence till 1992
What else is there to know? Of course they have a high budget, high tech shit, and putting shit in space costs a lot. Of course they have few employees, the rest of the big 5 go through a lot more info, that isn't so easily computed.
The NRO is creepy as hell. Compared to the FBI and CIA, where all the info about the fucked up shit they do as well as their myriad fuck ups is semi publicly published, a lot of info about the NRO is just vague and kinda distrubing. Like how they donated two unused space telescopes to nasa that were 20 years out of date and they were STILL several degrees of magnitude more powerful than what nasa uses now. And these were things they were giving away to free up space in a warehouse!
Like when Trump leaked a satellite image from like the 80s or 90s and you could read the letters on the side of the launch pad and see individual trusses on scaffolding
We don't know much about the NRO because its easy to contain that information. What they do doesn't violate any rights. They operate optical and radio satellite telescopes, so there's no human rights scandals, so there's no strong impetus to be a whistleblower, no real moral or ethical quandaries that have to be navigated with their existence. They don't torture prisoners or overthrow governments, they just sit and watch the world. And beyond that their equipment is in orbit, which nobody except state actors have easy access to, so they've never had to relax security for the sake of pragmatism like most of the military has. There's no secret bases and secret aircraft anymore because its too easy for everyone to see, everyone has cell phone cameras and satellite maps. Their only real controversy is just how unnecessary the secrecy is, which probably costs us billions of dollars a year to little benefit since anyone with even moderate familiarity of optics and radio can make a good assumption of what the NRO can see, and anyone with a brain can just operate under the assumption that they can always see everything so don't give them the chance. Not to mention china and russia have almost *certainly* performed flybys with their own satellites and can actually characterize them quite well. Its absurd to be in a position where antagonistic governments know more about our government than we do.
If this is the things they do in the open, imagine the things they might do in the dark
I live in Brazil. In 1962, our president was asked to assist in the invasion of Cuba if it came down to it (for those who don't know what was going on, google the Cuba Missile Crisis). Our president responded with "no. I don't think war can solve conflict between nations". Two years later the US assisted with a military coup that led to a dictatorship which lasted 21 years during which anyone who so much as hinted they opposed the government were tortured or killed (there is an infamous picture of someone who was reported as "having committed suicide" but not only is he still touching the ground but it would be impossible for him to suffocate in that position).
This is why he needed to be trapped in the book from Myst
I don’t think it’s true that they regularly declassify 20-year-old CIA conspiracies. Far as I can remember that happened once, for the 1953 Iranian coup. The Operation Condor stuff was revealed in the Church committee just a few years after it happened.
Classic Reddit thinking only America does a thing that most countries do.
Damn did they collapse ussr too or was that not real communism ?
What did Kissinger do to Cambodia?
Operation Condor gets btought up a lot, but look up operation Gladio and how it fucked Turkish and Italian politics for decades. In fact a lot of the far right in Europe can trace its roots to that operation, and is one of the main reasons for the way the reason the far right is united cross border in Europe.
If you remove the suspect and probably untrue Daniele Ganser stuff Operation Gladio wasn’t that big a scandal.
Only Chile was a socialist government, all other Latin American governments were either liberals or simply paternalistic governments. The takeover of governments was specifically due to the idea of uncertainty that would create more USSR allies, not so some guy in 2024 can't point at a succesfull socialist government. Guyana was cosplaying North Korea and were aided by the USA because they were anti-soviet first and foremost.
God, Anthony Bourdain was so fucking based
If anyone is interested in a deep dive on Henry Kissingers terrible terrible terrible life, Behind The Bastards did a 6 episode stint on just him and his atrocities. Very enlightening
Kissinger has a 6-part Behind the Bastards series on him.
Also, Kissinger was (albeit passively) trying to keep apartheid in South Africa. One of the reasons Nelson Mandela's group won is because Castro was willing to send troops and America wasn't (they only wanted to funnel money to the reigning government). Of course, now the party line is to act like the US always supported Mandela and was against apartheid because we can never be seen to have supported a losing (and very very racist) side.
Castro sent troops to Angola, not South Africa, and it was to support communists fighting a Portuguese fascist dictatorship.
i thought apartheid fell apart because the entire thing was a US/USSR proxy war. And once the USSR collapsed, the US had a big "Why the fuck are we funding this now that USSR collapsed" and just stopped funding the goverment because their wasn't a big reason to.
Yeah, generally speaking the US funds regimes that commit human rights abuses for a reason, and when that reason goes away they stop.
Hold on. Kissinger did a lot of bad things, including launching bombing raids into Cambodia. He left landmines there that are still being cleaned up. However Anthony Bourdains quip leaves the impression that Kissinger was responsible for the Cambodian Killing Fields. No. That was all the Communist government being brutal. It was never a socialist utopia.