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Operation Gladio

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Re: Operation Gladio

#41

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

adultSwim wrote: post #26
nine_k wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 eas…

>had we not immediately betrayed them after WWII

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

Re: Operation Gladio

#42

Post by jjtheblunt »

formerly_proven wrote: post #38
areoform wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

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.

Re: Operation Gladio

#43

Post by avgcorrection »

aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #41
adultSwim wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 eas…

>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”.

Re: Operation Gladio

#44

Post by motohagiography »

It's easy to kick up at the US and its spectacularly disreputable IC, but it's worth recognizing that totalitarianism is a virus that preys on the morally weak and subordinates them to dissolving their own socities and cultures. These movements operate as trivial pyramid schemes of betrayal and suffering, and that's what makes them stupid enough to scale. The communist flavour of these movements is by every measure as evil as the nazi one the allies had only just defeated, and a few extra casulties against its instigators to prevent them from taking hold and instituting their policies of mass starvation, mass imprisonment in labour camps, confiscation, and executions seems like an act of both charity and mercy.

I don't see how anyone who laughed and cheered watching the movie Inglourious Basterds (which was undeniably fun) could really object to any similar operation against the vanguard of their communist equivalents. The countries that failed to stop the expansion of that movement are remembered for their killing fields, their famines, their mass executions of people trying to leave, their national bankruptcies, and their meth dealing god emperors.

Re: Operation Gladio

#45

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

avgcorrection wrote: post #43
aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Re: Operation Gladio

#46

Post by iudqnolq »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #42
formerly_proven wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (…

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…

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.

Re: Operation Gladio

#47

Post by nine_k »

adultSwim wrote: post #26
nine_k wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 eas…

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.

Re: Operation Gladio

#48

Post by adultSwim »

nine_k wrote: post #47
adultSwim wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 eas…

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…

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.

Re: Operation Gladio

#49

Post by antifa »

areoform wrote: post #3

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 i…

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

Re: Operation Gladio

#50

Post by adultSwim »

aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #45
avgcorrection wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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.

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