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If you are wondering how it got so far off the rails, then look no further than the fact that they hired, trained, and equipped former Nazi SS officers. Not Weh

If you are wondering how it got so far off the rails, then look no further than the fact that they hired, trained, and equipped former Nazi SS officers. Not Wehrmacht grunts. Nor enlisted SS grunts. But SS officers. Less than three years after the Nuremberg trials. The trials where a sitting Supreme Court justice took time off to act as Chief Prosecutor on behalf of the US to condemn their bosses to death. They did it despite plenty of contemporaneous objections to the contrary. > Some of the newly released documents show that between 1949 and 1955, the CIA organized "stay-behind" networks of German agents to provide intelligence from behind enemy lines, should the Soviet Union invade western Germany. > One network included at least two former Nazi SS members -- Staff Sgt. Heinrich Hoffman and Lt. Col. Hans Rues -- and one was run by Lt. Col. Walter Kopp, a former German army officer referred to by the CIA as an "unreconstructed Nazi." The network was disbanded in 1953 amid political concerns that some members' neo-Nazi sympathies would be exposed in the West German press. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/06/AR2006060601555_pf.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/0... The CIA has an uncanny talent for arming and training future and former enemies of the US and most of the world.

scaramanga 4y ago
That's nothing, wait until you find out that the Japanese LDP was founded by class A nazi war criminals that the US released from prison :) If you think it's shocking that the US works with fascists, it can only because you know nothing at all about US foreign policy and how it works. The idea that it's "off the rails" rather than something that repeats so ofte it's not even interesting is _buck wild_ :)
- areoform 4y ago
  I try to look towards the better angels of everyone’s nature. Being jaded and cynical rarely solves problems.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    "The CIA can't seem to stop itself from training and supporting fascist movements" is actually a useful pattern to notice if the problem you're trying to solve is "where do these fascist movements keep coming from??" Considering that cynical is a judgment that I don't think is very useful here. It also assumes there is some valid, correct, non-cynical view of the CIA that assumes they don't do this. Which is fantastical, at least as useless a way to approach the world as cynicism.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - scaramanga 4y ago
    Optimism of spirit, pessimism of the intellect. Living in a dream world not only fails to solve problems, but I have noticed, tends to perpetuate them.
- hulitu 4y ago
  As they say: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
>The CIA has an uncanny talent for arming and training future and former enemies of the US and most of the world. The CIA? More like the USA… They saved the Soviets from collapse via Lend-Lease. They made communist China a global superpower with decades of outsourced manufacturing.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Preserving Soviet Union was unfortunate, but leaving the whole of Europe and most of Asia to Hitler was even worse. That would put the US homeland in direct danger of a major war. Policies of Deng Xiaoping in 1980s and 1990s looked much softer and promising than the current regime under Xi Jinping. The Tiananmen Square massacre should have been a warning, though. The Chinese played their growing economy card expertly, even more powerfully than the Japanese in 1960-70s.
  - adultSwim 4y ago
    > Preserving Soviet Union was unfortunate I wonder how things might have turned out differently had we not immediately betrayed them after WWII. Without constant threat of annihilation, they could have diverted funds away from military spending and towards productive uses, possibly also loosening their grip on power. It didn't help that non-authoritarian left governments, sometimes as mild as Bernie Sanders, were easily overthrown by the CIA.
    - aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
      >had we not immediately betrayed them after WWII Lol. That's an "interesting" take on history.
      - avgcorrection 4y ago
        When official history is written by the victors, all other histories become “interesting”.
        4y ago
jjtheblunt 4y ago
> hired, trained, and equipped former Nazi SS officers did Nazis claim pre-existing enlisted officers (that pre-date the Nazis) as their own? I mean Erwin Rommel predates the Nazis and was just a professional soldier, but they claimed him as their own, even though he himself always thought them nutjobs, it seems.
- areoform 4y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzstaffel
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    > The SS was the paramilitary organization that carried out the holocaust. Germany carried out the holocaust. Sure, the SS is most associated with it, which should not lead to the false conclusion that holocaust was "an SS thing". It was a German thing. Case in point, the Wehrmacht provided large numbers of personnel for the camps and the whole "clean Wehrmacht" idea started out as a defense in the Nuremberg trials (among other popular ideas such as "I just followed orders").
    - jjtheblunt 4y ago
      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.
      - iudqnolq 4y ago
antifa 4y ago
There are no good or bad actions, only good or bad teams.

scaramanga 4y ago

That's nothing, wait until you find out that the Japanese LDP was founded by class A nazi war criminals that the US released from prison :) If you think it's shocking that the US works with fascists, it can only because you know nothing at all about US foreign policy and how it works. The idea that it's "off the rails" rather than something that repeats so ofte it's not even interesting is _buck wild_ :)

areoform 4y ago
I try to look towards the better angels of everyone’s nature. Being jaded and cynical rarely solves problems.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  "The CIA can't seem to stop itself from training and supporting fascist movements" is actually a useful pattern to notice if the problem you're trying to solve is "where do these fascist movements keep coming from??" Considering that cynical is a judgment that I don't think is very useful here. It also assumes there is some valid, correct, non-cynical view of the CIA that assumes they don't do this. Which is fantastical, at least as useless a way to approach the world as cynicism.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- scaramanga 4y ago
  Optimism of spirit, pessimism of the intellect. Living in a dream world not only fails to solve problems, but I have noticed, tends to perpetuate them.
hulitu 4y ago
As they say: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

>The CIA has an uncanny talent for arming and training future and former enemies of the US and most of the world. The CIA? More like the USA… They saved the Soviets from collapse via Lend-Lease. They made communist China a global superpower with decades of outsourced manufacturing.

nine_k 4y ago
Preserving Soviet Union was unfortunate, but leaving the whole of Europe and most of Asia to Hitler was even worse. That would put the US homeland in direct danger of a major war. Policies of Deng Xiaoping in 1980s and 1990s looked much softer and promising than the current regime under Xi Jinping. The Tiananmen Square massacre should have been a warning, though. The Chinese played their growing economy card expertly, even more powerfully than the Japanese in 1960-70s.
- adultSwim 4y ago
  > Preserving Soviet Union was unfortunate I wonder how things might have turned out differently had we not immediately betrayed them after WWII. Without constant threat of annihilation, they could have diverted funds away from military spending and towards productive uses, possibly also loosening their grip on power. It didn't help that non-authoritarian left governments, sometimes as mild as Bernie Sanders, were easily overthrown by the CIA.
  - aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
    >had we not immediately betrayed them after WWII Lol. That's an "interesting" take on history.
    - avgcorrection 4y ago
      When official history is written by the victors, all other histories become “interesting”.
      - 4y ago

jjtheblunt 4y ago

> hired, trained, and equipped former Nazi SS officers did Nazis claim pre-existing enlisted officers (that pre-date the Nazis) as their own? I mean Erwin Rommel predates the Nazis and was just a professional soldier, but they claimed him as their own, even though he himself always thought them nutjobs, it seems.

areoform 4y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzstaffel
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  > The SS was the paramilitary organization that carried out the holocaust. Germany carried out the holocaust. Sure, the SS is most associated with it, which should not lead to the false conclusion that holocaust was "an SS thing". It was a German thing. Case in point, the Wehrmacht provided large numbers of personnel for the camps and the whole "clean Wehrmacht" idea started out as a defense in the Nuremberg trials (among other popular ideas such as "I just followed orders").
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    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.
    - iudqnolq 4y ago

antifa 4y ago

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