4 ms·

Think about the fact that this [1] only did not happen because a single person intervened - just a single person along the long line of custody from inception t

• NoGravitas 3y ago
  And look what happened to him.
  • westmeal 3y ago
    But it was TOTALLY not the CIA. There is NO WAY the CIA could've done that.
• lawn 3y ago
  Wow, I've somehow missed this.
  • jonhohle 3y ago
    I’m not sure if it’s sarcasm or not, but The Devil’s Chessboard lays out a case for the CIA acting as the military arm of the rich and powerful starting basically at its inception. All of the “communist” overthrows in the 50s and 60s happen to coincide with nationalist leaders (often democratically elected) who want to keep some of a country’s resources from falling further into the control of American corps. This typically resulted in actual dictators replacing them that allowed the businesses to continue to exploit while at the same time severely oppressing the locals. Some of the evidence is compelling, others is speculative, but a lot of the same bad actors show up in a lot of very similar global (and local) affairs.
    • masfuerte 3y ago
      Not just the CIA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
    • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > nationalist leaders (often democratically elected) who want to keep some of a country’s resources from falling further into the control of American corps This is an old geopolitical problem: rich democracies tended to surround themselves with alliances of despots. Athens, Rome and America. The corporate interests hypothesis is interesting. But the resilient one is that dictators reliably deliver foreign policy goals that electeds' voters value.
    • petsfed 3y ago
      I'll add that book to my reading list. I think, more broadly, that American, British, and French "anti-communist" foreign policy has consistently been about ensuring that American, British, and French companies continue unfettered access to a colonized nation's resources. Your actual governmental or economic structure is irrelevant, so long as Shell Oil or United Fruit Company are only answerable to their shareholders, and not the people of the country they're exploiting. Anti-communism, colonialism, nation-building, all these justifications eventually become just rationalizations for protecting specifically the colonizer's economic interests. The Great Hunger, the Bengal Famine, the Banana Massacre, the excesses of the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah, the Mandate for Palestine, the Belgian fucking Congo, all of these result from optimizing for foreign economic interests without any regard for local social interests.
      • pastacacioepepe 3y ago
        Loving how very based is this HN thread
        • mjcohen 3y ago
          based or biased?
          • pastacacioepepe 3y ago
            Usually HN is pretty biased but this thread is just based, thanks. Is the truth too "biased" for you?
• diggan 3y ago
  Worth noting that while that those proposed self-inflicted terrorist attacks were rejected, other terrorist attacks in Cuba by CIA were approved: > The Cuban Project, also known as Operation Mongoose, was an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks against civilians, and covert operations, carried out by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Cuba. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mongoose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mongoose Whenever one falls down the CIA rabbit-hole, it never continues surprise just how much pain they have inflicted on the world.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• instagib 3y ago
  The list of ‘see also’ on the site is a fun read. I never read about the “fog of war” incident before related to the Vietnam war inception which never happened. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident