My favorite part is when they lie to the president and Congress. Like, it’s not enough that they do dogshit evil for the US government, they have to do dogshit evil against it as well? Is evil just the highest goal of the CIA? Is the agency just staffed with sociopaths?
… don’t answer that, actually.
Letting the CIA develop a culture of criminality and invulnerability was a fucking mistake. Tear it down. Start over from the ground up.
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If name a country where didn’t work then you say “that wasn’t real socialism” or it’s the empire faults, always moving the goal post
Show one example where “socialism” didn’t end in a dictatorship shithole.
That’s easy - pretty much any government couped by the CIA.
Show me one example where a ‘socialist’ (including the mildest social democrat) government outside of maybe Europe was not continuously undermined, and if possible couped, by the agency in question.
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Go huf your copium.
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European countries, we has socialists policies, like national healthcare.
Show me one socialist country. No, USSR doesn’t count, just the same way Nazis’ “National Socialism” doesn’t.
Show me one socialist country.
Yugoslavia?
Then by that debatable logic, we also have proof that democracy does the same thing since the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is authoritarian…
What? Please explain what the hell you are talking about. Just because you have “socialist” in your name doesn’t make you anything social.
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Behind the Bastards podcast has taught me that we will never fix the culture, will only sometimes remove individuals, and it will always be shitty.
Hey now, just because it can’t be fixed doesn’t mean it can’t be better. The CIA is at a special level of dogshit. They can be less evil.
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In theory, yes. In practice I can’t imagine the political will exists to actually take down government-sanctioned criminal enterprises like the CIA. I think it would take something like a revolution to actually clean house at that level, and even that’s a long shot because revolutions make things worse more often than not.
I think reforming the CIA from the ground up isn’t impossible, though it’d require a great deal of political will. Going to punish the leaders though, that’s probably a lost cause.
Are they not already less evil? All the stuff people criticize it about took place mostly 50+ years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_report_on_CIA_torture
No. It’s really not.
Ahhh yes, I had forgotten about that. Pretty evil shit.
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Yes, absolutely. The culture of criminality and invulnerability is not even helpful to their job. Running drugs to fund black sites where they torture people for shits and giggles is not actually in any way vital to the purported functions of the CIA. More oversight would do them good.
Unless you’re asking if tearing it down and rebuilding it can be done without a period of reduced efficacy, in which case, no, that’s a price that would have to be paid.
Nope. And their shenanigans killing some people isn’t a problem on a bigger scale. They have done more good than evil and as long as it’s a net positive its ok.
Jesus Christ
and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
You can use this argument to justify any genocide.
Some people isn’t a genocide, especially when its politically motivated. Your argument is just completely unrelated to the topic.
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3 day old account. Lemmy.ee… Opinion rejected.
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They probably have done waaaay more good in the background but nobody notices because of the nature of it all. Russia isn’t their only problem. China is more of a problem actually, Russia is just collapsing basically, the only thing to do there is gather intel and make plans to secure the nukes once their government fails (nobody needs Russian Warlords with nukes…)
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Just like Russia in Africa an around the world (and China more on the economic side)
Russia in Africa? If you want to make this argument do not forget, that the greatest neocolonialistic forces in Africa are European countries, France, UK etc
Yes, but Russia doesn’t do it for colonialism but world destabilization. China loans money to poor countries so to keep them indebted and dependent. “”“Communist”“” countries nowadays really do suck. Capitalism is bad too but not at that level of bad.
The actual answer is they both suck. Russia, China, the US, France, Britain are all very guilty of destabilising and manipulating the government’s of developing countries. And the reasons are usually economic. Let’s not forget that most of the countries that have had coups recently have signed “cooperation agreements” with France. And that shouldn’t be seen as an excuse for China’s loanshark nonsense, or Russia’s shameless resource theft.
The developed (or “developed” in the case of Russia and China) world has a major problem interfering in other countries domestic affairs. Phrasing it as a capitalist Vs communist problem just ignores the root of the problem, which is human greed.
I agree with you, well put
You really need to check out the history of coloialism. There’s a lot of it and most of it is horrifying. Western countries have done every bad thing Russia and China are doing, and worse.
Oh I know that, there’s no denying it
Russia in a European country
Stop, next you’ll say they’re not an anti-imperialist force /s
Ehh, china would like a word about Africa.
China unironically has been more helpful to African development in the past few decades than Europe in the past few centuries. Mostly because China wants Africa to be turned into a prosperous region and serve as customers to China meanwhile the west has been focused on wealth extraction from day one.
This article just ignores non Chinese debt though? Which form the larger share in Pakistan.
And for Sri Lanka, China has offered relief which also led to the IMF also negotiating debt relief with Sri Lanka.
I agree with Zambia, the Chinese didn’t play nicely there and acted quite hawkishly. But they did restructure the debt in June when western lenders agreed to do the same.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/zambia-reaches-watershed-deal-on-china-debt-2392593a
Also read.
Also your article doesn’t really talk about events that lead to the economies of Pakistan and Sri Lanka ( Countrywide floods and covid killing tourism respectively) crashing and implies that it’s entirely china’s fault. I think they are quite important when talking about dying economies.
Also would like to add that this still doesn’t compare to European Colonialism.
Agreed. Wasn’t meaning to be exhaustive, just challenge a bit the china is good theme
Mostly because China wants Africa to be turned into a prosperous region and serve
as customers toChina
who were they doing it for, an-crap?
Even Australia is not immune.
(Not really, this is just a fun conspiracy theory with one of our most impactful PMs)
It’s really not that wild of a theory.
- The Australian government of the time was very left wing, doing things like creating universal healthcare and education.
- Whitlam was threatening to shut down Pine Gap, the joint Australian-US spy station in the middle of Australia, and a key location for the CIA’s information gathering efforts in Asia.
- The Governor-General of the time, John Kerr, had known ties to known CIA-backed organisations.
- The US in the lead-up to the Dismissal appointed as its ambassador to Australia a man who has known connections to a coup in Indonesia, and he was also the ambassador to South Korea during a coup there.
- Whitlam even threatened to reveal the identities of CIA agents in Australia.
- A US military contractor has spoken out and said that the CIA internally referred to the Governor General as “our man Kerr”.
The US had many clear motives for wanting this. They had the means thanks to Kerr. And they were afforded the opportunity by the Senate deadlock. There are certainly a few reasons to say otherwise, but at the very least it’s impossible to dismiss the theory as crackpot.
Agreed, as far as conspiracy theories go this is definitely on the more credible side at least in my view. I just didn’t want to present it as fact.
Who?
He was responsible for introducing universal healthcare and free university in Australia.
TIL, thanks!
And probably why there’s a band called “The Whitlams?”
Yup. Here’s a snippet from their Wikipedia page:
Freedman named the band after the former Prime Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, although Plunder had sought to call themselves, ‘The Three Nice Boys’. According to Freedman “I loved the family names—the Smiths, the Reivers. I thought, the Whitlams, no-one’s done that. I’ll be able to steal all the goodwill that Australia holds in reserve for Gough Whitlam.”
Also, if you didn’t see it already, there are actually a lot of really good reasons to suspect US involvement in the event that has come to be known as “The Dismissal”. A brief explanation of some of them are in another comment further up the page.
Looks over at Pakistan army getting bribed for the nth time to remove the government
The Cold war called and wants its meme back.
I’m not saying they wouldn’t happily get back into the business of helping to undermine and overthrow democratically elected regimes if they thought they had a good reason, just that they haven’t really done so since the end of the cold war.
Fuck socialism, I lived 30 years in Venezuela (and don’t blame the sanctions, they just started in 2019)
What part of socialism ruined Venezuela?
That was more an issue with a couple corrupt dictators. Varying degrees of democratic socialism are perfectly fine.
Since joining lemmy I’ve learned that apparently gloabal socialism can’t handle a single 3-letter agency.
Last time i responded to this dumb meme i got banned.
CIA killed a Democrat? When?
Chile, Salvador Allende (first exemple to come in my mind). Does it tell you something ?
No it doesn’t. You’re just throwing out random country words with no link to back it up. Your point is moot
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And to tack onto that, it’s part of the broader Operation Condor.
Operation Condor (Spanish: Operación Cóndor, also known as Plan Cóndor; Portuguese: Operação Condor) was a United States-backed campaign of political repression and state terrorism involving intelligence operations, CIA-backed coup d’états, as well as assassinations of left-wing socialist leaders in South America from 1968 to 1989.
Oh wow that’s fucked up
50 years ago