Operation Gladio

[hackandthink]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daowxbaeurw

Oktoberfest Bombing München 1980, Operation Gladio

from time to time in german media: the police stopped investigating Neonazi involvement.

[pantalaimon]

Not sure if Daniele Ganser the best source for this…

[LtWorf]

Ah yes. Bringing democracy democracy, but also arming terrorists just in case people vote incorrectly. How not to be grateful for this?

[scaramanga]

Oh yes, when the CIA was formed to interfere in Italian elections, "democracy" was definitely on the mind of US foreign policy officials :)

[MonkeyClub]

There are many ways to be ungrateful, the best ones end with drone strikes in your vicinity /s

[warinukraine]

Better dead than red.

[areoform]

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/2006/0...

The CIA has an uncanny talent for arming and training future and former enemies of the US and most of the world.

[scaramanga]

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_ :)

[antifa]

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

[jjtheblunt]

> 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.

[aaaaaaaaaaab]

>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.

[UltraViolence]

I'm vehemently against these "stay behind" sabotage troops. When you look at how they fared in WWII you'll notice they didn't make a difference militarily, but did lead to enormous casualties amongst the civilian population, mostly from reprisals.

I believe we should fight to win or lose and give up. Fighting a guerilla war when you country's occupied will not make any difference in the end.

Worse still, these so-called paramilitaries often branched out into crime and human rights abuses. They might even turn against the government that created them.

[formerly_proven]

For “in case of soviet invasion break glass” cases you would’ve wanted a contingency like this, could just do without literal nazis, war criminals (plenty of opportunities for that once the soviets invaded, I imagine) and terrorists.

Oh and maybe manage to keep it secret from the enemy, Germany. JFC sometimes I wonder if there is anything German security services don’t fuck up, the distrust from NATO allies is and was certainly well earned.

[adultSwim]

Seeing this pattern come up so many times, working with the most extreme elements of a country, it appears deliberate. I imagine we picked it up from the British, and other imperial powers.

[rainworld]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brabant_killers

[xanathar]

There are some striking similarities with the White Uno Gang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Uno_Gang

[joenot443]

This was a wild read, thanks for the link. Is the consensus in the EU that Gladio was involved, even if they never came out and admitted it?

[Dhareck]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rtd7TeT2U0Q It's a good summary, in Italian, of the Gladio operation in Italy

[mach5]

gladio never stopped, it just came home

[cbreezyyall]

you say lone wolf mass shooter, i say domestic gladio.

[rizoma_dev]

Little domino tile: following the end of WWII, the US installs terrorist cells in Europe in fear of a communist takeover

Big domino tile: Silvio Berlusconi becomes prime minister of Italy in 1994

[MonkeyClub]

Silvio is also tied to the P2 lodge, right?

[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.

[warinukraine]

Thank you for this. Damn right.

[nextstep]

The US has a massive budget for regime change, both overt and covert, and has for almost 7 decades. And we wonder why right wing politics seems to be flourishing?

[LtWorf]

Let's not forget financing the sicilian mafia to keep the farmers at bay.