I was glad to see a topic in which most HN contributors seem freely critical of US actions, which is not the case with more recent events.
Talking of MK programs, I wanted to emphasize how far these agencies could go awry, see the alleged LSD poisoning of an entire French village in 1951 [1].
Most criticism comes with the implicit belief that the US has cleaned up its act since the terrible experiments of the Cold War era.
That's an intellectual fallacy it's easy to fall prey of: if most cultures and nations have committed heinous acts in their past, one should assume they are still doing terrible things to this day.
MK-ULTRA is dead, but history teaches that one day we'll learn of something even worse that's occurring right under our noses in 2023. It is disingenuous to criticise what the CIA and other three letter agencies have done, while not being totally opposed to their existence to this day. Who knows how they are experimenting with people on US soil, how they are fomenting revolts and financing drug lords in South America today.
Sadly, any such criticism can be easily waved away by calling it a conspiracy theory, which is how they keep operating with impunity. The only difference between an outlandish conspiracy theory and history are the existence of declassified government documents.
I jumped to the section on Europe and the only entry for the last 20 years is:
> In late 2019, CIA agent Anne Sacoolas hit and killed a British teenage pedestrian named Harry Dunn with her car, while she was driving on the wrong side of the road, near the RAF Croughton base in the UK where she and her husband (both CIA agents) worked.
This is a great text. Most internet English language forums have a heavy American culture bias. So it's not easy to find places to talk in a calm and unbiased manner about US imperialism.
In a couple 100s of years , history will be talked about this era of "Pax Americana" and the lengths that the US Gov went trying to cling to its power.
Is it good, is it bad? Depends on where you are really.
I think it'll be a lot shorter than 100 years. It didn't take 100 years for the British empire to collapse. It showed its weakness during WWII, and the Suez crisis put the old dog out of its misery a mere 10 years later. Chernobyl preceded the fall of the USSR by only 5 years.
How long after COVID will America fall? China's already brokered peace in the Middle East between our best friend and our worst enemy in the region. The Universe has a sense of humor. Given the historical precedent, will we mark the end of the US empire with China negotiating peace in occupied Ukraine or in occupied Palestine?
I'm clearly the furthest thing from a patriot, but I am fairly certain the history books will place our collapse somewhere between the Soviet Union and the British Empire on the atrocity scale. If we outdo Churchill's genocide in India, it's going to involve nuclear hellfire, and then there won't be any history books to remember it by anyway.
And on NK there's no internet at all. So what? Why this fixation in changing the focus out of the US with whataboutism? Others' worse actions dont make ones bad actions better.
It’s not really whataboutism to say “I like the US empire better than other wanna-be empires because not a single wanna-be empire allows you to meaningfully criticize it”
The US did bad things to its own people like bikini atoll and MkUltra and the Tuskegee Experiments. Maybe it even did things like stage 9/11 as a false flag (there were real plans to stage a similar false flag in the 70s to support a war against Cuba) - even if it did, I’m allowed to speculate about it or even claim it to be true online. In China try to mention Tiananmen Square. Even if the US empire is evil, which I think is a bit overly harsh at the general level while agreeing that many of its individual actions have been evil, it’s better than any of the other empires.
America is the first (and maybe only, ever?) major
imperial power that allows such open discussion of
its atrocities.
I did not claim that America was the first imperial power to allow public dissent. That, as I'm sure you'd agree, is manifestly untrue.
So it's unclear to me what point you're attempting to make by pointing out a single instance of prior public dissent in the British Empire.
Particularly since Swift's work of satire was not exactly a direct criticism of the British Empire, nor a catalogue of its atrocities.
If you do the minimum feasible amount of research and read the Wikipedia article, you will learn that it was largely a parody of other such popular contemporary treatises, a thing that is easy to miss in 2023 if you aren't familiar with the context in which "A Modest Proposal" was written.
Back to my original post... I certainly don't think America was the first to allow such dissent. I think it is the first to do so on such a scale.
(I also don't necessarily think America allows such dissent for entirely noble purposes. As has been often pointed out, legitimate criticism and evidence often gets lumped in with whackadoo fake conspiracy theories and is therefore discredited by default in the public's mind. The end result is a more effective form of suppression than could be achieved by direct totalitarian repression. The US government will let you talk about the MKUltra experiments or Guantanamo all day long because barely anybody will believe you, or care.)
The scale is an artifact of the ease of publication today. I agree that the speech allowed today is greater than ever before. Your point stands.
The US First Amendment is indeed unique, but it came from a tradition[1][2]. And it's not so long ago that US citizens were prosecuted for sedition. And this is not totally unique to the US or Britain[3][4].
> In the mid-1890s Edmund Dene Morel was working for Elder Dempster as a shipping clerk based in Antwerp, when he noticed discrepancies between public and private accounts given for the import and export figures relating to shipping from the Congo.[5] Morel deduced from the steady export of firearms and cartridge, against the disproportionate mass imports in rubber, ivory and other lucrative commodities, that no commercial transaction was taking place.[6] He concluded that the use of force was the only explanation: the consistency of the exchange could only be supported by a state-led system of mass exploitation.[7] Resigning from his role in 1901, Morel turned to journalism to investigate and raise awareness about the activities of the Congo Free State authorities, establishing his own journal in early 1903 – the West African Mail.[8]
Your post is showing as downvoted for me right now. I tried upvoting it so it doesn't show as greyed out. Thanks for sharing this resource; I had not come across it before and I think it is a valuable resource to share and a meaningful contribution to the discussion on this topic.
>That's an intellectual fallacy it's easy to fall prey of: if most cultures and nations have committed heinous acts in their past, one should assume they are still doing terrible things to this day.
>MK-ULTRA is dead, but history teaches that one day we'll learn of something even worse that's occurring right under our noses in 2023.
I can’t help but reflect how much of the tragedy, conflict, and war in human history has been caused by these agencies run amok.
What’s striking about these MKUltra type programs is the magnitude of horrible things stemming from a relatively small number of clandestine operatives doing insane experiments on the population.
Based in the article in The Times yesterday, I’d say we can confidently add global pandemic to this list, and a reminder that the US doesn’t have a monopoly on this particularly deranged form of violence.
Up until 2019 I’d say the USA was the worst offender, but let’s hope no one ever catches up to what China did in Wuhan.
> I can’t help but reflect how much of the tragedy, conflict, and war in human history has been caused by these agencies run amok.
A relatively small amount most likely. Maybe on par with the amount that has been caused by yellow journalism (e.g. the Spanish-American war, anti-ethnicity political cartoons). Most of anything "caused" by them is not from them running amok, but from them doing the job they were ordered to do by higher officials.
And, of course, we only rarely see what they prevented from happening.
Nope, didn't quite mean that. What I meant was the overall gravity of what was the pandemic.
Quite possible that something that happened in one place was much more serious, or even totally different in other place, and in other places it was life as usual.
For me the jury is out there, if indeed there was a pathogen out there. For all you know it could have been a radiation leak. In other cases it could have been cases of cold or flu.
What I can confidently say is that it was not the pandemic of large proportions as it was made out to be. (no one I knew died). What I can also confidently say is that no one can really say with a high degree of certainty that it was a virus, the tests (PCR) are flaky, the symptoms can be attributed to many things etc. etc.
> MK-ULTRA is dead, but history teaches that one day we'll learn of something even worse that's occurring right under our noses in 2023.
In the grand scheme of American violations of human rights, MK-ULTRA barely even registers. I can think of a dozen worse things we know are happening right now off the top of my head. Trump and Biden's internment camps, the tent cities in every US city, kids as young as 12 working in slaughterhouses, solitary confinement in prisons... I'll spare everyone from this turning into a rant.
At least we can rest assured that everything we've been told of what's going on in Ukraine and the causality the underlies it is True.
Outrage at things in the past is easy, but if we want to really improve the world it may be necessary for smart people to stop refusing to think clearly on current events.
I don’t know about this counterexample. Refusing to think clearly is what Russian apologia is made of. A world in which only the US has agency and only the US can do wrong is not clearheaded.
Yet not "enhanced interrogation," which is arguably a continuation of MK-Ultra experimentation. That has plenty of defenders, though I'd argue both the Iraq War and Guantanamo Bay aren't as universally despised as you claim.
Although one must be critical of these events, please be aware that soviet undermining is active in pushing these subjects. Just don't give up all hope and throw any babies out with the bathwater i guess.
I thought the invasion of Iraq and use that f Guantanamo are universally accepted to have been pretty idiotic even by super power standards. The USA gained no security and lost inordinate amounts of money, blood and good will.
I think sometimes the typos are speech-to-text artifacts. For instance "used that" would be phonetically similar to "used at" and I could see that easily tripping up STT. I know people that use STT and don't review the output before sending so I get weird text messages from them from time to time.
Yeah it is just you. Non-American users aren't Russian/soviet bots. It is interesting to see the tactics in discussion being used here: add conspiracy to facts so they seem less plausible.
Have you seen these typos? These aren't just "I don't speak the lingo" typos.
And if I was attempting to bend the narrative, a good tool for that might be a counterargument that, tho apparently strong, is actually weak. Let's not be naive about how this works.
Talking of MK programs, I wanted to emphasize how far these agencies could go awry, see the alleged LSD poisoning of an entire French village in 1951 [1].
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-10996838