In addition to my previous reply, and to separate the more controversial part from the rest:
And if we return to the subject of actually secret, non-open operations—if I believe (which I do) that FSB bombed some of Russia’s own apartment buildings (for I am a conspiracy theorist in regards to several conspiracy theories), but that the MI5 wouldn’t do that against British apartments, nor would CIA do it for American apartments, I don’t think it makes much sense to say that the Russian national character enables Russia to blow its own people up, but that the British and American national characters does not.
Frankly, if you believe that people running the MI5 or the CIA would be willing and capable of doing something like that, I think you have a very distorted view of reality in this regard. Unfortunately, the inferential distances are probably too large for us to have a productive discussion about it in this context.
(In reality, I don’t think CIA would be capable of killing my neighbor’s cat without it leaking into the press tomorrow. In fact, they’d probably bungle the task so badly that the leak wouldn’t even be necessary.)
America in the Cold War self-identified as anti-communist, so in any dispute between people identifying as communists and people that didn’t , I know America would back the people that didn’t.
That would have been news to many anti-communists, but let’s better not go there.
Frankly, if you believe that people running the MI5 or the CIA would be willing and capable of doing something like that, I think you have a very distorted view of reality in this regard. Unfortunately, the inferential distances are probably too large for us to have a productive discussion about it in this context.
The CIA assassinated a US citizen not two months ago, and the government made no attempt to hide it out of an (accurate) expectation that the public would approve. Of course I doubt the FBI has killed a white person on US soil by blowing up their apartment recently, or will in the forseeable future, but if we allow probable facts about national character to be this specific it seems that trivially any fact about what a government is likely to do is a fact about its national character.
In addition to my previous reply, and to separate the more controversial part from the rest:
Frankly, if you believe that people running the MI5 or the CIA would be willing and capable of doing something like that, I think you have a very distorted view of reality in this regard. Unfortunately, the inferential distances are probably too large for us to have a productive discussion about it in this context.
(In reality, I don’t think CIA would be capable of killing my neighbor’s cat without it leaking into the press tomorrow. In fact, they’d probably bungle the task so badly that the leak wouldn’t even be necessary.)
That would have been news to many anti-communists, but let’s better not go there.
The CIA assassinated a US citizen not two months ago, and the government made no attempt to hide it out of an (accurate) expectation that the public would approve. Of course I doubt the FBI has killed a white person on US soil by blowing up their apartment recently, or will in the forseeable future, but if we allow probable facts about national character to be this specific it seems that trivially any fact about what a government is likely to do is a fact about its national character.