(CW: everything, SA, brutality, torture, unimaginable cruelty)

There’s a documentary from 1972 called Winter Soldier, where veterans of the US invasion of Vietnam testified to their war crimes. Here are a few excerpts of the transcript: http://links.org.au/node/3343

Consider the following recollection of Vietnam-style “counter-insurgency” warfare, provided by Scott Camil, a former member of the 1st Marines:

Anybody that was dead was considered a VC. If you killed someone they said, “How do you know he’s a VC?” and the general reply would be, “He’s dead,” and that was sufficient. When we went through the villages and searched people the women would have all their clothes taken off and the men would use their penises to probe them to make sure they didn’t have anything hidden anywhere and this was raping but it was done as searching… The main thing was that if an operation was covered by the press there were certain things we weren’t supposed to do, but if there was no press there, it was okay. I saw one case where a woman was shot by a sniper, one of our snipers. When we got up to her she was asking for water. And the Lt. said to kill her. So he ripped off her clothes, they stabbed her in both breasts, they spread-eagled her and shoved an E- tool up her vagina, an entrenching tool, and she was still asking for water. And then they took that out and they used a tree limb and then she was shot.

An ex-machine gunner with the 1st Air Cavalry detailed the routine violence that accompanied cargo runs on his CH-47 “Chinook” helicopter:

It was quite usual that there would be a sniper outside a village in the foliage, in the trees, and if we took fire from one sniper we’d return fire on that sniper and then continue to spray the entire village with machine gun fire and M-16 ammunition until we either ran out of ammunition or we had flown so far away from the village that we could no longer reach them with the weapons…The free fire zones were posted on the operation map in the operations tent and this gave us a policy to kill anything that moved within that area.

Sadistic games at the expense of civilians were used to spice up the day:

Rotor wash was also used to blow down the huts, literally blow down the villages….So we’d come in and flair on a ship and just blow away a person’s house. Also, the Vietnamese, when they’ve harvested a crop of rice, put it out on these large pans to dry and that harvest is what is supposed to maintain them for that season— what they’re supposed to live on. We’d come in to flair the ship, and let the rotor wash blow the rice, blow their entire supply of food for that harvest over a large area. And then laugh, as we’d watch them running around trying to pick up individual pieces of rice out of a rice paddy.

While it was unusual for hundreds to be gunned down in a single location (as occurred infamously at My Lai in April 1968), the Winter Soldier testimony confirms that it was nothing out of the ordinary for dozens or scores of civilians to be slaughtered in “search and destroy” missions:

We moved into a small hamlet, 19 women and children were rounded up as VCS— Viet Cong Suspects— and the lieutenant that rounded them up called the captain on the radio and he asked what should be done with them. The captain simply repeated the order that came down from the colonel that morning. The order that came down from the colonel that morning was to kill anything that moves, which you can take anyway you want to take it… I turned, and I looked in the area. I looked toward where the supposed VCS were, and two men were leading a young girl, approximately 19 years old, very pretty, out of a hootch. She had no clothes on so I assumed she had been raped, which was pretty SOP [Standard Operating Procedure], and she was thrown onto the pile of the 19 women and children, and five men, around the circle, opened up on full automatic with their M-16s. And that was the end of that.

Plugging Ghost Stories for the End of the World podcasts series on Palme

What We Did In Vietnam

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/07/what-we-did-in-vietnam

The Stig Engström thing is so totally ridiculous like their claim of how he obtained a 357 magnum is that he “borrowed” it from a gun collector friend, then kept it in his advertising firm office, without the collector friend asking for it back or wondering what he was doing with it, then on the night of the murder he leaves the office, first without the gun, spots Palme, returns to the office to grab it, then goes back to shoot him.

Just complete detective fiction brain type shit, personally I think the fascist internal police conspiracy sounds the most plausible, at least compared to “Palme once did a thing that these foreign fascists objected to, this proves the motive!” You had a police scandal at the time of cops going around in plainclothes and baseball caps(hence the nickname of “Baseballigan”) and using extreme violence against homeless people and drug addicts.

The same police chief that created the formal groups that these cop gangs were part of, also presided over the Palme investigation, and though the groups had formally been disbanded about 3 years before the murder, the cops basically kept on doing the exact same actions but as regular officers rather than as part of the “Street Violence Groups”(actual name, Gatuvåldsgrupper). These groups were connected to at least two immediate murders but no cop ever faced consequences beyond fines. Palme had reportedly also been personally briefed about Nazism proliferating in the ranks of these cops.

Apparently back in 2010 some papers were declassified which revealed that fellow cops had left internal tips that the baseball gang cops were involved with the murder or the actual gunman themselves, and that a taxi driver had identified one of the cops as hailing his cab 5 minutes after the murder.

Not entirely dissimilar to the US’ coup of Australia in 1975.

vaxxed?

Vietnam is where boomer learned how to boomer.

The one SocDem who maybe wasn’t a moderate fascist and the CIA has to go and kill him smh

And now Swedes are huge America worshippers. Even their “nationalists” have no sense of national pride as they gladly throw it away for America. Fucking sad.

I will read this article as soon as I get a chance, but as with all of these intelligence operations, it can take to the form of a motley crue of fascists coming from different places and with different priorities and collapsing certain ambitions together for mutual aim, in this case, the killing of Palme. Stig Larsson, the novelist, was in a unique position in his job at a Stockholm newspaper at the time, to track leads and try an assemble a cohesive story in the aftermath of the assassination. He became obsessed, and continued personal research on the subject up to his own death. He amassed a personal archive of information on the case, uncovering new evidence, following leads that the media and police failed to take interest in. After his death, the person who acquired his personal storage unit acquired this archive, and set to the task of trying to make sense of the work, and follow up on the leads where they had been left off. The BBC made a documentary about this investigator and his conclusions after years of pouring over the documents and furthering the investigation, and he is pretty convinced it was elements of apartheid South Africa that oversaw the ground operation, of course in consort with the CIA and other actors within Sweden with connections to police, militias, and intelligence. So calling the US nazis for what they did in Vietnam and calling out the racist apartheid project for what it is, even as a moderate social democrat, is enough to get you offed if you do it in earnest on the world stage.

As much as I love Ghost Stories for the End of the World, I felt there was not sufficient exploration of this well-documented line of inquiry, and barely a passing mention of Stig’s work on the matter. After listening to that, I was left with the impression that the Stig Engstrom (lotta stigs) lone gunman theory was seemingly as alluring or viable an explanation as anything else. Even if this is not the case that others were left with this impression, I was a little confused as to why such a (typically) rigorously researched show failed to explore this further. I suspect that Matt, the host, was taking a little of a well-earned break after doing the Octopus series, and handing over the reigns of research to others, taking more the role of interviewer for this series. Anyhow, thank you for linking the article.