Behind the Bastards - Part One: The World Anti-Communist League: A Study in Nazi Death Squads
Aired: 2022-07-19
Duration: 01:24:30


=== Behind the Bastards Intro (02:47) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that.
[00:00:21]  Trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:00:25]  Trust me, babe.
[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:36]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[00:00:43]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:00:47]  I doctored the test once.
[00:00:48]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:00:53]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:00:55]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
[00:00:58]  My mind was blown.
[00:00:59]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:01:01]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:01:02]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:01:04]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:01:08]  Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:16]  10-10 shots five.
[00:01:17]  City hall building.
[00:01:18]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:01:20]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:01:22]  A shocking public murder.
[00:01:24]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[00:01:30]  I screamed, get down, get down.
[00:01:32]  Those are shots.
[00:01:34]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[00:01:36]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
[00:01:40]  Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:50]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[00:01:54]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:01:58]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[00:02:05]  An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
[00:02:09]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:02:12]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:02:21]  What's assassinating my John Lins?
[00:02:26]  Why?
[00:02:27]  Why?
[00:02:28]  Why, Sophie?
[00:02:29]  Why did I say that?
[00:02:30]  I don't know.
[00:02:31]  Why would anyone say such a terrible thing?
[00:02:33]  That's what I want to know.
[00:02:34]  Robert, I'm simply asking you why you would start like, why?
[00:02:39]  I don't know.
[00:02:40]  Nobody knows, Sophie.
[00:02:41]  That's the most important thing is that no one knows why things happen or where they happen.
[00:02:46]  I disagree.

=== The Worst Mistake of the USSR (14:28) ===

[00:02:47]  Or who they happen to.
[00:02:48]  But this is Behind the Bastards podcast.
[00:02:52]  Bad people tell you all about them.
[00:02:56]  And normally, this is a podcast where I read a story about a bad person to somebody who's coming in cold.
[00:03:02]  But today, I am the person who is chilly, who is coming in frigid, frost on my shoulders, as I talk to my good buddy, Chris.
[00:03:12]  Chris, how are you doing?
[00:03:14]  Doing okay.
[00:03:15]  It is thundering incredibly ominously, which I feel like is a good accent for the story.
[00:03:20]  Yes.
[00:03:20]  Oh, ominous thunder.
[00:03:22]  Nothing better.
[00:03:23]  Turn up your mic, pick up.
[00:03:24]  Let's get some of that on the line.
[00:03:26]  It's like I can like feel stuff shaking a little bit.
[00:03:29]  It's a it is a pretty impressive thunder round.
[00:03:32]  Yeah.
[00:03:33]  That's good.
[00:03:35]  How are we?
[00:03:35]  What do we, what do we, what are we, what do we, what are we today?
[00:03:38]  What are we talking about?
[00:03:39]  Who are we?
[00:03:39]  Where are we?
[00:03:40]  Robert, we were told that after the war, the Nazis vanished without a trace.
[00:03:45]  But tell us what I know about Nazis, that they went away forever after the war.
[00:03:50]  Still dream of a master race.
[00:03:51]  The history books, they tell us of their defeat in 45.
[00:03:55]  But Robert, why did they all come out of the woodwork on the day the Nazi died?
[00:04:00]  Okay, I've done my obligatory chumbo wumba, and so now I can answer this question.
[00:04:05]  You did.
[00:04:05]  That was a good chumba wumba.
[00:04:07]  I liked it.
[00:04:08]  Thanks, Chris.
[00:04:09]  I'm going to have to throw a wumba some chumbas later on here, but I'll let that be something that we build to.
[00:04:15]  The funny thing is, my favorite version of that song actually isn't the chumbo wumba version.
[00:04:19]  It's the what was it?
[00:04:20]  Like the Stockholm's women's anti-fascist choir did a version of it that rules.
[00:04:25]  There we go.
[00:04:26]  That does sound nice.
[00:04:28]  Yes, it was very exciting.
[00:04:30]  And the other thing that's exciting is that the answer to that question is that it turns out after the day the Nazi died, the Nazis came out of the woodwork and they all joined the World Anti-Communist League.
[00:04:40]  Ah, that is.
[00:04:42]  There we go.
[00:04:43]  There we go.
[00:04:44]  That's the subject of today's story.
[00:04:47]  Yeah.
[00:04:49]  These guys.
[00:04:51]  Guys, a bunch of real freaks and weirdos.
[00:04:55]  Now, somewhat weirdly, for a story that is about a lot of Nazis, we're actually not starting in Germany.
[00:05:03]  The actual story here.
[00:05:06]  Yeah, well, I mean, one of the sort of consistent themes of this entire episode is stuff happening around the orbit of the Soviet Union.
[00:05:15]  And so I guess you could technically start the story in Ukraine, but I didn't do that.
[00:05:20]  And instead, I'm starting it in China in the year 1923.
[00:05:24]  And this is a year in which the Soviets are going to create a monster that will haunt them until the day the USSR collapses.
[00:05:31]  And that monster is called the KMT or the Chinese Nationalist Party.
[00:05:37]  Now, okay, people who know the history of this are going to be like, Chris, have you lost your mind?
[00:05:43]  What do you mean the Soviets created the KMT?
[00:05:45]  And the answer is, yes, I have lost my mind, but it is for reasons that are completely unrelated to this.
[00:05:50]  For reasons that are related to the daily show we all agreed to do.
[00:05:53]  Yeah, that.
[00:05:54]  Yeah.
[00:05:54]  And also also this episode.
[00:05:56]  But yes, the daily show.
[00:05:59]  What a good idea that was.
[00:06:02]  I genuinely agree.
[00:06:03]  That was a mass idea.
[00:06:03]  Love it.
[00:06:04]  I cannot believe I was sober while I agreed to that.
[00:06:06]  Incredible.
[00:06:08]  Genuinely baffling decisions.
[00:06:11]  Yeah.
[00:06:12]  I'm very happy we got multiple other people brought on to deal with that problem that it was.
[00:06:20]  I was going to say, Robert and I were not sober when we agreed to that deal.
[00:06:24]  Oh, I mean, that explains a lot.
[00:06:27]  I was sober last in 2009.
[00:06:30]  So anyway, maybe 2010.
[00:06:33]  Okay.
[00:06:33]  Yeah, that's pretty recent.
[00:06:35]  So, okay, so we've actually talked about this period all the way back in the warlord, the episode about the Chinese warlord period that I did.
[00:06:45]  So the Nationalist Party or the KMT is by Chinese standards, even in like, you know, 1923, they're a pretty old political formation by Chinese standards.
[00:06:56]  It's founded in 1894 by Sun Yet-sen, but by 1927.
[00:07:00]  Wow, I had no idea it went back that far.
[00:07:02]  Yeah, well, it's kind of weird.
[00:07:04]  So there are two different dates you see about it founded.
[00:07:09]  There's one date where Sun Yet Sen starts an organization that joins another organization.
[00:07:12]  But yeah, it's really like the oldest of the sort of continuous Chinese revolutionary groups that come out of the sort of pre overthrow of the Qing Dynasty era.
[00:07:24]  And, you know, it does a lot of stuff.
[00:07:25]  They do a bunch of revolutions, but by 1923, they're just a disaster.
[00:07:29]  They're a complete mess.
[00:07:30]  They're an organizational mess.
[00:07:32]  They're political mess.
[00:07:33]  Militarily is a mess.
[00:07:34]  Financially, it's a mess.
[00:07:35]  Like, this is supposed to be like a mass political party, right?
[00:07:38]  They're trying to take over all of China.
[00:07:40]  They don't even have a newspaper.
[00:07:42]  It is, this is, this is China's Democratic Party.
[00:07:46]  Yeah.
[00:07:47]  And the USSR, having failed in their attempt to sort of bring revolution to the West via like the Red Army storming through Eastern Europe, the consequences of which we will get back to in a second, the USSR short turns its attention east.
[00:08:00]  And Sun Yet-sen and the Bolsheviks come to an agreement in which the Soviets start sending advisors and weapons to arm the KMT in their war against the sort of Chinese warlords.
[00:08:09]  And chief among those people is a guy named Mikhail Borodin.
[00:08:12]  Actually, I don't know if it's Michael or Mikhail.
[00:08:14]  Probably should have figured out.
[00:08:16]  If they're Russian, you always say Michael is Mikhail.
[00:08:18]  Yeah.
[00:08:19]  Mikhail Borodin, who's he's like, that's a Russian-ash name.
[00:08:23]  Yeah.
[00:08:23]  Yeah.
[00:08:26]  He's like a Mikhail Borodin.
[00:08:29]  Yeah, that's a good one.
[00:08:31]  He's like, he's like the Bolsheviks-Bolshevik.
[00:08:34]  He's a very, very old school.
[00:08:35]  Like, guy who left the Bund and joined the Bolsheviks in 1903.
[00:08:40]  Yeah.
[00:08:40]  He has this impeccable sort of revolutionary credentials.
[00:08:44]  Yeah.
[00:08:44]  Smelled Lenin's morning breath like that close.
[00:08:47]  Yeah.
[00:08:48]  Yeah.
[00:08:48]  And he is about to make one of the worst mistakes the USSR has ever made, which is pretty impressive if you look at the history of the USSR.
[00:08:58]  Yes.
[00:08:59]  Which includes the largest lake in the world that they killed.
[00:09:02]  Yeah, it's pretty remarkable.
[00:09:04]  And like this one, it probably killed more people than losing that lake, which is.
[00:09:11]  Yeah, look, I'm a big believer that like, fuck lakes, fuck them all.
[00:09:16]  Kill every lake.
[00:09:18]  I mean, look, hey, you too can become the Soviet Union, wage a protracted people's war against lakes.
[00:09:24]  Exactly.
[00:09:25]  This is my opinion.
[00:09:26]  When the revolution comes, the first thing we need to deal with is not the fascists.
[00:09:30]  You know, it's not like control of the far right in Florida or wherever.
[00:09:35]  We got to nuke the Great Lakes.
[00:09:38]  Not the cities.
[00:09:39]  We got to nuke the lakes themselves.
[00:09:40]  It's the only thing that's going to protect us.
[00:09:43]  I know what you're going to say, but I need you to listen to a song called The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot.
[00:09:50]  And then tell me, those lakes don't have some vengeance coming.
[00:09:53]  We're not blowing up the lakes.
[00:09:57]  We could.
[00:09:58]  We shouldn't.
[00:09:59]  Our new slogan, a nuke for every lake.
[00:10:01]  A nuke for every lake.
[00:10:02]  Christopher Torrey.
[00:10:04]  Do you not take his side?
[00:10:07]  Fuck them lakes.
[00:10:08]  That is the official stance of CoolZone Media on the Great Lakes.
[00:10:13]  I like watching these.
[00:10:14]  Nuke the lakes.
[00:10:14]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:10:16]  It'll be good for everybody.
[00:10:17]  It'll bring in tourism to whatever cities people have on those fucking lakes.
[00:10:21]  It'll be good for people.
[00:10:23]  So no.
[00:10:25]  That's just science.
[00:10:26]  Absolutely.
[00:10:26]  That's just mathematics.
[00:10:27]  The spit is going on so long.
[00:10:29]  Please, please save us from this, Chris.
[00:10:32]  So speaking of saving people from things, so Borodin, with Sunyet-sen's sort of help and approval, turns the KMT into like a modern mass political party with this sort of centralized organization and the centralized political apparatus.
[00:10:45]  They get an actual like ideology.
[00:10:48]  And as is going to become very important later on in the story, the party starts to develop political and ideological discipline.
[00:10:56]  And as part of this effort, the nationalists send Chenkai-shek to the USSR to study Soviet military and ideological techniques.
[00:11:04]  And when he comes back, they put him in charge of a sort of new Soviet-style military academy, from which he is going to build an absolutely enormous power base in the army because he's the guy who is now training all of the officers.
[00:11:16]  But the Soviets are like, no, this is fine.
[00:11:18]  They call him the Red General.
[00:11:20]  Chenkai-shek shakes hands with Stalin and everything seems to be going great, except there's one minor problem here.
[00:11:27]  Chenkai-shek is not a communist.
[00:11:29]  He is not a leftist at all.
[00:11:31]  He's like, basically, he's a gangster who's kind of nationalist.
[00:11:36]  Now, the other thing that's extremely bad about all of this is that Sun Yet-sen dies in 1925.
[00:11:43]  And Chiang Kai-shek is pretty rapidly able to take control of the party.
[00:11:46]  Now, the other thing that's happening here is that even by sort of Soviet standards, right, I mean, this is pre-Salin, like, fully taking control.
[00:11:54]  So even by Soviet standards, the new sort of KMT organization is incredibly centralized.
[00:12:01]  And the person at the top of it has an enormous amount of political power.
[00:12:04]  And so, you know, Chiang Kai-shek takes over the party and he also sort of personally commands the loyalty of this new generation of officers who've been trained by the Soviets.
[00:12:10]  He has a bunch of Soviet weapons.
[00:12:12]  And, you know, the result of this is that he now has the best army of any Chinese political faction.
[00:12:18]  And what has happened here is that the Soviets have, in essence, like, they have built a party in their own image, right?
[00:12:23]  They've built this party that's designed with this sort of like ruthless efficiency and stamping out kind of revolutionaries.
[00:12:29]  And they have handed it to a fanatical anti-communist drug lord who immediately turns around and uses it to massacre like the entire Chinese urban working class and the first of his white terrors.
[00:12:39]  Now, that seems bad for Organization.
[00:12:42]  Yeah.
[00:12:43]  It's not good.
[00:12:45]  My favorite part, I think I told the story in the last episode.
[00:12:48]  My favorite part about this, though, is that like, okay, so Chiang Kai-shek is like killing the communists, right?
[00:12:54]  It's like in 1927, and the communists are like, they go to the Soviet Union.
[00:12:58]  They're like, hey, what should we do?
[00:12:58]  And the Soviet Union is like, they're having some kind of like Trotsky and Stalin are having some kind of argument.
[00:13:04]  And the line that comes out of them is like, well, you guys have to like stay allied with this party that is murdering you.
[00:13:10]  And it's just like, yeah, and then they all die, right?
[00:13:14]  He kills something like a million people.
[00:13:17]  Okay, so that's a pretty serious set of crimes against humanity there.
[00:13:21]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:13:22]  It's really bad.
[00:13:23]  And this is like, this is the Soviets doing great stuff.
[00:13:26]  But, you know, okay.
[00:13:28]  So Chiang Kai-shek kills about a million people trying to wipe out the Chinese left.
[00:13:32]  But we can ask ourselves another question, which is how did this actually go for Chiang Kai-shek in the long term?
[00:13:38]  And this is a question that can be answered by answering the very simple question, Robert, who actually won the Chinese Civil War?
[00:13:47]  Was it China?
[00:13:51]  Technically?
[00:13:54]  So it went well.
[00:13:56]  Yeah, it went great.
[00:13:57]  Yeah, this is why Taiwan and China are currently one country run by the Chinese nationalists.
[00:14:03]  By the same government, yes.
[00:14:04]  Yeah.
[00:14:05]  Yeah, it's great.
[00:14:06]  I mean, if you listen to America for roughly a generation and a half, Taiwan is China and the only Chinese government that we need to worry about.
[00:14:14]  Yeah, we will come back to that because that turns out to be a thing in this story.
[00:14:20]  But, you know, so Chiang Kai-shek, like the net effect of Chiang Kai-shek's like incredibly vehement anti-communism is that he creates another monster who is going to absolutely destroy him.
[00:14:32]  That person, of course, being Mao Zedong.
[00:14:35]  And, you know, when you sort of like take a kind of macro view of this, right?
[00:14:38]  This whole thing is a cycle, right?
[00:14:40]  The Bolsheviks are the monster that sort of capitalism unleashed when they crush the Paris Commune.
[00:14:44]  The Bolsheviks create the modern KMT and the KMT, you know, like slaughters the entire urban like Chinese Communist Party and they, you know, they unleash another monster by turning the CCP into the sort of the peasant army that Mao is going to use to crush the KMT themselves after World War II.
[00:14:59]  But, you know, the problem here and the problem for this story is that Mao didn't actually finish off the KMT.
[00:15:06]  You know, they retreat to Taiwan after losing the civil war.
[00:15:10]  And they're able to do this because in 1947, the KMT forces that were occupying Taiwan do what they call the February 28th incident.
[00:15:19]  And it's kind of complicated.
[00:15:21]  We will one day do a full thing on this.
[00:15:23]  But the basics of it is there's an uprising in Taiwan against the sort of brutality of the KMT occupation.
[00:15:29]  And the KMT kills something like 20,000 people in a week.
[00:15:34]  And this is like, you know, this is a genuine horror, right?
[00:15:36]  They're beheading students.
[00:15:37]  That is a lot.
[00:15:37]  It's a lot of people to kill in a week.
[00:15:39]  Yeah.
[00:15:40]  I could kill maybe 5,000 people in a week.
[00:15:43]  Yeah, I mean, you have to do it.
[00:15:44]  The resources we have here at CoolZone Media, yeah.
[00:15:46]  Tops 5,000.
[00:15:49]  I think you can do 5,000.
[00:15:50]  I think if we pull everyone else together, we can get that number up to maybe seven.
[00:15:54]  Yeah.
[00:15:54]  We have a lot of staff now.
[00:15:55]  Yeah, we do have a lot of staff now.
[00:15:57]  We have a lot of staff now.
[00:15:58]  Sophie, can we get some of the numbers people to just to just run that by so we have some options on the table?
[00:16:05]  Sure, Robert.
[00:16:06]  Okay.
[00:16:06]  Thank you, Sophie.
[00:16:09]  Yeah, so, you know, the KMT is like the, they're like cutting people, like cutting parts of people's faces off and like taking them.
[00:16:16]  It's really bad.
[00:16:18]  This is like, this is, this is like, this is basically like the foundational like crime of modern Taiwanese political history.
[00:16:25]  And it's, there's like a huge portion of like all of the politics that are going to happen in Taiwan from then until like now are in large part because of this.
[00:16:37]  And if you read books about Chiang Kai-shek, like, well, the books that are not about Chiang Kai-shek, but where like Chiang Kai-shek shows up for some reason, this is like the crime that they always talk about.
[00:16:47]  And, you know, it is really bad.
[00:16:48]  But the thing you have to understand about Chiang Kai-shek is that like, this is probably not even in his top 10 war crimes.
[00:16:54]  Like, this is a man who once killed 400,000 civilians by blowing up a single dam.
[00:17:00]  After the February 28th incident, Taiwan until like the 90s is under this thing, this thing called the white terror, where, you know, the government disappears a bunch of people.
[00:17:09]  They kill a bunch of people.
[00:17:10]  They torture a bunch of people.
[00:17:11]  But the thing is, again, this is his second white terror, right?

=== Fighting for Japan and White Terror (15:56) ===

[00:17:15]  Man.
[00:17:15]  And that's something he and I have in common because that's what people call me when I've had a couple too many.
[00:17:21]  Can you tell me that much?
[00:17:24]  You know, actually, I feel like I should actually have looked into Chiang Kai-shek's drug use more because this guy, this guy is running a lot of drugs.
[00:17:32]  But, you know, but the thing about these white terrors, right, is that like, okay, the white terror that he does in Taiwan is like a genuine horror, right?
[00:17:41]  It's also, he kills something like a 25th of the people at the first white terror killed.
[00:17:47]  Like, well, that's got.
[00:17:48]  So he's moving in the right direction.
[00:17:50]  A couple more terrors and he won't be killing anybody at all.
[00:17:53]  Well, I mean, the thing that Shiang Kai-shek does, we're going to see in the story is that he stops.
[00:17:57]  Okay, he doesn't stop killing people in Taiwan, but like the number of people he kills in Taiwan go down over time.
[00:18:01]  The number of people he kills.
[00:18:02]  That's probably this is sort of a win.
[00:18:04]  The number of people he kills in every other country just starts like rapidly increasing as time goes on.
[00:18:10]  Yeah, I mean, you got, look, you're going to kill the people somewhere.
[00:18:13]  So I feel like still progress.
[00:18:17]  Yeah, we're only going to do a we're going to do a soft white terror in Taiwan, and we're going to do a hard white terror in Guatemala.
[00:18:27]  So, you know, and like, I think the thing with Chiang Kai-shek, right, is the reason he's not remembered as one of the sort of like great historical historical monsters.
[00:18:33]  Like, again, this is a guy, like, killing 28,000 people in a week is like Tuesday for Chiang Kai-shek.
[00:18:38]  And like, the only reason he's not remembered as this sort of like monster is that he's overshadowed once again by like the sort of the trio quad thing of Maost Alan, Hitler, and Churchill.
[00:18:49]  Yeah, there's a lot of people doing, like, he killed a million people, and that's, that's pretty good numbers in the other year.
[00:18:56]  He's probably got like, yeah, I mean, he's probably got like three or four million.
[00:19:00]  Yeah.
[00:19:00]  Which, and that's solid.
[00:19:02]  Look, don't get me wrong.
[00:19:03]  Solid numbers historically.
[00:19:05]  Like, if you're, if you're three, four million dead, pretty good.
[00:19:08]  You're doing real good as a war criminal on a historic level.
[00:19:11]  But man, first half of the 20th century, that shit doesn't even get you on the board.
[00:19:16]  No, you're like, you're like a, you're like a sea lister.
[00:19:19]  The LeBron Jameses of genocide are out in the streets in those days, and there's, there's a lot of them.
[00:19:26]  Like, this fucking Scotty Pippin-ass mass murder ain't gonna cut it.
[00:19:31]  How was that, Sophie?
[00:19:32]  Was that, was that a good basketball?
[00:19:34]  I mean, it depends on who you're asking, but yes.
[00:19:37]  Thank you.
[00:19:38]  Acceptable, but very subjective.
[00:19:41]  I approve.
[00:19:43]  Scotty Pippin was the only other basketball player I could think of.
[00:19:48]  I assume he's not as good as LeBron James.
[00:19:51]  I mean, he would say he is, but yeah.
[00:19:56]  Yep, so would Shankai-shek, but sorry, bro.
[00:19:58]  I mean, look, the thing with Shang Kai-shek is that Shang Kai-shek has the ability to shoot you if you don't agree with him.
[00:20:04]  I don't think Scotty Pippen has the ability to sort of like mobilize an entire death squad apparatus to make everyone think that he's better than LeBron James.
[00:20:11]  No, no.
[00:20:12]  The only basketball player who had a solid death squad apparatus was, of course, Shaq.
[00:20:19]  Are we just going to see how many basketball players you can do?
[00:20:21]  How is that?
[00:20:21]  Remember, I liked it.
[00:20:22]  I mean, it also once again did work.
[00:20:25]  Thank you.
[00:20:26]  I recently watched the new Adam Sandler basketball movie, so I'm very knowledgeable about basketball.
[00:20:32]  What was funny about that, Sophie, is like every third second in that movie, somebody comes on screen and you, I can tell whenever they come on that, like, oh, that's a famous basketball guy.
[00:20:41]  And I'm supposed to have a reaction to the fact that he's in this movie too, but it means nothing to me every time.
[00:20:47]  Yeah, you didn't have me there to be like, that's who that is.
[00:20:50]  And you're going, I don't care.
[00:20:51]  And then that's blamism, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:20:54]  Yeah.
[00:20:54]  Yeah.
[00:20:55]  He's the best touchdown.
[00:20:58]  Go, Patriots.
[00:21:00]  You were doing so well.
[00:21:01]  Okay.
[00:21:02]  Also, that's really.
[00:21:03]  Yeah.
[00:21:03]  Don't ever say that in front of Chris, by the way.
[00:21:06]  Chris really hates the Patriots.
[00:21:10]  I will go back to my Taiwanese roots and convey a death squad over this.
[00:21:14]  Yeah, I don't know if you knew this, Chris, but Chris really fucking hates the Patriots.
[00:21:19]  Well, guess no one's gonna be doing a hole in one.
[00:21:24]  I don't know.
[00:21:25]  Wow.
[00:21:26]  Brave.
[00:21:27]  Let's get back to the story.
[00:21:29]  So Chenkai-shek, in a lot of ways, is he is incredibly ahead of his time.
[00:21:36]  So, so, okay, you can talk at sort of the like the periods of anti-communism, right?
[00:21:40]  And, you know, he, he has this problem that he, he's working in, he's working in a period of anti-communism in which the Nazis exist.
[00:21:45]  And, you know, while the Nazis are around, the Nazis are sort of like the top dog of anti-communism.
[00:21:50]  Although, Chikai-shek was ally with the Nazis.
[00:21:52]  And his son was in the Weimark.
[00:21:55]  And he almost led like a, he almost led like, not a division, but he almost led like troops into Poland.
[00:22:01]  The only reason he didn't was that he got pulled back to Taiwan to like fight off the Japanese.
[00:22:06]  Yeah.
[00:22:06]  But, you know, and this is one of those, one of the eras of Nazi history that people don't get enough, which is that like while Nazis are pretty much tied directly into like white supremacist shit today, the OG Nazis were extremely willing to work with people who were from a variety of different like ethnic groups and including fight with them.
[00:22:25]  There was an Indian and Pakistani military unit in the SS because again, racism changes over time, like everything else, and innovates.
[00:22:36]  Yeah, I mean, like I've talked about this before, but look, yeah, there were there were Nazi military advisors like leading Chinese troops in the Battle of Shanghai.
[00:22:43]  And it's it's very weird.
[00:22:45]  But, you know, Chiang Kai-shek, like, he loses this war, but he, he really has the prototype for the sort of second phase of anti-communism, which is that if you look at the KMT, right?
[00:22:57]  He, it has an incredibly centralized party, ideological party apparatus.
[00:23:02]  It has a bunch of death squads and is funding itself as an anti-communist dictatorship via the drug trade.
[00:23:07]  So he is doing, he is like 40 years ahead of everyone who is doing anti-communism.
[00:23:14]  And so two of the two journalists whose book I'm going to be using for a lot of this, Scott and John Lee Anderson, they're two journalists who grew up in Taiwan under the military dictatorship.
[00:23:26]  And they call this model of anti-communist party the Death Squad Party for reasons that we will see shortly.
[00:23:34]  And yeah, they're going to spend a lot of time exporting this to other places.
[00:23:38]  Now, what's sort of interesting is that Chiang Kai-shek was like hated by like every American officer who had to interact with him during World War II, which like, yeah, yeah, no, no shit.
[00:23:48]  Like, yeah, me too, buddy.
[00:23:49]  I also hate this guy, but I'm admittedly biased because his government tried to publicly execute one of my great uncles.
[00:23:54]  Okay, well, what was your great uncle doing, though?
[00:23:56]  How was he dressed?
[00:23:58]  He was dressed pretty well.
[00:23:59]  He there's a long story.
[00:24:01]  There's a long story about what exactly happened there, but he did in fact survive.
[00:24:07]  However, I'm still holding it against him for trying to publicly execute him.
[00:24:11]  Yeah.
[00:24:12]  Yeah, but you know, it's weird.
[00:24:14]  So while the civil war is going on and Dream World War II, everyone hates him.
[00:24:18]  But the moment he loses the civil war, he becomes the cause celeb of what's called the China lobby in the U.S., where these like hardline anti-communists whose things that they want to like help Chiang Kai-shek in his just incredible delusion that one day he's going to like invade China again and retake the homeland.
[00:24:34]  Like, and like he, like, the government in Taiwan made my mom, who was like five, sing songs about how they were going to reclaim the motherland one day.
[00:24:42]  It was just good.
[00:24:44]  Yeah, this place is like, like, it is a just sort of incredibly neurotic, like sort of totalitarian military dictatorship.
[00:24:58]  Yeah, I feel, I mean, first off, squad goals.
[00:25:03]  But yeah, that sounds like it could be a problem to live under.
[00:25:07]  Yeah.
[00:25:07]  But, you know, and of course, but like the people who backed him, of course, are the best and brightest of the people in American politics.
[00:25:12]  You have Douglas MacArthur.
[00:25:16]  Oh, yeah.
[00:25:17]  Yeah.
[00:25:17]  He's a good one.
[00:25:18]  Right.
[00:25:19]  This is this is fresh after he attempted to start a nuclear war in order to distract from the fact that he had completely fucked the war in Korea.
[00:25:27]  Yep.
[00:25:30]  There's another very famous person you probably know, Joseph McCarthy, better known for other works.
[00:25:35]  Yeah.
[00:25:36]  Oh, God.
[00:25:36]  Of course.
[00:25:37]  Yeah.
[00:25:37]  Joe McCarthy.
[00:25:38]  Slick Joe, known for...
[00:25:40]  Great guy.
[00:25:41]  Nothing bad.
[00:25:42]  Yeah.
[00:25:43]  Great.
[00:25:44]  And so the KMT and their American allies start looking for other sort of like fanatical anti-communists to enlist their cause.
[00:25:51]  And this search eventually leads them to the formation of the World Anti-Communist League.
[00:25:56]  One of the people who they find is Perk Chung-ki, who's the built, well, okay, he's the second military dictator of South Korea.
[00:26:02]  And I keep saying we're going to do an episode about him one day, and I promise we will.
[00:26:06]  But he's so much wild ass, especially in this period, Korean history, that people in the United States don't know fuck all about.
[00:26:14]  It's really good.
[00:26:15]  Real good shit.
[00:26:17]  This guy, like, this is a guy who, so he fought for the Japanese in World War II.
[00:26:22]  And okay, so like there are a lot of Japanese people who were forced to like conscripted into fighting the Japanese army.
[00:26:27]  Sure, it was a military dictatorship.
[00:26:29]  Yeah, that's the way it feels.
[00:26:31]  Perk Chung Ki is not one of those guys.
[00:26:33]  He fought for the Japanese Empire because he loved like I from pure ideology, he was like, he looked at the Japanese empire and was like, oh shit, I love this.
[00:26:42]  And, you know, like, he is, he is incredibly fascist.
[00:26:44]  Like, this is the guy who Nobu Suke Kishi talked to after the war and was like, whoa, buddy, you got to tone the fascism shit down a little bit.
[00:26:50]  Like, it's, it's, it's wild.
[00:26:53]  And, you know, but like, like, just, okay, utterly inexplicably, this is, this is the second, like, second communist decision in this episode that I'm just like, what are you guys doing?
[00:27:02]  The communists let him join the communist party.
[00:27:05]  And this is baffling to me, right?
[00:27:07]  Like, here is a dude who literally fought for the Japanese on purpose.
[00:27:12]  And, you know, the communist party looks at him and goes like, what should we do with him, boss?
[00:27:15]  I know.
[00:27:15]  Let's let him in the party.
[00:27:17]  And so he, like, immediately gets arrested and just instantly, like, the fastest ratting I've ever seen in my entire life, just like rats on his comrades to the government.
[00:27:27]  Which, like, like, okay, so I am in principle against snitching.
[00:27:32]  I also like really don't understand what the communists were expecting was going to happen here.
[00:27:38]  Like, you, you brought in a guy who fought for the Japanese army on purpose.
[00:27:41]  Of course, he was instantly going to betray you.
[00:27:43]  Like, really?
[00:27:46]  It's baffling stuff.
[00:27:47]  Yeah.
[00:27:48]  I mean, the Korean communists.
[00:27:52]  But so in 1961, he coups the government and he's the guy who like really fully brings Korea on board with this whole sort of like world anti-communist league thing.
[00:28:00]  He starts sending like generals and like KCIA guys to the league.
[00:28:04]  The Moonies are also a big part of this.
[00:28:08]  I'm not going to talk about them here because we have to talk about Moonies a lot.
[00:28:12]  Yeah.
[00:28:12]  Go listen to Lot and then make your own electronically fired blunderbuss.
[00:28:16]  Yeah.
[00:28:17]  That's the official stance of this show.
[00:28:20]  Look, I just, they deserve it.
[00:28:24]  So the other major group that that's involved in the creation of the World Anti-Communist League is called the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, or the ABN.
[00:28:32]  And the ABN are a bunch of people who they're united by like two things.
[00:28:36]  One is that they really hate the Soviets.
[00:28:38]  The second thing they're united by is that they did the Holocaust.
[00:28:42]  Well, that's bad.
[00:28:43]  Yeah.
[00:28:43]  Yeah.
[00:28:44]  The ABN was founded by a guy named Yaroslav Stetsko, who I think if you've been looking into Ukrainian history in the last like, you know, year, you probably, you might know who this guy is.
[00:28:55]  He's the guy who was chosen by Stefan Bandera to be the second in command of the newly formed organization of Ukrainian nationalists.
[00:29:03]  I'm glad that didn't wind up going anywhere.
[00:29:05]  Oh, yeah, no.
[00:29:06]  Look, it completely stalled out.
[00:29:08]  They never ended up fighting.
[00:29:10]  They are fine.
[00:29:11]  Everything's great.
[00:29:12]  Look, they did not end up fighting for the Nazis during Operation Barbarossa.
[00:29:17]  Stetsiko does not walk into the city of Lvov alongside a bunch of guys in the Weimark and immediately start doing the Holocaust.
[00:29:25]  None of this ever happens.
[00:29:27]  They didn't kill 7,000 people in like, I think, I think a week.
[00:29:33]  Most of whom were.
[00:29:34]  I mean, honestly, compared to Kai-shek numbers, that's rookie.
[00:29:38]  Yeah, well, I mean, it's weird because, like, okay, so like in any other group of people, like this guy is, you know, a world historical monster.
[00:29:47]  He's kind of on the B team in terms of like the people in this episode, maybe the C team.
[00:29:54]  So the thing that he does is, so he gets into Lvov and he immediately declares like a new independent like Ukrainian state with him as a leader.
[00:30:00]  And I'm just going to read from the speech that he gave when he was declaring this independent Ukrainian state.
[00:30:06]  The Ukrainian state will corroborate will closely cooperate with great national socialist Germany, which under the leadership of Adolf Hitler will create a new order in Europe and throughout the world.
[00:30:15]  The Ukrainian army will fight together with the allied German army for the new order in the world.
[00:30:21]  Well, it didn't quite happen.
[00:30:23]  So that's, I mean, well, yeah, it doesn't happen for two reasons.
[00:30:27]  One is that the Nazis lose.
[00:30:27]  Two is that he instantly gets arrested because the Nazis were like, hey, you guys didn't tell us that you were going to declare an independent state.
[00:30:33]  Yeah.
[00:30:33]  Oh, yeah.
[00:30:33]  What do you do?
[00:30:34]  We don't want there to be a Ukraine.
[00:30:36]  Yeah, no.
[00:30:37]  And this is something we're in agreement with the Russians about, actually.
[00:30:41]  We don't want this country to exist.
[00:30:43]  Yeah.
[00:30:43]  And, you know, so he gets thrown in prison.
[00:30:45]  And Stetsiko, like, Tusko, like, after the war, he will claim that he was put in a concentration camp and the Nazis persecuted him.
[00:30:52]  And like, this is kind of true.
[00:30:54]  But like, okay, so the thing that they put him under is called, quote, honorary arrest.
[00:31:00]  Yeah.
[00:31:00]  And he's like, he's in like the nice prison.
[00:31:03]  And they let him out a few times during this while this is going on so you can coordinate more stuff.
[00:31:08]  And in 1944, they let him out just like entirely because the war is going so badly.
[00:31:12]  They were like, screw it.
[00:31:13]  Let's throw the Ukrainians at the Russians.
[00:31:15]  And he and Bandera form this thing called the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fights the Red Army.
[00:31:21]  And they also do some like incredibly half-assed fighting of the Nazis, which was like largely, as best I could tell, this largely seems to be so they could like say that we fought the Nazis.
[00:31:31]  I'm going to read a passage here from the book, Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War, about what happened next.
[00:31:37]  At the end of 1943, in the forest of, oh God, I don't know how to pronounce this, Jotimir, Gazalia, the western part of Ukraine, these same Ukrainian nationalists held the first clandestine congress of the anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, the ABN, creating at the same time the Ukrainian National Army, the UPA.
[00:31:57]  The UPA then took part in attacks on the retreating Weimar, while at the same time harassing the Red Army, the communist partisans, and Jewish citizens due to their suspected communist sympathies.
[00:32:06]  The UPA, consisting of around 70,000 guerrillas, were joined by fragments of the SS's Ukraine, Belarusian, Russian, and Kozak battalions, as well as Hungarian, Romanian, Soviet, Baltic, and Georgian deserters.
[00:32:18]  Now, the author is being like a bit too kind to the UPA here.
[00:32:22]  The main reason that they are quote, they quote, harass Jewish citizens is because like an enormous number of these are just people or just like fanatical anti-Semites.
[00:32:31]  But this is the birth of the anti-Bolshevi Bloc of Nations.
[00:32:35]  And again, like Stetsko, this is a guy who fought for the Nazis.
[00:32:39]  He probably has the lowest body count of the next like four groups I'm going to talk about.
[00:32:45]  Also in the anti-Bolshevik Block of Nations, something called the Croatian Liberation Movement.
[00:32:50]  The Croatian Liberation Movement was led by a guy named Stefan Hefer, who formed it alongside Ante Pavlovic, who is the founder of the Ustasha.
[00:33:01]  Now, the Ustasha are a Croatian fascist organization that fought alongside the Nazis and were given control of a new sort of Croatian fascist puppet state with Anton Pavlovic as its leader.

=== Croatian Jew Genocide Nightmare (04:10) ===

[00:33:11]  Here's from the Holocaust Museum about what happened next at a concentration camp called Chidosevic.
[00:33:18]  I did learn how to pronounce it and then I immediately forgot.
[00:33:20]  Yeah.
[00:33:22]  There's a lot of concentration camps.
[00:33:24]  Yeah, well, this is the third largest camp in Europe.
[00:33:28]  So between, this is the, yeah, this is from the Holocaust Museum.
[00:33:32]  Between its establishment in 1941 and its evacuation in April 1945, Croat authorities murdered hundreds of thousands of people at Josevik.
[00:33:41]  Among the victims were between 45,000 and 52,000 Serbian residents of the so-called independent state of Croatia, between 12,000 and 20,000 Jews, between 15,000 and 20,000 Roma, between 5,000 and 12,000 ethnic Croats and Muslims who are political opponents of the regime.
[00:33:57]  The Croat authorities murdered between 320,000 and 340,000 ethnic Serb residents of Croatian Bosnia during the period of Ustasha rule.
[00:34:07]  More than 30,000 Croatian Jews were killed either in Croatia or at Auschwitz.
[00:34:12]  And to put this into perspective, that is over 75% of like all Croatian Jews who were killed by the Ustasha during the Holocaust.
[00:34:20]  And the thing about this camp is that unlike the rest of the concentration camps in Europe, they don't have gas chambers.
[00:34:27]  They are doing all of these killings by hand.
[00:34:31]  And it's not just that they're doing this by hand.
[00:34:35]  I'm going to read this thing from the Jerusalem.
[00:34:37]  Yeah, I mean, that's the fucking Azasha.
[00:34:39]  Yeah.
[00:34:40]  Yeah.
[00:34:40]  The late Jasa Alemani, who served as president of the Belgrade Jewish community, described Josevic as barbaric, saying that the murders were predominantly carried out manually.
[00:34:51]  Very seldom did they use bullets, he said, because they believed the victims didn't merit it.
[00:34:57]  Almuni describes some of the Ustashi's methods, which included cutting the eyes out of their victims and slitting their throats, throwing live prisoners into brick furnaces and poisoning children.
[00:35:07]  And, you know, you've talked a lot on this show about how the Nazis were trying to execute Jews by firing squad and they couldn't psychologically handle it.
[00:35:15]  And that's why they moved the gas chambers.
[00:35:17]  The Ustashi can do this.
[00:35:19]  Yeah.
[00:35:19]  Like, they keep doing this through the entire war.
[00:35:22]  Yeah, there's, I mean, one of the many stories about the Holocaust that isn't told enough is that like the actual German SS were not nearly the most brutal war criminals on the Nazi side.
[00:35:36]  The Ustashi's fucking nightmare people.
[00:35:38]  And others, like if you look at what's happening in the fucking Balkans during this period of time, like what's going down in what becomes Serbia and Bosnia and how the genocides are being conducted there by Nazi allies, like it's a lot of the same thing, which is like, oh, we'll just, we'll just strangle people.
[00:35:53]  We'll just cut their heads off by the thousands.
[00:35:55]  Like, we don't need to waste bullets on this shit.
[00:35:56]  We don't need to gas chambers.
[00:35:58]  Like, as is often the case in wars, like the nastiest fucking shit happens in these, these places like the Balkans and chunks of Eastern Europe that, um, and with soldiers from those areas where like there's, there's already, when the war hits, kind of a heightened level of acceptance of violence just because of shit in the recent past.
[00:36:19]  And like the, the, the, the most nightmare stories come from a lot of those, those places kind of on the fringes of the Nazi power.
[00:36:28]  Yeah.
[00:36:29]  And like, like, these, like, the Ustasha, like, it gets to a point where, like, there, there, there, there is, there are, like, there are instances where like the Nazis just banned their units because they look at what they're doing.
[00:36:37]  They're like, hey, guys, like, you're a bit far away.
[00:36:40]  Well, I mean, there's a thing, a number of things, because, like, again, it's bad for morale.
[00:36:44]  Like, Nazis, Nazis are complaining about what some of these units are doing.
[00:36:48]  Yeah.
[00:36:50]  This isn't what soldiers do, right?
[00:36:52]  Um, is the attitude some folks have.
[00:36:54]  Like, it's, it's, it's a mess.
[00:36:56]  Um, yeah.
[00:36:58]  And so Stefan Heifer, who he's going to become an important world anti-communist leader and a member of the sort of anti-social block of nations.
[00:37:04]  He seems like a good guy.
[00:37:06]  He was the governor general of Baranja County in the new Nazi Croatian state.
[00:37:12]  And Anton Pavilvich, who's again the founder of the Ustashi, is one of the founders of the Croatian Liberation Movement, which is the Croatian representative at the ABN.

=== Sophie's Powerful New Words (04:14) ===

[00:37:21]  It's great.
[00:37:22]  Cool.
[00:37:23]  Do you know these guys who went on to have careers?
[00:37:26]  Great.
[00:37:27]  This is great, Robert.
[00:37:28]  Is it products and services?
[00:37:30]  Chris, because let me tell you.
[00:37:33]  Confusingly, we are sponsored by the Ustashi.
[00:37:38]  A lot of people will say, why are you sponsored by the Ustashi?
[00:37:43]  And I'll say, you should check out their promo code.
[00:37:48]  How are we doing, Sophie?
[00:37:49]  No words.
[00:37:50]  No words.
[00:37:51]  I've got nothing.
[00:37:52]  I got that.
[00:37:53]  No, I just got that.
[00:37:54]  I got that.
[00:37:55]  Well, that just, that happened.
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[00:40:01]  I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:40:07]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:40:14]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:40:20]  From power to parenthood.
[00:40:22]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:40:26]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:40:28]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:40:30]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:40:35]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:40:41]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:40:44]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:40:50]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:40:52]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:40:55]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:41:03]  What's up, everyone?
[00:41:04]  I'm Ego Moda.
[00:41:05]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[00:41:16]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:41:19]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:41:24]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:41:27]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
[00:41:31]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.

=== Operation Condor Death Squads (15:26) ===

[00:41:36]  Yeah.
[00:41:36]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:41:39]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:41:41]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:41:49]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:41:52]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:41:59]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:42:01]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:42:02]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:42:03]  Yeah.
[00:42:03]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:42:13]  Oh, yes.
[00:42:18]  All right.
[00:42:19]  So meanwhile, the Romanian delegation of the ABN is a bunch of people from the Iron Guard, who is a Romanian fascist organization that did this during a fascist uprising in 1941.
[00:42:33]  A mob of several hundred attacked the Sephardic Temple, American correspondent Leigh White reported at the time, smashing its windows with stones and battering down its doors with lengths of timber.
[00:42:42]  All objects of ritual prayer books, shahs, Talmuds, Torahs, altar benches, and tapestries were carried outside and piled into a heap, which is soaked in gasoline and set afire.
[00:42:52]  A number of Jewish pedestrians were herded together and forced to dance in a circle around the bonfire.
[00:42:57]  When they dropped an exhaustion, they were doused in gasoline and burned alive.
[00:43:01]  And I cut the description off.
[00:43:03]  It gets way worse after that.
[00:43:05]  Yeah, if doused in gasoline and burned alive is like a ramp up before we really put our foot on the gas.
[00:43:13]  It gets like they are, all I will say about that is they are incredibly, they are incredibly specific in how they use their anti-Semitism to kill people.
[00:43:23]  It's like it's stuff you couldn't, it's stuff you couldn't write a serial killer doing because, yeah.
[00:43:31]  And this is, this is, uh, this is the Romanian delegation to the ABN.
[00:43:35]  Belarus's delegation is called the Belarusian Liberation Movement.
[00:43:39]  Its representative is a guy named Dmitry.
[00:43:42]  Kazimovich, who was appointed by the Nazis as the chief of police of Smolnesk, where he exterminated Jews and communists.
[00:43:48]  Zelensky.
[00:43:49]  Zolensk.
[00:43:50]  Yeah.
[00:43:50]  Yeah.
[00:43:51]  And he also joined an SS commando unit to fight the Soviets and was eventually smuggled out of a refugee camp by British intelligence and worked for the American army.
[00:43:59]  Oh, good.
[00:44:00]  It's great.
[00:44:01]  And yeah, so he founded this entire thing as a way to spy on the Soviets for the U.S.
[00:44:05]  And at this point, we should mention that like this entire just literal group of people who did the Holocaust is funded by both the US and the UK.
[00:44:15]  The ABN is like all over American politics.
[00:44:18]  Like they successfully lobbied the U.S. to doing into doing this thing that like I'm pretty sure by the time this comes out, Biden will have also done his version of it, which is called Captive Nations Week, which is like all presidents still do this to this day.
[00:44:31]  It's supposed to be this thing that like honors nations held captive by authoritarian governments.
[00:44:35]  Oh, that's nice.
[00:44:37]  It's the political equivalent of the like slapping a drowning hand meme.
[00:44:41]  There you go, Kurds.
[00:44:43]  Well, I also like, I really want to just take a moment to appreciate that the United States government, which is a state that literally holds hundreds of indigenous nations captive and occupies their land, declares captive nations week since the 1600s.
[00:45:01]  That doesn't sound like the America I learned about in Texas.
[00:45:04]  Yeah, no.
[00:45:05]  And again, like they do this because some dipshits from the Ustashi told them 70 years ago.
[00:45:10]  Well, I'm glad that our honor of captive nations is the honor of the captive nations of racists in particular.
[00:45:18]  That's good.
[00:45:19]  It's also fun because if you look at the declarations of this, the only states that are like ever mentioned are states that can be like somehow vaguely tied to communism.
[00:45:26]  So like, you know, they'll talk about like, we need to freaking out.
[00:45:29]  Oh, I bet these guys had a fucking hard on for Rhodesia.
[00:45:32]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:45:33]  And even Biden released like his statement last year.
[00:45:36]  It talks about like, it talks about like Nicaragua.
[00:45:39]  It talks about like Cuba.
[00:45:40]  Literally no mention whatsoever of Saudi Arabia, which again, in my lifetime has invaded what, at least two, possibly three countries on top of just being Saudi Arabia.
[00:45:51]  Saudi Arabia, that doesn't sound like the country that Joe Biden would fist bump.
[00:45:55]  Come on.
[00:45:56]  No.
[00:45:58]  So the ABN starts working on the state.
[00:46:00]  I can now imagine Joe Biden fist bumping a new Stashi militant.
[00:46:04]  That's good.
[00:46:06]  Reagan got pretty close.
[00:46:09]  Reagan did get close.
[00:46:10]  Reagan did get close.
[00:46:14]  I don't know.
[00:46:14]  Biden's a 50-50 on that shit.
[00:46:16]  The only thing he's consistently good on is hating the British, which I do respect.
[00:46:20]  I do investigate that.
[00:46:21]  I appreciate this.
[00:46:25]  So the ABN starts talking with Chien Kai-shek through a bunch of contacts, and they help train Taiwan's secret police.
[00:46:32]  And they also help set up Radio Free Asia, which is incredibly fun.
[00:46:36]  Now, contact between the ABN and the Taiwanese government leads to a 1966 meeting of Chien Kai-shek's Asian People's Anti-Communist League in Seoul, South Korea, with representatives of sort of the whole global anti-communist movement comes together to do something.
[00:46:48]  And 170 representatives from 60 nations show up.
[00:46:52]  And what's interesting about this first.
[00:46:55]  The interesting thing here is this isn't all fascist.
[00:46:59]  The very first meeting where they're trying to figure out what is going to happen, who's going to be in this, there's like, there are like social democrats who show up to this.
[00:47:05]  There are like regular conservatives.
[00:47:08]  And all of these people immediately get run out.
[00:47:11]  There's this group called the Assembly OF Captive European Nations who like, they're not like great people, but they also like didn't literally well, actually can't verify they didn't literally do the Holocaust, but they are they aren't literally the leaders of the Usashi and yeah not, not literally running a group so bad that the SS was occasionally like, oh guys yeah, like might need to pump them brakes.
[00:47:35]  The bar for anti-communism is like like the the, the bar of like how bad you have to be for the anti-communist not to accept you is like yeah really, really really low and like these people keep tripping over it.
[00:47:47]  And yeah, you know, and these guys are like you know, I cannot I cannot emphasize enough that the dudes we're talking about are quite literally people that, like Heinrich Himmler, would read reports about what they were doing and need to have a stiff drink.
[00:48:00]  Yeah, like it's.
[00:48:02]  And these guys, you know so.
[00:48:03]  So the, the sort of moderates try to become the delegations from eastern Europe, and the ABN just like runs them out, because the Abn's already like tight with the Taiwanese and the Taiwanese are, you know, one of the major sort of power blocks here and the.
[00:48:14]  The result of this is that you know, from from the formative meeting of the World Anti-communist League.
[00:48:18]  This is just going to be a fascist organization, and you know okay, so we've now met two of the three sort of main power blocks in the World Anti-communist League.
[00:48:26]  Right, there's the.
[00:48:26]  There's the East Asian block, centered around Taiwan and South Korea, and they also they have support from like South Vietnam and like Singapore and the Philippines, but yeah the, the core, there is sort of Taiwan and South Korea there's.
[00:48:37]  There's the ABN fascists in Europe, who are again the Usashi and the IRON Guard and like their people.
[00:48:42]  And now it's time to meet group number three.
[00:48:44]  Uh, this is the Latin American Anti-communist Confederation, or CAL UM.
[00:48:50]  CAL is originally a friend group for a group called LOS Tecos, who are a fascist desk squad from the Autonomous University OF Guadalajara.
[00:48:57]  Oh, Mexican fascists oh yeah well, these guys are great.
[00:49:01]  So so the the the, the modern iteration of Tecos was founded by a guy named Carlos Cuestra Gallardo, who is a Mexican Nazi who was doing something in Berlin during World War Ii, we don't know what.
[00:49:14]  There are various rumors uh, some of them including him, like being part of the group who like, decides on the final solution, like we don't know.
[00:49:23]  There's, there's rumors he was Hitler's secretary, like it's very unclear, he's doing something to support the Nazis.
[00:49:29]  He's uh, you know, Woke Hitler hiring, hiring people from all backgrounds yeah yeah well, look if, if these guys are stand and uh, integration focused king yeah yeah, all you have to do is be like so unfathomably Anti-semitic that, like even the other Anti-semites eventually are like you guys are too much.
[00:49:48]  You can't say this out loud like and and so, so he, he survives the war and he goes back to Mexico to help help establish this like network of like fascist Mexican priests who hide people from like the IRON Guard and other like fascist collaborators.
[00:50:00]  And these guys are like, they're like yeah, there's like the liberation theology priests, and then there's who they start killing very quickly, yeah yeah um, and these guys are like like they're convinced that the Un is a Jewish conspiracy.
[00:50:13]  They like they rave constantly about Marxists, the Zionists and the Freemasons and they also think that Vatican Ii, with the church tacked like a bit to the left, is a good enough reason to just literally Start killing Catholic priests, even though, again, all of these people are Catholics.
[00:50:26]  A bit to the left, all they did was change the fucking liturgy to be in English.
[00:50:33]  Yeah, and it was like, if this is this is all these people just go like, there's an entire group.
[00:50:37]  Like, there's a lot of like Francoists who like sort of go ape.
[00:50:41]  Like, it is like, yeah, just that's their model.
[00:50:45]  One of my favorite things about Catholicism is when you get like these Vatican II conspiracies where the church is literally like, well, our religion's dying because nobody understands what the fuck is going on in these services and stuff.
[00:50:58]  Perhaps we could slightly modernize it so that people can understand what's being said.
[00:51:03]  These guys think the Pope is Jewish.
[00:51:05]  They literally think this.
[00:51:06]  It is like classic Jewish person, the Pope.
[00:51:09]  Yeah, it's like it's this whole thing.
[00:51:12]  And so the Tecos are like, they're a death squad, right?
[00:51:14]  They kill people, like students.
[00:51:16]  And the league comes to them and are like, hey, you guys are anti-Semitics.
[00:51:20]  You guys are death squads.
[00:51:21]  Like, go find other anti-communist death squads in Latin America and recruit them so we can talk to them.
[00:51:26]  And they do.
[00:51:26]  Like, these guys are literally, they're football talent scouts, but for death squads.
[00:51:31]  Well, that's good.
[00:51:32]  I mean, look, you know how I feel about death squads, Chris.
[00:51:36]  If you're not getting the good, like somewhere out there is the LeBron James of killing a lot of people and pushing their bodies into a crudely dug pit.
[00:51:46]  And if you don't find him, you know, another death squad's going to get him.
[00:51:49]  And then you're not going to win the...
[00:51:51]  Sophie, what is the basketball award for good at basketball?
[00:51:54]  MVP.
[00:51:56]  Yeah, you're not going to win the MVP.
[00:51:58]  So.
[00:51:59]  Yeah, look, you got it.
[00:52:00]  Well, the other thing, again, is this is very important, right?
[00:52:02]  Robert's so proud of himself.
[00:52:04]  You don't have the smirk he's giving is so cool.
[00:52:07]  Thank you, Sophie.
[00:52:08]  It's about time you took an interest in one of my hobbies.
[00:52:12]  I'm learning.
[00:52:13]  It's a real Heisman Trophy Day for the Death Squad, people.
[00:52:16]  No.
[00:52:17]  Oh, wow.
[00:52:18]  Okay, I'm going to turn this to a baseball metaphor, which is that, okay, so the other thing that's happening here, right, is that you have to build up your roster, right?
[00:52:25]  And you have to build up to build up your sort of like your minor league system.
[00:52:29]  You have to do this so that you can train other death squads.
[00:52:31]  And these guys are about to become the fucking 90s mariners of building up death squads.
[00:52:36]  They have a bullpin so deep they can fucking like they they, they can they, they can kick out literal hall of fame power hitters because they don't need more hitting.
[00:52:43]  They have so many death squads.
[00:52:46]  And who's the Wade Boggs of death squads in this period, by which I mean who is drinking 70 beers on a flight from I don't know Stockholm to Smolensk?
[00:52:57]  Oh uh, what?
[00:52:58]  It's this guy named Jomo.
[00:52:59]  Oh god, why I can't remember his last name.
[00:53:01]  Yeah yeah yeah, yeah.
[00:53:02]  It's that guy who hilariously, kind of isn't going to come up in there.
[00:53:06]  There's a lot of people who did a lot of assassinations, who are in the, who are in the league, who we're not going to talk about because they're like, just D-listers.
[00:53:11]  Yes, there's so many.
[00:53:14]  So the thing about the CAL is that they they're, very quietly, one of the most important organizations in the history of the Latin American Cold War and almost nobody's ever heard of them.
[00:53:25]  But one of the things that they do is in 1973.
[00:53:28]  So these meetings right, you get a bunch of death squads showing up to it and you get a bunch of countries like sending their intelligence services to these meetings to go like, talk about with other countries and tell like right-wing, anti-communist intelligence services and in one of these meetings in 1973, the dictatorships of Brazil and Paraguay agree to exchange information and sort of like coordinate security measures to the CIL.
[00:53:48]  Now Paraguay at this point is ruled by uh, Alfredo Stroessner, who is one of the the World Anti-communist League's biggest supporters, and the man like this guy like personally hosts several World Anti-communist League conferences.
[00:54:01]  Um, he also like he he, he sold eight-year-olds into sex slavery.
[00:54:06]  Um, he like the worst thing that he does is he does this, this genocide against the indigenous Aceh population.
[00:54:14]  Um, i'm gonna read from the Washington POST, 1977 and, by the way when, when I read this thing you have to understand this is, this is from 1977.
[00:54:21]  There are like 20 more years of the genocide that are going to happen after this quote, 50 of the Aceh population living in Paraguay since in 1968 have since disappeared.
[00:54:32]  Wow yeah, that's pretty bad.
[00:54:36]  Yeah, and you know where did they go?
[00:54:38]  Well okay, they got raped, tortured and murdered by settlers who are doing a genocide and to take their land.
[00:54:42]  There are, like there are these ache hunters whose job is literally to go out and kidnap a che people and like force them to live on these like reservations, quote unquote on their farms, like they're doing slave raids or selling children.
[00:54:54]  They're forcing people like somebody should stop that.
[00:54:56]  Yeah, no one ever does.
[00:54:58]  Somebody should.
[00:54:59]  No one ever does like this.
[00:55:00]  This goes on, this goes on for the like the entire 30 years of like, the Strosser's dictatorship okay, and now, in 1973, Strossner starts coordinating his police repression with the Brazilian dictatorship through the CAL.
[00:55:11]  Um the next year, the Cal's coordinating Council meets Rio De Janeiro.
[00:55:15]  Um, the coordinating council there's representatives has representatives from Argentina Bolivia Brazil Chile Colombia, El Salvador Guatemala Mexico Paraguay Uruguay, and also there's a bunch of Cuban exiles.
[00:55:28]  Um okay, so you know what?
[00:55:30]  What are they doing there?
[00:55:31]  Um, this is from the book Predatory States.
[00:55:33]  The purpose of the meeting was to receive information and to exchange experiences concerning communists and pro-communists in order to adapt methods that could be applied throughout the continent.
[00:55:43]  It was important because one of the main resolutions sought to establish a system to exchange confidential information among member nations.
[00:55:51]  Now, people who know your sort of like Cold War Latin American history are starting to perk up right now, because if you studied, like this stuff, that list sounds really familiar, and it should be.
[00:56:00]  Uh, there's a couple of allies thrown into the list, but that is the.
[00:56:04]  Those are the countries that are involved in operation Condor, and that meeting of of the World Anti-communist League's Latin American affiliate, the CAL was uh, one of the first steps towards setting up the Condor System.
[00:56:16]  Uh, the next year there there's a like a I guess you call it a more official meeting, but there's a meeting of intelligence services, um from Argentina Bolivia Brazil Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay to sort of expand cooperation further and you know, this turns into Condor.
[00:56:30]  So, all right, what?
[00:56:31]  What is operation Condor?
[00:56:33]  Um, the last two quotes that I sort of pulled are from this book called the called Predatory States, Operation Condor and covert war in Latin America.
[00:56:40]  It's a very good book.
[00:56:40]  I recommend people read it.
[00:56:42]  Um, it was.
[00:56:42]  It was written by a LONG Island University political science professor named Jaypratise Mcsherry, And I'm going to use the intro that she uses to this, which is describing what happened to a guy named Martin Almada, who's the guy who writes the foreword to the book, just to give you a sense of what this stuff actually looks like.

=== Torture Victims in Latin America (02:08) ===

[00:57:02]  In 1974, Martin Almada was dragged out of his house in Paraguay in the middle of the night by our friend Alfredo Strossner, after which he was tortured for 30 days for quote, intellectual terrorism.
[00:57:15]  Intellectual terrorism.
[00:57:16]  Well, so they bring him in and they're trying to figure out what he did, right?
[00:57:19]  And the only thing this guy did was he was like a leader in a teacher's union and he was like using the teaching methods of Pablo Fieri.
[00:57:28]  And so for this, they torture him.
[00:57:31]  They force his wife to listen to his screams over the phone for 10 days.
[00:57:34]  And then they told her that he'd been killed, at which point his wife dies from a heart attack.
[00:57:40]  Oh.
[00:57:41]  And yeah.
[00:57:42]  I don't like that.
[00:57:43]  No.
[00:57:43]  I don't like that story.
[00:57:44]  Yeah.
[00:57:45]  I don't like that story at all.
[00:57:47]  And the other thing that's interesting about...
[00:57:48]  Okay, so in some sense, right, like this is just, this is a thing that military dictatorships do.
[00:57:53]  But those wacky military dictatorships.
[00:57:57]  Okay.
[00:57:57]  Yeah.
[00:57:58]  Yeah.
[00:57:58]  But, but, you know, like, normally when you get kidnapped by a dictatorship, right?
[00:58:02]  There's a bunch of soldiers and like spooks from your country.
[00:58:05]  Right.
[00:58:06]  When this guy's not.
[00:58:06]  It's always been my experience when I've been kidnapped by a military dictatorship.
[00:58:10]  So it's, it's one, it's one, you know, it's dictatorship in one country.
[00:58:13]  But but when this guy gets kidnapped, there's military attaches from Argentina, from Brazil, from Bolivia, from Chile, and from Uruguay.
[00:58:20]  And eventually Almada gets released from prison after like this giant hunger strike and there's huge Amnesty International campaign and he starts trying to figure out what the fuck happened to him.
[00:58:29]  And it turns out that Martin Amada and his wife have become very early victims of Operation Condor.
[00:58:36]  Oh, they're ground trailblazers.
[00:58:39]  Yeah.
[00:58:39]  And do you know who else were victims of Operation Condor?
[00:58:43]  No one.
[00:58:44]  The products and services that support this podcast?
[00:58:46]  Exactly zero of those.
[00:58:48]  They almost certainly alluded.
[00:58:49]  That's who supports our podcast.
[00:58:51]  Man, if only the Ustashi had been the target of Operation Condor, we would all live in a better world.
[00:58:58]  No, no, but instead, they're big into the podcast game.
[00:59:02]  And, you know, there are major backers of the island where we'll let you hunt children for sport and for food.

=== Martin Almada's Tragic Fate (04:26) ===

[00:59:10]  Yeah.
[00:59:10]  And for food.
[00:59:11]  It's unethical just to hunt kids for trophies.
[00:59:14]  You know?
[00:59:15]  Gotta cook them.
[00:59:18]  Brisket.
[00:59:19]  Oh, God.
[00:59:22]  Sophie, that's what the ad, that's the ad.
[00:59:24]  I'm just reading the ad as it was sent to us by the and the Ustashi people, okay?
[00:59:29]  It's the promo code with how many M's.
[00:59:35]  Good.
[00:59:35]  That's at least nine M's.
[00:59:37]  Yeah.
[00:59:40]  Okay.
[00:59:41]  Here's the ads.
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[01:00:51]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[01:00:56]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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[01:01:19]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:01:22]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
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[01:01:39]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:01:46]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[01:01:52]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:01:59]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[01:02:05]  From power to parenthood.
[01:02:07]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[01:02:11]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[01:02:13]  From addiction to acceleration.
[01:02:15]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[01:02:20]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[01:02:26]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[01:02:29]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[01:02:35]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[01:02:37]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[01:02:40]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[01:02:48]  What's up, everyone?
[01:02:49]  I'm Eco Mode.
[01:02:50]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[01:03:01]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:03:04]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[01:03:09]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[01:03:12]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
[01:03:16]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[01:03:21]  Yeah.
[01:03:21]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[01:03:24]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[01:03:26]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:03:34]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.

=== How Operation Condor Worked (14:27) ===

[01:03:37]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:03:44]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:03:46]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:03:47]  There's a lot of luck.
[01:03:48]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:03:58]  Oh, boy.
[01:04:01]  We're back.
[01:04:06]  No segue.
[01:04:07]  I'm immediately just going to read a description of how condor is.
[01:04:10]  Don't ever do that voice again.
[01:04:11]  That was uncomfortable.
[01:04:12]  Please continue.
[01:04:13]  No.
[01:04:14]  So.
[01:04:14]  So.
[01:04:15]  Sophie.
[01:04:15]  No.
[01:04:16]  Sophie.
[01:04:16]  Sophie.
[01:04:17]  Hey today.
[01:04:17]  Hi.
[01:04:18]  Hi.
[01:04:18]  Hello.
[01:04:19]  What's up?
[01:04:19]  How are you?
[01:04:20]  Good.
[01:04:21]  How's it going?
[01:04:21]  Great.
[01:04:22]  Chris.
[01:04:22]  Take over.
[01:04:23]  Please.
[01:04:24]  The Condor system consisted of three levels.
[01:04:27]  The first was mutual cooperation among military intelligence services to coordinate political surveillance of targeted dissidents and exchange intelligence information.
[01:04:35]  The second was covert action, a form of offensive unconventional warfare in which the role of the predator remains concealed.
[01:04:41]  Multinational Condor squadrons carried out covert cross-border operations to detain disappear exiles and transfer them to their countries of origin where most disappeared permanently.
[01:04:52]  Third and most secret level was Condor's assassination capability known as Phase 3.
[01:04:57]  Under Phase 3, special teams of assassins from member countries were formed to travel worldwide to eliminate subversive enemies.
[01:05:04]  Phase 3 was aimed at political leaders especially feared for their potential to mobilize world opinion or organize broad opposition to the military states.
[01:05:13]  So what Condor is, right, is a bunch of countries, it's Chile, Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and later Peru, working together to form just like multinational death squads and using them to like.
[01:05:24]  They have these death squads and kidnapping teams and they use them to target like internal enemies and subversives who, it turns out, is just literally anyone doesn't support the government.
[01:05:32]  Um, i'm gonna read a quote from an operative of DINO, which is Pinochet's uh National Intelligence Directorate, which is like they're like the secret police, but also the CIA.
[01:05:43]  Oh good, they're, they're great, and by great I mean they sound like cool guys.
[01:05:49]  Yeah, one Deemna operative explained Dina's strategy as follows, first the aim was to stop terrorism, then possible extremists were targeted, and later those who might be converted into extremists.
[01:06:01]  Similar to language is used in 1977 by Argentine general Ibirco Saint Jean, when he said, first we kill all the subversives, then we kill all their collaborators, then their sympathizers, then all those who remain indifferent.
[01:06:15]  Ah um, maybe take notes on that.
[01:06:19]  People who remain indifferent yeah, they're gonna kill you too like, unless you are an active supporter of the regime and also, you never piss anyone off ever, somehow miraculously.
[01:06:29]  Uh, they're gonna kill you too.
[01:06:30]  It's great.
[01:06:32]  And and so this.
[01:06:33]  This works on two levels.
[01:06:34]  Um, on the one side, there's like, there's these internal purges, right which, which are aided by intelligence from other Condor countries.
[01:06:39]  So, for example, in our in 1976, the Argentinian army like, stages a coup and takes control of the country and they start what's known as the dirty war, in which the government disappears 30 000 people, who become known as disaparacidos.
[01:06:51]  Uh, one of the uh fun tactics of the Argentinian army and their death squads was to keep pregnant women alive just long enough to force them to have their babies and then kill them and steal the babies which okay, that doesn't sound like good behavior.
[01:07:05]  Sure yeah, and and I you know okay, all of these guys are Right-wing Catholics, and i'm not even going to bother spelling out the comparison to force bursters in the U.s I.
[01:07:13]  I will leave that metaphor as an exercise for the listener.
[01:07:16]  And these killings were done like part, partly they're done directly by the state and partly they're done by state supportive death squads.
[01:07:23]  In Argentina, that death squad is called uh, the Argentine Anti-communist Alliance, or Triple A. Uh, here's Mcshery.
[01:07:30]  Oh that, it is it the same Triple A that helps me when I need my car test?
[01:07:34]  Yes, you know I I I.
[01:07:35]  I genuinely can't tell I I, I.
[01:07:36]  I think I think the quote i'm about to read they're they're making a triple a joke, but i'm not entirely sure i'm gonna say yes, just based on the long lines that you have to stand in that place, I I buy it in in.
[01:07:48]  In november 1973, the triple A detonated a bomb in the car of senator Kipolato.
[01:07:53]  Kipolato, Urigorian, that's a gnarly name, of the Union Cívica Radical, which is hilariously a moderate party.
[01:08:04]  The first claimed terror, its first claimed terrorist attack, the senator was severely wounded.
[01:08:08]  He was the victim of another bomb in 1975 and was tortured and interrogated by army officers in that year.
[01:08:15]  They told him, quote, he wants to know about the AAA?
[01:08:18]  Well, we're the AAA.
[01:08:19]  We put the bomb in your car.
[01:08:21]  Oh, well, that's nice of them to say so.
[01:08:24]  Yeah.
[01:08:25]  It's also worth noting.
[01:08:26]  So the AAA, they get kind of absorbed into the Argentinian military, but they kind of still operate under the it's, I don't know.
[01:08:36]  After the military coup in 76, they're more inside the state than they are outside of it.
[01:08:40]  But they also host the 1980 meeting of the CIL in Buenos Aires after they were sort of semi-absorbed.
[01:08:45]  They're also heavily involved in the World Anti-Communist League.
[01:08:47]  And we're going to come back to that 1980 meeting because it also was very important.
[01:08:51]  But that'll be for the next episode.
[01:08:53]  For now, we should talk about how Condor actually worked a bit more.
[01:08:58]  McSherry describes it as a parastatal organization in that it's technically inside or tied to the state, but it operates completely in secret.
[01:09:07]  And it has a unified command structure that involves operatives from intelligence services, from the military.
[01:09:13]  There's cops, there's right-wing civilians and paramilitaries.
[01:09:17]  But again, the secrecy of this means that even other parts of the military don't know that they exist.
[01:09:23]  As we've seen with AAA, Condor makes use of paramilitary, sometimes folding them directly in the chain of command.
[01:09:28]  Sometimes they just basically do contract killings out to other fascist paramilitaries.
[01:09:35]  And their whole command structure remains entirely unregistered.
[01:09:38]  It is by its very nature outside of the sort of bounds of the state bureaucracy.
[01:09:42]  Everything is unbarked, untagged, secret, or black ops.
[01:09:46]  Its officers are commissioned literally as special agents.
[01:09:49]  It operates as a sort of like a secret parallel state alongside the official state.
[01:09:53]  And I want to pause here for a second to think about the extent to which American and British pop culture is entirely centered around valorizing this stuff.
[01:10:02]  Like pop culture is completely obsessed with secret agents.
[01:10:04]  There's 25 Bond movies.
[01:10:07]  There are five different Call of Duty Black Ops games, right?
[01:10:10]  Like the last Black Ops game is literally you working for Ronald Reagan to do stuff for the CIA.
[01:10:17]  And, but it's like, okay, if you think about what this stuff is, right?
[01:10:19]  All of this Black Ops stuff, it's this, you know, you look at the sort of purest expression of it in Latin America.
[01:10:26]  It's just that it's literally just this tyrannical parallel state whose job it is to kill subversives.
[01:10:31]  And it's the Death Squad machine.
[01:10:33]  And it's like, this is our entire pop culture is about making everyone think the Death Squad machine is cool.
[01:10:39]  Well, but the Death Squad machine is drunk all the time.
[01:10:42]  And that's pretty neat.
[01:10:44]  Yeah, but here's the thing.
[01:10:47]  I went to university and I therefore know that you can be drunk all the time without being a death squad.
[01:10:56]  We had very different college experiences.
[01:10:59]  That's a story for another day.
[01:11:01]  Am I right?
[01:11:03]  I mean, admittedly, we are on our like third college paramilitary in this episode.
[01:11:07]  That's right.
[01:11:08]  That's right.
[01:11:09]  Just like how.
[01:11:12]  Don't do it.
[01:11:13]  John, Sportsman.
[01:11:16]  You were doing so well.
[01:11:17]  We were so proud of you.
[01:11:19]  Yeah, it was like four for four.
[01:11:21]  Touchback.
[01:11:22]  First down?
[01:11:23]  No.
[01:11:24]  Three-pointer.
[01:11:25]  Oh, no.
[01:11:26]  Nailed it.
[01:11:26]  Nailed it.
[01:11:27]  Uh-huh.
[01:11:29]  So, all right, we now have a picture.
[01:11:31]  We have an incredibly lackluster picture of the nature of basketball.
[01:11:35]  We have a better picture of the internal structure of Condor.
[01:11:38]  But the thing is, Condor is a multinational operation, and a huge part of it is doing what the modern CIA would call extraordinary renditions.
[01:11:45]  And this means that they're just like kidnapping dissidents who'd, for example, fled from Chile to Paraguay.
[01:11:49]  And then you bring them back to Chile, that you torture and execute them.
[01:11:52]  And as this program, you know, goes on, they start, they start assassinating people like all over the world.
[01:11:57]  And these people, you know, they're not just getting murdered, right?
[01:11:59]  They're getting horribly tortured.
[01:12:01]  The bodies that people find are like heavily mutilated.
[01:12:03]  They're stabbed wounds.
[01:12:04]  They're heavily burned.
[01:12:06]  The Argentinian classic is just dropping people both dead and alive out of helicopters.
[01:12:11]  Well, at least they're not discriminating between dead or alive.
[01:12:14]  That's true.
[01:12:15]  Everybody gets dropped out of a helicopter.
[01:12:18]  That's the quality.
[01:12:19]  Yeah.
[01:12:21]  And, you know, and the other thing is they're not just killing like completely random, like nobody or like, you know, incredibly minor activists.
[01:12:28]  They're killing people who are like very high profile and very famous.
[01:12:32]  Like in 1976, they killed the former president of Bolivia, Juan Jose Torres in Buenos Aires.
[01:12:38]  And, you know, one of the favorite tactics that they use for sort of getting away with this stuff is that they'll kill a bunch of people and then blame it on the left murdering each other.
[01:12:45]  But like, that's not actually enough to cover up we killed the president of Bolivia.
[01:12:51]  Well, we killed the president of Italy too, but nobody has a problem with that.
[01:12:54]  We're going to, oh, we will, we will get to that.
[01:12:56]  Actually, we, I, I, I will mention it and then pointedly not explain it next episode.
[01:13:01]  That's good.
[01:13:03]  That's good.
[01:13:04]  To be fair, the assassination of the fucking prime minister of Italy, just listen to Alex Jones' show the next time Steve Pieczenik is back on because he's the one who did it.
[01:13:13]  You can hear from an actual InfoWars contributor, the guy who killed the prime minister.
[01:13:20]  To be fair, all right, there are a lot of people who were involved in killing the prime minister.
[01:13:23]  We cannot give Steve Pieczenik the whole credit for KGB was involved.
[01:13:28]  It's not just magic and Biggie, Tom, Cruz, someone, who was, who was else on the team, Sophie?
[01:13:36]  Are you trying to make a Magic Johnson Larry Bird reference right now?
[01:13:40]  That's the one, Larry Bird, Lawrence Bird.
[01:13:42]  To be fair, I'm okay with you fucking up his name.
[01:13:45]  Magic Johnson and Larry Flint.
[01:13:48]  Two heroes.
[01:13:50]  Very okay with you fucking up his name.
[01:13:52]  Go for it.
[01:13:53]  Whatever you want.
[01:13:54]  Good.
[01:13:54]  All right.
[01:13:56]  Back to the game.
[01:13:57]  So, okay, you know, it is incredible.
[01:13:59]  Like, it is so obvious that like people, that like there's something going on here that's assassinating people that like even journalists are just starting to write articles that are like, yeah, there's probably something going on here.
[01:14:10]  And so, Robert, you might be asking yourself, what is the United States, the champion of democracy and human rights and the leader of the free world doing about a bunch of death squads murdering anyone who doesn't actively support a military dictatorship?
[01:14:23]  And the answer is, sometimes they write a few strongly worded letters.
[01:14:28]  They do this like twice.
[01:14:29]  They write a few strongly worded letters.
[01:14:32]  Mostly they do nothing.
[01:14:33]  And then the other part of the time, they're actively helping them do it.
[01:14:37]  So to get a sense of like the level of impunity that Condor had from the U.S. government, the political counselor of the U.S. Embassy in Ecuador, and sorry, in Uruguay, you know, did the right thing for once.
[01:14:47]  And he he and a so basically they figure out that a Brazilian labor leader is about to be like kidnapped and assassinated by these guys.
[01:14:55]  And he helps this guy escape.
[01:14:58]  And in retaliation, a bunch of dudes in ski masks grabbed him off the street and broke every vertebrae in his neck and back.
[01:15:04]  And again, this guy works for the U.S. embassy and they broke every single vertebrae in his neck and upper back.
[01:15:11]  And the U.S. does nothing.
[01:15:15]  Yeah, what would you expect us to do?
[01:15:18]  You know, okay, so like every once in a while, you'll do one of the things that happens with the ran control, right?
[01:15:23]  Is that they like kind of, they accidentally get a DEA agent killed.
[01:15:27]  And after that, the U.S. just goes like absolute ape shit.
[01:15:29]  Like, it's just like, okay, but this guy is an embassy guy.
[01:15:33]  You'd think that like if you kill, if you like, like almost kill a guy from your embassy, like something would happen, but like, no, no, it doesn't happen at all.
[01:15:40]  Absolutely not.
[01:15:41]  Yeah.
[01:15:41]  And speaking of the government doing nothing, in 1976, agents of the Chilean National Intelligence Directorate working with right-wing Cuban exiles from the CIL car bomb a man named Orlando Lettier in Washington, D.C. Letier had been the socialist foreign minister under ANDA, and he's just like implacable foe of Pinochet.
[01:16:01]  And the Chileans are like, yeah, we'll just kill him.
[01:16:03]  And so they do it, right?
[01:16:04]  They just kill him literally in Washington, D.C. with a car bomb.
[01:16:09]  And the guy who does it is an American Dina operative named Michael Townley.
[01:16:14]  And he serves five years in prison and then gets FBI witness protection.
[01:16:19]  So there are an enormous number of people in this country who have served more time in prison for literally having weed than this guy is serving for doing a car bomb assassination in Washington, D.C.
[01:16:30]  Yeah, that seems.
[01:16:32]  Yeah, it's great.
[01:16:33]  And this is like during the Carter administration, too, and nothing happens.
[01:16:37]  Just nothing.
[01:16:38]  I think it's really the Carter.
[01:16:39]  I'm pretty sure.
[01:16:40]  Yeah, 76.
[01:16:41]  Yeah.
[01:16:41]  And the reason they don't do anything is twofold.
[01:16:44]  One is that the CIA is systematically lying under oath to Congress about whether it, like what it knew about Condor.
[01:16:50]  And the other reason is that the U.S. is actively helping them.
[01:16:54]  There's two channels of this.
[01:16:54]  One is that there's good evidence that the CIA actively helped the Chilean government kidnap and murder multiple American citizens.
[01:17:01]  But it's actually much worse than that because so Condor as a sort of network is running off of this encrypted American telecommunication network and equipment that is based in the Panama Canal zone.
[01:17:12]  Now, Robert, I'm going to ask you, what was the U.S. government running in the Panama Canal Zone in the 1970s?
[01:17:21]  They were just helping boats.
[01:17:22]  You know, they love boats.
[01:17:24]  We're big boat people, America, and we like to keep them moving.
[01:17:28]  What was the other thing we were running there?
[01:17:32]  Just boats.
[01:17:34]  Yeah, just boats.
[01:17:37]  There was a guy named Manuel Noriega who was famous because he was good at boats.
[01:17:41]  Yeah.
[01:17:43]  Cocaine.
[01:17:44]  Just boats.
[01:17:45]  We also have a very famous boating school there called the School of the America.
[01:17:48]  It trains a great past.
[01:17:49]  We have to learn how to boat.
[01:17:50]  If you want to learn how to be on a boat, because it's the school of how to take your boat across the Americas.
[01:17:56]  That's why they call it the School of the Americas.
[01:17:58]  All of the Americas is for boats.
[01:18:02]  Yeah.

=== School of the Americas Secrets (03:19) ===

[01:18:04]  So, yeah, that's right, baby.
[01:18:06]  It's School of the Americas.
[01:18:07]  We're doing the School of the Americas again.
[01:18:09]  And it turns out that I'm just going to read this from Predatory States.
[01:18:13]  As one military graduate of the School of Americas put it, the school was always a friend for other special operations, covert operations.
[01:18:20]  So they're using the School of the Americas as cover to run a covert assassination network that's going to kill like an incredible number of people, including multiple U.S. citizens, some of whom were killed on American soil.
[01:18:33]  It's great.
[01:18:35]  Yeah, that's like, I don't know what that's like.
[01:18:39]  Something basketball.
[01:18:42]  You know, and that's where that's just where all of that.
[01:18:45]  Thumbs down from Sophie on that one.
[01:18:47]  On that terrible basketball metaphor.
[01:18:49]  That's where we're going to leave it today with the World Anti-Communist League having helped spawn and carry out Operation Condor alongside their friends, the CIA.
[01:18:58]  Well, if your friend is the CIA, you can find the rest of our shows on the internet.
[01:19:07]  Aquazone Media.
[01:19:09]  You know what?
[01:19:09]  Actually, here's a little, we should do a little bit of house cleaning here because folks have been yelling about this on a couple of different things.
[01:19:14]  Go for it.
[01:19:16]  So people are always like, hey, there's some weird edit thing or there's some clip or something is wrong here.
[01:19:23]  And I have to tell you all right now, none of that has to do with us.
[01:19:26]  It has to do with like whatever fucking weird ass app you're using.
[01:19:28]  And usually it's Spotify.
[01:19:31]  It's usually Spotify or it's fucking Podcast Republic or like Pod Fucker or whatever goddamn bespoke ass pod app you motherfuckers use.
[01:19:41]  Just fucking use an RSS feed.
[01:19:42]  Anyway, whatever.
[01:19:43]  People are weird.
[01:19:44]  I don't know what to tell them.
[01:19:46]  But there's really nothing, nothing particularly that we can do.
[01:19:51]  I can give you a here's how podcasts work.
[01:19:53]  Can I give some advice?
[01:19:54]  Yes.
[01:19:55]  If you notice that your thing is being funky on Spotify, delete it, refresh your feed, re-download it.
[01:20:02]  If the episode sounds fucked up, instead of hopping online and assuming that it's us, hop onto your phone, delete it, re-download it, and it'll probably be fine.
[01:20:13]  Because here's the thing: this show gets downloaded like 10 million times a month on like a thousand different goddamn apps.
[01:20:19]  And like that just introduces a lot of different ways for things to get all fucky in weird ways.
[01:20:25]  And we, we, we do our best with quality control, but we have no control over like podcast, cum guzzler, or whatever app you like to use.
[01:20:35]  Um, so you know, try re-downloading the show before you yell at Sophie on the internet about how the pod podomy app that was sodomy and pod that I mixed together.
[01:20:49]  I liked it.
[01:20:49]  Uh, is it isn't working right, okay?
[01:20:51]  It's it's fine.
[01:20:56]  I do love it when people are like, Hey, do you know why your podcasts are fucked up?
[01:21:00]  And then they'll just like name some app I've never heard of.
[01:21:02]  And it's like, I don't know, maybe it's because you're using some weird goddamn app I've never heard of to download a fucking podcast.
[01:21:09]  What do you want from us?
[01:21:11]  We can't, we can't, we don't even know how many apps are out there people are using to download our fucking shows.
[01:21:17]  And everyone is like, My audio is skipping.
[01:21:19]  Yeah, that's Spotify.

=== Why Your Podcast Sounds Fucked Up (03:06) ===

[01:21:24]  You can't see it, but I'm smiling on the outside while dying on the inside like a winner.
[01:21:29]  Speaking of winners, Chris, where can people follow you?
[01:21:33]  You can find me at it mechr3 on Twitter.
[01:21:39]  Yeah, that's it.
[01:21:40]  Don't look for me anywhere else.
[01:21:41]  You won't find me.
[01:21:42]  Yeah.
[01:21:43]  And look for me behind you whenever you feel afraid, because that's where I'll be stealing your wallet.
[01:21:51]  I'm ending it on that.
[01:21:57]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:22:00]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:22:11]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:22:19]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:22:21]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:22:23]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:22:25]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[01:22:30]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:22:31]  Trust me, babe.
[01:22:32]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:22:42]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[01:22:49]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[01:22:53]  I doctored the test once.
[01:22:54]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:22:59]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:23:02]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
[01:23:04]  My mind was blown.
[01:23:05]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[01:23:07]  This is Love Trapped.
[01:23:08]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:23:10]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:23:14]  Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:23:22]  10-10 shots five, city hall building.
[01:23:25]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[01:23:26]  Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey, whatever.
[01:23:28]  A shocking public murder.
[01:23:30]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[01:23:36]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[01:23:38]  Those are shots.
[01:23:40]  A tragedy that's now forgotten and a mystery that may or may not have been political that may have been about sex.
[01:23:46]  Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:23:56]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[01:24:01]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:24:04]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[01:24:11]  An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
[01:24:15]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[01:24:18]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[01:24:27]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:24:29]  Guaranteed human.