1) I can totally believe it could happen

2) Every intelligence agency is trained to put out disinformation, to their own publics no less, and what’s worse they actually foment the revolutions and destabilize countries which leads to these very wars that create so much havoc

UK spy agencies are behind the astrotufed revolution in Iran, for instance, which took out their democratically elected government. CIA helped arm and train Mujahideen and has been involved in every war since Laos … whether it is Laos or Nicaragua, or Panama or Israel or Cuba, the CIA or KGB was on the case, fomenting revolutions and training insurgents. NPR did a great piece on this:

https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/01/30/512449534/...

CIA has been arming and training far-right extremists in Ukraine for years before Russia’s invasion… because of the proxy war in Donbas, but also because of the larger geopolitical goal of flipping all Russia’s neighbors against them:

https://news.yahoo.com/cia-trained-ukrainian-paramilitaries-...

Russia’s spy agencies have probably helped astroturf the recent protests that caused pro-Western governments in Moldova and Slovakia to resign, which few people in the West are talking about for some reason.

And China is next (QUAD). China’s own intelligence agencies pressure Chinese all over the world, threatening their families back home:

https://www.voanews.com/amp/east-asia-pacific_china-tries-mu...

This is a big reason why I am a libertarian. Not so much taxes, more like actual violence and destabilization of order. Thess agencies are unaccountable and the politicians fail to prevent chaos by doing all their deals behind closed doors. They are supposed to work for the people but all they do is fail to make deals and then gaslight their own public about their own failures when wars or pandemics break out.

Most regular people don’t want to kill each other over a flag. I think that, in the future, we will abolish this idea of killing in the name of nation states just as we have largely as a species moved past the Crusades and religious wars.

As programmers you can recognize when a system is broken. I suggest a simple fix … our governments want to know what we do when we transfer our $600? Sure. I want to know what goes on behind closed doors when they make deals. Put it all on CSPAN. Biden-Putin on CSPAN. Bennett-Putin-Zelensky on video. Normandy format meetings on video since 2015. Ukraine-Russia negotiators publicly on video. Why’d they disband after only 3 hours? Imagine if the NATO-Gorbachev talks were public? We would all know what was said. Imagine if Russia publicly applied to NATO in 2001 and was denied and we all knew what they’d have to fix to enter? None of these wars would happen.

Most of these wars happen due to lack of transparency and these spy + “intelligence” agencies thrive on the secrecy!

And also this environment enables “unspoken” bullcrap rules like “NATO is really a military alliance against Russia and is working to flip all its allies”, and “QUAD is really a military alliance against China and is working to flip all its allies” and “BRICS is an economic alliance against USA and is working to flip all its allies”. This just destabilizes the world and smaller countries pay the price, but they get to do these multi-decade plans because we the people allow them to.

And as a stretch goal I’d like to PUBLICLY audit the Pentagon’s $35Trillion black hole of a budget. All Americans should support that, if only from a fiscal responsibility point of view.