re: #146 steve_davis

the CIA had to be reformed so as to stop them from killing leaders, not because they were bad at it, but because they kept killing democratically elected folks in order to install various autocratic puppets. If we actually assassinated Putin so that a democracy could flourish, it would, I’m pretty sure, be a first. There was no law against killing Hitler on the international conventions of war, I don’t think. I mean, several movies have played off that.

Yes, if the July 20th Valkyrie plot had succeeded against Hitler, the people who succeeded him would not necessarily have been democrats. I could well imagine that modern Germany might look more like Franco’s Spain or Pinochet’s Chile than the progressive, open-minded democracy that it is today.