They've been pulling shady stuff for ages. Ever heard of the false flag attacks in relation to Cuba? The bay of pigs false flag bombings, and the proposed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods ? Terrible stuff.
What percent of Americans do you think know about these things? If you set the over/under at 5%, I'd happily take the under. I'd probably be inclined to take the under at 2% as well. That's what's really changing. The government being horrific and abusive is nothing new, but having any remotely relevant chunk of people aware of it, is. And many of those events you mentioned remained completely classified for decades. Operation Northwoods was not made fully available until 2001, about 40 years after it happened.
Now everybody is getting to see this happen in real time. Fabricating evidence to invade Iraq, a completely dystopic domestic surveillance system revealed by a whistle blower, what happens when societies faces even the slightest threat (from a pandemic in this case), the complete collapse of media integrity, completely routine abuse of spying powers, politicization of every single body of the government, and much more. This is what makes now, so much different than the past. "We", as in way more than 5%, are all seeing this play out in real time - and it's shaping our worldviews.
I think it's over 5%, but not much more. There's also the issue of learning about the government abusing power can be intimidating. You learn they do lots of extrajudicial murder, do you speak out and be the next target? We need mass movement of people to call it out and resist for them to change, and I don't see that happening soon enough
.. not to mention the impressive apparatus that was applied to make people think that the Cuban missile crisis started with Soviet missiles showing up in Cuba ..
I'll just quote the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article on it:
"In 1961, the US government put Jupiter nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey. It had also trained a paramilitary force of Cuban exiles, which the CIA led in an attempt to invade Cuba and overthrow the Cuban government. Starting in November of that year, the US government engaged in a campaign of terrorism and sabotage in Cuba, referred to as the Cuban Project, which continued throughout the first half of the 1960s."
I'd recommend The Jakarta Method for some insight into the legitimacy of the concerns of regime change.
Could those missiles be (late) reactions to Soviet activities in the areas, such as keeping their most combat-ready forces just across the Ljubljana Gap and the very recent territorial claims for Eastern Anatolia?
Mate, Soviets outnumbered USA+UK in Europe by a factor of 2 as of late 1945 (see Operation Unthinkable) and it only got worse from there. In 1949 there were about 3.5 million Soviet soldiers spread across East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechia etc. The entire US army went below 1 million by 1947, with a very small fraction deployed in Europe.
The West was consistently on defensive/deterrence against the USSR throughout the Cold War, there's no point denying that.
The USSR ceded their claim to parts of Turkey some 8 years before the missiles were deployed there, yet it kept the 13 rifle, mountain and mechanized divisions in Armenia and Azerbaijan, under the so called Transcaucasian Military District. Similarly the so called Southern Group of Forces was stationed in Hungary just across the Ljubljana Gap from Italy.
It is a bulletproof fact that throughout the Cold War the USSR had an offensive stance in Europe, and conventional NATO forces there only stood some chance in defensive. Eventually the insane military production, sometimes amounting to 25% GDP, including ludicrous quantities of tanks, IFVs and SPGs to support the supposed rush to the English Channel, brought the colossus down.
