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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29998 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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including the U.S., have used false flag tactics to achieve or advance domestic policy goals?

When?

Depends on how recent and how reliable you want the examples to be.

The one that tends to stick in my mind is when they used a dubiously sourced Dossier to justify investigating a Presidential Candidate during his campaign and extensively during his term as President, even as it's veracity was genuinely questionable.

Even more recently, there's the speculation that the U.S. blew up that oil pipeline, despite ya know, not being in a declared war

Then there's the Gulf of Tonkin Incident going back further, which justified invasion of Vietnam.

Gulf of Tonkin Incident

speculation that the U.S. blew up that oil pipeline, despite ya know, not being in a declared war

domestic policy goals

I never realised that Vietnam and Ukraine were inside the United State, huh.

The one that tends to stick in my mind is when they used a dubiously sourced Dossier to justify investigating a Presidential Candidate during his campaign and extensively during his term as President, even as it's veracity was genuinely questionable.

How does this count as a false flag, even if you think the dossier was rubbish?

The falsification of an incident or, more broadly, treating false information about an incident as true, for purposes of claiming a threat exists and thus a policy response is required?

Seems to fit the definition.

"We have proof that Trump is likely a Russian Asset trying to harm the U.S." is pretty isomorphic to "We have proof that North Vietnam torpedoed a U.S. Navy vessel."

When the 'proof' is in fact conjured up by the same people trying to justify the action they are attempting to take.

A false flag operation is an act committed with the intent of disguising the actual source of responsibility and pinning blame on another party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag

Unless you're arguing that a 'false flag' only entails literally engaging in an attack against your own country whilst flying a different country's flag.

I never realized that Vietnam and Ukraine were inside the United State, huh.

Before I actually respond to this, are you agreeing that these are examples of 'false flag' tactics or no?

Instead of "false flag", I propose "fabricated or greatly exaggerated incidents or allegations". The US has used fabricated or greatly exaggerated incidents or allegations to justify not just the Vietnam War, but also the Iraq War and, perhaps more controversially, the Spanish–American War and US entry into World War I.

But these are all foreign policy matters. The objection, which I share, was to the claim that such tactics have been used "to achieve or advance domestic policy goals".

False flag is catchier, recognizable, and gets the point across. "Fabricated or greatly exaggerated incidents or allegations" is too verbose, unclear, and vague to serve the same purpose.

The falsification of an incident or, more broadly, treating false information about an incident as true, for purposes of claiming a threat exists and thus a policy response is required?

Not quite, and this is why Gulf of Tonkin isn't really false flag in my view. A classic false flag incident would be something like the Mukden incident, where the Japanese blew up a railway themselves and then blamed it on the Chinese. Gulf of Tonkin is different because if it was anything it was the zhuzhing up/misunderstanding of a real incident, and citing it as cause for a war that they wanted anyway. They didn't actually do anything themselves with a view to blaming it on someone else, which is surely required to call something a false flag.

The Ukraine pipeline perhaps gets a bit closer if certain things which may not be the case are. If the Americans did do it, and hoped it would be blamed on Russia, then ok we are closer to false flag, but if they did it and it was because they thought there was a strategic advantage to be had in stopping the flow of gas then not really.

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