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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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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.