Bloody flags
true or false?
The manufactured border incident; the messy explosion; the murder mystery … false flags are as old as warfare. Our own era of perpetual war by drone and cyberattack is making good use of them.
It’s not difficult to know the reason. It has been said that today’s politics comprise about ninety percent emotion and ten percent fact ... and that, too, is something of a false flag, for who is really able to calculate the percentages? Be that as it may, it is the fact of emotion, and not the emotional fact, that matters.
Case in point is a couple of bombings, reputedly, by Israel. The first, of a consulate in Damascus, violating a most basic tenet of civilised state behaviour, raised barely a peep in the civilised world; elsewhere, people are screaming bloody murder.
Another asymmetrical response may be seen regarding Palestine. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed or maimed there by Israeli arms since October. But it is only when a handful of young handsome Western humanitarians lose their lives that the civilised world throws up its arms in outrage.
Blessed by being only semi-civilised, Russians are said to be masters of the false flag. They have planted so many that hardly anyone believes them when they assign blame for an outrage to this or that perpetrator, as recently happened with the bombing of a Moscow concert hall.
Israelis have a similar but not an identical problem. They are also rarely believed, but for a different reason. They have lied, less about actions per se than about the justification for them, and they have got away with doing so for the most part because their victims have so few real friends.
Not so regarding this unfortunate team of European and North American volunteers, murdered from the sky. The lesson won’t be lost on wavers of the bloody flag.