Wednesday 30 March 2022

false flag

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

The term "false flag" originated in the 16th century as a purely figurative expression to mean "a deliberate misrepresentation of someone's affiliation or motives".[1] It was later used to describe a ruse in naval warfare whereby a vessel flew the flag of a neutral or enemy country in order to hide its true identity. The tactic was originally used by pirates and privateers to deceive other ships into allowing them to move closer before attacking them. It later was deemed an acceptable practice during naval warfare according to international maritime laws, provided the attacking vessel displayed its true flag once an attack had begun.[2][3][4][5]
The term today extends to include countries that organize attacks on themselves and make the attacks appear to be by enemy nations or terrorists, thus giving the nation that was supposedly attacked a pretext for domestic repression and foreign military aggression.[6]
...
Russian invasion of Ukraine
In January and February 2022, Western government agencies predicted that Russia would use a false flag operation in Ukraine.[25] In the days leading up to the 24 February Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government intensified its disinformation campaign, with Russian state media promoting false flags on a nearly hourly basis purporting to show Ukrainian forces attacking Russia, in a bid to justify an invasion of Ukraine.[26][27] Many of the disinformation videos were poor and amateur in quality, with mismatching metadata showing incorrect dates,[27] and evidence from Bellingcat researchers, and other independent journalists, showed that the claimed attacks, explosions, and evacuations in Donbas were staged by Russia.[26][28][29][30][27]

False flag - Wikipedia

What is a false flag?
A false flag is a political or military action carried out with the intention of blaming an opponent for it.
Nations have often done this by staging a real or simulated attack on their own side and saying the enemy did it, as a pretext for going to war.
The term was first used in the 16th Century to describe how pirates flew the flag of a friendly nation to deceive merchant ships into allowing them to draw near.
False flag attacks have a long and ignoble history.
German invasion of Poland, 1939
The night before Germany invaded Poland, seven German SS soldiers pretending to be Polish stormed the Gleiwitz radio tower on the German side of the border with Poland. They broadcast a short message to say the station was now in Polish hands.
Gulf of Tonkin incident, 1964
On 2 August 1964, a sea battle occurred between a US destroyer and North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the Vietnamese coast...
However, President Lyndon B. Johnson and staff decided to believe the initial version of events and presented the incidents to Congress as two unprovoked attacks on US forces by North Vietnam.
It led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed President Johnson to start bombing raids on North Vietnam and greatly escalate US military involvement in the Vietnam War.
'Little green men' in Crimea, 2014
In the early days of Russia's annexation of Crimea, people started to appear on the streets who were dressed and armed exactly like Russian soldiers but without Russian insignia on their uniforms.
The Kremlin insisted they were members of local "self-defence groups" who wanted the territory to be returned from Ukrainian control to Russia...

False flags: What are they and when have they been used? - BBC News

U.S. officials say they are concerned Russia could be preparing to use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine after the Russian Defense Ministry accused Ukraine of possibly planning a false-flag chemical weapon attack.
An administration official said the U.S. is worried that the Russians are making the claim “to justify a false-flag operation or them using chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine themselves.”

U.S. warns Russia could use chemical weapons in false-flag operation in Ukraine

We now live in an age where, to some at least, nothing is as it seems, everything can be labelled a conspiracy and no amount of evidence to the contrary will change people’s minds. There have been several documented false flag operations throughout history, and the existence of them goes some way to explaining why thousands upon thousands of people all around the world believe many more covert operations have been carried out regardless of government claims to the contrary. One thing’s for sure – the false flag operation has come a long way since the days of pirate ships flying false colours to get their hands on lots of lovely booty.

The truth about 'False Flags' from Nazi Germany to the Vietnam War | Sky HISTORY TV Channel

Russia has a long and storied history of using false flag operations, many of which were revealed when KGB records reached the public after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1939, the Soviet Army shelled one of their own villages near the Finnish border, which they then used as a pretext for invasion just four days later. In 1968, Russia used false flag attacks to justify its military intervention in Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact nation began pushing for social democratic reforms.
In more modern history, Russian President Vladimir Putin himself is widely believed to have taken power through his creative use of false flag operations. In 1999, apartment buildings in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk were bombed, killing hundreds of Russian civilians. The bombings were immediately blamed on Islamist Chechen rebels and used as justification for what became the second Chechen war, but perhaps more importantly, served as the impetus for Putin’s sudden rise to power over then-president Boris Yeltsin.
How do we know this bombing was likely a false flag operation? Shortly after the bombings, another undetonated bomb was found in the basement of a building in the Russian city of Ryazan. Investigators were able to track the bomb not to Chechen rebels, but rather to Russia’s own FSB—the direct successor to Russia’s infamous KGB. The FSB went on to declare the bomb a fake that they planted simply as a training exercise.
Putin, it’s worth noting, served in the KGB for 16 years, until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

How false flag operations work and Russia's history of using them - Sandboxx

I decided to re-read David Satter’s August 2016 cover story in the magazine, “The Bloody Czar.”
Satter, an American journalist with extensive experience in Russia and the former Soviet Union, detailed the rise of Vladimir Putin from obscurity to the pinnacle of power in Moscow — and how it all could have been catalyzed by a murderous false-flag operation.
“I believe,” Satter wrote, “that Vladimir Putin came to power as the result of an act of terror committed against his own people.”
2The evidence is overwhelming that the apartment-house bombings in 1999 in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk, which provided a pretext for the second Chechen war and catapulted Putin into the presidency, were carried out by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Yet, to this day, an indifferent world has made little attempt to grasp the significance of what was the greatest political provocation since the burning of the Reichstag."
“I have been trying,” Satter continued, “to call attention to the facts behind the bombings since 1999. I consider this a moral obligation, because ignoring the fact that a man in charge of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal came to power through an act of terror is highly dangerous in itself.”
The apartment bombings — which were quickly blamed on Islamist Chechen rebels — killed hundreds of Russian civilians. Putin, newly named as the political successor to then-president Boris Yeltsin, vowed revenge and was shot into power. He then proceeded to prosecute the war in the breakaway province of Chechnya and crushed the rebels. Combined with a general economic boom, Putin become the undisputed and, for a time, extremely popular, ruler of Russia.

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