Psy-Ops & False Flags
(Question mark with fiery background)
I didn’t want to write this yesterday. In fact, I’d decided not to log onto Twitter/ X at all, foreseeing a war of slurs between uninformed obsessive non-combatants waving flags of places they’d never been to, repeating slogans – undeterred by their lack of cultural, historical, linguistic or (nuanced) political understanding. However, when I did venture on, it seems many had the same thought (I’m nothing if not unoriginal) so it wasn’t as crazy as anticipated.
Psychological operations, psy-ops for short, are accepted as a coherent category in that branch of psychology that deals with warfare. False flags, in this view, can be seen as a sub-category. Neither is controversial, as long as both are assumed to be:
historical
malevolent (when employed by an enemy)
benevolent (when employed by us/ an ally)
Operation Mincemeat (2021 Warner Bros, dir. John Madden, based upon the 2010 book by Ben Macintyre) is a famous 1943 psy-op that was not a false flag. It involved the corpse of a homeless Welsh civilian dressed as a soldier and set adrift off Huelva, just north of Cadiz, to persuade the Nazis that the Allies would land in Greece.
The origin of the phrase ‘false flag’ is nautical: the flag known as the ensign signals the nation where the ship is registered. Unless sailing under a flag of convenience, nowadays often Panama, for tax reasons, ships fly the flag of their country. In the UK, the ensign is the Union Jack in the upper left (sinister) quarter of a red flag. Of course naughty nautical Scottish nationalists may also hoist a cheeky wee Saltire or even the Lion Rampant.
Shockingly, unlike highwaymen, not all pirates are gentlemen. Instead of hoisting the Jolly Rodger in Hollywood-honoured fashion – before getting down to a good bit of swinging around on dangling ropes (of which on ships there are precisely none) waving cutlasses and forcing the tyrannical captain and his officer henchmen to walk the plank to the hearty cheers of the remarkably clean crew – ungentlemanly pirates will hoist a false flag, luring their target vessels closer by this deception.
The phrase evolved from stateless pirates pretending their ship is registered in the same country as their prey, to countries carrying out military operations under foreign guise – for psychological effect. This is where it gets tricky.
Obviously State A may have no problem, especially when a conflict is over, admitting that it won by dressing up a battalion as the enemy and having them flee the front line, demoralising the rest of their pretended countrymen of State B. That sounds clever, daring and rather fun. Crucially, no-one gets hurt.
However a false flag is, by definition, a military action by State A blamed on State B. Unfortunately, most military actions in times of war are not as peaceful as running away. Also, State B are hardly likely to openly use deadly force against their own citizens; so we now come to the problem with modern false flags:
A false flag, typically, describes a situation in which a State uses (or appears to use) deadly force against its own citizens, disguising its agents as the enemy.
With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher famously said:
Some things can never be revealed.
Famously is the word academics use when we can’t find the source. However that the Iron Lady had state secrets is, now, widely accepted. One of the accusations against the British State is that it killed Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, in order to justify its continued presence there. This was told to me in person, years ago, by someone who named his trusted source and had no reason to lie to me. (Please don’t accept this double hearsay statement of mine as proof of that accusation.)
Going back to the description of the typical false flag, above, it’s clear that, when thingsare eventually revealed, the State authorities will suffer less from a deception that physically or psychologically harms no-one (as some would say about the assassination of Charlie Kirk this year, meaning that it was staged) rather than one in which innocents (children being considered more so than women, with us men being basically expendable) are injured or killed. However, how would we know?
It’s accepted in the authorised version, and by all camps of conspiracy theorists, that the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001 involved a massive human toll of death, injury and life-threatening chaos and disruption to the economy, travel and services. So, unlike Operation Mincemeat, if it was a false flag, the State responsible (the USA) is never going to admit it.
Now let’s consider cases when that human toll is alleged to be only apparent. That’s the accusation made by some about the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. Ironically, if this was a false flag and the British State was responsible, it’s not going to want people to deny that toll – even if it didn’t happen.
However, false flags can also kill. There are many extremely suspicious connections between the authorities and the perpetrator of the killing of schoolchildren and their teacher in Dunblane in 1996. Dunblane is a quaint wee Scottish village that I’ve visited often. As is traditional in wee villages, everyone knows everyone and absolutely everything they do. There is no possibility that those deaths were staged.
So what am I saying? We can categorise public traumatic events with massive psychological effect as follows:
natural disasters
involuntary disasters (caused by negligence or recklessness)
real attacks by unknown terrorists
real attacks by known terrorists
harmless deceptions by the State
harmful deceptions by the State
Of the latter, those carried out against ‘the enemy’ are likely to be forgiven (by ‘us’, whoever we are). Retroactively, the deadly bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946 might be put in that category by Zionists today, as some of the Jewish perpetrators (who dressed as Arab hotel workers) went on to become officials of the State of Israel. However, the British State is likely to still see it as a real attack by known terrorists – albeit one that, apparently, the British Palestinian authorities did not take seriously until too late.
A State is far less likely to admit to perpetrating a false flag attack that results in injury and death when it’s against its own citizens.
The citizens are less likely to believe that their beloved rulers are capable of treating them as disposable props for a staged scenario.
Anyone emotionally connected to the victims (real or apparent) whether personally or just caught up in the mass outpouring of emotion, much of it online, is very unlikely to welcome questions about the reality of the event.
As well as the above considerations, there is also the egos of talking heads (establishment, conspiracy theorist or controlled opposition) building a lucrative platform on a certain ideological stance. People can react very badly to anything that disrupts their revenue stream.
So my advice, when the next calamity occurs, and something seems suspicious about it, is this:
don’t react immediately
wait for facts
check the internal coherence of the official story
if it’s important to you, and you can take the flak (some of it personal and nasty) from at least 2 different camps, point out the holes in the story
In all of this, remember that real people may be feeling shock and emotional vulnerability; and, if there are actual casualties, then to them (if still alive) and their loved ones, your questioning of the event, even if justified on the facts, can only come across as callous.
Nevertheless, while respectful of human suffering, in the face of impending tyranny, questioning official narrative may be the most human thing you can do.
Thanks to Piotr Siedlecki for releasing his image Question Mark 2 into the Public Domain.
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