FALSE FLAGS?

SEPERATING FACT FROM FICTION IN A COMPLICATED WORLD

When various people on the Left accredited two assassination attempts against Trump, in the run up to the Presidential election to “false flags,”I took a step back. Generally speaking, conspiracy theories are the meat and vegetables of the fascist Right, as Neumann observed when he critiqued their use by Hitler, in his rise to power. On the Left, we tread a higher path and use critical analysis regarding our dire political situation rather than pointing towards all embracing conspiracies by “elites” that are somehow suspended above the material forces of production. In much the same way, I remain skeptical that the assassination of vile MAGA rabble rouser Charlie Kirk was some kind of false flag either. This isn’t to say that the MAGA fascist cabal havn’t exploited these events and milked them for all they are worth, the way that the forces behind George W. Bush exploited the 9/11 attacks to enact an invasion of Iraq, plans for which were drawn up as early as 1996.

For me, the issue with the attempted assassination of Trump was the way that Kamala Harris and the Democrats folded, withdrawing from their earlier (correct) claim that Trump is a fascist and the new Hitler. Having already abandoned any semblance of working-class politics, giving praise to capitalism and counting on celebrity sponsorship, she threw in the towel the moment she described Trump as an authentic democratic politician. As for Kirk, this fascist scumbag might have served the MAGA freikorps well by targeting Left Wing academics and students on campus, inciting violence against them and championing weapons deregulation, but his death was also a godsend to a rapist paedophile President looking for a pretext to crack down on the American media in an unprecedented way. Any critic of Trump, MAGA, the deployment of the ICE gestapo to American cities and the subsequent deployment of the military to consolidate Trump’s fascist coup had to be an accomplice in the murder of beautified Saint Charles Kirk of the Fascist shit! However, do I think this was a choreographed Reichstag burning moment? Maybe, but I need to see more proof to say so.

Conspiracy theories are nothing new in the modern period, since David Icke and Lynton La Rouche rebranded The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as the Illuminati in the 1990s but they only gained traction with the 9/11 attacks – and the debut of the Internet. In fact, there may well be a “conspiracy of sorts,” at the heart of the attack on the twin towers, in that the Saudi Arabian rentier capitalist elite was determined that the Caspian Shield oil pipeline to be constructed by the Carlisle Group in collaboration with the then Taliban regime in Afghanistan would never be built. That explains why every terrorist involved in the hijackings, and attacks, had some kind of connection with Saudi Arabia and why members of the Bin Laden dynasty were quietly flown out of the US, as correctly pointed out by Michael Moore at the time. It explains why evidence related to the 9/11 attacks is still being withheld from the US public (and above all the families) and might explain why Seal Team Six killed Osama Bin Laden in Western Pakistan, instead of extracting the bastard to stand trial on US soil. This more mundane sort of conspiracy, however, isn’t enough for the grand conspiracy theorists of history, who keep banging on about controlled explosions, drone aircraft and all kinds of nonsense, in order to promote a simplistic “explain-all in one sentence” version of events for people who know sweet f**k all about the dynamics of the Middle East.

Because the “war on terror” was rightly unpopular with anyone with two brain cells to rub together these conspiracy theories quickly gained traction because the population were being lied to both regarding the wider circumstances of the 9/11 attacks and (later) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The principal beneficiaries here, however, were fascists like Alex Jones on InfoWars, later implicated in the January 6 fascist coup plot for which (in my view) both Jones and Trump should have been put on trial, found guilty and hanged.

Muddying the Waters

Nor is this an isolated example of how grand conspiracy theories of history service the fascist Right more than the Left. In the 2000s, in the UK, David Icke might have done the public interest a service when he re-published Simon Regan’s important journalism in Scallywag, regarding the existence of a Deep State paedohile ring manipulating politics, arms sales, property investments and offshore banking in the UK. Regan paid with his life for his exposes and ongoing investigation as did Jill Dando before him. However, the very moment Icke connected this to his own ridiculous theories involving The Illuminati, Regan’s credible journalism was immediately discredited. Having smeared Stephan Mesham’s disclosures regarding his harrowing experiences in the North Wales care homes, this enabled Private Eye in particular to bang on about Satanic rituals, blood drinking and other such crap that is obviously not true, making anybody who talks about Deep State paedophile rings look like a fascist, a nut, or both.

In the age of the Internet this “revelation” by Icke was quickly appropriated by QAnon and (once again) the self -serving “rabble-rouser” and fascist crank who is Alex Jones, leading to the ridiculous “Pizza-gate” claims, that made allegations of a Deep State paedophile ring, either side of the Atlantic look even more ridiculous – as well as ideologically suspect. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t like the Clintons. I also make the point in my novel, by way of fictional journalist Orla Regan, that the Deep State paedophile operation in Britain wasn’t set up to feed the perversions of the child-molesters with which the Iron Bitch undoubtably surrounded herself. Rather, it was set up to target and neutralize her enemies.

What’s interesting about Jones’ bullshit regarding “pizza-gate,” is that it narrowly preceded disclosures regarding Jeffrey Epstein who has since been framed (like Jimmy Savile) as a lone sexual predator. Of course, the fact that Epstein worked with his then business partner, Robert Maxwell, to launder money siphoned illegally from the USSR, no more featured in Jones’ simplistic, all-embracing fairy tale, than the fact that his network facilitated the recruitment of paedophile rapist Donald Trump (code name Krassov) by Kryuchkov’s corrupt KGB Sixth Directorate as early as 1987. Neither does the recruitment through sexual blackmail of Leon Black who remained Trump’s main conduit to Putin (whose bitch he remains) up to and including the invasion of Ukraine.

In much the same way, Mandelson’s introduction to dirty Russian money, that has been manipulating British politics ever since, by way of Granville Janner and Jeffrey Epstein (again) doesn’t really fit with the fantasy of a grand conspiracy theory involving a non-existent “global liberal elite.” When the bombshell that Starmer, as DPP, and under pressure from Mandelson, covered up Janner and Savile, allowing Janner to elevate to the peerage, conveniently explodes ahead of the next general election this will be conveniently isolated from the wider activities of a paedophile operation that has always serviced the interests of the Far Right. As an example, when evidence was finally revealed concerning abuse at the South Vale care home, that led to the murder of Bulaq Forsythe and a cover up involving Margaret Hodge, this was hermetically segregated from reference to any wider paedophile network connecting the North Wales care homes to Dolphin Square, whose principal purpose was to maintain Thatcher in power. Rather, it was all down to Lambeth Council, and the GLC, being determined to fight Thatcher, thereby neglecting what was happening in their own back yard.

Investigation Versus Conspiracy Theory

This of course is the other side of the “conspiracy theory coin,” in that while grand conspiracy theories of history always service the agendas of the extreme and fascist Right, there remains a parallel tendency in certain quarters to dismiss any form of investigation that digs deeper than the gruel served up, stone cold, on mainstream media as evidence of further “conspiracy theory.” First and foremost, capitalism is a mode of production that is dying and which increasing needs fascist corporatism to survive at our expense. It isn’t a conspiracy by some global cabal, dating from the Knights Templar, liberal or otherwise, and this is why Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco should be a must-read for everyone. Just as conspiracy theory feeds on the manipulated banality of mainstream media, however, so accusations of “conspiracy theorist” can be invoked to discredit credible investigative journalism again and again.

Evidence to support the latter claim abounds. Along with the assassination of Robert Maxwell, and collusion between Loyalist paramilitaries and state forces, one of the biggest stories that I ever covered involved the murder of Hilda Murrell by fascist subcontractors of MI5 working through ZEUSS Security and Saphire Investigations in Shrewsbury, for which Andrew George (no relation to Barry) has been fitted up and framed. The moment that an important book by Hilda Murrell’s nephew, Rob Green, whom I know, was published along comes former Stalinist turned fallen Guardian columnist David Aaranovitch to compare credible evidence of a wider conspiracy in Murrell’s murder with some of the craziest conspiracy theories on the planet. Suffice to say that this is the same Aaranovitch, formerly of the reactionary and Right-Wing Communist Party, who was a career bureaucrat on the student union during my entire time as an undergraduate, who was then secured a job by Stuart Hall at The Independent, who never trained as a journalist (like some of us) and has never investigated a story in his life! Departing from The Guardian, shortly after he supported the Iraq War, this is the same Aaranovitch who then became Murdoch’s bitch on The Times, at which point I rest my case.

What applies to Aaranovitch’s flippant dismissal of a wider conspiracy (and cover-up) surrounding Hilda Murrell’s murder applies in spades to fellow fallen Guardian journalist David Rose, late of the Socialist Workers Party and once a half-decent crime reporter. Rose, however, didn’t only buy into the fiction that policing culture at the Metropolitan Police had improved, following the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 (as did a number of criminologists who I used for my PhD). He also started to rely in excess on his Met contacts, who fed him stories in the bulk-standard tradition of “lobby journalism” in British Media Culture. Since then, he has descended even further than Aaranovitch into the toxic media sewer, by working for The Daily Mail. It was here that Rose went to extraordinary lengths to “prove” that care home abuse on Jersy had nothing to do with a wider conspiracy and that no children were ever murdered there.

Pride of place, however, goes to former member of Canadian military intelligence, Frank Furedi, who is now Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Canterbury University. From the 1980s he ran a black operation for the state, in the form of a cult called the Revolutionary Communist Party, with the deliberate agenda of undermining the Left and the labour movement. This is not to be confused with the re-branded Socialist Advance of today. In 1995, the RCP was rightly sued by both The Guardian and ITN for claiming that the Channel 4 News had fabricated evidence of the Serbian genocide and, in particular, the massacre at Srebrenica. Taken to the cleaners for this mother of all conspiracy theories, Furedi’s cult were baled out by the Charles Koch Foundation, much as Tommy Robinson has been more recently baled out by Richard Shilman and Elon Musk. They then transformed overnight into the Right Wing (and now fascist) think-tank known as the Spiked group.

Aligned to the fascist leader of Hungary, Viktor Orban, through the opaquely funded MCC Brussels, Furedi is most famous for defending national boundaries and immigration controls, thereby framing immigration as a problem category and inciting violence against asylum seekers. He has also weighed in on the McCarthyite witch hunt presently sweeping both British and US universities, trying to incite Charlie Kirk style attacks on what he has called “an academic Taliban” in the cesspit pages of the Daily Mail. An interesting sideline of Furedi’s however, has been to promote a cod sociological study of conspiracy theories that hardly matches that of Neumann in the 1930s, whereby he attacked Carole Cadwalladr as a conspiracy theorist over her sterling exposure of illegal Russian funding to Cambridge Analytica’s manipulation of the BREXIT vote.

That Furedi’s despicable cult made these claims when Carole was actually being punitively sued by Aaron Banks, using Britain’s weaponized (and wholly discredited) defamation laws speaks volumes. It’s also personal for me in a left-of-field kind of way, for all that I’ve never met Carole Cadwalladr (now of the excellent platform, The Nerve) and only know her at one point remove, through a fellow friend and journalist currently investigating Roberto Fiore. Back when I was an undergraduate a group of my friends in what later became Anti-Fascist-Action were framed on kidnapping charges. The Next Step, as Spiked at that time called itself, produced an article that could have sealed their conviction and put my name to it, even though I never wrote it! I will hold my hand up and say that at 20 years of age, I was in talks with the RCP at that point, because they were talking about building workers’ defence squads to fight fascism. However, the first thing I knew about the bloody article was when I was harangued by Manchester anti-fascists on a Bloody Sunday march in Birmingham. Within 10 years the RCP were calling for free speech for the BNP.

To me, what this scum did in Manchester in the early 1980s has been replicated in spades in the attack on Carole Cadwalladr when she was being sued by Aaron Banks. Let’s just say that I’m coming for you, Frank, and that I’m going to bury your whole stinking fascist outfit.

So, this is where I now stand on conspiracies. In short, conspiracies do happen but in a wider historical context, framed by wider class forces, and under circumstances not of their own choosing. And so, for that matter, do false flags.

False Flags from the Gulf of Tonkin to Rafah

One irrefutable false-flag from modern history was the Gulf of Tonkin incident in which the Viet Cong were falsely accused of attacking an American battleship off the coast of Vietnam in the late 1960s, thereby facilitating the war in Vietnam. This is a fact, and was cited by CIA whistle-blower Phil Agee, in Counter-Intelligence Quarterly, when he claimed that something similar had happened after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. In fact, we all know the primary reason for the invasion that led to the first Iraq War. From 1986, when the Fao Peninsula fell to Iranian forces in the then conflict between Iran and Iraq, the Gulf Arab States (and the West) had supported Saddam Hussein as a de facto proxy against Iran. When the war was over, however, those same Gulf States demanded the war loans be paid back by Saddam, even though the Iraqi economy was on its arse. To add insult to injury both Kuwait and the UAE exceeded OPEC oil quotas, driving down oil prices, and crippling the Iraqi economy still further.

In addition, Saddam had always wanted deep water anchorage for supertankers in the Shatt-al-Arab.

In this context, April Glaspie’s appointment as US ambassador to Iraq can only be seen as significant. Previously posted in Somalia, Glaspie had an intelligence rather than a diplomatic background and notoriously proclaimed that any territorial dispute between Iraq and Kuwait was of no interest to the United States. This much is verified by New York Times journalists who later wrote the instructive book: Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf. Given that Kuwait is historically part of Iraq in any case, carved into existence as it was by Sir Percy Cox of the Indian civil service, this gave Saddam what he perceived as a green light that if he invaded Kuwait, he would be allowed to get away with it. The Arab Cooperation Council, after all, had been feted by Western academics and diplomats, including at University of Exeter where I was a post-graduate student at the time. When Saddam did invade it led to the biggest Western military mobilization since the Korean War.

Of course, the lies didn’t stop with the invasion, any more than the subsequent crimes of the Western forces weren’t completed insulated from the “embedded journalists” on the ground. The late Robert Fisk, whom I knew, was particularly good on this. The lies that Saddam’s soldiers turned off incubators for prematurely born babies, in a Kuwaiti hospital, continued to be circulated even when proved false, much like claims that Hamas beheaded babies following the hostage abductions in Israel, two years ago. Sadly, Phil Agee devalued an otherwise excellent piece of journalism when he mooted that the 1989 Halabja gassing of the Kurds might have been a hoax. Alternative news media was in its infancy in the early 1990s and Counter Intelligence Quarterly, no longer exists to my knowledge.

Pass masters of the false flag of course include the Israeli’s, past and present. Borrowing from Goebbals’ playbook, that “justified” the 1939 invasion of Poland, under the rubric of “Operation Himmler,” the “Lavron affair” of 1950 found MOSSAD bombing Jewish communities in Cairo, blaming it on Muslims, much as Monzer al Kasser (possibly working for MOSSAD) would do in Argentina in 1994 (Bearing in mind that “Islamic Jihad” never existed). In 1967, which was before Nixon and the anti-Semitic Henry Kissinger proclaimed Israel their “beat cop in the Middle East,” the Israelis attacked the USS Liberty. Disregarding the role of Abu Nidal, who was an asset both of the CIA and MI6, in precipitating the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, a bombing in London in 1994 was also down to MOSSAD, in the same year as the far greater attack in Argentina (then the worst anti-Semitic atrocity since World War II).

This brings us to the present. We all know that since the “ceasefire” in Gaza, the Zionists have attacked the territory 20 times killing 100 people. Indeed, that may well have gone up once I post this missive. What we also know, thanks to The Canary, is how the Zionists have justified this transgression, in cautious defiance even of Donald Trump. According to Israel’s Channel 14, there was an attack on the Rafah crossing by Hamas. Apart from anything else, this highlights the fact that the Rafah crossing is still closed, depriving the besieged survivors of the Zionist holocaust of food, clean water and medical supplies. However, even if Hamas weren’t a busted flush in Gaza (which I believe they are and have been for a while) the idea that they could attack the Rafah checkpoint in this way is preposterous. Assuming that Channel 14 didn’t simply make it up (and perish the thought on that one) and that an actual bombing took place, then this is further evidence of a false flag.

Bringing it all Back Home

As I said at the outset of this article, I am highly skeptical that Charlie Kirk’s assassination was a false flag and I won’t be shedding any tears either way, as I never condemn any anti-fascist violence whether I think it particularly wise or not. MAGA are fascists therefore no violence against MAGA of any form will be condemned by me. Meanwhile, the idea that Zionists killed this advocate for violence against left wing academics and students because he had somehow seen the light regarding Israel’s crimes seems like a cock-and-bull story to me. As George Monibot once said regarding the war on terror, things are bad enough in real life without laying on wild speculation with a trowel.

However, there are real false flags taking place in the US, on a regular if more mundane basis, what might be called a “Reichstag burning lite,” as Trump’s illegal military occupation of US Cities serve to try and consolidate his fascist coup. As a series of articles in The Intercept point out, this probably began in Chicago when a woman allegedly rammed a group of National Guard (or was it the ICE Gestapo?) in her car. According to official reports as ventilated on toxic mainstream media (and I don’t only mean Fox) some 10 cars rammed the officers involved. This actually conflates with the Chicago PD’s report on the actual incident, which may or may not have taken place.

There then followed another incident in which a shot was fired during a protest outside of a concentration camp, otherwise known as an ICE detention centre, in Alvarado, Texas, in which a cop was injured. Immediately after the incident, in which the gunman was not apprehended, Zachary Evetts and Autumn Hill were arrested as part of an alleged “Antifa Cell” and charged with terrorist offences reminiscent of the “SO15 trawl” of AFA, that followed the Baltic Exchange bombing in 1993 but also the grotesque and ridiculous banning of Palestine Action much more recently. The two accused are charged with “providing material support to terrorism” and “aiding and abetting the murder of a government official.” This has false flag written all over it and directly feeds into the framing of “AntifA” as a terrorist organization and generalized crackdown on the Left which will accompany Trump’s fascist coup.

Nor does it stop here. In Portland, which is the epicentre of Trump’s fascist ire, again according to The Intercept, a group of anti-fascist protesters were rounded up and forced to march by Trump’s stormtroopers in a scene reminiscent of Pinochet’s coup in 1973. The anti-fascist protesters were then filmed as smoke grenades, pepper spray and flash grenades were set off all around them, making it look like a riot was actually taking place. This was later played out as authentic footage on American TV. In other words, this was a real false flag and indicative of the shape of things to come.

So, do I believe every claim of a false flag? No. Do I believe that false flags happen and that they are happening more frequently? You bet. In fact, I believe this a lot more than I believe we still live in functioning democracies either side of the Atlantic.

Roger Cottrell, PhD