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Political Comparative Journalism, False Flag Operations, Putin, Georgia 2008 and Crimea 2014, Hitler, Sudetenland 1938 and Poland 1939

Submitted by on October 9, 2014 – 12:34 amNo Comment

All is sometimes not what it appears to be.

It was while reading the salmon coloured pages of the Financial Times that I came across an excellent piece by Tony Barber in the Global Insight section entitled:“Baltic states fear Kremlin concern for their ethnic Russians”.

This FT piece sparked a memory of a point that I had raised to a Goldsmith’s lecturer, when I attended a guest class in leadership this year. I spoke about the fact that Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Crimea 2014 were the age old dictatorial excuse of defending ones own indigenous population in other corners of the world as a means for attack. An aspect that has come to be known as false flag operations.

This of course was the same con that convinced the League of Nations in 1938 to let Hitler march into Sudetenland to “protect” the German speaking population. Thereafter marching into the rest of what was then Czechoslovakia. This was followed by the invasion of Poland a year later due to a set up where German soldiers dressed in Polish uniforms and attacked a radio tower in upper Silesia which became known as the Gleiwitz incident. This was done as a way to show “Polish aggression”, “defend Germans rights” and thereby justify the invasion of Poland.

In the FT piece and with the above historical examples, I feel that this  “Political Comparative Journalism” can be used as an extremely important example of thought analysis and historical thinking. This type of journalism can fill in those pieces of the past because I truly believe once you know how one part of the system is constructed you have figured out the pattern and it never really changes and as the adage goes how can we know where we are going if we don’t know where we came from?

For instance, Hunter S. Thompson’s book On the campaign trail 72 covering the US elections is as poignant as ever about the political process today as it was then. It dealt with double speak, undemocratic behaviour, huge corporate sponsors, backstabbing, digging up dirt and telling the electorate everything they wanted to hear to get elected. Contemporary undemocratic issues of this nature in America concern accusations against Jeb Bush, the then Governor of Florida, concerning the unclear presidential election results in 2000 which ended up in a recount. And speaking of the west, false flag operations were of course used with regards to the undiscovered WMD’s that both Blair and Bush used as an excuse to attack Iraq in 2003. Pior to these events a very famous false flag operation was the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. A US navy ship provoked the Vietnamese and then accused them of acts of aggression which was the catalyst for US President Lyndon B. Johnson to get the backing of Congress for open warfare against North Vietnam.

It seems that, mostly, the flexing of political muscle is about divide and rule, good guys bad guys, black and white, terrorist/freedom fighter, PR machines, propaganda, hearts and minds, doves and crows. Yet the world is really a little of all of these things but when is the grey ever really allowed to come to the surface? We all certainly don’t help matters either as we move into the security of our own little political camps behind our own little walls underneath our own little banners.

“Political Comparative Journalism” seems to me to be another important type of responsible journalism and reminds us that these tricks have already been done before and this is something that has always been inspiring to me as a journalist. I made the case to Dan Hodges of Searchlight in an interview with him in 2011, where I asked him about the rise of extremism after the 1929 stock market crash to the same rise again in the recession of 2008.

The solution to confront these almost never ending political patterns would be for us all to open up a history book and do some bloody research. Then I feel that it would be near impossible for the wool to be pulled over our eyes, for the pattern not to be spotted, for our passions to be exploited and for false flags to be raised.

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