False Flag Red Flag

Events conspire

It is 2002. I am in Thailand. I am drunk. And I am arguing with a German backpacker about 9/11. Gunter* believes that 9/11 was an inside job by the US government against its own people. I think Gunter is insane. However I demonstrate my own lack of sanity by continuing to argue with Gunter. For three hours. Who is the real lunatic here?

“Ah, one day the CIA said they knew nothing about the attacks. And the next day, they said they knew everything. It was an inside job. It was a false flag operation.”

Everything is a false flag operation.

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

A few weeks ago, a acquaintance of mine drunkenly yelled at me that he thought that the Oct 7 Hamas attacks were a false flag operation by Mossad and the neo-liberal, Zionist press were covering up the truth**.

Around a dinner table a couple of weeks ago, someone suggested that the assassination of Charlie Kirk was a false flag operation by MAGA. And then another person countered that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last year was also a false flag operation. “He just squeezed a blood capsule behind his ear!!!”

I politely disagreed with them. Except for the Oct 7 guy. He was escalating from beer to whiskey and I knew I had to make a tactical withdrawal if I had any chance waking up the next day.

And it’s not as if false flag narratives only exist on the Left. The Right is rife with false flags.

So many false flags being run up the flagpole to see who will salute them.

It’s not that false flags don’t happen. It’s that they are difficult and time-consuming to mount, require significant effort to cover up, and are public relations nightmares if you get caught. The odds are that most of the time, whatever most people say happened is what happened.

So why is the “false flag” narrative so enticing?

Real life is messy. Events frequently fail to follow the narratives that we would like them to. People who we think are evil are not responsible for all the bad things in the world. This is highly inconvenient. False flag narratives allow us to reconcile reality with narrative in a simple way that is impervious to contradiction. All evidence that disproves the false flag is tainted and compromised. Our enemies are not just bad but also highly competent.

And we repeat them to each other in our own cosy epistemic bubbles where we never utter the comfortable words that might pop them.

So for me, false flag theories are a red flag for conversation. Sometimes its not a conspiracy.

*I can’t remember his name so lets just go with Gunter for now.

**He will never read this because he refused to read anything on “NaziStack”.