Letting it Happen on Purpose, Triggering a Reaction and Full Spectrum Propaganda: As Old as Empire

With the current Middle Eastern Crisis we see both the Letting it Happen on Purpose (LIHOP) and Triggering a Reaction (TAR) strategies that have been used by Empire for centuries to create an excuse to carry out some heinous act, combined with Full Spectrum Propaganda (FSP) to get the general population properly riled up into repeated versions of 1984’s “two minutes of hate”. That two thirds of the Israeli troops guarding Gaza were sent away to protect some West Bank Settler shindig is not open to question, and neither is the oh so obvious stand down of the remaining troops to facilitate the Hamas incursion. Also, the ignoring of what would have been a cacophony of alarms from the extensive electronic monitoring systems as Hamas spent hours destroying a section of the Gaza open air concentration camp wall. What has become very obvious is that the Hamas incursion was meant to kill IDF soldiers and grab Israeli citizens and then return to Gaza, and that the Hamas militants were themselves surprised at the scale of their own success.

Israel has utilized the most advanced technology to monitor and control the Palestinian population, including the facial recognition system called Red Wolf.

But how to get the “two minutes of hate” fully rolling? Ah yes, fabricate a “massacre” through FSP. The important thing was to get the “massacre” blasted out by every single subservient mainstream media news channel and bought and paid for politician, NGO and other Empire shill on a completely coordinated and continuous basis. Then, as the evidence of the fabrication became apparent, push that evidence to back pages and little-seen alternative news media while making sure the facts of the case are disappeared from the mainstream. So, the “massacre of 1400 Jews”, the “greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust” FSP would be registered in the minds of the populace. Then also 1984-style completely redefine the meaning of phrases such as “from the river to the sea” and “free Palestine” to be antisemitic slurs and threats to destroy Israel; which they certainly are not. So, let’s go through the disappeared facts:

-       As of this time, the Israeli government have downgraded the number killed during the Hamas incursion to 1200, with only about 980 having been named

-       It is very hard to find exact numbers, but it does appear that about half of those dead are either Israeli Defence Force or Israeli security services personnel, killed whilst engaging the Hamas militants

-       A number of Israeli survivors of the Rave and the Kibbutz have stated that the Israeli forces fired directly upon buildings housing hostages, including with tank rounds. This has been confirmed by some IDF personnel

-       The IDF also released a video of IDF helicopters indiscriminately firing on cars and people

Here is an article in The Cradle that documents some of the above. Notice the extra flagging of two of the videos below that cover some of the above by YouTube that can be seen as an obvious attempt to reduce access, while much worse content on the same platform is not so tagged. I have placed the titles of the two flagged videos above them:

Watch the video about 7 October YouTube would rather you didn't see

Video released by Israeli army shows helicopters firing indiscriminately on 7 October

From the above facts it is obvious that no “massacre” took place, rather an open fire fight between Hamas militants and the IDF and security forces, with the Israeli forces indiscriminately destroying buildings and firing at both cars and fleeing civilians. The vast majority of the dead were therefore either actively taking part in fighting or were most probably killed by the Israeli side or by crossfire. Not included in this would be other “civilians” that had completed their national service in the IDF and were armed; themselves becoming active fighters. To juice up the “massacre” story the Israeli propagandists also threw in “mass rape” (a standard part of any Empire propaganda since Yugoslavia in the 1990s) and even “burning babies” (a copy of an actual real event that took place during the Nakba, perpetrated by Israelis), and “beheaded babies” (echoes of the “babies thrown out of incubators” FSP excuse for Iraq War 1); all of which have been disowned by the IDF or fallen apart as no real evidence surfaced - but they keep being repeated nonetheless.

We also have the testimony of some of the freed hostages that the Hamas militants actually treated them with a great deal of respect and empathy.

Many of the hostages have already been killed by IDF shelling and air strikes on Gaza, it’s almost as if the Israeli government doesn’t want them to survive. We also have the Hasbara fabricated “Hamas bombed a Palestinian hospital” propaganda that has been taken apart even by the New York Times; a story rapidly parroted by the Western media to quell the reality of the intentional Israeli bombing of a hospital.

The Israeli leadership have even truly “jumped the shark” with their propaganda, for example with Netanyahu’s attempt to blame Muslims for the Holocaust! As I sat down to enjoy Sunday brunch today I picked up a national Canadian newspaper (which thankfully I do not read very often), The National Post, which was attempting to bring its readership into a delusional reality where antisemitism is rife in Canada (the subjugators being identified as the victims and conflating opposition to the genocidal actions of Israel to antisemitism) and Muslims are the new Nazis (utterly reversing reality) while the daily murder of Palestinian children is given short shrift; the Ministry of Truth in 1984 would be proud. Lots of hardworking Winston Smiths in this “news” organization. There will be no “Israel cuts off electricity to Palestinian babies in incubators” stories thrust on the newspaper front pages and acting as the lead story of the MSM news media, and repeated ad nauseum by politicians and crying photogenic young women in Congressional hearings, to gain popular support for actions to put an end to this genocide; even though those stories would sadly be true.

The next stage of Triggering a Reaction started with the large-scale murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, together with the cutting off of all supplies of electricity, water and food and the destruction of large swathes of the built environment. Then to add insult to injury, repeated illegal air and missile strikes by Israeli and US forces on the sovereign nations of Lebanon and Syria (the latter housing the multiple illegal US bases that protect and foster head-chopping terrorist groups). And then to add the cherry on top, more wild statements by Israeli officials about driving the Gazan population into the desert in Egypt and even nuking Gaza, together with West Bank Israeli settlers going full-on My Lai with the Palestinian population there.

The rhetoric used by the Israeli authorities and many of their supporters abroad parallels that used again and again by colonial forces attempting to construct rhetorical and ideological support for their crimes against humanity, as with the British and the Mau Mau in the colonized and occupied Kenya of the 1950s. The term Mau Mau was a British invention as the colonial authorities were actually fighting with the freedom fighters of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA - the equivalent of Hamas) which was the military wing of the Kikuyu, Meru and Embu populations. The colonial authorities referred to their opponents as “perverted tribalists”, an uncivilized group that wanted to return to the uncivilized dark period before they had enjoyed British civilizing influences.; mirroring the Israeli attempts to dehumanize the population that they are subjugating. Tens of thousands were interred in open air concentration camps (just like the millions in Gaza and the West Bank), with extensive torture and ill treatment, made worse by a British settler population seen as the most racist of the British Empire (just like Israelis who are taught from their early years to hate Palestinians and see them as lesser beings than themselves), and included massacres. The contest was a very unequal one between the well-armed state violence of the British and the lightly armed KLFA; again mirroring the realities of the current Israeli-Palestine conflict. In the book Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, Elkins details the ongoing and systematized violence required to maintain colonial rule, and in Empire’s Violent End, edited by Zaalberg and Luttikhuis, contributors detail how colonial powers will fight and terrorize to the bitter end to maintain their dominance.

You would think that the Israelis and some of their pals in the US military wanted to trigger a wider conflict. And while US bombs and missiles are used to kill thousands of Palestinian children, medical staff and independent journalists are targeted, and the IDF shoot up another Gaza hospital, the US President states that there is no chance of a cease fire. Has a US President, since the genocide of the Amerindian population, ever so blatantly supported and facilitated such obvious genocide? You would really think that the Israelis and their pals are going out of their way to enrage other nations to trigger a reaction that can be used as an excuse to bomb the crap out of them, wouldn’t you?

But those pals (Hezbollah, Iran …) are taking a very careful stance, seeming to be clever enough to see the perhaps too obvious trap set by the Israeli and Western planners who think that they are the cleverest people in the room when in fact they may be the dumbest. At the same time the other 7 billion, and even a significant chunk of the golden billion, are seeing through the FSP. So, what happens next, do we have any historical parallels? Well, actually we do!

Let’s acquaint ourselves with President Woodrow Wilson, that celebrated heroic purveyor of “democracy” and “freedom” that turns out to be a racist bigot imperialist who certainly didn’t mind a good bit of fascism when required. For three years from 1914 to 1917 the US population had been flooded with anti-German FSP (“dastardly Huns bayonetting babies”) while the US tried really, really hard through LIHOP and TAR to get the US into WW1 against the express wishes of the US public; but to no avail. Hell, Wilson had to actually promise not to enter the European War in late 1916 to get re-elected! The biggest example of LIHOP was the sinking of the Lusitania that was carrying oodles of munitions for the British and took a very strange course straight through the known whereabouts of German U-boats; the Germans had even taken out advertisements in US newspapers warning passengers not to board such ships!

On the TAR side we had the ever-increasing role of the US Navy in protecting shipping that was supplying the British and French war efforts while doggedly respecting the sea blockade of Germany. But no matter how hard Wilson and his buddies tried they just couldn’t get the US population triggered enough to enter the war. So, in complete exasperation, and with the British on the verge of being unable to pay for any more supplies, Wilson and his buddies declared war on Germany anyway – just a few months after being elected on the promise no to do just that! When the utter resistance of the US population to happily go die in a far-away continent for not very democratic countries that still had Kings and Queens and extensive colonies was shown by the miserable response to the voluntary (to start with) call to arms sterner measure were put in place: fascism.

Yes, you read that correctly – fascism. How else would you describe a regime that immediately implemented extensive and all-encompassing censorship and propaganda, fed a hatred of an ethnic group (Germans), passed laws that put people in jail for years for any words that could be construed to be against the war effort, and organized a 250,000-strong Nazi-SA like bunch of thugs called the American Protective League? It was three years until this what Hochschild referred to as “Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis” was rolled back. And over 100,000 Americans died, and many more were wounded and emotionally maimed, to make the world safe for British and French imperial elites and US bankers.

In WW2, the US elites were also desperately trying to trigger Japan and Germany to declare war on them (TAR) repeating exactly the same tactics with respect to the Germans and engaging in an oil embargo against Japan which was an existential threat to that nation. Stephen Wertheim in Tomorrow the World has already documented that early after the fall of France the US elite had decided that the nation needed to enter the war in order to establish US hegemony. It can be argued that there was also a certain amount of LIHOP with stationing the Pacific fleet in harms-way at Pearl Harbour while ignoring many warnings and possibly its own intercepts of Japanese diplomatic and military messages (the US had broken the Japanese encryption codes). As with WW1, many US citizens did not want to get embroiled in a European War, but the “day that will live in infamy” and the self-harming German declaration of war on the US did the trick.

Quite like the 9/11 event that was facilitated by an astonishing amount of “incompetence” in the US security services for which no one was held accountable, executive branch indifference to repeated warnings, “coincidences” with respect to numerous US military exercises in the area on the day of the attack, a strange reluctance to place fighter jets to protect important facilities and intercept rogue planes, a strange lack of use of the anti-aircraft weapons that adorned some of the buildings (e.g. The Pentagon), and even lightly damaged buildings suddenly collapsing many hours after the attacks and others collapsing perfectly into their own footprint at free-fall speeds. Many of the “failed” officials involved even got promoted! If it smells like LIHOP and looks like LIHOP it’s LIHOP? Oh, and of course the strange gift of US$100,000 from Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmed, the head of Pakistan’s ISI (intelligence service) to Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 19 hijackers, the flying out of the US of 140 Saudis including bin Laden family members during a mass grounding of US airspace, the very rapid transference of the remains of the twin towers (the crime scene) abroad as scrap and the refusal to release any of the video footage taken and seized around the Pentagon. All lost in “another Pearl Harbour” and actively forgotten by the mainstream media and government officials, followed by the Homeland Security Act, mass domestic espionage, and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq 2 (aided by the Niger Yellow Cake and Weapons of Mass Destruction FSP, and spying on UN officials to get information to make them vote with the British and US) .

In the 1960s the US Security Services had devised Operation Northwoods which would have involved a series of false flag operations within the US, including the hijacking of civilian airliners, which would be blamed upon the Cubans to rile up the US population long enough to get them to support a US invasion of Cuba. The 1970s congressional hearings (the Church Committee etc.) into such activities identified widespread actions of the US security state against its own citizens to nullify challenges to the prevailing hegemonic culture, which included the penetration, subversion and control of fully legal political groups through COINTELPRO and other actions of an FBI which was then the private army of Edgar Hoover. This was on top of experiments carried out on unsuspecting citizens (MK Ultra) and the widespread sacking and blackballing of those that harboured “incorrect” views (i.e. anti-bourgeois thoughts) and a massive campaign of foreign subversions and assassinations. This was even while the more “sensitive” information was kept away from the public. What do we call a state that polices individual’s thoughts, holds show trials (the McCarthy hearings), infiltrates and subverts citizen organizations, considers murdering its own citizens and blaming those murders on others to legitimize a foreign invasion, carries out experiments on its own unsuspecting citizens, and fosters hatred of designated Others, while attempting to take the land of others (Vietnam) for its own exploitation? If its based upon unencumbered private property relations then its called fascism.

Remember the increasing shelling of the Donbass by the Ukrainian military at the start of 2022, and the massing of 150,000 Ukrainian troops on its border? TAR to get Russia to invade and provide the excuse for the Russian sanctions and foreign exchange reserve theft designed to cripple Russia?

What about that the second US naval clash with Vietnamese forces in the Gulf of Tonkin that now seems to have never happened, or that battleship that conveniently blew up in a Cuban harbour to allow the US to declare war on Spain and steal the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam?

Or the Marco Polo Bridge incident used by Japan to invade China in 1937?

LIHOP, TAR and FSP are as old as empire, and still proving their worth to bamboozle populations into accepting what the elites were already planning to do. And each time after the event, perhaps years later, the Imperial mainstream media and some politicians and NGOs complain how they were “bamboozled” and “mislead” into reporting blatant lies. Amazing how they never seem to learn …

Then again if they started to learn they may end up like poor Winston Smith, or maybe just lose their job.

Even highly religious anti-Zionist Jews are not safe from being given the rough treatment by the Israeli security forces, how dare they endanger the Zionist cultural hegemony and show that Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing!