False Flag Ops and the Delusions of Mad Dictators
Autocrats fill a timeless mold. They draw from the same bag of dirty tricks. My bet is that Putin indeed will invade Ukraine.
HITLER: “What makes a people or, to be more correct, a race is not language, but blood.”
PUTIN: “Our kinship has been transmitted from generation to generation. It is in the hearts and the memory of people living in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that unite millions of our families… For we are one people.”
HITLER: “German-Austria must be restored to the great German Motherland… People of the same blood should be in the same Reich.”
PUTIN: “The Ukrainians who fought in the Red Army…were defending their home, their great common Motherland.”
HITLER: “The Versailles Diktat is not law to us. A signature was forced out of us with pistols at our head and with the threat of hunger for millions of people. And then this document, with our signature, obtained by force, was proclaimed as a solemn law.”
PUTIN: “You promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the East. You cheated us shamelessly,”
HITLER: “As in other German territories of the East, all German minorities living there have been ill-treated in the most distressing manner.”
PUTIN: “I have to say that Russophobia is a first step towards genocide. You and I know what is happening in Donbass. It certainly looks like genocide.”
HITLER: “This night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory. Since 5:45 this morning we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met with bombs… I will continue this struggle, no matter against whom, until the safety of the Reich and its rights are secured.”
PUTIN: (stay tuned).
See echoes of two strongmen separated by eight decades? Eerily similar even? There’s a good reason for this. Autocrats fill a timeless mold. They draw from the same bag of dirty tricks. Their rule invariably is a toxic elixir of paranoia, grievance, threats, fabrications and fabulism. We got a glimpse of budding autocracy under four years of our very own Duce-wannabe. And he’s not finished with us yet.
As for the last response, it will go something like this:
PUTIN: “This night for the first time Ukrainian regular soldiers fired on our forces on our territory. Since 5:45 this morning we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met with bombs… I will continue this struggle, no matter against whom, until the safety of the Motherland and its rights are secured.”
The historical parallels get even more eerie. The New York Times reports:
The United States has acquired intelligence about a Russian plan to fabricate a pretext for an invasion of Ukraine using a faked video that would build on recent disinformation campaigns, according to senior administration officials and others briefed on the material.
The plan — which the United States hopes to spoil by making public — involves staging and filming a fabricated attack by the Ukrainian military either on Russian territory or against Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine.
Russia, the officials said, intended to use the video to accuse Ukraine of genocide against Russian-speaking people. It would then use the outrage over the video to justify an attack or have separatist leaders in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine invite a Russian intervention.
The video was intended to be elaborate, officials said, with plans for graphic images of the staged, corpse-strewn aftermath of an explosion and footage of destroyed locations. They said the video was also set to include faked Ukrainian military equipment, Turkish-made drones and actors playing Russian-speaking mourners.
Russian officials had found corpses to use in the video, discussed actors to play mourners and plotted how to make military equipment appear Ukrainian or NATO-supplied.
The Russians didn’t need to be very original or to put much thought into this false flag op plan. They stole it, scene-by-scene, straight from the Nazi playbook. Here’s an account of Nazi Germany’s “Gleiwitz Incident,” as reported by Britain’s Daily Mail:
As night began to fall on 31 August, 1939, a small, hand-picked team of SS troops crept into the then German city of Gleiwitz.
Disguised as Polish saboteurs, their mission was to launch an attack on the city's main radio station to give Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler a justification for invading Poland.
It was part of what was codenamed Operation Himmler - the false flag attacks carried out by the Fuhrer's military intelligence service the Abwehr, along with the feared SS and the Gestapo to give the impression of Polish aggression towards Germany.
Entering through the back door, they locked three technicians into the basement before broadcasting a short message in Polish saying: “Attention! This is Gliwice. The broadcasting station is in Polish hands.”
To make the raid seem more convincing, German concentration camp prisoners dressed in Polish army uniforms were given lethal injections and then shot in the face to avoid identification.
Their corpses, were later shown to journalists as 'proof' of Polish provocation.
Within hours, the incident was being reported across Germany, where it was picked up by the BBC and the Reuters news agency.
A few hours later, the German battleship SMS Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Westerplatte peninsula, on what is now Poland's Bay of Gdansk. At the same time, 29 German Stuka dive bombers hit the small Polish town of Wieluń.
World War II officially begins. It will claim 70 million lives.
Let me pause here to plead guilty to “Godwin’s Law,” i.e., the theory that as an online discussion progresses, it becomes inevitable that someone or something will eventually be compared to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis.
But as you can see from all of the above, Putin and Hitler have much in common, to the point that, were he at the (now defunct) 401st KGB training school in Leningrad, he would have been cited for plagiarism. But as I said, dictators basically sing from the same sheet of music, whether in German or Russian, or whatever.
My bet is that Putin indeed will invade Ukraine. He shares with Hitler boldness, aggressiveness and recklessness. They think alike: “blood” of the folk, historical mysticism, cult of “Motherland,” manifest destiny, surrounded by enemies, stabbed in the back by foreigners, irredentism, balls to the wall/bet the farm bellicosity and a messianic complex. As former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul has noted, Putin isn’t fazed by sanctions and isolation. He is thinking about his legacy 100 years from now. Add grandiosity to the strongman’s repertoire.
Washington and its allies are playing their cards right. Their assertive “intelligence diplomacy” of broadcasting Putin’s own secret plans as a means to pre-empt him from action is particularly smart. (Reporters’ demands for release of the original intelligence to show the government is not lying are excessive and counterproductive.)
The NATO partners are holding firmly, though not without some wobbles, specifically from Hungary’s own strongman and Putin fanboy Viktor Orban, neo-Gaullist Emmanuel Macron and his wing and a prayer diplomacy, and Germany’s green and insecure chancellor Olaf Scholtz.
Displaying in stark relief to Putin the million tons of bricks that will come down on him in terms of severe sanctions and political isolation is certainly the right thing to do. But this veteran former diplomat has to agree with Amb. McFaul. Putin thinks like a delusional czar obsessed with his legacy. He is in too far at this point. And, as we’ve seen repeatedly over the years, he has no compunction to blow his wad on a high stakes gamble. He therefore won’t hesitate to launch World War III — in which case we’re all cooked and Vladimir Vladimirovitch will find himself comparing notes with the Fuhrer in Dante’s Seventh Circle of hell: Violence.
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.