Political provocation is more prevalent than you think

All we have to do….

J and I have wonderful breakfast conversations. In fact, we yearn for compatible days off just so we can spend our time yakking over several mugs of tea and coffee. We’ll spend the time before our first meal of the day quickly scouring the ‘tubes for juicy gossip just so we can try to top each other with the most audacious political happenings of the past 24 hours. And they happen far more frequently than you would believe. For my American readers, the two US stand-outs from recent times are Obama’s “war is peace” Nobel peace prize speech (I swear it should be framed. Alternatively, we could put it on infinite loop playback right next to George Orwell’s grave and power an entire town from the energy generated by that poor corpse spinning in his grave. Nyuk nyuk.) and Jimmy Carter’s morally bankrupt repudiation of international justice in his apology to Israel. (I could never figure out why everyone thought he is such a great man; after all, when all’s said and done, he’s nothing more than a politician. Oh well.)

But back to the matter at hand, stalwart reader. How aggressive are humans actually? That was a recent topic. Are we animals that will make war at the drop of a hat, or is there something else involved? How many conflicts have begun, or got a great boost, from a provocation?

Now, neither J nor I are historians by trade, so we don’t presume to have the definitive list, but what we dredged up from memory was still rather interesting.

Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin incident that announced the entry of the USA into the Vietnam War was a lie. The unprovoked torpedo attacks from the North Vietnamese that sparked American retaliation not only never occurred, but the US destroyer Maddox was playing silly buggers in order to provoke things in the first place.

Poland. On 31 August 1939, German SS soldiers set up an attack on one of their own radio stations at the Polish-German border and the Germans broadcast a message, in Polish, urging Poles to kill the Germans who resided in the Silesian region.

Modern Poland. In the 1980s, the government carried out covert actions that were ostensibly anti-Communist (fires, infrastructure vandalism) in order to provoke the Soviet Union into invading and quelling the rising Solidarity movement. Thankfully, this one failed.

Iraq. The US gave the green light to Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, then used the invasion as the premise to start the first Gulf War.

Malaysia. There is now a book out that says that the infamous May 1969 race riots were actually engineered with the full cooperation of the incumbent government in order to further its own ends.

Indonesia. A different use of provocation, but still…. Military man (and wartime collaborator) Suharto turned a botched coup attempt by an opposing military faction into anti-communist propaganda, initiating a massacre that took the lives of more than half a million communists, sympathisers and (I’m sure) people who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Israel. David Ben-Gurion had a reputation for giving the go-ahead for numerous provocations carried out by Israeli intelligence services throughout Europe against Jews, in order to convince them that Europe was completely anti-Semitic and that the best bet for their future was the new state of Israel.

China. The Marco Polo incident can be seen as deliberate Japanese provocation that essentially began World War Two in Asia in earnest (after some smouldering since the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931). China was to Japan as Poland was to Germany … its liebensraum.

Germany. Hitler. Jews. ’nuff said.

Iran. The Straits of Hormuz incident (2008) was, especially if you view the videos, deliberate provocation on the part of the United States, and not the first either. Here’s an article from Asia Times that explains the significance of “international waters”, “Iranian inspections”, and so on within the context of the Straits.

There are plenty more examples of both blatant provocation and use of covert action by a government (it doesn’t matter which one, black or white, communist or capitalist, they’re all the same) either against its own citizens or against another country’s citizens in order to further its own ends. In fact, there are so many other examples that you have to wonder if we would have even had the amount of carnage humanity has sustained throughout history if it wasn’t for one small group of people at that time (and they weren’t solely men, so don’t fall into that trap) using spin to advance their aims … and to hell with their fellow human beings.

On the one hand, it makes me feel a bit optimistic because it tells me that, left to our own devices, people have a tendency to just generally want to get along with each other. On the other, it depresses the hell out of me because it also tells me how easily we can be manipulated by people we trust to do what’s best for us.