False Flags and Postmodern Statecraft

“A postmodern statecraft of increasing chaos and narrative dispersion is evolving in the context of an evolving and decaying American empire”[1]. From it, new monsters are emerging. A postmodern statecraft is one beyond the confines of national sovereignty. The borders of a Hobbesian realm represent a bygone era of definable limits. In an interconnected, globalised world the parameters of sovereignty are captured by elite networks, ultra-mobile forms of capital and multi-scale surveillance that flits between private and public ownership.

Take the Epstein network for example. It’s plugged into many different nodes, from organised crime and blackmail rings to a variety of intelligence agencies[2]. Culture industries and global governance are weaved together in the construction of shared narratives that proffer “global interests” as the primary aim of statecraft. The emergence of logistical sovereignty as the paradigm of geopolitics, nations reduced to regions and cities that can be plugged into trade networks. Culture reduced to a hotchpotch of selectable alternatives in a dizzying array of constructable identities. “Logistics, as an intercursive mechanism for information, is now itself a battlefield of modern geopolitics”[3].

What is the Epstein network other than a purveyor of information? Its precedents in figures like Craig Spence, Roy Cohn and Robert Maxwell were all collectors of intelligence via the development of networks. The intercursive mechanism of information, the maintenance of its continual flow through a spatial singularity that reduces identity and nationality to tradeable commodities.

Concepts of multipolarity or Pax Judaica are reflections of this. Creating distinct regions that reconfigure centres and peripheries. China’s Belt and Road Initiative or Israel’s investments (both public and private) in surveillance (pre-crime and terrorist detection) technologies[4] are reflections of a logistical sovereignty around controlling these flows of information, making everything legible to elite networks and forms of capital that are reliant upon them. Cudenec’s description of this as a criminocracy[5], being ruled by criminals constructing a racket, is indicative of the integration across governing types that is occurring. There are no longer distinctions between business, organised crime and governance. All three require integration for the legibility of information flows to grow. One of the defining characteristics of the 20^th century was the growth of these integrated networks from localised political machines to global behemoths[6].

Sovereignty is now a reflection of these networks – beyond the state within exceedingly obscure arrangements. Non-governmental organisations, international bodies and forums, and intelligence-security complexes. It is here that we see statecraft play out in narrative construction and the building of a wholly integrated world. No one can escape their gaze.

It is here that we see another development of the postmodern statecraft that has internationalised its industrial, technocratic precedents – the use of terrorism to manage populations and control the public sphere. I previously noted a situation of deep politics as the governing paradigm. Anti-popular, culturally homogenising and obfuscatory, with a definition of its enemy as anyone that attempts to remain illegible from it. This has emerged from the monsters birthed by Pax Americana. A vast series of industrial-state structures that gave prioritisation to the concerns of global industry, the military and security agencies. As part of their methods of controlling the public sphere and construing policies that favour their maintained dominance, the use of terrorism is paramount.

Terrorism is defined by the capacity to disrupt the everyday flows of intercursive activity by pure violence. Irrespective of the supposed ideological reasoning of terrorists, the fundamental aspect is an ontological break with banal reality. The destructive ripping through of a bomb or the bare brutality of a massacre create a liminal space between the ordinary (defined by commercial and cultural actions) and the warzone, being both and neither. Attacks like 9/11 or the Manchester Arena bombing make the former into the latter temporarily, producing what Edkins calls trauma time[7]. While Edkins characterises this break as having liberatory potential, to disrupt our social reality and its hidden violences and hierarchies via the unifying nature of individuals uniting in the face of such direct violence, it also contains manipulable features amenable to capture by the agencies of deep politics.

Robinson characterises terrorist events as “structural deep events” involving structural level policies (the why), deep politics actors (the who) and manipulation of an event (the what). At an abstract level structural level policies is the expansion of logistical sovereignty as a governing logic. Deep politics actors are those networks and complexes that aim toward the manipulation of events that are lacunae, shattering spatiotemporal expectations through the production of trauma time.

“The first aspect of event manipulation involves the rapid reaction by authorities whereby, with only minimal investigation, a problem is identified, responsibility attributed, and the necessary solution then presented to the public. As Entman describes, in relation to the political ‘framing’ of media reporting, defining a problem, its causes, making moral judgements, and the prescribing of policy remedies, are central components of narrative building”[8].

Whether denoted as false flags or recreant events, the authority to emplace a narrative that explains and re-embeds these liminal acts back within the confines of logistical sovereignty presents a means by which the public sphere is deconstructed and remoulded to fit the criteria set by these narrative constructs. The double aspect of trauma time can be both liberatory and futile, presenting the limits of sovereign power but without the capacity to actually demur from it. At a deeper, structural level, the manipulation and level of control present in the way these terrorist acts occur further deconceptualises trauma time as an inhibitory phenomenon. To break spatiotemporal norms is not to liberate but to obfuscate the centres of power onto an abstract enemy, a perpetual enemy[9] that serves the ends of undefined geopolitical actors.

Operation Gladio and Northwoods are the archetypal examples – the use of various ideological groups and lone actors to disrupt the political potential of alternative spaces of social organisation. Intelligence agencies organised and allowed various terrorist acts to ensure that these alternative spaces were disrupted or destroyed (at least politically as viable alternatives). They demanded greater securitisation of society to combat the threat of these multifarious terrorists, thus empowering the very actors creating the chaos.

Chaos is the point of this governing strategy as it is the ultimate disrupter of organisational loci that fall beyond the legibility of security complexes and global networks. To present autonomy from them is the same as declaring war upon them. When their currency is information, to reduce the value by removing oneself from the transaction is to create the potential for a crash or meltdown, irreparably damaging the governing logic upon which logistical sovereignty requires for its functioning.

A purely political form of primitive accumulation that closes the ideological space to the narrowest of views. There are many ways this is enacted, from inert recreancy to conspiratorial planning. Recreant acts are the acts of institutions that receive a high level of trust or hold a significant fiduciary responsibility but fail to meet the obligations inherent upon the trust or responsibility given. Regulatory capture would be such an example, where the constituency of governance (e.g. citizens affected by the negative externalities of producers) is overridden by the regulated industries/actors, meaning any regulatory apparatus implemented is to their benefit and either neutral or negative to the distributed classes of consumers/citizens.

“They transform our ‘lifescape’, alter how we see the world, and disrupt ontological security—confidence in one’s self-identity and in the stability of one’s social and physical surroundings”[10]. At the level of terrorist attacks, the failure to take threats seriously or consistently allow dangerous actors into the country with minimal safeguards would be recreant. Intelligence relating to the potential of terrorists hijacking commercial airliners to use as roving bombs was routinely ignored. The aftermath of 9/11, rather than a reassessment of the misplaced powers of the intelligence-security apparatus, was the promotion and solidification of governing narratives that favoured an unrepentant American imperialism. Invading any country no matter the threat it posed so long as it provided a geopolitical crux upon which American power could be expanded. Equally, the 7/7 attacks and the Manchester Arena bombing were the outcome of lax immigration policies and the enclaving of Muslim populations in the former and the use of proxy Jihadis in Libya to further destabilise the Middle East in the latter, leading one of its fighters to return to the UK unchecked and then bomb a concert. In nearly all cases of terrorist attacks, no matter their scale, the perpetrators were known to police and intelligence agencies[11].

One of the main questions that recreancy raises is that of accountability. “Is recreant behavior a result of a lack of will—motivation, resolve, or desire on the part of experts or specialized organizations—or is it a result of incompetence”[12]. Can anyone be held accountable for the lack of action or even wilful inaction of these institutions? Historically, the answer is clearly no. Every such attack, being treated as a structural deep event, has led to the entrenchment of these institutions as they reorganise lifescapes and foreclose political possibilities. “Nonetheless, leaders used these events to justify restrictions on civil liberties, a new American militarism, and a policy, unprecedented for the United States, of preemptive war”[13]. Operation Gladio has been reengineered to use Islamist terrorists as proxies[14] for the actions of governing networks and the realisation of logistical statecraft. The spirit of Operation Northwoods became operational as government agencies manipulated members of the Patriot movement and other right-wing fringe groups to bomb Oklahoma City, covering subsequent investigations of other perpetrators.

Moving into the realm of wilful action and manipulation, we see false flags as another mechanism of statecraft, constructing narratives and disrupting counter-narratives. False flags played a major role[15] in the expansion of the military-industrial complex via Pax Americana during the 20^th century, becoming a definitive aspect of statecraft as the means of guaranteeing American hegemony. “Either elements within the government or intelligence agencies take active measures to ensure an attack occurs, often called LIHOP (‘let it happen on purpose’) or they deliberately promote an enemy attack, often by using foreign operatives as proxies or by supporting, training and equipping genuine attackers. This is sometimes referred to as MIHOP (‘make it happen on purpose.’) When MIHOP ‘terrorist’ attacks take place these can be considered acts of ‘sponsored false flag terrorism.’ However, false flag attacks are not necessarily terrorist related and can also be pure military operations, unrelated to terrorism”[16].

The line between recreant acts and false flags is blurred. To engender chaos does not necessarily require wilful acts, but neither does it preclude the direct intervention of governing agencies to engineer such attacks and thereby manipulate the spatiotemporal field of ontological normality. One can see this in the remarkable similarity of major terrorist attacks around the world[17]. A system of patterning seems to occur whereby hearsay evidence is collected, ideological intention quickly attributed, convenient material being found (passports in the rubble of the Twin Towers, directly incriminating evidence on laptops or in apartments, etc.), eyewitness accounts that suggest a highly trained perpetrator or cadre rather than an amateurish lone wolf, and as previously mentioned their being known by intelligence agencies who allowed them to move around unchecked. This was particularly true with the 9/11 hijackers, Salman Abedi (the Manchester Arena bomber) and Ali Mohamed. In many cases, perpetrators are also informants for the FBI or MI5, as was the case with Mohamed and Abu Hamza.

The Heathrow liquid bomb hoax[18] presents a specific case of such patterning, being a portent of the Manchester Arena bombing. In August 2006 a supposed terror plot involving TATP explosives was foiled with a series of arrests made. Incendiary claims by the British Home Office and American DHS suggested this as the next 9/11 or 7/7. However, much of the evidence obtained was reliant on information obtained from Pakistan’s ISI (notorious for their extraordinary renditions i.e. torture). Many of the arrestees didn’t have passports, making an airborne attack exceptionally difficult (even for incompetent airport security). In the end, charges failed to stick. But the narrative structure of a TATP device that could produce everyday terrorism was there. British security services had a track record of making up or exaggerating threats related to TATP explosives.

We move from false flags which are definitively real events created by specific actors to false false flags, narrative constructions reliant on the stirring of chaos as an end in itself. Relating to the August 2006 hoax, Nafeez Ahmed noted that its purpose was political arbitrage on the part of Blair, even at the expense of capitalist interests like the airline industry which lost millions through impromptu closures and new security requirements. “It’s always a psychological attack aimed at our perception of the world or of certain groups of humans, or certain alleged dangers”[19]. The Manchester Arena bombing, as well as other recent terrorist attacks, have become a blend of fact and fiction. No longer a case of event manipulation, there’s now event construction.

David Hughes’ series on the Manchester Arena bombing demonstrated a series of discrepancies in eyewitness testimonies, emergency services protocols and visual evidence vs. the official narrative that showed whatever happened in the arena does not fit into a holistic story. Whether a pure hoax or merely a series of discordant narrative fragments designed to create chaos and disengage critical examination, these are events whose purpose has become overtly psychological, disrupting lifeways not just through pure violence and the manipulation of trauma time but through ontological violence designed to make the public sphere passive. Questioning the narrative no longer matters, it’s about manipulating the responses themselves to serve ulterior agendas. One can question in the same liberation that one can be liberated in trauma time. It is ultimately fruitless, as it is inculcated into the same narrative strictures. Those who question, like Richard D. Hall, become part of the construction itself as warnings to others who ask questions of these events. False false flags are geopolitical theatre, useful in the same way as recreant acts and false flags – the furtherance of postmodern sovereignties and their obscure network forms. The abstraction of the friend-enemy distinction means the abstraction of the narrative itself. Obvious discrepancies don’t matter because it is not designed to be foolproof. They are there to demarcate the spaces of political possibility.

“Two conspicuous elements proposed are ‘invacuation’ (safe entry) and ‘lockdown’ measures. Consistent with the ‘Covid-19’ era, we see the relentless ‘securitizing’ of society, with the public subjected to increasingly draconian measures, even to enjoy a concert or sporting event. It is not difficult to envisage a digital ID — the gateway to technocracy — as a necessary requirement to meet the ‘invacuation’ measures”[20].

“San Bernardino, along with staged-managed events like the sensational Garland Shooting in April 2015, and the highly engineered Paris Attacks (January & November of 2015) and many other shootings this year and year’s past – have conveniently opened the door for sweeping ‘national security’ changes, while at the same time reigniting the old War on Terror meme, rebranded as the ‘War on Radical Islam’, for new audiences to be politically seduced by western media and politicians alike”[21].

New audiences to be inculcated into invacuation measures, to be made malleable to digital forms of identification. This is involuted in that the digitalisation of identity across media platforms and APIs is the creation of chaos in identity itself, the creation of fragmented and disputed identity with various proprietary trails intersecting and contradicting. Postmodern statecraft abounds in the liminal space of security and economic crises. “It is possible likewise to see the potential attraction to hedge funds with a penchant for buying assets on dips created by chaos. Some ‘conspiracy theorists’ suggest that the Labour regime and Deep State more generally need to clamp a full-on surveillance state on us before End State capitalism runs out of money, or the full toxicity of mRNA becomes undeniable”[22].

Two recent terrorist attacks indicated the potential evolution of the narrative patterning. The intensification of false flags has been representative of the American empire and the concomitant globalisation of communication technology and logistical flows. They are analogous to the other, America being the liberal empire[23], the multicultural melting pot of cultural homogenisation. Operation Gladio and its successors were there to foreclose the space of possibilities into a control grid of wholly surveilled centres and desiccated peripheries. With the evolution and decline of the American empire and the emergence of forms of postmodern statecraft that signal a regionalised series of new centres, the forms of narrative structure have adapted.

The Manchester synagogue attack in October 2025 had the hallmarks of a chaotically structured event. Two victims, one shot by the police. Instantaneous attributions of terrorist activity, followed by large numbers of arrests and subsequent releases. The counter-terrorism police’s timeline demonstrates such[24]. “Minutes after the first call was made to GMP and as firearms officers were making their way to the scene, Al Shamie called 999 claiming responsibility for the attack. He also pledged allegiance to Islamic State”. Similar behaviour to the Paris attackers in 2017 who loudly declared the attack on behalf of Al-Qaeda in Yemen. ISIS is now little more than a branding opportunity, a way of signalling that this is definitely a terrorist attack. “We have conducted assessments across our systems, and I can reiterate that Al-Shamie had never been referred to the PREVENT programme, nor was otherwise known to Counter Terrorism Policing”. How could this be known so soon? It took years of inquiries to uncover the truth of Salman Abedi’s connections to British intelligence, yet somehow Manchester police knew instantaneously that he was never regarded as a terror suspect. It also conveniently ignores Al Shamie’s recent arrest for rape, which meant he was known to the police.

The aftermath presented similar discrepancies. In the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bombing, we were told don’t look back in anger[25]. A psyop designed to pacify anger against Muslim immigrants and their enclave populations, to prevent native Brits from questioning why we house a hostile population. The necessity was shown later in 2024 when Axel Rudakubana showed the power of anger to construct counter-narratives and the equal power of the state to crush dissent. No such invocations followed the synagogue attack. Instead, Netanyahu suggested the attack was an indirect consequence of Britain’s recognition of the sovereignty of the Palestinian authority. Jews were allowed to look back in anger.

The Institute of Strategic Dialogue[26] and other pet think tanks of global networks suggested further crackdowns on freedom of speech to combat antisemitism (a nothing problem in the UK exaggerated by ridiculous definitions and hate incident reporting). GNET suggested the British government “revisit their strategic communications playbooks and consider whether they need to be more authoritative; Issue safety messages warning of the prevalence of misinformation and conspiracy theories during this window; Conduct preventative measures ahead of time to build general media/digital literacy and ‘prebunk’ such narratives”[27]. Such preventative measures are undefined, but in practice mean limiting the scope through which one can criticise Israel or Jewish power. We’ve already seen Bridget Phillipson request universities crackdown on antisemitism[28].

The Bondi Beach attack in December 2025 bears similarities. Perpetrators declaring themselves part of the ISIS marketing team, strange eyewitness testimonies and unbelievable coincidences. A Holocaust survivor was caught up in the shooting, as was a survivor of the October 7^th attacks. The latter happened to be capable of taking a selfie despite blood dripping from a wound on his head[29]. Its laughable but it doesn’t matter, as it further closes the window of political enquiry. Jews were killed and that’s all that matters. The response shows this, as Australia has introduced stronger speech codes to prevent antisemitism and thereby curtail criticism of Israel, a country increasingly troubled by widespread recognition of the PA and growing discontent in American and European (Israel’s cash cows) populations to their decimation of Gaza.

These two events indicate the evolution of postmodern statecraft as one of its bastard children, the Pax Judaica, emerges as a governing logic of new forms of logistical sovereignty. Two attacks that invoke a global need to tackle antisemitism[30] and maintain the dominance of Jewish power networks in the West. “In this context there isn’t an actual enemy threatening their very existence, but a scapegoat elicited for three purposes: To prop up a declining Israel and expand the censorship regime; Attempt to induce fear into common Jews, manufacturing their consent behind these authorities (oligarchs and organized political pressure groups) via a mind virus of constant siege mentality; and amplify “prophecies” about Edom, whose persecutions are expected (and even to be engineered) as part of some unfolding messianic plan”[31].

In the context of the Jerusalem summit, the necessity of these false flag psyops becomes more evident. “The answer, I suspect, lies in the way in which our political institutions have been systematically captured by elements favourable to, and often funded by, Israel – a reality that has become all too obvious since the onslaught against Gaza began”[32]. As the summit proselytised, the main aim of Israeli foreign policy must be the delegitimisation of the pro-Palestinian narrative and the removal of international agents critical of Israel. Operation Gladio, as a blueprint of statecraft, has evolved again in the rise of Israeli and Jewish interests as the paramount global concern.

We are witnessing economic stagnation, technological revolution and the dying lights of Pax Americana. What’s emerging is a more chaotic regionalised set of centre-periphery relations that make up a postmodern statecraft of increasing instability. Controlling the narrative through any means necessary is of prime importance. “The establishment only bestows this level of extraordinary attention (and therefore power) on narratives and people that it controls, as there is no benefit to them in heavily promoting an organic narrative that they don’t control, as they don’t know how it will develop or whether these developments will be in the interests of the agenda they wish to promote”[33]. But which establishment, and how? It isn’t just the case that we are seeing more information and more cracks in the establishment narrative, but a more involuted narrative construction that lives with the chaos. Look at the Epstein revelations and look what little they’ve done to the geopolitical landscape. We are happily ruled over by criminals and rapists but there is no visible alternative. One can only steer into the chaos, allowing illegibility to grow from it. We are in a time of monsters and minnows will not survive.

[1] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2026/01/31/empowering-the-narrative-pax-judaica-and-control-of-the-public-sphere/

[2] https://mintpressnews.cn/mega-group-maxwells-mossad-spy-story-jeffrey-epstein-scandal/261172/

[3] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2022/04/29/the-logistical-state/

[4] https://unlimitedhangout.com/2019/09/investigative-series/how-the-cia-mossad-and-the-epstein-network-are-exploiting-mass-shootings-to-create-an-orwellian-nightmare/

[5] https://winteroak.org.uk/2023/06/26/criminocracy-and-its-lies/

[6] https://www.mintpressnews.com/shocking-origins-jeffrey-epstein-blackmail-roy-cohn/260621/

[7] Duncan Bell, Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship Between Past and Present

[8] https://www.journalof911studies.com/a-plausibility-probe-of-911-and-covid-19-as-structural-deep-events/

[9] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2025/12/29/deep-politics-and-the-perpetual-enemy/

[10] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08941920.2012.690066

[11] https://iaindavis.com/islamist-extremists-proxies-of-the-west-part-4/

[12] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08941920.2012.690066