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What you are attempting is to set ground for claiming that because events of 'type X' have occurred, that 'event A' is an event of 'type X'. It does not hold. It is analogous to someone accusing you of telling a lie, and offering as proof that lies have been told prior to your speaking. You would probably not accept that as proof you were engaged in mendacity, nor should anyone else.
The term 'false flag' seems to have leaked out from intelligence jargon into general usage, and to have under-gone some alteration during the journey. The original usage referred to an asset who was deceived about who he or she was actually providing information to, or engaged in other business for. As an example, a person might be persuaded to photograph documents detailing a metallurgic process under the impression he was providing information to a business competitor, rather than to an agent of a foreign power. The term has now come to mean, to many people, an action carried out by agents of a government against its citizens, that is passed off as having been done instead by a foreign power or a criminal group. Incidents of this sort have in fact been carried out from time to time, but that this is so proves nothing at all about any particular incident in which the people or armed forces of a country are attacked. Two well known instances of this sort are typical of such actions, and worth some detail accordingly.
In Manchuria, in 1931, a cabal of Japanese officers arranged for a small explosive charge to be set off on the tracks of the South Manchurian Railway, outside the city of Mukden, with the blast being blamed on Chinese troops quartered nearby, and being used as pretext to activate an action plan for protecting the railway by disarming Chinese garrisons along the line. The explosion was very small; indeed, an express train ran over the rails moments after the detonation, and its crew reported no more than a certain 'swaying' of the train. No real damage was done. All that was necessary was for a 'bang!' to be heard and reported.
Part of the Nazi plan for commencing invasion of Poland in 1939 called for a force of SS men dressed in Polish uniforms to 'attack' a radio station in a German town on the border the night before the invasion was set to begin, so it could be claimed the Poles had started hostilities against Germany. The disguised SS men brought along several prisoners condemned to death by the Nazi regime, who were killed on the scene to provide corpses to back the claim of fighting in the town. Apart from these unfortunates, there were no casualties. The event was duly trumpeted in German newspapers and radio broadcasts, and the invasion that morning presented to the populace as a response to this crowning provocation by the Poles.
The most striking element of both these incidents is the lack of real harm done, and this is indeed typical of such efforts. Neither the officer conspirators of Imperial Japan's Manchurian garrison, nor the Hitlerite regime, can be faulted as lacking in ruthlessness, and so it is instructive that the actual damage was so slight. It would certainly have been possible for a charge on the tracks in Manchuria to have wrecked that express train, or for the SS men to have killed a goodly number of civilians in that border town, after all. But even in fully totalitarian milieus, maintaining the fiction would have been problematic, and so the planners made sure to avoid the unnecessary risk.
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