The Old False-Flag-Attack-by-Ultra-Nationalists Trick?

Virtually all terror is planned and organized by rich people. Sensible people understand that attacking innocents in response to attacks on other innocents compounds the original crime. But power grows out of a gun barrel, and a habit of murder marks the most powerful in every society. Ordinary morality is a social survival characteristic: Under harsh conditions, a group of people will do best if mutual aid and cooperation constitute the norm. In contrast, the rich are a social class founded by those who prey upon the consequent prevalence of ordinary morality: when most people are moral, cheaters, liars, thieves and bullies tend to accumulate power.

Religion is one of the most important lies. Bullying people into espousing propositions which contradict reason trains them to suppress their own critical faculties and blindly believe their pastors. Controlling the shepherds, the criminal rich control the flock and can thus amplify their personal criminality into terrorism, war and genocide.

Of course, the powerful authors of terror use their control over religion and (more recently) the mass media either to deflect blame toward their opponents or, in the case of torture, to suppress public condemnation. Historical terror blamed on mobs, domestic political progressives or foreigners generally turns out, on examination, to have been incited, organized, and funded by wealthy factions in a bid to maintain or increase their political power. Rent-a-mobs heralded the end of the Roman Republic and pestered the Empire's capitals until the fall of Byzantium. Pogroms in medieval Germany and Greater Poland oppressed not only Jews but also the rising middle class which Jews spearheaded, thus extending feudal power and feudal misery in Middle Europe for a century or two.

The Reichstag Fire, which the Nazis, fronting for a cabal of the richest men in Germany, falsely blamed on the communists, served as a pretext for the imposition of dictatorship. The Second World War began a few years later when the Nazis staged a fake battle scene on the border and pretended that Poland had attacked them. Decades later, a leading member of the putatively communist Baader-Meinhof terrorists in West Germany was a secret federal police agent, later publicly active as a neo-Nazi. The Bologna train station bombing in 1980 and the Aldo Moro kidnapping, blamed on leftists, were actually committed by wealthy fascist “stay-behind” paramilitary groups organized under the American CIA's Operation Gladio. The explosives for the 1993 New York World Trade Center bombing were supplied by a federal police infiltrator. The 9/11 attacks, blamed on foreign arabs, were actually organized and managed by some group with enough power and inside access to wire three huge skyscrapers for controlled demolition unmolested and stand down Air Force interception of three out of four lumbering passenger jetliners.

Applying the precepts above to the Mumbai attacks of November 2008, one is led immediately to doubt the Indian government's hasty claim that Pakistan is to blame, and to consider first instead the hypothesis that a well-funded group of home-grown ultra-nationalists might be responsible. And in fact just such a group has been implicated in recent bombings in India. A Lieutenant Colonel of Indian Military Intelligence linked with extremist Hindu paramilitaries has been arrested¹ on suspicion of having supplied the cyclonite used to bomb the Samjhauta Express Train in February 2007 and a location in Malegaon this past September. Moreover, with elections looming, the opposition Hindu nationalist BJP published an expensive front-page newspaper advertisement while last week's attacks on Mumbai were ongoing, citing them to portray the more moderate ruling Congress party as weak.

It seems improbable to me, a priori, that Israel could really have been involved in the attacks². After all, the Hindu military has a tradition stretching back centuries or millenia; surely even its craziest planners can organize and mount a commando raid against unarmed civilians on the waterfront without the Mossad's help! Moreover, involving other nations in such a gambit radically increases the odds that the fraud will be exposed. Reports cited below of Europeans among the terrorists are interesting, but, if true, imply that some of them either escaped or were secretly captured by the Indian authorities.

However, there is an alternate scenario, under which Pakistan's executive branch might benefit from such an attack, and which would explain the appearance of such reports as ISI propaganda (or perhaps that's all they are, regardless): Pakistan has announced a large troop movement of 100,000 soldiers from the Afghan border to the Indian in response to the elevated risk of war with India resulting from the Mumbai attack. Perhaps this movement, which will take Pakistani forces out of direct military conflict against the USA, Pakistan's primary foreign patron, is the goal. Targeting civilians in Mumbai instead of some town in Kashmir would maximize the war tension generated by this small military operation.

On the other hand, maybe Mustaque Ali is right.