2022-9 False-flags, Ukraine, Bosnia, Ossetia
Thursday, June 9, 2022 PRESS RELEASE on 9.6.2022: REFERENDUMS… OR ‘FALSE FLAGS’?
“The people will determine the future of Zaporizhzhia region. The referendum is scheduled for this year.” Vladimir Rogov, Kremlin spokesperson, quoted in TASS, yesterday.
False flags referendums are always binary, and “all the wars in the former Yugoslavia started with a referendum,” (Oslobodjenje, Sarajevo’s newspaper, 7.2.1999). Furthermore, most referendums do not identify the will of the people, or even the will of a majority… but only the will of he who wrote the question. (It’s usually a he, Hitler and other ‘democratic’ dictators, or dictatorial democrats like Tudjman.)
Zaporizhzhia So what is the question? “Simple majority decisions… cannot be fair in a democratic sense because the imposition of binary alternatives is itself unfair.” (William Riker, Liberalism against Populism.) And what about the people of Tatarskaya? Or Chechnya? Or Buryatskaya? (There are over 50 ethnic groups in the Russian Federation, a few in European Russia and the northern Caucasus, and dozens in Siberia.)
The March 2014 referendum in Crimea was followed by two other false-flag polls in May, in Donetsk and Luhansk. But if a ‘small’ part can opt out of the whole, then surely a ‘tiny’ part can opt out of the ‘small’… like those famous Russians dolls – matryoshki. The Russians used to call it “matryoshka nationalism,” until it suited Putin’s imperial politics in South Ossetia.
In 1920, Ireland opted out of UK; so Northern Ireland opted out of opting out and opted back in again. Like-wise in Ukraine: when Donetsk tried to opt out of Ukraine, two ‘tiny’ regions, Dobropillia and Krasnoarmiisk of nearly 3 million people voted, and 69% of them wanted to opt out of opting out and to stay in Ukraine.
As in the Balkans and the Caucasus, so too in Ukraine: only some referendums are recognised, only by some.
There was another referendum in 2014, in Scotland. And the word Scotland, ‘Shotlandiya’ (Шотландия), was used by Russian separatists in Luhansk, to ’justify’ the unjustifiable. We are all part of the problem. At the very least, people in Ireland and Scotland (as well as Catalonia) campaigning for a referendum should seek a multi-option poll, if only as an example to those in war zones like Zaporizhzhia, Republika Srpska and South Ossetia, all of which are rattling their sabres and ballot boxes, campaigning for false-flag, binary polls.
Peter Emerson, Director, the de Borda Institute
Russian speaker (and some of what was Serbo-Croat).
OSCE election observer in 10 contests in Ukraine, 2004-14; 1 in Russia, 2004; 4 in Bosnia, 1996-2000.
Member of the EUMM for South Ossetia in Georgia, 2008-9.
