Arson is the original false flag tool, the ultimate political weapon. From Nero to the Nazis it has been wielded to great effect and for a variety of purposes, political and otherwise.
"Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City" By Bench Ansfield (due to be available for purchase in August 2025).
A revelatory account of the wave of arson-for-profit that hit American cities in the 1970s, and of the tenants who put out the fires and reclaimed their neighborhoods.“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” Supposedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, the phrase encapsulated an entire chaotic era in this nation’s history. Across the 1970s, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, leveling poor communities of color. However, as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames, the majority of those fires weren’t set by residents—as is usually assumed—but by landlords seeking insurance payouts. Ansfield introduces the term “brownlining” for the subprime insurance practices imposed by the federal government and insurance industry after 1968, and shows why, with buildings worth more dead than alive, landlords turned to the torch. In an expansive narrative stretching from the Bronx to Britain to Brazil, Ansfield tracks the flows of money that signaled the arrival of our financialized age. From the ashes arose the modern tenant movement and the fight for housing justice amid a new era of housing insecurity.Bench Ansfield is an assistant professor of history at Temple University. Ansfield holds a PhD in American studies from Yale University and won the Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in American history from the Society of American Historians.
An excerpt from, "Organized Arson as a Political Crime. The Construction of a Terrorist Menace in the Early Modern Period" By Johannes Dillinger, Crime, History and Societies, 2006:
The list of those who allegedly engaged in secret warfare against their enemies by hiring vagabonds as arsonists is long and impressive. A few examples shall suffice. One of the earliest cases of politically motivated organized arson is the Bundschuh of 1517. Prior to the Great Peasants’ War (1524-1526) the German Southwest experienced a number of peasant rebellions, the so-called Bundschuh upheavals3. The term Bundschuh was originally used for cheap footwear worn by peasants. As rebellious peasants chose the Bundschuh as their symbol the word ‘Bundschuh’ took the meaning of ‘organized peasant upheaval’. There were Bundschuh activities in 1493 in Schlettstadt (Alsace), 1502 in Untergrombach (Baden), 1513 in Lehen near Freiburg im Breisgau and supposedly in 1517 in the entire upper Rhine region on both sides of the river. None of these rebellions succeeded. The sixteenth century Bundschuh risings were all supposed to have been initiated and organized by the same man: Joss Fritz, a peasant and surveyor of the fences from the village of Untergrombach. After the failure of his two earlier insurgencies Fritz supposedly chose a new tactic in 1517. He allegedly recruited a large number of vagabonds. In turn, these vagabonds were to recruit new adherents to the Bundschuh among the rural population. In addition to that, the vagarants were paid to raise fires at the beginning and throughout the uprising. One of these vagabonds was arrested and betrayed all the plans of Fritz. Thus, the 1517 Bundschuh revolt was over before it even started. In 1524 three hundred houses burned down in Troyes. The damage was blamed on vagabonds who were said to work for the Habsburgs. These arsonists were allegedly about to target other towns in France. At the imperial diet at Regensburg in 1540, the Protestant estates demanded that emperor Charles V should take action against a Catholic conspiracy. This conspiracy supposedly planned to eradicate the new creed by destroying whole regions: a series of arsonist attacks by vagrant beggars were to raze Protestant towns and villages to the ground. As one might expect, Heinrich von Braunschweig was supposed to pull the strings of this conspiracy in the Reich while the pope himself financed this gigantic autodafé. In German Habsburg countries there were rumours about arsonist attacks organized by the Hussites in the 1420s, by the Venetians in early sixteenth century and finally by the Turks from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In the sixteenth century, princes who had been forced out of their territories were suspected to have made pacts with itinerant arsonists to prepare the military retaking of their respective lands. Duke Ulrich of Württemberg and Albrecht Alcibiades von Brandenburg-Kulmbach are well-known examples. On a smaller scale, members of Southwestern Germany’s lower nobility were accused of having enlisted the help of Mordbrenner against the domineering power of the dukes of Württemberg. After the devastating fire of London, British cities took measures against vagrants who were said to be the henchmen of the Quakers, or of the Catholics. These religious minorities were supposed to be eager to spread terror and insecurity in the Anglican kingdom. There were rumours about organized crime in Poland in the seventeenth century. A Polish secret organization was said to offer the ‘services’ of tramps as arsonists. Probably the best-know example of politically motivated organized arson is that of the arsonist scare in revolutionary France. During the Grande Peur especially the rural population feared a pact between the aristocracy and the itinerant poor. The vagrants were to raise fires to destroy the crops and to spread fear and tumult in order to stop the revolutionary movement. During the English ‘Captain Swing’ protests of the 1830s it was rumoured that Irish itinerant working men were paid by wealthy Jews to commit arson. The adherents of ‘Captain Swing’ were at pains to emphasize that they did not cooperate with the fireraisers.
The day after the fire, at Hitler's request, President Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree into law by using Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. The Reichstag Fire Decree suspended most civil liberties in Germany, including habeas corpus, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right of free association and public assembly, and the secrecy of the post and telephone. These rights were not reinstated during Nazi reign. The decree was used by the Nazis to ban publications not considered friendly to the Nazi cause. Despite the fact that Marinus van der Lubbe claimed to have acted alone in the Reichstag fire, Hitler, after having obtained his emergency powers, announced that it was the start of a wider communist effort to take over Germany. Nazi Party newspapers then published this fabricated story. This sent the German population into a panic and isolated the communists further among the civilians; additionally, thousands of communists were imprisoned in the days following the fire (including leaders of the Communist Party of Germany) on the charge that the Party was preparing to stage a putsch. Speaking to Rudolph Diels about communists during the Reichstag fire, Hitler said "These sub-humans do not understand how the people stand at our side. In their mouse-holes, out of which they now want to come, of course they hear nothing of the cheering of the masses." With communist electoral participation also suppressed (the communists previously polled 17% of the vote), the Nazis were able to increase their share of the vote in the 5 March 1933 Reichstag elections from 33% to 44%. This gave the Nazis and their allies, the German National People's Party (who won 8% of the vote), a majority of 52% in the Reichstag.
