History Main / PretextForWar

The leaders of Viridia and Tyria want to go to war. Not for a [[SillyReasonForWar silly reason]], but due to anything from good old fashioned jingoism, greed, political/economic/religious differences, or a good old fashioned historical grudge. However, they can't just out and out declare war, [[SarcasmMode that would be uncivilized!]] So instead they will wait for or manufacture a Pretext For War out of whatever should come their way.

* Used in ''ModernWarfare 2'', where Private Allen's corpse is used as a pretext for the war-happy Ultranationalists to give them an excuse to invade the United States.

** An American soldier massacring Russian civilians is legitimate cause for war.
*** This trope is actually active on both the Russian and American sides in different ways. The Russians have been looking for an excuse to go to war with America for years, and are just waiting for a catalyst. Even if the US was completely uninvolved, there's a fairly decent chance they would have blamed the CIA anyway. Indeed, they may have done just that. A well known internationally wanted terrorist is seen, plain as day, strolling into an airport with a machinegun. Even though Allen's corpse is left there, the only thing that would identify him as a CIA agent (or even an American for that matter) is information being fed to the Russian government by a terrorist organization or the game's villian (who are both less than reputable). On the American side, Allen is there for the sole purpose of BEING the catalyst, and his mission was made from the start.

* WorldWarI. The assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was just an excuse for the annexation of Serbia. Which sounds a bit unreasonable until you realise that the very existence of Serbia, an independent nation of ethnic Serbs who aimed to someday unite all of Yugoslavia, was a threat to the unity of the Habsburgs' multi-national empire. Right from the start they thought that, with Germany backing them all the way, Russia would back down rather than risk war with them 'and' Germany at the same time, as happened 6 years before over the formal annexation of Habsburg-occupied, technically Ottoman Bosnia.
** Furthermore, right from the start the German High Command's universally accepted plan of action was the Schlieffen plan, which involved invading France through Belgium and taking her out of the equation before the Russian steamroller could mobilise and flatten the Allies from the east. So when Russia mobilised her armies Germany delivered an ultimatum to France as a pretext for war, demanding her neutrality and asking her to hand over fortresses integral to France's defences along their shared border within 24 hours. The French were only too happy to refuse with indignation; the ''Revanche''-ist movement, a movement seeking revenge for France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the re-annexation of the province of Elsaß-Lothringen (Alsace-Lorraine) was a force not to be denied.

* ''GalacticCivilizations 2'' has a random event where people from one civ automatically assassinates a very high-ranking politician of another civ, forcing war between the two.

-->''Of course you realize, this means war!''
-->--'''Groucho Marx'''

* The plot behind ''ThePrincessBride''.

* The manufacture of such a pretext is a major plot point in both the film and book versions of ''ThePrincessBride''.

* The Silurian captured by the humans in the recent ''DoctorWho'' two-parter hopes to be killed and tries to get killed, just to start the war.

Point is, an incident any two sane heads of state would quietly defuse is treated as a RantInducingSlight in order to start the war.

**** Or to make a long story short, some people wanted some stuff and threatened war but only kind of wanted a war. Some other people didn't want to give it to them but kind of wanted a war too. No-one really meant to but everyone started having a war. A really, really big war. Then 4 years later they all thought to themselves, 'Why the hell did we do that?'

* ''[[{{Tintin}} Tintin and the Broken Ear]]''. A CorruptCorporateExecutive encourages Tintin (then working as the aide to a BanannaRepublic's dictator) to declare war on a neighbouring country. Tintin point-blank refuses, so the executive frames him and he's forced to flee the country in a staff car. The car is fired upon by the [[BorderCrossing border guards]] and the incident is then used as an excuse for war.

* ''[[{{Tintin}} Tintin and the Broken Ear]]''. A CorruptCorporateExecutive encourages Tintin (then working as the aide to a BannanaRepublic's dictator) to declare war on a neighbouring country. Tintin point-blank refuses, so the executive frames him and he's forced to flee the country in a staff car. The car is fired upon by the [[BorderCrossing border guards]] and the incident is then used as an excuse for war.

* The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident Gleiwitz Incident]] was used as a pretext for Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939. SS officers in Polish uniforms attacked a radio station near the Polish border and broadcast anti-German propaganda. They even dressed a prisoner in Polish uniform and shot him to add authenticity.

* The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident Gleiwitz Incident]] was used as a pretext for Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939. SS officers in Polish uniforms attacked a radio station near the Polish border and broadcast anti-German propaganda. They even dressed several concentration camp inmates in the same uniforms and shot them to add authenticity.

* The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident Gleiwitz Incident]] was used as a pretext for Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939. SS officers in Polish uniforms attacked a radio station and broadcast anti-German propaganda. They even dressed several concentration camp inmates in the same uniforms and shot them to add authenticity.

* The War of Jenkins' Ear
** For those who are not into obscure history, the British had managed to get themselves exclusive rights to trade slaves in the Spanish colonies in America, but at the cost of Spanish crews being allowed to board British ships and search their cargo. Relations became rather strained, and then a one-eared merchant captain by the name of Jenkins showed up in Parliament with a severed ear and a story of Spanish brutality that sparked the above war. It is doubtful as to whether the ear exhibited in Parliament was actually Jenkins' lost ear, as historians today and his contemporaries believe that he lost his ear in a bar fight years before.

* In DragonAgeII, the centerpiece of [[spoiler: Anders' BatmanGambit is that Knight-Commander Meredith would use his attack on the Kirkwall Chantry as a pretext for declaring open war against the Mages.]]