You aren't being played. The powerful have used this strategy to keep the citizenry divided and in conflict for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Governments literally create false realities to keep people in conflict. That is so that populations remain fearful of each other and divided and do not unite to overthrow the elites. It is a part of a strategy of tension that has been employed for at least hundreds of years through governments and probably thousands of years through religions.

We are manipulated into a distrust of one another along racial lines. The following is a passage from Howard Zinn's "A People's History..."

Black and white worked together, fraternized together. The very fact that laws had to be passed after a while to forbid such relations indicates the strength of that tendency. In 1661 a law was passed in Virginia that "in case any English servant shall run away in company of any Negroes" he would have to give special service for extra years to the master of the runaway Negro. In 1691, Virginia provided for the banishment of any "white man or woman being free who shall intermarry with a negro, mulatoo, or Indian man or woman bond or free."

from another section:

Bacon's Rebellion brought together groups from the lower classes. White frontiersmen started the uprising because they were angry about the way the colony was being run. Then white servants and black slaves joined the rebellion. They were angry, too-mostly about the huge gap between rich and poor in Virginia. The greatest fear of wealthy southern planters was that black slaves and poor whites would combine in another uprising like Bacon's Rebellion. One tool to keep blacks and whites from uniting was racism. Edmund Morgan , a historian of slavery in Virginia , wrote in his American Slavery, American Freedom that racism was not a "natural" feeling about the differ¬ences between black and white. Instead, white leaders encouraged a negative view of blacks. If poor whites felt contempt for African Americans, they were less likely to join with them in rebellion.

It's the same strategy gone global. And now that we have instant global communication, they can't just lie about it in the newspaper and trick everyone. They have to actually act it out or find patsies to act it out for them.

Think about it... do you actually have reason to hate anyone? ....or have you only been taught who you should hate? Do you actually know for certain that the individuals in every "terrorist act" are actually who we are told they are? Would the people have actually had the motivation or resources to commit an act of terror or were they only able to do it because a government agency enabled it?

These are all legitimate questions.

http://www.sott.net/article/125878-The-Strategy-of-Tension-NATOs-Secret-War-Against-Europe

Daniele Ganser, professor of contemporary history at Basel University (Switzerland) and chairman or the ASPO - Switzerland, published a landmark book about "NATO's Secret Armies." According to him, during the last 50 years the United States have organized bombings in Western Europe that they have falsely attributed to the left and the extreme left with the purpose of discrediting them in the eyes of their voters. This strategy is still present today, inspiring fear for the Islam and justifying wars on oil.

Tufts Professor, Michael Glennon, even explains this in his book "National Security and Double Government". The TL;DR is basically that you don't have any choice or right to self-determination anymore because anything can be justified in the name of "national security". http://harvardnsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Glennon-Final.pdf

National security policy in the United States has remained largely constant from the Bush Administration to the Obama Administration. This continuity can be explained by the “double government” theory of 19th-century scholar of the English Constitution Walter Bagehot. As applied to the United States, Bagehot’s theory suggests that U.S. national security policy is defined by the network of executive officials who manage the departments and agencies responsible for protecting U.S. national security and who, responding to structural incentives embedded in the U.S. political system, operate largely removed from public view and from constitutional constraints. The public believes that the constitutionally-established institutions control national security policy, but that view is mistaken. Judicial review is negligible; congressional oversight is dysfunctional; and presidential control is nominal.

Need people to be afraid of "muslim terrorists"? So you saw that video off the Charlie Hebdo thing, right? Here is what I saw. I'm no expert, but I have been putting in a lot of time into reading and learning how these operations work: I saw a couple of professionals work smoothly and cleanly. They had a very well-planned out attack and made a nice escape. It certainly did not look like a couple of guys who have never seen action and suddenly self-radicalized. Even if you have trained, unless you have seen a lot of action and can control yourself, then you are going to be panicked and scattered. Those guys were smooth and in control.

Not only that, but the big tip-off to me was the leaving behind of the ID cards. This always conveniently happens. Oswald's wallet, James Earl Ray's "bundle of evidence", and even the passports that miraculously showed up at 9/11. It's a common tactic because it works so well on the general population and spin control through their agents in the media can discredit those who point out the absurdity.

Now what happened the next day?

Well, a couple of guys took some hostages in a bakery or something. This is where those agents who try to find people willing to become radicals come in. If you had to make something like this happen, what do you do? You probably show them that you can get them money and weapons. You probably use your knowledge of other fake acts by other agents to show them that you are connected to the terrorists. Then you tell them, "The signal is coming. There will be an attack today, then muslims like us everywhere across Europe will stage a coordinated attack. Your mission will be to hold hostages in this bakery!" Then they see the attack happen and believe that it is real. These aren't ever really bright people to begin with so they never figure out they are being set up. The reality is those poor patsies would have probably never had a vector to do anything at all if these agencies had never enabled them. Do you think they got those guns by themselves? Seriously... this is how those types of things operate. You have to create an illusion like a magician. If you go and look at those JTRIG slides, that's exactly what they talk about. These guys love to compare themselves to magicians that create false realities. Examples here: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/02/24/art-deception-training-new-generation-online-covert-operations/ and here: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

I know it sounds like madness, but we have some really famous quotes to back it up:

William Casey, CIA Director 1981-1987: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." —Unnamed White House aide[1] The quote is now widely attributed to Karl Rove

This is what Karl Rove meant by "we are history's actor's". They are literally creating a reality of their own choosing (that of course serves themselves) for the masses to move them to the actions that they want them to.

edited for formatting.