Of course, the citizens of every state needs must care about their own lives first — biological, familial and otherwise social, financial, emotional, spiritual. Security and stability in those aspects of life are generally part of everyone’s quality of living.
That Putin has been able to sustain and transform many aspects of the defunct Soviet Union tells a story about the kind of political power exercised in relation to malignant narcissism. In effect, he has got Russia revolving around himself, and for the discomforts he has caused, the Russians have channels today for faith and patriotism. The “Communists” are gone but the essence of the old nomenklatura has been transformed into an ultra-nationalist and neo-imperial enterprise.
The public that has wished to take an interest in foreign affairs has plenty of information — responsible, valid, and reliable — for working, but large constituencies may only attend to so much in aggregate. I would not think of such as “ignorant masses” but rather people with families and jobs and struggles and worries of their own. They may find what they need to know WHEN it matters to them, when the dots circle back to their own interests, and they perceive that.
The stimulus for the response made note of the people voting Putin into power.
And here’s a little bit of history on the relationship between the Soviet Union and the application of political terrorism as a normal part of its politics:
Of course, every “Allahu Akbar” attack promotes a strong patriotic and nationalist response, but if the same were normal or normative throughout Islam, the Kingdom, for starters, wouldn’t have to defend itself from such “challengers”, and Muslims, in general, would not be the first to be assaulted in the path of “jihad”. They would all be on the same page, right?
Islam, in both cultural and religious facets, has issues, no doubt, and it has its internal struggles to allay the same, but what the 1920s — Stalinism first (1920s), then the Muslim Brotherhood (1928), then Nazism (1930s as a nascent movement)) has just about planted in our 2020s needs to be recognized.
Islam is in the chaos, for sure, but it’s Moscow stirring it.
New thought? New data?
Have a look. Take it apart.
I hope we do not come to mirror the values of our fascist enemies.
This blog — and blogger — has been through this region in thought a few times, but a post like this one has to do with compression and distillation: how is one to wrap a lot of story into a brief post online that works both as a doorway and window into a world where the dots connect and the data may be fact checked, reviewed, worked, and still found standing?
Metonyms “Putin”, “Moscow”, “Russian State” may be considered as separate from Russia and the Russian People, who now have a troubled economy and have been once again subjugated by a powerful authoritarian state and kept dark and disinformed by state-controlled media.
The conversation to which the top portion of this post responds was pitched against Islam in its totality and the kind of barbarism and tribalism that have made the names of so many despotic states and terrorist organizations. I took exception to that approach because it’s the one that sustains issues central to conflict with and within Islam, for in the black and white and magical thinking — and fear — associated with the medieval mode, no one wins the war that becomes the war of all against all.
To get ahead of that kind of behavior demands having another look at how it developed both across long time and more recently in the worst of the “realpolitik” of the last century.
Update – December 5, 2016 – Related Reference
“The regime did not just open the door to the prisons and let these extremists out, it facilitated them in their work, in their creation of armed brigades,” said the former member of Syria’s Military Intelligence Directorate, one of more than a dozen of Syria’s secretive intelligence agencies.
The former officer said most of the releases happened over a period of four months up until October 2011 and that the project was overseen by the General Security Directorate, another of Syria’s widely feared security organisations and one of the most important.
“State media tells Russians that their military is only killing Islamic State fighters in Syria,” he says.
“Do you believe this is true?”
He grimaces and gestures for me to switch off my recorder.
It’s an understandable reaction. Rafiq’s not only afraid of Syrian intelligence officers; he’s also worried about Russian authorities who are increasingly intolerant of dissent. “If Russia really was just destroying Islamic State, that would be great,” he says. “But this is not the case, unfortunately. It is also killing many civilians and moderate rebels. My people are suffering every day from Russian bombs.”
Alghorani is convinced that members of ISIS were released strategically by Assad. “From the first days of the revolution (in March 2011), Assad denounced the organisation as being the work of radical Salafists, so he released the Salafists he had created in his prisons to justify the claim … If you do not have an enemy, you create an enemy.”
This three-part series documents the Syrian dictator’s sinister contributions to this tale of terrorism and horror. First, he tried to ingratiate himself with Western leaders by portraying the national uprising against him as a terrorist-led revolt. When that failed, he released jailed Islamic extremists who’d fought against U.S. troops in Iraq, then staged phony attacks on government facilities, which he blamed on terrorists. Far from fighting ISIS, Assad looked the other way when it set up a state-within-a-state with its capital in Raqqa, and left it to the U.S. and others to counter the Islamic extremists.
As AQI metastasized across Iraq and eventually became ISIS, Iran sought to position itself at the vanguard of the global effort against the terrorist group, claiming that it was dedicated to beating back its advances. However, Iran and its clients, particularly Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, have notably failed to dislodge ISIS from any significant territory. Former U.S. military intelligence officer Michael Pregent observed in May that Iran and its allied militias in Iraq did not extend themselves to fight the terror group, and concluded that “Iran needs the threat of ISIS and Sunni jihadist groups to stay in Syria and Iraq in order to become further entrenched in Damascus and Baghdad.” A month later, U.S. officials similarly charged Syria with bombing non-Islamist rebels “in support of ISIL’s advance on Aleppo,” which helped the terror group push back Syrian opposition factions that were fighting Assad’s regime.
Monday’s Ynet report on Iran’s ongoing financial support of Hamas, which the Gaza-based terrorist group partially uses to fund ISIS’s affiliate in the Sinai Peninsula, shed more light on Iran’s strategy of using its proxies to bolster ISIS.
Trump has also expressed interest in continuing to hold large rallies as he did throughout the campaign for “the instant gratification and adulation that the cheering crowds provide,” the Times wrote.
Russian troops attacked 3 times in the Donetsk sector, all of them in various places, involving use of heavy armor. Adversaries violated the ceasefire at the Svitlodarsk bulge and in Avdiivka. Every attack lasted 30 to 45 minutes. The enemy launched over 50 mortar shells at our positions. 21 insurgents’ attack took place in the Mariupol sector, and seven involved use of heavy arms. Ukrainian troops registered militants’ mortar attacks only in two points – Krasnohorivka and Vodiane. Over 80 mortar shells were launched at our positions. In total, Russian proxies are violating the ceasefire along the entire frontline. Ukrainian troops responded with fire in all the areas.
In the wake of Tuesday’s election in the United States, all too many commentators in the West appear to have forgotten that Vladimir Putin has been backing Donald Trump not because they are soul mates but rather as a means to a much larger end: the weakening of the US and the destruction of key institutions of Western integration like NATO.Putin may prove to be wrong in assuming that Trump will be an effective means to that end, but it is clear the Kremlin leader is far more pleased by the impact of the conflicts that have broken out in the US and by speculation in Western capitals about Washington’s loss of influence than simply by having Trump on his way to the White House.
Before Donald J. Trump does anything else, he’s going to have to articulate and navigate a position with Putin and a re-medievalized Russian security state.
One day, BackChannels will collect the books around the place and write a 3×5 card for each and by category — there are more volumes in “The Russian Section” than appear online. Nonetheless, and especially online for readers who arrive, much like the editor, with more curiosity than formal background in foreign affairs, international studies, and political science, there may be greater value in a short list — a short hallways with half a dozen doors — than in a comprehensive one.
In the online environment, such posts are stepping stones — no need to dwell: click on a selection and move on!
As a former anti-Semite and anti-Zionist campaigner, I am very worried about the recent wave of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incidents happening across the UK. I know anti-Semitism, I practised it and I can smell the threat which is on its way to the Jewish community of the UK.
“When I look at the flag of Israel, I realise the true meaning of this flag is as the symbol of those six million Jewish martyrs who sacrificed their most valuable lives for the future of their race and religion, for the future of their children and for the future of the only Jewish nation in the world.”
The true meaning of Israel’s flag isn’t about the Holocaust, which is just one event, however horrifying and ultimately ineffable it may have been, but signal of more than 5,000 years of the survival of Jewish culture, ethics, language, and law — and perhaps today signal as well of the survival of the influence of the same in others, much including Christians and Muslims, for without Moses in the hagiography, there would be neither Jesus nor Muhammad. There have been always other possibilities, but the lore and intellectual adventure of the Hebrews appears to have served the formation of the two great contemporary religions.
“As I have repeatedly said, it is not our fault that Russian – American relations are in that poor condition.”
If you’re a BackChannels regular or an enthusiast in political psychology, you know that the “malignant narcissist” — autocrat, bully, or dictator — is never wrong.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
Lest any forget, there’s plenty of reading at hand (these days: Amazon One-Click shopping may be the next best thing) for guarding against forgetting.
Posted by The Guardian, November 9, 2016.
BackChannels has framed contemporary conflict in terms of time, i.e., whether confronting Assad or, for a domestic example, the Ku Klux Klan, the modern person is actually rejecting the reappearance of the past in his own path.
For the most part, whether involving the aggressive Muslim Brotherhood aspect in contemporary Islam, the barbarism on display in Syria — and do “thank” Assad, Putin, and Khamenei for choosing that evil path — or the Russian invasion of Crimea, one is actually aiming the finger back at the world of Medieval Political Absolute Power, i.e., AKA the divine right of rule, rule by a presumptuously superior nature, rule by thuggery, and, most certainly, unquestionable authority, or authority beyond criticism and beyond law.
Putin : Medieval Political Absolutism
vs
Trump: Modern Democratic and Checked Distribution of Political Power
Choose.
Posted by VICE News, March 3, 2014.
While “western” political success and related productivity and affluence provide for western humanism and other aspects of idealism, “eastern” barbarism and suffering have left behind a world in which fear and insecurity appear to threaten those who should be in the most confident and secure of internal psychological states. Leadership in tribal cultures and states tend toward a winner-take-all — and loser-lose-all — position in their politics, and it may be that we mistake for a better politics and ennoble with the term “realpolitik”.
Our world pays a high price in general suffering — suffering associated horrors beyond imagining — for the emotional care and feeding of its “malignant narcissists” — its most damaged bad boys, the same that make themselves known as political and war criminals.
So:
Bashar al-Assad: war criminal?
Vladimir Putin: war criminal?
Ali Khamenei: political criminal?
As a class, dictators “exceed limits” — just as Muhammad warned 🙂 — and in doing so free themselves from other normative restraints while at the same time condemning themselves to remaining in political power at any cost (always to others).
In effect, the worlds of despots become worlds of political absolutes, and if for no other reason than the near impossibility of the retreat of their authors.
If over the past five years you had been a Syrian noncombatant, would you wish to see Bashar al-Assad a) remain in power, b) exiled, or c) hung in public?
If you had been swept off the streets of Tehran and dumped in Evin Prison (say for wearing that hijab a little to far to the back — or for being Baha’i or gay or western in outlook) , or if you had had family murdered by the Iranian regime, would you care to see Ali Khamenei’s term in power a) modified, b) truncated, c) “terminated with extreme prejudice”?
Has Putin a graceful retreat today — Syria was al-Assad’s war and armies, flyers especially, make mistakes; and Ukrainian autonomy was Khrushchev’s mistake, which was made with the confidence that Kiev would remain forever bent to Moscow?
Putin may have that.
And Trump may be wise to see that Putin, the Russian State, and the Russian People (of Russia proper) have that “out” — but to horse trade Ukraine, the European Union, the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization?
“Nyet” to all that!
(Liberal politics have come to mire judgment, unfortunately. Biography.com maintains a page titled “Political Criminals” but begs credulity by placing side-by-side J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, both of whom may have exceeded some boundaries in power, with Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Fidel Castro, and Idi Amin all of whom plainly represent the most reckless of minds and murderous of despots).
Historian John Bew suggests that much of what stands for modern realpolitik today deviates from the original meaning of the term. Realpolitik emerged in mid-19th century Europe from the collision of the enlightenment with state formation and power politics. The concept, Bew argues, was an early attempt at answering the conundrum of how to achieve liberal enlightened goals in a world that does not follow liberal enlightened rules.
If, as the poet says, America is not the world, then the world is surely owed an apology for the lack of attention paid to what ought to have been, and are, a series of alarming developments throughout Europe and the Middle East. Perhaps appropriately, all have involved or implicated a revanchist authoritarian power for which the incoming commander in chief has repeatedly professed his admiration and which, after having done all it could to facilitate an upset American electoral outcome—“maybe we helped a bit with WikiLeaks,” as pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov put it Wednesday morning—offers its hearty congratulations on his victory. Meanwhile, Russia’s alleged “wet work” and maneuvering outside the United States in the last two weeks has been even more impressive.
BackChannels 