Category Archives: 21st Century Feudal

FTAC — A Wrap-Up on Mentality — Malignant/Medieval and Reparative/Modern Narcissism

11 Monday Apr 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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In our common malignancy, perhaps, our narcissism lends repair to psychological damage to self concept. Life’s rough and in part insults us, less or more, but, again perhaps, the greater the insult to esteem — the heavier the hand — the more passionate the want of self-aggrandizement, security, and wealth.

In the healthy, it’s good having basic and somewhat above good circumstance in freedom, money, and general security. In the malignant, the same wants get Up There and Out There. On Back-Channels, I’ve likened such qualities to the recognized psychological pathologies that are bipolar disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. In our general political psychology and related sociology, we aspire and trade up in comfort and prestige, and we do that through laws an practices that accommodate a healthy general development with concern spanning the distance from penthouse to street.

The malignant do things quite differently.

Muammar Qaddafi’s Mullah Shweyga story (easily looked up) tells the difference. Such leaders take full advantage of the possession of the power to visit suffering on others with impunity. All of the crimes that may be visited on one may as well be extended to others: capricious “justice” or detainments, imprisonments, hangings, tortures. Each dictator asks: “who is going to stop me?” And off each goes into the high life on the backs of the hungry, the powerless, and vulnerable.

I’m always happy to share the Reuters piece on Khamenei (“Assets of the Ayatollah”), but I think it better that others embark on similar journeys as regards the entire host of figures whose power has proven malignant and resides in the brutalities and related fears and levers (e.g., bribery and patronage; intimidation and murder) known more to the medieval mind than the modern one.

Yes, this may be the only blog on earth suggesting the reader continue doing the research.

🙂

Here’s a related comment on Moscow’s role in managing conflicts in a manner fit to destroy those it manages to manipulate and prize from the same conflict-related income and, at least in its own hive-mind, power and prestige.

Moscow, representing Putin’s political police, himself, and the oligarchs, may be a greater power than Tehran. It may barely be keeping its political image clean — remember: officially, Moscow is helping Damascus fight “The Terrorists” — but it may have the habit of manipulating political situations to its advantage.

From Somali General Galal, who is still alive, here’s a densely compacted recap of the Somali vs Ethiopian war over the Ogaden: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1

In the PROCESS of that war, Moscow apparently manipulated Somali leaders into laying claim or reclaiming the Ogaden, pitting first guerrilla then regular forces against Ethiopian control of the space. As advances pushed Ethiopia out of the contested space, Soviet Russia stepped in to arm Ethiopian forces, who then pushed back the Somalis. The Ogaden continues to host some related “low-intensity conflict”.

Who won?

Getting away from one’s own interests, in this instance Syria, and venturing to overview Moscow’s involvements in conflicts worldwide across time may help us more brightly resolve (accurately perceive) states of affairs in Syria and the Middle East Conflict.

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Hef & Holly – A Note on Malignant and Reparative Narcissism

30 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology

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PERHAPS —

The Malignant controls, discourages, manipulates

&

The Reparative liberates, encourages, and grows

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Attempt to escape as he may, the editor of BackChannels returns to his themes even while journeying out to Hollywood between the pages of a hardcover, i.e., celebrity Holly Madison’s Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny (New York: Harper Collins, Dey Street imprint, 2015).

As ladies men go, some peacocks appear to have an image both to create and maintain, and not infrequently that at high cost to the cheerleaders seduced into hanging on to their elbows.

Now how different is that from the global politics — and the themes attending those “leaders and their followers in a dangerous world” written about by Jerrold Post (2004)  — visited here by way of the pack of contemporary autocrats?

🙂

I have seen the term “state capitalism” applied to Putin’s medieval revanch in the creation of the post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia now wrapped around his own “vertical of power”.  The idea has its appeal (and many related posts break into a BackChannels’ category ne “21st Century Feudal“).

In the American Wildness, distributed business-borne capitalism, which in North America could not be otherwise, appears to produce in part feudal competitions and related private environs as part of the nature of power arrayed between chairmen and presidents, members of the board, and shareholders and other stakeholders.  The degree to which those at the top embrace their own “vertical of power” and effectively promote their own cultural fascism around and beneath them needs must vary, but overarched by democratic governance, such private feudal behaviors have only the boundaries of a few legal papers (noncompete and nondisclosure agreements, for a start), the discipline of their accounting departments (no workee, no checkee), and their doors for fending off equally private but solitary revolutions: employees belittled, degraded, demeaned, denigrated, enslaved by their environments can, do, will outgrow their my-way-or-the-highway keepers — and walk across the street or do that highway thing and move one big town, state, or country over.

It’s a big world, and life’s too short to tolerate a capricious and irrational subjugation forever.

Of course, with governments operated as private businesses for authoritarian elites, the same problems are much, much greater for those suffering — and not individually: en masse — beneath them.

Additional Reference

BackChannels.  “Malignant Narcissism”.

Odell, Amy.  “The 14 Worst Things About Hugh Hefner, as Revealed in Holly Madison’s New Book: From his incessant mansplaining to the constant infighting he created among girlfriends, Madison describes her life in the mansion as anything but happy.” Cosmopolitan, June 22, 2015. 

Wikipedia.  “Presidency of Vladimir Putin”: About the same time, Vladimir Ryzhkov pointed out that a bill Medvedev had sent to the State Duma in late January 2009, when signed into law, will allow Kremlin-friendly regional legislatures to remove opposition mayors who were elected by popular vote: “It is no coincidence that Medvedev has taken aim at the country’s mayors. Mayoral elections were the last bastion of direct elections after the Duma cancelled the popular vote for governors in 2005. Independent mayors were the only source of political competition against governors who were loyal to the Kremlin and United Russia. Now one of the few remaining checks and balances against the monopoly on executive power in the regions will be removed. After the law is signed by Medvedev, the power vertical will be extended one step further to reach every mayor in the country.

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FTAC – Brussels – On Public Impatience and Outrage

25 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

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I don’t question the police for courage. A quick glance at the news tells how aggressive and deep the investigation has gone on this attack. As regards the better solution of having forestalled the attack, the European neighbors seem to be attending to that area of criticism. The public — and on Facebook, those now featuring the meme “Je Suis Tired of This Shit” — also tires of complacency in the presence of this implacable (“sub-state transnational”) enemy. Expect the heat to rise against this class of transnational state enemy.

From the editor’s accidental (2007 and broadband-enabled) introduction to them, the “Islamic Small Wars” have been wars for “detectives and poets” — detectives, because every element in an attack has welled up out of a chain of criminal conspiracies; poets, because what’s in the head got there through language and language-driven manipulation.

In the American experience from 2007 forward, we have seen at least the watched figure of Carlos Bledsoe (Little Rock, 2009) carry through his attack without impedance, the similarly tagged Tsarnaev brothers (Boston, 2013) similarly succeed (and there were other attacks — e.g., Nidal Hassan, Fort Hood, 2009 — that involved perpetrator signals in words and actions that should have produced responsive countermeasures — counseling, detention, investigation), and it seems not until San Bernardino (2015) that authorities acknowledge the character of the attack, its relationship with “radical Islam”, and the “gating” missed all along the timeline to the massacre.  Now, having turned that corner, the attack in Brussels adds impetus to the business of using accumulated experience and knowledge to finally “crawl up the vines” with intents shifting between investigative purposes to actually dismantling involved criminal networks.

Maybe.

“Open source” punditry ends about here where governments may (finally) set to work against the God Mob using accumulated nonpublic intelligence and methods.

As the whole sheet of martial and political music may go, the dark gifts of the 20th Century that were Hitlerism and Stalinism would seem in the mix given the contribution of both to the development and distribution of now decades of similar terrorism, especially that targeting airliners and terminals (for reading up on the 1970s experience, BackChannels recommends Brendan I. Koerner’s The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking).

Obama’s Administration, perhaps having chosen to display the least visible war possible, has perhaps effectively met the challenge posed by Putin’s post-Soviet transitioning of Russia into, for now, a feudal estate and the related aggression sustained by aligned but old powers, especially that represented by the piratical Ayatollah Khamenei with his handling of Hezbollah and Hamas and other elements in the field.

BackChannels reminds readers that the Soviet dissolved a little more than 24 years ago (December 26, 1991), that the quarter-century anniversary is therefore this year, and that Putin and NATO may be engaged in a tug of war over how the world will look — and how medieval absolute power in the modern world will have fared — on Christmas Day 2016.

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Excerpt – David Ramati on the Historic Western Experience with Islamic Aggression

24 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars

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It is important to understand this history in order to understand what we are up against; our enemy has a long memory and seeks to avenge this defeat of its ancestors. The radical Islamists are not upset about our presence in their lands, nor are they especially upset about Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, nor about our “exploitation” of their oil fields, nor our invasion of Iraq. They are taking a much longer view, a view with vengeance in mind! They want vengeance for Tours, vengeance for Granada, vengeance for Vienna. They want to reinvigorate Islam, return to the days of pride and victory and submission by their foes. They want to establish the Caliphate and place the entire world under Sharia law. 9/11 was the first step in this process of re-establishing Jihad as a divine force of conversion and conquest but it will not be the last. If America, Europe and Israel fail to understand this, then they have made a fatal mistake in warfare in that they have failed to understand their enemy and even worse; they have failed to identify who their real enemy is.

Ramati, David. “The Ongoing War Against Islam.”  Academia.edu, n.d. Quoted with the permission of the author.

“Shimmer” always applies — not all Muslims (and Muslims appear most frequently the first victims of Islamist ambition) but some.  Which ones?  The perpetual question: Daniel Pipes’ “How Many Islamists?”

Considering the Islamist’s delusions of future grandeur a part of the “civilizational narcissism” and “malignant narcissism” integrated with their enterprise, BackChannels has tried to attach motivation to the medieval complex in which the power of God is believed to flow down to benighted mortals.  The view is one the modern world has long dismissed in practice (although a dozen European states remain kingdoms).

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FTAC – Syria – Medieval vs Modern

23 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Politics

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Natural ethnolinguistic cultural separation, survival, and co-evolution should be, imho, a global standard in the understanding of the foundations of the peace. Viewed through that prism, Baloch, Hebrews, Kurds, and Pashtun have claim to the lands that bore them into being, culture and language themselves representing a People’s struggle confined to living with themselves and their ecological environment.

The politics in play in Syria have pitted the medieval worldview promoted by despots intent on keeping themselves in “absolute power” against the power-distributing and checking forces of the west in its post-Enlightenment phases. The same has also pitted as post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia against the arc of NATO or westward-moving states. The once Arab and Soviet-promoted anti-Semitism cultivated in Syria has probably contributed to impeding efforts to get in the way of the creation of the tragedy.

In fact, the good of the western world certainly do pray for Syrians. Whether by way of Judaic, Judeo-Christian, and perhaps (or soon) Judeo-Christian-Islamic “Ethical Monotheism” or by way of “Ethical Humanism” or “Secular Humanism”, western ideals involving mankind tend toward egalitarianism (none are supreme by virtue of birth) and universalism (our values and principles are accessible to all).

It is important to see Putin, Assad, and Khamenei or “Syndicate Red Brown Green” or “Post-Soviet Neo-Feudal” Russia as expressive of a medieval worldview now long superseded by arrangements attached to functioning international conventions and law and trade.

Posting to this blog has slowed quite a bit as its editor wishes not to keep saying the same things over and over and over and over . . . again.  Certain criminal behaviors involving “non-state transnational actors” and certain state leaders and their followers fit medieval concepts involving their own legitimacy and the concomitant development and sustaining of the immense power and wealth they’re able to personally amass or commandeer.  Whatever the superficial banner representing the character of the enclave of a dictator or “malignant narcissist”, the range may be better noted by scale (start with the pirate’s cove and work on up to the national socialist dictatorship) than by nominal affinity with some system of mystical belief.  The name of the eternal game for those committed to the latest fascisms: money.

On BackChannels, the concept “Syndicate Red Brown Green” reflects elements from movements within the communist / post-communist worlds, the worldview of the New Nationalists (Orban, Erdogan, among others), and, of course, that of the hipster “Islamists” so devoted to general destruction and the destruction of Israel and Jewry worldwide in particular, and it attaches to the leadership, which cleans up (makes a lot of loot) on what it can “put over” on followers and marks while maintaining vast systems of patronage.

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Brussels – A Note from Correspondence

22 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars

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I can guess at the choices faced by governments better than charting out the answers.

How many Muslims currently serve in the Uniformed Services?

How many of those have committed treason in direct deed or by facilitating a “Green on Blue” attack?

The services certainly have the data from events in the combat arenas plus Fort Hood, but I’ve no idea whether anyone has bothered compiling and assessing that data for the purpose of channeling Muslim personnel.

In Israel, a vetted Muslim officer has produced honor for himself, his service, and his country: http://www.jewishnews.co.uk/theres-only-one-country-in-the-middle-east-that-could-produce-a-soldier-like-me/

In the United States, Nate Terani has done the same.

As you know, but I will repeat myself, I have seen an “Islamic Small Wars” breaking down into medieval and modern parts, and it appears to me the modern are growing their ranks while the medieval, like those producing today’s assault in Brussels, have made themselves the targets of massive transnational counterterrorism criminal investigations. The west will roll them up through the end of the year (a year that will also mark the 25th year since the dissolving of the Soviet, and the two, the Soviet and global terrorism, have never been unrelated).

No one today should blame Moscow for Brussels, not even in the most twisted of theatrical political thinking, but the perverse clinging to Medieval Political Absolutism and the relation of that to the criminal part of feudalism should perhaps not be overlooked.  When the assault on Brussels is taken apart, the experts will certainly attempt to reverse engineer every aspect of the attack back to who acquired the explosives for it, how, and involving whom.  The criminal act that makes the headlines may not be separated from the flowcharts of less visible crimes — where did the money come from? Who built the bombs?  Who else was in on the conspiracy? — associated with its design and management.

My somewhat extreme correspondent had wanted all Muslim personnel banned from U.S. military service.  Ridiculous — and on this basis: the mass casualty and recruiting center assaults that have taken place on American soil have each been preceded by caution-creating behavior, language, travel, or foreign warning sufficient to urge detention, investigation, or refusal to enter the country prior to each event.  After the attack in San Bernardino, the excuse that there had been “no warning” may be dismissed.

On a related note, Mitchell Gray’s book, I Heard You Were Going On Jihad: How a Minnesota FBI agent may have prevented a second wave of attacks before 9/11 and exposed the Oklahoma terror network certainly raises questions about the Federal government’s working methods as regards possible foreknowledge, but it doesn’t shift responsibility for the 9/11 attack away from the Jihadists that commandeered a handful of airliners.

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BDS (Cult) Modules

08 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics

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This page may turn out a work in civilizational regress as so many leftward and youthful peacocks climb the virtual barricades “in solidarity” with the Palestinians, eliminating economic development and jobs, fostering Arab apartheid politics (check out those holding pens called “camps” in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria), and serving Hamas billionaires, among others, along their disinformed way (ah, but that’s what youth is for).

++++++

Founder: Omar Barghouti, M.A., Tel Aviv University.

“Norman Finkelstein on BDS” — Posted to YouTube February 15, 2012.

“Noam Chomsky 2014 The BDS Movement and Tactics” — Posted to YouTube July 13, 2015.

“SodaStream Palestinian Employees Farewell” — Posted to YouTube March 2, 2016.

On BackChannels, “FTAC — Tip to the KGB’s Amplification of Middle Eastern Anti-Semitism” (October 12, 2015); “FTAC — Approaching Anti-Semitism and the Medieval Revanch” (October 22, 2015); Syndicate Red Brown Green; Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation.

Hamas

Blake, Matthew.  “Hamas admits it DID use schools and hospitals in Gaza Strip as ‘human shields’ to launch rocket attacks on Israel – but claims it was ‘mistake’.”  Daily Mail, September 12, 2014.

Danan, Deborah.  “Gaza’s Millionaires and Billionaires — How Hamas’s Leaders Got Rich Quick.”  The Algemeiner, July 28, 2014.

Freimann, Myer.  “Hamas Killed 160 Palestinian Children to Build Tunnels.”  Tablet, July 25, 2014.

Greenfield, Daniel.  “Palestinian Authority: 1,700 Hamas Millionaires in Gaza.”  Frontpage, March 24, 2014.

Levy-Weinrib, Ella.  “Meet the Hamas billionaires.”  Globes, July 24, 2014.

Peskin, Doron.  “Hamas got rich as Gaza was plunged into poverty.”  YNet News, July 15, 2014.

Borschel-Dan, Amanda.  “10 years later, how BDS became the politically correct way to delegitimize Israel.”  The Times of Israel, July 9, 2015.

Greenfield, Daniel.  “S-BDS: The Rise of Stealth BDS.”  FrontPage, April 29, 2016.

Horowitz, Adam and Philip Weiss.  “The BDS Movement at 10: An Interview with Omar Barghouti.”  Mondoweiss, July 9, 2015.

Israel & Judaism Studies (IJS).  “Zionism — Its Origins and Aspirations”.

Jacobson, William A.  “Vassar student gov’t passes anti-Israel BDS Resolution.”  Legal Insurrection, March 6, 2016.

JTA.  “Students at Canada’s McGill University Reject BDS Motion.”  Haaretz, February 29, 2016.

JTA.  “Vassar College student government passes BDS resolution.”  March 7, 2016.

Kaplan, Lee.  “An ISM Volunteer Activist Learns the Truth About the ISM: Human Shields for Terrorists Out to Destroy Israel.”  Stop the ISM, n.d.

NGO Monitor.  “BDS (Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions)”.

Rothstein, Annika Hernroth-, “I Love Adolph Hitler”: BDS at South African Universities.”  The Tower, 31 (October 2015).

Sorin, Gerald.  “Academic Boycott: Free Speech or Sordid Vilification of Israel?” Haaretz, March 20, 2015.

Vassar BDS.  “Vassar Boycott Divestments, Sanctions (BDS) Resolution.”  February 1, 2016 by Vassar BDS Coalition.

Updates

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/50-us-governors-join-ajc-initiative-to-support-israel-fight-bds-300459614.html – 5/17/2017.

 

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FTAC – On the Meaning of Al Aqsa

04 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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I can’t endorse the sentiment, ______, having taken a moderate course, but I hope that more and more Arabs will take note of the abuse of the refugees at the hands of their leaders and the medieval disinformation and manipulation campaigns that have led to The Preoccupation not only with the Jews but their own self-concept and status in the world. Too many fathers like al-Husseini have put them on the worst imaginable track, i.e., the emulation of Hitler and the Nazis. Some who have embraced that most may be due to wake up from the nightmare within them that has long masqueraded as their dream.

BackChannels now has plenty of information as to how the Israelis, the west, the refugees of 1948 and their generations, got to this unpretty pass.  The themes erupting in WWII — that Stalin-Hitler thing — have been sustained in the middle east conflict; the Soviet promotion of anti-Semitism in the middle east and the concomitant terrorism of the PLO and PFLP have been similarly and perhaps exhaustively covered; the formation and presence of what has been referred to here as “Syndicate Red Brown Green”; the self-dissolve of the Soviet on December 26, 1991 also has been remarked in these virtual pages, as have the feudal kleptocracies kept floating along in its place and around it; less has been remarked as regards the post-Cold War Era around the world, but BackChannels believes we’re in that realm as this is being posted.

All in all, and with Khamenei pressing for Israel’s destruction while a smattering of Sunni-majority states brand Hezbollah as a terrorist organization (that move took a while plus some “war by proxy” on Iran’s part), the world, even in one of its most medieval appearances, appears to want to move forward, not backward — and forward would seem toward the classical liberalism of the west.

The comment to which the excerpt responds called for the realization al-Husseini’s manipulative lie: the Jews haven’t any desire to “take over” Al Aqsa Mosque — never did and never will — because while being Jewish involves attending to self defense, it also involves being about and for others, and that includes the Arab brother and sister.

Two of Hillel the Elder’s most famous statements ring down through the ages: “That which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another.”  That is an idea predicated on the concept of human self-restraint.  Israel may produce harm when harmed itself, but it does not have to prove its power through making others suffer with impunity.  If met with the force that would do that to people, including its own people, then it may answer in kind.

The second of Hillel’s language-based corrals:  “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  If I am not for others, what am I?  If not now, when?”

Some Palestinians may be surprised to find Israelis for them in peace, but peace is needed as part of a sea change in the character of our humanity.

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