Category Archives: 21st Century Feudal

FTAC – Soviet to Syria – Now

01 Tuesday Sep 2015

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

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Blame Berezovsky (the wealthy man who effectively upgraded Putin’s political clout — http://www.thedailybeast.com/…/how-boris-berezovsky…). The Russians, as a people, and Afghanistan as a financial black hole for military expansion, managed to derail the Soviet (dissolved December 26, 1991); however, hardline privileged had already produced a plan to outlive the Soviet (reference: Karen Dawisha – http://www.miamioh.edu/…/cultural…/putins-russia/ – and the results of that today plus the Islamist stance of the opposition (Assad needed “the terrorists” for his play, “Assad vs The Terrorists”) has led to today’s mass murder and destruction in Syria.

Compression and distillation matter.

The ability of the average victims of fascist and feudal sociopaths may depend on a quick pickup on critical information — accurate, clear, complete (delivered honesty and with the highest integrity) — and the independent discernment and both personal and public political decision making it enables.

A good telegraphy should open on to new worlds, truth revealing and trustworthy.

For those with the necessary time and resources (and intellectual freedom), the Russian Section of the Library of this blog provides ample reference for seeing the Putin machinery as it worked across the president’s years in power and across the arc of the impositions of the Soviet Era.

For those horrified by the destruction wrought by Assad in Syria and determined to address it, BackChannels suggests addressing first endemic Syrian anti-Semitism and anti-westernism, which may contribute to blocking greater western intercession — actually, at the moment, any intercession — in Syria.

For a look at the Russian contribution to man’s inhumanity to man as overseen by President Putin, Oryx, a blog oriented to military tactics, provides a look through such articles as “New evidence proves Russian military directly engaging in Syrian Civil War” (August 29, 2015) and “Captured Russian spy facility reveals the extent of Russian aid to the Assad regime” (October 6, 2014) — and there’s more between those dates.

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FTAC – On Conflict and “Nominal Affiliation”

30 Sunday Aug 2015

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

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“Humanity” is between or in the middle in tragically real ways and should not be divided “nominal affiliation” and core moderate belief, Shiite or Sunni (eastern or western; Christian, Jewish, or Muslim; northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere). The malignantly narcissistic, whatever other adjectives and labels might apply, believe themselves born to rule — to lord over others — by birth, and in their quest to do that or sustain their positions, they refer to birth or affiliation as exclusive and privileged: and then they relentlessly manipulate their friends (flattery, pandering, patronage will do it) and subjugate and plunder their critics and rivals. In that regard, all dictators are the same. Their labels and causes matter much less than key aspects of their lost personalities. Those listed above: no compassion; no empathy; no generosity with others if not in the name of their own glory. A question naturally follows: who else?

The prompt appeared in a forum on Syria in which, as BackChannels itself might have it, Putin, Assad, and Khamenei (also Nasrallah and an illustrated figure I didn’t recognize) were presented as a Shiite axis of evil.  That realpolitik model holds.  The producers and actors have put on the play, “Assad vs The Terrorists” — but what about the opposition: does it too wish to sustain its feudal and medieval perception of others?

Let the question stand.

Bigots, bullies, cowards, and liars take note: there may be more and less in a name when it comes to carrying around contempt for others on the basis of race, creed, color, religion, or, at times, the coast, desert, mountain, plain, or valley of origin, or the name of clan, family, or tribe.

Where is the enmity located?

No one minds a little competition, but conflict on the basis of “the other”  — actually, the name of the other — appears to BackChannels to become self-destructive and self-defeating.

 

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Syria – Assad – “We trust the Russians . . . .”

26 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Political Psychology, Regions, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Syria

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girl-injured-clinic

Injured girl, field hospital, Douma, Syria. The downloaded image itself contained no EXIF or IPTC data.

Related: http://www.citizenside.com/en/photos/politics/2015-07-27/118223/syria-field-hospital-in-douma.html#f=0/1299528 – 7/27/2015.

“. . . we trust the Russians.  They proved throughout the crisis, the last four years, they proved they are honest, transparent, and have principles . . . .”

BBC.  “Syria’s Assad ‘confident’ of Iranian and Russian support.”  Video and news report.  August 26, 2015

Without Putin, Bashar al-Assad as a dynastic leader would have been finished in 2011.  However, instead of appropriately responding to Syrian complaints at the time and the yearning for a voice in their own governance, Assad chose to arrest and torture children.  All that has changed in the past four years has been the scope in breadth and cruelty of the punishment meted to noncombatant Syrians.

At the outset, President Vladimir Putin’s post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia presented a block to the start of the erosion of the Assad family’s absolute ruling power; next: Assad cultivated ISIS by selectively not bombing the al-Qaeda Typicals in their infancy, which then dealt to himself a glorious piece — in his warped eyes — of political theater, “Assad vs The Terrorist”.  Putin, Assad, and Khamenei each knew “The Terrorists”, which have largely turned out to be ISIS, although many other and similar organizations exist in the field, would present an even more difficult challenge to the west.

For Khamenei, nothing could sustain an Islamic theocratic tyranny in Iran quite like the prospect and reality of a continuous Great Shiite vs Sunni Battle, for which ISIS would conveniently serve as foil to the further expression and regional projection of Iranian Shiite power.

For the west, perhaps, there is less of “reset” in what has taken place in Syria and more of pressing the collapse of Soviet-style “state capitalism” in the form of an oligarchy — a “new nobility” — brought into existence and managed by Putin.  From that perspective, Russia has stalled in Syria and Crimea — and given the price of oil at the well these days — or the evident callousness of the Russian leadership — it may not want the burden of settling either conflict or reconstructing that which it has helped destroy, both “hot spots” being more effective at bleeding the west of financial resources and focus.  With U.S. President Obama shrugging away much of that form of challenge — or seeming to do that — that tack may not be going so well.

Similar observations may be made in regard to Iran’s position.

Even though it will see immense cash flow for the “nuclear deal”, the regime will have to deal with greater greed around itself as well as its unpopular extension through wars by proxy in the region.

Who knows but that Hezbollah will tire of its men dying for the ambitions of the Ayatollah.

Still, nothing will change all that fast.

While Putin, Assad, and Khamenei together defend “absolute power”, the suffering accompanying that psychology — and what ISIS means to bring to Syrians, i.e., greater tyranny in the name of God, will be even worse — will grow worse: the “Eye Doctor” has lost himself in his own inverted fantasia, a world in which Putin’s Russia has proven “honest, transparent, and principled” (tell that to Ukrainians) and Syrians suffer primarily at the hands of “The Terrorists” and not beneath the barrel bombs dropped on the most helpless of them by Assad’s own air force.

The “additional reference” section may be at this point outmoded by a very good and quick Google search engine.  We can find what we may want to read in flash; whether we can find the conversation we need to have as quickly remains to be seen.

Search string: “Syria, barrel bombs” / news:

http://www.npr.org/2015/08/22/433735915/activists-un-denounce-deadly-syrian-barrell-bombs – 8/22/2015

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/20570-barrel-bombs-fall-on-syrias-douma-killing-50-source – 8/23/2015

http://www.ibtimes.com/syrian-regimes-barrel-bombs-kill-more-civilians-isis-al-qaeda-combined-2057392 – 8/18/2015

http://www.dailysabah.com/nation/2015/08/25/assads-barrel-bombs-cost-syrian-boy-his-family-and-hearing – 8/24/2015

Search string: “Syria, water, war” / news

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/26/world/middleeast/water-is-called-casualty-of-syrian-war.html – 8/25/2015 Related: http://www.unicef.org/media/media_82980.html

Search string: “Syria, moderate forces” / news

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11817208/US-failed-to-protect-us-says-commander-of-Pentagon-trained-rebels-in-Syria.html – 8/21/2015

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/19/us-trained-syrian-rebels-we-need-training-be-faste/ – 8/19/2015

Search string: “Syria, New Syria Force”

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/18/middleeast/new-syria-force-fighter-abu-iskander/ – 8/18/2015

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/26/world/middleeast/ahrar-al-sham-rebel-force-in-syrias-gray-zone-poses-challenge-to-us.html – 8/25/2015.

Misc.

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2015/08/246155.htm – 8/17/2015.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/08/25/video-syrian-toddler-rescued-from-under-the-rubble-of-bombed-building/ – 8/25/2015

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/africa/20625-are-we-human-beings – 8/24/2015

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FTAC – On the The Repudiation of Feudal Barbarism

19 Wednesday Aug 2015

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

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Part of the difficult in addressing ISIS and others becoming defined as “Islamists” by the worlds to which they have brought harm involves accessing the greater body of literature stemming from the Qur’an and the legends and speech of Muhammad plus a body of commentary plus a developed and divided legal history. The miscreant groups, and clearly Qanta Ahmed repudiates them in her article, draw on verbal lore, however selected, however selfishly believed, to validate their barbarism.

My acquaintance who have delved into, let’s call it “dangerous text”, have done so with some blanketing “Islamophobic” intent, in essence justifying ISIS behavior on the basis that ISIS claims, and with which Dr. Ahmed claims to be unfamiliar.

Scholarship developed in isolation or within a circumscribed intellectual and geopolitical space may be given to corruption by the scholar’s own self-interest. In any religion, a cleric or priest or other “holy man” may be expected to install in others what benefits his own position. Today, asking a modern person — again: any religion — to delve into the arcane bodies of work promulgated by the experts, i.e., asking me to read the Talmud, for example, or Dr. Ahmed to plow through volumes (and ages) of related intellectual history to support further argument, merely leads the mind back into the closed universe of the feudal world. What ISIS has put on display by displaying itself needs no extraordinary scholarly knowledge for universal condemnation, including condemnation by the greater Islamic Ummah.

Those whose obsessions lead them back into lost worlds may also drown themselves in the same. For some, myself, at least, time is the only ocean, and one wants to navigate the crossing of it into the future, not into the past.

The prompt: the posting of Dr. Qanta Ahmed’s condemnation of ISIS (CNN, August 18, 2015) on a forum page and, in the background, a conversation with a friend who has collected and come to know a fair portion of the material on which the Daesh project permits itself its excesses.

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FTAC – Iran’s Political Evolution – Wider Angle, Please

18 Tuesday Aug 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Political Psychology, Politics, United States of America

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I relay some conservative thought, as in the above video, with hesitation as it doesn’t represent my thoughts, but my thoughts . . . egads! smile emoticon

I think issues associated with any aspect of the “Islamic Small Wars” (my term) are by nature intergenerational and likely to be longer-lived than any single American presidential term. Therefore, the prism through which these events and processes are viewed must be wider than the instance in which they occur.

While it’s true that the Obama Administration appears to have done as much as possible to accommodate a tyrannical regime that has refused all compromise on its barbaric, lethal, and piratical agendas — outside Iran and within — it’s also true that there will be another American Administration in about a year, that other and alternative games (political and military), ideas, and plans developed and out of sight are going to be “forwarded” into that administration. While the future has yet to be written, Iran will have a new generation of professional, about 50 percent or more of it female, graduating from its colleges in the same period; it will have within whatever influence has been brought to its elites and “masses” (I hate the term, but it suits) by Internet, relationships, and by new trade; if the regime gets its money back (from sanctions), it may have issues with avarice and greed at the highest levels.

I believe Time is with the west, not the medievalists, but it takes some tolerance of threat and related patience to get through time, and, granted, the Obama Administration has embarked on a long-term but still perilous course.

The question for the medievalists — Putin, Assad, Khamenei: how well have you done, really? Extended in Yemen, stalled in Ukraine, one-third of Syria beyond state control — and each situation appears stalemated at best?

This is a long video, but it may help some readers align with the observations and thoughts of more specialized intelligentsia.

Posted to YouTube 11/26/2013.

Related: Abbas Milani.

Near horizon: uncomfortable.

The Iranian regime is known for its aggressiveness, anti-Semitism, duplicity, egoism, and piratical character.

It is also known to be ageing.

Persians know too their greater history — and none among the educated have forgotten Cyrus.

A little offstage: the effects of the history of state police forces, from the czars to the Soviet and KGB to today’s FSB in Russia and VEVAK in Iran.  At about 25:15 in the above video, Professor Milani invokes the modern update term on feudalism: “state capitalism”.  Oligarchy.  (The URL trope to insert here: Reuters “Assets of the Ayatollah” — and so done).

Whatever one might wish to call such dictatorships operated by state mafia or theocracy, I believe the form still feudal and formed around the concentration of political power and access to wealth in one human demagogue.

In any case, the demagogue in Tehran has at hand a latent nuclear weapons making capability, in state or beyond (who knows?), and the worth of any agreement with the same has no basis in experience or earlier history (save that scandal with the illicit arms trade and even perhaps rougher politics).

Still, time is time, and the more time floats around and past the dictator, the more cultural evolution may temper the excesses of the malignant personality.  Where The Great Leader will not, or cannot, change, the Greater Society may.

Related Reference

Alliance of Iranian Women: Until Victory

“In September 2012, women made up more than 60 percent of all universities’ student body in Iran.”

Norman, Natasha.  “5 Badass Iranian Women Who Are Shattering Stereotypes of What Feminism Looks Like.”  World.Mic, July 23, 2015.

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FTAC – Troika – One Last Time

17 Monday Aug 2015

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

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It hasn’t occurred to the world that Gaza and Syria both suffer deeply beneath the boots of those sharing the same feudal mentality. Putin, Assad, and Khamenei may be blamed for Syria, which for the Obama Administration may represent the final chapter on the dissolving of the Soviet Union about 25 years ago. Khamenei’s interest in feudal absolute power has its mirrors in Sunni Islam, not uniformly or officially, but nonetheless those with a medieval mentality sponsor Hamas to continue the brutalization and exploitation of the residents of Gaza.

While what is represented by the above image was taking place, Putin mustered up about $51 billion for the Winter Olympics in Sochi, and he paid some to transfer Russian nationals living in Syria back to Moscow.

How’s that for humanism?

We all suffer with Syrians whose lives have been swiped like knocked over chessboard pawns, but we may keep in mind too that the origins of the tragedy reach back to the Cold War and, in fact, have been sustained by threat on the post-Soviet neo-feudal side. Today, I believe that side is hurting, or has been hurt, by Saudi-aided reduced oil pricing, sanctions, in-state piracy by both Moscow and Tehran, and by “hybrid warfare” and “war by proxy” aggression and the financial and political costs attending each. Those old friends, official Russia, Syria, and Iran have been playing losing hands, but they’re taking their constituents down with them while “living large and in charge” of their small but special space.

If the repetition of themes times me, I know the same will tire readers.

The prompt for the post: an image of suffering from Syria — a boy in pain on a gurney located close to the latest fighting — and the wish the people would genuinely care as much about Syria as the “fake Palestinian cause”.

Fair enough.

While the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left may embrace the old KGB-PLO relationship and other might come to appreciate what the Hamas billionaires (Haniyeh and Mashaal both qualify) really represent in the brutal occupation and repression of the people of Gaza — well, most of the resident because some have made some pretty good money off the sustained conflict and related local exploitation and repression — most in the anti-Semitic bunches simply don’t know the history well enough to avoid their own seduction by feudal — also absolute, fascist, and ruthless — powers.

Related Reference

Dandachi, Aboud.  “Three lessons learned from the Syrian conflict.”  Daily Sabah, December 4, 2014.

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FTAC – On Feudalism and the Middle East Conflict

17 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Political Psychology, Politics

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The wealth tied into the feudalism that drives the middle east dispute may be difficult to imagine for most. On the Shiite side, Ali Khamenei and his brother control in private portfolio about $57 billion. Reuter’s “Assets of the Ayatollah” (easy lookup) tells how that came about. At least two of the Hamas leaders, Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal, have developed reputations as billionaires also. Basically, “the terrorists” (the leaders) are not being spoiled: they are living the lifestyles to which they have become accustomed.

Israel’s medical ethic, which stems from the Hippocratic Oath, has been always to leave the politics at the door and attend to the needs of the injured and sick. I think that ability to separate issues and focus on challenges in separate dimensions may be expressive of the modern mind as the medieval appears less able to set abstract and just boundaries.

The feudal mode in thought and governance may also dominate Sunni politics, which is complex. Erdogan, the Turkish leader, has moved into his immense “White Palace” and proven reluctant to destroy ISIS at this time. He appears to prefer beating back Kurdish hopes for independence to stalling the ISIS project. He would (I believe) align with “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” if not for his Sunni identification. Still, overarching Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Erdogan, and some others is the devotion to “political absolutism” or the concentration of “absolute power” in a single leader. As much works against the democratic and humanist distribution of power throughout populations.

Stimulus: Israeli doctors have been treating an Hamas terrorist recently, and the poster had asked whether the modern workspace was luxurious enough to spoil him.

🙂

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