Category Archives: 21st Century Feudal

A Note on Marching Forward Into the Past

15 Friday Jul 2022

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Religion, United States of America

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Abortion

In the United States, it would seem the Federal state has some retrograde constituencies, politicians, and now Supreme Court judges who would rather not have a credible and mighty democratic republic but rather a collection of backward and parochial cesspools operating along callous and ignorant–or ignorant and sadistic–lines of power, and at that the kind of power accustomed to imposing suffering on others in the name of religious righteousness and related malign and narcissistic will, for religion serves often as a cover for hypocrites, their abuses, and the crimes.

In Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, there was no real reason–forget the hair-splitting with the Constitution: the earlier Roe v Wade had been affirmed and reaffirmed across more than 50 years of equally contentious debate–but that involving the political lust for power and magically-thinking Christian zealotry. What I refer to in general as the “American Medieval Christian Front”–there are a lot of organizations that may be included in the nation’s “Far White Right” and “Christian Nationalist Movements”–has proven that America’s extraordinary secular-humanist democracy (start with Thomas Paine‘s writing) may be degraded and perverted in purpose by a medieval mob fully willing to impose its will on less passionate others, i.e., ordinary Americans of many faiths, quite absent of any consistency in reason.

Putin’s Trump naturally played the medieval card and in packing the Supreme Court left an odious present that fairly gutted common faith in the protections of the Constitution. In effect, the former president returned power to the kind of people–and the kind of scoundrels–who didn’t really like it in the first place.

Soviet/Post-Soviet Russia and Attempted “Positive Channeling”

The Cold War Is Over

The cold war of poisonous Soviet-American feelings, of domestic political-hysteria, of events enlarged and distorted by East-West confrontation, of almost perpetual diplomatic deadlock is over.

The we-they world that emerged after 1945 is giving way to the more traditional struggles of great powers. That contest is more manageable. It permits serious negotiations. It creates new possibilities–for cooperation in combating terrorism, the spread of chemical weapons and common threats to the environment, and for shaping a less violent world.

The New York Times. “The Cold War Is Over”, April 2, 1989.

The Cold War may not have ended quite as well as the hope and optimism displayed and promoted in the west had promised and, to a large extent, operationalized. In fact, Western-launched investment and cooperation were set in place with earnest good feeling all the way to the ferocious eruption of civil war in Syria in 2011, after which it appears detente served to defend western stability. Ten years later — and do note the significant years 1991, 2001, 2011, 2021/2 — the invasion of Ukraine transformed any sense of enforced balanced in power that the west had believed in into plain containment and push-back through a western-leaning alley.

Of course, all of that above might be the crayon, large and messy, version of history. The details turn up cooperation masking the greater arc linked to criminal KGB and their soon-to-be President–Vladimir Putin.

Within the Soviet/Post-Soviet sphere, I have used the following references to suggest the Big Picture “narrative arch of history”–i.e., the 30 years of taking revenge for the Soviet Army’s retreat from Afghanistan and the dissolving of the Soviet Union that followed three years later:

Nekrasov, Andrey. Director. Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File. 2007. The documentary suggests disaffected KGB had pried their way back into power by the mid-1990s.

Politkovskaya, Anna. A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Before her assassination, Politkovskaya had reported on the brutalizating of Chechen villages by an unbridled and somewhat deranged Russian Army.

Satter, David. “The Unsolved Mystery Behind the Act of Terror That Brought Putin to Power.” National Review, August 17, 2016. Satter details the KGB false-flag operations undertaken to heighten the demonization of the Chechen People while framing Vladimir Putin as the hero who would defend Russia from them.

Schindler, John. “Exploring Al Quaeda’s Murky Connection to Russian Intelligence.” Business Insider, June 10, 2014. Ayman al-Zawahiri would return to Afghanistan from “detention” in Russia over the winter of 1996/7 and make compact with Osama bin-Laden for the staging of the attack on the United States referred to as “9/11”, i.e., September 11, 2001 (in Wikipedia, “September 11 attacks”).

Wikipedia. “Felix Dzerzhinsky”. Putin has made his affection for Stalin and the Soviet Union quite clear, but the head of the Cheka secret police has held a special place in his heart, e.g., “Putin Renames Police Unit After Bloody Cheka Founder Dzerzhinsky”. So why include the note here? Felix Dzerzhinsky was born September 11, 1877. Coincidence? Or just very interesting?

No intellectual somersault should be needed to connect 9/11 with the heightening of awareness and focus on Islamic Terrorism worldwide as well as with the concurrent development of western patriotism, nationalism, and xenophobia that would in turn become the “New Nationalism” in EU/NATO, the foundation for the strengthening of politicians on the Right and movements further to the Right in support of authoritarianism, isolationism, cultural chauvanism, racism, revolution, and terrorism.

Related defense and security related term of art: Reflexive Control.

Reprise: Medieval or Modern?

On Facebook and Twitter, I have now and then posed the rhetorical question, “In which world do you wish to live: Medieval or Modern?

The feudal-medieval realm of absolute and exclusive power often commanded by brutality on one hand and excessive unaccountable reward (but without power) on the other?

Or democracy or constitutional monarchy in which power has been attenuated by balancing the interests of the powerful and wealthy of the state with the views and powers of elected legislatures and courts, including high courts, nominated and confirmed through elected representatives?

If you’re of the 21st Century and cognizant in relation to its other issues, the most clear, reasoned, and responsible answer to “medieval or modern?” would seem that of rejecting the “charms” of the medieval mode.

For the most part, our species leans — and needs must lean — forward into the future.

Alas, some portion develops elaborate fantasies about a yesteryear in which their ancestors were great in battle and at leisure in wealth, perfectly comfortable with the degradation and enslavement of others to keep themselves as if gods deeply admired and always obeyed. These days, those who try to impose that archaic, delusional, and ugly-for-others reality on the space around themselves encounter in the west resistance loaded with derision. Those who may accept it where they have been made to feel they must have only to feel their own souls diminished, enslaved, and rendered meaningless.

In the family . . . it might work, but most people may remove themselves from an oppressive family and have the protections of the state to forestall recapture.

Within and surrounding an entire state: disaster!

Cited Above (Inconsistently) or Also Related Online

Associated Press. “Putin: Soviet collapse a ‘genuine tragedy’.” NBC News, April 16, 2005.

Gutterman, Steve. “The Week in Russia: ‘Ghastly Zealot’ Or Medieval Prince? Neither One Will Stand On Lubyanka Square As Statue Vote Abruptly Stopped.” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty (RFERL), February 26, 2021.

Oppenheim, James S. “A Few Keys Related to ‘East-West Rivalry’.” BackChannels, July 2, 2022.

Oppenheim, James S. “FTAC: Endemic Russia Anti-Semitism–A Note.” BackChannels, February 1, 2021.

Oppenheim, James. S. FTAC: Middle East Conflict: Back to Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter and Forward to the Plundering of Palestinian Misery by Palestinian Leadership Elites.” BackChannels, December 29, 2017.

Oppenheim, James S. “Syria–Russia’s Barbarism–The Hospitals.” BackChannels, November 18, 2016.

Oppenheim, James S. “Syria: The Horror: 2011.” BackChannels, December 29, 2017.

Oppenheim, James S. “War | East-West | Abomination | Syria | Bombing Hospitals.” BackChannels, February 24, 2018.

Nemtsova, Anna. “Stalin’s Monsters Resurrected in Statues and Public Portraits in Putin’s Russia.” The Daily Beast, January 26, 2021.

Smith, David. “‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years–ex-KGB spy.” The Guardian, January 29, 2021.

The Moscow Times. “Putin Renames Police Unit After Bloody Cheka Founder Dzerzhinsky.” September 23, 2014.

Thomas Timothy L. “Russia’s Reflexive Control Theory and the Military.” PDF. Journal of Slavic Military Studies: 17: 237-256, 2004.

Wikipedia. “Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization”.

Wikipedia. “Thomas Paine”.

Wikipedia. “Roe v. Wade”.

U.S. Department of State. “United States Relations with Russia: After the Cold War: 1990-1991.” Archive. Office of the Historian.

“First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Putin said. “As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.

“The epidemic of collapse has spilled over to Russia itself,” he said, referring to separatist movements such as those in Chechnya.

Associated Press. “Putin: Soviet collapse a ‘genuine tragedy’.” NBC News, April 16, 2005.
Posted to YouTube July 15, 2022.

–33–

Malignant Narcissistic Process Distilled

10 Sunday Jul 2022

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

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Having approached this topic quite a few times over the years, I’m loath to either repeat myself after this or in the way of academics elaborate and make a career on top of a kernel of bullet points or terms of art. Here is how I believe a malign narcissism develops and then extends into the feudal-medieval aspects of power and greater political life and, ultimately, cultural and civilizational tragedy–and let’s be done with that.

Narcissistic Mortification: experiences of humiliation or shame to the extent that the identity and self feel damaged, impotent, and small. The discomfort–for what it is to do to the person–may be considered remarkable.

Covering/Splitting: “Covering” refers to the hiding of the damaged self and the packing away of an awful experience; “splitting” refers to the creation of an heroic undamaged self to be both asserted and defended at all costs. With “MaligNarcs”–expressed through authoritarian, dictating, and sociopathic manipulation–the appreciation or recognition and respect for normal boundaries and limits fade before the objectives of the self in hiding damage and asserting extraordinary power.

Control of the Experiences and Perceptions of Others: most well known: “gaslighting”. However, add deceptions and lies without ends or limits. Whatever works . . . works.

Messianic Delusions of Grandeur: Although the “MaligNarc” creates the chaos–no different from the fireman who sets the fire, so he may show up and put it out as a hero–the vision is to stand astride the same heroically saving his class, creed, gender, race, and religion from all who would diminish any part.

Unlimited Narcissistic Supply: adoration and love unlimited.

Whether you recognize all or part of the above from personal or political life, take the experience into account and put it to use. In effect–bully in the family; the butcher of his own state–the monster has been found out and has no place to hide.

For a pejorative, “MaligNarc” suits.

–33–

A Few Keys Related to ‘East-West Rivalry’

02 Saturday Jul 2022

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Epistemology, Europe, North America, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Russia

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As a blogger drifting along the contours of institutions and media concerned with defense and national security, I’ve encountered two primary challenges: how to condense, distill, and package strong material for public overview and impact; and, sigh, how to give the “pebble” sufficient weight to get a firm small wave bouncing back and force across the Internet pond.

Without further ado . . . .

.Felix Dzerzhinsky, born September 11, 1877
.Dawisha (RIP) Soviet Nomenklatura Mid-1980s Transition Plan for the Distribution of State Assets
.Nekrasov’s documentary
.Zawahiri in Russia, ’96-7
.Satter On The Moscow Apartment Bombings
.9/11 Reflexive Control->New Nationalism EU/NATO
.Sustained Active Measures | Russian Mafia State | Syrian Barbarism | Trump Ascendancy
.Ukraine, 2014 Crimean Annexation, Invasion 2022

*Section mentioned in “Russia Full Tonto Kleptocracy, Mafia, and Terrorist State” (BackChannels, June 28, 2022) and lightly edited for presentation in this post.

Do you see what I see?

Of course not.

You haven’t been on my specific poli-sci/poli-psy/poli-spy tour, but the clues in events and personalities don’t reside only my mind: they are all here on the web. My guess: the knowledgeable, say at GCHQ or NSA, have already put them together (well, those cats have got to have better resources and more interesting conversations), but the ordinary public appears to me to be struggling with what has happened–and with what may be happening if it doesn’t come to grips with a strong true representation of cultural and political reality.

Premise-Thirty Years Revenge for ’89 and ’91

I believe Bolshevik criminal elements within the Soviet KGB wasted little time prying their way back into power and prestige sufficient to bend the Russian Federation’s democracy and justice to their own will and for their own ends (ref.: Nekrasov documentary on Litvinenko, Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case AKA Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File).

In addition to focusing on self-enrichment and power, the cohort appears to have been bent on vengeance for the Soviet Army’s defeat in Afghanistan in 1989 and the dissolving of the Soviet Union itself at noon on December 25, 1991, an implication drawn by the manner of Vladimir Putin’s ascent to Russia’s presidency, his legendary affection for Felix Dzerzhinsky, Joseph Stalin, and Soviet Era Russia, and the inadequacy expressed through his “malignant narcissism” (see “Liar, Thief, and Tyrant”, February 20, 2022, on this blog) and related devotion to supporting his own Russian messianic heroic image through artifice (because that’s all he really has). The emperor may have no clothes but neither Russians nor the west are dwelling on that as he has Russia focused on his greatness (or else!) and everyone else his destructive threat.

Moscow’s Development of the East-West Rivalry Narrative

I believe conventional western financial and political leadership took the familiar tack of wanting to help the defeated get back on its feet through the extension of capital, the hand of cooperation, and patient tolerance or understanding for the Russian travail that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Only at the turning point of the Syrian Civil War (2011) did western detente return to play–and then containment. Today, for having accepted the position of responding to Russia’s initiatives and rollout of its own and quite evil narrative arc, EU/NATO have found themselves in various ways somewhat compromised; a little incoherent about corruption, legacy, power, and realpolitik in each state’s own way (for related review, have a look at authoritarianism or nationalism in Hungary, Italy, Poland, Turkey, and the United States) ; and finally brought to face once again a most dangerous confrontation with Moscow and its criminal Soviet-post-Soviet character now on full display in the ethnic cleansing and “rubbling” of Ukraine.

Perhaps Washington thought it progress to have worked on the “War on Terror” with Moscow, but in the end, the Pentagon and State Department found the Taliban kept in business by Russian arms and materiel–and both would leave Afghanistan with the Taliban guarding Russia’s embassy in Kabul.

Avarice, Inferiority, and Greed–Russia and Trump

Russia and Russia’s leadership may have a “special” narcissism and enormous compensating vanity, but I am certain that among nations and their full collection of political experiments that it has no “special truth”, for at every opportunity, Moscow has supported criminals, dictators, fanatics, and terrorists–and it has through its Active Measures and destabilization operations put to work similar elements in its targets.

The poster displayed in this tweet appears to have been a gesture of support from within Russia following Trump’s 2016 election win. One may take it as a comment on the medieval mentality and related methods popular with both leaders and their respective followers.

Donald John Trump as Malignant Narcissist

The steps and terms-of-art I’ve picked up in relation to “Malignant Narcissism” have been these, and while practically self-explanatory, academics and analysts have spent serious verbiage on each. I’ll step in most informally to convey the gist.

Narcissistic Mortification: experiences of humiliation or shame to the extent that the identity and self feel damaged, impotent, and small. The discomfort–for what it is to do to the person–may be considered remarkable.

Covering/Splitting: “Covering” refers to the hiding of the damaged self and the packing away of an awful experience; “splitting” refers to the creation of an heroic undamaged self to be both asserted and defended at all costs. With “MaligNarcs”–expressed through authoritarian, dictating, and sociopathic manipulation–the appreciation or recognition and respect for normal boundaries and limits fade before the objectives of the self in hiding damage and asserting extraordinary power.

Control of the Experiences and Perceptions of Others: most well known: “gaslighting”. However, add deceptions and lies without ends or limits. Whatever works . . . works.

Messianic Delusions of Grandeur: Although the MaligNarc creates the chaos–no different from the fireman who sets the fire, so he may show up and put it out as a hero–the vision is to stand astride the same heroically saving his class, creed, gender, race, and religion from all who would diminish any part.

Unlimited Narcissistic Supply: adoration and love unlimited.

The best example I’ve read and repeatedly distributed in relation to Vladimir Putin has been David Satter’s investigation in the National Review — “The Unsolved Mystery Behind the Act of Terror That Brought Putin to Power” (August 17, 2016). For Donald John Trump, one may explore the web for “Trump, Malignant Narcissist” and find the long list of both learned and light psychobabble. Here’s a passage just plucked off the web:

According to psychologist John Gartner, Trump clearly exhibits four key symptoms of malignant narcissism — the “most destructive” personality type — including paranoia, narcissism, antisocial personality disorder and sadism. “

This type of leader pops up all throughout history, and they’re always extraordinarily disruptive,” Gartner told AFP, noting that the same label has been applied to Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.

“What is so strange is that we’re not used to seeing this type of leader in America.”

Raynaldy, Romain. “Psychologist-backed documentary labels Trump ‘malignant narcissist’.” The Jakarta Post, September 1, 2020.

You can tell the condition’s gotten really bad when it expresses as the “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation“, which has been myself just calling it as I’ve seen it.

PBS, June 28, 2022.

And for political theater . . .

That’s a mob–or it was a mob, a heavily armed one too.

Medieval leaders love mobs, also secret gangs, behind-the-curtain deals with other “nobility”, dumb but loyal armies, and the idea above all of being as if gods, blessed by religious power, and free to define the law of the lawless land–and in Russia’s absolute “patrimonial authoritarianism”, apparently free to treat persons and property as alike and to destroy either at will and with impunity.

Modern leaders do all they can to minimize and eliminate that mentality from their districts, regions, and states, for the modern world in every facet relies on complex cooperation and the integration of large systems. It may help if they’re devoted to the health and well being of their respective constituencies and not solely the representatives of one patrician class or another.

Thematic on this blog has been “Medieval v Modern”, and, of course, it or I, or the same 🙂 , has posed the question, “In which world do you wish to live? Medieval? Or Modern?”

As the European Union and NATO see more clearly what Moscow has “accomplished” with its barbarous medieval ambitions (or delusions) over the past 30 years of support for the post-Soviet but still Soviet spheres of control and influence–and, finally, in the so-far “ethnic cleansing” of Ukraine–both will have to determine to take apart the Putin’s Olde Regime and nurture in its place a modern Russia that Russians too (as it dawns on them what has been and is being done to them and their children) might appreciate and embrace. In this passage where every day is agony for Ukrainians and an eternity for diplomats and politicians, that day’s on a seemingly far horizon, but it’s there and will become more visible with time. So-called “leaders” like Putin and Trump have made themselves impossibly archaic and in cultural, ethical, and moral terms, if not financial (yet), bankrupt.

Truth be known: neither Putin nor Trump has anything–apart from a little money or laundering service–to offer anyone.

–33–

Russia Full Tonto Kleptocracy, Mafia, and Terrorist State

28 Tuesday Jun 2022

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, North America, Political Psychology, Russia

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“Full Tonto”?

Criminally insane, mad, off the rails, and in the manner of the Malignant Narcissist and Thug in Charge, Russia has lost all sense of boundaries and limits. Putin’s Russian Circle of Thieves has taken from the Russian People their dignity, economy, freedom, and security; it has marched into battle enslaved conscripts and either criminal or leveraged (both) officers.

I’ve made the case on this blog that the “end of the Cold War” became in its underlying reality a struggle for revenge on the west for the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan (shorthand: “’89”) and the dissolving of the Soviet Union in bankruptcy (“’91”). We are now about 30 years out (1992-2022) from Vladimir Putin’s most traumatic political memory (the fall of the SU) and very near direct war against what has become a politically absolute, criminal, and rogue state held in the grip of real mafia and political thugs.

How Close the Prospect of War with Russia?

How Free are the Russian People Under Putin?

Might There Be Some Practical Motivation for Russia’s Conquest by the Destruction of Ukraine?

Amelin, Anatoliy, Andrian Prokip, and Andreas Umland. “The Forgotten Potential of Ukraine’s Energy Reserves.” Harvard International Review, October 10, 2020.

Excluding Russia’s gas reserves in Asia, Ukraine today holds the second biggest known gas reserves in Europe. As of late 2019, known Ukrainian reserves amounted to 1.09 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, second only to Norway’s known resources of 1.53 trillion cubic meters. Yet, these enormous reserves of energy remain largely untapped. Today, Ukraine has a low annual reserve usage rate of about 2 percent. Moreover, more active exploration may yield previously undiscovered gas fields, which would further increase the overall volume of Ukraine’s deposits.

A Note on the End of the Cold War and Russia’s Persistent Imperial Vanity

I’ve no idea what CIA, GHCQ, NSA, et al. have been doing, but I’ve cause to believe I’ve both found and uncovered The Dots, fuzzy and large though they may be. Here they are:

.Felix Dzerzhinsky, born September 11, 1877
.Dawisha (RIP) Soviet Nomenklatura Transition Plan
.Nekrasov’s documentary
.Zawahiri in Russia, ’96-7
.Satter on Moscow Apartment Bombings
.9/11 Reflexive Control->New Nationalism EU/NATO
.Sustained Active Measures | Russian Mafia State | Syrian Barbarism | Trump Ascendancy
.Ukraine, 2014 Crimean Annexation, Invasion 2022

Circumstantial? Coincidental? Disconnected?

I don’t think so.

I suspect one or more Soviet Era KGB found themselves driving cabs early in 1992 and determined to get themselves back into business inside the state (watch Nekrasov’s documentary).

Motivating Zawahiri to team up with Osama Bin Laden to work on fireworks for 9/11?

Addressing Islamic Extremism (and Osama Bin Laden) may have been something Moscow and Washington thought they might work on together.

Wishing not to repeat myself nor dull the reading with definitions (“Active Measures”, “Destabilization Operations”, “Hybrid Warfare”, etc.), it may do to stop here but with the observation that Russia’s barbaric behavior in Syria starting in 2011 may have also set the stage not only for the invasion of Ukraine but added emphasis to its various nuclear-related civilizational, existential, and political threats: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has no conscience.

Regarding the term “Mafia State” as applied to Russia

Galeotti, Mark. “Gangster’s paradise: how organised crime took over Russia.” The Guardian, March 23, 2018.

McIlvenna-Davis, Dylan. “Gangs and Gulags: How Vladimir Putin Utilizes Organized Crime to Power his Mafia State.” Berkeley Political Review, December 16, 2019.

These newly established enforcers formed the seedy underbelly of Russian society that expanded upon the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the move towards free-market practices. Since his rise, Vladimir Putin has incentivized gangsters to do his bidding in a new way. Rather than overt collusion, the Russian government, as ABC puts it, “make[s] its views known” and allows gangs to operate within the guidelines set forward by Putin.

As the European Council on Foreign Relations notes, more and more crime networks tangentially linked to Russian actors have appeared all over Europe. Multiple politically convenient assassinations or assassination attempts have been made on anti-Russia figures by gang members who have been accused of being Russian assets. The Russian government, via the Russian mafia, has dabbled in ventures ranging from hacking to money laundering.

Nevzlin, Leonid. “The Result of 20 Years of Putin: Russia as a Mafia State.” Institute of Modern Russia, January 24, 2020.

The west handled the “end of the Cold War” as if the key elements in “east-west rivalry” had been resolved and returns to the previous state of affairs could be dulled through cooperation, peace, and prosperity.

As much has proven over time an horrendous goof however noble the intents.

*

Regarding Russia’s “help” with the “War on Terror”: Rowlett, Justin. “Russia ‘arming the Afghan Taliban’, says US.” BBC, March 23, 2018; Maynes, Charles. “The Russian Embassy in Kabul Is Now Under Protection of the Taliban.” NPR, August 16, 2021.

*

The West–EU/NATO–has been “played” by Moscow.

Putin & Co.’s Russia presents as nothing less than a most barbaric, criminal, and self-centered enterprise bent, enthralled, and maddened by its own destructive capability, narcissistic paranoia (see “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation”) and grandiose messianic delusions.

Posted by Fantasy & World Music by the Fiechters, January 23, 2016; on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01BBELZFC .

This with Russia’s criminal political enterprise persistent through Putin more from the Bolshevik camp than the Romanov will end in Russia internally–or from without but with consideration for The Russians en masse and for the world’s Modern International Standards in cultural comportment, development, integration, law, technology, and trade, all of which Putin & Co. have chosen to degrade and destroy without putting up anything at all that could be called Good.

–33–

FTAC: Russia’s One Big Step Backward-Why Ukraine Must Prevail to the Four Compass Points of Its Pre-Crimean Annexation

05 Sunday Jun 2022

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, Political Psychology, Russia, Ukraine

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Macron fears a nuclear exchange with a deranged Putin, but compromise anywhere along Ukraine’s writ will not damp that possibility. Putin’s criminal narcissistic psychopathy has been such as to compel ever greater distancing from the “narcissistic mortification” that derailed him on to a false heroic course in the first place. The only western solution for him and his codependents will be to reverse the tide in its entirety and get the demilitarized zone on the Russian side of the fence. In no way has Ukraine been at fault in relation to Russia’s aggression and barbaric caste. Putin, whatever demonic fantasia he may have as regards his own medieval revanche and resurgent and thug-reliant absolutism, may have just made himself Russia’s Last Emperor, Rus, and Varangian. Even Ukraine’s modern Russian-speaking citizens hate the onslaught driven by his delusional derangement.

I wrote that comment two hours ago here:

Times Radio, June 5, 2022.

Russia’s despotic President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has escalated his real black politik to threatening the world’s food supply and nuclear security, and to think that encouraging him with a small morsel of eastern or southern Ukraine will appease either him or the weak men fully inveigled in his criminal madness should seem to the cool headed among political analysts and politicians worldwide irredeemably delusional. “Vovo” has succeeded primarily in making himself Russia’s Last Emperor, Rus, and Varangian, and beyond that, he has ruined Russia’s character, credibility, integrity, and reliability as a modern and responsible.

I had heard in the high school classroom of the 1970s that Russia’s history had long involved “taking one step backward before taking two steps forward.”

Although I lack the scholarship for filling out that statement with examples from the 10th Century to this day, I would suggest that Putin’s Feudal-Medieval Revanche has accomplished nothing for ordinary Russians and post-Soviet neighbors (viewed by Putin as still client states or satellites in a cooked-up Russian “Near Abroad”) but to associate the obscenity of breathtaking corruption with wealth (as with Ukraine’s former bullying political mafioso Viktor Yanukovych) while otherwise crawling along, if at all, with modern economic development and law. In place of Russia’s cooperation, friendship, and trade in the international sphere, Putin has through his actions and words put on full display his own brand of barbarism, enslavement (of Russian soldiers, no less), ethnic cleansing, and the crudest leveraging having to do not only with basic energy and food resources but with the pride and spine of greater leaders whose accomplishments he may never hope to achieve.

Putin has ruined himself, his image, and his stature in history while Russians left behind have paid the price for his ambitions and crimes internally–and they will pay a price too for his crimes at war, but with one caveat: Ukraine and the rest of the world need the healthier, modern, and much higher integrity state that a post-Putin & Company Russia needs must become.

Related Online

Faulconbridge, Guy. “Putin warns United States against supplying Ukraine longer range missiles.” Reuters, June 5, 2022.

Of course there’s much else related online, but at this point, the actively engaged may noodle through the news and opinion themselves. While I may return to bibliography, I wonder if with short opinions whether a need for it remains. With some posts–and some unwieldy writing–the scope of coverage has required reference as dots for connections. Here where Putin has brazenly and stupidly fashioned a gambit that comes to “Step up, step down, or step back–or else!” neither experience, knowledge, prudence, nor wisdom counsel appeasement.

–33–

FTAC: Big Picture Made Small: Moscow’s Narrative Arc from the End of the Cold War

10 Sunday Apr 2022

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

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A friend on the social network tagged me on the matter of Marine Le Pen as a friend of Putin. Forthwith my answer –>

Regarding Marine Le Pen – https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/08/white-house-putin-paris-00024054 – she’s a problem for the western alliance.

After the dissolving of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, some KGB elite found themselves driving cabs, i.e., out on the streets, stripped of power and privilege. It didn’t take long for part of that set to determine to regenerate themselves, perhaps through their former networks (I’m mythologizing but keeping to milestones in the greater narrative arc), and set about taking revenge against the west.

1994 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances Ukraine gave up its Moscow-controlled nuclear warhead inventory in exchange for promises that it would never be invaded (by Russia, among others).

1996/7 – https://www.businessinsider.com/exploring-al-qaedas-murky-connection-to-russian-intelligence-2014-6 – Ayman al Zawahiri spent his winter in the company of the KGB.

1999 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings; https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/08/vladimir-putin-1999-russian-apartment-house-bombings-was-putin-responsible/ .

2000 – http://edition.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/03/27/russia.elex/index.html – Putin’s election results.

9/11/2001 – I would call the event a Russian “Reflexive Control” operation by proxy against NATO. Whatever the truth of the matter, it provoked the proud flesh of a wounded west into a far rightward motion, i.e., the “New Nationalism”. In France, and with Putin’s blessing, Marine Le Pen picked up on the pride.

I’ll add another one or two touchstones here.

2011 – the Arab Spring and desertification lead to protests in Syria against a callous regime quick to respond with violence to any challenge of its authority. The same had also a mighty lever in enjoining the “War on Terror” against any enemy it wish to call a terrorist. Spillover: mass migration -> NATO, starting with Turkey, the same became a stimulus for greater nationalism accompanied by xenophobia. Most affected: Hungary, Italy, Poland, and the United States.

2016 – America caught the DTs –>

In the listing of years as the perhaps KGB penchant for clever aggression, the whole has gone with the “ones” — 1991; 2001; 2011; and if the invasion of Ukraine had been squeezed in right, 2021.

Putin’s Russia has been cooking on all of the medieval burners, numerology somewhat included, and, indeed, NATO has now to catch up with the array of conditions and threats fashioned by Moscow since the end of the Cold War, and Moscow, representing the Russian “Mafia State”, has some advantages given European and North American appetites for every illicit good and service moving around the planet. It and its buddies among dictators and thugs view the west both as turned toward nationalism (sadly true in part) and morally degenerate — but in Ukraine it has drawn a response remarkably different from what it had imagined. The key to that has been its criminality and barbarism. The cruelty displayed over time and across the post-Soviet Russian space of interest has been effective as regards inspiring hate for everything associated with Moscow. Whether the New Nationalists, Le Pen included, view themselves as part of the problem in light of Putin’s behavior, we shall see. One thing they won’t want will be domination by the Stalinist Russian.

Published to YouTube on March 24, 2017.
Published to YouTube February 27, 2022.

Felix Dzerzhinsky’s Birthday: September 11, 1877.

The Moscow Times. “Putin Renames Police Unit After Bloody Cheka Founder Dzerzhinsky.” September 23, 2014.

Regarding the Soviet’s own mid-1980s plans for dissolving itself, I recommend Dawisha, Karen. Putin’s Kleptocracy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Also helpful but may need the reader’s own web sleuthing to find the DVD: Andrei Nekrasov and Olga Konskaya’s video, Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case (the URL is active at the time of publishing this post), a documentary assembled among the living, including the FSB detective Litvinenko who rebelled at the agency’s takeover by criminals. For the middle of the post-Cold War narrative and it’s most notable moment, YouTube hosts this short feature from ABC13 Houston: “Remembering 9/11 | Archive Footage We Will Never Forget” (posted to YouTube September 11, 2018).

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A Note on Russia’s Criminal President and the Long Effort to Destroy Western Political Coherence, Cohesion, and Will

21 Monday Mar 2022

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, Europe, North America, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Russia, Ukraine

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Karen Dawisha -> Andrei Nekrasov and Olga Konskaya’s “Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case” -> David Satter’s “The Unsolved Mystery Behind the Act of Terror That Brought Putin to Power” -> Anna Politkovskaya’s A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya -> John Schindler’s “Exploring Al Qaeda’s Murky Connection to Russian Intelligence” -> 9/11 : Reflexive Control -> New Nationalism — in Wikipedia, “Neo-Nationalism” — in EU/NATO and its effects in Great Britain (BREXIT), Hungary (Orban), Italy (Far Right), Poland, Turkey (Erdogan’s feudal revanche), United States (Trump).

Why?

Karen Dawisha detailed how the Soviet nomenklatura prepared in the mid-1980s for the demise of their state and what would have been their fall from grace but for plans to capture the state’s assets for themselves.

Mission accomplished.

Husband and wife Andrew Nekrasov and Olga Konskaya documented in part how former KGB driving cabs determined to return to their former status in power as politically criminal agents with the master who seems today busy with trying to steal back a state that had gotten rid of its Moscow puppet. Once again, Moscow’s premier secret police–from Okhrana to Cheka to FSB–have succeeded in destroying goodness and justice in Russia (the west may be only waiting for the Russians to figure out how they have been themselves once again enslaved).

David Satter has made a mission of convincing the world that Putin’s ascent to power was predicated by the KGB’s false flag bombing of apartment buildings over which the fingers would point toward Chechen Rebels. Given the Kremlin’s penchant for absurd lies, barbaric acts elsewhere, and dramatic political theater and reputation for Orwellian perceptual control across time, I’ve been convinced.

Anna Politkovskaya reported directly on the brutalizing of Chechen villages to drive men and boys into the camps of experienced Chechen terrorists while sustaining an Islamist warlord in power.

According to John Schindler, the KGB had terrorist Ayman al Zawahiri of hijacker coordination fame as a guest over the winter of 1996-7, which makes sense of a timeline that fits with the KGB’s “recovery” of its less savory powers a little earlier in the mid-1990s (do watch the Nekrasov documentary for what happened in the gap between the “end of the Cold War” and the launching of revenge for the Soviet loss in Afghanistan and subsequent bankruptcy).

Aside, those fond of serial coincidences may enjoy looking up Felix Dzerzhinsky’s birthday and taking into the consideration the role of “1” in the dissolving of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the September 11 attack on the United States in 2001, the start of civil war in Syria in 2011, predicated in part on fighting “The Terrorists” (together with the west), and now the Russian Invasion of Ukraine here in 2021.

Hey, wait a minute!

Lol.

(“Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps”).

Motivating terrorists to blow up the World Trade Center while working with western security to eliminate terrorism . . . that’s pretty slick, but it fits with the temperament of the damned that have also sustained the Middle East Conflict and countless other “frozen conflicts”– as well as dictatorships — worldwide, and it also helps answer the question as to why the west has bent backward so often for so long in the interest of sustained peace beneath the black cloud of mutually assured nuclear destruction.

To this point, the west (again, Zawahiri, KGB, from 1996, it’s easy to see) has been repeatedly bitten by Islamic Terrorism, albeit less lately than in previous decades, and thereby encouraged to stand up for its own cultures — and Christian or secular governments — while treated to waves of migrations motivated by once Soviet-backed conflicts, crime-related violence (at the transnational level), and economic despair (note: although desertification in the presence of global warming has had nefarious political effects, including motivating appeals to despots for relief).

When Obama offered the “reset”, the decision point to join the west over Syria’s agricultural woes — and later to the United States said, “don’t forget who you are” — as well as the stern warning to Putin not to return to the “KGB Playbook” . . . it was already too late (really: have a look at 2016’s Putin-Trump billboard in Russia – or the old “laundromat” story – or the real estate stories).

So here we are with a monster dredged from fascist, feudal, and medieval quarters that now razes with blunt force and fire a modern state aspiring to a democratic, free, honorable, and peaceful future. While we have done more than stand by and watch–we have been responding to our more stranded neighbor–we haven’t faced the full criminal scope of the Russian President’s magical narcissistic beliefs and his related and wholly destructive behavior. Deluded and drunk in power, President Putin lies to himself and to Russia, and yet no one will either dare interfere with his course, and, quite possibly, no one knows how.

Have conditions in the west to become “existential” to do as Ukraine has been doing?

UATV English, March 21, 2022.
Live at posting.

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Two Twitter Spears

15 Tuesday Mar 2022

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, North America, Political Psychology, Russia, Ukraine

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Life Online and the War in the Ukraine move fast!

With that speed, inspiration -> political punditry -> launch (something, anything, hope it works) has become a very short cycle.
***

Got to jump down turn around and send a missive flying
Go to jump down turn around and compose again . . . .
***
So it goes.

Sources for the first tweet date back to the Putin-Trump bromance of 2016 and the Republican chorus of denials over Russia’s onslaught of methods of perceptual channeling and control that were to be popularly known as “Active Measures”–>

It’s impossible to miss Russia’s criminal anger and resentment of the modern world in its aggression against the west as its secret police and other elements got to their feet in the shadows of the “End of the Cold War”. Out to the edges of the former Soviet spheres of conflict, control, and influence, an habitual penchant for Absolute Power and the endorsements of political theater and terrorism became fixtures of political behavior in Chechnya and Syria as well as Afghanistan (Russian arms and materiel were to support the Taliban all the way back to Kabul).

To this day, Russia’s leadership has shown the world nothing of modern compassion, conscience, constructive ambition, empathy, or humanity while demonstrating only the feudal-medieval barbarism and rapacious destructiveness and greed of the police state it has become and that it intends to impose on Ukraine and the west.

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