Category Archives: 21st Century Feudal

FTAC: Lady Justice, Scales, and Power v Justice for the Palestinians

30 Friday Jun 2017

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

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justice-scales-gifPrompt: the image of the Scales of Justice and the remark that the mission of the just is to “keep the balance or to seek balance when there is an imbalance”.

. . . . the scales of justice do not represent the equalization of everything or refer to “cultural relativism”: they represent blind-equal-objective weighing of evidence in matters pertaining to justice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice

Justice does not seek to make the wealthy poor or the poor wealthy but rather to maintain the same ethical, legal, and moral principles as societies choose desirable and good for both classes. Rich or poor, black or white, Israeli or Palestinian Arab, all should be equal under the law.

In that the the Arab hangover from the 20th Century, the PLO, and Hamas apply different standards for the managing of Palestinian Arabs in their greater population than they do for themselves, it would seem an injustice on the part of such leaders to treat the Palestinians as less than themselves.

For Israel, military oversight is only a practical matter of defense. For the wealthy Abbas, Haniyeh, and Mashaal, the enclosure, separation, and language-borne “weaponizing” of their subject populations must be something else, i.e., the idolization of power over justice.

By way of Moscow’s practically patented habits in barbarism, including the manipulation of “the masses” through disinformation and reprehensible cultural education, the Palestinians have come to represent to the world a much confined and ill-used population anchoring for their leaders a most lucrative conflict business.

That’s just how it has been for the past 70 years: the feudal leadership directs popular anger toward Israel but keeps itself flush with serious cash.

Related on the Web:

If it had been invested shrewdly and well Gaza today could be a mini-Monaco. It could have a deepwater freight port, a flourishing fishing port and a leisure harbour crammed with the yachts of wealthy visitors. It could have resort hotels on the sea and farms, ranches and orchards in the hinterland producing nutritious food.

It has nothing of these. It is a failed state of poverty, misery and violence. So what happened to all that money? Well, a lot went on guns, explosives for bombs and material to build rockets to launch at Israel. But the bulk has certainly suffered the fate of most wealth in that neck of the woods. It has simply been embezzled, not by Israelis but by Palestinians and above all by their leadership cadres.

Forsyth, Frederick.  “So exactly how did Yasser Arafat get so rich?”  Express UK, November 15, 2013.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is currently building a $13mn presidential palace in the West Bank, just outside Ramallah.

Reportedly scheduled to take two years to finish, the palace’s construction, including two helipads, guest quarters and administrative offices over more than six acres of land, comes just months after the PA was forced to pass an emergency budget when billions in pledged international aid failed to come through.

Middle East Eye.  “In Pictures: The $13 mn Palestinian presidential palace.”  September 9, 2015.

Related:

Menachem, Yoni Ben.  “The Businesses of Mahmoud Abbas and His Sons.”  Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, September 14, 2016.

Related:

Corre, Addam.  “Hamas Leaders Worth Millions of Dollars From Allegedly Skimming Donations and Extortion: Is Anyone Surprised?”  Inquisitr, July 18, 2014; updated July 22, 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 Magazine, July 25, 2014.

–33–

Live at Posting: Atlantic Council, “Disinformation Week”

29 Thursday Jun 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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How Putin’s Moscow and its information  warfare work.

Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/23/moscows-rules-a-module/

–33–

FTAC: Moscow-Tehran – Slow Diplomacy with the Untrustworthy

25 Sunday Jun 2017

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

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Given Tehran / Moscow-Tehran’s duplicity where their ambitions have been concerned, State would have known the Iranian treaty worthless before it was signed and consequently used weakness (remember Kerry’s pink tie?) to purchase time for other measures.

In that Moscow-Tehran tie together in analysis, the same policy in diplomacy has helped Moscow-Damascus destroy Syria while running down Moscow’s ready cash base. Possibly: we weren’t going to be blackmailed by the incubating of ISIS or the threat of mass migration; instead, in time-honored fashion, we have been watching the enemies of the west destroy themselves.

The Saudi deal — billions in arms — seems more complex but pursues similar ends in relation to the continued diminishment of the once Soviet Era axis that Moscow has been trying to sustain and Washington has been trying to neutralize and transform. In that the Saudis have had a long history with The English and today are today heavily invested in western success (look over Kingdom Holdings) and taking some steps to alter the deeply medieval character of the state — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/02/sixteen-women-the-kingdoms-most-powerful/ — the relationship may be more valuable than the arc of time involved in getting a medieval state that has contained itself from violently aggressing against the west — into position for updating.

That these “moves” work too slowly and across Administrations dissatisfies us, but some — well, maybe just me — who take the long view of Russian, Islamic, and post-revolution Iranian politics, the popular demand for direct-fast change promises primarily to deliver the chaos and violence of revolution and war (which may have to be met in any case given Moscow-Tehran’s commitment to feudalism, feudal political methods, and the sustaining for their populations a medieval worldview). It would seem better to maneuver both into being less ready for war on a large scale — one by allowing the leadership to run the state short on ready operating cash (Russia) and the other (Iran) by way of the modern wants of its constituents, who will find they cannot get what they want if their regime cannot contain itself.

–33–

FTAC: Observation: Arab Refusal of Culpability for the Middle East Conflict

21 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Egypt, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Jordan, Palestinia, Political Psychology

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Prompt: mention of “Israel apartheid” (a standard trope in the anti-Semitic wings of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left) and “letting the refugees return”.

How about ending Arab apartheid and absorbing the Arab refugee generations whose first were abandoned between armies in 1948?

http://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300172348/palestine-betrayed

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/enough-said-false-scholarship-edward-said

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

Oh, and how about giving the Palestinians their money back, considering the manners in which Arafat and Abbas became multi-millionaires and Haniyeh and Mashaal billionaires.

Sustaining the MEC supports feudalism, makes crooks wealthy, and extends for Palestinians The Preoccupation with the Jews.

Prompt: Israel is the sole cause of the refugee issue.

Arab absence of empathy and favoring of an anti-Semitic posture and related supremacist assumptions at the end of WWII led to the refusal of terms and the subsequent genocidal (river to the sea) gang-up on the new Jewish State. The “Palestinians” — Egyptian and Jordanian Arabs, migrants also to the fields of the new agricultural economy of the day — had been encouraged out of the way of battle with hopes the Jews would be gone when it was over.

It didn’t work out that way.

It takes a mighty and malign narcissism to refuse culpability for a disaster like the one dealt to the Arab refugees of 1948 (never mind the 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands that would follow in the wake of the war) and then to turn the same bereft population into a political “poker chip” for the enrichment of a criminal few unconscionable enough to spend decades manipulating hate in the cause of their own aggrandizement.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/

It appears that given a choice between encouraging conflict and undertaking development, the Jew-hating and once Soviet-loving portion of the Arab bloc invariably persists in poisoning the Palestinian mind, keeping the conflict alive, and handily siphoning off the world’s charity to line its own pockets in related systems of patronage, not that any should want “powerful families” to find themselves bereft of their portion of the take.

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

–33–

Note from “Saddiq” in Quetta on the Murder of Mashal Khan

20 Tuesday Jun 2017

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

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“Saddiq”, which is not his real name, is not well known — and shall here remain that way — while the victim of murder by mob — lynching, we call it — Mashal Khan has had his name played up in newspapers worldwide.

According to an al-Aribya report (April 16, 2017), Khan described himself as a humanist, his friends referred to him as an uncommitted Muslim, some believed him aligned with the Ahmadi faith, and in revolutionary spirit, he had on his wall images of Karl Mark and Ernesto “Che” Guevara.  His father noted that his son was tolerant toward all religions.

And what happened to him?

“He was badly tortured after being shot at a close range… He was beaten with sticks, bricks and hands,” senior police official Niaz Saeed told the AFP news agency (BBC, April 13, 2017).

Had there been even an ounce of Islamic or other “justice” in his murder?

“While Khan was accused of publishing blasphemous content on Facebook, the police has found no evidence to prove these allegations” (Huffington Post, April 21, 2017).

The news suggests Mashal Khan was shot and tortured to death by a primitive mob that believed itself momentarily empowered and sufficiently righteous to commit a most medieval kind of murder (in the name of God, no less) on no more evidence than rumor.

From Quetta, here are Saddiq’s remarks lightly edited for visual appeal, sensibility, and spelling (corrected and converted to American English).

Mashal Khan, a brilliant journalism student of Wali Khan University, Mardan Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa, Pakistan – he was killed by a mob, a crazy mob, in university.

Blasphamy was his crime according to the mob.

I personally knew Mashal Khan.

He was atheist and openly preached his ideas in students gatherings – he didn’t care the extreme religious make up of society.

Wali Khan University is situated in a rural area and most students of it belong to villages where mullah or religious elements are dominant.  Mullahs are blindly followed in those areas.  The day of the killing, the mob was easily influenced.  

I know Mashal was discussing those banned ideas of atheism, but besides that, Mashal also criticized the university administration and teaching staff for doing more than one job.  Most staff was engaged in part-time jobs, which was disturbing the studies of students.  Mashal was planning to mobilize the students and go for protest against the administration, but he was killed. 

In Pakistan, it’s fashion to use blasphemy for personal gains, and it happened in Mashal’s case. 

The culprits are mostly from well-off political families.  Most belong to the dominant political party “Awami National Party”.  Ironically, Awami National Party is leftist and believes in liberalism, and yet its children used the weapon of blasphemy against Mashal Khan.  To me, the justice does not seem to happen because the culprits are so strongly tribal and political.  

Mashal’s father told media that he would not get justice for his son.

Mashal belonged to a conservative society where religious junta mean mullah denied to offer him their funeral prayers. 

In Pakistan, if you have enmity with someone or any different, you can kill him or tag him with the label of blasphemy.  One can analyze the situation by looking at the murder of ex-governor of Punjab Province.  He was killed by his guard for blasphemous statement, and three hundred lawyers offered their services to the murderer.

In such a society, one must stay silent.

Mashal was stupid in that way: he was warned by friends, but he often discussed atheism.

To the observation about the ex-governor of Punjab Province, BackChannels responded, “Salmaan Taseer was the bravest of men.  He lives in the present and in the future. Those who prefer the murderer have chosen to live backward in time. They chose barbarism over law and blind faith over both faith and reason.”

Noble words for comfort, but the truth remains plain as does in so many other conflicted regions of the world: Mashal Khan, a young humanist, journalist, modern leader in the making, was first shot and then mercilessly beaten to death by an insensate, moronic, and sophomoric rabble of know-nothings.

Additional Reference

Mashal Khan Murder

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/26/lynching-of-a-student-sparks-uproar-in-pakistan-against-blasphemy-laws – 4/26/2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Mashal_Khan

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/04/pakistan-charged-journalism-student-murder-170415104542323.html – 4/15/2017.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1326729 – 4/15/2017.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-04-19/pakistani-journalism-student-was-lynched-alleged-blasphemy – 4/19/2017.

https://www.voanews.com/a/university-student-killed-pakistan-blasphemy-allegations/3809016.html – 4/13/2017.

Salmaan Taseer Assassination

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmaan_Taseer

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8248162/The-killer-of-my-father-Salman-Taseer-was-showered-with-rose-petals-by-fanatics.-How-could-they-do-this.html – 1/8/2011.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35684452 – 2/29/2016.

Related from Afghanistan – The Lynching of Farkhunda, March 19, 2015

At 4:08: “Everything was normal, so normal, just like any other day.”

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FTAC: A Note Involving C. S. Lewis, Bush in Iraq, and the Updating of the Modern Apprehension of Character in Leadership

14 Wednesday Jun 2017

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Prompt:

My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position [imposing “the good”] would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under of robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some points be satiated; but those who torment us for their own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to heaven yet at the same time likely to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on the level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

The C. S. Lewis quote met a rejoinder involving the Bush Era war in Iraq.

Ask hungry children, also the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs about Saddam.

Bush and the neocons did the right thing but focused too much on “regime change” and seemingly not at all on cultural transition. In the long run, which now characterizes what I believe Iraq has been about all along, natural cerebral and less natural political evolution have a codependent relationship, i.e., the more intelligent we become as a species, the more empathetic, reasoning, and thoughtful we must become as well — or perish in our own nuclear plasma.

C. S. Lewis may not have known that he was addressing a recognizable kind of evil in “good” character, and that would be the do-good messianic character of the malignant narcissistic (related look-ups: bipolar disorder; narcissistic personality disorder. In such people, power becomes the power to visit suffering on others with impunity. This is something that made the Soviet Era Communist Party and its machinery so execrable; it is also the same thing that has made the “Islamists” and their zombie-think intellectual machinery and very real criminal muscle also deeply repugnant to mankind. One may note similar cause and narrative in the Christian “inquisition” and numerous royal and sectarian conflicts.

Let’s not take the words of great writers such as C.S. Lewis as being beyond reproach by way of improved knowledge and new observation and updating.

Regarding Islam’s internecine issues and political psychology: the rancor should come down in geopolitical numbers and scope as feudal methods in power and the medieval worldview become more difficult to “sell” against the full suite of modern administrative alternatives and their presence in the fast becoming archaic fortresses of the medieval mode.

–33–

FTAC: “Claims regarding Iran’s innocence . . . .”

14 Wednesday Jun 2017

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

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Claims regarding Iran’s innocence in relation to global terrorism are fallacious. The state supports Hezbollah and Hamas and is itself an immense kleptocracy — http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 .

As regards Sunni-based terrorism, a fair look-up of “Zawahiri, Russia” should straighten that out. In the wake of the Soviet defeat in the 1980s, the criminals appear to have picked up on the CIA/ISI method of producing a treasury-draining proxy (Charlie Wilson’s Taliban) and throwing it back at the west.

The Kingdom has invested heavily in western success (via Kingdom Holdings) and has embarked on cultural updating sufficient to produce an iconic set of accomplished women — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/02/sixteen-women-the-kingdoms-most-powerful/ . However, sigh, in the medieval worldview, the legitimacy of kingdoms rest on the persuasive power of clerics.

My trope for all dictatorships: “Different Talks — Same Walk!”

They all produce leaders who look good on the outside — well, maybe Qadaffi’s a stretch on that — but turn out irredeemably ugly on the inside. I call them “MaligNarcs”, short for “Malignant Narcissists”.

The greater east-west framework: feudal methods, medieval worldview v modern democratic rule of law and the constraint of power by representative means. On that, the House of Saud has a long history with “the English” and may be expected to lean westward with time. The same may not be said today of Moscow / Moscow-Tehran and all the related phantoms of the Soviet Era.

–33–

Also in Media: “The Kremlin’s Newest Hybrid Warfare Asset: Gangsters” | Foreign Policy | June 12, 2017

14 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media

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. . . as they look to prosecute their “political war” against the West, the Russians are emerging as the most enthusiastic users of gangsters’ services. Given that their intelligence services are now up to Cold War levels, it seems ironic that they would even need such amateur auxiliaries. However, so ambitious and numerous are their operations that even they sometimes need some extra capacity or deniability.

Mobilizing Moscow’s Mob

Some of the instances when Russia has used criminals as proxies are well known. Russia’s seizure of Crimea, for example, and the subsequent undeclared war in Ukraine’s Donbass region were carried out not just by Russian special forces, but by local gangsters serving as so-called self-defense volunteers. Similarly, many Russian cyberattacks, especially large-scale ones, involve mobilizing criminal hackers. (Indeed, the cyberespionage division of the Federal Security Service has actually recruited hackers by giving them the choice of prison or service.)

Read the whole enchilada: The Kremlin’s Newest Hybrid Warfare Asset: Gangsters | Foreign Policy