Of course, the citizens of every state needs must care about their own lives first — biological, familial and otherwise social, financial, emotional, spiritual. Security and stability in those aspects of life are generally part of everyone’s quality of living.
That Putin has been able to sustain and transform many aspects of the defunct Soviet Union tells a story about the kind of political power exercised in relation to malignant narcissism. In effect, he has got Russia revolving around himself, and for the discomforts he has caused, the Russians have channels today for faith and patriotism. The “Communists” are gone but the essence of the old nomenklatura has been transformed into an ultra-nationalist and neo-imperial enterprise.
The public that has wished to take an interest in foreign affairs has plenty of information — responsible, valid, and reliable — for working, but large constituencies may only attend to so much in aggregate. I would not think of such as “ignorant masses” but rather people with families and jobs and struggles and worries of their own. They may find what they need to know WHEN it matters to them, when the dots circle back to their own interests, and they perceive that.
The stimulus for the response made note of the people voting Putin into power.
Trump has also expressed interest in continuing to hold large rallies as he did throughout the campaign for “the instant gratification and adulation that the cheering crowds provide,” the Times wrote.
Russian troops attacked 3 times in the Donetsk sector, all of them in various places, involving use of heavy armor. Adversaries violated the ceasefire at the Svitlodarsk bulge and in Avdiivka. Every attack lasted 30 to 45 minutes. The enemy launched over 50 mortar shells at our positions. 21 insurgents’ attack took place in the Mariupol sector, and seven involved use of heavy arms. Ukrainian troops registered militants’ mortar attacks only in two points – Krasnohorivka and Vodiane. Over 80 mortar shells were launched at our positions. In total, Russian proxies are violating the ceasefire along the entire frontline. Ukrainian troops responded with fire in all the areas.
Before Donald J. Trump does anything else, he’s going to have to articulate and navigate a position with Putin and a re-medievalized Russian security state.
One day, BackChannels will collect the books around the place and write a 3×5 card for each and by category — there are more volumes in “The Russian Section” than appear online. Nonetheless, and especially online for readers who arrive, much like the editor, with more curiosity than formal background in foreign affairs, international studies, and political science, there may be greater value in a short list — a short hallways with half a dozen doors — than in a comprehensive one.
In the online environment, such posts are stepping stones — no need to dwell: click on a selection and move on!
As a former anti-Semite and anti-Zionist campaigner, I am very worried about the recent wave of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incidents happening across the UK. I know anti-Semitism, I practised it and I can smell the threat which is on its way to the Jewish community of the UK.
“When I look at the flag of Israel, I realise the true meaning of this flag is as the symbol of those six million Jewish martyrs who sacrificed their most valuable lives for the future of their race and religion, for the future of their children and for the future of the only Jewish nation in the world.”
The true meaning of Israel’s flag isn’t about the Holocaust, which is just one event, however horrifying and ultimately ineffable it may have been, but signal of more than 5,000 years of the survival of Jewish culture, ethics, language, and law — and perhaps today signal as well of the survival of the influence of the same in others, much including Christians and Muslims, for without Moses in the hagiography, there would be neither Jesus nor Muhammad. There have been always other possibilities, but the lore and intellectual adventure of the Hebrews appears to have served the formation of the two great contemporary religions.
“As I have repeatedly said, it is not our fault that Russian – American relations are in that poor condition.”
If you’re a BackChannels regular or an enthusiast in political psychology, you know that the “malignant narcissist” — autocrat, bully, or dictator — is never wrong.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
Lest any forget, there’s plenty of reading at hand (these days: Amazon One-Click shopping may be the next best thing) for guarding against forgetting.
Posted by The Guardian, November 9, 2016.
BackChannels has framed contemporary conflict in terms of time, i.e., whether confronting Assad or, for a domestic example, the Ku Klux Klan, the modern person is actually rejecting the reappearance of the past in his own path.
For the most part, whether involving the aggressive Muslim Brotherhood aspect in contemporary Islam, the barbarism on display in Syria — and do “thank” Assad, Putin, and Khamenei for choosing that evil path — or the Russian invasion of Crimea, one is actually aiming the finger back at the world of Medieval Political Absolute Power, i.e., AKA the divine right of rule, rule by a presumptuously superior nature, rule by thuggery, and, most certainly, unquestionable authority, or authority beyond criticism and beyond law.
Putin : Medieval Political Absolutism
vs
Trump: Modern Democratic and Checked Distribution of Political Power
Choose.
Posted by VICE News, March 3, 2014.
While “western” political success and related productivity and affluence provide for western humanism and other aspects of idealism, “eastern” barbarism and suffering have left behind a world in which fear and insecurity appear to threaten those who should be in the most confident and secure of internal psychological states. Leadership in tribal cultures and states tend toward a winner-take-all — and loser-lose-all — position in their politics, and it may be that we mistake for a better politics and ennoble with the term “realpolitik”.
Our world pays a high price in general suffering — suffering associated horrors beyond imagining — for the emotional care and feeding of its “malignant narcissists” — its most damaged bad boys, the same that make themselves known as political and war criminals.
So:
Bashar al-Assad: war criminal?
Vladimir Putin: war criminal?
Ali Khamenei: political criminal?
As a class, dictators “exceed limits” — just as Muhammad warned 🙂 — and in doing so free themselves from other normative restraints while at the same time condemning themselves to remaining in political power at any cost (always to others).
In effect, the worlds of despots become worlds of political absolutes, and if for no other reason than the near impossibility of the retreat of their authors.
If over the past five years you had been a Syrian noncombatant, would you wish to see Bashar al-Assad a) remain in power, b) exiled, or c) hung in public?
If you had been swept off the streets of Tehran and dumped in Evin Prison (say for wearing that hijab a little to far to the back — or for being Baha’i or gay or western in outlook) , or if you had had family murdered by the Iranian regime, would you care to see Ali Khamenei’s term in power a) modified, b) truncated, c) “terminated with extreme prejudice”?
Has Putin a graceful retreat today — Syria was al-Assad’s war and armies, flyers especially, make mistakes; and Ukrainian autonomy was Khrushchev’s mistake, which was made with the confidence that Kiev would remain forever bent to Moscow?
Putin may have that.
And Trump may be wise to see that Putin, the Russian State, and the Russian People (of Russia proper) have that “out” — but to horse trade Ukraine, the European Union, the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization?
“Nyet” to all that!
(Liberal politics have come to mire judgment, unfortunately. Biography.com maintains a page titled “Political Criminals” but begs credulity by placing side-by-side J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, both of whom may have exceeded some boundaries in power, with Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Fidel Castro, and Idi Amin all of whom plainly represent the most reckless of minds and murderous of despots).
Historian John Bew suggests that much of what stands for modern realpolitik today deviates from the original meaning of the term. Realpolitik emerged in mid-19th century Europe from the collision of the enlightenment with state formation and power politics. The concept, Bew argues, was an early attempt at answering the conundrum of how to achieve liberal enlightened goals in a world that does not follow liberal enlightened rules.
If, as the poet says, America is not the world, then the world is surely owed an apology for the lack of attention paid to what ought to have been, and are, a series of alarming developments throughout Europe and the Middle East. Perhaps appropriately, all have involved or implicated a revanchist authoritarian power for which the incoming commander in chief has repeatedly professed his admiration and which, after having done all it could to facilitate an upset American electoral outcome—“maybe we helped a bit with WikiLeaks,” as pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov put it Wednesday morning—offers its hearty congratulations on his victory. Meanwhile, Russia’s alleged “wet work” and maneuvering outside the United States in the last two weeks has been even more impressive.
The Russian state’s history of political criminality — that which has driven the upending of its governments twice in the past 100 years — has sat at the base of the middle east conflict and helped kept it collecting money for those it blessed: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, Ismail Haniyeh, and Khaled Mashaal.
I don’t know if the state of affairs will straighten out with Donald J. Trump in office, but the more word gets around, the more likely it will.
Once you know — and perhaps once Moscow knows the popular west knows — and once the Palestinians know — this game with the refugees should be over.
Noting the KGB history may not change Arab culpability for sustaining the refugees as an apartheid population in relation to their own states, but two legs of the old table have been removed by time — Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, both state sponsors of terrorism.
If the 1920s may be noted as the launch period for the Muslim Brotherhood, the umbrella organization beneath which al-Qaeda and others have developed, then this new way of looking at the old conflict also starts to put away an entire era of warfare that needs finally to be consigned more largely to the 20th Century.
Both the creation of the document, commentary on it, and the voting that ensued refused to acknowledge Moscow’s old hand in the creation of the Middle East Conflict.
Reminiscent of Newspeak, the English language as applied to Israel and the Palestinians has been repeatedly bastardised and butchered beyond all recognition, and accepted by many people as “the truth”, without question or challenge.So below we helpfully present a dictionary of terms that have been as misappropriated as the Jews’ history in Israel. For practice, we suggest you go to Kia Ora Gaza’s Facebook page with this dictionary in hand. In no time at all, you will be a card-carrying Newspeaker!
Index
Apartheid. Colonise Fascism Flotilla Genocide Human rights activist Illegal Occupation Oppression Peace activist Pro-Palestinian Refugee Refugee camp Siege Stolen Terrorism Extra-judicial killing Zionist
BackChannels 