https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Michel
Charles Michel serves as the President of the European Council. When the news comes straight from the authority who makes it, no further confirmation would seem needed.
Update: Related Online
–33–
01 Thursday Feb 2024
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Michel
Charles Michel serves as the President of the European Council. When the news comes straight from the authority who makes it, no further confirmation would seem needed.
–33–
19 Friday Jan 2024
Tags
American Traitor, American Traitors, DJT, Donald John Trump, Donald Trump, Fascism in America, The Traitorous Mister Trump
Donald John Trump may not think of himself as a cowardly and smarmy con man, felon, mafia chief, or traitor to his nation in light of his own delusional, grandiose, and messianic character and apparent absence of conscience. However, all indicators point back toward cooperation with Vladimir Putin in relation to seeing himself installed in power–with immunity from felony-level wrongdoing, no less–by an overwhelmingly White Christian American Nationalist Front that itself appears to have America’s Republican Party leveraged away from its traditional adult, civil, Constitutional, lawful, and responsible navigation.
When FBI arrested Russian mafia engaged in money laundering operations at Trump Tower, we, more or less Americans who read the news, gave him a pass.
When Trump covered for Putin in the now infamous “Helsinki Moment”, mainstream media and moderate cognizant and good Americans were shocked but then gave that moment two minutes of squawking before some other drama displaced it.
Here, copied verbatim, is what Trump said in that now hideous and signal moment:
***
all I can do is ask the question my people came to me dan coates came to me and some others they said they think it’s Russia I have president putin he just said it’s not russia i will say this i don’t see any reason why it would be I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today and what he did is an incredible offer he offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators with respect to the people I think that’s an incredible offer
Guardian News. “Key moments from the Trump-Putin press conference.” Start: 0:0:07. Transcript machine generated. July 16, 2018.
***
And there Trump is, no different back then than he is today: inveigling, lying, infantilizing, pandering and far gone in the sordid business of trading country–and American law–for the lowest in the way of criminal, corrupt, and ruthless power.
And where has been the GOP in relation to Trump?
***
…Trump and company don’t simply want to “deconstruct the administrative state,” as Trump whisperer Steve Bannon famously said. They want to remake the state to concentrate political and economic power in the hands of themselves and their wealthy friends. That requires removing the checks on executive power that are embedded in the federal bureaucracy.
Basically, Trump wants to transform a system that already tilts dangerously in the direction of oligopoly into a full-blown patronage state along the lines of what Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary and Vladimir Putin has accomplished in Russia.
Feffer, John. ”What Will the World Look Like if Trump Wins?” Fair Observer, December 18, 2023
***
In X-speak, has #America tired of #FeloniousTrump #4FelonyCases91Counts?
Today, Americans know that Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election and with premeditation chose to lie to his base, which may now be considered either gullible or just plain traitorous and vicious, and then he drove a violent portion to insurrection in an attempted coup. Those whom Trump betrayed and inveigled in his madness should be especially angry with him.
Call him “Trumpolini” and hope America–the vast majority of Americans–will find the courage to defend their nation, its revolutionary Constitution and spirit, and be finished with him as well.
Oppenheim, James S. ”Trump and the Question of Insurrection.” BackChannels, January 9, 2021.
Cheney, Liz. Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning. Little, Brown and Company, December 5, 2023..
Desjardins, Lisa. ”Key takeaways from the Jan. 6 committee report summary.” PBS. December 19, 2022.
Feffer, John. “Trump’s Dirty Money.” Foreign Policy in Focus, December 18, 2023.
Feffer, John. ”What Will the World Look Like if Trump Wins?” Fair Observer, December 18, 2023.
Gellman, Barton. “The Election That Could Break America.” The Atlantic. November 2020.
Harding, Luke. ”The Hidden History of Trump’s First Trip to Moscow.” Politico, November 19, 2017.
Illing, Sean. ”Trump’s ties to the Russian mafia go back 3 decades.” Vox, January 12, 2019.
Leonhardt, David. ”The G.O.P.s ‘Putin Wing’.” The New York Times, April 7, 2022.
Unger, Craig. “Trump’s Russian Laundromat.” The New Republic, July 13, 2017.
Winters, Michael Sean. ”The GOP does Putin’s bidding.” National Catholic Reporter, December 15, 2023.

-33-
14 Thursday Dec 2023
Tags
Biden Impeachment, Criminal Speech, disingenuous speech, Donald Trump, GOP, Lies and Lying, Medieval v. Modern, Political Reactionaries, politics, Republican Party, Republican Sedition and Subversion, Speaker Mike Johnson
Later that same month, the subcommittee held a hearing aimed at promoting Missouri v. Biden, the lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana that challenged the Biden administration’s efforts to work with social media companies to control disinformation.
“The executive branch has undertaken a broad campaign to censor the American people,” Johnson declared. “That’s the headline. That’s the takeaway today.”
Roth, Zachary. ”How U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson helped derail a fight against election lies.” Kansas Reflector, November 27, 2023.
While the Biden Administration’s program focused on integrity in the interest of the American People, Johnson and Republican attorneys general chose to hamper the effort in their own partisan interest, an interest that belies a lust for power unbridled by any interest in the bedrock that is truth x context x empirical observation x careful handling, sifting, and weighing of factual data x reasoning with good character and good sense — all of that to fool what they may presume to be their own sheep.
Call the sort of lie Speaker Mike Johnson uttered disingenuous speech or sophistry. Our “executive branch” encouraged honesty and integrity, but Johnson took it as a moment to call it censorship and thereby safeguard disinformation, chicanery, and fraud, which may to Johnson may rank among Christianity’s most fundamental and necessary virtues for they are not so useful to any sustained secular democratic republic.
Johnson has also touted the Dominion Voting Machine Hoax, i.e., that America’s voting machines were built in Venezuela and rigged against Trump (Trump has another relationship involved with Venezuela, and it’s not rigged against him).
Regarding the baseless assertion that the 2020 national election had been rigged or made fraudulent in some way, Trump lawsuits launched the courts into 62 investigations of the allegation, and all but one were found against Trump–and the one turned out trivial and far from changing the election.
Not all politicians lie so brazenly to their constituencies–and for the privileges of power itself, no less. Today’s Grand Old Party has stained itself with its abandonment of the Constitution, honor worth the recognition, and general integrity. Speaker Mike Johnson has only led the cowardly and seditious charge and been booted into place potentially to fully subvert the 2024 election.
For those daring to cross over to the forever burnt side of history, here is a smorgasbord of methods known to delusional or practiced liars: baseless accusations; defamations; deflections of responsibility; denials of culpability; erasures, omissions, and revisions in the telling of events; fabrications and frame-ups; fishing expeditions; libels and slanders.
For criminals, there are more potent forms of foul speech in the abuse of the law: conspiracy to commit crime and incitement to violence are two. Speech intended to defraud is another. Trump himself appears to own a special collection of tools with his finesse in vocalized or otherwise signaled coercion and intimidation–or marching orders. He has, after all, developed a reputation as a highly motivational speaker.
At the moment, the House has embarked on a programmatic impeachment of the incumbent President Biden and has done so without a single affirmed assertion or charge.
For his part, Mike Johnson has recently approved a thing most precious to our reactionary Republicans, i.e., a Fishing Expedition under the facade of democracy.
The US House of Representatives has voted to formally open an impeachment inquiry into president Joe Biden, moving forward a process that has been promised by Republican leaders since they regained control of the lower chamber in midterm elections in 2022. / Although no evidence has been produced, Republicans have accused Biden and his family of personally profiting from his position while vice-president under Barack Obama.
Yerushalmy, Jonathan. ”Biden impeachment inquiry explained: what is happening and could the president be convicted? The US House of Representatives has voted to formally open an impeachment inquiry into Biden–without any evidence he has committed wrongdoing.” The Guardian, December 14, 2023.
Anderson, Lisa Marie. ”Speech in a Low Dishonest Decade.” The Wilson Quarterly. Winter 2020.
Cheney, Liz. Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning. Little, Brown and Company, 2023.
Basu, Zachary. ”MAGA movement gets its speaker.” Axios. October 25, 2023.
Glasser, Susan B., Jane Mayer, Evan Osnos. ”Mike Johnson and the Power of the Big Lie.” The New Yorker, October 27, 2023: Podcast. “You have to lie about the election to rise in power if you’re a Republican in the House,” the staff writer Jane Mayer says, “but when you face potential sentencing in a court yourself, the truth finally comes out.”
Oppenheim, James S. ”Trump and the Question of Insurrection.” BackChannels, January 9, 2021.

###
05 Tuesday Dec 2023
Tags
America, American Cultural Evolution, American Future, Donald Trump, malignant narcissism, malignant narcissists, Medieval v. Modern, New American Community, next new world, political psychology, Secular Democratic Republic, Vladimir Putin
Does everybody lie?
Perhaps a little bit to be less blunt or hurtful in the criticism or solicited response to another’s cooking, demeanor, fashion, or life.
Perhaps now and then for hooky, nooky, and bong–that’s not so good but fair in a mood or pinch.
Perhaps a convenient compliment for a kiss.
Perhaps to spare another pain or worry in souring conditions, so one is thought just fine when things are dicey.
To hide something (not so big a deal); to get something (and make life a little more sweet).
It takes another kind of nut to snowball a whopper, to put one over on a community, to seduce, fuck over, and ruin an associate, family, institution, or state–but that’s what malignant narcissists wind up doing in the process of covering the memory of their own humiliation or mortification with a great projection of an undamaged and unassailable heroic self, courageous in adversity, heroic before all, and totally full of bullshit.
The type I have in mind: delusional, grandiose, messianic and in appearance absent of normal boundaries and limits, i.e., the parameters of conscience. In the cause of their own baseless glory, one may wade into their swamps of baseless accusations, defamations, deflections, denials, fabrications, frames, omissions, and revisions (some of them alibis). And downstream to be found in their targets: baseless belief, confusion, and eventual disappointment as the “reality” painted turns out having had nothing to do with reality at all.
More likely, Russia’s secret political police, FSB, loaded basements with explosives in the dead of night, set off the detonations, and “credited” an allegedly unruly Chechnya resistance for the act in order to convince Russians to elect Vladimir Putin as their best problem solver and hope for security and stability. Code name: “Storm in Moscow”; on this blog: “Reference: Journalist Alexander Zhilin, Operation Storm in Moscow AKA Moscow Apartment Bombings” (May 3, 2023). And the payoff for the False Flag Operation? Not only election to power–and today absolute and imperious power–for Putin, but in his head and for his twisted spirit “Unlimited Narcissistic Supply”, i.e., the adoration and validation of the Russian People without end.
The United States of America has for its defense against all enemies foreign and domestic the services of 27 integrated Federal security agencies. For election, the nation enjoys a full suite of relevant threat detection and law enforcement capabilities from Homeland Security on down to security assistance for local districts. Against all of that, Donald Trump has launched the lie, rumor, belief, and “alternative truth”–which is no truth at all!–that his opposition (how dare they…) stole the 2020 national election. “Election Denialism” appears to have become for some–including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson–their faith-based religious obligation, but no factual basis for it has surfaced, and without that, Trump’s efforts to overturn the previous election amount to no more than the most delusional and grandiose attempted theft imaginable.
Putin and the Russian Mafia State appear to have set a certain tone in the region of archaic-reactionary and brutally repressive kleptocracy, and my guess is Trump is trying to catch up. Well, this is for America’s Christians to know as regards how criminal power exploits faith and related institutions: “KGB FSB ROC M-O-N-E-Y” (January 18, 2021).
From gutter to mansion, America supports an extraordinary duality in relation to sinners and saints, and, quite frequently, the would-be saints turn out the most curious of sinners. The famous are known: Jerry and Becki Falwell and the Pool Boy, Giancarlo Granda (People, Jan. 25, 2022)–and noted Becki in relation to the couple’s role at Liberty University, “We had to put on an act” ; Jim Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye (maiden name LeValley) who together in marriage stumbled over the husband’s one seemingly acknowledged affair–one allegedly forced with Jessica Hahn, who was paid off for her silence–and allegations involving several homosexual flirtations or liaisons (The Washington Post, Sept. 22, 1988). The less famous but in their own wild way as infamous, whether charmingly so (old rascal) or heinous (for having committed a crime), we may be collectively just not all that angelic. Penance, piety, prayer, and promise afterward may suffice for easing conscience and erasing guilt, and sometimes penance precedes change, present and future, for the better. In any case, I wonder if all Americans, and regardless of religious subscription, may not expect some level of pious hypocrisy in themselves, if honest, or in their ranks (if that’s more comfortable) while striving to do better, but to cover repetitive criminal intent or behavior with the appearance of piety, that is something else.
One may not refer to either Donald John Trump or Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin as ethically or morally good men. As the governors of nation-states, neither has offered much evidence of care, concern, or interest for the whole body and spirit of their respective nations–Russians suffer sustained abuse and neglect if beyond Putin’s near direct circles of influence and power; for ordinary Americans, Trump has bragged to his wealthy friends from his own gilded halls at Mar-a-Lago, “You All Just Got a Lot Richer” (Vanity Fair, Dec. 24, 2017) after signing into law substantial tax breaks for them. Having ceded substantial tax revenues to private sector interests–and the public be damned (which it literally might be if such power prevails)–why should the buccaneer not commandeer the entire ship of state for his own crony capitalist private enterprise–just as Vladimir has done? He has already developed a base ripe for ripping off.
Around the world, constituencies will find leaders who prefer to treat the idea of the state as a private and family enterprise to be milked for their own profit and the securing of their family and their associates. They’re motivated by greed and lust and–given their underlying fear of humiliation and consequent delusional self-concept and obsession with their own aggrandizement–the allure of their own potential to control others without question. Centuries ago, that characterization would have fit well with a medieval world more than familiar with the concept of “Absolutism” or “Absolute Power” and its violent and not infrequently tyrannical enforcement. Today, the same personalities and personal psychology–associate what I have in mind with Erdogan, Orban, Putin, and Trump–appear archaic but difficult to address and ameliorate from the perspective of any democratic idealism, especially from the vantage of the still revolutionary Constitution of the United States of America (related in the way of inspiration for revolution and the idea of a new nation–Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”, January 10, 1776). The named would be quite comfortable beneath the titles of Sultan Erdogan, Tsar Putin, King Orban, and, perhaps, King Trump.
Now that we’re all here, we’re going to have to deal with ourselves as a whole community and not so much as myopic and parochial islands fit for some Americans and not for others.
All American citizens are Americans.
Our guests are of two kinds: aspiring Americans or foreigners who have come here for business or travel.
As Americans, our challenges are not only American but by way of our own far expanded global awareness–apprehension or “consciousness”, actually–we have made ourselves global and universal in character. So have others, and with transnational business (and crime) all of the next functional steps have already been taken. Basically, our connections have changed and become enjoyable, essential, and permanent–or if adverse or made cautious by our own dependence, then a part of the challenge of an evolving new world.
Also as Americans, we have lived by a deeply devoted and earnestly defended Constitution designed to establish and sustain forever a secular democratic republic. Our western civilizational heritage–Judeo-Christian well acknowledged; Greco-Roman for the history, legends, and myths still echoing our own existence–has arrived here compassionate, down to earth, and reasoning. The wealth of the world has been brought here a long time, and as there is only one world, one Earth, we’re already blended with it and perhaps ready to adjust and assimilate, discard what’s not going to work, and appreciate that which proves good universally. We’ve been doing that a long time too, but for international relations, more may be involved than wearing cashmere and sipping tea.

We may see more than we once did; we may do more than we once could; and we should look ahead and do more than live in the past–or allow the greatest future ever to be stolen from all by evildoing feudal-medieval nutcases, whether religious extremists or criminal politicians who cannot contain their own worst compulsions.
So this much I may suggest about the next New World that is the one in which we are already living: it just hasn’t room for malignantly narcissistic “leaders” and their self-absorbed devotion to their own aggrandizement, enrichment, and power through fraudulent display and theft outright. The Next New World will need knowledgeable, powerful, and visionary high-integrity souls for its leadership in the development, establishment, and distribution of extraordinary systems for agriculture, business, education, health, justice, and general prosperity and security worldwide.
###
03 Sunday Dec 2023
Tags
2020-presidential-election, cnn, Donald Trump, election-of-2020, Felonious Trump, GOP, Liz Harrington, local, news, Russia
Donald Trump’s base claims to have been cheated out of winning the 2020 American election, and so there are a few cheerleaders on X apparently devoted to the surreal task of expressing outrage as an offensive measure. Trump hire Liz Harrington has been insistent about a lost election that Trump, in fact, has been trying to steal for himself.
Prove the cheat, #LizHarrington.
–https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/politics/elections/2021/01/06/trumps-failed-efforts-overturn-election-numbers/4130307001/
–https://www.cisa.gov/topics/election-security/rumor-vs-reality
–https://apnews.com/article/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-trial-trump-2020-0ac71f75acfacc52ea80b3e747fb0afe
Here are examples of attempts to invalidate 2020 election results by guile and by force.
–https://youtu.be/o3hrN0cP58Y (it was a perfect phone call).
–https://youtu.be/Iludfj6Pe7w
#FeloniousTrump #4FelonyCases91Counts
AmericanCharacterMatters #IntegrityMatters #TruthMatters #ModernAmericansMatter
DJT-delusional, grandiose, messianic and without normal boundaries and limits. The psychology’s well known. Nothing was taken away from the #AmericanPeople in the course of the 2020 election.
Our #UnitedStatesOfAmerica is no medieval polity. It is no “mafia state”. It is a modern secular democratic republic, and not one elected official, including President, “rules” by cabal, divine right, fraudulent claims, force, or violence.
In fact, the role of an American President is not to rule the country but to act as its most powerful management executive in compliance with the Constitution of the United States and its Legislative and Judicial branches. Only recently, so it seems to me, has the Republican Party embarked on or endorsed a program of what appears an effort to install authoritarian, corrupt, and evidently criminal control of the state.
The Xpression has been well received, and here you may see it yourself.
###
27 Friday Oct 2023
Tags
American Nationalist Fascism, American Reactionary Conservatism, Donald Trump, Fascist Nationalist GOP, GOP, Republican Party
Updated and revised post from October 26, 2023
I had had three X tweets here, but they were not showing to my satisfaction, so I have recreated the one that matters most.
A responsible #RepublicanParty would end #Denialism and the sustained entertainment of #FeloniousTrump as a potential #AmericanPresidentialCandidate–but your assembly of Americans-In-Name-Only appear unable to question #DJT‘s #AbsoluteReactionaryDemagoguery. For that, it appears you have chosen to destroy your nation.
#GOP #MikeJohnson #Trumpsters->#AmericansInNameOnly #AINOS

Posted to X on October 26, 2023 by J. S. Oppenheim.
I have found “X-pression” becoming pointless as the forest wakes up, all of the birdies go tweet tweet tweet and one’s own expression drowns in the cacophony. Nonetheless, X interaction feels engaging and here serves as part of a morning routine involving strong coffee, access to a portion of the world’s best journalism online, and, sigh, also a collection of voices practically medieval in their bludgeoning unreason.
–33–
18 Wednesday Oct 2023
Tags
Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, Failed Rocket Launch, Hamas, Hamas Lies to Save Face, lying, malignant narcissism
First things first: Israeli Precision Guided Rockets neither miss their their targets nor fail to destroy them in their entirety.
The explosion that took place did so in a parking lot, and it produced no cratering nor damage to nearby buildings.
Next: Arabs may lie to save face and sustain pride in allegedly blameless fashion.
I would ascribe such behavior to primitive, medieval, and tribal mentality and would do so across cultures inclined to both humiliate and spoil their boys as humiliation motivates the development of the malignant narcissist.
The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) analysis has included review of Israeli military launch records; radar air activity tracking records; reverse-tracked rocket fire traced to the proximity of the hospital, i.e., rocket trajectory show the launch took place south of the hospital–and not far from it; and independent video of the actual failure of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s rocket.
In intercepted audio communications, launch controller-tracker officers note the location of launch as a cemetery behind the hospital . . . . So there’s the location south of the hospital–a cemetery!–and both cause and opportunity to lie about the attempt.
Oppenheim, James S. “Malignant Narcissistic Process Distilled.” BackChannels, July 10, 2022.
Whitaker, Brian. “Lying is a cultural trait of Arabs, says Barak.” The Guardian, May 22, 2002.
Regarding the matter of Hamas having lied to Palestinians to cover the shame attending a failed rocket launch (while blaming it on the other guy), the ways have always been several: cover, deflect, deny, erase, fabricate, frame, and omit.
–33–
07 Saturday Oct 2023
Tags
#MedievalVModern, Assad, Gaza, Hamas, Israel, MadVlad, malignarcs, MEC, middle east conflict, MoscowApartmentBombings, OperationStormInMoscow, Palestinians, Putin, Rus, RusNazis, Russia, Russian Political Influence, RussianMafiaState, Taliban, TsarNobody, Zelensky
No more clear an example of #MedievalVModern may appear than the war that has broken out between #Hamas and #Israel. For Hamas, only the weapons are modern. The motivations have been deeply medieval, well rooted in directed misperception, i.e., disinformation, fabrications, lies promoted and sustained by edict and enforced by unquestionable and vicious authority. In essence-this on the Gaza Strip-the #Palestinians have been perceptually controlled by their own “leaders”, and they are now bound to be driven to destruction by them too.
For possibly most of the public, the story may be that Israeli settlers went wilding in Gaza and Gazans fought back, e.g., https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/6/palestinian-killed-as-israeli-settlers-attack-west-bank-town-of-huwara, but what has rolled out in the past day appears a full-scale Hamas battle plan, one with infiltrated shock troops and rockets (more than 2000 of them so far). In first fast response, BackChannels has forwarded through X background on #Russian antisemitism-https://conflict-backchannels.com/2021/02/01/ftac-endemic-russian-anti-semitism-a-note/-and #Russia’s related handling of the #Palestinians: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2023/04/22/ftac-moscow-suffocates-the-palestinians/; https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/12/29/ftac-middle-east-conflict-back-to-max-erwin-von-scheubner-richter-and-forward-to-the-plundering-of-palestinian-misery-by-palestinian-leadership-elites/. The behavior of those who would call themselves #Rus (and bridle at the hash term #RusNazis) appears just as barbaric and vicious as it must have in the 10th Century when the same displaced the last Khazar outpost.
*
Sviatoslav finally succeeded in destroying Khazar imperial power in the 960s. The Khazar fortresses of Sarkel and Tamatarkha fell to the Rus in 965, with the capital city of Atil following circa 967 or 969. A visitor to Atil wrote soon after the sacking of the city: “The Rus attacked, and no grape or raisin remained, not a leaf on a branch.”
http://mirror2.polsri.ac.id/wiki/wp/k/Khazars.htm (see “Addendum, June 19, 2023” on BackChannels for related data).
*
Today’s Khazarian and Rus descendants and others who have come to define Ukraine’s cultural, ethnic, and tribal endowments in total have become #ModernPeople, overwhelmingly lawful, fair and just, and peaceful in business and in general comportment while the most corrupt of persistent medieval thugs, Viktor Yanukovych, had been booted back to Moscow by general popular revolution, e.g., https://world.time.com/2014/02/22/ukraines-president-flees-protestors-capture-kiev/ and with the moral support of Ukraine’s army.
While Russia professes good will daily through its X-platformed embassy sites, its claims inevitably belie its own horrendous evil in the realms of chaos and mass destruction. The at-hand BackChannels references: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2023/06/28/a-dark-mirror-in-language/. For those most evil, language may be perverted to cover crime in the present and humiliation in the past as the rogue malign narcissistic psychology fashions strategies in language to match.
For the adverse personal and political psychology in play: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/10/malignant-narcissistic-process-distilled/; https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/anthropolitical-psychology/paranoid-delusional-narcissistic-reflection-of-motivation/.
Whatever Russia and the entities within its sphere of Soviet/post-Soviet Era influence may say of their enemies, it’s certain that they are describing themselves and their own ethical, moral, and spiritual bankruptcy. Their leaderships prove predictably corrupt and (out of necessity) dishonest and repressive. As a collection of #MaligNarcs, none–from #Assad in Syria to the #Taliban in Afghanistan–can bear critics or rivals anywhere close to home, and all have made their bones on atrocity, brutality, and mass murder. In yet another BackChannels package-https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/19/detecting-post-soviet-russias-black-narrative-of-revenge-for-89-and-91/-waits this gem: https://www.businessinsider.com/exploring-al-qaedas-murky-connection-to-russian-intelligence-2014-6.
#Putin, #TsarNobody in my #Zelensky-inspired desktop world, has with his KGB/FSB cohort proven immune to inconveniences posed by conscience (note: I’ve made a trope of “delusional, grandiose, and messianic ideation with an absence of normal boundaries, conscience, and limits” as shorthand for Narcissistic Personality Disorder and the political expression of the same beneath the label of “Malignant Narcissism”). For perhaps the most horrifying example of Putinesque stage management and perceptual control: #OperationStormInMoscow AKA #MoscowApartmentBombings, and here-https://conflict-backchannels.com/2023/05/03/reference-journalist-alexander-zhilin-operation-storm-in-moscow-aka-moscow-apartment-bombings/.
When it comes to bombing apartment buildings in the dead of night, none have done it better than #MadVlad who today threatens nuclear annihilation using the same methods in language inversion and psychological project to blackmail the west into the abandonment of Ukraine. And that’s “above the table”, i.e., in plain sight.
*
The speech came after hardline political scientists and commentators in Russia said a return to nuclear testing could send a powerful message to Moscow’s enemies in the west. “I hear calls to start testing nuclear weapons, to return to testing,” Putin said.
Some in Russia have called for Putin to detonate a nuclear bomb to show the west that Moscow’s patience over its support for Ukraine and apparent unwillingness to negotiate is wearing thin.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/05/vladimir-putin-escalates-nuclear-rhetoric-with-threat-to-resume-testing
*
Hamas has long found a sympathetic (or sympathetic-acting) presence in Mikhail Bogdanov, Moscow’s envoy to the Middle East. While it has been an independent actor, it appears to have also long-ingested the former communist state’s anti-Semitic rants and emphatic absolutism while holding itself n place with methods familiar to all dictatorships (for overview: https://freedomhouse.org/country/gaza-strip/freedom-world/2023).
Much has been written about the #RussianMafiaState. For quick reference->
Mustaffa, Munira. “Russia: The mafia as the state.” The Interpreter, August 31, 2023.
Rachman, Gideon. “Putin, Trump and the meaning of a mafia state.” Financial Times, August 28, 2023.
*
Israel has been hampered in its assistance to Ukraine by a deconfliction arrangement with Russia over Syrian airspace (e.g., https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/russia-sees-military-coordination-with-israel-syria-continuing-2022-02-26/). Nonetheless, The Jewish State has arrived today with biblical, global, and modern histories. In Israel it has a homeland; around the world, it contains communities of all races and cultural strands bound together by Judaism, its Torah, and Jewish experience and lore across thousands of years; and it has so contributed to the ideas of the west that the entire political culture may refer to itself as “Judeo-Christian” as well as “Greco-Roman”. The barbarians from European North and Asian East have in Russia chosen to remain defined by whatever fear they may install in others and then tribute exact or steal in wealth. That’s what they did in the Byzantine and Medieval Eras, and that is what they are doing now.
In the Middle East, the Palestinians have served Russia as a block and goad to the west and the burgeoning and vibrant cultures associated with the democratic open societies of the world whose freedoms may be well symbolized by Israel’s vitality.
In Eastern Europe, Ukraine by revolution, election, and today war has in every possible way become part of the west, leaving Russia to attempt its capture and subjection or destruction even while “Muscovy” dies or destroys itself for its own archaic and deeply displaced, misguided, and perverse ambitions.
*
Also related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2021/07/26/ftac-palestinian-kgb-the-palestinians-abused-and-plundered-by-their-own/.
*

Nekrasov, Andrey. Director. Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File AKA The Murder of Litvinenko.
Wikipedia. “Russian Imperial Movement”.
###