Category Archives: Also in Media

Bana Alabed – One Video – One Tweet

02 Friday Dec 2016

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

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Posted to YouTube by TRT World, November 28, 2016.

Posted 19 hours ago.

Excerpted from Human Rights Watch Report, “Russia/Syria: War Crimes in Month of Bombing Aleppo – UN General Assembly Should Organize Emergency Special Session” December 1, 2016:

(New York) – The Russian–Syrian coalition committed war crimes during a month-long aerial bombing campaign of opposition-controlled territory in Aleppo in September and October 2016.

Ruins of a residential house that was struck in an aerial attack, killing at least 24 civilians, on September 27, 2016.
EXPAND

Ruins of a residential house that was struck in an aerial attack, killing at least 24 civilians, on September 27, 2016. © 2016 Syria Civil Defense

The Violations Documentation Center, a Syrian civil monitoring organization, documented that the bombing campaign killed more than 440 civilians, including more than 90 children. Airstrikes often appeared to be recklessly indiscriminate, deliberately targeted at least one medical facility, and included the use of indiscriminate weaponssuch as cluster munitions and incendiary weapons. Satellite imagery that Human Rights Watch analyzed shows more than 950 new distinct impact sites consistent with the detonation of large high explosive bombs across the area during the month.

Excerpt from “The One Chart That Russia’s Military Should Be Very Afraid Of” –  The National Interest, November 26, 2016, on Russia’s economic performance and related defense sales:

The good news for Moscow is that Russian operations in Syria have provided effective advertising for Russian military hardware. Back in March, Vladimir Putin boasted that Russian arms sales in 2015 had exceeded US$14 billion, and prospective foreign orders had reached US$56 billion. (As a caution, SIPRI’s arms transfer database, which measures the value of delivered goods, lists a 2015 exports figure of less than US$10 billion).

Everyday online, BackChannels swims through a kaleidoscopic assortment of news-related e-mails, Facebook posts, tweets, reports, articles, and opinions — actually, the day begins with reading out of an old fashioned hardcover book (the latest – an autobiography by Stanislav Lunev) — and over time, the particles of reality sort themselves into sensibility.

The sensibility here today: Assad incubated ISIL; Assad, unable to blackmail or goad the west through “Assad vs The Terrorists“, has long chosen to follow his own dictate: “Assad, Or We Burn It“;  Putin, intent on both a KGB and Imperial Era revanche — the best of both his worlds, perhaps — has with Assad and Khamenei pursued that path that would defend and display “medieval  (and totalitarian) political absolutism” and reintroduce the democratic open societies to barbarism while destabilizing the same through the encouragement of extremist (Far Right and Far Left) political discord.

On the receiving end of that murderous ambition: a mother and her seven-year-old daughter using Twitter to reach out to the world.

Additional Fast Links

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/ – 10/2/2015.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/14/isil-groomed-for-a-role-in-assad-vs-the-terrorists/

Update – December 4, 2016

https://twitter.com/WithinSyriaBlog/status/805482152016117760

BackChannels often returns to check on its posts to see if new information has changed the message.  In this instance, the “AlabedBana” account appears to have been suspended.  Hypotheses: al-Assad’s Syrian State closed the account; Bana Alabed and her mother are gone; Twitter, for security, suspended the account.  Off the field and unable to either investigate or get an honest answer from Damascus — Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran speak with twisted tongues at best — there are no answer, only a melancholy and blank mystery in the Twitterverse.

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Also in Media: “Priest Examines France’s Modern Antisemitism” – Juicy Ecumenism – December 1, 2016

01 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, France, Religion

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Yet when discussing continuities and discontinuities between antisemitism past and present, Desbois distinguishes that the leading force behind antisemitism in France today is not native French, but rather immigrant Muslim communities. Contrary to common comparisons of modern antisemitism with Nazism’s rise in the 1930s, he states that the “story does not repeat itself. We are in a new situation.”  While Adolf Hitler is dead, jihadist groups like ISIS have “new ideologies that say not only is it good, but it is something good in front of God, to kill Jews.”

Desbois stated that the “problem unfortunately is all from radical Islam, the violence. It is not publicly polite to say that but it is true…only the extreme right speaks about that.” “If you go into Paris you will not find an old, Catholic lady kicking you in the streets,” he noted, a message underlined by his slides citing jihadist killings of Jews in Toulouse (2012), Brussels (2014), and Paris (2015).

Source: Priest Examines France’s Modern Antisemitism – Juicy Ecumenism

Also in Media: Window on Eurasia — New Series: “Putin’s Language Doesn’t Threaten Russia’s Neighbors but Does Threaten Russia, Shchetkina Says” — December 1, 2016

01 Thursday Dec 2016

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

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  Unfortunately for Russians, what Putin is doing puts them and their culture under threat. “For Russia, the fate of their language is a question of life or death” because the language is in many ways a metaphor for Russia itself. “The Russian language, Russian culture and Russian literature are … what Russia is.”

Indeed, Shchetkina argues, Russia doesn’t exist anywhere beyond these things; and that explains why Putin has said that Russia has no borders because Russia is a “virtual” reality rather than a geographic one.  And in this is a problem: “this culture and language does not belong undividedly to a country which is now called the Russian Federation.”

Source: Window on Eurasia — New Series: Putin’s Language Doesn’t Threaten Russia’s Neighbors but Does Threaten Russia, Shchetkina Says – 12/1/2016.

Also in Media: “Why Vladimir Putin Hates Us” | Observer | November 22, 2016

29 Tuesday Nov 2016

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

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Predictably, the Kremlin maintains that moving state-of-the art missiles into Kaliningrad is a response to American ballistic missile defenses which have been deployed in Eastern Europe. As usual, Moscow depicts all its military moves, even ones which are destabilizing to regional security, as cosmically defensive, so great is the Western threat to Russia.

Source: Why Vladimir Putin Hates Us | Observer

Relevant on BackChannels: “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation”.

Also in Media: Georgie Anne Geyer commentary: “After 52 years, peace could break out in Colombia” | The Columbus Dispatch – September 15, 2016

26 Saturday Nov 2016

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On Feb. 15, 1966, the government announced that Father Camilo Torres had been killed in an encounter with Colombian troops. The wars went on; Camilo became the revolution’s holy mascot.

At the time, we who were covering the story wondered: How long would these ”wars” between the disaffected, nihilistic young and the wealthy landowners and priests who ran Colombia actually last? Five years? Ten? Maybe even — God forbid — 15?

In fact, these wars have lasted 52 years, with 220,000 dead on both sides, and with the 6,800 or so Marxist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known always as FARC, ruling over 18,000 peasants. In the isolated valleys and rivers of that mountainous land, they were using the peasants in part as a workforce for coca, and thus cocaine, production.

Source: Georgie Anne Geyer commentary: After 52 years, peace could break out in Colombia | The Columbus Dispatch

Also in Media: “Islamism’s Recurring Back to the Future Failure” – Religious Freedom Coalition – November 17 2016

18 Friday Nov 2016

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

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Egypt’s “Muslim Brotherhood is done,” stated the native Egyptian Copt and Hudson Institute Islamism expert Samuel Tadros on November 2 at McLean, Virginia’s Westminster Institute.  Yet his presentation “The Future of Islamism in Egypt” before an audience of about 30 ominously examined how the dangerous ideology of Islamism would continue to outlive repeated failures by the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations.

Tadros noted that the failure of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists to hold power in various Arab nations following the misnamed 2011 “Arab Spring” popular overthrow of Arab dictators.  Accordingly, “people were happy to talk about the end of Islamism,” a “phenomenon that the Arabic-speaking world had suffered from for generations.”  Particularly in Egypt, following the July 3, 2013 military overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government, state repression facing the Muslim Brotherhood “today is much larger than anything they have faced in the past,” with thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members either jailed or exiled.

Source: Islamism’s Recurring Back to the Future Failure – 11/17/2016.

 

Also in Media: “Playboy Interview: Donald Trump (1990)” | Playboy

16 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, American Domestic Affairs, Political Psychology, United States of America

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But if the grass ever did look greener, which political party do you think you’d be more comfortable with?  Well, if I ever ran for office, I’d do better as a Democrat than as a Republican–and that’s not because I’d be more liberal, because I’m conservative. But the working guy would elect me. He likes me. When I walk down the street, those cabbies start yelling out their windows.

Source: Playboy Interview: Donald Trump (1990) | Playboy

It was too good a quotation not to share on this blog.

There are others nuggets as regards the Trump show, the promotion of extraordinary egotism (on this blog, the same may be interpreted and developed as a malign or reparative narcissism), admiration for the Chinese government’s show of strength at Tienanmen Square, and obsession with nuclear war:

I’ve always thought about the issue of nuclear war; it’s a very important element in my thought process. It’s the ultimate, the ultimate catastrophe, the biggest problem this world has, and nobody’s focusing on the nuts and bolts of it. It’s a little like sickness. People don’t believe they’re going to get sick until they do. Nobody wants to talk about it. I believe the greatest of all stupidities is people’s believing it will never happen, because everybody knows how destructive it will be, so nobody uses weapons. What bullshit.

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Also in Media: “Russia-made 300mm Smerch multiple rocket launcher ordnance found unexploded in Donbas” – Uaposition – November 14, 2016

14 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Russia, Ukraine

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The SBU Security Service of Ukraine has reported an unexploded piece of ordnance of the Russian-made Smerch heavy multiple rocket launcher (MRL) was found in the Anti-Terrorist Operation zone in eastern Ukraine.The rocket landed in the yard of a local resident in the village of Berezove in Maryinsky district, Donetsk region, the SBU`s press center said.Military experts concluded that the marking of the rocket reveals that Russia`s hybrid military forces in Donbas use 300mm (12 in) rocket projectiles fitted with fragmentation submunitions scattering cluster warheads.

Source: Russia-made 300mm Smerch multiple rocket launcher ordnance found unexploded in Donbas – Uaposition

For more background on ceasefire violations in Ukraine:

http://www.osce.org/ukraine-smm/reports

For additional background on Russian aggression in Ukraine:

UAPosition.  “English translation of audio evidence of Putin’s Adviser Glazyev and other Russian politicians involvement in war in Ukraine.”  August 29, 2016.

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