Category Archives: American Domestic Affairs

Hamas Urges Palestinians Toward Injury and Death

14 Monday May 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, American Domestic Affairs, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Political Psychology

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wpo-gaza-memory-hole

This morning, BackChannels copied and pasted to its Facebook “reading page” the following quotation:

— At a gathering point east of Gaza City, organizers urged demonstrators to burst through the fence, telling them Israeli soldiers were fleeing their positions, even as they were reinforcing them. —

“Israelis kill more than 50 Palestinians in Gaza protests, health officials say” (May 14 at 12:14 p.m. by Loveday Morris and Hazem Balousha).

The Guardian posted about the  the same thing: “Israeli troops kill dozens of Palestinians in protests as US embassy opens in Jerusalem – live updates” (May 14, 2018).

Such statements are not untrue — who?  did what?  to whom? — but incomplete and superficial.

Hamas chose to play the joyful occasion of the inauguration of the American Embassy in Jerusalem as just right for drama — and it chose to lie in a most functional or practical way to fairly order ever hopeful, ever strung along, ever disinformed, misled, and infuriated Palestinians toward the world’s best defended border and the troops that have made that so.

Related on BackChannels:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2018/02/06/set-palestinian-kgb-and-other-backchannels-observations-related-to-the-middle-east-conflict/

Addendum: FTAC: May 15, 2018: How Palestinians Will “Defy the Odds”

Palestinians will truly “defy the odds” when they find the courage and wherewithal to stand up to those who keep them most captive, channeled, and ill-informed: Fatah and Hamas. Until that day, they will repeat what they have been told about themselves, go around in circles somewhere between a frustrated complacency and a volcanic violence, and find themselves where they began, duped by Moscow, led by thugs, and subject to a part of the world’s most corrupt and piratical leadership.

Some should be asking Abbas about his new airplane.

Some should be asking Hamas how the Israelis could have been running away when they were firing to clear their fence line.

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FTAC: Gambling with Authentic Popular Democracy (APD) v “Potemkin Democracy”

09 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

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Brooke Seipel’s piece in The Hill, “Trump threatens to remove news networks’ press credentials over negative coverage” (May 9, 2018) provided the remark on the BackChannel’s reading page that inspired the following — and rather drifting — comment.

Trump should not have stepped off with denouncements of the Fourth Estate. However, BackChannels believes the location of tension in the world is that between the Modern and Medieval political worlds, and in the 21st Century, the medieval is a world of lies and manipulations. Motivation: money — for its own sake.

I need to update this piece —

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

The observation a year ago was that Islamic Terrorism had been prodded, channeled, and used _by Moscow_ to produce a reflexive “New Nationalism” in the EU / NATO states as part of Moscow’s efforts to degrade cohesion among the western democracies and within the military alliance defending them.

In an update, I would want to look over the potential integrating and related interference and shaping of Russo-American relations at highest levels. I’m a little tired as a volunteer poli-sci / poli-psy blogger, but were there encouragement plus a few $$$, that’s where intuition would send me.

There is obviously — and from the start with this Administration — a global class of immensely wealthy business personalities who appear to help one another along while also moving their hosting nations around in ways that address a number of issues.

BackChannels has to this point generally promoted “Authentic Popular Democracy” (APD) — not Potemkin Democracy operated by global elites. The guys (generally speaking) mixed up in these “Russian connection” investigations seem to believe otherwise, and that their money may purchase controlling influence.

Is that a world that is wanted from a democratic perspective?

President Trump’s “Russian Thing” becomes ever more complex and deep with the latest explorations into the working of financial clout by one of Russia’s wealthiest men, Viktor Vekselberg (the look-up may be left to the reader because the web has made that part of the blogger’s work almost superfluous).

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FTAC: A Comment on America’s Deep Polarization

03 Thursday May 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics

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The Left is the achievement of Western enlightenment.

Recall the authoritarian and reactionary governance in place that involved hundreds of years of warfare between politically absolute monarchies and the development of a mercantile class powerful enough, eventually, to stand up for their own interests and security.

The Soviet / post-Soviet Far Left indeed continued the Russian historical experience with paternal authoritarianism — and, of course, it built on the secret police organization established by Nicholas II (the Okhrana). The rest is more or less KGB history and a long history of motivating or driving politics based on the amplification of the victimization of numerous groups thrown beneath the wheels of history — or believing themselves so.

The formerly moderate Left’s — or “cultural left’s” — embrace of humanism, secularism, the broadest freedom possible for persons (as opposed to, say, impersonal “headcount”) is echoed in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. We were raised to believe in Man and Reason and great possibilities. It’s from the Russian side and, in part, the 19th Century and earlier portions of the 20th that we seem approving of authoritarianism and thuggery, frankly, in now polarized Left and Right camps.

One may suppose the center has not held — and we have forgotten many of the good things we as Americans were to embrace.

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/02/02/united-states-of-america-basic-training/

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French President Macron’s Address to the United States Congress, April 25, 2018

25 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Fast News Share, France, Free Speech, United States of America

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Also Relevant

9/11 –

http://www.businessinsider.com/exploring-al-qaedas-murky-connection-to-russian-intelligence-2014-6

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

New Threats – New Powers and Criminal States

https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/

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

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/02/02/united-states-of-america-basic-training/

The Illusion of Nationalism

Here!  Here!

BackChannels has been fighting the New Nationalism from the moment it detected its origins in the stimulus produced by Islamic Terrorism as manipulated by Moscow and Tehran worldwide.

The blog has also associated America’s deep and frequently extreme political polarization with “Active Measures” and related “hybrid” and “information” warfare designed by the dictatorships running Moscow and Tehran against the will of their people.  It seems surreal that a French President would now stand before the American Congress and underscore those points while a populist American President stands some to the side and between as regards accommodating, so far, aggression in Ukraine and an  unspeakable horror show for humanity in Syria, which has been strengthened also for Iranian and Russian forces as well as their proxies and “little white men” (same as those “little green” ones who literally walked into Crimea).

Best Solution – Digital Data and Artificial Intelligence

SophiaOnCosmoIndia

Screenshot: Sophia AI on the cover of an Indian edition of Cosmopolitan.

BackChannels heartily endorses fair and free trade, global cooperation that is constructive for all — no zero-sum games or negotiations — and, of course, due attention to the psychological and social ramifications of exchange involving Big Data and. God bless Sophia and her engineers, the revolutions to come in artificial intelligence.

There Is No Planet B

Fake News

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/10/23/fake-news-genuine-fake-news-the-real-fake-news-get-your-fake-news-here/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/28/a-short-page-referencing-works-by-or-associated-with-ion-mihai-pacepa/

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

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/10/01/the-active-measures-links-page/

I was drawn away from the desktop during this morning’s speech, but am very glad here to have returned to a recording of it (thank you Fox 10 Phoenix for fair use and fine editing) and spent the afternoon with it.

I think it safe to say that America LOVES French President Macron.  At the end of this clip, I seen no one sitting in protest.  I don’t know if that’s a rare occasion (another remark made about this event and one best left unremarked), but I’m going to be feeling it — feeling its goodness — for a while).

–33–

 

 

Changing Time for All Time: A Note on Antietam

22 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, United States of America

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Visitor's Center, Antietam National Battlefield Park, Sharpsburg

Visitor’s Center, Antietam National Battlefield Park, Sharpsburg, Maryland, June 1, 2017.

For visitors from other lands, the small patch of Maryland countryside on which the center has been planted represents the beginning of the end of slavery as an institution in the United States of America. In one horrific days of battle, General McClennan’s forces pushed General Lee’s Confederate army from the field but left it also to retreat west across the Potomac River and thence to fight a long war that would end about where it began but with the moral vision and structure of the country forever changed in favor of equality under the law and “liberty and justice for all”.

It takes a long time to change men — and to change their attitudes and beliefs about money and about one another. My America remains a work in progress, but as long as the work hews to the liberal view of man and the earnest distribution of political power through democracy accompanied by integrity, I think we Americans — and everyone else — will continue getting better in the building or forming of greater societies.

Where we have let people down, I’m sure we are going to be made to remember it. Where we have helped people up, one may hope we’ll be remembered for that too.

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FTAC: To a Pakistani On the Image of American Warmongering

13 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Political Spychology

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The Grand Game for Hearts and Minds remains in play between America and Russia.

Searching up video title “Five Decades of Lies and Wars” will take you to the prompt for the following text.

Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures

It was the Soviet Union that poured $1 billion itself into America’s domestic Vietnam Era anti-war movement. Its cause: totalitarian perceptual control.

The SU had also funded a host of organizations within the World Peace Council with interest in the seduction and leveraging of the same. When Soviet tanks started appearing in the SU’s satellite state, many organizations withdrew from the WPC and Soviet support. They had gotten the sweet picture — the sweet words — on their way into business with the Soviet but had gotten a clear picture of how Moscow really worked as east-west politics, essentially authoritarian “political absolutism” v democratic liberalism, really worked.

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

The phantoms of the Soviet, which dissolved in bankruptcy and much reviled in Russia some 26 years ago, remain in the character and spirit of Russia’s political administration today, while terms like “active measures” — also “information warfare”, “hybrid warfare”, “reflexive control”, etc. — remain obscure.

When will the world wake up from the control of dictatorships?

Today’s Moscow has been arming the Taliban in Afghanistan. How that center of power feels about people is on full display in Syria, where its air force has been bombing hospitals. How the RF may regard Pakistan may be seen along the daily bloodied front line where its army sits poised to invade democratic Ukraine.

Related for background on BackChannels:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/

It appears that the Phantom of the Soviet — capitalized and singular, there can be only one — wishes to replay WWII and the end of the Cold War with KGB methods in political (and perceptual) control intact.

Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat . . . .

Moscow’s direction looks a little crazy to BackChannels.

The host of self-defeating dictatorships should leave the 20th Century and move forward with liberal modernity and related responsive and responsible democratic governance.

–33–

America’s Broadest Interests: A Question – and Open for Debate

09 Monday Apr 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Are our “national interests” more monetary than spiritual or vice versa? Or are they / we balanced or forked between our practical needs and our ideals, principles, and values?

Will we do what we do for love — or for love of money?

Polices need never be black and white, one or the other, but one may ask where we have been going in relation to our deeply autocratic and piratical “competition” in the world.

Around the world, we have seen dictators promise their people the world while stealing for themselves their unfair share.

Is that where the West is now bound?

Off the train already: Erdogan.

Stepping off: Orban.

Who else?

Who’s next?

–33–

FTAC: Syria: Will the West Please Stand?

09 Monday Apr 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics

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The prompts may be inferred — has Syria signaled the weakening and weakness of the west? And are we so beholden to “Big Money” — the personalities of the powerful and wealthy of the world — that we have abandoned our western political character? — for the following and linked pieces of the BackChannels Soapbox Opera.

Syria has been the demonstration project for a medieval absolutism that intentionally fails to differentiate between the value of property and that of persons. The indiscriminate killing by the Assad regime as flanked by Putin and Khamenei has reinforced that most feudal view of sovereignty — and it should be seen that way. The same “troika” has also extended the tenure of Russian totalitarianism in which centralized power has shown it may arrange all perception for everyone else. There should be no question that Assad incubated ISIS — i.e., allowed the al-Qaeda types to stream into the battlespace and form, and then encouraged their organization by choosing to battle the west first while also bombing neutral noncombatant targets. “Assad v The Terrorists” has been grand and bloody political theater from the start.

If all were so — even though much seems so — we would have disengaged from Syria and nascent “Kurdistan” completely, but I think the spirit of the west still evolving and strong. In Syria, the post-Soviet axis has been effectively destroying itself, especially as may be measured by Syria’s diminished population and controlled land space.

Russia and the “phantoms of the Soviet” in it may be fabulously wealthy, but the state has been deeply damaged financially — and not by sanctions completely but the accumulated effects of capital flight and mafia behavior for decades.

Where Iran has had its hand in driving conflict, it has poisoned land and politics both.

The west has been cautious beneath the now immovable cloud of potential nuclear exchange with its enemies, and it has perhaps (!) suffered from early post-Cold War cooperation that with “Putin’s Pivot” on Syria (2011) has become problematic.

As regards Powerful Big Money, the western investment in its own existence in ideals, principles, and values IS being tested. If the west fails to defend its hard won experience, then welcome to the New Feudalism and wars cooked up endlessly for illicit and licit trade in totalitarian fashion (black market arms –> miscreants; state arms sales –> states). Alternatively, if the west wants to exist as a liberal statement, it will have to stand to defend its integrity.

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