Category Archives: American Domestic Affairs

FTAC: On the Preservation of Political Heritage and Memory

20 Sunday Aug 2017

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

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With standards set by the definition of speech-related crimes (conspiracy, incitement, sedition, and a very few additional regions associated with prohibitions, rightly), I have been absolute about “Freedom of Speech” prerogatives for Americans. I not only see nothing wrong with such a statue but everything right if connected to greater contemplation requiring greater knowledge and humanity.

I own here a copy of Mien Kampf.

It doesn’t make me a Nazi.

In the area of public display managed by public offices or services, see this morning’s wall on Back-Channels.

In general, I endorse Milan Kundera’s observation, “The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

States and their leaders do have their icons and standards, and it’s those that may be favored or disfavored across time and adjusted by public consensus openly as part of the process of governance. It would seem that gross historical revisionism has accompanied extremist ideologies and absolute power across time. Certainly, it has been “Communists”, “Fascists”, and “Socialists” along hard lines that have sought to erase the past. Perhaps an exception may be made for the eventual erasure of the names of Palestinian mass murderers who have been made into heroes beneath the despicable and upside-down guidance of Soviet Era thought about the relationship between State Power and “The Masses”. Extreme revolt against that would seem in order today — when and as the Palestinians learn how they have been abused by Moscow — but Confederate flags, statues of despots, books — place them where they belong, but keep them somewhere and don’t forget them or what they said they stood for, or what they really did with their lives.

Today . . . it’s last week’s Big Topic: from the post-Civil War statues of Confederate military nobility to one of Lenin in Washington State, American extremists have engaged in minor battle over what’s in the public presence while the public has been urged to review policy and, perhaps, considering “moving the furniture” of the public lawn or into the back rooms we call museums.

Here’s Laura Southern on the matter:

And here a statement from the National Trust on Historic Preservation (June 10, 2017): https://savingplaces.org/press-center/media-resources/national-trust-statement-on-confederate-memorials#.WZoELdQrJlZ

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Those Seeking to Divide Us . . . .

12 Saturday Aug 2017

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

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https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/12/trump-condemns-violence-at-charlottesville-alt-right-rally-says-country-must-come-together-as-one.html

Now who would seek to divide the American political campus against its own best interests?

The above played live on YouTube earlier today.  It’s now appears or sounds like a recording.  (Post-Publication Note: the YouTube poster revoked third-party replay (perhaps) because it knows its feed was designed to present Charlottesville and the United States of America as a House Mightily Divided, and while it has seemed that through the election season and this most turbulent of Administrations, we may not be so divided as confused by so much media devoted to the dramatizing of extremes.  “Active Measures”?  Could be.  The poster, “CCW News”, boasts (boasted) some arrangement with PressTV — and, reliably (if you click over to YouTube), listen to who is talking, masking away history, and framing the present.

Here, I will leave the copy as initially published.

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We are told that we are divided.

Are we?

We’re “reminded” in the Jahi Issa interview that southern slavery was a colonial enterprise apparently absent of African and Arab practices in conquest and trade.

Here’s a block of URL’s on the history of the world’s most spiritually dismal industry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_the_Muslim_world http://autocww.colorado.edu/~toldy2/E64ContentFiles/AfricanHistory/SlaveryInAfrica.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Sudan https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/history/slave-trade.php

Contemporary (and a sad thing to note):

http://www.africanholocaust.net/articles/21stcentury%20slaves.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_contemporary_Africa http://www.dw.com/en/as-slave-trade-abolition-is-celebrated-millions-of-africans-continue-to-live-as-slaves/a-18337189 |
Portal Page: http://www.stoppingslavery.org/slavery-in-mauritania.html

Regarding the “southern” contribution, which seems archaic in this day and age: “blood and soil” and “the Jews will not replace us . . . .” — even absent of close-up evidence, the process has Moscow’s political “fingerprints” all over it.

Color codes previously noted and applied on Backchannels:

Red = Old Comrades (Soviet Era communists)
Green = Islamists (strident of Islam)
Black = Black Segregationists

“Red-Green Alliance” serves to represent the effort in the 20th Century to combine political forces to unseat the political intentions of the liberal democratic west.   The “Black” component flows down, imho, from older radical politics.

“ANTIFA” is a mystery organization with a global footprint, BackChannels wonders who is behind its development, recruitments, and evidently (and ironically) uniform counter-demonstration programming.

Regarding the New Nationalism (and resurgent feudalism and embrace of the medieval mode) in Europe and North America, BackChannels has suggested that Islamic Terrorism (“Allahu Akbar Terrorism”) has been channeled to goad Americans and Europeans toward the defense of their respective homelands.

Related Reference

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

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Also in Media: “Can Ayaan Hirsi Ali Liberate Islam from Islamism?” | by Andrew Harrod | Religious Freedom Coalition | July 20, 2017

21 Friday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, American Domestic Affairs, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Religion

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“Dawa is to the Islamists of today what the ‘long march through the institutions’ was to twentieth-century Marxists,” writes Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her latest monograph, The Challenge of Dawa:  Political Islam as Ideology and Movement and How to Counter It.  In it the Somali-born political activist accurately analyzes the threat of, and necessary response to, Islam’s faith-based political ideology, yet the feasibility of her desire to reform this “Islamism” out of Islam is questionable.

Analyzing dawa’s call to Islam, Ali calls for a “paradigm shift that recognizes how violent jihad is intertwined with the ideological infrastructure of dawa,” the “subversive, indoctrinating precursor to jihad.”  Reflecting a commonplace myopic focus on jihadists, President George W. Bush “often referred to a ‘war on terror,’ but terror is a tactic that can be used for a variety of ideological objectives.”  Accordingly, “nonviolent and violent Islamists differ only on tactics; they share the same goal, which is to establish an unfree society ruled by strict sharia law.”

Source: Can Ayaan Hirsi Ali Liberate Islam from Islamism?

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FTAC: On Governance and Realpolitik

21 Friday Jul 2017

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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Okay — we know how smooth politics are with 300 million Americans — you design the system for 1.4 billion Chinese. 🙂

Possibly, Russia’s answer and part of the seduction of the EU / NATO states may be to protect the power of financial and political elites against the demands of great populations with needs to match.  Why not sew it all up with friends in the nomenklatura?

When the west demurred from engagement in Iran’s 2009 attempted revolution, I don’t know whether the decision was to buy time for Russia to run itself down or to capitulate to governments representing kleptocratic dictatorships. Instead of making the world safe for democracy (these days), we may be preparing it for governance by powerful and wealthy elites who think little of the liberties, lives, and happiness of others (who exist to serve them).

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Also in Media: On the Koch Brothers

16 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Politics, United States of America

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Oddly enough, the fiercely capitalist Koch family owes part of its fortune to Joseph Stalin. Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer who settled in Texas and ran a weekly newspaper. Fred attended M.I.T., where he earned a degree in chemical engineering. In 1927, he invented a more efficient process for converting oil into gasoline, but, according to family lore, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a threat and shut him out of the industry. Unable to succeed at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union. In the nineteen-thirties, his company trained Bolshevik engineers and helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries. Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration. He returned to the U.S. In the headquarters of his company, Rock Island Oil & Refining, in Wichita, he kept photographs aimed at proving that some of those Soviet refineries had been destroyed in the Second World War. Gus diZerega, a former friend of Charles Koch, recalled, “As the Soviets became a stronger military power, Fred felt a certain amount of guilt at having helped build them up. I think it bothered him a lot.”

In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover . . . .

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations

At a time when Americans are watching with some horror contests between the Trump Administration and responsible mainstream media, also between the Trump Administration and Congress, also between the Trump Administration and America’s ill and vulnerable, and, finally, between (not the Trump Administration) absurdly polarized American political parties, the Koch Brothers as cultural philanthropists and political activators seem ever an indirect part of the American experience.

Since reading a Mother Jones piece on the brothers, BackChannels has been compiling Koch Brothers articles without comment, but may here share the list and let that suffice for the time being.

Note: where date of publication appears embedded in the article URL, BackChannels will not repeat it in listing.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/05/koch-brothers-family-history-sons-of-wichita – 5/20/2014.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/02/opinion/woodhouse-koch-brothers/

http://www.npr.org/2016/01/19/463551038/dark-money-delves-into-how-koch-brothers-donations-push-their-political-agenda

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-The-Koch-Brothers-meet-the-crackpots-454481 – 5/19/2016

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/behind-make-america-great-the-koch-agenda-returns-with-a-vengeance – 11/21/2016.

http://www.exposedbycmd.org/2017/03/23/kochs-bankroll-movement-rewrite-constitution/

http://billmoyers.com/story/deep-history-radical-right/

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Americans_for_Prosperity

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

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FTAC: “Fake News!” Cheerleaders, Enablers, Sources . . . .

02 Sunday Jul 2017

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

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Inspiration: another baseless Trumpeted attack on CNN.

Posted elsewhere earlier today:

If there’s “Fake News” among the majors of “Big Media”, there must be fake journalists and institutions passing along their fakery to young journalists.

https://www.cjr.org/

http://www.poynter.org/

http://www.pulitzer.org/

http://ejc.net/

I’ve been arch in the opener (of course): The organizations noted have each devoted themselves and inspired young journalists toward excellence.

The weakness in democracy resides in the absence of meaningful political education in the constituents or deliberate disinformation, generally by way of the “agent provocateurs” of foreign sponsors. Basically, if the voters fail their history tests 🙂 and sustain their disinterest in most domestic and foreign affairs, then they leave the character of the government up to government elites and potentially elite influences. If that’s where we’re going, government may as well become a private business benefiting private interests and exploiting as much of the public as possible.

In some ways, such a process may be inevitable, as we rely on others to keep other machinery humming while each of us does our thing even if as free as we may be to independently read and pursue research curiosity. We’re plainly limited x time / day x energy and cannot “ride herd” on the reporting on critical issues.

Still, I would question the leader who attempts to dissolve the credibility of the professional journalism community while engaged in turning a state into something of a private fief.

Fault for American ignorance in relation to the “Fourth Estate”, not to mention the foundations of American political culture and America’s leadership (or perhaps now former leadership) in the greater world may be assigned to generations of business and technical interests on our public education systems. The failure to transmit cultural basics and values down to the floor of the economy is signal of cultural failure.

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The Quiet Assault – A Glance at Interdicted Tech Smuggling to Russia and China

18 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by in American Domestic Affairs, Political Spychology

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Set aside Anna and her ring.

Last week’s short wee-hour’s shutdown of a portion of Charleston’s port set off by a potentially disinformed conspiracy blogger and webcaster signaled popular American concern and sensitivity to the defense of the homeland, never mind the capabilities and sensitivities of the nation’s capacious national defense and security industry.

Made curious by the homegrown event, BackChannels recalled an incident in which a young Russian national living in the south had been arrested for shipping rifle scopes to Russian, but memory being what it is — some fluid-inscribed organization of thought suspended in brain chemistry and structure — I thought to briefly explore a more subtle aspect of assault on the homeland.  Two themes emerged: 1) the role of innocents either duped into the smuggling process or possibly ignorant of the law and the import of their actions (perhaps Fermenova’s “delivery” had been intended solely for hunting boar); 2) we might want the struggling democracy to get the shipment 🙂 — but, really, the action must be propelled by our own collective politics and government authorized.

Or else!

Here listed in chronological order are the morning’s result —

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wisconsin-woman-unwittingly-ships-military-hardware-russia/story?id=11290519 – 8/2/2010 – Conspiracy exploited an innocent to work an at-home job fiddling with packaging (“Don’t do it.  Go for a regular job in a regular business”).  🙂 -> Russia.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/latvian-beauty-anna-fermanova-months-prison-smuggling-sniper-scopes-russia-article-1.967810 – 10/25/2011 – Night vision goggles and sniper scope -> Russian ex-husband, “target master” at a hunting lodge.

 https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/houston/press-releases/2012/russian-agent-and-10-other-members-of-procurement-network-for-russian-military-and-intelligence-operating-in-the-u.s.-and-russia-indicted-in-new-york – 10/3/2012 – 11-member “procurement network” – micro-electronics -> Russia.

http://www.theblaze.com/news/2014/10/08/officials-russian-man-attempted-to-smuggle-military-night-vision-technology/ – 10/8/2014 – Dmitry Ustinov – arms components – night scopes – thermal imaging technology -> Russia.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdga/pr/russian-citizen-sentenced-federal-prison-illegally-exporting-firearm-parts-russia – 12/11/2014 – Viacheslav Zhukov – firearm magnifier scopes -> Russia.

http://nypost.com/2015/09/09/spy-pleads-guilty-to-smuggling-military-technology-to-russia/ – 9/9/2015 – Alexander Fishenko – $50 million – sensitive electronics -> Russia.

https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/smuggle-military-technology-russia-brooklyn-doj/ – 10/6/2016 – Alexey Barysheff (naturalized), Aleksandrovish Karpenko, Alexey Krutilin – sensitive electronics -> Russia

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/04/27/bay-area-couple-charged-with-illegally-exporting-night-vision-scope-parts/ – 4/27/2017 – Naum and Irina Morgovsky – Night vision rifle scope parts -> Russia.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/23/la-woman-arrested-on-charges-of-smuggling-us-space-technology-to-china.html – 5/23/2017 – Cathy Chen – $100,000 worth of space communications technology -> China.

Also in this morning’s look-see, an attempt to distribute rifle scopes and thermal imaging technology to the westbound state of Ukraine:

http://www.uapost.us/en/news/u-ssha-zaareshtuvaly-ukrayincya-za-kontrabandu-teplovizoriv/ – 3/7/2017 – Volodymer Nedoviz -> Ukraine.  While BackChannels is with reason more concerned with the smuggling of “game-changing” restricted technologies to Russia, which may be reverse-engineered as well as distributed, it understands U.S. State’s interests and others in maintaining oversight of the same in a troubled world.

While the “live fire demonstration” that some consider the atrocious military behavior by Russian forces in Syria has boosted Russian defense sales, it would appear evident that Putin’s Federation has yet to figure out, much less build and distribute (much less commercialize) state-of-the-art night vision and thermal imaging technology.  Caution: don’t take the observation as authoritative, but rather a sensible conclusion drawn from the efforts of so many over time to attempt to ship the same toward Moscow.  If we need to be fanciful, and since the innocent’s packages (first URL cited in the above list) included military or police uniforms, that content suggests some interest in infiltrating American units (same uniform, same arms — slip a person into costume and plant).

Additional Reference

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article156277354.html – 6/15/2017. “No problem on ship at after threat claim at Charleston port” (AP).

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FTAC – A Note on Clinton’s Post-Cold War Knowledge

13 Tuesday Jun 2017

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 Soviet Union officially dissolved itself in bankruptcy on December 25, 1991. It did so with plans for the survival of the privileged of the Party — reference: Karen Dawisha’s groundbreaking book _Putin’s Kleptocracy_.

KGB Colonel and today President Putin has ditched the old banner, Communism, for “State Capitalism” and rebuilt essential elements of the Russian cultural-political experience: KGB/FSB, Centralized Power (that would be himself), and Aristocracy (“the oligarchs”).

The general public’s knowledge of the Cold War has been dimmed by time and the passing of a generation that needed to impart a base of knowledge in foreign affairs to the general public and failed to do that.

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

Putin has displayed preference for other autocrats — Erdogan, Orban, Le Pen, Trump — and the cause for that has been the reinstalling of the feudalism and the medieval worldview in the states of the European Union and NATO, and he gotten far with that project using Islamic Terrorism as a goad to getting there.

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

Read a little bit considerately, independently (no spin — your thoughts only), and quietly.

And look up “Zawahiri, Russia”.

Clinton, for all the many faults of the family and its character, knew the post-Cold War history and what it meant for the United States of America and the open democracies of the west. I don’t defend her; I didn’t vote for her. What I’ve come to observe — and I edit Back-Channels — are the processes by which my fellow Americans have been driven toward polarized extremes.

If BackChannels didn’t post it here, it would be lost somewhere beneath Sean Hannity’s latest Facebook comment about Susan Rice, a thoroughly partisan info-morsel for his hungry crowd — better to preserve it in an obscure blog that matters — or should matter — more and more as the free world, the European Union, and NATO approach Putin’s politically absolute and frequently criminal Moscow.

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