When comparing quality of life conditions between advanced Western nations and individual states within the U.S., a growing amount of data available shows that those which are the most conservative and religious are the most violent and plagued with far greater social problems in more than a dozen categories like overall crime, economic mobility, infant mortality, environmental abuse, teen pregnancy, incarceration, life expectancy, poor educational systems, murder, healthcare efficiency, average worker to CEO pay ratio, paid maternity leave, obesity, income inequality and minimal worker’s benefits.
The claim expressed in the title generally applies as much to individual states in America as it does to the nations of the world. Contrary to the repeated slogans of asserted “self-evident truths” within my very conservative upbringing, I’ve discovered that the economic, historical and sociological data shows that the best answer is a moderate combination of conservatism, liberalism and libertarianism. See in the statistics below sizable evidence…
Much of the information below comes from Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. This remarkable text evaluates and combines the work of dozens of historians to show that, contrary to popular opinion on the left and right, the planet has become far more peaceful than in any other time in history. Terrible things like the following are in radical decline (or in some cases have been eliminated): warfare, rape, murder, judicial torture, child abuse, legal and illegal slavery, use of the death penalty, robbery, infanticide, bullying, lynchings, corporal punishment, misogyny, theft, domestic abuse, racism, blood sports, religious persecution, burglary, debtors’ prisons, sexism, abortion, dueling, property crime, witchhunts and animal abuse. This process started when societies began to organize away from hunter-gatherer communities between 7,000-10,000 years ago into structured civilizations, but shifted to an accelerated level of reform during the 18th century’s Age of Enlightenment and…
From the early sacking of the generals accustomed to the state that Kemal Ataturk bequeathed to the Turks to the latest and disingenuous assaults on the Kurdish People under the cover of fighting terrorism accompanied by something like the resurrection of the Kurdish PKK, a Marxist-infused movement dating back to the 1970s and long stalled in its ideological tracks but naturally mixed back into Kurdish politics, Turkish President Tayyip Recep Erdogan has pursued a course in action, behavior, and language more familiar to Moscow than to Washington.
Add in that grandiose residence, the “White Palace”, a mixed development Versailles, but with its private residential part supporting some 250 rooms set on a landscape dotted with at least a few $10,000 trees imported from Italy.
On this post, the related and additional reference sections and fair-use excerpts should provide plenty for reflection on Turkey as a NATO state that while fulfilling its military contract has drifted as a democracy far into authoritarianism. Although the Moscow-Tehran axis blocks any chance of an Erdogan-Putin political “bromance” like that between Putin and Hungary’s Orban, who despite his state’s NATO membership has displayed the same drift toward authoritarian rule, Erdogan’s path remains the one that leads to dictatorship.
Related Reference — Freedom of the Press
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2015/turkey – “Turkey: 5-Year Decline in Press Freedom”: “Conditions for media freedom in Turkey continued to deteriorate in 2014 after several years of decline. The government enacted new laws that expanded both the state’s power to block websites and the surveillance capability of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT). Journalists faced unprecedented legal obstacles as the courts restricted reporting on corruption and national security issues. The authorities also continued to aggressively use the penal code, criminal defamation laws, and the antiterrorism law to crack down on journalists and media outlets.”
http://www.dw.com/en/security-for-turkeys-erdogan-scuffles-with-journalists-in-washington/a-19157072 – “Security for Turkey’s Erdogan scuffles with journalists in Washington”: “The president’s security detail removed one opposition Turkish reporter from the speech room, kicked another and threw a third to the ground outside the Brookings Institution, in a melee that provided Washington’s foreign policy elite a firsthand glimpse at the state of the press in Turkey.” Note: In the United States, Secret Service details protect foreign heads of state. However, it appears that Brookings, Erdogan’s own security detail may have made moves against would-be Erdogan critics.
. . . Erdogan has used his strong Islamic credentials to project himself as a pious leader, when in fact he consistently engaged in favoritism, granting huge government contracts to those who supported him and to his family members, irrespective of conflicts of interest and the corruption that ensued as a result.
The breakdown in 2015 of the government-initiated peace process with Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has been accompanied by an increase in violent attacks, armed clashes, and serious human rights violations since summer 2015. The latter includes violations of the right to life and mass displacement of residents in eight southeastern towns where the security forces and PKK-affiliated youth groups have engaged in armed clashes, as well as denial of access to basic services including healthcare, food and education for residents placed under blanket curfew conditions for extended periods and in some cases months at a time. The past eight months have seen hundreds of security personnel, Kurdish armed fighters and civilians killed, with almost no government acknowledgement of the civilian death toll estimated at between 200 and 300 in this period. The renewed violence has provided the context too for numerous arrests of political activists and alleged armed youth on terrorism charges and ill-treatment of detainees.
See Richard Spencer’s piece, listed below, for an estimation of a changed PKK politics within the Kurdish effort to eject ISIS, where the Kurds of produced the most effective ground fighting force since the Syrian Tragedy took hold in 2011, and otherwise establish and sustain their autonomy despite their historic four-state division and subsequent treatment as an ethnic suzerainty.
“The PKK has become part of the people. You can’t separate them anymore,” said Zubeyde Zumrut (in Diyarbakir), co-chair of BDP, which won control of one hundred municipalities in the southeast of Turkey in the 2009 local elections and thirty-six parliamentary seats in the June 2011 national elections. “Which means if you want to solve this problem, you need to take the PKK into account.”
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s recent attack against academics – who signed a petition condemning military operations in Kurdish cities and calling for peace and negotiations – is yet another banal expression of the authoritarian politics that have long prevailed in Turkey under Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule. All authoritarian regimes are anti-intellectual and this tendency intensifies when they are in trouble. So it is not surprising that Turkey’s president and his party look for scapegoats to blame for their domestic and foreign policy failures. Indeed, authoritarianism is rarely a reflection of political power; rather, in most cases it is a result of weakness.
We joined the agency in January, hired to edit English-language news, but quickly found ourselves becoming English-language spin-doctors. The agency’s editorial line on its domestic politics – and Syria, in particular – was so intently pro-government that we might as well have been writing press releases. Two months into the job, we listened to Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç talking bollocks about press freedom from an event at London’s Chatham House, downplaying the number of imprisoned journalists in Turkey.
SPIEGEL: The government says it is exclusively pursuing terrorists.
Demirtas: The war is primarily focused on civilians that Erdogan suspects of supporting the PKK. Almost 400,000 people have had to leave their homes. The southeast of Turkey resembles Syria.
What has happened is that Turkey has decided to allow Iraqi Kurdistan’s army, the Peshmerga, to join the YPG, the PKK’s Syrian affiliate, in defending Kobane.
The Kurds of south-east Turkey cheering the Peshmerga convoy as it passes are of course hoping they will save their fellow Kurds in Kobane. But they are also cheering the new-found unity of the Kurdish cause. For once, the faction-fighting of their leaders has been set aside in a common purpose, and the Kurd in the street feels anything is now possible.
The Turkish PM is on a roll: About 10% of the country’s top brass are in jail, awaiting trial for allegedly plotting against him. Voters have given him a mandate to rewrite the country’s constitution, produced under the shadow of a 1980 military coup and that allowed the military to interfere in the process of governance.
But there are suspicions the evidence against the officers was fabricated and the moves are intended to silence the opposition. Numerous journalists and academics are being held on similar charges.
There are differences in how different scriptures work and (!) how they may be leveraged into religious or secular autocratic power.
I’m the editor of the blog cited, and for the idea that more human misery has to do with the character of leaders and their followers than with related artifacts — books, legends, poems, songs, etc. — I’ve used for dictators the phrase, “Different talks — same walk.”
In general, most people don’t like the “walk” — or strut — laid down by a strongman, but for the medieval of mind, the crowds or “masses” matter much less than relationships with similar powerful persons, their own inner circles in business, military, and paramilitary communities, and then the constituencies that have bought in with them. Out of that complex political community come the “evildoers” and those leveraged to cooperate with them.
“Different talks — same walk.”
The latest in polling has given us the “94 percent” figure: what is different then about the six percent who would endorse the violence against innocents that may be delivered with the cry “Allahu akbar”?
I think the true immediate axis in global conflict is that between medieval and modern conceptions of man and related concentrations or distributions of power in those who govern. How absolutely powerful a tyrant is compared to the leader constrained by institutional powers greater than himself.
Chatyping in social media dredges up a host of ideas familiar to BackChannels readers, not least among them the idea that a kind of personality produces for itself a political environment suited to its need for control of the surrounding world — and that to the point where it may mete out suffering to others with impunity. Such power proves always deeply destructive and sadistic.
It’s best to catch it at the gates — in the truly functioning democracies, at the polls — but even then the popular will may invest in an egregious choice.
Addendum – April 16, 2016
Regarding narcissism, which may be malignant or reparative in its balance, one possible trigger for the malignant — those who seek absolute power over others and in the process lose their brakes (or “exceed limits”), an instance or pattern of “narcissistic mortification” may set off attempts at covering (hiding) and repair that lead to the barking, as it were, and the rejection of criticism.
The reinvention of the self that follows may include a verbal part that then serves to aggrandize, elevate, empower the narcissist, and when it gets going as a kind of cycle and dare, then develops the business that is a cult at the lowest level and a dictatorship at the highest.
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One may infer such a development between Jim Jones, the mass murder by Kool-Aid guy, and Bashar al-Assad, the mass murderer by way of whatever means have happened to be at hand, but not find the incident or period of mortification as that resides in the narcissist’s memory.
This blog’s editor got off on a little bit of a roll this morning, but will ease off on pontification. 🙂
The challenge is setting off and managing a transition from the medieval mode in governance toward modern features.
Europe itself continues to support at least a dozen monarchies, and they would be no different as centers of power and sources of patronage than the Saudi Kingdom or the Islamic Republic of Iran were it not for the leveraging of power out of exclusive hands.
Much of the world contesting the authority of the west (basically: Russia vs NATO) has either to press forward with “political absolutism” or turn toward “classical liberalism”. In Moscow, Putin has chosen a feudal, neo-imperial course. In Riyadh, such a luminary as Prince Al-Waleed has found ways to blend — at least for himself and those to whom he extends patronage — the best of both worlds.
What Moscow, again using that proper noun to represent Putin, the “New Nobility” (FSB), and the Oligarchs, appears to want is greater chaos in the world to which it then may respond as a provider of greater stability!
Moscow plays a deeply manipulating script over and over and over.
Let’s try this Matryoshka doll method of nesting from the larger to the smaller:
Moscow vs NATO
Tehran vs Riyadh (Shiite vs Sunni Islam)
Damascus vs Split Proto-Democratic | Proto-islamist Forces
Hamas | Hezbollah vs Tel Aviv
From the big conflict-containing political doll down to the smallest:
Medieval Autocratic Power vs Modern Distributed Power
From my desktop experience and perspective, the principle as regards the architecture of the most notable “conflict set” — we should stop calling it “East vs West” at this point — doesn’t change.
Moscow appears to want a world of vast feudal estates managed by “strongmen”.
Washington may appreciate and produce wealth fit for kings, but its system prefers the presence of a meaningful electorate, then politicians, then the Chief Administrator we call a President, lesser administrators, and then appointed judges, all of its political machinery governed by a stable Constitution and a host of legal codes upheld from township to Federal region.
That’s the “different kind of war” seen from the BackChannels’ desktop. It has great stability — “Medieval Autocratic Power vs Modern Distributed Power” — but also some variance within (and the Rolling Stones have conquered only popular Cuba).
In that parenthesis is another conflict that involves the discrepancy between the rule of the strong (anywhere) and the popular will (anywhere). Although both Moscow and Washington — and all the others — support vast internal security campuses, the differences may be at least superficially marked (e.g., KGB/FSB vs FBI / CIA / U.S. Homeland Security) but with depth immediately beyond this blog’s interest, reach, and scope.
As regards the binary “Medieval vs Modern”, change on the side of the good — universally compassionate and reparative — involves myriad elements in transition. Perhaps when President Obama has counseled patience or refused to demonize Islam in its totality — a common complaint from the extreme wings of western nationalists — it has been to both compel but manage a global and gradual political greening. Whether the Administration has done far too little at a mosey may be subject for another post.
In our common malignancy, perhaps, our narcissism lends repair to psychological damage to self concept. Life’s rough and in part insults us, less or more, but, again perhaps, the greater the insult to esteem — the heavier the hand — the more passionate the want of self-aggrandizement, security, and wealth.
In the healthy, it’s good having basic and somewhat above good circumstance in freedom, money, and general security. In the malignant, the same wants get Up There and Out There. On Back-Channels, I’ve likened such qualities to the recognized psychological pathologies that are bipolar disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. In our general political psychology and related sociology, we aspire and trade up in comfort and prestige, and we do that through laws an practices that accommodate a healthy general development with concern spanning the distance from penthouse to street.
The malignant do things quite differently.
Muammar Qaddafi’s Mullah Shweyga story (easily looked up) tells the difference. Such leaders take full advantage of the possession of the power to visit suffering on others with impunity. All of the crimes that may be visited on one may as well be extended to others: capricious “justice” or detainments, imprisonments, hangings, tortures. Each dictator asks: “who is going to stop me?” And off each goes into the high life on the backs of the hungry, the powerless, and vulnerable.
I’m always happy to share the Reuters piece on Khamenei (“Assets of the Ayatollah”), but I think it better that others embark on similar journeys as regards the entire host of figures whose power has proven malignant and resides in the brutalities and related fears and levers (e.g., bribery and patronage; intimidation and murder) known more to the medieval mind than the modern one.
Yes, this may be the only blog on earth suggesting the reader continue doing the research.
🙂
Here’s a related comment on Moscow’s role in managing conflicts in a manner fit to destroy those it manages to manipulate and prize from the same conflict-related income and, at least in its own hive-mind, power and prestige.
Moscow, representing Putin’s political police, himself, and the oligarchs, may be a greater power than Tehran. It may barely be keeping its political image clean — remember: officially, Moscow is helping Damascus fight “The Terrorists” — but it may have the habit of manipulating political situations to its advantage.
From Somali General Galal, who is still alive, here’s a densely compacted recap of the Somali vs Ethiopian war over the Ogaden: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1
In the PROCESS of that war, Moscow apparently manipulated Somali leaders into laying claim or reclaiming the Ogaden, pitting first guerrilla then regular forces against Ethiopian control of the space. As advances pushed Ethiopia out of the contested space, Soviet Russia stepped in to arm Ethiopian forces, who then pushed back the Somalis. The Ogaden continues to host some related “low-intensity conflict”.
Who won?
Getting away from one’s own interests, in this instance Syria, and venturing to overview Moscow’s involvements in conflicts worldwide across time may help us more brightly resolve (accurately perceive) states of affairs in Syria and the Middle East Conflict.
“Everyone knows that American Jews and Israel are drifting apart . . .”
Everyone does “not know” because it isn’t the truth.
I am an American of Jewish descent.
I don’t speak Hebrew, but I belong to a synagogue. While I am as interested in being an American without a hyphenate, and in the United States of America, that is possible, I am not only comfortable being Jewish but democratic, humanist, liberal, and pro-Zionist.
The propaganda that starts with an assumptive phrase, “Everyone knows” often goes on to “about the Jews”. Most American Jews well know the history of the invocation of such phrases and the persecution of the Jewish People that continues apace without regard to possession of the Hebrew language or religious passion (Hitler, I believe, set the mark for “genocide” for one-fifth “Jewish blood”).
I don’t really want to take on the genetics crowd, but Jewishness, believing (in God) “ethical monotheism” and appreciation of cultural customs and holidays and rituals appear all over the world, from Cuba to the Asian subcontinent (include China and Africa . . . everywhere) through the Jews. Regardless of real race — talk about “rainbow coalition” — the vast majority of Jews recognize the significance, promise fulfilled, and powerful function of the possession of a real spiritual — and functional and functioning — homeland. Our culture — our way, our ethics, morality, our arguments . . . in fact: no Moses — no Muhammad — knows the land from whence it came, and in that most all share.
Ask a Baloch, a Kurd, a Pashtun (“B’ni Israel”) about his relationship with the Land of The People.
The response may be no different for the Hebrew People and Jewish People of the global diaspora. We know the land from whence we’ve come — and we know what we have had to overcome to get there. We are not drifting from that land: we are drifting the world closer to it.
So Jews argue (and the cliche goes: “two Jews, three opinions”).
Call what we do intellectual freedom combined with the ambition to learn and explore ethics, law, and psychology and much else without limits.
We’re not drifting apart: we’re drifting more together, and not only the Jews, but with the same “mixed multitude” that Moses led out of Egypt.
As regards the business of establishing a “Palestinian state” — and BackChannels’ editor endorses a two-state solution or, if unachievable, suzerainty — resides with the creaking old absolute-power enthusiasts: the PLO / PA and Hamas, both apparently incapable of change (on this blog, have a look at “Why the Jews“) and chained themselves (by money most of all) to the Moscow-Tehran axis, post-Soviet, neo-feudal, and relentlessly piratical, both of them.
The opener, “PROPAGANDA ALERT” may have ironic meaning for some (bigots), but it refers to the tack taken in the first paragraph of the Abrams review and might apply to liberal gloss throughout lauds the excessive criticism of Israel as programmatic in “saving Israel” (from those blasted far right wingers) while barely touching on the perfidy of the Jewish State’s sworn enemies –and not the Palestinians but the Palestinian leadership.
As ladies men go, some peacocks appear to have an image both to create and maintain, and not infrequently that at high cost to the cheerleaders seduced into hanging on to their elbows.
I have seen the term “state capitalism” applied to Putin’s medieval revanch in the creation of the post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia now wrapped around his own “vertical of power”. The idea has its appeal (and many related posts break into a BackChannels’ category ne “21st Century Feudal“).
In the American Wildness, distributed business-borne capitalism, which in North America could not be otherwise, appears to produce in part feudal competitions and related private environs as part of the nature of power arrayed between chairmen and presidents, members of the board, and shareholders and other stakeholders. The degree to which those at the top embrace their own “vertical of power” and effectively promote their own cultural fascism around and beneath them needs must vary, but overarched by democratic governance, such private feudal behaviors have only the boundaries of a few legal papers (noncompete and nondisclosure agreements, for a start), the discipline of their accounting departments (no workee, no checkee), and their doors for fending off equally private but solitary revolutions: employees belittled, degraded, demeaned, denigrated, enslaved by their environments can, do, will outgrow their my-way-or-the-highway keepers — and walk across the street or do that highway thing and move one big town, state, or country over.
It’s a big world, and life’s too short to tolerate a capricious and irrational subjugation forever.
Of course, with governments operated as private businesses for authoritarian elites, the same problems are much, much greater for those suffering — and not individually: en masse — beneath them.
Wikipedia. “Presidency of Vladimir Putin”: About the same time, Vladimir Ryzhkov pointed out that a bill Medvedev had sent to the State Duma in late January 2009, when signed into law, will allow Kremlin-friendly regional legislatures to remove opposition mayors who were elected by popular vote: “It is no coincidence that Medvedev has taken aim at the country’s mayors. Mayoral elections were the last bastion of direct elections after the Duma cancelled the popular vote for governors in 2005. Independent mayors were the only source of political competition against governors who were loyal to the Kremlin and United Russia. Now one of the few remaining checks and balances against the monopoly on executive power in the regions will be removed. After the law is signed by Medvedev, the power vertical will be extended one step further to reach every mayor in the country.
Much of the information below comes from Steven Pinker’s book, 
BackChannels 