Regarding the “Cold War”, the 24th anniversary of the dissolving of the Soviet Union took place December 26, 1991, which date places all of us in the 25th year out from the machinations of that abominable terror-supporting enterprise. Of Putin’s bid to sustain a modern security state and oligarchy — the “New Nobility” — it may be suggested that “Resistance is Feudal”, because it is. The open democracies and communicating systems of the modern world present an existential challenge to dictatorships worldwide that continue to rely on medieval methods for keeping themselves in power.
Modern Arabs and Muslims for Jews and Israel frequently encounter the defensiveness and xenophobia inspired by the complex history of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism, which story in Muslim-Jewish relations is not the only story, only the one over which people are rightly most sensitive. The prompt for what follows emerged in a very small online workgroup on anti-Semitism — and kept restricted in headcount to keep the same manageable and progressing — and it involved the issue of Jewish defense accompanied by the familiar blanketing animosity that accompanies conflict between ethnically-identified rivals. Diffusing that focus requires a very different view of intercultural politics and political reality.
For BackChannels, today’s greatest struggle, and it’s a long one, is that between the medieval apprehension of the world and the realities of the modern world and its greater potential for humanity.
With some wandering, this “From the Awesome Conversation (FTAC)” moves from simple apology for hurt toward a much greater theme: civilizational transitioning.
Although the BackChannels style has been to italicize such posts — and put this “further explanation” at the bottom of the piece — that approach has been reversed for length and greater ease of reading.
Above: bolding added.
I’d like to see reconciliation even while noting that context — “rhetorical situation” — shapes our conversations here and elsewhere.
There may be “component parts” and “knee jerk reactions” that just bring out the worst in us.
There are certainly impolitic thoughts swirling through our heads as passing events “get to us” and we “go off”.
And there are strong defenses involved in meeting criticisms that may go deep and turn a little meditation into a searing event.
There’s an old high school joke: “Time exists so that everything doesn’t happen at once; space exists so that everything doesn’t happen to you.” 🙂
Today, and because of our handle on the material necessities in life — no one starves for lack of food but rather lack of access to the same — “space” has become less important than “time” and how we live in Time is what all the arguing comes down to. The Jews, and I am certain in response to miseries, found their point of departure from the tyrannical and disordered — probably some Qaddafi-type of 6,000 years ago. “Pharaoh” gets the blame (and Egyptian women credit for rescuing Moses) . . . and we have all gotten a different start on a different civilizational path. It’s good to revisit the basics and perhaps as a different expanded base for something needed tomorrow. Time gives us time to play with time.
One more thing as regards bigotry in general: disaggregate.
I don’t think the future needs a politics defined by, say, “Arabs and Jews”, but rather, at this time, the Medieval of Mind and the Modern. To get to a more modern world, a more mutually survivable world (at least) or more thriving (at best), some elements seem needed to get the “medieval of mind” through the barriers to the modern world.
In the peace crowd, it’s common to the point of cliche to talk about “building bridges”, i.e., “common ground”, and perhaps cultivated bonding.
The invisible sieve concept is different. It’s about massive positive filtering toward a more comfortable, peaceful, and prosperous world. Some Out There with Baghdadi and ISIS may not make it. Quite a few among leaders, sad to say, don’t want it because their power is invested in the perpetuation of medieval absolutism. Putin’s display of this was brilliant: $52 billion for the Winter Olympics at Sochi : $0.00 for Syrian Relief + the incubation of ISIS, which serves his medieval / neo-feudal worldview — and that of Assad and Khamenei as well.
Notably, this as an aside, I may regard the promotion of anti-Semitism as an artifact of the medieval world. It ranks right up there with the history of the use of the accusation of heresy in the Christian church as a means of leveraging wealth from competitors or the hapless, and in Muslim-majority states today, the “takfiri” have put on display the same political mechanics.
In other forums and following the Jewish mythos of a journey to a river, I’ve referred to a “river in time” that requires on the banks of the past a novel “forming up”. It sounds simple, but any brief reflection on the economic and social systems within and around clans, families, and tribes in their real politics tells that political reality proves anything but simple. While Khamenei has Revolutionary Guard forces in Iraq’s more sectarian Shiite militia, the state of Iraq itself struggles but nonetheless produces a more balanced official army, and one duly chastened by its route from Mosul and the ensuing slaughter visited upon its troops by ISIS. That the Iraqi defense forces have come back at all seems to me nothing short of miraculous, but now they’re doing their work.
The Syrian migration issue that has so fueled the arguments that divide the west (in chess: a fork) between cultural self-defense and the promotion of its Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian values — to which Islam may contribute or adjust, but ejection of al-Qaeda is certain — involves simply in-filtering good people while rejecting the infiltration of fascist-minded subversives who may be so by way of habits of mind or the adoption of ungodly ambitions.
The modern world is not altogether a good world. It can be deeply impersonal and “depersonalizing”; it can drop people from many kinds of inclusion, including economic, that neither churches nor families (or clans) are guaranteed to rescue or redeem; it can support criminals in the board rooms and in public offices: however, it strives continuously to be better than its current state as reflected in its state of affairs. Modernity involves ideas about cultural and social progress and produces systems — accountable, responsible, responsive — that produce, overall, a better state of being or life experience across the board.
The medieval want for themselves alone, and that with low regard for others.
Egypt may have an authoritarian politics in place today, but it’s modern and appears transitional; the wildly popular rejection and ejection of the Muslim Brotherhood signals, at least to me, a broad cultural recognition and sea change in response to a confrontation with a representative of the medieval world. Egyptians have chosen a march forward into something else — something modern.
Forgive my rambling.
Suffice it to say this forum may be as much about broad cultural change and preservation as much or more than anti-Semitism.
The experience may be likened to looking through a very small window out onto a much larger world, and, in the words presented here, “Tiimescape”.
Has Creating Change taken on a New Meaning: Does that Change involve LGBTQ America Supporting Anti Semitism?
By Melanie Nathan, January 21, 2016.
This week will go down in history as one of the saddest and most destructive, ever, in the lives of LGBTQ Jews. We became the target of antisemitism disguised as protesting alleged “Israeli oppression.” Anyone who truly understands the history, the context and milieu will clearly access the bottom line and that came in the form of the chant that served to helm the onslaught by LGBTQ protesters at the Creating Change 2016 Conference, who yelled:
” From the river to the sea Palestine will be free.”
The chant reverberated through the halls of the Hilton Hotel in Chicago, as protesters eventually blocked access to attendees at a peaceful, all inclusive, religious Shabbat reception, held by A Wider Bridge (AWB) and to which Israeli LGBTQ guests had…
In the American high school education of the 1960s, the above were part of the canon taught to all. Any who missed mention of Golding, Huxley, and Orwell or failed to read Animal Farm (or the Cliff Notes) would have had to have missed school altogether. Awareness and fear of absolute obedience before a tyrannical authority; of erasure beneath the wheels of an engineered, mechanical, repeating society; of cynical political manipulation and exploitation; and of savagery itself were built into the imaginations of the young. As our own society could not be the dystopian nightmares observed in reading, we would have to wade back through history or wait for the Islamic Small Wars as they present online to let us know that somewhere our fictions were emblematic of somebody’s political and social reality in situ.
Training a new generation of youth and inoculating them against the Western cultural invasion constitute another mission of the female Basiji, who should make their “children aware of the problems of threats through explaining outcomes and upshots of the soft war.” To achieve this goal, the WSBA established the Babies’ Basij to indoctrinate children before they reach school age. To establish the Babies’ Basij, the WSBO implemented the plan of Quranic kindergarten (mahdha-e mehrab). Under this plan, a WSBO kindergarten was established at each mosque with a WSBO base. Children between the ages of three to five years attend these kindergartens. In addition, the organization designs a curriculum to be used in the home for instructing children who are younger than three years of age. Female Basiji are encouraged to bring their children to Basij activities, in order to socialize with other children and train them for future posts in the Islamic regime (p. 117)
Columbia University Press provided BackChannels with a review copy a month or two ago, and while reading took place post-haste, reviewing has had to wait for the “what to say” about a book whose author, Saeid Golkar, has covered the subject thoroughly and done so in plain textbook prose that makes the telling of the tale — specifically, coverage of the layout and history of the most pervasive organizational element exploited by the Iranian regime to create, reinforce, and sustain a society obedient to its will — on each page all the more chilling.
Although Golkar balances his exploration of the Basij organizations (“Basij is a Persian word meaning “mobilization.” The complete name of the group, Sazeman-e Basij-e Mostazafan, means “Organization for the Mobilization of the Oppressed”) with this-or-that modules (.e.g, “The Basij: Nongovernmental Organization, Administered Mass Organization, or Militia?”), there are portions focused on the regime’s impositions throughout the land, and as much comes out in subchapter titling: “Penetration in Society: The Organizational Structure of the Basij”; “Mass Membership and Recruitment Training”; “The Mass Indoctrination of Basij Members”; “The Basij and Propaganda”; “The Basij and Moral Control”; “The Basij and Surveillance”; “The Basij and Political Repression”; “The Basij and the Controlling of Families . . . Schools . . . Universities . . . the Economy.” By the time one reaches “Islamic Warriors or Religious Thugs?” the drift in concern has been made abundantly clear.
Golkar, however, generously covers the contrary view: the Basij are part of the regime’s patronage system, and those who wish to earn some money and make way on their careers may join for the familiar and practical causes known well to western chambers of commerce and numberless academic and civic organizations.
Just don’t forget who’s boss!
Here’s the last paragraph before the appendix:
“With the expansion of the Basij’s involvement in Iran’s social, political, and economic life, the opportunity for the country’s peaceful transition to democracy will decrease dramatically. Because many Basij commanders and members have been co-opted by the IRI, it is not implausible to think that they will resist any serious attempts at government reform that would jeopardize their positions” (p. 196).
Trump the Businessman, not political scientist, and perhaps an ignoramus when it comes to the small wars linked to Islamists and the post-Soviet struggle to maintain in the world medieval “absolute power” — the power of despots — hasn’t a clue about the larger forces he’s encountered. He lives in the land of reaction: you-do | I-do. It’s a social game and in related psychology referred to as “transactional psychology”, but he’s oblivious to the chain that links together Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdadi and risks becoming himself a part of endless conflict in a medieval — “21st Century Feudal — context.
Trump’s “tough guy” posture mirrors Putin’s stance and plays into Putin’s own reactionary and 19th Century “New Nobility” vision.
Unlike Obama, Trump may not have access to the long narrative in realpolitik except through the few academics and advisors he may have summoned to brief him. American presidents, this one way or another, get seated at the helm of a big chunk of machinery perpetually running, and it’s not until one gets into that chair that deeper operating instructions and orientation become possible. For good reason, the outsider may not be able to see inside an administration’s machinery in its depths. While Americans continue to admire the productivity and strength of capital in the hands of a good businessman, the same values that produce that person may impede that “hard-nosed” personality’s approach to immense cultural and political transformation worldwide.
The Feudalists — Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Baghdadi, and their like worldwide — would like nothing more than the conflict that would perpetuate their stays in power and with it the grotesque enormity of their plunder. The cliches apply: “East vs West”; “Christianity vs Islam” (and with that, we might as well revisit “Catholics vs Protestants” while certainly witnessing today “Shiites vs Sunnis”); and the general “Clash of Civilizations”. The truth welling up out of the messes more resembles “Medieval Absolute Power” vs “Modern Democratic (and Meritocratic) Distributions of Power.”
“Medieval vs Modern” has long seemed to BackChannels the more true conflict axis.
The big one which explaining to those many millions who still think changes are easy to bring — just raise our minimum wage and reduce the prices! It is not that simple and reeducating them will take time, reducing dependency on the state will take time, and getting them to stop throwing trash outside their homes will take time. But the religious preachers will have to come on board and help in the brain “write” to counter the past 50-80 years of brainwash. That is the tough one, but that is an internal matter that concerns Egyptians and no one else.
BackChannels:
What things (changes, conditions, policies, results) most produce hope in Egypt?
Naima Nas:
For as long as I can remember there have been (policies and changes and plans, etcetera ) but the one thing that has always been missing is autonomy en masse. The average citizen needs to be independent and resourceful, not just the hundred or so officials in office.
The good news is there are a lot of such citizens — possibly half the population.
There are the people who take advantage of reforms in any field and comply with laws that ensure improvements. If more schools are available and the law says everyone must stay in school till a certain age, they make sure their children go to school and do their homework and learn well, regardless of how difficult, and move up the ladder. I was born in a family like that . Policies or even magic potions have to be cooperated with not just set.
It may surprise you to learn that there have always been laws in Egypt addressing every area that needs addressing. The laws are all there, they just need to be applied to everyone without exception. That has always been the obstacle. That is the first thing that mesmerised me about Europe when I first stepped on the continent. It does not matter what or how trivial or grave the discrepancy, everyone answers to someone.
But to apply that to the chaos that is Egypt -pulled from pillar to post for years – is to start at the top and work down. Which is exactly what Sisi ‘s logic appears to be and the reason why I unreservedly support the man in his quest.
I’ll list one or two things as examples.
1. Understanding that it is impossible to have democracy or anything remotely resembling a fair government when the ruling elite are theocratic . So the “Islamic for Muslims only president” had to go, pronto! And no one cares how legitimate were the elections that put him there. He lost his legitimacy when the plan to throw Egypt under the Sinai terror bus became clear. And no one was waiting for paperwork!
2. Now we all — or almost all — agree on what we don’t want and what we really wish for, so let us make these laws visible! Starting with swift action against corruption. From the top down. That is the hardest thing to do. Because we all have a time when we wish we can speed up a process any which way .
3. Leading by example. So as he (el-Sisi) goes on records extending his hand in peace and sealing it with representatives on official level to boot. So can we — the average citizens . No one is too controversial by attending church or a synagogue and having Christian and Jewish best friends as many of us have done for years. Now it is definitely not a novelty to be tolerant and open minded because, look, the president has long been doing that.
Finally
4. The big one which explaining to those many millions who still think changes are easy to bring — just raise our minimum wage and reduce the prices! It is not that simple and reeducating them will take time, reducing dependency on the state will take time, and getting them to stop throwing trash outside their homes will take time. But the religious preachers will have to come on board and help in the brain “write” to counter the past 50-80 years of brainwash. That is the tough one, but that is an internal matter that concerns Egyptians and no one else.
The Obama Administration has played the weak hand in relation to overt confrontations while possibly working behind-the-scenes to kick the legs out from under the should-be-defunct Soviet arrangements. As I don’t live “behind the curtains” — or the doors of the CIA, Defense Department, and State and other national security and defense elements — I encounter the news with an analytical bent that really can’t confirm nor deny American weakness in the encounters with serious challenges. Neither, perhaps, can America’s enemies produce better estimates, so it would seem. In the end, the despots, the commanders, and their generals wage bets with every act of war. For these, if they don’t aggress in the face of weakness, they’re pussies (sorry); if they do and have their asses handed to them (eventually), they’re gone but with some grudging respect for following orders and going over the cliffs together. It’s a dubious honor, but so many belligerent “Armies of God” seem so completely invested in the medieval beliefs and visions that serve their handlers that they have no exit into the modern world. War, in essence, becomes for Hezbollah and others a loopy dead end.
The 21st Century’s investment in total in feudalism may be immense: it goes far beyond Hezbollah and into any number of “state capitalist” dictatorships (whatever the “ism” they preach) and criminal enterprises. Still, the medieval outlook and the barbarism associated with it, whether mafia, state mafia, or religious mafia, becomes less and less wanted given the modern tools enabling more fair distributions in power and greater security to the lawful through the earnest development and sustaining of “rule of law”.
Probably, the lands of the lawless have always to implode over internecine doubts, jealousies, suspicions, and rivalries. The depth of their tragedies, whether of Hitlerian or Stalinist proportions, may be measured in the suffering in extent and time of the constituencies made to ride along with maddened power inherently inherently malign and narcissistic.
The prompt was a comment suggesting Hezbollah’s possession of Syrian chemical weapons stocks, an issue that had been in the news in 2013 and appears more recently in The Wall Street Journal (July 23, 2015): http://www.wsj.com/articles/mission-to-purge-syria-of-chemical-weapons-comes-up-short-1437687744
Other of the Morning’s Remarks
Promotion of the Shiite vs Sunni feud promotes the medievalism endorsed by Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdadi whose own positions rest on sustaining political “absolute power” (dictatorship) for themselves!
From the modern and perhaps outside perspective, the medieval worldview brings its horrors to the surface in continuous and unresolvable conflicts. The medieval order has become today a ceaselessly demonstrated death machine.
With comparatively less headcount, a solid foundation in a single ethnolinguistic cohort, and thousands of years of varied history, the Jews have unhappily but successfully ejected much of what failed them over the years — animal sacrifice may serve as a convenient symbol of the abandonment of priestly magic. When the near 0-CE Hillel makes principle ascendent over ritual and works to improve convert access to Judaism, the religion “tails forward” (my opinion) to the Ethical Culture Movement associated with Felix Adler. It’s not the end of the story, God willing, nor a story about the abandonment of Judaism, but it is a story about staying the same and changing at the same time. Some beliefs, ideas, and rituals have well stood the tests of time, and time may disappear altogether between the lighting of the Sabbath candles between millennium.
The Qur’an’s promotion of the authoritative voice and injunction may make movement away from the medieval world more difficult. What I witness (by having been here day after day for years) are the channels, trials, and errors of a community that plainly will not travel further with the Muslim Brotherhood’s (et al.) guidance, but how people deal with Bad Baghdadi and similar others seems varied. Atheists, “apostates”, converts, modernists, reformists — everything but barbarians, and the barbarians (that go off to join ISIS or knock around in the killing fields — and the odd bombing — with Hezbollah) may be setting themselves up for slaughter. Many things will be tried as the future gets under everyone’s feet (as it apparently has in Egypt) and we hope a few things will work and peace will prevail between the “Abrahamic religions”.
Re. Obama: I don’t know that region that is “what’s really going on”, but it appears evident that Obama wants the world to police itself because he has most of American military policy focused on acute issues (like ISIS in Iraq) and covert and policing this-and-that in Somalia and other places where efforts only occasionally ping the headlines but have to have been continuous for those headlines to appear.
Re. Islam: it appears to have an issue with Baghdadi, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood Organizations, and with the medieval troika Putin-Assad-Khamenei — but ALL of that involves a potentially archaic feudal world from which modern souls should and do wish to depart. Getting more people across that bridge may be what the modern world needs to do to survive itself. However, that world appears flanked by two “superpowers” — Russia under Putin’s aegis and a China that straddles the medieval and modern worlds with the appropriation — via investment — of western assets and continuing “state capitalist” / political elite control of its nation, which might serve to keep away chaos from 800 million residents of the state.
Re. Trump: he’s a businessman, not a politician; he’s a pretend “tough guy”, a poker player, not a statesman; and I believe he’s ill-educated for leadership in the foreign policy of the United States. The world is not a China shop, but he’s a bull in it nonetheless and in need of a completely different education to come up to speed.
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Israel’s a strong state in command of its own defenses and related defense doctrine. However, as life need not be always a competition between similar entities, comparisons involving the cliches of Israeli prowess and Arab ineptness seem to me always questionable as well as certain to induce jealousies and resentments.
Immediate Arab states of affairs start with much greater populations and a more challenging melange of environmental and social themes. While the Hebrews have forged their lives apart, a kind of breakout or breakaway from despotism and disorder, Arab leaderships — and the latest suffered by the Persians — have wrestled long with systems of patronage and repression that have alternately kept the lid on darker forces or let them out, a bipolar political swinging fit to the medieval world that the modern might strive to attenuate but with a node for the scale and scope of the effort.
The BackChannels editor may cover a lot of topics in a day, but all talk and no reading (or play) makes for a dull pundit. More importantly, the greater the familiarity with political material, the stronger the need for more in-depth reading, other research, and talk, and that and other interest may slow the feed to this blog.
China’s martial ambitions have come up in social network chatter, of course, and that world too, this despite decades of development, investment, and trade, appears to remain committed to its possession of medieval absolute power and the related military force required to first defend it and then expand its influence and reach. The prompt for this note, which was made on the morning of January 8, 2016, was a January 7 article in the National Interest describing Chinese-Pakistani sea exercises involving submarines in anti-submarine warfare drills:
When you look at any state-of-the-art military machinery, you’re seeing the result of a long forward-looking process that started with talk, got the design bench, won funding, and produced a small industry in supplier contracts. In part, the incessant preparation for war _across the spectrum_ helps keep war in abeyance and the process of its part in aggression slow. Still, that process is there.
What I find frightening is after so many post-Nixon years of expanded investment and trade, the Chinese communist talk (despite all the mansions of Melbourne, AU sold to elites — plus ownership of the world’s largest bank) hasn’t changed a jot. Back-Channels observation of the defense of medieval political absolutism in relation to the Moscow-Damascus-Tehran axis of power may well apply to Moscow-Beijing. With Putin perhaps the Baghdadi of despotism, these old familiars may well be ganging up to force the United States and the world to accept what Assad plus the invasion of Crimea represent to Europe and the United States: i.e., the will of the despotic to impose themselves on the world at any cost to humanity.
If the United States had gambled on money as being the first principle of power, it appears to be losing its own shirt. Indeed, while the west has been kicking the legs out from under the old Soviet order (Moscow-Damascus-Tehran), a part of the arrangement may well be kicking back, and for the west, the distribution of money through constituent populations count for much more than it appears to in Moscow and Beijing (where Russian and Chinese development may be traded off for the ambitions of imposed military power and subsequent plunder, which may be the point of that power for those leaders).
I think the Cold War, in essence, wraps around the “Islamic Small Wars” (my term), and on top of feudalism, a part of the framework involves the despotic attempting to “stage manage” the appearance of their wars. That may be called “political theater”, KGB style.
On Back-Channels, I’ve worked up to the incubation of ISIS as a political tool useful to Putin, Assad, and Khamenei — https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/syria-assad-vs-the…/ . Now that it’s not working out so well, the firestarter, perhaps, has to join the firemen in at least some aspects of common endeavor. Still: the stake for the anti-western axis, including Islamic terrorists, is the sustaining of the medieval worldview and their own “absolute power” within it.
The Soviet dissolved 24 years and one day ago (Dec. 26, 1991).
However, the spirit of aristocracy and privilege has come to live on in Putin’s “New Nobility” and beside it as well relationships formed around the idea of sustaining the worlds of absolute authority and the profiting of a few at the expense of the many through a familiar script: seduce, Subjugate, PLUNDER!
The chant reverberated through the halls of the Hilton Hotel in Chicago, as protesters eventually blocked access to attendees at a peaceful, all inclusive, religious Shabbat reception, held by A Wider Bridge (AWB) and to which Israeli LGBTQ guests had…
BackChannels 