Update From the Awesome Conversation – June 29, 2015
Obama’s bought time to let education and this web-thingy update a generation of Persian professionals away from the medieval regime; he’s also demonstrated some U.S. – Saudi ability to degrade oil revenues, control the offsets in new revenue, and insult the regime (also Putin’s regime) using U.S. controls. Will the lesson take or has it worked? I guess we’re staying tuned and will find out.
I put up an Allen West post on Back-Channels — https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/the-united-states…/ — there’s the chance that the staunch conservative voice may overplay its hand, which relies here heavily on fear of the first delivery of a nuclear attack (could be dirty bombs delivered by rockets fired by Gaza; could be a one-off delivered by Hezbollah, which has got the full store of rockets already).
Money is funny for Khamenei’s regime. He and his brother are reputed to control a conservatively estimated $57 billion in personal assets. Basically, “state sponsorship” – personal, criminal, or actually from state coffers — of terrorism is not a financial problem — and its comes cheap in any case: what happens if others become more enriched, more dependent on the possession of their assets, more greedy for new business themselves?
So the nuclear deal seems a bad deal on old terms, but Obama’s ship of state and all attached to it left that harbor a while ago, and we’re sailing with these new variables in play. Ultimately, America is indigestible to the forces perceived by conservatives as enemy: we’re not going to be conquered, as much as we obsess about that, but the kind of evil posed, proposed, and sustained by Putin-Khamenei needs to be met by altering their native political demographics to come to more accommodating, more productive global standards. The two mentioned are playing or pushing for a more deeply medieval world steeped in greater chaos and conflict: we’re building a more modern world interlaced and held together by open communications, democratized business and personal relationships, and the embrace of anti-piratical and perhaps humanist overarching shared values.
The “nuclear deal” might be a bad deal — but it also might be a good move.
A rabbi said to me one day with regard to the Islamic Small Wars, “Everyone’s in too much of a hurry to get to the end of the story.”
Well then, as regards global conflict and threat: let’s hasten slowly and be not so much in a hurry to see how it all ends.
Time may work in the favor of our humanity against the ravages brought to it by those “malignant narcissists” we call “presidents for life” and “supreme leaders”, the human containers and projectors of absolute personal (also often infantile and sadistic) power.
“Organizations like Rabbis for Human Rights who get money from the European Union, get money from the New Israel Fund, they’re using that money to smear Israel’s name around the world by using the example of Susiya, which is a one-hundred percent illegal village, and using that as an example of the bad Israeli occupier not allowing the poor Palestinians to live here, and that’s a scene they want to create, but hopefully with this video, you have seen a different view of that, and the truth has to come out.”
Real ethnic cleansing proceeds with a concept from the dark mirror in language — https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/anthropolitical-psychology/paranoid-delusional-narcissistic-reflection-of-motivation/ — i.e., the ability to deliberately invert a situation (so the Jews are attacking Hitler and Germany) and present the inversion as the truth. Anti-Semitic ideation — and much bigotry toward others as well, Rwandan Tutsi, Hungarian Roma, for examples– appears to rely on such knee-jerk nationalist or racist cant and its Orwellian head-nodding acceptance — or embrace by those most benefitting from this form of lawless territorial aggression, and doubtless not the souls camped out but their wealthy handlers.
Addendum – Forwarded by Regavim: Background on Sussiya
Susiya- the Facts, and only the Facts
A historical village? Not really! The claim that this is an Arab village which existed hundreds of years, or even decades, is completely false. According to travelers in the 19th century, and from surveys of villages and population conducted by the British mandatory powers in 1945, which mention all of the villages in the area and even some of the inhabitants, there is no hint of the existence of a village named Susiya, except as an ancient archeological site. This rocky land on which this illegal encampment is situated served the purpose of grazing land. In those days, only during the grazing months, the caves in the area provided temporary protection for the shepherds from the village of Yatta from robbers, wild animals, and inclement weather. Aerial photographs testify that in this place, there never was any settlement before the year 2000, except for 4 or 5r structures which were built illegally during the late 1990’s.
Jewish history. In the archaeological excavations on the ancient site, there was found an ancient Jewish settlement which dated from the 4th to the 9th centuries of the Common Era. According to the scholars, this was a thriving Jewish community, which existed hundreds of years after the destruction of the Second Temple, and achieved the height of its development at the end of the Byzantine period, and at the beginning of the old Arab period. On the site, they discovered a large synagogue, ritual baths, homes, community buildings, and other structures. Further, in 1986, 277 dunam in the area were allocated to establish an archaeological site, and from then on, it was forbidden for the shepherds to use the old caves. At first, during the grazing seasons, the shepherds came and put up tents and —- for the period of the grazing, but in the last decade, the Nawaja family has tried to take permanent control over the area.
Not an expulsion—an eviction of squatters. Research in the population registries of the Civil Administration indicates that the majority of the families found in the illegal encampment owned homes in the village of Yatta. The Najawa family, who lives in Yatta, seized control of lands which do not at all belong to them. Thus, we are not speaking of driving people off of their lands, but of evicted illegal squatters who have put up tens of structures in violation of the law.
Illegal building – At present, there are about 64 structures in the encampment, all of which were built illegally and without building permits from the authorities of the Civil Administration. 85% of these structures were put up between 2011 and 2013, by systematically ignoring the administrative orders of the supervising authorities(?) which forbid continuation of the building, and even contrary to the specific orders of the High Court of the State of Israel, which has been involved in this case since the year 2001. The Court has ruled that the claims of the squatters to ownership of the land are invalid, and there is no basis to approve building on that area.
Contempt of Court – In 2013, the High Court issued an interim order against the illegal building, which explicitly found that the is forbidden to carry out more illegal building in the encampment in addition to that which already existed. Yet, after the issuance of that order, more than 33 illegal structures were put up, which amount to more than half of the total number of structures in the encampment. To anyone who respects the law, it is clear that this is a scandal and in contempt of the rule of law.
The Jews could not have done very well against the Romans!
🙂
Revisit Titus and the horrific burning of Jerusalem.
Revisit Masada, for that matter.
The distillation and order I suggest for the uptake of a Judaic monotheism, which we all share (whether we like it or not) starts with the jurist Hillel the Elder (35-BCE to 10-CE), who produced decisions and an outlook that made Judaism less ethnic, more evolving around principle, and more accessible to conversions (uh oh). smile emoticon So: Hillel the Elder –> Jesus and Paul –> General Constantine –> General Muhammad.
We may agree on the unity (and sanctity) of life and of a natural life well lived, but our disagreements on scripture, the composition of extended works and exegesis, devolve to our ethnolinguistic cultures once more separated by geospatial relationships and by time. In retrospect, here at the advent of a new world interlaced with Internet-based communicating, our enmities seem cultivated in fear and dreadfully superficial and malignant narcissism.
At this point, no one need have the last word — not Moses, not Jesus, not Muhammad, nor our overlooked link in the end-of-the-Roman Era family guy Hillel the Elder. What we may need are new words resonant with the more noble aspects of our common humanity.
Artists and assorted creative types needs must submerge themselves with object-projects: book, essay, play, poem, screenplay. That’s what it takes to pioneer thought and fashion ideas and insights into transmissible forms, and that auto-constructed isolation may go hard on the soul — it certainly has on mine, and the desktop has added its own layer of interference with the experience of what is proximate in the way of events and people. Nonetheless, “chatyping” in response to what others spell out online proves always stimulating while the cyber-environment — global, politically across cultures, across political boundaries, across languages and religions — provides a glimpse at what today is possible and perhaps needs to become a new reality in conversation.
The Awesome Conversation itself has been nothing less than miraculous.
What comes next?
This blog has stated its six most irreducible virtues at the top of the sidebar to the left.
Those ennobling characteristics, however, may be brought to bear against a world rife with cruel and despotic leaders and their deeply manipulated and misguided (start with “state-controlled press” and end with “absolute political suppression”) followers and the messes made by related widespread conflict, diminishment, ignorance, and impoverishment.
Rome was neither built nor taken apart in a day, and while Latin has become a “dead language” — useful to the Catholic Church and to science for its stability, Hebrew has been returned to life and with it, so one may hope, interest in the preservation, survival, and evolution of some approximately 7,000 still living languages and the cultures and subcultures each represents in the global tapestry.
The complaint fit the format, “people are dumb and don’t listen” — but when one approaches a “people problem” with numbers in the hundreds of million and with the heaviest percentage cash poor and illiterate, the wisdom of culture and evolution working together to contain the energies of that humanity comes to the fore. The modern world must have long patience with the cultivation and transformation of lawless, feudal, and medieval space, which in fact may be the larger world.
The passage responds to a fellow and frustrated expatriate Pakistani moral entrepreneur.
1. Network algorithms favor more favored contacts, so our circles and readership may become smaller with the weight of interest given to select others — they 4,000 are not ignoring you but, more likely, missing you;
2. Time is the New Space. In addition to what the computers may be doing to add a layer of programming to defining or reducing our own social chaos (now we have too many friends! 🙂 ), we are all fully booked, or have that option, for computer-borne intellectual and social activity. The machinery runs 24/7/365, has no consciousness itself — or conscience — and is as large as the universe of data-containing disks that support it. We have just one mind each with limited memory and time. No comparison.
3. The conflict I’ve noted in our world is greater than the “Islamic Small Wars”, with which all are too familiar by way of the news: instead, it is the world of the concentration of power in singular personalities — absolute, feudal, and medieval — vs the world of more broadly distributed power, which I call “modern”. That is what makes a team of Putin and Khamenei — different talks: same walk. The same has made billionaires of Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh. The same represent the rule of the lawless vs the rule of the lawful.
4. Finally, cultures may be also our containers: what would we do with time if we were not individually integrated with them? I think the “modern” a big step up from the “medieval” (as discussed above), but individually and culture-wide, we work with conditions as given. Presented with dictators and associated barbaric and piratical forces, we defend our other interests and battle back as best we may. Some struggle involves military, police, and political initiative, but most of such a struggle involves mind — “intellectual battlespace”.
The Haggadah with which I grew up contains among other fine thoughts an interesting assertion: “With every generation a little more freedom is won”. That’s a good thing for a child’s ears. As adults: what more noble a cause?
Our religions — there are about 40 major of the class (and about 7,000 living languages worldwide, each seeing the world a little differently) — are part of our own containment and also multifaceted. It’s good to have them, and all that survive also evolve (or my people would still be trembling before smokey altars).
May the earth have long patience. 🙂
good thing for a child’s ears. As adults: what more noble a cause?
Our religions — there are about 40 major of the class (and about 7,000 living languages worldwide, each seeing the world a little differently) — are part of our own containment and also multifaceted. It’s good to have them, and all that survive also evolve (or my people would still be trembling before smokey altars).
Inside the pressure cooker, the battle between the clans and Hamas ebbed and flowed according to the fortunes and political needs of the Islamist group. One of the first clans targeted by Hamas was the al-Bakr family, which controls much of the strip’s fishing fleet. Known as Fatah loyalists, they came under attack during the clashes between Hamas and Fatah in June last year; after suffering heavy casualties, more than 200 al-Bakr gunmen surrendered to the Hamas fighters.
From threaded chat correspondence with independent forensic media analyst Thomas Edward Wictor (July 21, 2015):
The problem is that reporters don’t bother to educate themselves, and words are losing their meaning. I have idiots arguing with me that shrapnel now means any fragment of a projectile. Fine, but the four victims had round holes in them, and not a single IDF munition uses round metals balls, whether you call them shrapnel or potato chips.
The IDF MAG Corps report says that the IDF fired two missiles. I can find physical evidence of only one missile being fired. The second missile left no trace evidence. No crater and no debris.
There’s video evidence of three separate explosions. One was the IED below the terrace of the Adam Hotel, one was the IDF missile hitting the shipping container, and one was the IED going off in the rubbish bin behind the Avenue Restaurant and Coffee Shop.
Those are the only explosions I know for sure took place.
If there’s a difference between the “Rule of Law” and the feudal alternative that is the “Rule of the Lawless”, it lies in final obedience to dispassionate courts working the representative will of a free people — free to speak; free to argue law in creation, theory, and fact; free to seek and hold office; free to submit themselves to their own best common and deeply argued and informed wisdom.
Wictor’s forensic investigations engage assertions and incidents that could do with such courts.
In relation to the murders of Mohammed Bakr, Ahed Bakr, Zakaria Bakr, and Ismail Bakr on July 16, 2014, Wictor has assembled raw video footage, media footage, research (as above) on Gaza’s true underlying political history and sociology, and both meticulously and repeatedly queried the same.
While Wictor may not represent a court of the lawful either — not more than anyone else — he represents a different kind of public defender and prosecutor: a global citizen fighting — in relation to this incident — the defamation of the Jewish People, which is equally a struggle for what is truthful and possessed of integrity regardless of the interests of men: good principal, good law, honest research — “clear, accurate, and complete” remains the journalist’s standard — and discerning, reasoned, and responsible judgment.
And if Wictor’s collection of conclusions remains doubtful?
Examination by a court of the lawful would begin with “discovery” in the presence of the prosecutor and the accused.
Here is a smattering of Wictor blogs on this piece.
In the last article listed, Wictor says of himself, “What I’ve become—without either knowing it or planning for it—is an investigative reporter. I use what are known as open sources, meaning everything that I study is available on the Internet. This is something anyone can do. All it takes is patience.”
Do others see what Wictor sees?
The answer is unimportant, for it should be understood that the findings of one investigator remain subjective, however clinical and objective the undertaking: the presenter of so many reports — and ruminations — would appear to know that he is neither also judge nor jury nor even colleague or professional rival. Still, there is only one true story about what happened on July 16, 2014, and Wictor has done more to look it over twice, three times, and more in the public venue that is his blog and the “Hamas Operation on Gaza Beach” portion of it.
Related Reference
Hamas, which promotes political Islam, has mounted occasional crackdowns on more radical groups that chafe at its engagement with Abbas and truces with Israel. Such groups support the broader struggle led by Islamic State and al Qaeda.
Hamas has attempted to crack down, often through violent means, against opposition displays in Gaza. In May, the Palestinian entity demolished a mosque that was allegedly a recruiting ground for ISIS jihadis. At the time, a tweet from a Gazan ISIS-aligned group said, “Armed men from Hamas came to Deir Al-Balah and destroyed the mosque, acting in a way that even the Jewish occupiers and the Americans have not acted.” Also in May, a group that claimed to be affiliated with ISIS claimed responsibility for the bombing of Hamas headquarters.
In December of 2004 I received an article from a strident Islamist from Pakistan. The article was released by an Islamist group and had 812 “reads” at the point it entered my e mail box. The article is copied below:
32 US Marines Killed in ‘Special Falluja Attack’
“In an attack which is deemed the first of its kind, 32 US marines were killed when 3 Iraqi Resistance Fighters commandeered a US tank and used its guns to open fire on US forces in the area.
The Resistance Fighters, belonging to the 1st army of Mohammed, were able to attack and kill the 6 occupants of the US tank which was located at the main street near the veterinary hospital in Falluja.
The Fighters than used the tank’s machine gun and shells to attack a cluster of US marines located about 300 meters away who were holed up…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadiya_Savchenko: “Russia’s Investigative Committee insists she crossed the border voluntarily, without documents and in the guise of a refugee.[20] Russia’s pro-Kremlin TV channel NTV, however, reported on June 20 that Savchenko had been captured by “rebels” and then handed over to the Russian authorities.[21] Ukrainian officials said she had been illegally taken to Russia by Russian intelligence services in collaboration with pro-Russian rebels.”
http://khpg.org/index.php?id=1437143184 – 7/18/2015 – “New attempt to keep Nadiya Savchenko trial secret” — “Russia is insisting on holding the trial of captured ex-pilot Nadiya Savchenko in a Russian city bordering the area of Ukraine under Kremlin-backed militant control. There are no legitimate grounds for this move which will seriously hinder access to the trial, and could, Savchenko believes, put her mother and sister in danger. Her formal appeal* to Russia’s Prosecutor General to move the trial to Moscow where all investigative activities and assessments were carried out has effectively already been rejected. One of her lawyers announced late on Friday afternoon that Savchenko has already been moved from the remand prison in Moscow and is on her way to the Rostov oblast.”
http://khpg.org/index.php?id=1435707020 – 7/2/2015 – “Savchenko material shows how Russia concocted ‘case’ and what it can’t conceal” – ” The key problem in the investigators’ case is Savchenko’s irrefutable alibi however there are also a number of other obvious flaws in their version which do not go away despite being assiduously ignored..”
Posted to YouTube 7/7/2015
This patriot, made a Hero of Ukraine by President Poroshenko on March 2, this Joan of Arc detained in spite of the diplomatic immunity to which she has been entitled since her election to the Rada and as Ukraine’s representative to the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, has become simultaneously the symbol of Putin’s arbitrary exercise of power and of Ukrainian resistance.
As Russia celebrated with great pomp and ceremony the seventieth anniversary of the defeat of Nazism, one might have hoped that Putin would make a gesture.
Here in Moscow she has been charged as an accessory to murder, linked to the death of two Russian journalists covering the conflict in eastern Ukraine between the rebels and government troops.
But the BBC has seen mobile phone data from the day they died, that her lawyers argue proves her innocence.
Imprisoning a Ukrainian officer, who disappeared while on duty last month in the battleground region of Luhansk, will make it hard for Russia to maintain its claim that it is not in league with the separatist rebels. According to the Ukrainian government, the rebels captured Savchenko in June and illegally smuggled her across the border into Russia, where authorities not only arrested her but took her hundreds of miles to the city of Voronezh, a provincial capital in the heartland of western Russia. Diplomats and top officials in Ukraine, as well as their U.S. allies, have already cited the case as among the clearest pieces of evidence so far that Russian security services are working in concert with the rebel fighters. That means the case is sure to bolster the Western argument for another round of sanctions against Russia this month.
Russia agreed to immediately free all hostages and illegally held persons. Yet Russia and the separatists it backs continue to hold at least 500 hostages. They include Savchenko, as well as Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov, both of whom were captured by separatists on Ukrainian soil and illegally transported against their will to Russia.
We continue our publication of the prison writings delivered to us by Nadiya Savchenko, the Ukrainian pilot who was abducted by pro-Russian separatists on June 18, 2014, and who has been in prison ever since. La Règle du Jeu, in partnership with Kyiv Post, Ukraina Pravda, The Huffington Post/WorldPost, and other magazines and newspapers, is launching a double appeal: Do not forget Nadiya, and do everything you can–everything–to obtain her release.–Bernard-Henri Lévy
When it comes to the perception of brute force in power, the language play in the invention of the term “21st Century Neo-Feudalism” proves more convenient than earnest and popular political science on the matter, so suggests a cursory glance at related Google search results, which frequently lists this blog as the term’s proponent. Nonetheless, as witness through Internet-borne media to Nadiya Savchenko’s abduction and imprisonment in relation to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “hybrid warfare” (by proxy thugs) in Ukraine, the term would seem well applied.
Typing here from the sidelines, the lawlessness of the feudal world — in effect, the caprice of the senior mafia running the show — concentrates power in a titular head, who may actually have it, and a surrounding bulwark of favored and patronized nobility. Against that model, the lawful of the democratic world — also argumentative, bureaucratic, responsible, responsive — tend to distribute power across a magnificent quilt of private and public and local to international interests. Adventurous and bright, the very tough Nadiya Savchenko appears to have managed to become selected for being trapped between the two worlds.
Putin’s message: I have captured and caged the brave Ukrainian bird; come and get her.
That’s absolute power.
I have long suggested here and elsewhere that that kind of power becomes the power to make others suffer with impunity — and Putin, among others, have demonstrably got it.
What power have the democracies against “political absolutism”?
The power of international law as invested in western institutions?
Talk, talk, talk.
The ogre keeps the stolen bird caged.
Old tweet: “Putin, Assad, Khamenei — together they are defending absolute power.”
Posted to YouTube 7/15/2015
Why shouldn’t Bashar al-Assad continue slaughtering or displacing all Syrians who disagree with his ownership — absolute control — of Syria and dominion over the lives and property of all who inhabit his realm?
Nothing has diminished his power where he may still project it, and, in fact, the political theater produced by “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” and to which I refer as “Assad vs The Terrorists” has positively contributed to his power. Assad appears to have forked Obama’s policy on Syria (whatever it might have been), for the American has had to have his military fly sorties against Daesh, everyone’s enemy, but also — and mostly so — Assad’s enemy.
Assad didn’t always have “The Terrorists”, but through sufficient selective bombing and fighting, he achieved the incubation of the “Al-Qaeda Typicals”, and now he has them, and he has got Washington bombing them at Washington’s expense!
Oh, the glory.
Posted to YouTube 7/18/2015
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei too has gathered power unto himself without limit, and he too appears to have going “hybrid warfare” and “war-by-proxy” in several districts, from Yemen today to the Gaza Strip, and these too continue with just enough impedance to hold them in place. If Tehran keeps its part of the “nuclear deal”, it will find itself with tens of billions of new or recovered dollars to earmark for throwing its weight around the region.
Why not?
Khamenei has met no lasting opposition within Iran — the world knows how that works — and within the region, whether manipulating the Al-Qaeda Typicals or the Hezbollah Virulence, sending Revolutionary Guard to battle Daesh with Iraq’s Shiite militia or cheering the Houthis as they bring wreckage and ruin to Yemen, none have yet curtailed his influence or meddling.
No “off button”; no “reset”; no brakes: that’s theocratic dictatorship — and that’s been Khamenei’s thing for a while now, and it’s working.
It would appear that “absolute power” needs no ethical, humanist, moral, or religion defense, for whether practiced by Putin, Assad, or Khamenei — different talks: same walk — all that is needed is unyielding relentless assertion.
What does Putin say?
I have got your most ambitious, darling, and high flying bird in my cage.
What does Assad say:
I have committed crimes beyond imagination and destroyed children’s educations, their homes, and their parents’ lives by the millions — but I am still here, President of Syria.
What does Khamenei say:
Khamenei doesn’t say anything, for Khamenei laughs.
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