Waiting for me on Facebook: a rumor of war (grammar removed, ellipses added):
Venezuela . . . soldiers from Russia and Vietnam . . . training population . . . civil war . . . Ukraine . . . urban combat . . . confrontation in the jungle like . . . Vietnam . . . .
WASHINGTON – The Venezuelan government’s close ties to Cuba and Iran pose a real threat to its sovereignty, and to the security of the hemisphere, retired Brig. Gen. Antonio Rivero, a former insider in the government of Hugo Chávez, told Fox News Latino during a visit to Washington, D.C., this week.
Rivero held high-profile positions under Chávez – from 2003 to 2008, he was the director of the Civil Protection and Disaster Relief agency – until he refused to chant “Socialism, Fatherland or Death,” a pledge emblematic of the Cuban Revolution that was imposed unexpectedly as part of the official military salute.
Put together with Karen Dawisha’s work on Putin’s management of Russia, the reversion to “state capitalism” in both Russia and Venezuela — and for Iran, the Khamenei brothers appear to be a $60 billion duo — seems to line up with this blog’s emerging thesis that in the battle between the medieval and modern, neo-feudalism appears to be making its dismal autocratic and disingenuous (about empowerment of the people, human rights, and modification of the distribution of wealth toward social ends) mark.
Suffice the clip to post as a matter of record and on this site an emblem of the themes often brought up here: “Red Brown Green”; now “The Newest Nobility” (has Obama attached to “Red Brown Green”? Do the world’s wealthiest live by different rules? Are the piratical in business and politics free to act as 21st Century feudal lords? Is the west and much of the aspiring world to be dragged backward into the medieval mode and therefore enslaved by the most “mafia”, the most ruthless and sadistic among autocrats?
Those who work in the OHCHR see themselves as an independent and neutral agency of the UN dedicated to promoting and protecting human rights. Indeed, in many instances, well-intentioned OHCHR officials draft valuable reports for council-appointed experts that call out various countries’ violations of freedom of speech and use of torture and arbitrary arrest. In addition, they support the High Commissioner’s role as an independent voice that can criticize countries for human rights abuses.
At the same time, it is also OHCHR officials who supply the material demanded by politically-motivated if not Orwellian resolutions initiated by non-democracies like Cuba, China, and Syria.
Choose your world: the one of fairy tales and lies that serve the despotic and the death they bring to innocents — or the one of integrity and hard truths that serve none but God and humanity in both the greatness of one and the frailty of the other.
Obama may be misguided or misled or in cahoots with what I guess I’ll call the “Newest Global Nobility” — very wealthy people who cooperate with one another in various ways while maintaining a popular screen of differences in their ideological or political rhetoric.
Khamenei — and his brother — appear themselves to be without boundaries, and perhaps unwittingly, the U.S. / NATO have opened the gates to Iranian power in Iraq — and, bear with the writer, Iran-manipulated ISIS (that’s the story I feel I’ve seen) provides both key and lever for that condition. Khamenei with ISIS has the leverage to convince Iraq’s Shiite community that it needs him in their defense, when, probably, he helped open the way for ISIS into Iraq and influenced the stall of the ISIS summer 2014 campaign north of Baghdad.
Complicated?
Putting on a show in “political theater” has been the Soviet way / post-Soviet neo-feudal KGB / FSB way, and Iran has been part of that all the way. The sanitizing and prettying up of the Camp Liberty crowd may signal Obama’s own complicity in this developing arrangement between emerging 21st Century neo-feudal politicians.
While “Red Brown Green” may be defined by the revanch skeleton of the Soviet Union in the form of a “Newest Nobility” — Putin-Khamenei as anchors, Assad, Orban, and Erdogan as lesser lords — the American and NATO roles in making adjustments on behalf of Really Big Money seems much less visible.
Is The Money Democratic or Republican?
Or is The Money just concerned with itself and include to manipulate whatever suits its accumulation best?
Are we watching the invention of a true-to-life (and politics) Global Monopoly Board?
BackChannels doesn’t know the answer to that question yet, but it’s coming to know how ruthless Soviet / post-Soviet and KGB-derived politics may be, and that to the extent that “false flag operations” and manipulated horrors like ISIL are possible in the cause of the acquisition of human but inhuman and psychologically disturbed (and disturbing) power.
Whether that “Moscow Apartment Bombing” kind of behavior (KGB false flag, according to Karen Dawisha) has found a place in the west remains to be verified (by some preponderance of evidence), but that Obama has been giving Khamenei a hand — Yemen ceded to the Houthis, apparently; the western coalition response to Daesh slowed before being made to response to atrocity (e.g., the enslavement and slaughter of the Yezidis; the intervention on behalf of the Kurdish community in Kobani) with some plans seemingly leaked — seems plain. In Obama’s world, inaction appears to have become as good as action as regards enabling and encouraging the development of increasingly bad news.
Russian news agencies say prominent opposition politician and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov has been shot dead in Moscow.
The Interfax news agency cited a law enforcement source as saying that Nemtsov was shot four times by an unidentified assailant late in the evening on February 27 and died of his injuries.
Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court has sentenced opposition leader Alexei Navalny to 7 days of administrative arrest for disobeying police during an unsanctioned gathering on downtown Moscow’s Manezhnaya Square in support for the people convicted earlier on Monday to prison terms for involvement in the May 6, 2012 clashes between protesters and police.
The Kremlin doesn’t invent anti-European or anti-establishment ideas, it simply supports them in whatever form they exist, customising their tactics to suit each country. They’ll support the far left or the far right — in Greece they support both. Despite its economic plight, the new Greek government’s first act was not a protest against European economic policy but a protest against sanctions on Russia. Only then did it tell its European creditors that it might not pay them back.
The following section has appeared already once on BackChannels but it bears repeating and may be seen in several locations as the fray between the neo-feudal dictatorships and the democratic open societies becomes more obvious and pressing.
Red Brown Green
Red = Soviet, post-Soviet, Putinesque neo-feudal Russia.
Brown = New Nationalist Movements — an allusion to the drifts of Orban’s Hungary and a part of the mix involved in Erdogan’s Turkey.
Green = Islamofascism generally with Ayatollah Khamenei possibly the most central element in driving the form worldwide, fromDaesh in IraqtoHezbollah in Argentina.
*If ever a head of state has experienced an “Oh F***” moment, it has to be Cristina Kirchner who has found herself and her government in the glare of intense global scrutiny in the wake of the death of of Alberto Nisman. The world has gotten the sense of what would inform her motivation to have Nisman out of the way, and now — as I read the news — it appears the global “Red Brown Green” aspect of a revanch post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia (revanch for those who enjoy privilege at any cost to others, including their own greater constituencies) has become clear as well.
News from Yemen (from back in the USSR/RF) —
During the meeting, the Houthi delegation promised an array of lucrative contracts in exchange for Moscow’s recognition of the Ansarullah’s authority.
The delegation assured that the Houthis will soon take control of oil-rich Marib Province, which they say will yield billions of dollars per day.
Let’s not forget Mikhail Bogdanov’s meeting with the PFLP back in the first week of November 2014.
The abandonment of principle characterizes the geopolitical space operated by The New Gang of Bad Little Boys (and Perhaps One Girl). No doubt, however, these play hard among themselves as well, but before the press approaches internecine differences, it’s just as well to note the cooperation between “political absolutists” disregarding the ideological and state interests that would be otherwise ascribed to them. As malignant narcissists — every one of them — what they have in common is the possession and want of immense power and wealth in service to their securing boundless “narcissistic supply” — they would be in their own halls of mirrors eternally glorious — and some day to be remembered as such (or else!).
Waiting to pounce on me from my inbox this morning: “Please report that Nicolas Maduro wants to visit Ecuador to seek international support . . . .”
My correspondent alludes to a source within Ecuador’s government: ” . . . the visit will be in April or June . . . .”
Is this really such a good time — a good year even — for travel?
With a country, one cannot simply water the plants, check the faucets, lock the doors and leave, and this is not such a good time for Nicolas Maduro for doing even so little as that.
Reuters reported Tuesday, “A teenager was fatally shot at an anti-government protest in the western city of San Cristobal on Tuesday, state officials said, exacerbating tensions in Venezuela amid an economic crisis and crackdown on the political opposition.”
Kluiver Roa was 14 years old. His father was reputed to be a member of opposition party Copei. Although an arrest was made, Reuters reporters found cause to call the crime scene circumstances — what actually happened — “confusing”.
Camouflaged police smashed into the mayor’s office and carried him away . . . Mr Ledezma was on a list of people and foreign powers named by Mr Maduro last week as attempting to bring down his administration.
Reliant on mineral wealth for wealth, the “Red Brown Green” arc of power’s extension into developing South American economies may be suffering from the same malady: the west’s intent to finish off the Soviet Empire.
It has been about 25 years since the Soviet dissolved without also dissolving the “perks” of the Party privileged and all of its direct associates, including associate leadership in distant states.
Is the Party over?
It appears the power mad — political species “Narcissus communist proto-fascist” — were dependent on climbing oil revenues — the miraculous abundance of “black gold”, and all of it theirs for the taking — for sustaining and growing both the functional and symbolic elements of power within their spheres of control, from state’s military equipage to the payouts in patronage that created the “nomenklatura”, which along today’s neo-feudal path appears to be a “Newest Nobility”, now rapidly deflating while being urged toward productive development investment — including investment in human development — and (gasp!) rule of law.
Financially strangling, the politically dying may be expected to put their people in their own place first, i.e., the privileged may be counted on to make themselves the last to give up privilege.
End Games, New Games
In the Awesome Conversation on Facebook, I often remind that Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe — another old Soviet tentacle — remains in power. What he has done to Zimbabweans, including the reintroduction of cholera in relation to withholding from a rival funds for water sanitation chemicals, seems of no account: in the “one man, one vote, one time” democratic ways of much of Africa, Mugabe will celebrate turning 91 this Saturday.
As our “malignant narcissists” appear to reject criticism, eliminate rivals, and cultivate a ceaseless “narcissistic supply“, one must expect politically geological aftershocks — or revanch birth pangs — basically kicking (whether leaving the world or coming into it) from the Fall of the Soviet Union and the latest squeeze on the oxygen supply that is cold hard cash at the wellhead.
Update – February 27, 2015
The regime’s favourite charge to level at hostile politicians is plotting to overthrow the government, often in conspiracy with the United States. But it is the president, Nicolás Maduro, who is staging a coup against the last vestiges of democracy. Venezuelans call it an autogolpe, or “self-coup”.
“He is alive, as long as nations are alive and struggle for consolidating independence, justice and kindness. I have no doubt that he will come back, and along with Christ the Saviour, the heir to all saintly and perfect men, and will bring peace, justice and perfection for all.”
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