Today I would like to share a letter written bySzabolcs Kerék-Bárczy and addressed to three American-Hungarians active in Hungarian affairs–Maximilian Teleki, Frank Koszorús, Jr., and Eugene Megyesy.
Szabolcs Kerék-Bárczy began his career as secretary to Prime Minister József Antall’s chief-of-staff. During the socialist-liberal government of Gyula Horn he attended Harvard University and received his master’s degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. After Viktor Orbán won the election in 1998 he returned to the prime minister’s office as chief-of-staff of István Stumpf, the minister in charge of the office. Between 1999 and 2001 he was adviser to the foreign ministry. Between 2001 and 2004 he served as Hungarian consul in Los Angeles. Later he served in various capacities in the Ibolya Dávid-led MDF until 2010. He describes himself as a liberal conservative. Currently he is a member of the presidium of the Democratic Coalition (Demokratikus Koalíció).
I agreed with my Orwellian alter ego – it didn’t look too good – and worried that my explanation wasn’t much better. I was heading to Australia to support Project Rozana, a charity founded by Hadassah Australia (the local chapter of Hadassah, one of Israel’s preeminent hospitals in Jerusalem) to create a $10 million endowment devoted to training Palestinian doctors in the West Bank in Israel’s Hadassah hospital. With over 27 engagements scheduled I had been asked to place the cross-cultural, interfaith program within the context of Islamism as it battles for supremacy over the narrative with Islam.
“I said, ‘That’s a very good joke. But it’s impossible, because my father is Muslim.’ But he insisted, saying that ‘according to Judaism, it goes by the mother’s side. And because your grandmother is Jewish, your mother was born Jewish and you were also born Jewish.’
“I thought that man was just old, and I said: ‘No, come on, my grandmother married a man named Muhammad al-Masri from Nablus and converted to Islam. Believe me that anyone born Muslim leads a Muslim life.’
It shook me. It was an all-out declaration of war against the city of which I had come to regard myself an inhabitant. It was an act of barbarity against my neighbors, friends and relatives. I did not know what I could do to fight back, but I was about to find out.
“The gunmen were armed quite seriously, they had everything they needed in their arsenal including machine guns and grenade launchers,” Kadyrov said in an interview on the radio station Echo of Moscow. He added that authorities had been expecting an attack and were prepared, though the assault was anticipated for Dec. 12, Russia’s Constitution Day.
Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013.
Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Michael Henry Heim, translator. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
It isn’t simply that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” as the novel’s most famous line has it. Kundera was showing us not only how one major event sweeps away another, but just how hard it is to remember at all, how disorienting to our own point of view and sense of time it is to try to follow what is going on around us.
In retaliation for losing Ukraine in the Russian-dominated CIS, Putin seized control of Crimea after a bogus referendum in which 97 percent of the population allegedly voted. The same thing was about to happen in the heavily Russian populated East of Ukraine but halted due to International Sanctions.
Corruption is a major obstacle to doing business in Russia, and petty corruption is common. The business environment suffers from inconsistent application of laws and lack of transparency in public administration. The public procurement sector is notoriously corrupt, with fraud related to government tenders costing the state billions of dollars each year.
http://www.business-anti-corruption.com/country-profiles/europe-central-asia/russia/snapshot.aspx – September 2014.
Corruption claims related to the 2018 Russia and 2022 Qatar World Cups have been circulating. In mid-November, FIFA cleared Qatar and Russia of any wrongdoing following an in-depth report by Michael Garcia, FIFA’s leading U.S. investigator and chairman of the investigatory chamber of the FIFA Ethics Committee. After FIFA cleared both nations, Garcia slammed the organization for not properly representing the facts. FIFA is once more reviewing his report.
Inexplicably, President Zeman called on his EU and NATO partners to accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea on the grounds that the 1954 decree that transferred the region to Ukraine was “stupid.” He went on Russian television and denounced the sanctions as counterproductive. As far as the fighting in eastern Ukraine was concerned, Zeman argued, the West had no right to interfere since it was a civil war.
Igor Luke’s piece fits with BackChannel’s own observations about despotic power (e.g., “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”) and drifts toward it (e.g., “Putin-Orban”) and explanations for the same developed in the books listed in the “Russian Section” of this blog’s incredible library.
I started this post close to the start of Putin’s address (in the above RT video) and may have 30 minutes left before the same draws to a close. 🙂 The Russian President’s emphasis returning capital flight from Russia and developing technology may correspond both to sanctions and reduced oil prices as well perhaps to either desire (that would be nice) or the purchase of time (more likely, chatyping here as a skeptical blogger) to continue developing neo-feudal nationalism and avenues of export for it in eastern Europe.
With loose reference here to political psychology, one may apply the notion that autocrats understand one another better than they do their natural enemies: democratic modern socialists and open society humanists. Still, as I listen to Putin’s translator – about 56 minutes in — and remarks about population and health care, the turn westward (don’t tell him!) is unmistakable. Inside of two minutes (and a little more), capitalization, equality, health care, economic and industrial forecasting, education and training, human development and achievement have been injected into the address.
Will Putin — and the oligarch super billionaires, all 110 or thereabouts — walk the turnaround talk?
Transcribed:
Dear colleagues, health care, education, social support, social security must become issues of true public good, true public value. They need to serve our entire society.
We cannot imitate education.
We cannot imitate health care or social security.
We cannot imitate caring for people.
We need to learn to respect ourselves.
We need to look at this important notion such as reputation and that reputation of a specific hospital, school, institution, or social office is a building stone in the overall reputation of our country . . . .”
If Putin’s neo-feudal and vertical-around-the-power inner circle, nomenklatura, and FSB turn about to embrace integrity and place it in value one step above loyalty — now that will take courage! — well, hell, I’d campaign and vote for him!
*
Psychology treats persons in part in their capacity as problems unto themselves, never mind their effects on others — everyone may need help, but there’s just one patient and experience of mind at a time.
Political psychology by definition needs must deal with both the vagaries of personality and the social organization of the same. By inference, we may expect the individual reprobate to consider and find a way of cleaning up his act and at practically any cost: as much becomes for a person an ethical, moral, and spiritual matter, a matter between himself and God or himself, history, nature, and time.
That is man confronting himself and how that story goes matters most to himself.
Putin’s reflection, as I am listening to it, involves the society he has created around himself, and that society has displaced immense wealth from the Russian people: will the owners of the state now return their stakes and set off the process of redistribution down through a new meritocratic Russia?
Noblesse oblige?
It might work.
One notices with people that efforts to improve in one area often yield improvements in other areas as well.
Best advice (if anyone’s reading): draw down the curtain on political theater. Locally. Globally.
Become real.
And please stop entertaining the PFLP, using the middle east to distract from eastern Europe, and much else that confuses intimidation, pandering, and patronage — and the fuller suite of degrading, demeaning, and dehumanizing methods — with legitimate power.
Remember what you said: you cannot imitate education, healthcare or social security, or caring for people.
I’ll add my two cents: you cannot imitate integrity either.
Take your time, for time has time in abundance for change.
The commentary on the latest in social technology drives back directly to political psychology, malignant narcissism, and networked narcissistic manipulation.
Beyond the “shared ideology”: theft.
Where numbers gather, the barbarism — mass slaughter, rape, rapine, slavery, sociopathic contempt for others and for life itself — cannot be overlooked, and where the barbarism has been sustained, the development of wealth for the despotic cannot be missed either.
The woman was wearing a burka when she allegedly stabbed 47-year-old mother-of-two Ibolya Ryan, who once lived in Colorado, in a mall restroom on Reem Island on Monday.
An hour after the stabbing, the suspect then planted a home-made bomb outside the house of a Muslim Egyptian-American doctor, Sheikh Saif said. But the device, which was made of small gas cylinders, a lighter, glue and nails, was successfully dismantled after one of the man’s sons found it. Sheikh Saif added that the woman targeted her victims based solely on their nationality and did not know either of them.
I’m finishing the Pacepa and Rychlak book Disinformation (which mighty tome I highly recommend to all interested in the Islamic Small Wars, foreign affairs, and political psychology), and the above tipped by Shoebat came together too quickly and neatly to leave laying around on the desktop screen.
Happy Helliday shopping, says I.
The incident will probably spark renewed talk about public dress and security as well as about manipulated vacuous zombie terrorists, including those of the “black widow” strain, which historic metaphor I now apply in more generic visual terms.
Doha-Washington may be competing with Tehran-Moscow (with Damascus between them), and the point of both would seem to be to have a scourge, accidentally or deliberately, worth elimination and the claim of rescue.
Assad managed to turn an “Arab Spring” revolution toward democracy and modernity into a deeply medieval and polarized civil war pitting his “secular” regime against Islamic extremists. It didn’t start out that way — and missing from the fields of battle: about nine million displaced Syrians.
On the Sunni side of this geopolitical knot (a knot because the Soviet Union was not finished off but merely transferred to the KGB, which has pursued a deeply feudal and equally thieving — internally and externally — course) stands an apparently duplicitous alliance that started out intending to knock Iran out of Syria (taking care of Hezbollah on the way) and produce an updated Islamic.
Things are just not working out the way they seem to have been planned — and much of that planning may have been to promote one appearance or another of a version of political reality. Again: there’s too much of theater in the combat.
The tail isn’t wagging the dog.
The whole dog is wagging the dog, from the tip o’ the nose to the end o’ the tail, U.S.-NATO and perhaps a Sunni-aligned alliance on one side while on the other: Neo-Feudal Russia, today a KGB/FSB Dictatorship, and its familiar “Axis of Evil” partners, Khamenei-Setad, Bashar the Butcher, and assorted anti-American and national socialist whatnot worldwide.
And hanging over every inch of the latest lightning in this storm: the immense and darker cloud of a nuclear umbrella.
In Tehran, the deputy chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Brigadier-General Massoud Jazayeri also denied any collaboration. Iran considered the US responsible for Iraq’s “unrest and problems”, he said, adding that the US would “definitely not have a place in the future of that country”.
Szabolcs Kerék-Bárczy
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