04 Monday Jun 2018
Tags
grand kleptocracy, Iran, Israel, Khameini, malignant narcissism, middle east conflict, political obsession, politically absolute nuttiness, Soviet / post-Soviet politics
Tweet Source:
Reuters on the “Assets of the Ayatollah”:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1
From 2016, Gatestone Institute: Colonel Richard Kemp:
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04 Monday Jun 2018
Tags
Arabization, Christian villagers, conflict ecology economics, conflict stimulus, desertification, Fulani Land Pirates, Nigeria
Posted to YouTube May 25, 2018
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falz
Posted to YouTube May 5, 2018
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Glover
“Published on May 9, 2018: Infectious in beat, jarring in violence and imagery, Donald Glover’s new music video “This Is America” touches on painful racial history and our contemporary culture of mass entertainment and murder. Jeffrey Brown talks with Rolling Stone contributor Tre Johnson about the video and the ways African-American artists are reflecting the nuanced tensions in how we depict black lives in America.”
What blogger / writer needs to write when compilations are practically ready-made?
Nigerian rapper Falz the Bad Guy, a former lawyer, has released a riff on Childish Gambino’s This is America, in which the song and music video are copied and reworked.
It’s good to know which video arrived first, but I’m not certain that it matters: we’re a wild species often accurately reflected in the poets’ mirrors. However, seeing ourselves so depicted, we might consider getting ahead of some basic challenges rather than acquiescing to being forever jerked around by them.
Posted to YouTube June 30, 2017
Posted to YouTube January 9, 2018: “Reacting to the incessant killing by Fulani herdsmen across the country, Comrade Mohammed Kudu Abubakar, Deputy National President of Arewa Youth Consultative Forum maintained that President Muhammadu Buhari should immediately pronounce herdsmen as a terrorist organization.”
Ultimate hope: expand old pasturage by reversing desertification where possible and producing ranch land with grazing crops, fenced boundaries, and appropriate agricultural cycling or rotations of cattle if, where, and as possible. Such armchair suggestions are, of course, easier said than done — and BackChannels, as have many others, have heard the “ranching solution” mentioned elsewhere. The same, however, needs to be done, and most complicating: cultural habits (for that, refer to Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” —Wikipedia entry; article online).
As regards Christian-Muslim enmity based in the uptick in violence and apparent disinterest of the government in responding to the barbarism — it’s really nothing else — BackChannels may note that both Boko Haram and Fulani violence may be associated with Chinese and Russian — and, most recently, American — defense sales to Nigeria. Perhaps both faith communities should appreciate Mr. Abubakar’s interest in investigating the path backward to getting AK-47s into Fulani hands.
And if AK-47s, why not later — if a civil war can be set up — MANPADS? RPGs? “Technicals”?
How much “low intensity conflict” or “small war” does it take to sell to one state or another how many billions of dollars worth of aircraft or other defense equipment and supporting systems?
It’s a cynical question but possibly one of the most interesting as regards civilizational ambitions and “realpolitik”.
http://dailypost.ng/2018/06/05/muslims-give-falz-7-days-withdraw-nigeria-video/ — 6/5/2018.
The Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC) has described ‘This is Nigeria’ song by Nigerian Singer, Folarin Falana, AKA, Falz the Bahd Guy, as a ‘hate video and an assault on the self-dignity of every Muslim.’
BackChannels has heard that the effort to intimidate the artist has been rebuked; however, this marks the seventh day out from that threat, so the story may be something to watch in relation to Nigeria’s cultural freedom of expression.
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23 Wednesday May 2018
Tags
kleptocracy, malignant narcissism, medieval v modern, political absolutism v democracy, Political Perceptual Control, realpolitik, Russia, Vladimir Putin
Putin: leader of nationalist Russia, master of “realpolitik” — leverage, punishment, reward — the Boss of bosses, capricious and absolute.
Whatever the game, why play one side or the other when you can own the whole board?
KGB Colonel, President, Emperor Putin has taken Russia back the one giant step to an authoritarian system reinforced by secret police — today’s FSB supports more staff per capita than ever did the KGB — capable of presenting events for public political perceptual control as with the Moscow Apartment Bombings and the Russian Army’s after-hours (deeply unofficial) brutalizing of Chechen villages in such a way as to drive the men into the waiting camps of Chechen rebels. He has succeeded in abetting greater chaos and conflict in the world, especially in Syria, while balancing the tension between adversaries that may stall change but keep all of the businesses, licit and perhaps illicit, running.
BackChannels credits Putin with turning Erdogan’s pretty little head back toward the feudal glory of the sultanate — or something like it — with the help of Turkish Stream, encouraging the family business in Hungary, and aiding with the election of the formerly more autocratic President (“Fake News”!) Trump in the United States (the French, better knowing what they’re about, didn’t quite go for his Marine Le Pen; Trump, BC presumes, has been tempered by having gotten himself into a job involving personalities as large as himself and powers greater than known in his organization — America’s democracy has not been overwhelmingly wowed or easily walked over). The popular perception of Putin may respond opposite the viewer’s interests: for old lefties, he’s the world’s greatest reactionary and using revived militarism and the Russian Orthodox Church to assuage bad feelings attending the insult of expanding financial hardship associated with related ambitions in Syria and Ukraine and, ultimately, the way the guy at the top gets his hooks into the best performing businesses.
Why not?
In Russia, there’s protest and resistance to Putin, but there is no competition for the power he has amassed and his ability to . . . rearrange the world along feudal lines.
And for “righties”, he’s still the go-to for “socialist” dictatorships like Assad’s.
Never mind that Assad via the KGB-style political theatrical “Assad v The Terrorists” has been building Syria down, enough so, and so desperately so, for Putin to permanently expand Russia’s military footprint in Hafez’s old sandbox.
After the one step backward into 19th Century and earlier Russian paternal authoritarianism, aristocracy, imperialism, and resurgent nationalism, one may wonder what may be the “two steps forward” if any are ever taken as needs must be: whether Putin likes it or not, the Russian Federation is, alas, multicultural and perhaps yearning — as Navalny might have it — for the liberal devilishness that are “rule of law” and “responsive and responsible governance”.
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18 Friday May 2018
Tags
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16 Wednesday May 2018
15 Tuesday May 2018
Tags
exploiting the masses, Hamas, medieval v modern, middle east conflict, Palestinian, Palestinian history, PLO, political blackmail, Soviet Era, totalitarianism
The Palestinian liberation movement descends directly from the Soviet Era and Moscow’s interest in leveraging grievance into the political power familiar to the world’s most piratical dictatorships. This is not to excuse western perfidy on parts of the global far right in the 20th Century, but to note where the phoniness in Palestinian politics originated.
At the end of WWII, what Adolph could not hold, Uncle Joe picked up and although representing a very different system from that of the German fascists, the feudal authoritarianism was there to encourage similar drift associated with absolute power — or “political absolutism” — in the middle east. (Note regarding Moscow: two major revolutions, three governments, one-hundred years — and The Bear remains absolutely authoritarian, criminal, and totalitarian).
We know today the KGB’s relationship with Arafat and the PLO (also the pride Yuri Andropov took in the airline hijackings of the 1970s) and we have learned within the past couple years of Mahmoud Abbas’s own KGB record.
Keep loving Moscow — and you will love even more Palestinian suffering by way of its designs.
Note well that ALL Palestinian top leaders have become multi-millionaires while Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh long ago developed reputations as billionaires.
The seduction, captivity, and suffering of the Palestinian main base has turned out a long-lived and powerful business for thieving elites and their systems of patronage.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftacantidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/
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14 Monday May 2018
This morning, BackChannels copied and pasted to its Facebook “reading page” the following quotation:
— At a gathering point east of Gaza City, organizers urged demonstrators to burst through the fence, telling them Israeli soldiers were fleeing their positions, even as they were reinforcing them. —
The Guardian posted about the the same thing: “Israeli troops kill dozens of Palestinians in protests as US embassy opens in Jerusalem – live updates” (May 14, 2018).
Such statements are not untrue — who? did what? to whom? — but incomplete and superficial.
Hamas chose to play the joyful occasion of the inauguration of the American Embassy in Jerusalem as just right for drama — and it chose to lie in a most functional or practical way to fairly order ever hopeful, ever strung along, ever disinformed, misled, and infuriated Palestinians toward the world’s best defended border and the troops that have made that so.
Related on BackChannels:
Palestinians will truly “defy the odds” when they find the courage and wherewithal to stand up to those who keep them most captive, channeled, and ill-informed: Fatah and Hamas. Until that day, they will repeat what they have been told about themselves, go around in circles somewhere between a frustrated complacency and a volcanic violence, and find themselves where they began, duped by Moscow, led by thugs, and subject to a part of the world’s most corrupt and piratical leadership.
Some should be asking Abbas about his new airplane.
Some should be asking Hamas how the Israelis could have been running away when they were firing to clear their fence line.
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12 Saturday May 2018
Tags
banking, communitarian politics, conservative progressive politics, economic development, economic disparity, economic distribution, free trade, human agency and choice, humanism, Kano Lamido Sanusi II, leadership, liberal economics, Nigeria, post-colonial Africa, values
Amen!
Conversation welcomed.
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BackChannels 