At first, it looked like an ordinary dictator’s response to a little criticism and a comparatively polite people’s request for a little consideration and power, but in 2011, what looked like a civil war masked the deeper, more prolonged, and vicious desire to sustain medieval absolute power — the power of the tyrant — against the entire Christian, humanist, and liberal experience and political philosophy of the western world.
Are there to be no differences between property and persons?
Are such malign narcissistic personalities, uniquely limited in conscience and that mysterious thing we call heart, to be given free reign to assert themselves as powerful primarily with false flag theater (e.g, “Moscow Apartment Bombings“, “Assad v The Terrorists”) followed by an expressed cruelty and sadism in power that encounters neither boundaries nor limits?
Know thy tyrants.
This east-west conflict between thieving barbarians and the just nobility of western civilization has been brewing in the post-WWII region in time, and the world that won’t massacre refugees is being drawn into the vortex.
Perhaps we should now ask about the nations watching from similar sidelines the horror on continuous display in Syria: where has been their courage, humanity, and resolve as Russian and Syrian air power directly bombed nearly two dozen hospitals and other medical facilities in the vicinity of East Ghouta, Syria?
Triebert, Christiaan, Evan Hill, Malachy Browne, Whitney Hurst, Dmitriy Khavin, Masha Froliak. “How Times Reporters Proved Russia Bombed Syrian Hospitals.” The New York Times, October 13, 2019, updated April 7, 2020.
“The commission found reasonable grounds to believe that government forces and the Shabbiha had committed the crimes against humanity of murder and of torture, war crimes and gross violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including unlawful killing, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, sexual violence, indiscriminate attack, pillaging and destruction of property,” said the 102-page report by the independent investigators led by Paulo Pinheiro.
Since the beginning of anti-government protests in March 2011, Syrian authorities have subjected tens of thousands of people to arbitrary arrests, unlawful detentions, enforced disappearances, ill-treatment, and torture using an extensive network of detention facilities, an archipelago of torture centers, scattered throughout Syria.
BackChannels experience suggests that if it’s called what it is — “war p___n” — it will attract a lot of viewers, such are the low desires of the world when it comes to deliberately seeking artless depictions of sex and violence. the above URL links to a video of a young man who wears a tire around his chest while receiving a beating.
A UN inquiry has found “massive evidence” that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, is implicated in war crimes as the latest reported death toll in the country’s civil war reached 126,000.
Navi Pillay, the UN’s human rights chief, said a commission of inquiry into human rights violations in Syria “has produced massive evidence … [of] very serious crimes, war crimes, crimes against humanity” and that “the evidence indicates responsibility at the highest level of government, including the head of state.”
Kobrin’s a little challenging for reading, but the manner of taking others into one’s own suicide in suicide terrorism has been well documented and explored.
Everyone has complaints: perhaps the pilot in the above video should have asked himself for greater insight into his own behavioral repertoire, so as not to have alienated so many others — and then blamed them for his continuing his own unhappiness.
Of course some parts of the world grind against us, but our souls battle back with constructive ends and ideals.
While the pilot had found fault with everyone on that plane, the same passengers may have missed the pilot who could just as well have gone on to tweak his “ugly duckling” music into a beautiful swan — then too, with the money he must have been making as a pilot, imagine if he had used his new wealth to attend to more children like himself, how amazing the things they may have gone on to do.
Instead, he took himself out of the picture and drew the hate and want of revenge from all of the families and friends associated with all of the passengers on board his flight.
“Brotality” promotes itself on facebook as an entertainment organization.
BackChannels readers are welcome to look them up and drawn their own conclusions.
The Urban Dictionary offers two or three definitions today of the term “brotality“, among them this gem — “When a real hard ass bro kills someone, mortal kombat style. ‘Bro’ being the prefix and ‘tality’ being the suffix.”
Many conversations in the social networks rely on partisan politics for argument — Democrats this, Republicans that. For the most part, the framing it time involves the period set by the run-up and aftermath of the Clinton v Trump election. BackChannels suggests that the greater challenges associated with “Islamic Terrorism”, America’s political polarization, and the advent of vicious Far Left and Far Right fascism span Administrations all the way back to the last day of the Cold War (Dec. 25, 1991) and therefore beg Americans to broaden their scope accordingly.
Try to set aside partisan information and opinion and look at the present international relations in the greater frame of the post-Cold War period begun on the morning of December 26, 1991, the day after the Soviet Union dissolved. Rather than write long (e.g., “We know today through writers like David Satter and scholars like Karen Dawisha . . . .”), I’d rather share one link to what has been really taking place with “Islamic Terrorism” and the “New Nationalism” x Russia’s interest in sustaining dictatorships and much of the related political dynamics of the medieval world.
Putin | Assad | Khamenei comprise a package, as it were, from the Soviet Era: they are each in their way a part of what has been left of it.
Putin | Orban | Erdogan | add the leadership in some former satellites reengaging with anti-Semitism — should open the window wide on the medeival revanche.
I feel quite Quixote-like fighting this post-Soviet battle for liberal democracy because what Putin has done is brought back authoritarian and fascist (Turkey) or nationalist (elsewhere in EU / NATO) leaders in a way way that has damaged interstate democratic cohesion.
Russia from before the Bolshevik Revolution and to this day has had a long history as a promoter of anti-Semitic ideas and as a host, motivator, manipulator, and sponsor of terrorism. I hope the “Reflexive Control” piece will open a window for greater curiosity that may then lead to greater perception of an east-west conflict in which Israel very much represents a democratic and humanist future where other forces have kept installed medieval tyranny.
The Obama-Trump Punch and Judy gets and takes a lot of attention, but the struggle for western democracy against Moscow’s eastern sham spans American (“I looked into his eyes”) Administrations.
At the closing press conference, in response to a question about whether he could trust Putin, Bush said, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy – I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Bush’s top security aide Condoleezza Rice later wrote that Bush’s phrasing had been a serious mistake. “We were never able to escape the perception that the president had naïvely trusted Putin and then been betrayed.”
In her book, No Higher Honour, Condoleezza Rice would go on to say, “There was little room to convince critics that the circumstances of 2001 and the relationship with Vladimir Putin then were very different from what would come to pass.”
BackChannels submits that Putin was perceived differently in the White House by KGB design in those years and was not all different from the soul of the Soviet Union that had collapsed ten years earlier. For reference to the Soviet transition plan developed in the 1980s for the event of dissolving, I would recommend reading Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy.
For an overview of Russian history and related authoritarian paternalism, BackChannels recommends from the Russian Section of its library the two volumes by Richard Pipes.
America as led by President Trump appears to be winning its battles but altogether losing its war against a potential tyranny in the making that has come in the form of a “New Nationalism”, i.e., a populist president who is himself autocratic and seemingly enthrall to and reliant on feudal aggrandizement, cunning, and dumb strength in both personal and public realms. As quoted from the Awesome Conversation and worth inserting here, the BackChannels piece on “Reflexive Control” and the rule of the manipulative and wealthy (like Medvedev) applies as regards the greater torque exerted by Russia, principally, and China as representing each their own politically unassailable business and leadership elites.
If Moscow believes it has taken the world forward by turning history’s clock backward, what has Washington done to freeze that totalitarian regress — and is it doing enough to keep from sliding into its own Orwellian (“Fake News!”) hell?
The American President — but not America’s governments in their totality — appears enmeshed in what ails most authoritarian regimes: questionable policies serving elites more than constituents, a host of political scandals, especially that “kompromat” thing that has come to associate the Trump brand with money laundering (for more, web search, say, “Trump, Felix Sater”) and philandering.
11/14/2010
3/29/2016
4/21/2017
Ours is a competitive world but also one bound by our human awareness of self and related facets of conscience, empathy, ethics, and morality. We’re aware of what we do and, perhaps, at the same time fearful of what we are capable of doing.
BackChannels believes that the Russian experience of the Mongol Invasion and related administration left their marks within Russian princes who would fear what any show of weakness might invite from the world around them while in the subjugated inspiring a festering crude anger and resentment. The vaunted “realpolitik” would then seem to have evolved from doing what works, and if criminality and main force and leverage appear to have worked, then then those devices may remain installed but deeply redolent of despair and disaffection and far opposite the inspiriting benefits of higher-integrity and rule-of-law democracy.
Setting aside the Israeli story a moment, points of leverage may have involved the “Turkish Stream” energy project, a piece of “realpolitik”, and an appeal to the narcissistic concept of cultural leadership and state in which the “Great Leader” is the embodiment of the living state concept _and entitled_ to aggrandizement and glory without limit (or, clinically, “unlimited narcissistic supply). Putin’s vision appears to me to be that of the medieval world sustained with raw power put in place of democracy.
The look of the mode — big palaces, nepotism on a royal scale, confusion in relation to the boundaries of person and state (and the state’s treasury) — marks the medieval mind and related revanche.
Men like Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Erdogan, Orban may consider true popular democratic government as impeding their own authority, sovereignty, and will. While the term “autocrat” sounds quite bureaucratic, similar concepts — caliph, emperor, king, sultan — fit these guys.
Because we know of the “Moscow Apartment Bombings” and that Russia has been arming the Taliban in Afghanistan — and there’s more back there with Zawahiri and others — it may not be too far fetched to suggest that Moscow has manipulated terrorism to induce in struck targets a predictable patriotic new nationalism and that “the terrorists” — ISIS or PKK — now provide a platform for conflict, all against all, and without end. Where Putin has held sway, he has turned back history’s clock.
Our President Trump has had no issues bearing and wearing the mantle of authority, but it would be facile to say he hasn’t had some issues with the “Estates” of a matured democracy. In that regard, he may fit the world to which Putin has wished to return the world.
Every US military leader ought to study the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962. The problems in Indo-China and Southwest Asia could have been reduced. Here was insurgency, terrorism, asymmetric warfare and the “eastern” method of warfare.
This novel was published in 1942 and is set in Algeria, a French colony since the 1830’s. France encouraged French citizens to colonize in Algeria and France also brought Algerians to France.
Camus won a Nobel Prize for literature for The Stranger in 1957 during the uprisings.
The end of WWI in 1918 ushered in a wave of anti-colonialism and this included Algeria. Independence was craved.
The novel focuses on the “antihero” Mersault who is a simple man who impulsively shoots and kills a nameless Arab on a beach on a blinding day. He is tried for murder.
After WWII France was very weak and began to lose contested colonies such as in Southeast Asia. The Front de Liberación Nationale (FLN) in Algeria spearheaded the fight and brutalities occurred on both sides as the French resisted independence.
The “absurdity” (Camus rejected that he was an Existentialist) of the trial was that Meurault was depicted by the prosecutor as “uncaring” or indifferent towards his dying mother. The outrage was not that he murdered an Arab but that he was not an appropriate son. That was his real crime.
Finally, in 1962 Algeria achieved independence and hundreds of thousands had been butchered. The fighting was extreme violence and cruelty. Hatreds fueled the inhumanity.
Critics point out the Arab victim was never named nor developed by Camus. This was seen as the French snobbery towards the native Arabs.
Algeria suffered an extremely brutal and cruel civil war in the 1990’s with ISIS like brutality. The Islamic party won elections in 1991 but the government canceled them.
Blood flowed. Heads fell. Flesh burned. Fear ruled.
Algeria is a major natural gas supplier. France still has great influence and al Qaeda has large cells there. Terror attacked still occur.
Europe battles problems with its Muslim populations especially from Algeria and neighboring Morocco. For decades the Algerians were marginalized and they claim treated as inferiors by France. Many joined ISIS.
We must learn from history and this includes novels that capture popular moods. We must learn better ways to live among ourselves and realize every human life is equal.
Meursault was a murderer. His crime was not being a bad son. But in this novel, much is learned about French attitudes towards their colonial possessions. We still deal with these attitudes today.
American holidays and strong community interaction with the military honor the military. Related concerts and parades are today legend for binding the nation into a coherent and cohesive entity worth defense and worthy of respect all around.
There are ancillaries in air shows and show components, e.g., Blue Angels, in other events.
The parading of missiles and tanks has been for most who produce that spectacle a boast and a threat associated with lesser power, not greater.
The Vietnam generation of military cannot be compensated nor, perhaps, repaired adequately, but all have been permanently honored, memorialized, remembered on the Mall and beyond that in America’s communities. If and where long-term disservice has been done, perhaps that conversation is the one that should be led by an American President.
“A Needle in the Rain”
(c)1996 J. S. Oppenheim & DRB Productions
Brief History Lesson Regarding the Vietnam Era and the Present
Hey, old college kids, remember the fatigue jackets, the grass, the Mobilization on the Mall, and the whole trippy deep ecology and far out peace thing?
Know that the Soviet Union invested $1 billion in the environmental and peace movements of the day (perhaps labor was already under way), and it got its money’s worth in the sabotaging of domestic will for that war. It would also come to lose influence with the hip when it demonstrated its true methods in “realpolitik” as it drove tanks into the Soviet satellite states that it had completely demoralized with its own narcissistic claptrap and thuggery.
I was young at the time — the last of the babies of the baby boomers — and on the draft rolls only briefly before our troops were brought home.
The “Active Measures” part of the Vietnam War is active today on Moscow’s part: disinformation, election meddling, war by proxy in support of kleptocratic dictatorships. If you approve of such methods and ends — much including the ownership of other humans as mere property and as well demonstrated by Moscow-aligned Bashar al-Assad and Iranian Grand Ayatollah Ali (“Hang ‘Em High”) Khamenei — do nothing, say nothing. If that’s not the world in which you wish the next generations to live, look back, get caught up on Orwell — or Hitchens on Orwell — for a start — and look forward to engaging in this now really different kind of war.
BackChannels believes the strong have cause to celebrate through national holidays and shared American events, but it is the weak that needs must put their muscle on display in parades.
The strong?
End Note
When one works a few ideas around to a compressed or distilled state, one hates to lose them in cascades of commentary published through the social networks. Blogging helps preserve such thoughts and keep them available via keyword searches. This passage comes from an earlier take on the same theme:
With President Trump, the American public faces three deep challenges:
1) how do deal with disinformation in the long term — “Active Measures” from Russia’s machinery, deflection and related strategies involving information and (“Fake News!”) rhetoric;
2) how to resist our own deepening divisions to return to quintessential American ideals, principles, and values, starting with the valuing of integrity in business and government and consequent distaste for corruption;
3) how to address enemies that have found ways to blend and practice war indirectly, not only by proxy but with “frozen conflicts” aiding the movement of arms and narcotics worldwide and ability to deeply manipulate terrorism (e.g., see “Moscow Apartment Bombings”; read Anna Politkovskaya’s observations on the brutalizing of Chechen villages).
We may be in a little bit of trouble because the Cold War didn’t end quite where we thought it had and not much has prepared EU / NATO constituencies for its apparent phantoms and their still medieval political ambitions and views.
As BackChannels interests developed, it became possible to plug-and-play appropriate material into Facebook and Twitter feeds with the hope that the same would pass through the western choirs, as they may be, and into the Palestinian’s own debilitating, degrading, faked-up “orientalist” gang counseling resistance with one hand and thieving (via corruption and other methods) from the same with the other.
Those genuinely interested in peace but making their careers, for now, on the spine of the conflict may today ask themselves how much they need to sustain the conflict as a conveniently evil institution.
As a dictatorship or sham democracy, one may expect today’s Moscow and company in similarly absolute power to want to keep another generation of refugees or Gaza and West Bank residents trapped in time and kept exactly as they are. The business that made Arafat and Abbas multimillionaires and Haniyeh and Mashaal billionaires has been pretty good for cash and the related power that comes with dispensing the same as patronage. Why stop now? Or ten years from now? Or twenty . . . or seventy-plus?
BackChannels would ask a different question: what do the open democracies wish to do with political systems redolent of medieval and totalitarian epochs and post-modern and politically criminal worlds?
Should Palestinians not “enjoy” another 70+ years as the political captives of their interlocutors?
There’s no end to bibliography and producing it becomes after a while mindless. With strong word processing software, it may be possible for the URLs to become a long list at the back of a book, so BackChannels will again freeze this “set” about here (August 12, 2018). If there is a place to go with the contemporary history of the middle east conflict, it would be into Yuri Andropov’s relationship with terror worldwide and then, to get to “now”, the KGB/FSB’s relationship with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, and others that so bedevil the west and that appear in Vladimir Putin’s “RealPolitikal Theater” to support feudal-medieval political absolutism.
BackChannels 