The question was why mental illness seemed to be taking the murderous mad jihad direction — and answer had to do with the susceptibility of some to messages similar in medieval thought to that represented in this now well-known video featuring imam Farrokh Sekaleshfar and the ability to integrate that with their own problems.
Posted to YouTube by United West on April 6, 2016 in relation to the Orlando “mass casualty” attack by Omar Mateen, who was also known to the FBI.
As “lone wolves” keep turning out to be “known wolves”, it would seem sensible to review three dimensions of law: incitement and sedition — to both dampen the ardor with which some ideas are presented and to get them into discussion before a critical public; and detention of perhaps greater period to provide law enforcement with the time needed to caution or channel a “person of interest” and to investigate what is going on within a person who by way of speech and activity has thrown out a number of caution flags.
Focusing on aberrant medieval thought and extremism without attachment to affiliation allows moderate souls to formulate and choose moderate paths without the burden of defending against an aggressive and unnecessary demonization.
I would not want to make an enemy of someone who really isn’t my enemy _unless made out to be that way_.
Each seduced “Allahu Akbar terrorist” has the effect, of course, of tarring Muslims as a class and driving resident nationalist sentiment toward an extremism of its own.
McVeigh — a very different story — got a mention, but one might and perhaps should focus on the way he handled his grievances associated with the FBI ambush on the Koresh facility at Waco and the other long-argued-about shooting at Ruby Ridge.
Re. McVeigh — I might suggest that dictators and terrorists share this characteristics in their political psychological makeup or expression: “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” (https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/anthropolitical-psychology/paranoid-delusional-narcissistic-reflection-of-motivation/) — where each takes upon himself a messianic mission to restore something damaged (I would call that “projected externalization of damage” — i.e., in McVeigh’s head, it’s not Timothy who has been damaged but the American Constitution — and he’s the hero who’s going to make the statement that addresses that by summarily engaging in mass murder.
Tsarnaev Brothers — same thing. In fact, we could probably go down a pretty good roster (let’s not leave out Brevik) and find out the key is less what we imagined as a class or division issue and much more a personal issue shared by very different individuals.
If I type as an apologist, it may be to keep the spotlight on the extremism and shared psychology but not necessarily to give each culture or subculture coughing up terrorists a free pass as strident ideas (‘this is what the book says . . . killing them now would be a mercy’) incite and apparently obligate that “narcissistic paranoid delusional” class of messianic murderers.
Shultz began by lecturing Gorbachev, as early as 1985, on the impossibility of a closed society being a prosperous society: “People must be free to express themselves, move around emigrate and travel if they want to . . . Otherwise they can’t take advantage of the opportunities available. The Soviet economy will have to be radically changed to adapt to the new era.” “You should take over the planning office here in Moscow,” Gorbachev joked, “Because you have more ideas than they have.” In a way, this is what Shultz did. Over the next several years, he used his trips to that city to run tutorials for Gorbachev and his advisers, even bringing pie charts to the Kremlin to Illustrate his argument that as long as it regained a command economy, the Soviet Union would fall further and further behind the rest of the developed world.
Gorbachev was surprisingly receptive. He echoed some of Shultz’s thinking in his 1987 book, Perestroika: “How can the economy advance,” he asked, “if it creates preferential conditions for backward enterprises and penalizes the foremost ones?”
Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. P. 233. New York: The Penguin Press, 2005.
Ah, were those not the days?
Times changed and perhaps in ways the West would not have anticipated nor intended.
Call this a bonus quote from another book listed in the “Russian Section” of this blog:
Khodorkovskiy moved to establish links with the West, but those financial circles recall that when they first met him and his team, the Russians didn’t how to use a credit card, they didn’t know how to write a check, and they didn’t have money enough to stay even in a hostel. They were quick learners, but as Anton Surkov, an independent security expert who had previously served in Soviet military intelligence and who knew Khodorkovskiy and those like him in the late 1980s, stated, “It was impossible to work in the black market without KGB connections and without protection from the KGB. Without them, no shadow business was possible. . . . The creation of the oligarchs was a revolution engineered by the KGB, but then they lost control.” As to whether Khodorkovskiy’s Bank Menatep was indeed one of the many vehicles used to launder CPSU money, as the legend goes, one of the five major initial shareholders, Mikhayl Brudno, who fled to Israel when Khodorkovskiy was arrested under Putin in 2003, simply said, “It can’t be ruled out that some companies that belonged somehow to the Communist Party were clients, but we were not able to identify them as such.”
Posted to YouTube by the Woodrow Wilson Center, October 23, 2014.
Referenced: Dawisha, Karen. Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
While Karen Dawisha’s book covers the development of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle from seemingly earliest acquaintance, BackChannels would have to re-read old and read “unreads” from the “Russian Section” of this blog’s library to note and gather together the hints of transition planning in the five to ten year span preceding the official dissolving of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991.
Note: BackChannels’ editor will take reviewer’s copies in advance of publication.
However, this post is simply to pass along a few titles that promise to “entertain, educate, and delight” the reader who has found his way to the intersection of post-Cold War politics and contemporary “hybrid warfare” and terrorism.
As 2016’s production of a summer out of the 1960s enters its final month, BackChannels enjoyed these oldies but still very, very goodies.
Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. New York: The Penguin Press, 2005.
Everything you wanted to know condensed.
Motyl, Alexander J. Vovochka: The True Confessions of Vladimir Putin’s Best Friend and Confident. Augusta, Georgia: Amphora Literary Press, 2015.
A “me and Vlad” story — and no President-for-Life ever had a better buddy or mirror!
Pomerantsev, Peter. Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. New York: Public Affairs, 2014. Nothing is true but Pomerantsev’s book, and at the end even Pomerantsev’s reality becomes a surreal impression left to fade in memory. In between: criminals, state-managed happy media, a mind-control cult involved in an ill-fated model’s leaping boldly into suicide, and assorted men on the take and women on the make bagging “Forbes’s”.
How crazy surreal?
A man dials the serial number on his firearm, comes up with a woman’s voice, pursues, woos, and marries the dame — and it works out.
Smith, Martin Cruz. Stalin’s Ghost. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007. When it comes to heroism and virtue — also combat, corruption, crime, and history — fate is funny — and Cruz, in the telling of a great tale, peerless.
Baghdadi’s organization has provided Assad with the excuse wanted for depopulating and leveling his state; it has given Putin something ugly to throw westward; and it serves now as a hornet’s nest somewhat defined in space and useful for demonstrating Moscow’s latest in military prowess and technology.
Russia’s stand in Syria — now that Iraq’s no longer a Russian client state and Libya has similarly disappeared in that regard — has become remarkable for the hardware, technology, and troops allocated to “The Terrorists” (while apparently hitting also hospitals —
Russophiles “rescued” by Russia’s incursions in Crimea appear to be learning about their true status as “protected” subjects: prices are soaring while their rubles lose value and their earnings remain flat.
Turkey
Russia, having also and apparently won over Erdogan into fulfilling his destiny as Turkey’s next presumptive sultan and guardian of the Moscow-enabled “Turkish Stream” Gas-to-Europe energy delivery system, has also demonstrated the chutzpah of asking permission to use the airbase at Incirlik — as NATO forces now do — for running sorties against ISIL targets in Syria. President Erdogan assented, not that Putin needs those runways at this moment.
European Union and BREXIT
It should be clear by now that every “Allahu Akbar Attack” prods a reflexive nationalism.
Add the refugees pouring out of Syria and flowing into Europe and other potential hosting space, and the backlash forms around a new xenophobia.
The gates and fences go up, first in the form of “defense leagues” and later in potential policy. BackChannels credits the Soviet / post-Soviet style incubation and later “deployment” of ISIL with goading a brief majority of Brits into separating the island state from the main traffic in commerce and politics associated with the continent.
Russia is engaged in a major buildup of strategic nuclear forces, building new missiles, submarines, and bombers. A State Department report on Russian activities under the New START arms treaty stated in the spring that Moscow added 153 strategic nuclear warheads to its arsenal under the treaty.
The increase in warheads is said to be the result of the deployment of new SS-27 Mod 2 intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple warheads and SS-N-32 submarine-launched missiles.
For all such statements made — fighting the terrorists in Syria; co-opting Turkey against its European and NATO interests; spooking the Brits out of the EU; and redeveloping the nuclear-obsessed Cold War mentality, Putin may nonetheless be working with a low stack of financial chips. Even though he may offset that with appeals to blood-and-soil nationalism and related sacrifice, one wonders how much room for play he has with the oligarchs who may be expected to pay either for ambitions now or their aftermath later.
A glance at posts like this one and its sources also suggests that while Putin has indeed brought Russia to its feet with the immense theatrical prowess that produces both the Winter Olympics at Sochi and the spectacle of a ruined Syria, it’s the latter on which Russians, poor or wealthy, connected or well outside the system of patronage, and “Russophones” in the “Russian near abroad” may wish to dwell.
MOSCOW — Russia flexed its muscles again over Syria on Friday, for the first time launching cruise missiles at targets from warships in the Mediterranean Sea days after beginning bombing runs from a base in Iran.
Taken together, the new military moves appeared to be a demonstration that Russia has the ability to strike from virtually all directions in a region where it has been reasserting its power — from Iran, from warships in the Caspian Sea, from its base in the Syrian coastal province of Latakia and now from the Mediterranean.
“Russian doctrine states that tactical nuclear weapons may be used in a conventional response scenario,” Scaparrotti said on July 27. “This is alarming and it underscores why our country’s nuclear forces and NATO’s continues to be a vital component of our deterrence.”
Mark Schneider, a former Pentagon nuclear policy official, said Russia’s new national security strategy, which was made public in December, discusses increasing civil defenses against nuclear attack, an indication Moscow is preparing for nuclear war.
Ankara has given Russia the go-ahead to use its Incirlik air base for operations in Syria, though no official request from Moscow to use the strategic military facility has been made, Turkey’s Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Saturday.
More than two years after Russia annexed Crimea and promised its 2 million people a better life, residents say prices have soared, wages and pensions have stagnated and tourists have fled.
The sunny and mountainous Black Sea peninsula is back in the news, with Russian President Vladimir Putin accusing Kiev of sending infiltrators across the border to wreck its industry. But locals say the damage has already been done by Moscow’s neglect.
Over the last week, the number of heavy weapons deployed near the front lines in eastern Ukraine has doubled, part of a pattern of Russia ramping up its military presence in the region throughout the summer. An estimated 40,000 soldiers have been stationed there, on top of aircraft and the anti-missile defense system.
All of this has been stoking fears Russia could be planning another invasion, two years after it formally annexed Crimea, as peace talks crumble. It’s Putin’s first visit to the territory since March.
The Russian military has test fired the short-range nuclear-capable 9K720 Iskander-M (NATO reporting name SS-26 Stone) ballistic missile during a large-scale military exercise in Russia’s Far East this week, according to local media reports.
Keep in mind that “Daesh” was incubated (manipulated into existence) by Bashar al-Assad to serve for political blackmail (“Assad OR The Terrorists”), as a goad to the west (a nice present to pack along with refugees bound for NATO states), as a foil (for Russian, Syrian, and Iranian forces), and for target practice (Russia has been showing off). https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/
BackChannels readers are more than welcome to independently research and review each claim.
BackChannels believes that the “Syrian Conflict and Tragedy” represents a complete theater of politics and war put on display by Putin, Assad, Khamenei and with Baghdadi’s organization their most useful villain.
Moscow’s own approach to terrorism, generally speaking, may be reflected in its hosting PFLP in Moscow (Nov. 2014) and refusing to designate either Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations. Although its state interests may differ from those of Tehran, its relationship has proven friendly enough for flying sorties into Syria from out of an Iranian base.
BackChannels way of addressing this relationship between “political absolutists”: “Different Talks – Same Walk.”
Pro-Russian network behind the anti-Ukrainian defamation campaign
Read this article in German, French, Russian and Ukrainian.
There has been a huge tide of false, incorrect and bloated reports that exaggerate or overemphasize the significance of the far right in the current Euromaidan protests in Ukraine. A Moscow-based journalist Alec Luhn writes in The Nation about “the Ukrainian nationalism at the heart of ‘Euromaidan’”, a leftist Seumas Milne argues in The Guardian that “in Ukraine, fascists, oligarchs and western expansion are at the heart of the crisis”, while a self-styled “independent geopolitical analyst” Eric Draitser, in his nauseatingly misleading piece for his own Stop Imperialism (later re-published by The Centre for Research on Globalization), even goes so far as to claim that “the violence on the streets of Ukraine […] is the latest example of the rise of the most insidious form of fascism that Europe has seen since the fall of the Third Reich”.
These and many other similar articles are all written according to the same pattern, and their aim is to discredit the Euromaidan protests as the manifestations of fascism, neo-Nazism or – at the very least – right-wing extremism.
Always a little differently than expected: perhaps our New Global Intelligentsia has now to deal with a more visible and powerful Global Business and Political Elite.
The epigrammatic thought springs from yesterday’s wrestling with a draft about the “Black Led Movement Fund” and foundations flowing down from Henry Ford’s enterprise and George Soros’s success.
It also stems from about ten years of personal growth in the region of international affairs abetted by the uptake of broadband, social networking (Facebook), and blogging ability (a new artform) and the development by affinity of a pretty good and English chatyping “international club” online. With that growth has come the recognition, at least on BackChannels’ part, that our “Awesome Conversation” has obscure nodes (like this one) and virtual public stars (too many to name) that comprises a still new and virtual thin band of global intelligentsia.
We’re thinking. We’re talking. We’re having a great conversation. And perhaps by doing so, we’re changing our world.
Beside (and above, I’m sure) the thinker-talkers exists another connected community, altogether more institutional, more private in its outlooks and its workings, but at the head of so many enterprises and institutions are real people, and one may well wonder about their cultural and political ambitions and visions.
Now back to the Black Lives Matter movement and its chief financial enablers and enthusiasts . . . .
In his day, Henry Ford had developed the strongest reputation as an anti-Semite, and in this day George Soros appears to have developed an atheist’s contempt for the Jews and Israel as part of an anti-nationalist atheist-socialist globalization program. Today, both Ford and Soros foundations have stepped in to fund the nostalgically Marxist Black Lives Matter movement and related Black Led Movement Fund with upwards (or beyond) a newsworthy $100 million.
While Americans and others in the world have been busy considering their election season options in the empowering of a next set of public of representative public leaders, the uber-wealthy have been applying money to political issues in their own way.
BackChannels wonders how much cultural and political “clout” the world’s wealthiest individuals exert and what kind of world are they fashioning (for the rest of us) as powers in their own right?
Note that George Soros with his portfolio valued at about $8 billion (but Forbes says “$24.9 billion”) has been estimated as being merely the 80th wealthiest person in the world: who are the 79 wealthier individuals ahead of him, and how are they involved with the world’s cultures and political themes?
On this post, BackChannels has certainly more questions than answers.
What each wants — these are not beauty pageant youngsters — is a big other and open question.
Reference
Regarding Henry Ford, Anti-Semite
Hitler was very aware of Henry Ford, of Henry Ford’s writings, and praised them. He turned to the same documents. There’s a common thread. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a cherished text for both. And there were certainly business connections between Ford Motors and the Nazi regime.
In the period from 1910 to 1918, Ford became increasingly anti-immigrant, anti-labor, anti-liquor and anti-Semitic. In 1919, he purchased a newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. He installed Charles Pipp as editor and hired a journalist, William J. Cameron, to listen to his ideas and write a weekly column, “Mr. Ford’s Page,” to expound his views.
Ford wanted to assert that there was a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. He blamed Jewish financiers for fomenting World War I so that they could profit from supplying both sides. He accused Jewish automobile dealers of conspiring to undermine Ford Company sales policies. Ford wanted to make his bizarre beliefs public in the pages of the Dearborn Independent. For a year, editor Pipp resisted running anti-Jewish articles, and resigned rather than publish them. Cameron took over the editorship and, in May 1920, printed the first of a series of articles titled “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.”
Regarding George Soros, “Anti-Semite”? Or “Atheist Social Democrat”?
According to Connie Bruck of The New Yorker, George Soros told her that “I don’t deny the Jews their right to a national existence — but I don’t want to be part of it.” According to Joshua Muravchik, Soros has publicly likened Israel to the Nazis. According to the Jerusalem Post, “Soros and his wealthy Jewish American friends have now decided to aim their fire directly at Israel . . . to form a political lobby that will weaken the influence of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.”
Russia’s General Prosecutor’s Office essentially banned two branches of Soros’ charity network in November, placing the Open Society Foundations (OSF) and the Open Society Institute (OSI) on a “stop list” of foreign non-governmental organizations whose activities were deemed “undesirable” by the Russian state.
OSF first came into trouble with the Russian government in July 2015, when it hinted it might ban the foundation along with a number of other pro-democracy organizations accused of launching “soft aggression” in the country.
Sussing George Soros as “narcissist / malignant narcissist” may take much greater time. However, the early impression formed by BackChannels is that he’s trying to hybridize Red-tinted socialism away from Putin’s imperial and nationalist revanche while buying into the Green (Political Islamic) mythology driven by the Soviet KGB early in the middle east conflict (related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/12/02/quote-manipulation-about-the-plo-leader-pacepa-and-rychlak-2013/).
Magui Rubalcava Shulman, Director, Immigration — served as program director for Hispanics in Philanthropy; worked on an evaluation of the Grants for Schools program of the Mongolian Foundation for Open Society Institute.
The things the “Islamists” do go against the grain of humanity — that’s just how I feel about that criminality — and the appropriate response by Muslims is repudiation.
What next?
Cultural blending, differentiation, and separation — there’s wisdom in recognizing and maintaining boundaries and margins in a world supporting about 7,000 living languages and what each represents. (Note that Putin plays the ethnolinguistic cultural defense and evolution card _against_ political boundaries, effectively violating margins. Also: Back-Channels credits Assad with the incubation of ISIS through deselection for bombing and combat earlier in Syria and also notes that Russia continues to maintain Soviet Era relationships with at least Hamas, Hezbollah, and PFLP. Muslims have not only to repudiate the fascist ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood organizations — that’s in that “No” to hatred, violence, and terrorism — but also to grasp Moscow’s role in the grooming and manipulation of such organizations as weapons focused toward the modern democracies).
Posted to YouTube by the Daily Mail, Aug. 4, 2016.
In the following video clip, President Putin notes, “That if you would like to stop the flow of migrants into Europe, if you want for them to live in their own countries, then you must return sovereignty to those countries where it has been taken away.”
Because of the incubating of ISIS as useful tool, BackChannels has long regarded the “Syrian Conflict and Tragedy” as a complete theater of politics and war managed off the post-Soviet Moscow hub, i.e., by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei, and by each to their own advantage but the common cause of sustaining medieval political absolutism in their respective states.
At time mark 1:44 on President Putin’s April 2016 St. Petersburg address, the President says of western criticism and opprobrium associated with both the incursion in Crimea and the conduct of the Syrian Civil War, “They realised that such destructive behaviour against our country was never going to work but nevertheless they’d like to silence our success.”
With a small nod toward conciliation, one may note of the YouTube video of Homs and the link immediately following that leads to an L.A. Times piece about the city that it had indeed been occupied by rebel forces and would be subject to state assault. Nonetheless, the intertwined battles for Syria and against the open democracies of the west have not gone so well for Moscow and its clients IF measured by areas of control, community wellbeing, and economic contribution or so many other benchmarks familiar where peace prevails and governments abet development.
“There were families members of Usud a-Sharqiya there,” said spokesman Younis Salama. “But does that justify them bombing the camp?”
Jaysh Usud a-Sharqiya primarily fights the Islamic State in Syria’s eastern desert region.
Last month, Russian aircraft reportedly targeted another FSA group, the New Syrian Army, in Deir e-Zor province. Moscow did not comment on either attack.
The local secret police soon arrested 15 boys between the ages of 10 and 15, detaining them under the control of Gen. Atef Najeeb, a cousin of President Bashar al-Assad.
In a gloomy interrogation room the children were beaten and bloodied, burned and had their fingernails pulled out by grown men working for a regime whose unchecked brutality appears increasingly to be sowing the seeds of its undoing.
BackChannels 