Category Archives: Epistemology

“At Least the Dictatorship Provided Its People with Stability”

27 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology

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Contrary to the beliefs of nice people who believe The West, the United States, and Israel the chief repositories of evil in the world, dictatorship do not provide their people with stability: they provide themselves with the power to accumulate and indulge in excess and that especially of cruelty, power itself as the malignant embrace it becoming the power to visit suffering on others with impunity.

Note: the editor has added the URL to a BackChannels piece on ISIS as Assad’s preferred enemy or foil. 

I used to say the same thing, especially in relation to the invasion of Iraq: ” . . . at least Saddam Hussein kept the lid on the pot.”

In retrospect, Hussein did not keep things under control. He leapt into a ruinous war with Iran when presented with weakness in the shadow of the Islamic Revolution, and produced infamous sport like this:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/saddam-drains-the-life-of-the-marsh-arabs-the-arabs-of-southern-iraq-cannot-endure-their-villages-1463823.html

As regards Syria, I and my blog 🙂 have tried to float a too accurate message about barbarism, feudal and totalitarian politics, and their blending in KGB-style Political Theater.  Assad had really to produce conditions favorable to the assembling of the “AQ-types”, the “jihadists”, and their sorting out into the most vicious of fighting elements, and then with ISIL / ISIS make certain that he would have the foil best suited to driving off (to Europe) his most troublesome noncombatant population.

Mission accomplished.

Where westerners believe themselves culpable for such a disaster — “if we hadn’t done this or done that” — the truth slips away without pursuit _except_ by a seemingly small cadre of academics and journalists (and retirees) who drill down beneath the convenient cant to drown themselves in the details of history.

Russian political culture has long displayed itself as medieval, ruthless, and ever paternally authoritarian.

In the near span of 100 years, 1917 to 2017, the experience of two upheavals by revolution and the appearance of three forms in government has not changed its historic character. Russians less connected to Moscow and St. Petersburg are missing out on all the fun with cash while the oligarchy could care less — and thus as it has ever been.

While Moscow often admires Europe and the west and adopts related aesthetic and cultural practices, it seems to resist deep political change, not to beg the point. The Obama Administration had indeed hoped to encourage a little bit of western liberal values in what remained of the Soviet axis of power in the middle east, and at that junction in 2011 defined by Bashar al-Assad’s response to a mild challenge to his absolute power, he would go on to say that Putin had reverted to “the KGB playbook” — and that’s the truth long forgotten at this point in the Syrian Tragedy, so I call it, and the more general and frightening “east-west rivalry”, so others call it.

BackChannels has adopted the term “paternally authoritarian” from the work of the recently late Richard Pipes.  There are two volumes listed in “The Russian Section” of this blog’s library:

Pipes, Richard.  Russia Under the Old Regime: The History of Civilization.  New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974.

Pipes, Richard.  The Russian Revolution.  New York: Alfred A. Knop, 1990.

Blog editors may not have the collegial and financial defenses plus resources known to tenured scholars, so there may be other of Pipes’ works here, even bookmarked — there’s a box full of set-asides that has not been opened in ages — but the two mentioned by do for a start.  Note also: flood by web-info, the editor has developed a short memory for which countermeasures are being installed, specifically, limited time on the web to much less “Facebooking” and blog posting in order to return to that world in which the companionship of a book — any long read — might be appreciated for a day or two without deflection or distraction.

Also related to Russia’s New Nobility, the KGB-infused political methods of a revived aristocracy, and the global eruption of the Newest Nationalism: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

Posted to YouTube nine months ago:

&

And posted to YouTube September 2016:

Best ask of every dictatorship: “Stability for whom?”

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FTAC: ALW: Earth Consciousness; Human-Universal Inter-Consiousness

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, Asides, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Journal, Philology, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion

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When I started my journey around the world Online (In English), I had never even heard of “Partition”.

While I forget much or what I read, I’ve had the wisdom to keep my reading — my books — close by and may rapidly access what I’ve read.

I have 2,000+ close by reading options and could do my own in-house “Great Books” education, languages included, but I have to match age and mission sense with available resources. ??

As a species, our issues on Earth are profound, and that includes not only our search of political reconciliation and the diminishing of war, God willing, but the greater taking up of the stewardship of our planet, so that we may enjoy the image of our survival much farther into the future than the end of, say, Epoch of Oil.

We can and should open our eyes more widely than we do today:

http://thomasberry.org/

From another conversation this day:

Do you believe in the existence of conscience? Empathy?

God also may be described as an “inter-consciousness” between man and nature across the universe.

Thomas Berry has promoted “earth consciousness” with our species as stewards.

I’d go the extra light year and may — or not as Internet publishing appears to promoted promote abbreviation and compression of thought.

Many years ago, I played with Heinrich Böll’s “Murk’s Collected Silences“, a short story about revisionism involving a radio host and his indecision about the invocation of that singular and most Proper Noun, “God”. At the end of his career and interested in shaping the memory of himself, he decided to hedge, and instead of the recorded invocations of “God”, he had his technician cut out the world and replace it with “thou higher being whom we revere”. Murk, the technician, then cut even the resulting moments of silence for splicing together.

Here on BackChannels, this editor has been using as a trope, similarly hedging but advancing a concept at the same time, “God, Nature, and the Universe”.

It may be that we humans merely process chemicals faster than rocks, and that is all that differentiates our species and all else that lives from stardust.

Indeed, one may see pools of blood where spilled become flakes the color of rust (for the same reason) and drops of it diminish to powder dissolving in air.

That is all we are.

When dead.

When living . . . what a piece of work!

As a species, we needs must be or become the stewards of all that lives and all that in addition supports the beautiful and thriving mission of life.

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FTAC: An American of Jewish Descent

30 Friday Nov 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Religion, United States of America

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Around the world, resurgent nationalism in defense of indigenous culture has refocused too many on the authenticity of their character: “The Real Americans”, “The Real Jews”, “The Real ____________”. 

Whatever the McCoy sought, one might discover a few overlaps.

What answer may there be to so shallow a perception– more than that: a defense! — of legacy in identity?

I spent forty years in the American Wildness before venturing into the synagogue where I live and joining it.

I recall one afternoon lazing on the mall of the Maryland campus when a “Succoth Mobile” stopped not far from where I was enjoying my hour in the sun and a representative came up to me and asked, “Are you Jewish?”

“No.”

I wasn’t middle eastern.

My American eastern woodlands were nothing like, what, the hills of Judea?

Here for harvest, we celebrate Thanksgiving.

However, I also recall spending hours one afternoon in some lonely part of an upper floor of McKeldin Library (UMCP) looking over the photography of the Holocaust.

I don’t recall the motive, only the moment.

I took my Bar Mitzvah in 1968 reading off a plastic card. The morning may have been a ceremony for two, and, on my side, certainly for the adults. I really hadn’t much to do with it at all.

Forty years later, after walking out of that mill, I walked into a real synagogue where American children spoke Hebrew with fluency at their ceremonies. The “Conservative-to-Reform” Friday night greeting of the Sabbath took place in both English and Hebrew, and the building remains regal and old. There were other European and Hebrew and Israeli features as well as the unmistakable imprint of generations going back 125 years.

In hyperactive America, that’s an old synagogue.

So, one might say, I got to reconnect with family, my spiritual family (although I have spent time with the Unitarians and the Ethical Society as well over the years). I have been also ten years with my synagogue.  I am one of those who, perhaps, visit for a time, but I am Jewish, and that knowledge is as fundamental to my sense of identity as my name, Schmuel. You may call me “an American of Jewish descent” but that in no way would make me less Jewish than thou.

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Epistemological Khashoggi: A Kind of Poem

23 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Asia, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Middle East, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics, Saudi Arabia, Turkey

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“Indeed, it would appear Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance, flight, or murder has become a matter most delicate, most intriguing, most opaque.”

Epistemological Khashoggi

Things we know.
Things we don’t know.
Things we don’t know we don’t know.
Things we don’t want to know.
Things we will never know.
Thing we know but don’t know that we know.
Things we don’t know but fervently believe.
Finally
Things we would like to find out.

One of the 15 suspects in the death of dissident Jamal Khashoggi dressed up in his clothes and was caught on surveillance cameras walking around Istanbul on the day Khashoggi went missing.

Footage being used as part of the Turkish government’s investigation into Khashoggi’s death was shared with CNN, and shows the man, identified as Mustafa al-Madani, leaving Saudi Arabia’s consulate through the back door wearing Khashoggi’s clothes, a fake beard, and glasses, a senior Turkish official told CNN.

Caralle, Katelyn. “After Jamal Khashoggi disappeared, a Saudi agent left the compound in his clothes.” Washington Examiner, October 22, 2018.

Were they really Jamal Khashoggi’s clothes?

Even so, what has happened to other potential evidence of murder?

Above all: where is the body?

A man in a foreign land leaves his fiancee (of another nationalist) parked by the curb, walks into his nation’s embassy to obtain a permit for marriage and fails to walk back out to drive off into the sunset with his presumed beloved.

Missing: the body.

Also missing: blood spatter; the odor of disinfectant; the appearance of discarded  . . . anything: clothing; a table or parts of one involved in a murder; not even a shoelace, much less a pair of shoes, has been shown to the public.

Also for public notice: embassies are considered a part of the sovereign territory of the state represented: what have the Turks been doing (directly) in the Saudi’s building?

Everyone knows the answer to that question — one good reason for the invention of the “Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF)” within buildings intent on defending the most private and sensitive of conversations.

Bold added:

Erdogan called on the perpetrators to be brought to justice in Istanbul and questioned whether the Vienna Conventions, which give immunity to diplomatic staff, applied in this case.

It was the first time that any official in Turkey has publicly outlined the Turkish contention that Khashoggi was killed by a hit squad sent from Saudi Arabia. But while Erdogan had promised the “naked truth,” he offered few details beyond those revealed by Turkish officials speaking privately.

Tuysuz, Gul and Eliza Mackintosh. “Erdogan says Khashoggi was victime of ‘ferocious’ pre-planned murder.” CNN, October 23, 2018.

Perhaps when Jamal Khashoggi left his fiance waiting at the curb, he had cause for wanting to leave . . . everything — and become a new man.

Perhaps a body will turn up.

Perhaps we will hear a recording or be subject inferential visual data.

However, the public may be left with an impossible question: whose data — whose story — should it adopt as true?

Related Online

Gall, Carlotta. “Security Images Show Khashoggi and Fiancee in His Final Hours.” The New York Times, October 22, 2018.

Perper, Rosie. “Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancée wrote a touching tribute for him on Twitter hours after Saudi authorities confirmed his death.” Business Insider, October 21, 2018.

But officials are skeptical of Saudi’s explanation for the Khashoggi’s death. Turkish officials have repeatedly touted claims that Khashoggi was brutally tortured and dismembered by what appeared to be a 15-person kill squad flown in from Saudi Arabia.

Where are the bones? The clothes? The “body bag”? Was there a sink? A plastic or porcelain tub? Where are the clothes of the killers? Where was the fire and smoke needed to burn things that burn? Where are his shoelaces and their plastic tips (if of common construction)? No nails? No hair follicles?

O’Connor, Tom. “Saudi Arabia Fires Intelligence Officials, Blames Them for Khashoggi Death.” Newsweek, October 19, 2018.

After his transforming Turkey into a family enterprise, what motive has anyone from the post-Enlightenment west for believing the presentations of President Erdogan?

In Sum

Where is the body?

Where, in fact, is the story?

BackChannels may suggest that the Saudi confession to murder should have been accompanied immediately by its evidence.  Today, the lag in time between the confession and the turning up of evidence — so late as to make fabrication possible — may make the confession suspect.

The time may be running out for even the telling of an untimely untruth.

Indeed, it would appear Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance, flight, or murder has become a matter most delicate, most intriguing, most opaque.

Breaking Online

Haaretz. “Report: Saudi Journalist Khashoggi’s Remains Found.” October 23, 2018:

Multiple sources suggested Khashoggi had been cut up and his face “disfigured,” Sky News reported.

Sources in the Istanbul Prosecutor’s office denied that Khashoggi’s remains were found at the consul general’s home, adding that a picture on social media purportedly showing the corpse is fake.

Haaretz and Reuters. “Explained Turkey Takes Aim at MBS: What’s Driving Erdogan in the Khashoggi Scandal.” Haaretz, October 23, 2018.

BackChannels will try to stop at this point: where is the body?  Is a body found really the body?  If a man wished to leave his body, loosely speaking, would he also not leave behind his old clothes?

There is no way to address such questions from an armchair or by watching television.

That may not be the problem — so the man is dead or, perhaps, on his way to early skiing vacation in the Swiss Alps (never let it be said the editor of this blog has not been a foolish romantic); what is the problem is that “the public” — or respective national publics or statistical clumps of national or party identity — may lose its basis for believing anything from any source.

What then?

What now?

Update: October 24, 2018

Kobrin, Nancy Hartevelt.  “Why the Saudis Had to Cut Up Khashoggi’s Body.”  Clarion Project, October 24, 2018.

Gruesome, brazen and barbaric were some of the terms that were thrown around in response to learning his fingers were cut off first, then his head and finally his body was chopped into small pieces in order to “disappear” it from the crime scene.

Images of such a sadistic act were the linchpin in inciting the political debacle. Yet, since the remains of Khashoggi’s body had not been found yet, it also served to precipitate a war over who controlled the narrative. With this “memory” destroyed, who owned the truth?

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FTAC: A Note on the “Unfake” Real Press

20 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, American Domestic Affairs, Asides, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Journalism, Philology

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I had thought The Washington Post article interested in depth and nuance (I hope this is the one: https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/conservatives-mount-a-whisper-campaign-smearing-khashoggi-in-defense-of-trump/2018/10/18/feb92bd0-d306-11e8-b2d2-f397227b43f0_story.html ).

Not all information is or needs to be stridently partisan or political. Even where “objectivity” may be impossible to achieve, having multiple sources represent multiple angles of a story lets all of us as readers compare reports, sift, and deduce what fits best together, impartially so, into a coherent whole. That is the soul of empiricism.

https://nypost.com/2018/10/19/saudis-confirm-killing-of-jamal-khashoggi-several-nationalists-detained/

The New York Post has been turning out pretty good for being “on it” as regards some of these international stories.

“The assessment by the Saudi attorney general was broadcast on state television.

The broadcast also reported that five top officials have been fired and 18 Saudi nationals detained as suspects in the death.”

The west, Left and Right, hippie liberal and knotted tie conservative, seem to have become more interesting in “framing” observation their own way than in cool-headed and, frankly, human-oriented analysis. That’s a bad habit to get into for any democratic and modern soul trying to temper medieval enthusiasms for absolute, capricious, and tyrannous power.

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FTAC: MEC: Palestinians: A People Waiting to be Born Again, Honestly

20 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics

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Prompt: “How can we constantly ask to be accepted and understood without giving the same???”

The problem is the false Palestinian narrative, and the more sympathetic the attention given to it, the more the Palestinians suffer — and most of all at the hands of their own leaders (plus their “handlers” in Moscow and Tehran).

The Middle East Conflict is part of the hangover from WWII, and the only way it’s going to lose energy is to be honest with the Palestinians about what really happened, i.e., about what was done to them by the Soviets and the Arab dictators who had thought the refugees better off stuffed into camps and intellectually weaponized with the biggest lie of all: “The Jews stole YOUR land.” That idea was not true then; it is not true today; and it will never be true.

One thing that may be true today is that the Arab Apartheid demonstrated in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria (have a look at Yarmouk for how the Arab and Muslim worlds have actually regarded Palestinians), and Egypt has after 70+ years of consistent separation and abuse actually formed a new people — but they need to get out of the womb in hell — or be brought out of that suffocated space — and turned right-side up, and that starts with recognizing exactly the evil that set them up for misery.

We should never be kind to the cruel.

We should never be sympathetic with the misguided but rather firm with the western insistence on great integrity in support of bedrock truth.

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2018/02/06/set-palestinian-kgb-and-other-backchannels-observations-related-to-the-middle-east-conflict/

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/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftac-antidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/12/29/ftac-middle-east-conflict-back-to-max-erwin-von-scheubner-richter-and-forward-to-the-plundering-of-palestinian-misery-by-palestinian-leadership-elites/

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Post-Soviet Palestinian

13 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Gaza, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

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Event: “Is a Sovereign Palestine Still Possible?”
Sponsor: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Date: October 11, 2018
Note: Audio starts after 8:30, and the program runs about two hours.

What will the recent changes in U.S. policy—including recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, terminating assistance to Palestinians and UNRWA, and closing the Palestinian representative office in Washington—mean for the future of U.S.-Palestinian relations and the Palestinian national project? Will the accelerated pace of settlement construction and attempts to normalize Israeli control over the occupied Palestinian territory create irreversible realities with long-term ramifications for Palestinian self-determination and regional security?

Host & Panel

Michelle Dunne – http://carnegieendowment.org/experts/236

Hanan Ashrawi – https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hanan-ashrawi

Daniel Levy – https://www.c-span.org/person/?daniellevy & https://www.usmep.us/

Andrew Miller – https://pomed.org/team/andrew-miller/

“The Jews stole your land!”: pure poison.

Palestinian camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt: Arab Apartheid. 

Arab denial of political crimes and violent provocations summoning Israeli and western response: Shameful.

Corruption and political suppression associated with the PLO/PA and Hamas: Heinous.

“Palestinian People”: after 70+ years of Arab / Arab-Russian abuse by crude manipulation: yes, but in situ.

Any other people would both deserve and have obtained better governance for themselves.

At a point early in the program, Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, claims the Jewish Israeli and ? Palestinian narratives equal on the basis of belief and absolute truth.  However, the Palestinians have never been of one national or religious background: Christian, Muslim, Jordanian, Egyptian, wandering.  What has fixed them in place and time has been Arab animus toward the (Majority) Jewish State of Israel, and it may be suggested that after 70+ years of punitive separation, the same may well have established themselves as another “people apart” — and perhaps ready to grow into new and better fit and more survivable shoes.  The time has come to step out of what has become a worn out narrative serving only the self-serving.

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2018/02/06/set-palestinian-kgb-and-other-backchannels-observations-related-to-the-middle-east-conflict/

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/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftac-antidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/12/29/ftac-middle-east-conflict-back-to-max-erwin-von-scheubner-richter-and-forward-to-the-plundering-of-palestinian-misery-by-palestinian-leadership-elites/

Suggested Themes

Accusation in a Mirror, Civilizational Narcissism, Denial of Culpability (Transactional Psychology), Malignant Narcissism, and Cultural Locus of Control

Related on the Web

Bergman, Ronen. “The KGB’s Middle East Files: Palestinians in the service of Mother Russia.” YNetNews, April 11, 2016.

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ALW: Historical Necessities – Humor and Soul

03 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Philosophy

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Recommended to this editor: David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace (Anniversary Edition, 2009).

Now wish-listed in my Amazon account, it would be a good book to own; however, the bookcases have been filled, and there’s even now a box full of books with bookmarks in them, the desktop having become more my platform than the sofa.

Darn.

The forum for the comment was one of Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi‘s pages on Facebook.  Daoudi, who once took a class of Palestinian students to Auschwitz and had his car torched for the effort, has been a strong advocate for a moderate Islam (Wasatia Movement (Facebook page]) and Israeli-Palestinian co-existence.  As suggested by the lost getabout, such efforts would seem tempered by the politics of the East Jerusalem space from which he prefers to work.

Fromkin’s book would be a good thing to own and read.  However —

I’m overstocked here with books, but if I had house and space, I’d go ahead and expand my library to 4,000 volumes, maybe more.

One thing about the truth in history: when something is true, all the small parts really do fit together.

In that fitting together, however, one may wish to have two essential elements for company: 1) a great sense of humor and 2) a lot of soul.

Previously recommended by yours truly to forum readers: Efraim Karsh’s 2011 volume, Palestine Betrayed.

Purpose: replace strident untrue (Soviet Era malarkey) narratives 🙂 with a broad, common, empathetic, high-integrity telling of history — because history may not be “written by the victors” but in the greater course of time by the decent and earnest among the world’s scholars — that might then provide a firm base of knowledge for all.

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