Orbán’s political takeover – buttressed by a German industrial lobby that relies on cheap labour in Hungarian plants – has largely been bankrolled by cash plundered from the European Union that he rails so fervently against. A 2019 New York Times investigation found that Orbán uses billions of euros in EU subsidies as a patronage fund that enriches his allies, protects his political interests and punishes his rivals. “The ideology is a ruse. The money is where the action is,” said Lane Scheppele.
Reasoning: America cannot deny her changed posture with Russia since the December 25, 1991 end of the Cold War. The now 26-year term opened handily with cooperation in security and trade, but it appears Moscow’s old habits for authoritarian and central control die hard — or die or fade not at all. Most recent in evidence: Russia’s extraordinary hacking of data rich and powerful Federal institutions.
BackChannels may consider the Nashville Explosion a “follow on”.
What’s next?
As with the 2017 Las Vegas shooting and the targeting of America’s Cowboy Class from the exotically eastern-named Mandalay Bay Hotel (it seems major attacks against the Homeland involve such poetics), one might consider the range both of American Cowboy cities and symbols and otherwise centers of American commercial and defense might and vitality.
The tempo of aggression would seem within Moscow’s control while Americans read of discoveries and events in the news.
Posted to YouTube by Movieclips Trailers, September 25, 2014.
The Soviet Union collapsed in bankruptcy 26 years ago on December 25, 1991. Those who believed in the failed stated, believed also in absolute power with themselves as chiefs of state otherwise known as the Party Nomenklatura. On our side, we believed, however briefly, that the tension between the Capitalist West and an expanding and thieving Communist Russia, the most central sponsor of dictatorships worldwide, including Khomeini’s to come as the Islamic Revolution in Iran, had collapsed as well and that democracy and prosperity would be Moscow’s new fate with the western world.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
President Trump’s own disingenuous remonstrance involving Russia and his undeniable involvement with the Russian Federation tells the direction the Post-Soviet Era has taken, to wit, Russia has become an authoritarian and combined mafia and police state whose elite cook up and swallow money before breakfast while those less connected with Putin and Moscow mumble along without potent representation (even Alexei Navalny in the shadow of his latest poisoning has been forced to serve his Russian constituency from beyond Russia’s borders).
Here is Mikhail Gorbachev in 2016 speaking about the dissolving of his former state —
Posted to YouTube by BBC News, December 13, 2016.
Accusation in a Mirror in One Statement
“That which I intend for you I will claim as your intention for me.”
In its secret life, Putin’s Russian Federation has mounted a challenge to the open democracies of the modern west. In Crimea, for example, it has produced the “Little Green Men” of “Hybrid Warfare” fame (it has also launched audacious cyber attacks against Ukrainian assets). Previously in the United States, it has sought to troll the nation into confusion (read up on “Cozy Bear” or the “Internet Research Agency”). Around the world and still in the domain of a perverse modern warfare, it has managed to sustain “Frozen Conflicts” that serve to inflict continuous insecurity in target states while providing comparatively safe harbors and transit zones for Transnational Crime Organizations (TCOs). Here’s a wrap by international energy consultant Agnia Grigas (2016) —
Posted to YouTube by the Atlantic Council, June 30, 2016.
The Nashville Explosion that took place Christmas morning involved procuring and producing an RV Bomb, arming it in addition with a powerful sound system and patiently programmed tape, possibly including attention-getting gunfire, and it went off in a sufficiently symbolic (there’s that cowboy thing!) location but one also deeply sensitive with AT&T communications infrastructure. Given the day and hour, there was little interest in carnage or sustained drama and attention — there was, when it was over, direct damage to a major American communications hub.
Imagine the same form of attack repeated in one city after another.
Sufficient threat shifts state positions in small and unseen ways, but an attack appropriately interpreted serves as a wake-up that in a democracy calls for “clear, accurate, and complete” public analysis as well as some necessarily immediate, opaque, and sophisticated countermeasures.
Simple Criminal Act — or Act of Terror or Act of War
Perhaps the “Nashville Christmas Morning Explosion” will turn out to be about lone nut case motivated by personal grievance and armed with money and know-how.
You know I’m in real estate, don’t you?
(Not a chance).
Addendum – In Which the Editor Considers Going Into Real Estate
The confirmation of Anthony Quinn Warner as the perpetrator has stalled where it had for Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, i.e., the “why?”.
The story will shift to the mystery woman on the other side of Warner’s “Quit Claim” in L.A., and, as with Paddock, there may still be no official explanation.
Troublesome here: “East-West Rivalry”; the “Whole Russian Thing”; The Location — Nashville, 2nd Street, hard by a critical AT&T communications center; the Christmas morning timing; the planning involved, the mockery (“Downtown”), the labor intensive execution, which had to include the gathering together and assembling of components, including the production of the tape and the creation or recording of the female voice on it.
How do you think you know what you think you know?
Where is the “Deep State”? What is “The Swamp”?
No medieval rumor mill in history competes with the accusations, innuendos, and wild conspiracy theories and faked-up notions promoted by the Far Gone Right.
To date, DT has lost numerous lawsuits for lack of evidence of fraud. AG Barr has rightly refused to walk with him over the cliff into anti-American authoritarian control of the nation by way of narcissistic paranoia and force.
“Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down,” Trump told Jones, who for years had been pushing a message that “elites” and “globalists” are part of a secret conspiracy that controls the world. “You will be very — very impressed, I hope.”
Wisdom: “He who points the finger has three pointing back at himself.”
“I just learned of absolute incontrovertible evidence of North Korean boats delivering ballots through a harbor in Maine, the state of Maine,” Stone said. “If this checks out, if law enforcement looked into that and it turned out to be true, it would be proof of foreign involvement in the election.”
Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap addressed Stone’s claims in a statement to NEWS CENTER Maine Thursday, saying the “vague rumor has absolutely no validity.”
On Election Day 2016, I sat in the passenger seat of Alex Jones’s Dodge Hellcat as we swerved through traffic, making our way to a nearby polling place. As Jones punched the gas pedal to the floor, the smell of vodka, like paint thinner, wafted up from the white Dixie cup anchored in the console. My stomach churned as the phone I held streamed live video to Facebook: Jones rambling about voter fraud and rigged elections while I stared at the screen, holding the camera at an angle to hide his double chin. It rarely worked, but I didn’t want to be blamed when he watched the video later.
The Breitbart article featured up top on a Facebook page: “Joe Biden Delivered Egyptian Disinformation to Israel Ahead of Yom Kippur War and Later Lied About It” (Dec. 13, 2020). The slanted header, an appeal to emotion without examination, was in the same piece — and shortly — debunked: “However, Biden himself paints a very different picture of the meeting with Meir, one that puts into question the depiction of him as an unwitting tool who unknowingly passed on disinformation to Israel.”
Well, gosh golly — watch plumes of dust rising into the air over the neighboring state’s military exercises, report it, and make a decision about the enemies true near intentions.
Can’t do that?
Not enough to go on?
Intelligence people use terms like “estimate” and “mosaic” to describe both the uncertainty of perception and the many pieces needed to venture a guess — a good one, so one hopes — about what’s happening in the world as they see it displayed before their own eyes.
From the Awesome Conversation
This editor’s response to the continuing partisan presentation of political history and present states of affairs –>
Our politicians need to be working issues rather than demonizing one another.
The Brietbart piece makes clear that the conveyance of “intelligence” is often ambiguous and subject to broader analysis. Biden was apparently not happy with what he saw, and the Egyptian effort at deception would have in those years been taken as par for the Arab course in its enmity with Israel.
Times have changed. Moscow backing Tehran (and Damascus) has helped pushed the Sunni Arab world westward for modernization as well as security.
Americans and Israelis should know who their enemies are as well as persons or states neither positioned for nor temperamentally fit for enmity. Overall, Israel has some complicated trade relationships, including with China who purchases oil from Tehran in support of both its belligerence and existence (China has been notoriously insensitive to the character of many of its trading partners). Here’s a part of the deal going between China and Iran — https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/05/chinas-great-game-in-iran/ (9/5/2020).
President Trump, now in his lame duck phase, has most definitely lost his bid for a second term. More or less, he lost his race on character, essentially driving voters out of the Republican ranks to ensure his losing.
In the United States, we have experienced a period of brutal polarization driven by the absence of critical research and reasoning skills in much of the population, disinformation from foreign interlopers (look up “Internet Research Agency” as an example), and plain old hyped up Party-invented agitation and propaganda. With Trump’s now unquestionable loss of a second term, it may be time to pack away the kit of passionate but largely errant assumptions and beliefs about American and, in general, western conservatives and liberals and have a fresh look instead (and again together) at real issues stemming from the illiberal character and greed of the enemies of the west.
“AOC” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — arrives online so filtered and slanted by a media process more abundant with opinion than primary data that I just don’t wish to take so many presentations at face value. Conservatives in general and self-branded conservative Jews tend to demonize her in ways long on accusation and short on substantial material.
With regard to the image at the top of this post, I would like to know exactly when and where AOC held that sign, IF she actually held that sign.
Notice, please, the QAnon promotion of the same AOC image but with different signs providing the message.
— and you know how it’s done: someone pastes up the art, slips it into the Internet Wild absent of context and any thematic evaluation, and out it goes to intellectually poison the gulls.
Agitation/Propaganda (agitprop) is never clear, accurate, or complete. It is always twisted, lacking in context, in detail, and integrity.
Excerpted from the above URL.
“Nearly 40 African American religious leaders released a statement supporting the bill, saying: “While we do not agree with every provision in the crime bill, we do believe and emphatically support the bill’s goal to save our communities, and most importantly, our children.”
Now I have to ask my fellow Americans: what kind of person, what mentality, what measure in irresponsible character grabs an attention-getting image with potent political content or suggestion and goes with it without at least a look into the claim?
That person — the person who would do that — that’s not an American.
We’re a real country full of real GOOD people working difficult issues as we go along, and if we’re not that today, let’s get back to that real fast!
That a certain portion of conservative and reactionary Republicans have chosen to develop and spread lies about George Soros — it’s practically an industry — comes as no surprise. Push-back, however, seems to me comparatively rare. The Political Correctness of the Far White Right immediately demonizes those who would defend the billionaire’s spacious philanthropy on behalf of authentic democracy, freedom, and progress.
The post that follows came about through involvement in one such conversation.
From the Awesome Conversation
Soros’s funding engages and liberates. Some of the people you hate so much appear to be fashionably “Marxist” but in fact hustling capitalist and modern Americans themselves, but they are leveraging substantial American challenges (involving bigotry) into careers.
BackChannels has come to regard the co-founders of Black Lives Matter as fashionably “Marxist” and perhaps misguided in the ways set by Soviet/Post-Soviet Active Measures — the term “Marxist” has been overplayed as a dog whistle for the nation’s reactionaries — but in fact deeply “capitalist” in their operating behavior as public figures — i.e., making their way — as modern moral entrepreneurs, each uniquely engaged in the address of the more stubborn aspects of America’s issues with class and race.
The Trump Administration lies to Americans — not as yet a still conscionable FBI (please do look up “FBI, Antifa” up to this day (August 8, 2020) and let BackChannels know of any substantiation of claims about either “Antifa” and “Black Lives Matter” as the direct drivers of protester violence.
In an open society, the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual; in a closed society, the role of the individual is to serve the rulers of the state. Other issues that concern all humanity – fighting pandemics and climate change, avoiding nuclear war, maintaining global institutions – have had to take a back seat to this systemic struggle.
Active Measures — The collection of Russian Agitation, Disinformation, and Propaganda Methods made evident through covert or subtle Influence Campaigns applied to wrecking the political coherence and cohesion of EU/NATO for the purpose of reestablishing Political Absolutism in the same and then using the most thuggish of feudal and medieval methods to leverage loyalty and wealth from them for contribution to the Greater Imperial Glory of Moscow, the Russian “mafia state” it has come to represent, and the immense enrichment of its oligarchy.
From the above references, one might suggest that in or with President Donald J. Trump, Washington, like Moscow, has had some kind of energized disinformation factory. It may not be the President’s factory, but he has encouraged and endorsed baseless conspiracy theories and the most disingenuous innuendo involving his political enemies.
Trump is being attacked, the memo says, because he represents “an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative.” Those threatened by Trump include “‘deep state’ actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans.”
The memo is part of a broader political struggle inside the White House between current National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and alt-right operatives with a nationalist worldview who believe the Army general and his crew are subverting the president’s agenda.
Foreign Policy has the full memo embedded in its account.
Said Rich Higgins back in February: “Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman wasn’t the first staffer to be fired from President Trump’s National Security Council and escorted from the premises by security. I went through the same ritual on July 21, 2017. But in contrast to Col. Vindman, I lost my job because I was loyal to the president” (by Rich Higgins for WSJ Opinion, February 12, 2020).
WASHINGTON — A cabal of leftist “deep state” government workers, “globalists,” bankers, adherents to Islamic fundamentalism and establishment Republicans are conspiring to remove President Trump and impose cultural Marxism in the United States, according to a former White House aide whose darkly worded memo detailing the alleged conspiracy got him removed last month from the National Security Council.
Who has placed themselves behind the QAnon distribution?
Who has been reading and ingesting the garbage?
Who among Americans believes everything an American president might care to tell them (especially this American president)?
Bigoted, fake, weak, willful and enamored, apparently, of the kind of powerful others known to the west as dictators, who, aware of the pain he has caused others through multiple bankruptcies and countless and apparently limitless lies can respect him out of love rather than fear?
Have some Americans been so duped and convinced of “HIS” nobility in character that they cannot admit to themselves that they may have been fooled?
Americans will now have to educate themselves in relation to the collected legacies of the nation without regard for immediate resources and public or private channeling. To have become this ignorant, this vulnerable, to such an ignoramus: politically and socially obscene and tragic.
BackChannels 