Category Archives: FTAC – From The Awesome Conversation

If — in my own head — I hit a universal note just about right in Facebook or other conversation, I may simply wrench it from context and publish it here in this category as a mix of observation and, I hope, a writer’s wisdom.

FTAC: A Bid for the Lost and Missing of America

13 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Canada, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, Political Psychology, Syndicate Red Brown Green, transnational crime, United States of America

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Inspiration for the post: a tirade against the specter of Democratic Socialist America in the fashion of the Soviet Communist sphere of influence and the detritus of the irresponsible authoritarian mafia states left behind for western conscience and vision to address.

” . . . who despite enjoying the benefits and protections of a free society . . . ” (would vote the Democratic ticket).

What happened to these, especially our approximately 490,000 missing Americans under age 21?

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2019/10/04/an-american-report-card/ — the page provides a glance at the numbers associated with America’s most troublesome social pathologies–cocaine use, homelessness, missing persons, opioid addiction, prostitution.

Life has its hooks, ladders, and chutes, of course, and will never be perfect for everyone, but the numbers represent some systematic decimation of a modern — not 1950s white bread — culture. Are those of the middle class and of the privileged supposed to completely turn away from the social epidemiology swirling around the apparently Lost of America?

We should know who is in the mix — and why — and get that unholy street stew separated and channeled in some helpful way.

If Americans hadn’t “social conscience”, there would be no laws involving environment, health, labor, housing, or much else that has brought and held the nation together as a unified polity. Politicians on the Left / Far Left have walked down their own streets and asked about the same questions for the same reasons. Now it would seem up to radically responsible moderates to steal that flame to produce an overall healthier state, not an environment fit to elite, rapacious, and ruthless personalities.

Some Red-Green elements that have flowed down from the Soviet Era machinery have infected America’s Democratic Party with the familiar Far Left cocktail of anti-capitalist, radical, and anti-Semitic (anti-Zionist) cant that in effect poisons their own projects before they can progress. The social conscience of the Democratic Party as stamped by Presidents Roosevelt in the 1930s and Johnson in the 1960s appears well under attack by the vanguard of a bullying old White Right political culture that really doesn’t care to address the misery it has learned to overlook.

Far be it, however, for BackChannels to overlook Hollywood’s role in the glamorizing and promoting of the very scourges that have both enriched the world’s mafia and — with dollars cleaned and spiffy — spilled back into working communities — here: read about Vancouver’s pleasant (not really) influx of wealth — as to make economic retreat and the decoupling from evil virtually impossible.

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Malcolm Nance on Trump

08 Friday Nov 2019

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

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Malcolm Nance interviewed by Touré at Politicon 2019 in Nashville, Tennessee, October 26, 2019.

Soviet / post-Soviet Russia continues to gas light the world with political theater. To get to how it does that, BackChannels cannot too highly recommend the following reading:

Politkovskaya, Anna. A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches From Chechnya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Press Books, 2003.

Schindler, John. “Exploring Al Qaeda’s Murky Connection to Russian Intelligence.” Business Insider, June 10, 2014.

As with much else in the wild, the Islamist program has a weedy persistence in relation to its 7th Century roots, but to really load it up, i.e., get manpower into it, takes the kind of brutalization that gives the victims no choice about fighting back. Anna Politkovskaya has detailed how artificial a process Russia’s “war” with Islam has been.

Related for thought:

Posted to YouTube by RT September 23, 2015.

John Schindler’s 2014 investigative report goes over the opportunity Russia’s secret political police organization had to encourage or manipulate Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri to perhaps get the ball rolling on America’s big black 9/11 day. As the world has more recently seen how Phantom of the Soviet Putin’s Moscow does business (not only in Syria and Ukraine), the connection’s worth consideration. Review the timeline: 1989 – Russian Army’s retreat from Afghanistan; 1991 – Soviet Union collapses in bankruptcy to leave Russian national culture to a newly defined and transitional Russian Federation; and ten years on, Al Qaeda hijacks and launches American civilian jets against America’s most iconic symbols of power.

Hmm.

Here’s a third reference suggestive of the persisting totalitarian character of Putin’s regime and political theater —

Satter, David. “The Unsolved Mystery Behind the Act of Terror That Brought Putin to Power.” National Review, August 17, 2016.

The late Karen Dawisha has also investigated the “Moscow Apartment Building Bombings” and come to similar conclusions as reported in her book, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?

Loosely Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/09/syria-assad-isil-background/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

Throughout the coming election season — or is it here already? — Americans will have to ask themselves whether they want to live in an authentic democracy or a Potemkin fake that merely resembles one. One version listens to the public’s voice with integrity; the other listens for advantage and herds people for service to other ambitions not in their interests.

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FTAC: Riff on the Sensitivity of the Malign Narcissist to Cartoons – Basics

05 Tuesday Nov 2019

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

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Inspiration for the Post

The other party’s recollection of the assassination of political cartoonists.

From the Awesome Conversation

Despots — malignant narcissists — live for “unlimited narcissistic supply”, i.e., the adoration of the public as if a god.

Here’s a portal from my blog:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/anthropolitical-psychology/

Generally speaking, I believe that excessive and malignant narcissistic process takes off with damage early in life, and there’s a term for that: “Narcissistic Mortification”. The humiliation of the child, negative response to what is good, etc., will do it, and if it’s really bad, the personality will cover the damage (hiding the shame) and split an heroic image for self-concept that may be built with boasts, brags, lies, and the deep and tireless manipulation of others around himself.

Pause: narcissism is natural — most of us take pride in our internal motivations, our appearance, the things we do, and some of the things we acquire. Narcissism is not a bad thing but part of a healthy life. Moreover, not all narcissists are evil; many are reparative — we’re natural do-gooders, lovers, husbands, wives, shepherds, and stewards of what comes into our separate domains. We care, and goodness, integrity, and truth matter.

The malignant — the despotic — put on a show.

The fireman sets the fire, so he may show up to put it out and obtain admiration for his heroism.

Related look-up: “Moscow Apartment Bombings”.

“Gas lighting” goes with a malign narcissism as may “messianic delusions of grandeur” — also loss of those boundaries and limits that account for respectful privacy and natural and normal legal and social tendencies. The malignant lose a good part of their humanity on their way to “greatness” — and their greatness is in their heroic image.

After all these years, I don’t know who else has been mining this seam in relation to political psychology.

I had started with a book by a former CIA profiler — Post, Jerrold M. Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior. Forward by Alexander L. George. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

We may today know more about dictators — how they tick — than we do their followers, but some of the mechanics are known too, and much of the existence of each distills to force, leverage, and money that provides for measures of bribery, induction of dependency, intimidation, and patronage. The inner circles and close followers of dictators would seem generally in on the game with the greater public bought off, fooled, impressed, mollified, and patronized.

Most hated by the dictator: a free press that more accurately conveys his reflection and does so broadly, publicly, universally.

Related Online

Burke, Jason. “The murder that shattered Holland’s liberal dream.” The Guardian, November 7, 2004.

Gathara, Patrick. “The death of the political cartoon: A pillar of journalism is being destroyed by oppressive government, online mobs and profit-oriented media moguls.” Al Jazeera, July 2, 2019.

Hart, Benjamin. “4 Cartoonists Killed in Attack on Charlie Hebdo Newspaper.” HuffPost, December 6, 2017.

Rowson, Martin. “The New York Times political cartoon ban is a sinister and dangerous over-reaction.” The Guardian, June 12, 2019.

Stack, Liam. “London Police Reopen Investigation Into 1987 Killing of Palestinian Cartoonist.” The New York Times, August 29, 2017.

Anderson, Hans Christian. “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” H.C. Anderson Centret.

Wikipedia. “Naji al-Ali”.

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FTAC: The Briefest Note on the Regressive Medieval Stance Toward EU/NATO

02 Saturday Nov 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Middle East

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Premise

The inspiration for the following three paragraphs came from an assumptive accusation to the effect that ” No Justice in the Middle East and the US/EU support these dictators, like Egypt and Saudi.”

Response

EU/NATO has no encouragements — of which I’m aware — for dictatorships.

Unfortunately, our geopolitical world having become arranged as it is presents challenges to what we may distill as a common humanity with some universal ethical, psychological, and spiritual qualities. Here, the bludgeons of the medieval worldview and its political methods should be easily recognized against the modern alternative: checked and distributed power x popular participation, representation, and self-determination.

The axis formed by the Putin-Assad-Khamenei alliance remains practically, hopeless medieval and committed to kleptocracy by absolute authority under cover of vacuous brutality or convenient dogma. Well-served: the malign narcissism of so-called “great leaders” who measured by modern standards really are not so great as they may believe themselves to be.

From the Awesome Conversation on Facebook

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FTAC: After Islamic State, the Continued Rise in the World of Fascist Absolute Power

30 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Syria

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Conversation Starter

Blanga, Yehuda. “Implications of the US Withdrawal from Syria.” The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, October 30, 2019.

Inspirational comment for what follows noted that “the #1 and #2 ISIS leaders” were now dead.

True and factored into the response that follows here.

From the Awesome Conversation

Islamist leaders believe themselves — and their followers believe them to be — as Muhammad, the channeled voice of God on Earth. Of rivals for Ayatollah and Caliph there may be no short lists to which another strident Believer may not be added.

As with other dictators, their power resides in part in the closed political systems one or another may be able to wrap around themselves as a defensive as defensive political political, religious, and social bubble. In my reductive way, as much responds in leaders to the humiliations of childhood or early adolescence as part of malign narcissistic development. All become politically absolute — and for practical conclusions, kleptocratic.

In the Syrian theater, Bashar al-Assad cultivated ISIS / ISIL / Islamic State in the gathering of the al-Qaeda types that streamed into his state as the 2011 “Civil War” (I call it the “Syrian Tragedy”) developed. His purpose, and well in the KGB style, was to produce a war he knew he could win by first choosing his enemy. So he bombed the hell out of noncombatant Syrians while failing (deliberately) to focus his forces on the Islamists until the same coalesced and he could add to them.

Russia removed her citizens early in this process, but it by no means abandoned its old client. On the other wing, Iran had its eye on Israel and plenty of nefarious conflict-encouraging and martial power of its own — it is no mistake or coincidence that the IRG and Hezbollah would come to the battle (as would Russian forces).

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/09/syria-assad-isil-background/

On this reading page, BackChannels has another piece — different author and publication — suggesting about the same thing. Our retreat has been a retreat before “political absolutism” or in the most undemocratic and illiberal support of it.

Related Online

Wechsler, William F. “Five Takeaways from the Death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.” Atlantic Council, October 28, 2019.

Addendum: Perpetuation of Threat

The bond between conflict and money may well make the world go around.

That may be fine as a part of our “human condition”.

Here, however, for the remaining and fully functioning liberal democracies of the 21st Century, the underlying argument that might be characterized — as I characterize it — as “Medieval (Absolute Power) v Modern (Democratic Distribution of Power)” involves the leveraging of the presence of unreasoning threat and “unassailable” leadership into the endless “wars of all against all”.

Is that what y’all want?

Putin-Assad-Khamenei, Putin-Erdogan: as much appears the world wanted. Their states are their personal ventures; their slogans the whips for their mobs; their ends: their own aggrandizement.

For the West that should be pushing back: mere containment of these old and evil forces, and the “containment” appears quite permeable for the methods now associated with Russia’s “Active Measures” and “Hybrid Warfare”.

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FTAC – About ‘Hybrid’ Putin – Some Questions for EU-NATO

25 Friday Oct 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philosophy, Russia, Turkey

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The grousing question was, ” Europe is right on Russia’s door step. They have militaries. Why aren’t they stopping Putin ? E.U. doesn’t do squat.”

The answer from BackChannels was —

Stop him . . . where?

From making friends?

From offering Russian passports to Russian speakers whom he may claim to be offering protection?

From spiffing up the nuclear missile silo and two radars in Crimea, Ukraine?

From bombing hospitals in Syria and bulking up his military presence in a space scoured of apparently excess Syrians?

From financing politicians like Marine Le Pen using circuitous routes to do so?

From cultivating like-minded “leaders” who view their states as family businesses and themselves as the best representatives of their national kind?

From playing his “energy card” in Turkey — and in Germany?

From flying nuclear-capable bombers in the Western Hemisphere?

From developing a nuclear missile too erratic and too fast to catch by any known defense system?

From stealing a Superbowl ring?

The boys, one selling, the other shopping Russian jets break for ice cream in the vicinity of August 27, 2019.

Related Online

Bekdil, Burak Ege and Matthew Bodner. “No obliteration: Western arms embargo has little impact on Turkey as it looks east.” Defense News, October 24, 2019.

ANKARA, Turkey, and MOSCOW — A number of Turkey’s NATO allies have suspended arms sales to the country in condemnation of its military incursion into Syria, but analysts and officials are shrugging off the embargo, saying it will have a minimal impact on the military’s operational capabilities.

Several countries, including France, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Norway, the Netherlands, Finland, Spain and Germany, imposed arms embargoes against the Turkish government after its troops entered Syria to attack the Kurdish militia, which Turkey views as a terrorist group. Turkey said its military operation, launched Oct. 9, will help create a safe zone in northeastern Syria.

https://www.defensenews.com/global/mideast-africa/2019/10/24/no-obliteration-western-arms-embargo-has-little-impact-on-turkey-as-it-looks-east/ – 10/23/2019.

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FTAC: Nascent and Socially Progressing Kurdistan and Putin, Erdogan, (Trump’s) Return to Feudal Authoritarianism and Absolutism

17 Thursday Oct 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Kurdistan, Political Psychology, Syria, Turkey

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From the Awesome Conversation (on Facebook) —

My general impression has been yours, i.e., PKK fighters accepted some “rebranding” to make their image palatable to the west in their fight for survival against Islamic State. However, here is what the web turned up in related (swift) research:

From January 2019 — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2019/01/02/moscow-as-medusa-with-all-the-snakes-attached/

From June 2019 – https://conflict-backchannels.com/2019/06/25/pkk-a-few-impressions-and-notes-on-the-kurdish-struggle-for-autonomy-and-unification/

The PKK launched with Soviet guidance and support in the late 1970s. Wikipedia nailed it in these two sentences: “The PKK was founded in 1978 in the village of Fis (near Lice) by a group of Kurdish students led by Abdullah Öcalan[19] and in 1979 it made its existence known to the public.[20]The PKK’s ideology was originally a fusion of revolutionary socialism and Kurdish nationalism, seeking the foundation of an independent Communist state in the region, which was to be known as Kurdistan.”

The political tone of the community has been in the direction of “democratic confederalism” — inclusion and input have been part of what nascent “Kurdistan” promoted when it played up the Rojava Experiment.

From the New Internationalist —

“There is no doubt that theirs is a shared ideology, one that has been formulated by their joint leader, Abdullah Öcalan, now in his 21st year of incarceration in a Turkish prison. But the PYD’s organizing principle is democratic confederalism: a system of direct democracy, ecological sustainability and ethnic inclusivity, where women have veto powers on new legislation and share all institutional positions with men.”

Within the short time since forming Rojava’s democratic experiment, child marriage, forced marriage, dowry and polygamy were banned; honour killings, violence and discrimination against women were criminalized. It is the only part of Syria where sharia councils have been abolished and religion has been consigned to the private sphere.”

https://newint.org/features/2019/10/11/assault-rojava

American moderates and progressives would recognize the development of a social democracy — not unlike what we in fact of evolved into, i.e., a modern place with modern laws and cares. That would seem what the Trump Administration has chosen to abandon with a few teary-eyed remarks about America’s soldiery and his (narcissistic paranoid) bent toward American isolationism (after the United States leading the development and defense of democracy in the world since the end of WWII).

Opposed by the PKK and part of the character of Kurdish political incoherence: the Kurdish Democratic Party —

“The KDP has been described as a tribal, feudalistic, and aristocratic party which is controlled by the Barzani tribe.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdistan_Democratic_Party

Has North America and Europe the wish to return to systems in which feudal authority commits crimes and invents policy beyond the questioning of the ordinary citizen?

By leaving the field to Putin and Erdogan and being himself autocratic in character, President Trump has suggested an answer to that question.

Note: The author edits and improves on the first off-the-cuff remarks in related threaded conversation on the way to posting the same or very similar on this blog.

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FTAC: Repaired Russo-Turkish Fault Line May Strengthen the East Against the West

14 Monday Oct 2019

Posted by in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Kurdistan, Russia, Syria, Turkey

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The great squawk raised against President Trump’s pull-out from Syria after the seemingly finished business of removing ISIS as an area-controlling power in the region may be assuaged by a few cogent and brief observations.

From the Awesome Conversation (on Facebook) —

  1. The Kurds have not been a unified political community.
  2. The PKK is another of the late 1970s-style “liberation” organizations set up by then Communist Moscow.
  3. The regional “balance of power” has included Russian-Turkish animus (for a long time), so a return to that geopolitical fault line may make some historic sense; however, the two former empires appear at present embraced over energy, warm with each the other’s politically absolute character, and cold to the liberal democracies and associated values of the west.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Turkey_relations

http://www.gazpromexport.ru/en/projects/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2019/10/13/syria-kurdistan-turkey-ceding-american-influence-in-kurdish-syria-and-permitting-isis-resurgence/

In the “Medieval v Modern” framework often mentioned on BackChannels, arrangements between Russia and Turkey suit the Forward-to-the-Past! ambitions of Presidents Putin and Erdogan (and perhaps Trump as well). Ah, well, the past from the present may seem both a bloodier but also more simple day, so that much more suited to the simple minded among leaders. Be that as it may, the PKK’s historic relationship with Moscow may now bring the Kurdish liberation element into renewed contact with the producers of the”KGB Theater” that brought the murderous Islamic State to their doorstep in the first place.

Putin’s Russia has proven itself a deeply destructive and inhumane force in Syria, one that has encouraged a tyrant to bomb and depopulate substantial portions of his own state, and one that has itself repeatedly bombed hospitals into ruin. Call it “Real Estate Acquisition and Development — Moscow Style”. May such a center of power as Moscow now find the Kurds and the PKK inconvenient?

As captive but perhaps (under the new circumstance) uncontainable ISIS elements melt back into the region (how many may it take to rebuild the movement or otherwise influence the politics of the region?), the perpetuation of conflict may seem to suit the greater “eastern” powers, one of which appears to enjoy the development and suspension of “frozen conflicts”.

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