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.
Kobrin’s a little challenging for reading, but the manner of taking others into one’s own suicide in suicide terrorism has been well documented and explored.
Everyone has complaints: perhaps the pilot in the above video should have asked himself for greater insight into his own behavioral repertoire, so as not to have alienated so many others — and then blamed them for his continuing his own unhappiness.
Of course some parts of the world grind against us, but our souls battle back with constructive ends and ideals.
While the pilot had found fault with everyone on that plane, the same passengers may have missed the pilot who could just as well have gone on to tweak his “ugly duckling” music into a beautiful swan — then too, with the money he must have been making as a pilot, imagine if he had used his new wealth to attend to more children like himself, how amazing the things they may have gone on to do.
Instead, he took himself out of the picture and drew the hate and want of revenge from all of the families and friends associated with all of the passengers on board his flight.
“Brotality” promotes itself on facebook as an entertainment organization.
BackChannels readers are welcome to look them up and drawn their own conclusions.
The Urban Dictionary offers two or three definitions today of the term “brotality“, among them this gem — “When a real hard ass bro kills someone, mortal kombat style. ‘Bro’ being the prefix and ‘tality’ being the suffix.”
Many conversations in the social networks rely on partisan politics for argument — Democrats this, Republicans that. For the most part, the framing it time involves the period set by the run-up and aftermath of the Clinton v Trump election. BackChannels suggests that the greater challenges associated with “Islamic Terrorism”, America’s political polarization, and the advent of vicious Far Left and Far Right fascism span Administrations all the way back to the last day of the Cold War (Dec. 25, 1991) and therefore beg Americans to broaden their scope accordingly.
Try to set aside partisan information and opinion and look at the present international relations in the greater frame of the post-Cold War period begun on the morning of December 26, 1991, the day after the Soviet Union dissolved. Rather than write long (e.g., “We know today through writers like David Satter and scholars like Karen Dawisha . . . .”), I’d rather share one link to what has been really taking place with “Islamic Terrorism” and the “New Nationalism” x Russia’s interest in sustaining dictatorships and much of the related political dynamics of the medieval world.
Putin | Assad | Khamenei comprise a package, as it were, from the Soviet Era: they are each in their way a part of what has been left of it.
Putin | Orban | Erdogan | add the leadership in some former satellites reengaging with anti-Semitism — should open the window wide on the medeival revanche.
I feel quite Quixote-like fighting this post-Soviet battle for liberal democracy because what Putin has done is brought back authoritarian and fascist (Turkey) or nationalist (elsewhere in EU / NATO) leaders in a way way that has damaged interstate democratic cohesion.
Russia from before the Bolshevik Revolution and to this day has had a long history as a promoter of anti-Semitic ideas and as a host, motivator, manipulator, and sponsor of terrorism. I hope the “Reflexive Control” piece will open a window for greater curiosity that may then lead to greater perception of an east-west conflict in which Israel very much represents a democratic and humanist future where other forces have kept installed medieval tyranny.
The Obama-Trump Punch and Judy gets and takes a lot of attention, but the struggle for western democracy against Moscow’s eastern sham spans American (“I looked into his eyes”) Administrations.
At the closing press conference, in response to a question about whether he could trust Putin, Bush said, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy – I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Bush’s top security aide Condoleezza Rice later wrote that Bush’s phrasing had been a serious mistake. “We were never able to escape the perception that the president had naïvely trusted Putin and then been betrayed.”
In her book, No Higher Honour, Condoleezza Rice would go on to say, “There was little room to convince critics that the circumstances of 2001 and the relationship with Vladimir Putin then were very different from what would come to pass.”
BackChannels submits that Putin was perceived differently in the White House by KGB design in those years and was not all different from the soul of the Soviet Union that had collapsed ten years earlier. For reference to the Soviet transition plan developed in the 1980s for the event of dissolving, I would recommend reading Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy.
For an overview of Russian history and related authoritarian paternalism, BackChannels recommends from the Russian Section of its library the two volumes by Richard Pipes.
America as led by President Trump appears to be winning its battles but altogether losing its war against a potential tyranny in the making that has come in the form of a “New Nationalism”, i.e., a populist president who is himself autocratic and seemingly enthrall to and reliant on feudal aggrandizement, cunning, and dumb strength in both personal and public realms. As quoted from the Awesome Conversation and worth inserting here, the BackChannels piece on “Reflexive Control” and the rule of the manipulative and wealthy (like Medvedev) applies as regards the greater torque exerted by Russia, principally, and China as representing each their own politically unassailable business and leadership elites.
If Moscow believes it has taken the world forward by turning history’s clock backward, what has Washington done to freeze that totalitarian regress — and is it doing enough to keep from sliding into its own Orwellian (“Fake News!”) hell?
The American President — but not America’s governments in their totality — appears enmeshed in what ails most authoritarian regimes: questionable policies serving elites more than constituents, a host of political scandals, especially that “kompromat” thing that has come to associate the Trump brand with money laundering (for more, web search, say, “Trump, Felix Sater”) and philandering.
11/14/2010
3/29/2016
4/21/2017
Ours is a competitive world but also one bound by our human awareness of self and related facets of conscience, empathy, ethics, and morality. We’re aware of what we do and, perhaps, at the same time fearful of what we are capable of doing.
BackChannels believes that the Russian experience of the Mongol Invasion and related administration left their marks within Russian princes who would fear what any show of weakness might invite from the world around them while in the subjugated inspiring a festering crude anger and resentment. The vaunted “realpolitik” would then seem to have evolved from doing what works, and if criminality and main force and leverage appear to have worked, then then those devices may remain installed but deeply redolent of despair and disaffection and far opposite the inspiriting benefits of higher-integrity and rule-of-law democracy.
Setting aside the Israeli story a moment, points of leverage may have involved the “Turkish Stream” energy project, a piece of “realpolitik”, and an appeal to the narcissistic concept of cultural leadership and state in which the “Great Leader” is the embodiment of the living state concept _and entitled_ to aggrandizement and glory without limit (or, clinically, “unlimited narcissistic supply). Putin’s vision appears to me to be that of the medieval world sustained with raw power put in place of democracy.
The look of the mode — big palaces, nepotism on a royal scale, confusion in relation to the boundaries of person and state (and the state’s treasury) — marks the medieval mind and related revanche.
Men like Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Erdogan, Orban may consider true popular democratic government as impeding their own authority, sovereignty, and will. While the term “autocrat” sounds quite bureaucratic, similar concepts — caliph, emperor, king, sultan — fit these guys.
Because we know of the “Moscow Apartment Bombings” and that Russia has been arming the Taliban in Afghanistan — and there’s more back there with Zawahiri and others — it may not be too far fetched to suggest that Moscow has manipulated terrorism to induce in struck targets a predictable patriotic new nationalism and that “the terrorists” — ISIS or PKK — now provide a platform for conflict, all against all, and without end. Where Putin has held sway, he has turned back history’s clock.
Our President Trump has had no issues bearing and wearing the mantle of authority, but it would be facile to say he hasn’t had some issues with the “Estates” of a matured democracy. In that regard, he may fit the world to which Putin has wished to return the world.
American holidays and strong community interaction with the military honor the military. Related concerts and parades are today legend for binding the nation into a coherent and cohesive entity worth defense and worthy of respect all around.
There are ancillaries in air shows and show components, e.g., Blue Angels, in other events.
The parading of missiles and tanks has been for most who produce that spectacle a boast and a threat associated with lesser power, not greater.
The Vietnam generation of military cannot be compensated nor, perhaps, repaired adequately, but all have been permanently honored, memorialized, remembered on the Mall and beyond that in America’s communities. If and where long-term disservice has been done, perhaps that conversation is the one that should be led by an American President.
“A Needle in the Rain”
(c)1996 J. S. Oppenheim & DRB Productions
Brief History Lesson Regarding the Vietnam Era and the Present
Hey, old college kids, remember the fatigue jackets, the grass, the Mobilization on the Mall, and the whole trippy deep ecology and far out peace thing?
Know that the Soviet Union invested $1 billion in the environmental and peace movements of the day (perhaps labor was already under way), and it got its money’s worth in the sabotaging of domestic will for that war. It would also come to lose influence with the hip when it demonstrated its true methods in “realpolitik” as it drove tanks into the Soviet satellite states that it had completely demoralized with its own narcissistic claptrap and thuggery.
I was young at the time — the last of the babies of the baby boomers — and on the draft rolls only briefly before our troops were brought home.
The “Active Measures” part of the Vietnam War is active today on Moscow’s part: disinformation, election meddling, war by proxy in support of kleptocratic dictatorships. If you approve of such methods and ends — much including the ownership of other humans as mere property and as well demonstrated by Moscow-aligned Bashar al-Assad and Iranian Grand Ayatollah Ali (“Hang ‘Em High”) Khamenei — do nothing, say nothing. If that’s not the world in which you wish the next generations to live, look back, get caught up on Orwell — or Hitchens on Orwell — for a start — and look forward to engaging in this now really different kind of war.
BackChannels believes the strong have cause to celebrate through national holidays and shared American events, but it is the weak that needs must put their muscle on display in parades.
The strong?
End Note
When one works a few ideas around to a compressed or distilled state, one hates to lose them in cascades of commentary published through the social networks. Blogging helps preserve such thoughts and keep them available via keyword searches. This passage comes from an earlier take on the same theme:
With President Trump, the American public faces three deep challenges:
1) how do deal with disinformation in the long term — “Active Measures” from Russia’s machinery, deflection and related strategies involving information and (“Fake News!”) rhetoric;
2) how to resist our own deepening divisions to return to quintessential American ideals, principles, and values, starting with the valuing of integrity in business and government and consequent distaste for corruption;
3) how to address enemies that have found ways to blend and practice war indirectly, not only by proxy but with “frozen conflicts” aiding the movement of arms and narcotics worldwide and ability to deeply manipulate terrorism (e.g., see “Moscow Apartment Bombings”; read Anna Politkovskaya’s observations on the brutalizing of Chechen villages).
We may be in a little bit of trouble because the Cold War didn’t end quite where we thought it had and not much has prepared EU / NATO constituencies for its apparent phantoms and their still medieval political ambitions and views.
It has happened: the refugees of 1948; the KGB-designed Arafat and PLO and associated Abbas; and Hamas, held to account for rocket fire from Gaza: all — whatever has been the mix — have coexisted with Israel for 70 years.
If not happily, there’s a story there that goes back to the WWII and the character of the Soviet Union then and comes forward to that of the Russian Federation today. Absolute power, corruption on the part of the powerful, the deceptive and disingenuous use of language — such have been the variables that have sustained Palestinian hardship and an angry coexistence with the Jewish neighbor from near the ruins of Ottoman power and Nazi adventure in the middle east. When the phantoms of the Soviet wake up and then decide to go back to sleep forever, then the coexistence will become peaceful, pleasant, productive, rewarding.
I don’t know if there’s a fairy tail ending with “peace and prosperity” for all, but I feel the burden and weight of the “Nakba” should be rightly assigned to the post-WWII role taken up by an historically autocratic, authoritarian, elitist Russia having difficulty shaking off its attachments to “political absolutism” and related egotism, narcissism, and hypersensitivity to civilizational self-concept and image.
Of course Moscow means to look noble and powerful before the world.
Well, here it has its chance to stop covering its yesterdays, which may include immediately two major revolutions and the weathering of three governments within the past 100 years, and shrug away the chaos and dishonesty that have brought a mess to Syria, hardship to Ukraine, and continuous meaningless and needless suffering to the Palestinian main base. BackChannels may well see in its crystal ball — why else publish such a blog? 🙂 — the difficulty of transitioning patronage and power away from corrupt elites in the effort to better and honestly serve the interests of an abused and disenfranchised once refugee population, but where else to go? Let the political criminals and gamblers settle up, reinvest, and move on to the challenges posed by genuinely noble causes and enterprises.
Inspiration: the argument that we are as we are, and we are ferocious and savage in our appetites, desires, and jealousies. For proof: have a glance at the “Middle East Conflict”.
My response —
I’m more hopeful.
Civilizational establishment and change involve unique conditions and experiences in place and in time. While we’re fond of saying, “The more things change, the more things remain as they were”, we’re really not happy dragging our yesterdays into our tomorrow’s if and when we’re aware of other and better possibilities.
Whatever the impediments have been in addressing nature, including our own, experience and biological evolution works through us as well: as a species, we may more incline toward conscience and empathy over time despite the demonstrated savagery of earlier eras.
On another day, I may have said such things were to be left to God,l nature, and the universe. On this one: perhaps we are in some ways responsible for how we manage ourselves and our conditions as a species dependent on the health of the earth itself and on ourselves for the qualities experienced in living.
Alive in the background: Aesop’s wisdom having to do with the character of the dangerous organism, scorpion or snake; however, there’s also Thomas Berry’s emerging earth spirituality: with the power to destroy our species-wide platform for existence, we may have also the obligation and ability — very adult thing that ability with science and technology shaped by concern — to be careful with Mother Earth as well.
Regarding “Qualities of Living (QOL)”
Dimensions
Biological / Physical
Economic / Distributed Degree of Freedom and Security
Psychological / Spiritual
The “QOL” concept needs a build-out to meet up with both the Freedom House audience and those who read article with titles like “Best Countries in Which to Retire”.
Still: let QOL stand x Area Defined, from community to region, and what takes place within the same over some measure of time.
Civil services and reporters naturally look into the “negatives” of space — crime rates, for example — while the development and planning communities also consider the architecture and engineering of environments for habitation. The end of so much effort — and widespread across time — should be improvements in good and secure living for all, not decay back down into greater anomie, conflict, crime, dictatorship, and living hell itself.
Inspiration: no other source than God-given existence itself.
Zionism has been always progressive — real yearning, real communes, real economic development, real inclusive democratic politics, real compassion for real people.
The Palestinian project has had other drives, most of all the defense of autocrats and their societies and states deeply invested in and dependent on political absolutism. They don’t want to change, and the GOOD reason for that has been to avoid creating conditions for cultural chaos, so change has to be mapped and done in steps; the BAD reason has to do with excessive greed, fear, and narcissism on the part of politically criminal leaders who need to deflect anger away from themselves.
To be truly progressive for Israel (and everyone else) means getting to the kind of cadre that continues to promote BDS and the political levers and methods associated with that “active measure” against the liberal humanism and ideas that have developed from Judaism and its emphasis on good law and social transaction.
Palestinian poverty has been enforced by the Palestinian Leadership exactly to draw charity and development support from the world for plunder and the enrichment of elites and their systems of patronage.
To really get half way to the bottom of the political engineering, one may start with the grooming of Arafat and the PLO (look up Ion Mihai Pacepa for that).
To get all the way back to the Nazi base that was picked up by the Soviet Union at the end of WWII — Stalin acquired in relationships what Hitler could not hold — you would go back to the figure of Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter and his relationship with Adolph Hitler.
The smallest note in history: Scheubner-Richter was killed by Hitler’s side in the failed Beer Hall Putsch that took place November 9, 1923. Kristallnacht was to take place exactly 15 years later on the same day in 1938.
Our laziness in ferreting out the details of the long story and making them a part of common public education have helped those who exploit and sustain Palestinian misery to keep themselves adorned in power and in wealth
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