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.
The conversational partner wished to play Atticus on behalf of the Palestinians apparently beset by Israeli nationalist — “Zionazis” in the more fervent of anti-Semitic Lost Left circles.
The analogy fails, Mohammed, because the integrity in the American lawyer who would pursue justice — the truth — before an angered and bigoted mob would not find the interlocutors for the Palestinians, i.e., the clans, organizations, and leaders who have funneled so much money away from the Palestinians, particularly honest or sympathetic.
When the Soviet Union dissolved in bankruptcy, the nascent new Federation managed amid the ensuing non-state crime and chaos to sustain certain aspects of the old architecture and relationships, including those with extremists, but the SU really is gone, and practically every one of its former satellites prefers autonomy to renewed subjugation.
What choice — or choices — have the Palestinians today between Abbas and Haniyeh?
Anti-Semitic talk and thought have been the most medieval tools for controlling, deflecting, and moving mobs and, at times, producing a little extra money for the feudal nobility by way of plunder accompanied by theft and murder.
The Soviet Union picked up a share of the pieces — relationships — after the Nazi defeat in WWII, and it exploited anti-Semitic sentiment to build a base for itself.
The medieval history of religion gets a little complicated. Ruling Christians in Hungary in the 12th Century formed laws to discriminate against Jews and Jewish potential and accomplishment, and then upon activation applied the same laws to Muslims.
I’ve taken the stance with anti-Semitism x feudalism and tribalism that associated conflict and cruelty are really about replacing the medieval mode and worldview with what has become politically and spiritually modern — democratically checked and distributed political power; multicultural inclusion; a great measure of compassion and secular humanism in the functional aspects of law, and where beneath such law, all are treated as equal.
The thought may at first seem spotty as President Putin handily sustains possibly the most pro-Semitic Russia in Russian history, but as one visits Moscow’s relationships with Assand and Khamenei, Hezbollah and Hamas (and PFLP) plus autocrats like Erdogan and Orban (add in Le Pen but perhaps not the now well-briefed Trump), Moscow’s medieval facets would seem unmistakable. Add to that the cruelties so well demonstrated in Syria and the cloaked “hybrid warfare” in Ukraine that would seem to amount to not much more than recognizable old infiltration accompanied by massive disinformation (for the misguiding of the masses, and much more of Russians — the 93 percent of Russians who may read and speak only in Russian — than of anyone else) and the onset of conventional war.
The inspiration for the post came by way of a Muslim convert to Christianity who had expressed enthusiasm for modern Israel, calling it a “Hebrew state” and an inspiration for the world.
Addendum
Not shortly after publishing this piece, I found a well-known figure boasting of a recently attended Christian, Jewish, and Muslim colloquy and querying the presence of a “clash of civilizations”. My response:
There is a “clash of civilizations” — but it’s not the one we have been led to believe exists, i.e., some thing between the Muslim and Christian worlds. That “clash” doesn’t exist in any meaningful reality: what does exist is the struggle of the modern world to displace several worlds — Christian, Jewish, and Muslim — remaining mired in medieval outlooks, politics, and practices.
The Kingdom is not a NATO member, much less one applying for European Union accession. It’s alliance with the west may be based on its defense of its own power and prestige in Sunni Islam (vs the Shiite anchorage in Iran) and on related defense, development, and trade needs.
Turkey no longer teeters on the “brink of Islamization”.
Over the course of many years, President Erdogan has managed to eviscerate the pillars of the westward-leaning government developed by Kemal Ataturk, starting with the neutralization of the generals and ending just about with the throttling of Turkey once free press. When President Putin leveraged Erdogan into an apology over the shooting down of a trespassing Russian jet, that signaled the end of common western interest within Ankara as regards the NATO agreement.
This one video clip foreshadows more recent events and serves as illustration of Moscow’s deal making realpolitik:
So Moscow has won, eh?
Not necessarily.
The anachronistic feudal systems that Putin (and Khamenei) wish to sustain in services to their own politically absolute power (dictatorship / kleptocracy) have ways of losing money and pissing off modern constituents. Moscow has been running down its state cash reserves for some time by way of criminal behavior that has spurred capital flight for years, induced the west into the application of sanctions, and promoted alternative energy sourcing that has driven down the oil revenues on which Moscow had counted for growth. Here’s the kicker: the less immediately fluid wealth of the Russian Federation has been parked in WESTERN banking institutions and valuable assets protected by rule of law!
Russia cannot expect to move to conventional war. It hasn’t the money to support related industry and troops. Instead, if offers its nuclear threat, which is a potent headache for everyone, and the more criminal and insidious permutations of combined “hybrid warfare”, which really combines the most underhanded methods in the subversion of target states while also totally managing the image of conflict and enjoy the benefits of transnational crime.
🙂
I smile because I — and you — should cry.
As I tire of making the same assertions over and over again as regards the “end of the end of the Cold War” (but we would like to avoid a “hot war”, right?), I may only suggest here a visit to my blog — https://conflict-backchannels.com/ — and perhaps spending some time with Agnia Grigas’s book on Crimea — http://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?k=9780300214505.
The world on display in the Moscow Grand Mosque video is the one held together by President Putin and arrangements he’s made that serve the interests of a now privileged social set using hyper modern tools of political repression. They have gone back to secret police, centralized power, and both a nervous and reactionary class of immensely patronized wealthy.
The People?
Who cares?
In the feudal states, The People will have their patriotism and religion, just like in the olden days . . . .
Reference: The Power of Money
Several of the following news reports appear to feed from the same source but with each their own flavor. No matter. The point made here is that Russia’s easiest money has been hit hard by time: capital flight; reduced oil revenues; sanctions –> depleted ready cash. Other wealth rides in banks, luxury assets, and markets, but for both western conflict analysts and Russian citizens outside of the “systema”, the money appears to be running out and domestic hardship appears already in the numbers.
Here’s an excerpt from observations published over the winter:
According to the Russian Finance Ministry, only 10 of Russia’s 85 official regions — most of them commodity producers and metropolitan areas with substantial tax bases — are economically or financially stable, down by half since 2015. Of the country’s remaining regions, 30 manage to scrape by because direct federal subsidies make up at least 33% of their revenues. Half of the $3.5 billion in subsidies that the Kremlin disburses each year goes to just 10 of those regions: Dagestan, Chechnya, Yakutia, Kamchatka, Crimea, Altai, Tuva, Buryatia, Stavropol and Bashkortostan. That leaves more than half of Russia’s regions struggling to fulfill their social obligations and meet the federal government’s demands for funding.
Seventy of Russia’s regions send 63% of the income they generate to the federal budget, keeping only the remaining 37%. The federal government, meanwhile, returns at most 20% of the money by way of subsidies and intergovernmental transfers.
As the fabulously wealthy – such as Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich – buy ever bigger yachts and build ever bigger mansions, the average Russian is becoming ever poorer.
Many ordinary men and women live in desperate conditions and last year a staggering 19.2 million people – or 13.4% of the population – were officially living in poverty .
Belarus, Chechnya and Russia are virtual “mafia states” and Ukraine is going to be one. For each of those countries, one cannot differentiate between the activities of the government and organized crime groups. Economic influence, sooner or later always reaches political power. a key factor in a government’s ability to combat OC depends on the extent to which the country’s best attorneys and law firms represent the mafia.
The vory v zakone do not engage in racketeering and murder, preferring to distance themselves from this activity and focus on crimes that are further up in the hierarchy, such as corruption of high-level ministers. The level of power that vory v zakone operate at is indicated by their level of interaction with these public servants, because cabinet-level officials do not spend time with unimportant people and cannot be tempted by those who do not have something important to offer.
Mr. Barsamian might enjoy tracing back Moscow’s role in the engineering of the profitable business that has been made of the Middle East Conflict and its efforts to sustain feudal political absolutism throughout the region.
Most Americans — most of the international public — has never heard of “active measures” and “framing” as employed by Imperial, Soviet, and today post-Soviet Moscow, but it may help improve qualities of living worldwide — and help to preserve our ecosystem — if environmental and social progressives were to take stock of Moscow’s autocratic-totalitarian methods proven, so far, consistent across regimes and their revolutions.
BackChannels regards itself as “progressive” but never “those progressives”. It endorses a fuzzy “Qualities of Living” concept, believes in the husbanding of the earth, counsels resistance to extremism, Far Left and Far Right and Other, and suggests always looking at presentations of problems twice.
Wikipedia also supports a page on “Active Measures”, and included on it is this observation:
“According to Stanislav Lunev, GRU alone spent more than $1 billion for the peace movements against the Vietnam War, which was a “hugely successful campaign and well worth the cost”.[3] Lunev claimed that “the GRU and the KGB helped to fund just about every antiwar movement and organization in America and abroad”.
I was young for the Vietnam War and on the draft rolls for just one college semester before Nixon brought to a close America’s role in the tragedy, but it’s easy to recall the “Mobilization Against the War”, the “kids” dressed up in beads and fatigues, in essence the alternative culture of the Baby Boom generation, so here decades later and learning of Moscow’s cynical application of plain old money in producing that zeitgeist comes as a surprise. Of course, it comes as no surprise that much of the more truly revolutionary and independent Left took note of Moscow’s tanks on the streets of foreign capitals (ref., as noted above, Wikipedia’s recounting of the history of the World Peace Council).
As regards the Middle East Conflict as a pretty good business for Palestinian leaders (Arafat and Abbas: multi-millionaires; Haniyeh and Mashaal: billionaires) but not for Palestinians, there’s much data online regarding corruption in the PLO/PA camp and plain exploitation by Hamas. Whether made rich by political corruption or bald crime and political repression, the basis for the “political absolutism” may be linked to the sustained feudal character of the societies involved and the related “malignant narcissism” of their leaders.
What happens when friends talk and compare notes, and discover they’re no long “on the same page”?
Attitudes rest on beliefs, and beliefs don’t always rest on empirical evidence nor good conscience and empathy. Beliefs may be grown on lies, and when it comes to the once Soviet-engineered “middle east conflict”, there is a cultural Petri dish loaded up with lies to induce, motivate, and sustain anti-Semitism in the Arab world and in the world at large with a focus on Zionism.
When a friend changes the conversation so abruptly, the conversation has a chance to change.
The sun did not revolve around the earth.
And the earth was found to be other than flat.
Lo and behold . . . .
In addition to the early and academically relaxed BackChannels page on “Social Grammar” — how we learn the ropes around family, clan, tribe, and nation in the process of language uptake and with it the ingestion of the culture into which we have been borne, there are couple of other pieces quietly alluded to the in above note from the awesome conversation:
Around the world — and not least in the United States with President Donald J. Trump’s rants about “Fake News!” — the world may be having a quiet conversation — a social back channel consideration of which this post is a part– behind the storms of news that concerns itself with the authenticity, validity, and reliability of what is delivered to it in media.
For a few moments “back there” in time — perhaps only some months to years — I was getting word of a “post-constitutional America” and coming across such “lovely” (bogus) concepts as “illiberal democracy” (ain’t no such thing as the first principle in the establishment of democracy has been and remains that of embracing “classical liberalism”, a dignifying, loving, magnanimous, and magnificent view of humankind that speaks to every person’s potential nobility in freedom and in power) and “post-fact” world (facts, like red traffic lights and the dangers of leaping from heights) appear to persist despite their “post-modern” dismissal.
Democracies are not illiberal.
The world is not “post-fact”.
And while Muhammad may have had the final word on God as enforced by war in his place and in his day, the world with its nearly 7,000 living language cultures persists in proving greater than any one perspective on God, nature, and the universe or the many curses and miracles that accompany our human experience. The evolution of our species — Homo Sapiens sapiens in its totality — and within it the emergence of human awareness, self-awareness, and the development of conscience may prove a thing greater than the observations and arguments of the many prophets and shaman who have accompanied and determined mankind’s cultural history.
From our comparative analysis, it emerges how both Russia and Turkey present astonishing similarities in their leaderships styles. It is important to outline such feature of the nations’ political life because, being both “leader-politics” countries, the style of their leaders influences greatly the shaping of the national political agenda and the strategies used by the states to pursue such agendas.
To sum up, one could say that all the facts taken into account here highlight the presence in both countries totalitarian democracy regime, centred on the figure of the all-powerful leader. None of the leaders actually ever rejected the principles of the pluralistic state. In the official national narrative, both of them could be overthrown by a democratic election. But why should this happen, when they embody the essence of their national identity. Just like Putin is THE Russian man, Erdogan image is moulded on THE Turkish one.
“In the official national narrative, both of them could be overthrown by a democratic election. But why should this happen, when they embody the essence of their national identity. Just like Putin is THE Russian man, Erdogan image is moulded on THE Turkish one.”
Perhaps if each were more secure with such an assertion, the press in each state would be free (it’s an easy look-up as to how they are not) and their political rivals less often inhibited, jailed, muzzled, or murdered.
The truth is each may be wrong about himself (there’s also an interesting psychology at play in their “malignant narcissism” and respective kleptocracies), and that’s why open and vibrant national conversations supported by “fair and free elections” matter in democracies — and not at all in dictatorships.
Old message on this message but perhaps new distillation.
The prompt for conversation was a Henry Farrell piece appearing in The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/04/10/hungarys-government-wants-to-shut-down-its-most-prominent-university-that-may-be-backfiring/ —
Lines of compatible feudal power: Putin –> Assad, Khamenei; Putin–> Orban, Le Pen; Putin –> Erdogan; Putin –> Donald J. Trump.
Putin is not asking for cooperation, imho, but rather for a revived feudal politics pitting all against all for time while Russia ramps up its own military-industrial complex as a major driver of its internal economy.
The sweethearts of EU and NATO who promote greater international cooperation and integration through shared humanist principles plus open passage plus trade haven’t perhaps relayed to their populations the complete criminal character of Moscow’s intentions and its methods, including the channeling, I believe, of Islamic Terrorism in target states to produce reactionary politics.
BackChannels believes Putin’s Moscow has encouraged political polarization in its targets by using “active measures” to produce the “New Nationalists” (like Le Pen, Orban, and Trump) and sustain a still strident “Red-Green Alliance” — Old Comrades and Neo-Islamists — in the west. The main thing has been to get the “Brown vs Red-Green” extremism going while working with its destabilizing effects on true democratic politics.
Mission accomplished?
Yes — but at the same time, Moscow’s grand scheme may be close to being found out.
Related in the News
Moscow’s demonstrations of barbarism in Syria and Ukraine may underscore the direction of its internal intents.
Kleptocracies are the cancers of states, and Putin, the KGB/FSB, and Russia’s “oligarchs” have had a field day enjoying the full flow of Russia’s productive assets far at the expense of Russians separated from the circles of centralized power. Toward the end or as declining cash reserves produce hardship throughout the state, wartime spending may become the heavy dessert found at the bottom of the devil’s barrel, for fear plus the intimidation that coincides with tests of loyalty may open pockets.
“Washington”, a metonym used the same way here as “Moscow” to represent the state and its leadership, knows that the Moscow-Tehran axis lies and, quite possibly, that it channels — through indirect manipulation — Islamic Terrorism (by choosing to fight the west and western-backed or western-endorsed everything first — “Moscow” cannot abide classical liberalism; by using old communist cadre and Islamists to sow the chaos in the world that it may then claim to stand as champion against (!) — convenient look-ups: “Terry Nichols, Philippines”, “Zawahiri, Russia”, and “Moscow Apartment Bombings” (HUGE false flag, that one): and of course there’s no questioning the existence of the “Moscow-Tehran” nexus in power and the continuing relationships both have with Hamas and Hezbollah and others (start with PFLP).
BackChannels believes that Washington has known all along that deals with Moscow and Tehran would not prove worth the ink used to sign them.
Moreover, if BackChannels and others believe Moscow complicit in the incubating of ISIS in Syria (look up Kyle Orton’s work on the matter), then it only makes sense to cut out the nonsense implied by the prospect of “cooperating” with Moscow in the projection of its related totalitarian narrative.
Also contributing to the above thinking: Russia has nearly 100 years of combined 20th and 21st Century history as an entity approving of or inured to terror as a political tool.
Posted to YouTube by The New York Times, April 7, 2017.
Comment:
The public presentation of conflict may attempt to keep separate Syria, Ukraine, Russia, and Iran, but I don’t think the Kremlin (this is a good comment for Kremlin Watch) has an “Off” button in association with the defense of the autocratic feudal past that each dictatorship represents. Expect “mission creep”.
BackChannels 