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.

Moscow’s Rules — A Module

23 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Russia

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This thin post telegraphs in web links a few of the essentials about President Putin’s Soviet / post-Soviet ultra-nationalist neo-imperial Russian project and revanche.  For the viewer, it may work as a portal both into related posts on BackChannels as well as a channel out for greater web-bound curiosity.

Agitation and Propaganda

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

http://www.statecraft.org.uk/research/russian-active-measures-modernised-tradition

Recently ‘Also in Media’:

Weiss, Michael.  “Russia’s Long History of Messing With Americans Minds Before the DNC Hack.”  The Daily Beast, July 26, 2016.

Related:

Weiss, Michael and Peter Pomerantsev.  “The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture, and Money.”  The Interpreter, November 22, 2014.

Heritage Foundation.  “Propaganda, Disinformation, and Dirty Tricks: The Resurgence of Russian Political Warfare.”  Features YouTube event recording (1:53:40).  Host: Helle C. Dale; speakers: John Lenczowski, Paul Goble, and Ariel Cohen.  April 21, 2014.

Freedom

https://freedomhouse.org/country/russia

Middle East Conflict

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

Moscow Apartment Bombings

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439060/vladimir-putin-1999-russian-apartment-house-bombings-was-putin-responsible

Russian Orthodox Church

The ROC has made billions from trading concessions granted to it by the government. It is increasingly asserting its position as the largest of the 14 self-governing Orthodox Churches and is using its political muscle in support of Putin’s aims. It’s no friend to evangelicals, especially in the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, seeing them as puppets of the West.

But how has it become so powerful – and how is it using its power?

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/how.the.russian.orthodox.church.is.backing.vladimir.putins.new.world.order/81108.htm – 3/3/2016.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the church received official privileges including the right to import duty-free alcohol and tobacco. In 1995, the Nikolo-Ugreshky Monastery, which is directly subordinated to the patriarchate, earned $350 million from the sale of alcohol. The patriarchate’s department of foreign church relations, which Kirill ran, earned $75 million from the sale of tobacco. But the patriarchate reported an annual budget in 1995-1996 of only $2 million. Kirill’s personal wealth was estimated by the Moscow News in 2006 to be $4 billion.

During this period, the church has been silent about genuine moral issues, such as Russia’s pervasive corruption and the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants in Chechnya. As Kirill begins his reign as patriarch, there is little reason to expect this to change.

Yakov Krotov, a liberal Russian Orthodox priest, recently compared Kirill to a “court Jew,” like Peter Shafirov, the foreign policy aide to Peter the Great. The role of the court Jew, according to Krotov, is to put a civilized face on a repressive system.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/20/putin-solzhenitsyn-kirill-russia-opinions-contributors_orthodox_church.html – 2/20/2009.

Security State

http://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-resurrects-the-kgb-moscow-security/

Soviet Era

https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/

Terrorism – Fast Links

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

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/12/ftac-how-isil-developed/

http://www.interpretermag.com/russia-the-state-sponsor-of-terrorism/

https://kyleorton1991.wordpress.com/2015/09/08/how-russia-manipulates-islamic-terrorism/

http://www.rferl.org/a/soviet-islamist-terrorism-israel-america-disinformation-pacepa/25034290.html

Standard Reference

Piontovsky, Andrei.  “Putin Using All Means Against the West — including Islamist Terrorism — Piontovsky Says.”  The Interpreter, December 12, 2016.

Rosenfeld, Jesse.  “Russia is Arming Hezbollah, Say Two of the Group’s Field Commanders.”  The Daily Beast, January 11, 2016.

Satter, David.  “Putin is No Partner on Terrorism: It’s a Mistake for Washington to Count Moscow an Ally.”  Foreign Affairs, December 22, 2016.

FTAC – A Post as Module

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439060/vladimir-putin-1999-russian-apartment-house-bombings-was-putin-responsible
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_and_the_Soviet_Union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures
http://Politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-resurrects-the-kgb-moscow-security/
https://freedomhouse.org/country/russia

In effect, Moscow, with its penchant for total control, bears responsibility for using the Palestinian refugees to block western democratic and open society (with free press) expansion while also milking the world under the guise of a good deed.

Moscow (Bogdanov) has met with PFLP in recent years (November 2014) and continues to refuse to designate Hamas as a terrorist organization.

In Syria, and keeping with its “total control” outlook, it appears that Assad himself incubated ISIL as an element that could be used to blackmail and goad the west.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/12/ftac-how-isil-developed/
https://kyleorton1991.wordpress.com/2015/09/08/how-russia-manipulates-islamic-terrorism/

Examine, query, test each URL. As a post on Facebook, the cited URLs taken together tell a story about Putin’s Soviet / post-Soviet transformation of Russia into an ultra-nationalist neo-imperial dictatorship.

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FTAC – Keith Ellison – Division and Information

22 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, United States of America

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Ellison stories speak to his relationships with CAIR, ISNA, Farrakhan, and others who have either articulated anti-Semitic and racist positions, especially Farakhan, or have been associated with questionable organizations, as for example CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood.

However . . . let the man speak.

In our online lives in the information ocean, all have been subject to surrounding currents and related choices in content selection. As I have had some time and understand that few have that luxury — and I don’t really have it (although I’m available for less public research tasking) — it may help at times to overview information about a subject and its tributaries. With that in mind, here also is an article about a 2016 Muslim Student Association (MSA, and in Minnesota) decision to REJECT BDS and anti-Semitic cant in its campus work.

http://www.mnrepublic.com/msa-avoids-divestment-and-anti-semitism-arguments/ – 3/8/2016.

Of course, there’s a slew of articles that analyze Keith Ellison’s leanings quite differently.

I may suggest that in the way of “reparative narcissists”, that their joining or including movements, organizations, or personalities with histories of discomfiting views — look up Farrakhan’s assistant Dr. Khalid Abdul Muhammad, and listen to his rant for a few minutes — intends drawing the same away from hate and violence because that is the character of a repairing personality.

Let the politician work — or even work his magic.

Here are a few “fast links” to opinions about politician and how he’s been seen in several ranks, especially the conservative and Jewish political communities.

BackChannels feels that if you listen to Keith Ellison in action and directly — and you have been informed of the role of the Soviet Union in forming up the PLO — then you understand something new about the generation of rhetoric in the politics of the middle east conflict and perhaps the promotion of internecine Jewish-Muslim conflict in the United States.

Additional Reference

Simon Wiesenthal Center.  “SWC: Congressman Ellison as DNC Chair is Wrong Signal at Wrong Time.” n.d.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/11/muslim_nationalist_keith_ellison_bad_news_for_women_children_gays_golden_retrievers.html – 11/21/2016.

http://www.meforum.org/2756/keith-ellison-stealth-jihad – September 2010.

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

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/218385/keith-ellison-supports-bds-and-admires-louis-farrakhan-so-why-are-jewish-democrats-supporting-him-for-chairman-of-the-dnc – 11/21/2016.

Dr. Khalid Abdul Muhammad’s 1993 Kean College Speech – 1:45:05 – Posted to YouTube August 29, 2014.  Khalid Abdul Muhammad had been an assistant to Louis Farrakhan, and, apparently, an angry one to the end.

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FTAC – Moscow – Beyond Rapprochement? Not So Fast!

19 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Gaza Suzerain, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Politics, Russia

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President Barack Obama is not the official who needs to be “outflanked” — nor is President Elect Donald J. Trump.

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

http://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-resurrects-the-kgb-moscow-security/

Perhaps Putin’s Moscow has promoted “anti- anti-Semitism” and good relations with Israel to continue to sustain its plundering of the middle east conflict.

Note that in recent years, Moscow’s Mikhail Bogdanov has met with PFLP in Moscow (November 2014 — an easy look-up today); that the state refuses to condemn either Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations; the state has not only cooperated fully with Tehran in supporting Bashar al-Assad’s hideous persecution of all who refuse to love him in Syria but has itself joined in the barbarism!

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/18/syria-russias-barbarism-the-hospitals/

Under President Putin’s hands, Moscow has been transformed from a once promising democracy into a revived “security state” along familiar old ultra-nationalist lines.

While Israeli conservatives and nationalists have been taking aim at Obama’s approach to managing conflict, the driver of the same — and for many years! — has practically escaped notice!

Soviet Moscow produce a long record of complicity and support for terrorism worldwide:

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

Considering how Putin has chosen to revive Russia to this date 25 years past the dissolve of the Soviet Union (December 1991), what makes Israelis think that Moscow today remains clear of the set of political elements continuing to bear down on its own destruction?

Moscow may yet leave Syria to Assad, but the string of bombings of hospitals, if not other war crimes, may have closed the door on rapprochement, either in fact or in somebody’s head or both.

Inspiration for the response:

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/19781 – 11/17/2016 — Dr. Martin Sherman’s weekly “Into the Fray” column, this one titled, “Obama unplugged: What to do?”

BackChannels may soon sum its observations in a list of related links involving the defunct Soviet Union and the present corrupt ultra-nationalist dictatorship that in earlier years appeared on the path toward democracy and political modernization.  Instead, and with what has been put on display in Syria — i.e., a medieval and totalitarian theater of politics and war, complete with “The Terrorists” — Russia’s leadership appears to have chosen to in some way relive the 1930s and to perhaps approach the 1940s.

BackChannels means not to allay a change in course but, naturally, to in fact suggest a course correction be made.

Related Reference

Osborne, Andrew and Simon Johnson.  “Russia beefs up Baltic Flee amid NATO tensions: reports.”  Reuters, October 26, 2016.

Peat, Charlie.  “Putin renovates Cold War MISSILE BUNKERS in Crimea as Russia prepares for global assault.”  Express UK, November 2, 2016.

Reuters.  “In Crimea, Russia signals military resolve with new and revamped bases.”  November 1, 2016.

Sputnik.  “Combat Readiness of Utes Missile Systems in Crimea Confirmed by Launches.”  November 19, 2016.  Note: the article reports a P-35 missile launch (NATO name “SS-N-3a), but BackChannels sees no major or western general media confirmation at this posting).

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FTAC – Israel Not At War With the ‘Arab World’

19 Saturday Nov 2016

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

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Well, the Jews are not “fighting the Arab World” — there’s a kind of defamation in that statement.

Israelis are defending themselves from those who wish to annihilate them — and considering who has been friendly toward and paying for Hamas and Hezbollah, well, gosh, it’s just not the Arab world after all.

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

Moscow-Tehran as an axis appears to want to maintain a common interest in positively medieval political absolutism. Somebody has learned how to make a lot of money (for themselves, their cronies, their lackeys, and their tools) that way.

http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1

http://Politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-resurrects-the-kgb-moscow-security/

Of course the Arab and Muslim worlds have within them strong anti-Semitic currents, but let’s go back to the 1920s and endemic 19th Century Russian anti-Semitism  and the echoes of other medieval anti-Semitism, the same that compelled Herschel and others to entertain the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in Israel, and come forward to three distinct aspects in the character of the 1920s: Stalin’s installment in power in Russia as the dominant state in the Soviet Union; the development in the universities of an intellectual path leading to Nazism; and the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood (1928).

All mere coincidence?

Additional Reference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_and_the_Soviet_Union
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/140328/timmerman-disinformation – 8/7/2013.
http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/the_czars_and_the_jews/
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/protocols.html

The mercurial, paranoid seventy-four-year-old tyrant was certainly capable of ordering the mass deportations. During the Second World War, he removed Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, ethnic Germans, and Crimean Tatars from their homelands—more than two million Soviet citizens in all. He was no novice, either, when it came to purges and show trials. In the Pravda report, most of the accused “murderers in white smocks” were identified as Jewish and agents of the U.S. and Israel. There were further arrests of Soviet Jews, exemplars of “national and racist chauvinism.” Jews were dismissed from their jobs. They were insulted on the streets, in shops, and on public transportation, according to Arno Lustiger, author of “Stalin and the Jews.”

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/imagining-stalins-plot-to-exile-the-jews – 2/1/2016.

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FTAC – Conservatives – Duped by Putin? You Decide

18 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, United States of America

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“Russia is hitting the groups that we are backing.”

This is absolutely right — and here’s why:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/12/ftac-how-isil-developed/

Assad incubated the al-Qaeda types all the way to ISIL!

And he did exactly by preferring other strategies and targets — noncombatants, including the sniping of pregnant women, and, of course western-leaning Free Syrian Army (FSA) and others in the field. Providing leeway provided room for ISIL to develop and play the convenient foil in “Assad vs The Terrorists”.

Please don’t believe me, but rather check out the significance of “Russia is hitting the groups that we are backing” by using and questioning the same references and checking them as well.

I would beg conservatives not to ennoble Russian (Putin-Assad-Khamenei) barbarism in Syria.

Some reminders:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/05/19/how-putin-became-president/

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

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

Have conservatives been duped (along with everyone else) by Putin’s changing postures over time?

It’s a question worth asking this day.

Posted by Gladbecker, November 12, 2016.

Above — and within the “awesome conversation” — the inspiration for this post.

Beneath — what Assad, as flanked by Putin and Khamenei, have done to Syria in the “cause” of medieval political absolutism.

Posted by Muhammed Al Mousa, September 4, 2016.

BackChannels believes American and Israeli and other conservatives have been duped by Putin and the arc of a narrative that began 25 years ago with the dissolving of the Soviet Union and the initial touting of capitalism and democracy that produced confidence in Putin as a leader who would bring order and stability to Russia while producing a civil and free society.

Instead, President Putin has been busy reproducing the Soviet-style “security state”, demonstrating a complete lack of conscience in the engineering of the Syrian Conflict, and, in general, establishing legitimacy for “political absolutism” and barbarism.

In essence, Putin represents the rule of the strong as more powerful than the rule of law, and, ironically, the conservative “new nationalists” of the open democracies — those who should be fully supporting the rule-of-law and other classically liberal and western values — appear to be helping him do it.

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FTAC – ‘The Masses’, Putin, and News Awareness

13 Sunday Nov 2016

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

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I generally don’t use the term “the masses”, and when I do, it’s to note how dehumanizing a term it really is.

Regarding Putin’s methods in ascent: one might credit Berezovsky and perhaps the Moscow Apartment Bombings.

On the chess pieces:

http://rbth.com/business/2016/03/09/where-does-the-russian-orthodox-church-get-its-money-from_574079

http://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-resurrects-the-kgb-moscow-security/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/110-oligarchs-own-a-third-of-russias-wealth-8869725.html

Of course, the citizens of every state needs must care about their own lives first — biological, familial and otherwise social, financial, emotional, spiritual. Security and stability in those aspects of life are generally part of everyone’s quality of living.

That Putin has been able to sustain and transform many aspects of the defunct Soviet Union tells a story about the kind of political power exercised in relation to malignant narcissism. In effect, he has got Russia revolving around himself, and for the discomforts he has caused, the Russians have channels today for faith and patriotism. The “Communists” are gone but the essence of the old nomenklatura has been transformed into an ultra-nationalist and neo-imperial enterprise.

The public that has wished to take an interest in foreign affairs has plenty of information — responsible, valid, and reliable — for working, but large constituencies may only attend to so much in aggregate. I would not think of such as “ignorant masses” but rather people with families and jobs and struggles and worries of their own. They may find what they need to know WHEN it matters to them, when the dots circle back to their own interests, and they perceive that.

The stimulus for the response made note of the people voting Putin into power.

Mention had already been made of Berezovsky and the Moscow Apartment Bombings.

Perhaps “Russia’s state-controlled press” should have been added to the “chess pieces” –Russian Orthodox Church, KGB Revival, Oligarch Aristocracy — section of the above response: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/vladimir-putin-russia-news-media_us_56215944e4b0bce34700b1df .  I sometimes indulge in minor revision, but not this time.

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FTAC – Russian Security State – The Shortest ‘Primer’ Syllabus

11 Friday Nov 2016

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

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Before Donald J. Trump does anything else, he’s going to have to articulate and navigate a position with Putin and a re-medievalized Russian security state.

http://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-resurrects-the-kgb-moscow-security/

https://www.amazon.com/Putins-Kleptocracy-Who-Owns-Russia/dp/1476795207

Americans — Far Left, Far Left, Down the Middle, I don’t care — may need a good review of the Cold War

https://www.amazon.com/Cold-War-New-History/dp/0143038273/

plus familiarity with “Active Measures” and the state’s history in relation to “Disinformation” and “Terrorism”

http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2016/09/counter-russian-disinformation-look-cold-war-tactics/131674/

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

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

Consider it a syllabus.

One day, BackChannels will collect the books around the place and write a 3×5 card for each and by category — there are more volumes in “The Russian Section” than appear online.  Nonetheless, and especially online for readers who arrive, much like the editor, with more curiosity than formal background in foreign affairs, international studies, and political science, there may be greater value in a short list — a short hallways with half a dozen doors — than in a comprehensive one.

In the online environment, such posts are stepping stones — no need to dwell: click on a selection and move on!

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FTAC – Why the Middle East Conflict Will Be Drawn Down (If It Is ‘Drawn Down’)

11 Friday Nov 2016

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

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Why things haven’t changed and may not until the root of the conflict has been made clear.

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

The Russian state’s history of political criminality — that which has driven the upending of its governments twice in the past 100 years  — has sat at the base of the middle east conflict and helped kept it collecting money for those it blessed: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, Ismail Haniyeh, and Khaled Mashaal.

I don’t know if the state of affairs will straighten out with Donald J. Trump in office, but the more word gets around, the more likely it will.

Two other notes of which to be aware:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_and_the_Soviet_Union

Once you know — and perhaps once Moscow knows the popular west knows — and once the Palestinians know — this game with the refugees should be over.

Noting the KGB history may not change Arab culpability for sustaining the refugees as an apartheid population in relation to their own states, but two legs of the old table have been removed by time — Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, both state sponsors of terrorism.

If the 1920s may be noted as the launch period for the Muslim Brotherhood, the umbrella organization beneath which al-Qaeda and others have developed, then this new way of looking at the old conflict also starts to put away an entire era of warfare that needs finally to be consigned more largely to the 20th Century.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, which places that development in the same region in time as the full blown expression of Stalinism and in Germany the final fermentation of what would then soon become Nazism.

Addendum – December 26, 2016

SECURITY COUNCIL
7853RD MEETING (PM)
SC/12657
23 DECEMBER 2016
Israel’s Settlements Have No Legal Validity, Constitute Flagrant Violation of International Law, Security Council Reaffirms
14 Delegations in Favour of Resolution 2334 (2016) as United States Abstains.

Both the creation of the document, commentary on it, and the voting that ensued refused to acknowledge Moscow’s old hand in the creation of the Middle East Conflict.

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