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 – On ‘Different Talks — Same Walk’

13 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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https://conflict-backchannels.com/syndicate-red-brown-green/

When it comes to autocracy and insanity, more or less, think “Different Talks — Same Walk.”

The combines of bipolar and malignantly narcissistic psychology cross cultural, ideological, and religious divides to produce the kind of person that becomes a dictator or the kind of person that becomes a terrorist.

Scaled in terms familiar in social psychology, some percentage of population drifts toward and into the available extremes at the margins of their chosen channels.

While the “Kool-Aid” varies, there are a lot of language- and information-related processes ferrying the right kind of personality into their kind of combat or political action.

With Islam — as opposed to, say, post-Soviet neo-feudal Russian nationalism — I / we, perhaps, have been on a journey from knowing very little to knowing enough to at least get the big picture about right, and with that we’re getting to see how the “jihadists” differ from Muslims who really have no wish to force on others or otherwise vigorously purvey “Political Islam”.

Greater than Islam may be our general transition and transformation from the medieval worldviews represented by “Red Brown Green” to the modern one of greater cooperation, integration, integrity, and inclusion plus, not a small thing, the want of being helpful to others.

Although one cannot overlook the medieval character of medieval religions and related behaviors; however, one may choose to set aside aspects of the content of one screed or another to more closely focus on the political and social psychology at work  — to be found on this blog: “social grammar”, “malignant narcissism”, “medieval vs modern”, etc.

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Posted to YouTube 4/6/2016

Related: Quinn, Liam.  “‘Let’s get rid of them’: British-born Islamic preacher who has called for gays to be ‘executed’ was giving lectures in Orlando weeks before nightclub massacre.”  Daily Mail, June 13, 2016.

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FATC – Comments on Gaza Between the Medieval and Modern Worlds

11 Saturday Jun 2016

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

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The Palestinians have been at the mercy of powerful Palestinian families and politicians for decades, and the same have kept refugee generations captive or enthralled or leveraged by brutality , disinformation, and outrageous promises.

Part of the story starts here — https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/quote-manipulation…/ — with the foreign policy practices of the Soviet Union and its promotion of anti-Semitic message and conflict. While Putin has worked on “anti- anti-Semitism”, his government has nonetheless met with PFLP in recent years (2014) and has refused to designate Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, which is how they’re officially viewed in the United States.

Districts in poverty are vulnerable to many kinds of exploitation, criminal and political — and sometimes both — through recruitment into programs that are not in their interest.

http://www.tabletmag.com/…/hamas-killed-160-palestinian…

http://www.padico.com/public/English.aspx?Lang=2…

Feudal methods from patronage to brutalization, intimidation, and murder help keep conditions in Yatta exactly as they are. The talk, whether of nationalism or Islam, enrage or mollify the dispossessed to the advantage of those who purport to represent their interests.

I’ve included PADICO, a Gaza-based development corporation, because its board of directors is listed elsewhere on the site, and each name may be researched as regards education and experience. In outline, many are modern — cosmopolitan, well educated — but perhaps no less than Hamas’s tunnel digging children, they too have been hamstrung between the medieval and modern worlds, or that is where they have maintained themselves.

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

One should refuse contextless gambits like the KDH (King David Hotel) bombing but might suggest that in 1946, the greater armies had barely stopped moving, the mess in destroyed and disrupted lives moving on the landscape must have been immense if not easily seen, and military and paramilitary action on the part of the British, whom I am sure wanted to be done with World War II and its aftermath, were still undertaken in the near shadows of other combat theaters.

The simplifications disservice multiple rich histories.

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FTAC – A Response to Advocacy for Putin’s Russia

27 Friday May 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Ukraine

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Re. democracies and monarchies: a dozen European states remain monarchies but tempered by their democratic complements in power (parliamentary systems).

Re. bigotry in the west — the point is the people fight it in concert with their governments. The real tension is between ethnolinguistic cultural majorities and their interest in preserving themselves and evolving as they themselves determine. As much has given rise to what I call the “New Nationalism” and, like Viktor Orban in Hungary, “New Nationalists”. Those on the Far Right in relation to those movements are often anti-Semitic, which goes with the defensiveness and, probably, patronage. Even in Hungary, however, such as Jobbik may become prominent but make the final climb into political leadership.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/a-note-on-hungarys…/

With Jobbik in Hungary, the revision is just weird, but explained some by the persistence of Soviet politics in the post-Soviet Era.

Regarding Ukraine, Alexander J. Motyl has been arguing for the ceding of Donbas, but it’s not about being Russian in any case. The truth is ordinary people resent state-enabled criminality and related criminal aggrandizement. Yanukovych worked to get himself shoved out of office, and some of Russian heritage with whom I’ve spoken — and some I have read about in Grigas’s book, resent being used by Moscow as “compatriots”. The claim of protection is seen as a pretext for aggression that either expands or strengthens Russia’s area of control and influence or that results in a “frozen conflict” lending itself to criminal enterprise (where there is no effective and functioning sovereign, there’s a lot of space available for mischief).

Even while posting about Nadiya Savchenko’s liberation, I have wondered about both inherent and legacy politics plus what the effect of fame and public interest may have on her political vision as she necessarily updates herself.

In the British sphere, I’ve unconditionally accepted Naz Shaw’s “turnaround” or present stance and, with either, her repudiation of the anti-Semitic facet of the Labour Party.

Finally, regarding criminality, we have all got some vanity, and our personal mixes of “reparative” and “malignant” narcissism generally fill out a moderate life. With the criminal class, immoderation becomes either desirable or habitual, partly because of what we think of as criminal has lost its brakes in conscience, busted through normative boundaries, and, here invoking the Islamic concept, “exceeded limits.” When these people are small and surrounded by a lawful society, the wind up in jail; when they’re large, they may go a long time in business before hitting any walls; and in politics, they can ruin states — and they do that in profound ways.

The want of the power to impose suffering on innocent others with impunity becomes, I believe, a facet of that political criminality we call “dictatorship”. It’s not just the firm hand that one may dislike to the point of loathing: it’s the dispensing of sadism that comes through those that the good find aberrant and abhorrent.

Welcome to Virtually New World.

Now that we’re all here and furiously chatyping, what are we (and leaders old and new) going to do with it?

We may try to recognize some things we don’t like about our Newest Age.

Also deeply related on this blog: “Why the Jews?”, a piece that is at bedrock about one human response to “absolute power” — within which concept BackChannels would include the power to make others suffer with impunity — that has worked its way around the world.

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FTAC – A Comment on Obama, The Islamic Small Wars, and the Syrian Tragedy

25 Wednesday May 2016

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

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Let’s try this model . . . .

We, including Muslims, have before us the archaic manifestation of a legacy in religion owned by about 1.6 billion souls. Some, and for reasons ranging from how they were raised to the possession of the adolescent messianic narcissism known to dictators, would place themselves somewhere beneath the Muslim Botherhood (intentional) umbrella.

Wouldn’t the moderate and peaceful, truly peaceful, want the hotheads and the improvident to get up and go where they might be seen and subjected to the horrors of their own dreams?

As I have argued elsewhere (any may feel welcome to ask), the incubating of the al-Qaeda types, including ISIS, in Syria appears to have been designed as political theater — a theater of the very real — to both blackmail and goad the west into concessions before the Assad regime. It was a good KGB-style plan, and, please note, Russia got to channel the worst of its own Chechnya rebels to the fighting (and it slipped in a few spies as well); however, update: NATO may sting post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia and its alignments (Damascus, Tehran) with its own wasps.

While ISIS has been growing or distilling out of other populations those most prone to join the fight as 7th Century barbarians in Syria, the greater world has been witness to the we’re-not-those-Muslims Muslim repudiation of the al-Qaeda types, the common use of the terms “Islamist” and “jihadist” and such to separate the same from the greater Ummah going forward, and, of late, the appearance reform-minded discussions (e.g., New Age Islam) and organizations (e.g., Muslim Reform Movement). Expect traction to take some time.

There are other facets . . . like that of getting the Iraqi military to hold itself together against not only ISIS, from whom it has been wresting territory this past month, but also from Khamenei’s aggression through Iraq’s more “fiery” Shiite militia, long infested with Revolutionary Guard officers.

Archaic | Feudal-Toward-Modern Main Body | Cultural Avant Garde –>

Quite possibly for the public accustomed to ironic simplifications, what Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran have developed in Syria looks a little like the mirror image of CIA’s support for the Taliban in association with Zia Haq’s own conservative Islamism pitched against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  In today’s Syrian Tragedy, it’s Moscow, essentially, that appears to manipulate the Sunni-aligned jihadists munching away on the landscape (and enriching itself with oil sales by way of whoever hands over the cash for it).

Be that as it may, it’s looking like the west has been neither blackmailed nor goaded by “Assad vs The Terrorists” has instead absorbed the fallout in finger-wagging (for not intervening) and refugee migration, and may well stick Moscow (Damascus and Tehran) with “The Terrorists”.  It may be toward that purpose that the Russian military has strengthened it presence in Syria.

The inspiration for the response: claim that ISIS had been strengthened under the Obama Administration in relation to the Administration weak response to terrorism.

BackChannels counterpoint: the strategy to move the medieval world (and the representatives of political absolute power) toward the modern one (and distributed, checked, and representative power) has a slow track, and in relation to the Islamic Small Wars involves making the feudal world sufficiently visible for fighting.  IF that idea works, THEN the post-Soviet axis (Moscow-Damascus-Tehran) has done a right thing for the wrong reasons: intending to get at the west, it has helped produce an enemy in space that can be addressed with conventional forces from every side opposed to it.

Reference

BackChannels.  “Syria — ‘Assad vs The Terrorists’ — How ISIS Defends Assad.”  October 2, 2015.

BCC.  “Syria conflict: IS ‘destroyed helicopters’ at Russian base.”  May 24, 2016 —  (breaking story today, May 25, and still frequently updated).

Bender, Jeremy.  “Russia’s war against terrorism isn’t what it seems.”  Business Insider, August 24, 2015.

Berlinger, Joshua.  “Did ISIS attack Russian military equipment at key Syrian base?”  CNN World, May 25, 2016.

Fox News.  “ISIS claims female Russian spy infiltrated terror network.”  May 9, 2016.

Martinez, Michael.  “ISIS video claims to show boy executing two men accused of being Russian spies.”  CNN, January 15, 2015.

McInnis, J. Matthew.  “Is Iran’s Iraq policy coming apart?”  American Enterprise Institute, May 17, 2016.

Osborn, Andrew.  “Putin ally says Chechen spies infiltrate Islamic State in Syria.” Reuters, February 8, 2016.

Pleitgen, Frederik.  “Russia’s military in Syria: Bigger than you think and not going anywhere.”  CNN World, May 9, 2016.

Sanchez, Raf.  “Iran-backed Shia militia says it will fight US Marines deployed to Iraq.”  The Telegraph, March 21, 2016.

Vice News and Reuters.  “Notorious Iranian General Makes Cameo as Iraqis Push to Retake Fallujah From the Islamic State.”  May 24, 2016.

Weiss, Caleb.  “Iranian Qods Force leader reportedly in Fallujah.”  Threat Matrix, The Long War Journal, May 23, 2016.

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FTAC – Ejection of the Archaic Past

22 Sunday May 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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The clip dates from 2013. I take note of the time because we’re in changing times where we may not be able to observe change — by what we’re able to see, we’re too limited — but if it’s taking place, there should be fewer of these clips available this year than there may have been in 2013.

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Archaic-Past | Restive Middle | Modern Muslim Reform Movements

That “archaic past” can no longer do any real thing for anyone except enrich its handful of malignant and piratical leaders. It’s going to go away, visible if by way of combat with the al-Qaeda Typicals, invisible if by way of unspoken individual and popular rejection. Out with the old. The new has many channels forward, including a conservative aspect, which I find convoluted but . . . what works might work.

Regarding Corbyn and the Far Out Left — http://www.the-american-interest.com/…/the-derangement…/

This is the 25th Anniversary Year of the Dissolving of the Soviet, and The Phantom of the Soviet wanders around in such persons as Corbyn, who should be also part of the “archaic past”.

Relevant on my blog: https://conflict-backchannels.com/syndicate-red-brown-green/

Those “al-Qaeda Typicals”, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the organizations and persons that support them are today readily visible to the public.  Perhaps still tender and less visible are organizations like the Muslim Reform Movement and publications like New Age Islam.

BackChannels’ question: has the modern world with its “math, science, and technology” mania passed the age of miracles?

The religion of the future will be cosmic religion. It will transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. - Albert Einstein

Is new scripture possible?

Are new exegeses based on old scripture possible and useful?

Over the years on this blog, and with such off-hand gems as “anthropolitical psychology”, one may look into the future with clinical observation and certainty, which may or may not be spiritually satisfying.

What does it mean to observe and say our global inventory of languages stands at fewer than 7,000 living languages, we are losing several every year, and each represents through sound and other signal a distinct way of living with others in proximity and with the land on which The People have been cultured?

Is that all there is?

Could be.

It could be magnificent as well if we continue to find God, Nature, and The Universe awesome beyond our comprehension.

Related: http://thomasberry.org/

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FTAC – MEC – Thin Wall

18 Wednesday May 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza Suzerain, International Development, Political Psychology, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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One has not to choose sides at all: one may choose integrity.

This is about where the modern Palestinian alternative narrative began: https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/quote-manipulation…/

The world’s community of “Kremlin watchers” well know the history of domestic political policing and the manipulation and stage managing of foreign conflicts, and that not much more different than what we’re witnessing today in Syria.

While Putin has been charming in Israel and inclined to accuse Ukrainians of anti-Semitic drift, one of the ploys involved in “information warfare” in the Crimean Stall, Russia has unfortunately had a long history with that brand of hate, and it surfaced in the Soviet’s approach to middle east politics.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/ftac-tip-to-the…/

International and Palestinian Solidarity continue to preach and promote “Sovietese” — the tired language of the Far Left and what I’ve called the “New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left” — and that’s coming from a modern liberal’s voice.

This a listing of the Board of Directors of a wealthy real estate development corporation anchored in Gaza:

http://www.padico.com/Public/English.aspx?Page_ID=631…

They are each real persons, profit minded, some educated in the United States. The public generally doesn’t hear much about the extent and nearness of private wealth in Gaza. There are embarrassing financial reasons for that — there are no ethical or moral arguments for not increasing investment levels throughout Gaza in the cause of peaceful trade.

Final note regarding the true economics of the privileged in socialism: both Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires. “Arafat’s millions” remains a popular look-up on the web, and “Abu Mazen” may be following in similar steps.

What would be wrong with having “Two Narratives for Two People”?

🙂

One of them would remain forever hateful and wrong — and manipulated by the most heartless bastards on the planet, the kind that produce child soldiers, that force noncombatants into harm’s way, that skim up their wealth from legitimate businesses, that run smuggling operations not in their people’s interests, and that create and spread lies guaranteed to keep their people muzzled and truly occupied (by themselves) and preoccupied (with “the Jews”).

In the title of this piece, “thin wall” refers to a boundary in information warfare.  It is the boundary between the creation, promulgation, reach and protection of Soviet-style propaganda under the cover of socialism and human rights and the potential intrusions of political observation and analysis naturally generated by the democratic and open societies.

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FTAC -Longitude – The Hebrews, Judaism, and Law

16 Monday May 2016

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

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While Judaism, Jewishness, and Zionism combine in the interest of Hebrew ethnolinguistic cultural and spiritual survival, the religion probably should not be confused with the practical motivation for related ethnic survival. For anti-Semites only, it’s all the same — Jews, Jewish faith, Israel, Zionism — but attacking Zionism in the age of tolerance becomes the more sustainable ploy.

In contemporary animus and conflicts targeting Jewish life, there are four themes:

1. Absolute Power — political power consolidated in one ruler;
2. Capricious Law — because the ruler is the law;
3. Idolatry – the ruler lays claim to divine right or historic inevitability for his legitimacy in power, and progressively conflates his image with God or the State, and expects followers to respond appropriately — or else!
4. Sadism — with confusion as to what is God and what is human, the permit to exercise a singular will to make others suffer with impunity comes into play.

However any may care to think about any number of political and religious figures in history, I feel the above describe the character of tyrants, small or large, or men or women on the way to becoming tyrants.

The Jewish program embedded in Christianity and Islam — attractive in Rome and useful in consolidating the Arab world — unfailingly promotes (from the git-go in Genesis) human consciousness, self-consciousness or self-awareness, and, most important of all, the possession of a human conscience. Moses later becomes the lawgiver who would oppose Pharaoh in the exercise of his contention that he himself was as if a god.

Game over.

The defense and transfer of concept over thousands of years has been apparently painful. The Jews, we Jews, are a mixed lot, including the atheist portion, but common to all has been mutual good regard, from Adam to Netanyahu, and the development of a conversation through time about divinity, ethics, and morality. We know discipline and order too, but Torah-derived or induced argument (regarding Isaac, should Abraham have talked back to God?) has led to a compendium of law sufficient for living, working, and trading in peace worldwide.

As an ethnolinguistic cohort, the Hebrews could grow only so much in numbers as Hebrews, but the uptake in Christianity and Islam fills in the story.

The “Abrahamic Faiths” should get off the bloody medieval and tribal merry-go-rounds and revisit their “operating instructions” line by line and in the context set by time — BCE, CE, feudal, medieval, mercantile, possibly “post-modern” — and eject the absurdity of global competition based on being born with a few labels in place.

As time is spacious and timeless, what other work than that of fostering ethnolinguistic cultural survival and co-evolution by producing a global political atmosphere in which mutual good regard matters.

Reference Off to the Side

Oppenheim, Lassa.  “International Law: A Treatise.”  London, New York: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1905.

While “The West” draws its shape also from Greek and Roman civilizations, the “Judeo-Christian” contributions in thought and in woefully bloody history serve to have produced so far deeply desired and survivable codes of conduct and of law.  Whether we’ll be able to enlarge the familiar term to “Judeo-Christian-Muslim” contributions remains to be seen, for as implied by way of the awesome conversation, what Baghdadi has put on demonstration smacks of absolute power, capricious law, idolatry, and sadism, all of which greater portions of Islam seem to be rejecting as I type.

American Islamic Forum for Democracy.  “Declaration of the Muslim Reform Movement / Signed by AIFD (December 4, 2015).

Berman, Ilan.  “Morocco’s Islamic Exports: The Counterterrorism Strategy Behind the Mohammed VI Institute for the Training of Imams.”  Foreign Affairs, May 12, 2016.

Varagur, Krithika.  “World’s Largest Islamic Organization Tells ISIS to Get Lost.”  The World Post / Huffington Post, December 3, 2015.

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FTAC – Another Approach to Islam and the Medieval and Modern Worldviews

08 Sunday May 2016

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

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Sadiq Khan symbolically stands between the medieval world, specifically a world defined by the possession of political (and social) absolute power as bragged, defended, and exercise by singular leaders using whatever means necessary to place themselves and keep themselves positioned as rulers. Although a dozen European states today remain monarchies, the democratic forces evolved within the “western” character — such things are not so limited, but for the sake of conversation one may use the convention — have over centuries modified and exchanged “absolute power” distributed power with a chief administrator or two (where a president and prime minister may co-exist).

The gulf between between the medieval and modern worldviews is immense and, perhaps as demonstrated by Putin and the related axis defined by Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran tells that the matter is not strictly about religion, including. It is about the human grasp of power and power in the hands of the malign.

With Islam, and this apart from examinations of the content of the Qur’an and related wisdom and exegesis — all of which criticism has been well argued and displayed all over the “strident infidel” web — the mere rejection of the “Islamists” (now that we have that term) and the bent toward caliphate, and that by the proverbial sword as swung by such as Baghdadi and others like him, constitutes reform. Whatever Muhammad may have done that Baghdadi believes he’s emulating, the modern wish not to do over and over and over and over all the way to second comings.

Evolved with piety kept intact, which I think may be D______’s conservative election, or instantly updated per the wishes of the Muslim Reform Movement, Sadiq Khan and others, again of modern bent, have a pretty good palette within which to reside within the House of Islam.

Regarding the role of the Jews (apart from “No Moses — no Muhammad”), the Hebrew’s teleological ejection of unquestioned and unquestionable human authority, the rejection of Pharaoh, has had its revolutionary impact on the world, and the shape of it has been such as to repeatedly meet some of the challenges posed by dictators, but as history has jagged edges, the power of the despotic may shrink across time, but there are many despots and some live out their lives to die peacefully in their beds (at least it’s looking that way for Mugabe).

In short (wouldn’t that be nice?), it’s not the Jews that may stand in judgment of Sadiq Khan but rather those who have come across from the medieval world and left behind — ejected — its manners in the development and exercise of political power.

The gist of the assertion posed as a question: the Jews won’t accept London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s overtures until Islam has been definitively reformed.

Well, bunk.

As noted above, the Ummah’s rejection of the al-Qaeda-type organizations may constitute “reform” — at least Baghdadi, that stickler for authenticity who believes he’s conducting a state in Muhammad’s image, would reject such “reform”.

In the medieval mode, it would be natural to expect that “one true church” would conquer all the others; in the modern, democratic, secular, and tolerant mode, every true church may borrow, evolve, and shift by parts accommodation and parts compassionate discernment and idealism.  The conquest by one of all becomes irrelevant.

As regards criticism and issues swirling around the figure of Muhammad and Islam, the blanket rejection of the same may call to mind Haider Mobarak’s term, “civilizational narcissism” as well as the many online sites devoted to the “anti-Jihad”.

Reference

Anti-Jihad (impossibly short list).  Answering Islam, Clarion Project, Pamela Geller, United West

BackChannels.  “Short and Pointed — The “Declaration of the Muslim Reform Movement.”  December 6, 2015.

Muslim Reform Movement.

Addendum – May 9, 2016

Sadiq Khan is no Muslim extremist. And it is not only his track record voting for gay rights that proves this. Having known him when I was a Muslim extremist, I know that he did not subscribe to my then-theocratic views.

Nawaz, Maajid.  “The Secret Life of Sadiq Khan, London’s First Muslim Mayor.”  The Daily Beast, May 8, 2016.

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