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 – Syrian Mass Migration – Tough Measures or Programmatic Ones?

18 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, North America, Northern Europe, Politics, Syria

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It’s too late for “tough” and as demonstrated by Hungary, the same plays to the fascist nationalism and medievalism promoted by Putin and Khamenei.

The way to handle waves of immigrants is simply to program ahead, determined to filter criminals and criminal jihadists from the ranks and produce a path for “acculturation, acclimatization, and assimilation.”

The other part is to go back to the “stink” that’s driving immigration and quell it. That too in Syria and Iraq needs must be done.

Will the west “hold off” on Syria?  For how long?  — And at what price?

Related from Pamela Geller: VIDEO: Doctor describes horrors in German hospital overrun by Muslim migrants, Doctors stabbed, no arrests, no media – See more at: http://pamelageller.com/2015/10/video-czech-doctor-describes-migrant-hospital-invasion.html/#sthash.XvkXDYAr.dpuf

Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2012/10/19/mobarak-haider-blasphemy-and-civilization-three-youtube-clips/

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FTAC – Russia in Syria – Afghanistan? Nope.

13 Tuesday Oct 2015

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

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Syria seems a much more confused battlespace with a Soviet / Post-Soviet backbone supporting feudal absolute power. Russia has returned to support of a Christian church — so it can’t be about “godless communism” — but retains strong alignment with the regime in Iran and the ophthalmologist in the middle. It looks to me like the Sunni-side Arab Emirates post by Hasan Hasan favors Sunni expansion (duh smile emoticon ) with murderous ISIS as its edge, not an evil entity worthy of destruction by both Shiites and Sunnis.

Sigh.

From the western perspective, medievalism is on full display, and, post-Enlightenment, battle is not reason and winning or losing in the same says nothing about metaphysics. Modern Obama has invoked the term “dumb war” for staying out of the Islamic partisan wars of the middle east. Having been right to do so, he’s narrowed the American scope to fighting “The Real Terrorists” (as opposed to Assad’s version of “The Terrorists”) and has had U.S. military campaigning against “ISIL” assets and leadership.

The conversation starter — a question: “Afghanistan II?”

Nope — not Afghanistan Two or too.

The prompt for the conversation came from this report on Russian battlefield losses in the Syrian Theater:

Nearly two weeks after the Russian intervention began in Syria, one could say it has not got off to a good start. Last week, the Syrian regime launched its first ground offensive against the rebels under Russian air support.

The assault, in Hama’s northern countryside, failed spectacularly – rebels affiliated to the Free Syrian Army destroyed at least 18 tanks and held their ground.

Hassan Hassan.  “How the Syrian crisis will change matters in Iraq”.  The National, October 13, 2015.

Considering the source and the role played by partisan opinion and reporting around the Syrian Tragedy, the report of so many tanks destroyed may do with buttressing.  Here it is:

The U.S.-made BGM-71 TOW missiles were delivered under a two-year-old covert program coordinated between the United States and its allies to help vetted Free Syrian Army groups in their fight against President Bashar al-Assad. Now that Russia has entered the war in support of Assad, they are taking on a greater significance than was originally intended.

Sly, Liz.  “Did U.S. weapons supplied to Syrian rebels draw Russia into the conflict?”  The Washington Post, October 11, 2015.

“We get what we ask for in a very short time,” one commander, Ahmad al-Saud, said in an interview. He added that in just two days his group, Division 13, had destroyed seven armored vehicles and tanks with seven TOWs: “Seven out of seven.”

Barnard, Anne and Karam Shoumali.  “U.S. Weaponry Is Turning Syria Into Proxy War With Russia.”  The New York Times, October 12, 2015.

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FTAC – Tip to the KGB’s Amplification of Middle Eastern Anti-Semitism

12 Monday Oct 2015

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

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The attached cartoon was generated by Putin’s former KGB culture and inserted (with many like it, also many field agents, and thousands of Party trained Russian workers) into the middle east to promote Arab anti-Semitism. It’s something to keep in mind with regard to historic relations between Moscow and Tel Aviv. The directing of anger and hate toward a convenient target suits a certain kind of criminal power and its will to manipulate and poison “masses”.

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The promotion of the Great Leader, the destruction of the individual, and the development of controlled media, pervasive propaganda, and political theater seem to BackChannels themes familiar to all dictatorships.  Those operating in Syria today seem to BackChannels only the most recently hyperdestructive.

The cartoons were passed to BackChannels more than a year ago.

As always, “The Russian Section” of this blog’s library provides plenty of background as regards the political atmosphere and psychological mechanisms associated with the Soviet and the Soviet Era.

In context of The Awesome Conversation, encounters with anti-Semitic expression in the press of the post- or pseudo-communist “Solidarity” organizations and in numerous chat forums online seems unavoidable, but one may point out to the injured and angered the true source of their own indoctrination and manipulation in “helping” them bend to the will of a malign leadership.

While many observations may be made of anti-Semites — some criminally anti-authoritarian and anti-law of any kind but their own; some so obsessed as to suggest mental illness as a foundation for their rants — the idea that suggested content, like the above cartoons, has been conveniently packaged and made easy to swallow by the ugly among the powerful should tell the bigoted something about their own gullibility or intellectual vulnerability.

Related URLs on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/12/02/quote-manipulation-about-the-plo-leader-pacepa-and-rychlak-2013/  This provides a key example of Soviet meddling in middle eastern politics that resonates today with Mahmoud Abbas’s deeply anti-Semitic stance and the less remarked financial piracy that has made him wealthy ($100 million in estimated portfolio — of course, Hamas rivals Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires, all made on the backs of Palestinians and their suffering).

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/04/29/soviet-anti-semitism-an-example-from-andrew-and-mitrokhins-the-sword-and-the-shield/ BackChannels tries to reduce some message to essence, but as evident in this post and many others, brevity leads only to more reading, and of reading there is no end.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/09/01/ftac-soviet-to-syria-now/  As bloggers may, BackChannels daily surveying of the news across the web — and it’s human labor here, not machine — occassionally gets ahead of the story.  Mention was made of some Russian military incursion in Syria on this post (thanks to another source) and, lo and behold, it’s big news today.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/03/19/its-hard-helping-you-when-you-are-anti-semitic-among-other-things/ – 3/19/2014.  In agony, Syrians have reached out to the world for rescue, but some in the political arena have surfaced with a problem: they hate Jews and they hate the west — and that animosity and beliefs and attitudes related to it has isolated them.  As Assad, Putin, and Khamenei afford only the lengthening of their own medieval misdirection, subjugation, and enslavement — and too much of horror has been delivered by Assad for going back — Syrians chained and hobbled by anti-Semitism and related hatred of the west will have to remove those chains — habits of mind — themselves.  In North America — no problems: the diaspora Syrian community may be as modern and plural as suits life in the United States and Canada.  As regards life in the war zones of Syria, the matter of belief — about anything — would seem complicated by whatever force happens to be in town on any given day.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/ – 10/2/2015.  Only the superficial news reader perceives of ISIS as entirely an autonomous movement, a scourge independent of other powers, but other powers, as in those now olden 20th Century days, have meddled to produce a piece of political theater: “Assad vs The Terrorists” or, as presented to the open democracies of the west, “Assad OR The Terrorists”!

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

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/08/26/syria-assad-we-trust-the-russians/ – 8/26/2015.  The conflict from Assad’s perspective.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/09/15/bashar-barrel-bomb-assad/ – 9/15/2015 – the conflict from other than Assad’s perspective.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/06/02/assad-or-burn-it-assad-burns-it/ – 6/2/2015.  The quotation more common online goes, “Assad, Or We Burn the Country”.  It’s the same thing and goes back to the political blackmail “Assad OR The Terrorists.”  Either Assad (Putin and Khamenei) continue to control (and plunder) Syria or the west gets the Black Flag Hornet’s Nest (of implied evil puns there has been no end since 9/11).

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/05/24/syria-assad-belarus-red-brown-green/ – 3/24/2015 – Have we reached the end of the end of the Cold War, or will we now be saddled with War Without End by Russia, Syria, and Iran under the control of Putin, Assad, and Khamenei?

BackChannels may compile news and comment on it, but it has yet to acquire a crystal ball.

The links are probably not comprehensive but representative of the thought developed on this blog.  There’s always more to look up on this blog, and probably, despite the author’s desire for brevity and compression, more to say about many “conflict, culture, language, and psychology” related things.

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FTAC – Russia in Syria – Continued Opine

01 Thursday Oct 2015

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

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https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/links-russia-in…/ I’ve been using some of these Back-Channels pieces as boilerplate. The the two powerful dictators — Putin and Khamenei — and the tyrant in the middle — Assad — may be making a statement about their natural right to exist as they do: colonel, president, emperor, ayatollah, or tyrant. As criminals do, they’re refusing the authority of powers other than themselves; they’re acting fully without compassion or empathy for others, except, perhaps those favored through their patronage; and, as the malignant among narcissists do, they’re putting on a show using a simple self-serving script, “Assad vs The Terrorists”.

In the time-honored ways of the tyrannical, each has “exceeded limits” by practically any standards (save those of ISIS, perhaps), plundered their own states, and reveled in their own glory surrounded by those who cooperate in their madness.

In business, feudal arrangements involving inner circles, private and proprietary methods, and profit seem a confirmed part of how we do things. With “state capitalists” — in Putin’s own words, “New Nobility” — why should the possession of power and wealth prove different?

I don’t think these kinds of guys stop until stopped. There are few avenues of appeal to humanity or sentiment (Putin was spending about $50 billion on Sochi while Assad was preferentially bombing his moderate opposition and large noncombatant communities: no funds were applied for the general relief of Syrians caught in this version of Hell).

The thread starter: a CBS This Morning video:

Posted to YouTube 9/29/2015.

Plainly, and even if representing a post-Soviet neo-feudal Russian, President Putin, as unkind as language may be to him, is himself a power with whom to be reckoned.  How that has had to have been approached may speculative, but, certainly, caution has been a large part of it.  In 1991, when the Soviet dissolved itself, NATO and the Russian People had had in mind a different kind of Russia.  The Cold War then seemed over — and it should have been over.

Behind each state government and system, democratic or despotic, exists an array of winners and losers, insiders and outsiders, privileged and needy.  Each government handles the business of life, justice, and fate differently.  Where the democratic open societies cultivate the distribution of political power along with the cultivation of individual ability and private fiefdom (we call them “businesses”), the medieval leadership concentrate power in the Great Leader and related favored and privileged insiders (for whom a “loyal lie” most certainly trumps “an inconvenient truth” — the child’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, always applies).  The transitioning of such societies seems to have to come from within (as much has played out in British history) and probably will, but with the Big Red Tantrum Button — the unspeakable in latent power — always close by, change may have to come about indirectly and slowly.

Related Reference

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/24/how-boris-berezovsky-made-vladimir-putin-and-putin-unmade-berezovsky.html – 3/24/2013.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/28/news/economy/obama-putin-russia-economy/ – 9/28/2015.

http://www.miamioh.edu/cas/academics/centers/havighurst/cultural-academic-resources/putins-russia/ (current)

Russian Section

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FTAC – America – The Presidency – Long Term

30 Wednesday Sep 2015

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

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I don’t think we’re destroyed, (name withheld): our bombers cover the earth daily; our satellite and other security systems are up 24/7/365; our armed forces have taken some hits in the area of “largeness”, but at the same time they have reinvented themselves in “force-multiplying” technology; our security industry, which includes at least 17 major active institutions is probably better knit together today than at any other time in their turf-divided histories; and we seem to have the capability of operating out of the spotlight.

Some programs run in the background.

I believe that this material — http://www.stripes.com/…/cia-special-ops-cooperate-to… — would not have been released to the public unless the CIA and military had agreed to “leak it” — i.e., to inform ISIS fighters as to just how closely they have been infiltrated and monitored. This has taken place, albeit off the Big Media radar, throughout the course of the Obama Administration. As such, the data argues against the conservative arguments involving appeasement.

I think what has happened is that the west has met and adjusted its tactics to the medievalism represented by, sigh, “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” and also distant rivals in Pakistan and elsewhere. We are the “Modern” at war with the “Medieval”. Time is the New Space, and we are fighting with these “emperors” and “new nobility” over the essential future models of governance. Colonel President Emperor Putin has found himself — and put himself — center stage in the defense of political “absolute power”. We, the west, remain and stand by “classical liberalism”: we believe in personhood for everyone: the despotic seem to believe that they — each — are the only persons who really matter.

I didn’t vote for Obama because of the Far (Out) Left connections and his experience with the Wright stuff . . . but I firmly believe that he is responsible to the major American institutions — DOD / NASA (that set the standards for the nation) and then the layers of bureaucracy that will survive him and other American Presidents to come. In that way, our democracy captures our elected leaders: they can talk all they want, and they can maneuver quite a bit, but once in the driver’s seat, the chief administrator’s chair, they’re cushioned or padded by all that has preceded them and constrained by other political forces. That despots don’t want that kind of position, and they’re fighting it all the way down.

Some Muslims — and Muslim to Judaism converts that I have encountered — believe that a “clash of civilizations” is taking form.  I take a broader view: the medieval past has inconveniences a great part of humanity, and the Moderns (and the Progressives) have a problem with that.  So do the clerics and dictators who counsel Obedience — or Else!  The autocratic or despotic — malignant narcissists, all of them — fear their own dawning irrelevance.

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FTAC – On Syria – For Syrians

27 Sunday Sep 2015

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

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The Syrian war and related conflict are about the persistence of feudal and medieval “absolute power” in the 21st Century. To maintain that illusion, but one bloody and miserable enough — I can’t imagine how it could be more miserable for Syrians — Colonel President Emperor Putin, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Tyrant Assad have had to produce on the ground a play and strategy fit to their own grandiose and inhuman delusions: “Assad vs The Terrorists”.

So far, they have brought about what they wanted — and needed — to create.

In the post-Soviet but neo-feudal Russian period, Putin now has an enhanced military position in Syria, and that presumably suits his desire for empire. Handily enough, Ayatollah Khamenei has gotten out of the deal a foil — a kind of chess opponent for him — in the creation of ISIS against which he may now set loose more Revolutionary Guard and Iraqi Shiite militia (the two are together in this): as long as the Great Shiite vs Sunni Battle burns between himself and Baghdadi, he’s in business and may continuing his plundering of Iran. Of The Tyrant Assad, what may one say? How glorious that it turns out himself standing off (in view of the west) the butchery of the al-Qaeda types, who themselves have also a dreadful program.

From an ethical and moral standpoint — from Pharaoh, another tyrant, to this day — everything is wrong about Syria, and the only people who can really fix conditions and themselves are . . . Syrians.

In the 20th Century: Stalin-Hitler (before Hitler betrayed Stalin). In this one: Putin-Khamenei (Assad depends on both). These men need to be seen for what they are, what they represent, and what they have hauled with them into our century, and Syrians would be wise, perhaps, to understand their own complicity in the development of their power. It’s good to leave them with their egomania, their cowardly hate, and their sadism.

Visual coverage of the Syrian Tragedy: lurid.

Painful.

The cause of it: a medieval “will to power” accompanied in the people by insularity and culturally transmitted contempt for others matched to fear and hatred of the Jews and of the west.  When trouble came and the same raised a cry and reached out for help, it appears the world most hated stood aside while the curtain rose on “Assad vs The Terrorists” and darkness came to their seared land.

One hopes that for those who reached across borders and those who have reached back that those mental conditions — habits of mind, learned social grammar, misperception, and fear of the condemnation of one’s own perverse society — will change.

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FTAC – Axis

24 Thursday Sep 2015

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

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What the Soviet and Soviet-inspired did with mind — information and psychology — has to be addressed and reversed wherever it traveled.

I invite (name withheld) to watch this conversation and, at any point, join it.

The “loyal lie” — told or believed out of fear or want (because people lie primarily to get something or hide something) — has been pitted against “inconvenient truth”, and while the truth may not be favorable in a given instant, it is always more reliable than the lie.

The KGB program had been a program of mass mind control — control of the press; punishment of dissidents; for Stalin, the mass murder of critics — and it was sucked up into Baathist pan-Arabism: there is no mystery as to how and why Bashar al-Assad, with Putin and Khamenei’s blessing, chose to decimate the Syrian state (in area, half lost) and people (half the population displaced or refugee on top of countless thousands dead or maimed — and tens of thousands of those children) rather than cede the assumption of the right to absolute political control or power.

For the despotic, there is not a sucker in every crowd: the crowd is there to be suckered.

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FTAC – In Response to Carson’s Statement

24 Thursday Sep 2015

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

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The ways of “secular humanism” are like a membrane surrounding religious aggregates, lol, but also from which the same more (apparently) satisfying beliefs about man and the universe may be hung. The helpfulness of the moderate outlook is to blunt the power of a narcissistic drive attached to any convenient existing “ism”, including humanism, and then muddle through in an uncomfortable (to all) but reliable (for all) equilibrium.

https://youtu.be/J9CeC3yrcG4

It’s okay in the boxing ring and for entertainment, but in public office, much less high and highest offices, it’s best to know that “God is greater” or “Master of the Universe” and humanity is just guessing, passionately, but guessing, in any case.

The Facebook chat veered toward refusing endorsement of any “fundamentalist” for office.

That’s fine.

I wouldn’t want a First Family handling rattlers to prove to itself on a recurring basis its own favor in the sight of God in exchange for its fervent beliefs.

However, how available is what is opposite the religious zealot, i.e., the irreligious “secular humanist”?

The quest for that right-for-president guy or gal may be impractical, especially if “secular humanism” is either positioned or seen as debunking all religious faith and thereby becoming a faith in itself.  Intuition suggests that the better framework in which to place a “godless humanism” is as a method — not a faith — designed to manage the separateness of differing beliefs and drives: we want to be free, and to be free means to be as we believe God wanted us to be, or to be as we believe we were fashioned by fate or nature, and doing that means “being ourselves” while also keeping out of one another’s way as a matter devolving to custom and law.

That faith — any — which would fail to recognize political, religious, and social boundaries forged in both the forming processes of communal and personal identity, would seem here to doom itself to perpetual conflict and defeat.

Focus of the discussion: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/09/there-was-nothing-illiberal-about-ben-carsons-muslim-president-comment/ – 9/22/2015.

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