The Rus warlords Oleg of Novgorod and Sviatoslav I of Kiev launched several wars against the Khazar khaganate, often with Byzantine connivance. The Schechter Letter relates the story of a campaign against Khazaria by HLGW (Oleg) around 941 (in which Oleg was defeated by the Khazar general Pesakh; this calls into question the timeline of the Primary Chronicle and other related works on the history of the Eastern Slavs.
Sviatoslav finally succeeded in destroying Khazar imperial power in the 960s. The Khazar fortresses of Sarkel and Tamatarkha fell to the Rus in 965, with the capital city of Atil following circa 967 or 969. A visitor to Atil wrote soon after the sacking of the city: “The Rus attacked, and no grape or raisin remained, not a leaf on a branch.”
Putin’s delusional accusations regarding Nazism in Ukraine better fit description as the “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” than any dominant or significant political stance held in modern Ukraine, and the same may better inform Russians and the residents of EU/NATO of the character of his insanity than any truth about international affairs.
As the murderous fraud Putin has been, he has no possession of good character and cannot purchase any authentic nobility. Deep down, I suspect he knows as much himself, and it is that (along with the narcissist’s early “Narcissistic Mortification“) that makes him so touchy as well as dangerous and errant.
One may hope that modern Russians when more fully and accurately informed en masse will finally part ways with their distant medieval and barbaric forbears.
Deutsch: Deckblatt der MfS-Richtlinie Nr. 1/76 zur Entwicklung und Bearbeitung Operativer Vorgänge Date, 1 January 1976, Source: BStU, GVS MfS 008-100/76; Author: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit der DDR | “Cover sheet of the MfS Guideline No. 1/76 for the development and processing of operational processes”; Ministry for State Security DDR. Online Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung .
Cause: Aid and Compensation for the harms and indignities imposed on those trapped within the Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic and subject to enslavement and punishment at the hands of the state’s secret police, the Stasi (Ministerium für Staatsicherheit).
We mere humans just don’t own time. For atheists, time is just a fact of life.
We do, again, and each as representative of Homo Sapiens sapiens, and for better or worse, own our memories.
It has been our species’ great misfortune to find always some portion of our numbers made to suffer at the hands of others.
Forget “God, Nature, and the Universe”. The earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, and volcano would seem possessed of physics and entirely dispossessed of conscience except that some of us believe that in the presence of one or the other, divine providence destroyed our lives or saved them.
Degradation, dehumanization, enslavement, subjugation, subjection, and other such evils–those are different, and in the history of our species, one sees the chains and whips changing hands by turns, and, sigh, we may feel ourselves lucky if wielding the whip . . . but then nothing lasts beyond bearing except a number of nefarious processes that we perhaps have not wrestled sufficiently into the past. So here we may acknowledge that we don’t get to erase our bad memories; we don’t get to retrieve the dead; we may or may not have some revenge on our tormentors–and if it was ourselves that held the keys and snapped the whips, our day–we know it secretly–has come–or will.
I believe it in the tendency of our species to develop awareness, compassion, conscience, consciousness, empathy, greater integrity and reason, and at the end of every dastardly era, great human sensibility and wisdom.
I was asked not long ago to help promote the cause of the internally displaced in place of the once Soviet-controlled and Communist German Democratic Republic.
Imagine, if you will, going to sleep in one dismal but predictable awful cultural, legal, political, and social circumstance and waking the next day without a country–and afterward a “democratic open society of the west” that prides itself on compassion but hasn’t much in place for you–and then years later when it does . . . you’re no more important in it than you were in the other place.
Perhaps one’s personal circumstance has become more bearable , the powers that be more polite, and amends for the insufferable past made with good will whether or not sufficient to quells bad memories and the residuals in nightmares.
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I have found in overview–remember my analytical discipline: collect, select, and opine–that East Germany’s internal migrants, all of whom went to sleep in one place in time and woke up in another entirely–have not been overlooked but perhaps underserved in the regions of cultural and economic development. In the Soviet way, they had been locked down in time, suffocated, surveilled, deprived of normal human political and social processes, and subject to deliberate state-driven control, diminishment, and, ultimately, erasure.
How would even the most benevolent of modern societies “compensate” for that experience?
Well . . . there is today the business of living well enough to create and enjoy better memories in freedom and with at least a modicum of privacy (although the “modern” appear to have some new horrors on the horizon, e.g., massive intrusion via data sifting) as well as dignity and security.
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Now and then, I haul out Qualities of Living (QOLs) a conceptual alternative to thinking about power as an expression of grandiose narcissistic ambition with accompanying control and influence ascribed to a potentate absolute or constitutional. What if power were more often the power to bring extraordinary improvement to geopolitical space in the many dimensions to be appreciated by the inhabitants of a given space?
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After 1990 “the whole software of life changed” for east Germans, says Markus Kerber, a bigwig at the interior ministry. Short-term pain was inevitable. Average labour productivity in the east was 30% of that in the west. Kohl’s decision to exchange Ostmarks at a 1:1 rate for Deutschmarks made swathes of firms uncompetitive overnight. Those that survived struggled with the western rules they had to import wholesale. By one estimate, 80% of east Germans at some point found themselves out of work.
Perhaps the Treuhand could have proceeded more gently, some argue today.
Cultural and economic adjustment, development, inclusion with some foresight and vision may turn out the key that will finally fix the past in the past where it needs to be. In this day, however, quite a number of cultures, groups, and just plain people have taken up the causes of yesterday, exhumed and tallied abuses, ranted high and low for justice, but the best all may do is not relive what’s gone and take pains–whatever it was–not to see it happen again.
In the 1970s the MfS changed its secret police activities and began increasingly to use “softer” methods. The GDR leadership did not want to compromise its attempts to gain international recognition: persecution and repression were to be concealed. The MfS now focused more on preventive surveillance and so-called “psychic demolition”. It used manipulation and targeted rumours in its attempts to systematically intimidate individuals or groups, to ruin their reputations, isolate or criminalize them. Friendships were destroyed, and professional careers ruined without the victims even realizing why.
However, the change in methods did not lead to any let-up in the repressive pressure exerted by the MfS. And the aim also remained the same: to prevent the development of non-conformist or dissident ideas and behaviour.
The rest of the group agreed that the destruction of trust was one of the most painful legacies of their experiences in the GDR. The dense informer network meant that everyone spied on one another. Many did not find out who had informed on them until decades later, when they requested their Stasi file.
So in the 1970s, the masterminds at Stasi School — formally known as the College of Legal Studies — decided on a new, more subtle tactic of repression, a way of stamping out rebellion without the overt use of force.
Instead of pounding their suspects into submission, they would send them mad. And so began the policy of Zersetzung.
The word meant disintegration or corrosion or decomposition. Today we would call it ‘gaslighting’ — playing with someone’s mind and self-worth until any resistance crumbles and he or she becomes either compliant or apathetic.
Six phases of postwar immigration to Germany can be distinguished (see table 2; see also Martin 1991; Münz and Ulrich 1993; Rudolph 1994; Seifert 1995). The first phase was dominated by the immigration of Germans: expellees, citizens of the GDR, other ethnic Germans
Born into poverty in pre-World War I Berlin, Mr. Mielke joined the Communist youth movement at age 15, and his career epitomized the grimness of Communist rule in East Germany, where assassination, kidnapping, execution, denunciation and intimidation were used to achieve and maintain power under the long, menacing shadow of the Soviet Union.
Mr. Mielke and the ministry for state security kept the 16.5 million people of East Germany obedient to Communism and repressed dissent for more than 30 years. Not only did the ministry pursue an effective campaign against those it regarded as enemies of the state, but its army of 90,000 agents and 260,000 informers finally turned East Germany into a country that spied on itself.
Posted by Movie Coverage to YouTube September 17, 2012. URL play-dot-google-dot-com has a version with English subtitles. It’s a fine movie.
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Is “living well” the best revenge?
I don’t know, but both alone and in community we most naturally make ourselves comfortable and secure if, when, and where we can. “Living well” with agency, autonomy, dignity, efficacy, freedom, inclusion beats all of the alternatives, and living well with some thoughtful planning for ourselves, our own, and others . . . I would call that repair and profound improvement.
Thousands of Ukrainians are continuing to express support to European integration and protesting against decision of Ukrainian government to refuse signing of association with EU in Vilnius. 27 November 2013. Kyiv, Ukraine.
March 5, 2022: In the Kharkiv region, the Ukrainian army seized 30 units of Russian equipment.
“I want you to know why thousands of people all over my country are on the streets. There is only one reason. We want to be free from a dictatorship. We want to be free from the politicians who work only for themselves, who are ready to shoot, to beat, to injure people just for saving their money, just for saving their houses, just for saving their power. I want these people who are here, who have dignity, who are brave–I want them to live a normal life. We are civilized people, but our government are barbarians. That’s not a Soviet Union. We want our courts not to be corrupted. We want to be free . . . .” Posted to YouTube by A Whisper to a Roar, February 10, 2014.
While China had been slow to accede to the multilateral Biological Weapons Convention and expressed interest in biological warfare competition, the world has not committed to the Wuhan Level 4 Biological Laboratory narrative regarding Chinese state culpability. There above (viewable on Amazon Prime Video) is the trailer from a counterintelligence thriller directed by the British auteur Michael Apted and released to the viewing public in 2017, about three years before the natural/unnatural dissemination of the COVID-19 strand and its effects.
So we may not know how Covid-19 got started, but we well know what it has done to our species’ natural biological and social existence, and we know who and what the disease has decimated financially or enriched beyond estimation.
While narcotics are money makers for burgeoning Transnational Crime Organizations as well as stimulus for police and paramilitary counter-narcotics budgets worldwide, the same represent also a form of biological warfare (snorted, swallowed, poked, and smoked into human frames with myriad rationales) that effectively deflects and degrades the energies and lives of untold millions worldwide while facilitating as well cultural and social chaos, decay, and despair. However made, narcotics money percolates upward — or across if sufficiently funded for the experience (Robin Williams: “Cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you are making too much money”) — and the $1 billion slurried up from Kensington Avenue becomes one Big Billion Dollar Infusion for spending in and around Philadelphia or anywhere else it may care to go.
Posted by Funny Clips from TV & Movies, August 19, 2015 from the 2004 film Layer Cake.
One cannot underestimate the propensity for ruthless threat and violence on the part of the world’s smugglers nor ignore the impact of the kind of money involved in smuggling — arms, drugs, humans for labor and for sex — all are money (really, just business) to the cartels, freelancers, and gangs involved in inveigling the world in vice and looting it by force. It has gotten so bad that cocaine and funding for terrorism has become a negotiated commodity between statesmen as well as a major headache for intelligence and law enforcement authorities.
Add, perhaps, what goes on behind the curtains.
So what happens to all that dirty money?
As suggested about Philadelphia’s infamous Kensington Avenue narcotics market, what the dealers scrape off the streets moves around and upward into cars and real estate or onward to other criminal or terrorist enterprises (and backwards: no new products, no sales). With bulk purchases (e.g., cars rounded up for export and sales overseas) or luxurious ones, the very next sale cleans the money and into town it goes.
Corruption II Business Private and Slick
Business and politics in feudal systems structured around Absolute Power, whether of corporation or state, may have features resembling corruption–bribes become incentives, kickbacks rewards, the receiving of less noble hooch and nookie pleasant encouragement for sealing a less private, more notable and admirable business deal. The details may disappear in the vapors of hangovers and lost memories, and that’s the end of the story. Take it a little further, however, and an act of indiscretion, pleasantly offered, may become leverage for blackmail and coercion. Jeffrey Epstein socialized among and with the powerful of the world, and he had his relationship with Putin too: was what he was doing really about an old perv with his own treasury?
Are America’s wealthy in some ways destroying their own national culture for a little bit of business or, perhaps, doing so out of naivete?
You tell me.
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What happens in El Norte moves into and may add to the chaos and misery known to Latin America in the sway of local and regional “narconomies”.
I have a Twitter trope that I’ll restate here without counting the letters:
North American arms–>south to Latin American gangs and cartels; LA migrants–>North; NA cash–>south; LA illicit everything–>north.
America’s black market arms (see Gaynor and Grillo in reference) are not the only ones reaching Latin America, but that the system has been large and persistent and with much related activity eating away at the country’s ethical, financial, moral, and social integrity, one wonders if it isn’t time for the “authorities” to get smarter and the “bad guys” — or the desperate — to have better options with perhaps a little less ambition before “what goes around” really does return in karmic fashion.
Kleptocracy, or “rule by thieves,” has for too long been disregarded from mainstream foreign policy discussions. It is often overlooked as a peripheral economic development issue: A problem for tax justice advocates and foreign aid workers. Yet it has been shaping international politics and the global security environment for decades. The Biden-Harris administration will have an unprecedented opportunity—and a unique responsibility—to confront this pervasive threat with decisive action.
This chance comes not come a moment too soon. Since the end of the Cold War, corruption has metastasized beyond national borders into a problem of almost unimaginable scale. The United Nations has estimated that $1 trillion are paid in bribes and a further $2.3 trillion otherwise stolen annually.1 Global Financial Integrity, a Washington-based think tank, cites corruption as a key factor in $8.7 trillion that vanished from official records of trade between 135 developing countries and 36 advanced economies from 2008-2017.2
Notice how Locke’s empiricism dovetails with the political principles of natural rights and basic equality: because all people have eyes and ears and minds, and because we must check and consult with each other to find truth, the many, not just the few, are entitled to assert their own beliefs and contest others. Epistemic rights, like political rights, belong to all of us; empiricism is the duty of all of us. No exceptions for priests, princes, or partisans.
With America’s former “Fake News!” Fake President dooming Congressional members of the Republican Party into becoming IrrElephants, now seems just the time for reconsidering the character, history, and nature of what informed and modern humanity has come to call “Truth”.
The matter shouldn’t be that complex, but considering the long history of narcissistic conceits (why of course the sun revolves around the earth!) and wars involving irreconcilliable beliefs, cocksure wrong conclusions, and innumerable faiths, it should seem no wonder that for the pleasure of obtaining where all may a deeply responsible peace we have arrived in a lively conversation about empiricism and epistemology.
I have only started reading Rauch’s book but feel both the quote and note here worthy of play.
The post-Soviet arc of power — define it for yourself and have a look any time — is riddled with cancerous, dying, or dead and failed states!
The world has plenty of other evil in it, but what “malignant narcissists” do to their own geopolitical spaces in the cause of their own aggrandizement (and centralization of power) always ends badly.
As far as I’m concerned, Americans are superior!
Lol.
We’re all on this one “Blue Marble” and many of our real issues — not issues rooted primarily in our own minds but a part of our shared global experience — are issues to be acknowledged and worked on together across our many cultural and political boundaries.
In any case, M, Big Pictures and more parochial ones — both at hand at the same time — Palestinian Liberation begins with you and your vision. You should defy Palestinian corruption and political repression at every chance, not overlook or shrug it away as both attach to your own character if accepted.
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So End The Occupation – Hamas Out of Gaza!
Seriously, B., have you ever raised your voice against Palestinian corruption? PLO/PA and Hamas political repression?
The Palestinians — the Refugees of 1948 and other Arab wars undertaken to destroy Israel — ” . . . from the river to the sea . . . .” — have long been abused, lied to, and suffocated by their own corrupt and venal leaders who with disinformation, framing, and incitements deflect attention from themselves.
Have you ever taken an independent look at the larger historical picture having to do with power absolute and power democratic?
Probably, the world is with the Palestinians for being for the most part beneath the boot and beside the sticky fingers of “leaders” that keep most of the base ignorant, impoverished, silent, and robbed of the charity and support intended for their economic development. Those who really care . . . care to look. The same would seem to reliably find Palestinian-generated blood spatter, corruption, repression, and unwarranted egoism.
Today, no one — least of all Palestinians — need to tarry in the politics of the 1960s and 1970s. That was then; this is now: modern people needs must demand accountability and integrity in their own governance as well as an accurate and dispassionate telling of true political history along with best informed and comprehending modern analyses.
Putin hasn’t to move one tank into Ukraine to control Ukraine, for he has already made himself central to Ukrainian (and NATO) awareness, fear, mobilization, and reflection.
Everything Ukraine may now do (and think) will have to do with whatever Putin chooses to do first.
Putin is in control.
Consider the Ukrainian defender’s now about seven-years-old experience and position with a belligerent and bullying Russia repeatedly and with impunity injuring or killing Ukrainian troops daily and weekly for all those years.
Where is that pain to be harbored and kept in check?
For how many more hours, days, weeks, months, years should Ukrainians tolerate the status quo of a “frozen conflict” sustained by the same criminals driven out in the 2014 Maidan?
Putin is in control.
How should Ukrainians feel about reaching out to a NATO that hems and haws over its imperfect governance while aspiring to meet modern democratic standards in rule-of-law?
Oh, has anyone had a good look lately at the degrees of corruption and rancor in relation to domestic political behavior within the United States?
At least the voting will of the American People voted out their own corrupt autocratic infection, but should any of the Atlantic Alliance have fallen so far to now have to bend over fully to pick up the reins dropped from the horse?
Hungary, Italy, Poland, Turkey have each gone at least partially — two especially — back toward family control or, alternatively, ownership of states by nobility, i.e., either way, the feudal mode in political absolutism.
Who’s next?
Putin is in control.
Posted to YouTube by France 24, April 13, 2021.
How tense the atmosphere? How dark the clouds? How near the enemy?
Putin is in control.
However far Russia dares to go with its annexation of Ukraine — and its thieving from Ukrainian business and industry and all else Ukrainian and good — Ukraine will have to stand up and go further, and God help NATO embrace and defend Ukraine.
“I heard Zelensky’s words as he said that Ukraine is ready to repel aggression. The fact is that he didn’t just say it’s ready today, it’s been ready for seven years already. It’s only that it’s a different level of readiness, because it’s hard to say when Russia might put their aggressive rhetoric to life,” Kravchuk told Current Time, a Russian language project created by RFE/RL with the participation of VOA.
He noted that Russia’s top leadership are directly threatening Ukraine and its sovereignty, including warning of “collapse of the state.”
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