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Category Archives: Notes On Reading BackChannels

Also in Media: Mark Galeotti on “How Russia Manages Its Political War in Europe”

02 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Notes On Reading BackChannels, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics

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21st Century Feudalism, Active Measures, broad-spectrum conflict, ECFR publication, political analysis, Soviet / post-Soviet politics, Vladimir Putin

ECFR218-Graphic-PSA

Source and Recommended Reading

http://www.ecfr.eu/page/-/ECFR228_-_CONTROLLING_CHAOS1.pdf

“Listen: we engage in foreign policy the way we engage in war, with every means, every weapon, every drop of blood. But like in war, we depend on both the strategy of the general in the High Command, and the bravery and initiative of the soldier in the trench.”

Russian former diplomat, 2017

Russia sees ‘active measures’ (aktivnye meropriyatiya) – from supporting populist parties through disinformation and espionage campaigns, all the way to incidents such as the attempted coup in Montenegro – as an essential part of its efforts to influence Europe.  Along with the usual instruments of foreign influence, such as diplomacy and economic levers, Russia is especially active in using covert and non-traditional means, from intelligence operations to military pressure and even organised crime, all of which have been the foci of recent policy briefs for ECFR.3 This final publication in an informal series seeks instead to consider the extent to which these campaigns are carefully planned and coordinated – and, if so, by whom.


Approximate date of publication: September 2017.

–33–

Reading BC – Those Big Headlines

09 Saturday Jul 2016

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Notes On Reading BackChannels, Political Psychology

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BackChannels, blogging, news, perception, politics

This follows from the previous post.

What is the difference between “moderate” and “extreme” politics?

And how “packed” should a blog post be?

Closing in on “Syndicate Red Brown Green” works a little at a time, at least for those who care to overview the results from a search like “Ferguson and Gaza”.

Ferguson is not Gaza — and Gaza would not be Gaza without Hamas, and Hamas is just another Muslim Brotherhood / Muslim Botherhood organization like . . . ISIL, the gang of the day.

In some ways, suffering — hunger, indignity, inequality, injustice — is the same everywhere, but we all don’t point the fingers the same way.

“White police shot a black man!”

Uh huh.

Except it was a Latino policemen, neither “white cracker” or Yalie WASP.

Should we even notice the “white guy” was Latino?

Not really.

We only do it because we’ve been made to notice that the deceased was black.

Before this is over, more fingers will point to force personnel evaluation or training, one or the other, not the whiteness of the force or the blackness of the community.

Probably, Philando Castile was an American Everyman who could have been any man.

This is what courts are for: examination, second looks, reevaluations.

Those old Lefties (and, believe me, this is being written by an old liberal) — now the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left?: to hell with the courts!

It was murder — and don’t forget to show whitey what’s what downtown.

So here comes that long hot summer involving some kind of 1960s and 1970s American Revanche — Glory Days!

There’s a whole new generation ready to pick up the cudgels.

Parts of the Revolution will be televised.

Anything not televised will show up on the World Wide Web.

–33–

 

FTAC – Conflict, Graphic Images, Social Sharing – A Comment

28 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Journalism, Notes On Reading BackChannels, Philology, Political Psychology

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political propaganda, visual obscenity

All I might suggest is “cultural updating” throughout the . . . what do we want to call them? “Unmodern”? — and no modern nuclear blast will be pretty either — world plus some shift in rules of engagement, including photography and communications, in the field.

I’ve been an accidental viewer of “war porn” — not always accidental: I “clicked” to see my first beheading, firing squad, mass execution, combat helicopter footage (all on YouTube), and so on, and then as a casual blog editor — no connections, no revenue — I found myself posting forensic outrages: https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/ftac-on-war-porn…/ The start of the worst was a photo of two children hanging from rafters in a Burmese hut. I was writing about the Rohingya Muslims. That photograph, which I had downloaded and republished, changed my statistics, and I eventually deleted it from my blog’s library and provided the LiveLeak URL in its place. We’re an f-ing wild and ghoulish species, apparently. And “porn”, which I interpret loosely as “exceptional explicit display” of anything, sells. When it’s pretty and waxed, it sells cars and cameras and guitars (“guitar porn” — ask a musician). When it’s conflict and sex, countless thousands to millions want to see spilled blood and sperm.

I don’t like sensationalized conflict shock images because they’re used to mask other political, social, and psychological realities. They make us angry when we see them — those children hanging from rafters, this young man to the left, infants washing up out of the water in Libya after their attempted migration by boat fails. We know what’s happening; we need to leave the dead to the grace of God; and we need to better focus on the politics (and psychology and language behavior — if you’re like me) that produced the horror.


Prompt: a discussion about visual propaganda.

BackChannels decided some time ago to demur on reposting sensational images of death and tragedy.  If it had a photographer in the field sending live data?  Perhaps it would go with the feed . . . I don’t know; however, promoting cause with shock — humans burnt alive (seen it in stills and videos — what is done to “witches” in Africa); hangings from cranes (who hasn’t seen that obscenity from out of the Ayatollah’s Iran?); stonings (at least the Soroya movie version); chemical gassing (thanks, Assad); barrel bombing (thanks, Assad); etc. — seems to me a particularly egregious practice (look at me! look at me! look at me!) and one that should undermine the publisher’s argument and cause.

Partisan causes — Christian missionary publications, for example; ISIS on display in the media, for another — turn death into art (like Nazis turning skin into lampshades) frequently, and I, and I hope others, abhor them for doing that to us.


Related: DiLonardo, Mary Jo.  “What are thought viruses?”  Mother Nature Network, August 27, 2015.

# # #

FTAC – Global Meld – Primary Reconsideration

10 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by commart in Notes On Reading BackChannels, Philology, Philosophy, Religion

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global society, Islam, Judaism, literary experience, religion, universalism, values

The question:

. . . . its very interesting to note that Judism and Islam are very similar. you have two systems biblical Judaism and rabbinical Judaism. we muslims have alhe sunat and ahl hadees. two sect one follows the Quran and the hadees while the other follows the Quran only. grin emoticon grin emoticon

Torah is the word of GOD. and Talmud is the commentry by the Rabbis. true?


Poor man — he could not have seen the loooooong answer coming, and neither could I who wrote it:

The books left to me by my synagogue’s former rabbi are The Torah — the Five Books of Moses — and the Nevi’im or “The Prophets”, which Wikipedia refers to as “the second main division of the Hebrew Bible”. It begins, “After the death of Moses the servant of the Lord, the Lord said to Joshua son of Nun, Moses’ attendant: / “My servant Moses is dead. Prepare to cross the Jordan, together with all this people, into the land which I am giving to the Israelites. Every spot on which your foot treats I give to you, as I promised Moses . . . .”

It looks like a sequel to me 🙂 , but for a language culture embedding and transmitting its codes and history in next generations, it’s powerful stuff.

It informs belief, and that’s enough, apparently, to provide culture its interior sense of mission.

With language art created and supplied, perhaps mysteriously so — there’s a subject for long discussion (first question: from whence comes the breath of inspiration? — artifact in text becomes available to interpretation: now the critics, the moral entrepreneurs, and the wise get to do their thing in the spirit of the work obtained.

This model of communications I think inescapable. We want meaning. We want to be more certain about something about which there can be no human certainty. And there you have it: volumes upon volumes of addendums, commentaries, and associated inspirational works — at least out of enthused or exuberant language cultures.

From Wikipedia on the Talmud:

The Talmud has two components. The first part is the Mishnah (Hebrew: משנה, c. 200 CE), the written compendium of Rabbinic Judaism’s Oral Torah (Torah meaning “Instruction”, “Teaching” in Hebrew). The second part is the Gemara (c. 500 CE), an elucidation of the Mishnah and related Tannaitic writings that often ventures onto other subjects and expounds broadly on the Hebrew Bible. The term Talmud can be used to mean either the Gemara alone, or the Mishnah and Gemara as printed together.

The whole Talmud consists of 63 tractates, and in standard print is over 6,200 pages long. It is written in Tannaitic Hebrew and Aramaic. The Talmud contains the teachings and opinions of thousands of rabbis on a variety of subjects, including Halakha (law), Jewish ethics, philosophy, customs, history, lore and many other topics. The Talmud is the basis for all codes of Jewish law and is much quoted in rabbinic literature.

___

When it comes to being Jewish, I’m not that Jewish: I have to look up everything, and I’m still ambivalent about re-reading The Torah, reading the Nevi’im; for scholarship, add: re-reading the Qur’an, and reading the Hadith (“Riyad-us-Saliheen” says the cover of my two-volume set).

It may be noted here that while Israel supports a Jewish-majority state, the state itself does not follow “Jewish law” but works off of a secular legal system while supporting the prerogatives of Jewish custom, e.g., Saturday as the day of rest (the U.S. does the same with its Christian majority: without the imprimatur of the law itself, Sunday is nonetheless recognized as the nation’s predominant day of rest, but it’s odd too within the folds of capitalism: the church goers go to church; the weekday nine-to-five workers have the day off; the printing presses continue publishing a thick newspaper for the day: however, many basic consumer businesses, starting with the grocery stores, remain open).

I suppose if the Torah, Nevi’im, and Talmud defined my existence in language, I would be quite a different person moving through the atmosphere created and bounded by those works.

The similarities sustained as time moves through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are there because the initial Jewish program — what Moses did not only with Jews but a “mixed multitude” (! — all who wished to leave Pharaoh and take their chances with the Jews) has proven attractive and robust. The Hebrews, being an ethnic cohort demarcated by language, could not share out the “Hebrewness” of the way in a universal manner (it could take in conversions, much as any may learn Arabic or Latin and become today scholarly and mysteriously authentic in identification with Islam or Catholicism). The opportunity to borrow ideas — and with Hillel the Elder modernizing Jewish thought about Judaism and making the same more accessible to converts — simply came along, imho, and here we are.

___

I / you / we and billions of others should not wish to (as Daesh may wish as indicated by its example) destroy worlds.

We need our inventory in language for its own sake.

We just don’t unnaturally build human languages. Esperanto did not make it. smile emoticon

However, we appear to need a supra-common ethical and moral platform from which to derive a few rules of universal good conduct.

We have elements in place like the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, but in our souls we cling to that which has been most familiar to us, i.e., our legacy in language as affected by the history and politics of our regions.

You asked a simple question. 🙂

And offered a sensible observation.

Oh what a little bit of stimulus can do!

What are your thoughts on culture and language, cultural updating, and and a religious progressivism?


Advice from a life-long heavy reader, the little boy always with a book: even given a lifetime of time in a library, we may read only so much, but as little as may cover individually, we may choose the breadth of our literary experience and, related to it, the expanse of our spiritual existence.

# # #

On Reading BackChannels – A Note on Small Adjustments

01 Friday May 2015

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Notes On Reading BackChannels

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BackChannels may place and remove some posts from time to time without explanation.  If a viewer finds a “URL Not Found” page . . . there’s no need for worry.

# # #

Rare Retraction – Tikrit – At Author’s Request

06 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by commart in Iraq, Notes On Reading BackChannels

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While Tikrit gets plenty of attention from major media, yesterday’s correspondent, name withheld, has requested retraction.  So done.  My apologies to those arriving here via the search engines.  The piece had provided some detail involving the Iranian side of the battle against ISIS; the cause cited in the writer’s request to quash the piece had to do with the rough English of the writing.

# # #

On Reblogging on BackChannels

22 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by commart in Notes On Reading BackChannels

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I’m not flapping my flippers on reblogs.  However, when impressed by relevance and substance in light of BackChannels’ own interests in  conflict, politics, and political psychology, I’m likely to pass the post along as a more elaborate form of linking, which laziness I indulge in too often.

In international politics, “Red-Green” stands for malign narcissism, power, and control, post-communist feudal at the Russian and other new nationalist wellsprings, Islamist wherever the al-Qaeda and Hezbollah main drives and affiliates wander.

# # #

Notes on Reading BackChannels

23 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by commart in Notes On Reading BackChannels

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Back Channels, blogging, notes

Web links not dated and not marked “n.d.” may be assumed to have been published on the same day as the post in which they’ve been noted.

* * *

Your host has been able to aggregate news items and comment on and around them freely to this point, but a number of prestigious publications, from The Economist to The New York Times, have started gating their product for a very few views before asking for tribute, and I may no longer access the same as freely as I have in past years.

Neither may you.

Countermeasures: develop a subscription kitty; attempt some / more primary virtual reporting.

Considering the news noted and commented on for this blog, the complaints are very, very small.

Nonetheless, the carving of the global English-reading audience has begun, and I would wish not to be captive to but a handful of major text-based media outfits.

* * *

The view rates for BackChannels, possibly the most obscure blog in the entire conflict universe, have doubled over the winter.  The numbers are still small but multiplied by days, they spark some interest: who is reading?  How may they be integrating what I’ve had to note about the axes of conflicts as defined by dimensions in political psychology?  Is there a formerly unquestioning Israel-hating anti-Semite Out There on whom it has dawned that the attitude itself is an issue that may be intellectually isolated, deconstructed, and dismissed as an artifact of legacy no longer useful?

Even one of such would change the world.

# # #

  • Compassion
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____________

Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner's own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.
___________

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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