For more than a decade, the U.S. and the West have fought Islamic terrorism predominantly on the military front. Strategists have completely neglected to treat — or even address — the ideological and psychological foundations of the mind.
I sometimes feel alone with this blog when reflecting at lay level+ on relationships involving language, cognition, and behavior, i.e., the psychology of language or, I suppose “psycholinguistics”. It’s therefore most heartening to see Tawfik Hamid similarly engaged, albeit with a different nomenclature.
Call it “Brain-istan” or “Intellectual Battlespace” (thanks, Tammy), reference “psycho-biological” or “psycholinguistics” we’re advancing together along lines addressing pervasive (also archaic and adverse) cultural programming.
Easy does it though.
Even though Hamid notes, “Islamic radicals force women to wear bland, shapeless and colorless dresses, and forbid the expression of any physical beauty,” I / you / we / they know that radicalism falls far short of adoption (on that, reference “Shimmer” around here). For rather lovely pictures of colorful Islamic dress, web search images related to the breaking news “Nigerian beauty pageant“.
One may hope for culturally convergent evolution to smooth over the rough edges of distinct cultures. I’d rather witness global peaceful cultural co-evolution — and it’s needed with as many languages and ways intact and included as may be possible — than what’s been going down in Syria (but, hey, that’s just me).
Will the report by the UN inspectors, the conclusion of whose work Russia, at a minimum, proposes waiting for, help to resolve the dispute between Putin and that portion of the international community that supports him, on the one hand, and, on the other, the leaders of a number of Western countries, including several regional powers, who have been certain from the outset that the use of chemical weapons was the work of the Syrian president and that he therefore needs to be dealt a retaliatory strike?
The whole world is watching, also judging, thinking, weighing, and a greater percentage of its citizens, from Riyadh to Islamabad, have today the intellectual tools for separating substance from bullshit.
In the above cited piece, Vitaly Naumkin pitches the Putin line — no surprise there — even while knowing that view also may be subject to dissection.
From whence came this:
Who held the camera, edited the recording, produced the music?
Who manufactured the projectile, the rocket engine, the launch platform?
If the production represented a rebel false flag, why is the launch team not in Syrian uniforms?
Would that not have been more authentic?
Or would it have been too much?
Also, who has the reputation for lying baldly?
How did that come about?
When is it going to stop?
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“We don’t know if Syria will accept the offer, but if imposing international control over chemical weapons stored in the country can help to avoid military strikes, we are immediately going to start working with Damascus,” explained Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov yesterday.
American discredit in the region seems to relate primarily to Bush’s dumb lie over Iraq WMDs, but the removal of one of the world’s most vicious dictators and his army plus the restoration of the Marsh Arabs and the securing of the Kurdish Community against Saddam Hussein’s depredations, which included gassing, would seem to make for a bright side. Add in the possibility of modern open democracy (MOD, lol), access to international news, and modern education, global in breadth and concerns — perhaps those are worth something too.
While remnants of the still leftward Arab finger in Iraq often points to America for subsequent bloodletting, it really has to point back to itself for the internecine and sectarian bloodshed that continues by way of its own hands.
Russian discredit starts with the accusing and contemptuous language of the old propaganda and drifts off into the cesspool of known banditry, corruption, dictatorship, and culture-permeating mafia technique.
Even so, Russia has become a modern state.
Perhaps it faces a primarily medieval post-modern question: if “information is power” how much power may one (man, organization) have over information and its effects in influence, intimidation, and perception?
It’s the question of the day.
The post-KGB KGB-infused (at minimum by Putin) FSB and post-Soviet new oligarch Russia has still in place old business, intellectual, and state political architecture, and while it has demonstrated its power to transfer wealth to its own, perhaps, and drive a Far Out Left propaganda press, perhaps, Syria continues to come down, day by day, hour by hour, and within miles of Bashar al-Assad’s own feet, and there is no one, including Russia, who wants to fiddle with it other than to let it burn a little more safely — without chemical weapons, if Putin is sincere in this matter — and toward a secular path, as no one between NATO and Russia wants Al Qaeda or Chechnya II either, and the cultural results of apparent if superficial convergent evolution by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Qatar toward the west — neither of those official Al Qaeda or Muslim Brotherhood buddies either — remain to be seen.
But what rankles many analysts about this paragraph is that it ignores Putin’s own role in enabling the already quite awful violence, as well as the extremism it’s inspired. Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s regime has killed so freely and so wantonly in part because it knows Putin will protect it from international action. Putin has also been supplying Assad with heavy weapons. It’s a bit rich for him to decry violence or outside involvement at this point.
I believe the general public — and not merely the generally paranoid — have for a long time had a good sense about the world’s secret worlds, and that whether involving business (intelligence) or government (intelligence). With an American cuckoo and two peacocks in, out, or avoiding dock, as it were, and publications like Spies for Hire, the dawning realization that our “military-industrial complex” includes a $52 billion annual spook bill may take some time developing weight.
Talk about “cloud computing”!
Involved are competitive urges — to “get the goods” on an adversary, alley, customer, or supplier (perhaps) — within an era of decaying or reorganizing cultural, political, and social boundaries. The Ayatollah’s nuclear program, for example, may present an “existential threat” to mine, grant me that, in Israel, but the problem is with the Ayatollah’s power and ambitions bound up with nuclear weapons technology and not my hip Iranian friends on Facebook — or, for that matter, perhaps, here and reading, thinking, reconsidering, formulating, imagining, defining, bonding, separating, all in new ways.
New poetry.
Updated poetics.
The questions outside the box may not be too far from where they are inside the box: who’s looking at what with what expectations?
One of my correspondents wrote to me this morning, “I contend that with the NSA capabilities the Believers will drill more deeply into the bedrock of their faith for unbreakable codes.”
So they may.
Not too long ago, the same person had me scouring the Internet for radioactive clay disks (a Believer would understand).
Whaddayaknow . . . .
I see the link has gone private. But that was then: I had to add “rock” to “radioactive” find the above memory serving analog.
Today’s environment has been affected by Fukushima Daiichi and, indeed, clay-related solutions may be involved in solving that disaster and show up tops today on similar searches — and then trust the National Security Agency (or Booz Allen and Hamilton — who knows?) to do similar things a billion times faster.
String theory.
And there are so many “strings” extant!
And some, I hope, get the alphasoup metonymic overlay and tonal jumble just about right.
“Political Spychology” — has a nice ring to it.
Put it to use.
Your way.
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China’s had a bad case of patent contempt goin’ on, but I think it has so far avoided Enormous Public Presence as regards its spy programs, but both the U.S. and Russia have had their curious and free enough among journalists (not to mention again the three little birds that have so recently flown off their own electromagnetic disks) — and more to come, Polonium notwithstanding, I’m sure. For those interested in the shadows built and cast by Big Governments, I recommend reading both Spies for Hire and The New Nobility.
With Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in play, no one really cares about the details: with Syria, the threshold ventured in March would seem to have been crossed in August, scaling up a dollop of death in one context to a brazen full-scale assault — 1,400 dead, 400 of them children, according to the Obama Administration — on innocents.
Must something be done?
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MOSCOW — Syria on Monday quickly welcomed a call from Russia, its close ally, to place Syrian chemical arsenals under international control, then destroy them to avert a U.S. strike, but did not offer a time frame or any other specifics.
Whether a disingenuous gesture to buy time or a sincere one to wage its war with the will of men and conventional machinery and materiel rather than with invisible, odorless clouds of poison, the gesture would seem to acknowledge culpability and guilt, and that with Russian encouragement to assemble, surrender (to international control), and destroy chemical weapons stores while also joining the signatories to the Chemical Weapons Convention.
It appears that a kind of monster born in German laboratories, manufactured in U.S. subsidiaries, and shipped out to several middle east states under cover of the “dual use” use label — all along the conception, development, and delivery line knew it would come to this, even though Syria worked out the details itself — must now be contained and destroyed in an active, “existential”, zero-sum kind of battleground.
Rick Ungar writing for Forbes today notes well the motivation: “Putin understands very well that he stands to gain far more by being the man responsible for taking Assad’s chemical stockpile out of the game than he stood to gain by being responsible for any future use of the same.”
It’s hard remaining evil when one wants most to look good and to be perceived as just and heroic.
Still, one recognizes that one recognizes a correct and right course and side, and that is the consequence of the presence of conscience.
And if Putin has a conscience . . .
😉
It’s not all public relations.
The world will not care whether Obama or Putin or other forces remove from battlefields — and if for all time, then good — the chemical weapons option. It is the other side of the equation — the one that would forestall the wanting to use such weapons — that would seem troublesome, i.e., the cultivation of conscience sufficient to turn a destructive capacity and drive, also the license afforded grandiose ambitions and delusions, toward courses more empathetic, kind, liberating, noble, and productive.
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Aside: a world that wants for basic resources, starting with energy and possibly ending with oxygen, must tame war itself, even if starting with the most barbaric of its rough edges, for the contemporary mix of exceedingly dangerous nuclear technologies and equally fragile alternative wonders (like solar-electric farms) demands that the exceptionally egotistical and reckless among leaders — those who too readily sacrifice others, including their own constituents and their children — be no more.
Such have become everyone’s monsters.
Fast Reference
By dragging Truthout URLs to this section, I have not joined the left, but I have as broad a spectrum of civil and gracious friends as I believe it possible to have in the online social networks, and so, as may we all, I get a good walk around the dimension of subjects of interest.
“Look, I’m not just talking about Snowden and Syria,” Mr. Obama said. “What about Pussy Riot? What about your anti-gay laws? Total jackass moves, my friend.”
Who else in St Petersburg publicly declared, as he did, that Syria’s “so-called chemical weapons attack” was in fact “a provocation staged by rebels, in hope of winning extra backing from their foreign backers”?
In making that categorical claim, the Russian leader left little room for compromise and ended up looking, perhaps, somewhat isolated.
For real, Bridget Kendall writing for the BBC reports that eleven countries endorsed a statement agreeing that evidence associated with Syria’s most recent chemical weapons attack “pointed to Syrian government culpability.”
As suggested here, also recently, the world is witness to a war about integrity and power.
Indeed, it is one thing for Putin to go about the business of restoring Russian grandeur and might and adjusting his state in a Russian way to the new day — and let Russians respond to that as they may: it is another thing to abet the state-driven barbarism on display daily in both Iran and Syria and to become identified with it.
Kremlin propaganda holds that it is the US State Department that organized the 2011–2012 anti-Putin rallies across Russia—the largest pro-democracy demonstrations since 1991. Russian opposition leaders who visit the US are accused of “treason.” Just as in Communist times, all human rights and democracy causes are declared to be part of the West’s “anti-Russian” agenda, and those who oppose the current regime, by implication, are deemed to be a Western “fifth column.”
So this theme — Putin’s Russia as a piratical state — has been on my mind.
At times, and of the two presidents of interest this week as regards the debacle in Syria, it has been Putin who has seemed the more open (then, say, Clinton on Benghazi) and more moderately progressive of the two (one may note that the promotion of secular values would seem a part of the defense of the Assad regime).
And then too Putin appears to back a real monster — a regime capable of devouring its own cities and gassing its own children — in Syria while yanking RT from the brink of critical, dispassionate, insightful, self-assessing journalism and placing it back firmly in the propaganda business:
The United States, Britain, and France are unwavering in their assertions that the Assad government and the Syrian Arab army were the perpetrators of the chemical weapon attack, despite no evidence to substantiate these claims. These governments seem to be sure that Damascus is guilty on the basis of it preventing a UN investigation team from visiting the site, and when investigators eventually did reach the area, it didn’t matter to them because they argued that the Syrian government had destroyed all evidence of wrongdoing.
Assad’s opponents have constructed a deeply cynical and hysterical political narrative that Western leaders are now parroting in unison.
When the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left lets go of the Vietnam War — the barricades, glory, lingo, and long hair (well, maybe that’s neither here nor there) — it will again something new and humanist instead of peacocky old script.
My opinion aside, the “western logic” on Syria might not disagree — Russia gave UN 100-page report in July blaming Syrian rebels for Aleppo sarin attack | McClatchy — but it might also ask what if instead of “deeply cynical and hysterical” (was somebody in the intelligence reporting channels caught crying and throwing a hissy fit?), the west’s multiple separated (x nation x department) intelligence analysts were NOT being ordered to The Party Line (whose? which one?) but were quite appropriate relaying their best, most comprehensive observations and assessments.
The western intelligence communities certainly have a problem with the Syria chemical weapons stories, but it’s one familiar to police worldwide: a crime may be evident but clues seemingly absent.
The art of committing a crime, including, say, a war crime, and methodically obliterating its chain of evidence, probably all the way back to the tire tracks of the launcher, wants for a mafia-minded spirit.
Again, something happened, and, mysteriously, no one saw it — or no available and credible witness seems to have seen it.
Still, the descending cloud barely warrants a look-up, for web searching strings involving “Putin” and a variety of socially negative adjectives (no need here to list them) yields fair entertainment if not enlightenment.
Under Putin, the Kremlin has become a court, where favorites strain to please, and the price of a minister’s post is $10 million. Meanwhile, with 350,000 employees, the FSB, successor of the KGB, has grown bigger than some European armies.
May we assume the FSB will be a force for the good of the Russian people and of mankind as well?
I’ve unfortunately / fortunately just recently learned how to drag a URL to the composition page of my blog, so herewith and with dates added (where conveniently found) just a few relevant titles:
Putin’s anti-corruption effort could very well suffer a similar fate. Today, he faces his own rights-based problem: Russian elites believe that they are entitled to rob the country blind. Indeed, it is an essential part of their informal contract with Putin. They are so convinced of the sanctity of this bargain that they are ready to oppose the anti-corruption effort tooth and nail.
It is no longer possible to distinguish where organized crime ends and the state begins in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. An extraordinary 17-minute video just exhibited by the anti-corruption website Russian Untouchables shows how an elite crime syndicate headed by a longtime gangster, Dmitry Klyuev, and including active agents of the Russian Interior Ministry and Moscow tax offices, managed to steal close to $1 billion from state coffers in fraudulent tax claims.
But it also turns out that much of the hot money held in the Cypriot banking system is Russian. Russian companies like the low taxes that come with having entities in Cyprus. Because of the wink, wink, nod, nod relationship between Cyprus and Russia, rubles deposited in Cypriot banks are as untraceable as dollars once were in Swiss bank accounts, according to Dmitry Gudkov, an opposition politician (about whom more in a moment).
The good news if you click on the link directly above, you will be reading The Moscow Times; the bad news is for how long one could muckrake on this theme — and, frankly, how silly it all gets. Of course, also with the watch story and much else — leather jackets, watches . . . — the means and values reflected would seem the very mirror, nothing less, of the western glamorization of wealth.
You might say,
What happens in Moscow stays in Moscow.
_____
Sure it does.
* * *
Hollywood writers know this old saw: “The good guy isn’t always good; the bad guy isn’t always bad.”
In the photo section of the above cited post, this note appears:
“The world is used to images of Putin as a virile master or Judo and no-holds-barred political infighting. But the films shows Putin in a much different light, as a lonely, exhausted man cut off from the world by his job and stubbornly fending off physical decline. “Politically speaking, he’s light-years away from me,” Seipel says. “It also took me a while to gradually understand what makes him tick. Still, I can’t say that I disliked him as a human being.”
One may leave that to Russia’s voters and the complex of relationships and values that today inform Russian society.
If as the quotation from Foreign Policy suggests, “Russian elites believe that they are entitled to rob the country blind,” the goose may run short one day on golden eggs.
Says a critic at 0:0:28: “There is only one word for the KGB personality. The word is ‘control’.”
* * *
* * *
“You’ve got to hand it to the West, we’ve taken something from them,” he said, as he recalled “packs” of 300 to 500 bikes blasting through Moscow at night, leaving traffic police helpless.
“But we’ve rethought it and took a completely different path,” he said.
Indeed, the club has become a polar opposite of this “outlaw past,” especially since 2009, when Putin, then the Prime Minister, first attended their bike show.
Old or new, what follows are just a few links addressing the role of humor in Syria’s agony.
* * *
On the Facebook page of the village’s artists, which bears the name “Posters of Occupied Kafr Nabl,” over 320 posters have been posted from the beginning of the rebellion until now. One, from the beginning of the year portrays Assad standing in pools of blood wearing a visored cap, with outstretched arms declaring “the situation is calm.”
We are keen to catch up, but neither of us wants to attract the attention of Syria’s secret police, so coffee is out of the question (the cafés are thick with mukhabarat). Instead, we keep walking, and as we walk and talk, Amjad tells me the latest checkpoint jokes.
But how to face those who film, upload and advertise such videos in the only aim of manipulating innocent children for their personal aims to incite mutual killings?
In our search for an answer to this question, “Bidayyat” came to the conclusion that irony is one of the few means capable to resist violence, hatred and sectarian killing. Irony prevails over hate speech, as it uses the more human impulses of laughter, joy, dancing and sarcasm.
Therefore, we produced this sarcastic video in the aim and hope that the two children of opposite will someday live side by side in dignity and freedom in a new Syria, free of tyrants and sectarian hatred.
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