Absolute Power x Close Associates & Family v Democracy, Open Competition, and Merit.
Would that real life were that simple, but for the Palestinians, most of them, real life remains too medieval and beset with corruption and greed. Credit the KGB for blocking the advance of western liberalism — and democracy and rule of law — over their captive or dead bodies, courtesy of a now Ageing Arab World and the habits and machinations of an equally ageing Old Kremlin.
I’ve been dulled by the sheer stupidity of repeated political cant and conversation, but this time with the Middle East Conflict (MEC) have at least both background (“Palestinian KGB”) and perhaps insight to offer in the cause not only of quelling medieval and tribal misery but also for cheerleading the arrival of a different and modern New World. Take as signal — and convenient juxtaposition — Russian KGB/FSB President Vladimir Putin’s apparent decision to draw back Russian forces brought to Ukraine’s border after having turned military “exercise” into an ambiguous and deadly enough threat not only to Ukraine but to an ordered world that has been working in the region of history after WWII. Putin’s will and ample leverage well demonstrated the power of the medieval outlook, but it may have run into a kind of thug’s “so what?” had invasion and war ensued (and quite cautious here, I’m following the retreat as observed in the Open Source).
Symbolically, Russia’s election to retrieve its forces following its “demonstration” may and should be it — the beginning of the end of the end 🙂 — for the more obvious play of the once barbaric, brutal, and feudal world, at least as regards the leadership and trajectory of states.
One hopes that with Israel’s most recent separation of deluded and violent parties — the “eternally” fist-shaking Israeli (“Nationalist”) and Palestinian (“Revolutionary”) forces will have reached their nadir in shared stupidity as the Palestinians prove captive to and exploited by their own leaders. As for those Israeli Nationalists, not only God but State Planners as well have set their boundaries, and all that is wanted should be just a little bit of insight by both into the causes of “East-West Conflict” where both have been made to stand in place while going nowhere in time.
Has The West lost courage and heart before Russia’s continuous press to undermine EU/NATO political coherence, cohesion, and resolve?
Have Moscow / Moscow-Tehran-associated chaos and conflict and their fallout in mass migration tired the western public and made some parts benevolent and others mean?
Have Moscow-aided (Taliban) and Tehran-sponsored terrorism (Hamas, Hezbollah) made us — citizens of the west — defensive and smaller than we were 20 years ago?
There should be a song, “Kompromat” being so much a theme with Moscow’s mafia-style influence on the world’s foreign affairs. Whether or not some number of western leaders or their subalterns — or family members — have been compromised and leveraged — and some have already been made to bow to Russian energy projects — is something I wouldn’t even pretend to know, but I would consider it possible.
Would Russian tanks invading Ukraine then not be bombed by Ukrainian and NATO forces — or defending Russian jets not be driven from the skies by the same?
We are about 20-1/2 years out from September 11, 2001 and our Soviet/post-Soviet old Cold War foe appears on the warpath unstoppable, facing only western opprobrium and sanctions, neither of which appear to have affected any of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, martial and political designs, philosophies, or, perhaps, critical inner-circle relationships.
EXCLUSIVE: Russia will soon have an assault force of 107,000 troops along Ukraine’s border, with an estimated 1,300 battle tanks, 3,700 drones, 1,300 artillery and mortar units and 380 multiple launch rocket systems —
🇺🇦🇷🇺US President Joe #Biden and German Chancellor Angela #Merkel agreed to call on #Russia to reduce its troops on the border with #Ukraine on Wednesday.
It's a move that reaffirmed their support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
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.”
My schematic for the personal journey and process known to malignant narcissists
Narcissistic Mortification –> Covering (humiliation and shame) / Splitting (the damaged child from the image of an heroic child) –> Gaslighting and other Willful Manipulation (to create and sustain an heroic image) –> Limitless Narcissistic Supply (the experiences of public glory, the roaring approval of crowds, the validations of humanity and God).
The power to (with impunity) threaten one’s targets is, of course, power. What those targets then do in the position of being threatened — and with Putin, boundlessly and without end — may or may not set the limits of that odious behavior.
Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists have been fighting in eastern Ukraine since shortly after Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. More than 14,000 people have died in the conflict, and efforts to negotiate a political settlement have stalled.
The Kremlin, which has not denied the troop movements, said on Sunday it was not moving towards war with Ukraine – but also that it would “not remain indifferent” to the fate of Russian speakers in the conflict-torn region.
Medieval leaders have ways of both boasting and lying their way into war.
While it should have been understand in the shadow of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that it would it would pick up the task of consolidating its “facts on the ground” — and it has certainly done that — it appears from this desktop that it has resolved to take the transformation of Crimea and Donbas further. It has, for example, installed an extraordinary new bridge into Crimea ne “Crimea Bridge” or “Kerch Strait Bridge” — all $3.7bn of it.
Vladimir Putin has opened a bridge between the Russian mainland and Crimea, tightening Russia’s hold over the contested peninsula, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
The 12-mile (19km), $3.7bn (£2.7bn) bridge is Moscow’s only direct road link to Crimea. Russia expects it will carry millions of cars and rail travellers and millions of tons of cargo each year. Previously, all car traffic passed over the Kerch strait by ferry or by passing through Ukraine.
It has, in fact, had a history of brutalizing Ukraine. The methods brought to bear — from “Little Green Men” to slanders involving the image of Nazi Ukraine as pervasive — should to all westerners (who might care to check Russian claims against factual data and timely testimony from multiple sources) be especially repulsive as such disinformation expresses contempt for those receiving it.
Do you respect people who lie to you?
Why should Ukrainians — or NATO — or Ukrainian Russian speakers respect Russia today for its massive “Active Measures” campaigns?
No wonder Vladimir has inspired the epithet that is “Putler”.
*
Russia says Ukraine is trying to provoke a conflict, while Kyiv has accused the Russian-backed separatists of increasing their attacks against government forces and Moscow of massing troops on its border.
Russia’s deflection of intent (“Accusation in a Mirror”) appears hackneyed today, but then one should not expect originality from a dictator whose desires would appear invested in a century (19th) far past its prime.
With the Open Source at my disposal, I could go on for a while longer, but what’s really on my mind is the “Moment of Decision”, i.e., that instant in time in which a choice must be made between freezing aggressive ambitions or going with them. As Russia last week left the West with a peaceful Easter Sunday, I expect that moment to arrive in two hours or seven, i.e., midnight in Kiev or earliest dawn. If those moments pass without incident out of the ordinary as regards Russian shelling and whatnot, Ukraine will remain tense but as is, which is not a happy prospect and rather mumbling at best. IF, on the other hand, Putin’s tanks power up, the world may be changed tomorrow, and Ukraine (and NATO) will have to face Russian barbarism and its implacable and unconscionable — well demonstrated in Syria — character and the reality-creating horror that seems always to accompany that character in its striving to create chaos wherever it goes and then be . . . taken seriously despite its moral bankruptcy and ugliness.
As Facebook responses — this one appeared on the Bukovsky Center page — and blog presentations differ, I have opted to let the blogging system work by adding URLs to the original text and allowing importation as commercial interests (Amazon’s) have made possible.
While Lloyd Billingsley has got right the description of Communist Totalitarianism, it just does not follow that the American Left and main portion of the Liberal Community has some Stalinist bent. Even the fashionable “far left” — short of the armed-up separatists who do fit Billingsley’s description from the “Far Out Left” and “Far White Right” (my terms) — places some premium on frank discussion and reporting with integrity. Some, unfortunately, have made alliance with the Soviet / post-Soviet remains of Communist Group Think and will swallow old Kool-Aid like the Boycott Divestitures and Sanctions (BDS) malarkey, but on the whole will report with integrity.
I have found enough in Patrice Cullors (“Marxist Trained” is part of her self-promotion) to both validate a number of race-related and systemic American issues.
The truths may be uncomfortable, but raising points in an open society undermines efforts to install a more deeply pernicious totalitarianism in America’s own open society — and by extension the still open (or remaining) democratic societies of EU/NATO. IF we in the West should wish to live in authentic (as opposed to Potemkin) democracies, we bear the burden of listening to earnest complaint and testimony and finding appropriate and best ways of responding to it and associated public and private realpolitik.
“Accusation in a Mirror”, a term derived from Kenneth L. Marcus’s eponymous essay (PDF) befits the hothouse atmospheres of both strident conservatives and edgy liberals as each accuses the other of attempting to established a communist or fascism totalitarian state in their areas of influence and operations.
Aside: I have long ago picked up on the idea that both communism and capitalism over-emphasize material well-being in their otherwise opposite philosophies, and if it’s true that such bipolar conflicts comes down to “owning the pie v sharing the pie”, the nation has other spiritual challenges. Personally, I would endorse the development of carefully constructed public-private compact with basic environmental and human interests and related principles and values foremost.
I would suggest to Lloyd Billingsley that he take in a less divisive and more magnanimous and realistic approach to an adjusted 21st Century politics; to Patrisse Cullors and others, black or white or other: let’s hear stories told with integrity while querying systemic shortcomings. Color — brown eyes or blue? — may be a “discriminator”, but what is one to do with hazel or flecked or green — or with skin cafe au lait, caramel, ochre, bronzed, freckled, eggplant, milky, peachy or with body types and facial features innumerable?
In my experience, nature more appreciates or favors variety than it does mono-cultures too isolated and too rigid to respond to the natural proliferation of antagonists (for the political portal associated with related science, see the Convention on Biological Diversity and its List of Parties).
For the time being, we’re having issues with perceived political power and empowerment and related injuries, injustices, jealousies, and resentments. While not everything may be repaired, we might choose to look ahead toward what needs may be diminished (starting with our own rancor) and what may be improved, better integrated, more loved, more appreciated.
I don’t want to spend too much time — or too much of your time — reinforcing what has become thematic on this blog: “Medieval v Modern”. However, there’s no evading forces backed by powerful wills intent on producing feudal power with extraordinary modern defense and intelligence technologies that lend themselves to the nightmares of totalitarian control.
Here’s the note.
From the Awesome Conversation
Both China and Russia practice and promote political absolutism in governance. More than convenience has been involved in their relationship — and in China’s stepping in to keep Tehran in the oil money it uses to fund its promotion of aggression by IRGC and proxies and further creation of chaos in the middle east. Regarding China’s threats to western power in this “hybrid warfare” age — so underhanded! — the smorgasbord is wide but not yet too strong.
In the process of blogging, I’ve found a convenient axis in “Medieval Absolutism v Modern Democratic Distribution of Power” (Medieval v Modern, essentially) and believe the New Nationalism and bents toward autocracy and authoritarianism (and corruption) run together. In that way, Xi, Putin, and Trump had been on similar pages in a rule book that doesn’t exist. The west for several hundred years has repeatedly turned away from Absolutism and the related admiration of singular and unquestionable authority. While I am much less familiar with China’s civilization than with Russia’s (and I may not get beyond tenderfoot with that), I would see the continued binding of Sino-Russo interests as inimical to the western path, its energies, and the greater spirituality that has made much of the bloc wondrously productive before the backsliding of some toward the feudal mode.
Feudal societies are never democratic, just, or humane. In Russia, the absolute power of the sovereign has covered the ownership — what else would you call it? — of persons and property as alike. When Russian air forces have bombed hospitals in Syria (and White Helmets who arrive to rescue the injured and retrieve the dead), it has been without regard to the humanity of the persons, helpless patients, caring visitors, the doctors, caught in that hell. The dismal character of that brand of leadership now paints its own horrifying portrait for viewing around the world daily.
China has sent is final message to the world with its own production of a panopticonic society that can view all of the people all the time through their phones (conversations, locations, purchases) without challenge or question. Great Britain with is public monitoring cameras and Snowden with his revelations regarding how far technology has come may suggest some worrisome potentials — and all gets hashed in freedom in the west through the open press — but China has gone the distance with its inherently paternal and degrading assessment of its human complement — and don’t let the Communist banner fool you: the state has become wealthy with global trade — and the western portion a large part of it — and it has been minting billionaires like no other state on earth while engaged in questionable international development and lending practices (see the above noted “contemporary political sins” post).
The “superpowers”, once defined by their nuclear capability, have on this one life-producing planet no choice but to compete or wrestle with one another over money, political philosophy, and both the character of power and the nature of our humanity. As an American, I promote an earnest freedom of conscience and moral agency and leave to pursue individual interests in what should be a competitive and meritocratic society even though it has its “feudalism” in the private sector in which family and social interests combine. Also as an American, one needs must endorse and support integrity and transparency in governance and protest, question, and resist efforts to install family interests and “great leaders” who may then (as Viktor Orban has done in Hungary, as Donald Trump appears to have attempted in the United States) choose to bend and twist their “democratic” states into private fiefs.
Republicans, no less committed to Israel as well as liberalism of the west, have been left to either join or repudiate an authoritarian assault or solution to American governance. Again, enough switched sides to get Biden elected. That doesn’t make Biden great; it just means the electorate refused to go further down the line with the then incumbent President Trump.
At least for Arizona, Goldwater’s long gone, or so it seems, and this most modern woman has been making her mark.
I don’t have a crystal ball, but if I did, I would see the Republican Party distilling down and out both its most reactionary representatives and anti-state extremists.
For the Democrats, the Far Out Left presents other issues, mostly holdovers from the ferment of the 1960s and the flow-down from Russia’s “Active Measures” — investment: $1B during the Vietnam War Era — some of which comes through in our environmental policies and some, alas, freighted with the Palestinian Solidarity Hoax. For the Dems too, the “Modern and Moderate” had best get to work against a fringe that seems to have gathered power but has nowhere to go with it. It too proves itself archaic.
Character ‘done in’ Trump’s chances for a second term.
On YouTube, “Republicans Voting Against Trump (RVAT)” and the same but titled “Republican Accountability Project (RAP)” provide plenty of material for again regarding Republicans as plain old good solid Americans, much relieving more faddish and unthinking Americans of their preference for demonizing one another over taking more sensible courses in facing challenges together and defining and resolving issues.
Stanislav Lunev’s claim that the KGB invested $1 billion in America’s own Vietnam Era Anti-War movement stands (as it has with Congress), and while we may appreciate grounded environmental policies, we may from this perspective question the fallout from that meddling in political culture. Putin, by the way, has continued the KGB/FSB tradition of meddling so well that both the Obama and Trump Administrations took action to expel the “known spies”, i.e., the crowd working under diplomatic cover in Maryland and San Francisco, California. BackChannels has commented on one aspect of that lesser and little known world in “Diplomatic Harassment–Short Compilation” (Dec. 29, 2016).
BackChannels 