Category Archives: Political Psychology

FTAC: The Yankee Responds

23 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology

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Article of Interest: 

https://www.eu-foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/21/analysis-from-the-su-24-crisis-to-the-moscow-ankara-rapprochement-leadership-and-foreign-policy-doctrines/

Passage of Interest: 

From our comparative analysis, it emerges how both Russia and Turkey present astonishing similarities in their leaderships styles. It is important to outline such feature of the nations’ political life because, being both “leader-politics” countries, the style of their leaders influences greatly the shaping of the national political agenda and the strategies used by the states to pursue such agendas.

To sum up, one could say that all the facts taken into account here highlight the presence in both countries totalitarian democracy regime, centred on the figure of the all-powerful leader. None of the leaders actually ever rejected the principles of the pluralistic state. In the official national narrative, both of them could be overthrown by a democratic election. But why should this happen, when they embody the essence of their national identity. Just like Putin is THE Russian man, Erdogan image is moulded on THE Turkish one.

“In the official national narrative, both of them could be overthrown by a democratic election. But why should this happen, when they embody the essence of their national identity. Just like Putin is THE Russian man, Erdogan image is moulded on THE Turkish one.”

Perhaps if each were more secure with such an assertion, the press in each state would be free (it’s an easy look-up as to how they are not) and their political rivals less often inhibited, jailed, muzzled, or murdered.

The truth is each may be wrong about himself (there’s also an interesting psychology at play in their “malignant narcissism” and respective kleptocracies), and that’s why open and vibrant national conversations supported by “fair and free elections” matter in democracies — and not at all in dictatorships.

Additional Reference

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2017/russia

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2017/turkey

https://rsf.org/en/ranking

https://rsf.org/en/russia

https://rsf.org/en/turkey

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Also in Media – TRT Live Coverage of Turkish Referendum

16 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Turkey

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https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/08/11/notes-on-erdogans-emerging-regime/ – 8/11/2016.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/08/10/ftac-putin-and-erdogan/ – 8/10/2016

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/07/21/also-in-media-the-countercoup/ – 7/21/2016

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/07/18/also-in-media-erdogans-islamist-mobs-know-that-their-moment-has-finally-arrived-coffee-house/ – 7/18/2016 (outbound reference)

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/07/17/dictatorships-putins-erdogans-different-talks-same-walk/ – 7/17/2016

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/06/30/putins-swipe-at-nato-via-erdogan/ – 6/30/2016

“At the end of the day”, which has come this day to Istanbul, Turkey will have as “Presidential System of Government”, i.e., as suggested by the above video from Moscow, another state featuring a paranoid “centralized government” featuring an autocrat, his military, including secret police, and his aristocracy.

 The amendments were received with heavy criticism from opposition parties and non-governmental organisations, with criticism focusing particularly on the erosion of the separation of powers and the abolition of parliamentary accountability. Constitutional legal experts such as Kemal Gözler and İbrahim Kaboğlu claimed that the changes would result in the Parliament becoming effectively powerless, while the executive president would have controls over the executive, legislative and judiciary.[36][37] On 4 December, the Atatürkist Thought Association (ADD), Association for the Support of Contemporary Living (ÇYDD) and the Trade Union Confederation held a rally in Ankara despite having their permissions revoked by the Governor of Ankara, calling for a rejection of the executive presidential system on the grounds that it threatened judicial independence and secular democratic values.[38]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_constitutional_referendum,_2017

https://turkeypurge.com/freedom-house-turkey-suffers-worst-decline-in-freedoms-in-last-decade – 2/1/2017

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2017/turkey

——

http://www.dw.com/en/turkeys-constitution-guarantees-press-freedom-but-thats-not-the-whole-story/a-37768976 – 3/1/2017:

“Those who report critically land behind bars,” stated Carl-Eugen Eberle. The media law expert heads the German branch of the Vienna-based International Press Institute (IPI), a global network of publishers, journalists and industry insiders. IPI actively supports press freedom and, like similar organizations such as Reporters Without Borders or Writers-in-Prison, it appeals to political leaders, sends letters and travels to problematic countries.

Since the coup attempt in July 2016 and the resulting state of emergency in Turkey, the state of freedom of press in Turkey has drastically worsened, according to IPI. Reporters Without Borders has spoken of “repression on an otherwise unknown scale.”

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FTAC: Moscow, Islamic Terrorism –> Reactionary Politics

11 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology

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Old message on this message but perhaps new distillation.

The prompt for conversation was a Henry Farrell piece appearing in The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/04/10/hungarys-government-wants-to-shut-down-its-most-prominent-university-that-may-be-backfiring/ —

Lines of compatible feudal power: Putin –> Assad, Khamenei; Putin–> Orban, Le Pen; Putin –> Erdogan; Putin –> Donald J. Trump.

Putin is not asking for cooperation, imho, but rather for a revived feudal politics pitting all against all for time while Russia ramps up its own military-industrial complex as a major driver of its internal economy.

The sweethearts of EU and NATO who promote greater international cooperation and integration through shared humanist principles plus open passage plus trade haven’t perhaps relayed to their populations the complete criminal character of Moscow’s intentions and its methods, including the channeling, I believe, of Islamic Terrorism in target states to produce reactionary politics.

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/09/syria-assad-isil-background/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/23/moscows-rules-a-module/https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/23/moscows-rules-a-module/

BackChannels believes Putin’s Moscow has encouraged political polarization in its targets by using “active measures” to produce the “New Nationalists” (like Le Pen, Orban, and Trump) and sustain a still strident “Red-Green Alliance” — Old Comrades and Neo-Islamists — in the west.  The main thing has been to get the “Brown vs Red-Green” extremism going while working with its destabilizing effects on true democratic politics.

Mission accomplished?

Yes — but at the same time, Moscow’s grand scheme may be close to being found out.

Related in the News

Moscow’s demonstrations of barbarism in Syria and Ukraine may underscore the direction of its internal intents.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/04/syria-war-showroom-russian-arms-sales-160406135130398.html

Kleptocracies are the cancers of states, and Putin, the KGB/FSB, and Russia’s “oligarchs” have had a field day enjoying the full flow of Russia’s productive assets far at the expense of Russians separated from the circles of centralized power.  Toward the end or as declining cash reserves produce hardship throughout the state, wartime spending may become the heavy dessert found at the bottom of the devil’s barrel, for fear plus the intimidation that coincides with tests of loyalty may open pockets.

“Washington”, a metonym used the same way here as “Moscow” to represent the state and its leadership, knows that the Moscow-Tehran axis lies and, quite possibly, that it channels — through indirect manipulation — Islamic Terrorism (by choosing to fight the west and western-backed or western-endorsed everything first — “Moscow” cannot abide classical liberalism; by using old communist cadre and Islamists to sow the chaos in the world that it may then claim to stand as champion against (!) — convenient look-ups: “Terry Nichols, Philippines”, “Zawahiri, Russia”, and “Moscow Apartment Bombings” (HUGE false flag, that one): and of course there’s no questioning the existence of the “Moscow-Tehran” nexus in power and the continuing relationships both have with Hamas and Hezbollah and others (start with PFLP).

BackChannels believes that Washington has known all along that deals with Moscow and Tehran would not prove worth the ink used to sign them.

Moreover, if BackChannels and others believe Moscow complicit in the incubating of ISIS in Syria (look up Kyle Orton’s work on the matter), then it only makes sense to cut out the nonsense implied by the prospect of “cooperating” with Moscow in the projection of its related totalitarian narrative.

Also contributing to the above thinking:  Russia has nearly 100 years of combined 20th and 21st Century history as an entity approving of or inured to terror as a political tool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_and_the_Soviet_Union

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Syrian Protesting Chemical Attacks, Lauding Trump’s Countermeasure, Shouted Down – Links to Soviet Era Antecedents

09 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Great Britain and United Kingdom, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Syria

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https://twitter.com/hassan_akkad/status/850798781473882112

Greater awareness of the Soviet Era history of the Far Left may help make greater sense of Hassan Akkad’s recent experience.

In relation to yesteryear:

According to Stanislav Lunev, GRU alone spent more than $1 billion for the peace movements against the Vietnam War, which was a “hugely successful campaign and well worth the cost”.[3] Lunev claimed that “the GRU and the KGB helped to fund just about every antiwar movement and organization in America and abroad”.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures

Lunev, Stanislav and Ira Winkler. Through the Eyes of the Enemy: Russia’s highest ranking military defector reveals why Russia is more dangerous than ever. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1998.

In relation to now:

Moscow’s Rules — A Module

Perhaps Great Britain’s version of America’s New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left should wish to recover the memory of it’s being played by Moscow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Peace_Council
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Great_Britain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_and_the_Soviet_Union

Vladimir Putin’s fascist nationalist revanche — that thing once again anchored by secret police, the adulation of a Great Leader, and the reappearance of deeply patronized (and compromised) aristocracy — appears to have proven George Orwell as relevant today as back when.

Have another look at the silencing of the one lone protester for Syrian lives at the British “Stop the War UK” event:

https://twitter.com/TehmoorKhalid/status/850388943422070784

After a video of the encounter video was shared widely online, Mr Akkad told the BBC: “I didn’t see them protesting against the chemical attacks, I didn’t see them protesting against Putin bombing Syria for the last two years.

“I wanted to go to that protest and I wanted to observe.

“I went to the protest and I saw a group of 30 people with placards, not a single mention of Assad.

“All the placards are against Donald Trump and they’re repeating baseless slogans with their megaphones.”

Fisher, Megan.  “Syrian refugee ‘felt oppressed’ by Stop the War protest.”  BBC, April 9, 2017.

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FTAC: Syria – “Expect ‘Mission Creep'”

08 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Russia, Syria, United States of America

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Posted to YouTube by The New York Times, April 7, 2017.

Comment:

The public presentation of conflict may attempt to keep separate Syria, Ukraine, Russia, and Iran, but I don’t think the Kremlin (this is a good comment for Kremlin Watch) has an “Off” button in association with the defense of the autocratic feudal past that each dictatorship represents. Expect “mission creep”.

The inflammatory header now running in the UK’s The Sun: “‘ONE STEP FROM WAR’ Furious Russia warns Trump he has ‘completely ruined’ relations with Moscow after Syria gas attack revenge bombing – as Putin sends warship to the Med” – https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3275613/donald-trump-us-attacks-syria-chemical-attack-sarin-latest-news/

And at this time in the more moderate European News:

http://www.euronews.com/2017/04/08/un-urges-restraint-as-washington-and-moscow-clash-over-syria

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FTAC – Syria and the Checking of Feudal Political Absolutism

07 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology

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Leave the Left (and Far Right) alone!

Post-Soviet “Active Measures” and related infiltration into EU / NATO intellectual assets may account for the promotion of polarized “Brown v Red-Green” politics.

The post-Cold War narrative arc spans American Administrations, but the general public (I’ve become accidentally a little bit specialized) tends to see the moment, i.e., a span of months to years, when it should be seeing decades of process in removing the holdovers from the Soviet Era.  For good reasons, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi are gone, but it’s at Assad’s Syria, the gateway to Iran in the old politics coming apart, that Putin visibly returned to the old KGB walk and the reinforcement of old relationships. As no one in the west has wanted another “cold war” or a strong “Moscow” on the tracks that it’s on, the purchase of time combined with sanctions and deflated oil pricing has substantially weakened the Moscow-Damascus-Tehran (more truly, “Moscow-Tehran” axis).

Now: enter Trump.

Just so it’s known: Moscow’s cash reserves have been deeply drawn down not only by years of reduced oil revenues and political sanctions but by the regime’s own abuse of the nascent Russian business system and the flight of capital from it. Most of what isn’t at hand has been parked in the western (rule-of-law) banking system or similarly stable high-value assets (most obviously real estate), and that may add to the discouragement of Moscow’s propensity for armed aggression. However, Putin is a bit of a wildcard as regards his own behavior, and he knows that when faced with a nuclear gambit, the United States will stand firm but elide the issue, returning that aspect of war to equilibrium.

For the Cold War days, moving “Jupiter rockets” sufficed to fully resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis. http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/moment.htm

In this day, NATO may have forward dual use conventional-nuclear warheads, giving paranoid Moscow perhaps some legitimate fits as regards its own state of risk. Here is the kind of article one runs into when encountering the nuclear arms control field:

http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2017/02/07/progress_on_strategic_arms_control_110760.html

To stay (in the old sense of that word) the course toward nuclear exchange, diplomacy and indirect confrontation have held off the contemplation of direct conflict engagement between Russian and NATO and western forces, but as history tells time and again with despots, that kind of leadership busts through its own boundaries, internal, psychological, external, political until firmly checked.

I think what you’re going to see in Syria will be the “checking” of Moscow’s revanchist (Soviet-style) ambitions and encouragement for it to engage the west in a once again responsible fashion.

It may help to keep in mind, whatever conclusions may be drawn here, that Russia has its own robust internal politics now forming up some challenge to the regime even though the regime holds the strong hand in its expression of absolute power.

The Obama Administration for both political and practical purposes put off confrontation in the field with the “phantoms of the Soviet” most likely to buy time, encourage change, and both financially and politically weaken the regimes that require politics in the feudal mode to sustain their own kleptocracies (“Different Talks — Same Walk!” is the BackChannels trope for how those relationships hold together).

Arguments about the legitimacy of political power are arguments about the future:

“What is to be done?”

“How are we to live?”

“Moscow”, the metonym for the Russian State as devised and held together by President Putin, knows how to make itself look good in superficial ways, but its less remarked positions have not been so wonderful.

Web search “Russia, Economy” brought up these three news pieces a few minutes ago:

http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/07/news/economy/russia-us-syria-economy-sanctions/

http://rbth.com/business/2017/04/05/poll-the-economy-is-now-more-important-to-russians-than-crimea_735282

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/feb/21/anthony-tata/how-have-sanctions-impacted-russias-economy/

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/08/12/also-in-media-an-economy-that-did-not-want-to-grow-the-russia-file-kennan-institute-blog/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/16/russias-nuclear-scarum/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/09/russias-pr-cocktail-new-nationalism-meets-falling-reserves-with-religion/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/08/21/russia-flexes-and-goes-hungry/

Related Opinion

http://www.russia-direct.org/opinion/why-does-russia-continue-protect-assad-syria 4/20/2016

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St. Petersburg Metro Blast – Ten Dead, Thirty Injured – Whodunit?

03 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, BCND - BackChannels News Day, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Russia

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BackChannels doesn’t know which way to go with the latest reports of the bombing of a subway car in St. Petersburg — cynical or sincere?

False flag (remember the “Moscow Apartment Bombings“) or authentic independent action by an enemy of the state?

Islamic terrorists or domestic dissenters?

For catching up:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/03/europe/st-petersburg-russia-explosion/index.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/03/saintpetersburg-bombing-casualties-explosion-metro-train/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/st-petersburg-metro-explosion-russia-bomb-attack-casualties-blue-line-a7664251.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/03/everything-know-explosion-st-petersburg/

BackChannels may experiment here with watch-write updating on this post.

This is a complicated attack made more so by the foreknowledge that the Russian State, if true to form, will frame it for the public and neither the public nor the sincere among police may have access or authority in the investigation launched.

In the west, the public would trust involved security services to get to the truth and to tell the truth.  In Russia, one may expect absolute authority to say what it may and for the public to nod agreeably or mumble away in political impotence.

(more to come)

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/st-petersburg-attacks-isis-russia-bombings-celebrate-islamic-state-response-a7664656.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-attack-cctv-st-petersburg-bomb-plotter-metro-blast-video-footage-a7664721.html

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Also in Media: “There’s An Emerging ‘Alt-Jihad’ Movement In The U.S. – But It’s Not Muslims Who Are Pushing It…” | Independent Journal Review | by M. Zuhdi Jasser | Mid-March 2017

02 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics

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These two characteristics, like the apologists, only end up serving entrenching the global jihad and its Islamist monopoly from which the alt-jihadists claim to want to save the world.

The alt-jihad consists of non-Muslims who refuse to leave room for even the remote possibility of branding Islam and any faithful Muslims into modernity. The alt-jihad is simple, simplistic, self-serving and dangerous. It attempts to deny Muslim dissidents any space, hope, or support whatsoever we so urgently need to make headway.

Their parroting of Islamist tyrannical rhetoric and their slash-and-burn approach only strengthens the hold Islamist extremists have on Muslim communities.The alt-jihad does not sincerely seek for Muslims to find solutions to the problems plaguing our communities, but rather seeks the containment, if not the elimination, of Islam as a faith. Some even seem to advocate that this happen “by any means necessary.” For the alt-jihad, there is no hope for modernization of Islam – there are terrorist Muslims, and terrorist Muslims-in-waiting.

Don’t take BackChannels’ word for it.  Go directly to the Source: There’s An Emerging ‘Alt-Jihad’ Movement In The U.S. – But It’s Not Muslims Who Are Pushing It…

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