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Category Archives: Political Psychology

FTAC – Deranged Power

02 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Psychology

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absolute power, despotism, dignity, freedom, human agency, lost souls, political criminality, political philosophy, political psychology, sadism, security, tyranny

The chat began with comment on the infamous Dr. Mengele and his demonic practices, but then it slipped a little sideways to talk about an inherent evil in procedures unrelated to the Nazi’s bent.


Again (again, again): the kind of power embraced by the despotic is the power to visit suffering on others with impunity and without conscience.

It may not be the procedure — e.g., abortion, sex change — that is evil but rather the removal of choice in its imposition.

Where abortion arguments are batted back and forth, the concern is not with procedure but the precedence of the “right” to choice on the mother’s part or advocacy for the fetus in its earliest phase.

Mengele and other famous sadists given the power to maim, torture, and murder with impunity do as the disturbed people they either were before their empowerment or have become as a consequence of it.


Much of this blog — perhaps all of it — has been concerned with the nature of political power in its most basic regions — “conflict, culture, language, and psychology” — and here it addresses the kind of extremist and vacuous force that gives way to wholesale theft and murder all the up the imaginable scale and beyond.

How could an ophthalmologist have created so much horror absent of conscience and shame?

Posted to YouTube by Muhammad Al Mousa on September 4, 2016.

How could the privileged and wealthy of Moscow — or Russia — have escaped the opprobrium associated with the most heinous irredeemable of war crimes?

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/18/syria-russias-barbarism-the-hospitals/
11/18/2016

–33–

FTAC – Short Note – Cultural Existence and Language

30 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology, Political Psychology, Religion

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conscience, language, language culture, language technology, philology

 


Language is a cultural invention and tool in which the world’s separated populations suspend themselves each as a unique enterprise. Perhaps in the densely populated complex societies, the aggregation of multiple cultures in political space require stronger tools for accommodation and integration.

The subjects of language, language history, linguistics, etc. are immense, but where we have the tools for our own demise, nature demands we find a common enough cultural and social code to keep everyone — and their languages — in existence

There are presently about 7,000 living languages extant, but the actual number is less and we lose several annually to natural discarding (if not through cultural annihilation). It’s for that reason I’ve taken the tack that a People possessed of a language, practically by definition invented in the space, small or large, on which they have been marooned, need their land and may be “updated” to civil standards of a sort and otherwise left to evolve.

That’s my proposed modern ethic.

Where we witness barbarism, what we may perceive as an absence of conscience may be instead a different set of cultural rules (desperately in need of adjustment). When ISIS idiots mass rape Yazidi women, they do so with language that has pandered to them and given them permit for extraordinary cruelty. Of course, some ISIS members flee ISIS for such reasons: the behavior on exhibit goes against the grain of their humanity.

Within Islam, the same may be noted of Muslims victimized by the Taliban: the Army School in Peshawar represented a Muslim community defending and raising its children, and the “Talibandits” attack, which must have seemed a virtuous undertaking to themselves, proved only to further destroy their image while encouraging more of the Ummah to shun their presentation of what Muslims should be.


BackChannels produced a page pointing to linguist Daniel Everett some years back, and it might be useful for any just starting on their journey into philology.

A “zeitgeist” is an expression of language in its totality and care must be taken — artists and poets may consider their responsibilities to man and God — or man and nature if that better suits — before encouraging the worship of chaos and death.

–33–

Diplomatic Harassment – Short Compilation

29 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Political Spychology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

diplomatic harassment, expulsion of diplomats, Moscow, political spychology, Russia, United States, Washington

Start with the rules.

The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961 is an international treaty that defines a framework for diplomatic relations between independent countries. It specifies the privileges of a diplomatic mission that enable diplomats to perform their function without fear of coercion or harassment by the host country. This forms the legal basis for diplomatic immunity. Its articles are considered a cornerstone of modern international relations. As of April 2014, it has been ratified by 190 states.[1]

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

Then proceed (bolds, colors, and italics added):

STATEMENT BY MARK TONER, DEPUTY SPOKESPERSON

December 29, 2016

Department of State Actions in Response to Russian Harassment

The State Department today declared persona non grata 35 Russian officials operating in the United States who were acting in a manner inconsistent with their diplomatic or consular status. The Department also informed the Russian Government that it would deny Russian personnel access to two recreational compounds in the United States owned by the Russian Government.

The Department took these actions as part of a comprehensive response to Russia’s interference in the U.S. election and to a pattern of harassment of our diplomats overseas that has increased over the last four years, including a significant increase in the last 12 months. This harassment has involved arbitrary police stops, physical assault, and the broadcast on State TV of personal details about our personnel that put them at risk. In addition, the Russian Government has impeded our diplomatic operations by, among other actions: forcing the closure of 28 American corners which hosted cultural programs and English-language teaching; blocking our efforts to begin the construction of a new, safer facility for our Consulate General in St. Petersburg; and rejecting requests to improve perimeter security at the current, outdated facility in St. Petersburg.

Today’s actions send a clear message that such behavior is unacceptable and will have consequences.

From Out of the Past (Moscow Has Played Rough)

“Family members have been the victims of psychologically terrifying assertions that their USG (U.S. government) employee spouses had met accidental deaths,” the embassy reported. “Home intrusions have become far more commonplace and bold, and activity against our locally engaged Russian staff continues at a record pace.

“We have no doubt that this activity originates in the FSB. Counterintelligence challenges remain a hallmark of service at Embassy Moscow.”

http://www.jpost.com/International/The-curious-case-of-a-diplomat-Wikileaks-reveals-all – 12/8/2010.

The British and American governments are acutely aware of the FSB’s campaign of intimidation. But neither has publicly complained about these demonstrative “counter-intelligence” measures, for fear of further straining already difficult relations with Vladmir Putin’s resurgent regime. Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel, was head of the FSB.

British sources admit they have files “five or six inches thick” detailing FSB break-ins and other incidents of harassment against Moscow embassy staff. “Generally we don’t make a fuss about it,” one said. So pervasive is the FSB’s campaign that the British government is unable to staff fully its Moscow embassy. The intrusions are designed to “short-tour” diplomats so they leave their posts early, the source said.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/23/russia-targeting-western-diplomats – 9/23/2011.

But many of the recent acts of intimidation by Russian security services have crossed the line into apparent criminality. In a series of secret memos sent back to Washington, described to me by several current and former U.S. officials who have written or read them, diplomats reported that Russian intruders had broken into their homes late at night, only to rearrange the furniture or turn on all the lights and televisions, and then leave. One diplomat reported that an intruder had defecated on his living room carpet.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/russia-is-harassing-us-diplomats-all-over-europe/2016/06/26/968d1a5a-3bdf-11e6-84e8-1580c7db5275_story.html – 6/27/2016

In Wikipedia

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung (East German Psy-Ops)

From the Russian Section

Harding, Luke. Expelled: A Journalist’s Descent Into the Russian Mafia State. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Related Reference

Duncan, Ian and John Fritze.  “Obama administration shutters Russian retreat on Eastern Shore in Maryland.”  The Baltimore Sun, December 29, 2016.

Price, Ned.  “The Administration’s Response to Russia: What you Need to Know.”  The White House, December 29, 2016.

–33–

FTAC – Opinion on the UN Vote Hostile to Israel (Resolution 2334 / 2016)

29 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, United States of America

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absolutism, democracy, Moscow, opinion, political philosophy, Resolution 2334, UN

The fingers were erect and wagging at Obama as anti-Semite and turncoat, which I found a bit radical.

Of course, other analyst-pundits have been weighing in on the UN’s latest gang-up on the world’s One Jewish State and the Administration’s dithering abstention, and that cacophony doubtless includes similar charges (or language) from Right side of the aisle.

Be that as it may, the chorus was heard with the original poster’s complaint that no dissent had been heard.

Well, at least let there be an argument.


I’ll dissent.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/24/ftac-moscows-presence-in-the-middle-east-conflict/

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

If there is, has been, or will be a contest between “medieval political absolutism” and the “modern democratic and checked distribution of power”, the same involves meeting the challenges posed by the “Phantoms of the Soviet” (the Union died 25 years, Dec. 25, 1991).

I think the west too quick to march on in post-Cold War glory — and the rush to do business with the reforming new Russia — and it got taken in by Moscow while Moscow, as represented by “Vertical-of-Power” Putin has gently but firmly twisted the state’s narrative from “Glasnost” all the way back to proto-fascist ultra-nationalism and neo-imperialism — backed by the demonstration of barbarism (in Syria), aggression (in Ukraine), and the possession of nuclear arms and updated weapons systems.

Is anyone feeling lucky?

While it’s true the Obama Administration has avoided direct confrontation with Moscow (how unseemly that would look! And I say that as cynically as any here), it has weakened Moscow’s ability to project and sustain military aggression in the near abroad. It will then be left to President Trump to address Putin and either abet, contain, or push back against what the Moscow Revival presents to western interests.

The UN resolution was execrable in every dimension!

https://www.un.org/press/en/2016/sc12657.doc.htm

However, the true target in east-west relations and in the middle east conflict remains a recalcitrant Moscow. A dangerous Moscow. A dictator’s Moscow (and check out the alignments on the voting).

Between Trump (Manafort, Millian, Kilimnik) and Putin, let’s hope the superficial media-relayed “bromance” is over — or it will be our lives more organized along more feudal principles in conflict with modern (democratic) ones.


Loosely related but from another conversation —


I wanted to suggest to you that a working “secular democracy” actually enables the full expression of religious passion as a private and private community matter. The system supports boundaries and a common agreement on the prudence and sensibility of good law, i.e., law that sustains a free and vibrant social order.

Jihad, provocation, and terrorism mean to upset civil order — and they can do it!

When will the west again push back against criminal, fascist, and proto-fascist aggression, I don’t know but know that as it loses its principles and values, if it does, it will have to respond to absolutism.


 

–33–

Also in Media: “The Collapse of the Soviet Union: 25 Years Later” | Frontpage Mag | Jamie Glazov Interviews David Satter, December 26, 2016

29 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

≈ Leave a comment

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21st Century Feudalism, 25th anniversary, dissolving of the Soviet Union, Russia

The ironies of absolute power were evident in Tsarist Russia. In the 19th century, the Russian philosopher Pyotr Chaadaev said that Russia existed to teach the world how not to live. He was referring to Russia’s contempt for the individual. “Alone in the world,” he wrote in his First Philosophical Letter,”we gave the world nothing and have taken nothing. We have in no way contributed to the progress of human reason and everything that came to us as a result of this progress, we distorted.”

Source: The Collapse of the Soviet Union: 25 Years Later | Frontpage Mag – 12/26/2016.

A little further on —

Satter: Soviet rule was based on lying as a substitute for truth. What mattered was not what was true but what could be made to appear to be true and the criterion for this ersatz truth was whatever was in the interest of the regime.

Against this background, the introduction of genuinely truthful information as a result of Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost could only lead to the destruction of the system. The elements of truth that were introduced as a result of glasnost became part of a delusionary system with which they were totally incompatible. The result was a confrontation over core principles and either the system or the truth had to be destroyed. Fortunately, it was the system that collapsed. In the end, massive falsification was formidable only as long as it was unchallenged. Once the truth was allowed in a limited form, the dykes holding back the reality of the outside world ruptured and the system became part of the past.

Related on BackChannels:

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

–33–

Excerpt – 1920s – The Spread of Hate – Russia -> Germany | An Excerpt from Laqueur

27 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology, Religion

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

anti-Semitism, cultural transfer, history, intellectual history, intellectual poisoning, intellectual transfer, Russia and Germany, Vinberg, Walter Laqueur

Excerpted from Walter Laqueur’s Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (1965) in the interest of understanding anti-Semitic ideation as a transferable cultural technology useful for controlling and leveraging mobs.  Of course, for anti-Semitic theorists, expression may not be so cold but rather driven by their own malignant narcissism and related contempt, defensiveness, and paranoia  — and Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation — that goes with it.

Wikipedia has an entry on the benighted star of the following paragraph:  Fyodor Viktorovich Vinberg


Vinberg was a most loyal and devoted subject of his Tsar and his writings are full of invective against all Russian politicians, particularly of the centre and the right, who had been deficient in this respect.  Shortly before the October revolution, Vinberg took part in a conspiracy to overthrow the provisional government, was arrested and sent to the Peter and Paul fortress.  There he had ample time to write his diaries and to bring some order into his ideas; like Hitler in Landsberg prison, he then and there prepared himself for his future political and publicist career. Vinberg was released, or escaped, in 1918, and went first to the Ukraine and later to Germany, where he systematically developed his ideas in the short-lived Berlin newspaper, Prizyv, the yearbook Luch Sveta (A Ray of Light), published first in Berlin and subsequently in Yugoslavia, his book Krestny Put (Via Dolorosa), and a number of other writings.  Vinberg’s ideas can be summarized as follows:

  1. The Jews are the source of all evil.  They must be exterminated.
  2. The liberals and the constitutional monarchists are responsible for Russia’s ruin.  Any form of democracy and republican regime is bad.  A strong dictatorship is needed, for the people are stupid and bad and can never be trusted.
  3. Russia and Germany must unite in order to crush the revolution.
  4. The Catholic and Orthodox Churches must unite against the combined power of the Judeo-masonic sects now operating as a new International.

. . . In his ‘Berlin letters’ published in Luch Sveta, we learn that nature loves the strong, the brave, the agile, those who act and do not talk; she loathes weakness and democratic half measures.  Vinberg has only contempt for the masses, and his only criticism of Nicholas II is that the late Tsar unduly idealized the muzhik, and the Russian people in general, who are really a good for nothing lot and deserve to be punished for having betrayed their Tsar.  The people will always remain a blind, ignorant, senseless mass which has never and nowhere understood anything apart from the crudest material needs.

Laqueur, Walter.  Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict.  P. 115.  Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1965.

Starting well before Vinberg and moving far past him, Laqueur connects the dots between the Tsar’s White Russian loyalists and emigres who had carried from the experience of the royals the anti-Semitic cant and nurtured racial contempt and supremacism of that medieval world.  The transfer of thought from Vinberg to Germany’s Rosenberg ensues.

What Rosenberg says of Jews and Jewish history can be traced, chapter and verse, to Vinberg’s ‘Berlin letters’ of 1919: the Jewish religion is highly aristocratic; the Jews have been engaged for many hundreds of years in a struggle against the gentile aristocracies; they use in this fight democratic, liberal, and socialist doctrines which act as a poison in the non-Jewish body politic.  Thus they destroyed the Roman empire through the deadly injection of democratic-Jewish Christianity . . . . (op. cit. p 116)

And on goes Walter Laqueur’s documentation of the intellectual history involving the transfer of such thought from the Russian experience and invention into a German culture soon to embrace Nazism.

 Vinberg died in February 1927, and did not witness his ideas coming to fruition.  His views are of historical interest because they constitute something in the nature of a half-way house between the old Black Hundred and National Socialism (op. cit. p. 117).

Related Reference

Alpha History.  “19th Century Anti-Semitism”.

Kellogg, Michael.  The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; online 2009.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  “Pogroms”.


The Aufbau Vereinigung (Reconstruction Organisation) was a Munich-based counterrevolutionary conspiratorial group formed in the aftermath of the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1918 and of the Latvian Intervention of 1919. It brought together White Russian émigrés and early German National Socialists who aimed to overthrow the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union, replacing them with authoritarian régimes of the far right. The group was originally known as Die Bruecke (The Bridge). Aufbau was also the name of a periodical it brought out.[1]

According to Michael Kellogg,[2] the Aufbau Vereinigung was a vital influence on the development of Nazi ideology in the years before the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 as well as financing NSDAP with, for example, funds from Henry Ford. It gave Hitler the idea of a vast Jewish conspiracy, involving a close alliance between international finance and Bolshevism and threatening disaster for mankind.[3] Recent research on Hitler’s early years in Vienna (1905-1913) appears to have shown that his antisemitism was at that time far less developed than it became under the new influences.[4]

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


Additional Wikipedia Reference

Wikipedia.  “Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter”.

As Hitler’s close associate, the white emigre Scheubner-Richter, familiar with private wealth and the defense of its productive assets, may have positioned the early Nazi movement as strongly anti-Semitic and anti-Communist.

Wikipedia.  “White émigré”.

White émigrés were, generally speaking, anticommunist and did not consider the Soviet Union and its legacy to be Russian at its core, a position which was reflective of their Russian Nationalist sympathies; they did not tend to recognise the demands of Ukrainian, Georgian and other minority groups for self-determination[citation needed] but yearned for the resurrection of the Russian Empire. They consider the period of 1917 to 1991 to have been a period of occupation by the Soviet regime which was internationalist and anti-Christian. They used the tsarist tricolour (white-blue-red) as their national flag, for example, and some organizations used the flag of the Imperial Russian Navy.

A significant percentage of white émigrés may be described as monarchists, although many adopted a position of being “unpredetermined” (“nepredreshentsi”), believing that Russia’s political structure should be determined by popular plebiscite.

Many white émigrés believed that their mission was to preserve the pre-revolutionary Russian culture and way of life while living abroad, in order to return this influence to Russian culture after the fall of the USSR. Many symbols of the White emigres were reintroduced as symbols of the post-Soviet Russia, such as the Byzantine eagle and the Russian tricolour.

The second Wikipedia piece may fill out the image of a region in which an entire class of residents have been forced to disperse while retaining the beliefs, principles, and values of their former lives.

–33–

Also in Media: “András Kósa: The speech of the chief, Őszöd ten years later, Part III” – Hungarian Spectrum – December 24, 2016

26 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Hungary, Political Psychology, Russia

≈ Leave a comment

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21st Century Neo-Feudalism, authoritarianism, Orban, political repression, Putin

. . . it has to be noted that in the mid-to-late 2000s, the European Union and the Obama administration viewed Putin as a leader who was democratizing cautiously. During his first visit to Berlin, the entire Bundestag gave him a standing ovation. Then, in the Russian parliamentary elections in the fall of 2011, he had to pilfer 17 percentage points to be able to win. In the spring 2012 Presidential election, he again needed to cheat to attain a “victory,” though less so this time. I think these things have changed Putin. He realized that the policies he had pursued up until then did not automatically expand his power, so he launched a campaign of harsh repression at home (including the killing of journalists and political rivals, remaking the Russian criminal code, and restricting the freedom of assembly), and again began to assert the conquering pursuits of Great Russia.

Reading highly recommended!

András Kósa: The speech of the chief, Őszöd ten years later, Part III – Hungarian Spectrum – 12/24/2016.

FTAC – Syrian Switch – Memory Against Evil

26 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

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sadism, Syria

All of a sudden, “20/20 hindsight” has become more significant than Monday morning coaching: where evil has bloomed, the good of the world may need to recover the memory of its beginning.


Assad should have “leaned west”, accommodated some political challenge from his people, and come into the modern fold. Instead, he responded to an actually mild civil challenge with the barbarous arrest and torture of young students (Darra, 2011).

Shall we simply forget how it started?

The American position appears to leave Syria a Russian client without challenge, but perhaps Washington had hoped for a more modern approach to a) accommodating political challenge and b) hunting out the al-Qaeda types that got going on the troubled landscape.

Instead, effort seems to have been put into incubating and producing ISIS, and the indiscriminate bombing that has destroyed much of Aleppo and Homs has proven similarly help to energizing the very forces Assad claims to be fighting! However, the same are the weaker forces and may be chased or surrounded and destroyed IF Damascus chooses to concentrate on just that.


Syria, In The Beginning – Sadism in Steps

Slackman, Michael.  “Syrian Troops Open Fire on Protesters in Several Cities.”  The New York Times, March 25, 2011.

Human Right Watch.  “Syria: Crimes Against Humanity in Daraa: Killings, Torture in a Locked-Down City Under Siege.” June 1, 2011.

McElroy, Damien.  “Syrian regime deploys deadly new weapons on rebels.” The Telegraph, August 31, 2012.

Holmes, Oliver and Erika Solomon.  “Alleged chemical attack kills 25 in northern Syria.”  Reuters, March 19, 2013.

Shubert, Atika and Bharati Naik.  “Syrian snipers target pregnant women, unborn babies, doctor says.” CNN, October 23, 2013.


Ashkar, who has been posting videos of the carnage, said Syrian troops were executing civilians on the streets, including women and children. Similar allegations have been reported by other residents to the United Nations and activists in Aleppo.

Nazish, Kiran.  “Aleppo civilians facing execution plead, “Oh, God, help us.”  USA Today, December 13, 2016.

–33–

 

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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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