Category Archives: Political Psychology

FTAC – Trump – What If Moscow Were Indulged?

09 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eastern Europe, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Ukraine

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The balloon: The thought that Trump might cede Crimea for piffle in debts or other trade.

Ridiculous.

Welcome to the New Dark Ages.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/08/ftac-trumps-choice-and-moscow/

I could wag the finger all day in the direction of Putin and his inner circle and the Phantoms of the Cold War (arisen from the Grave of Communism as Ultra-Nationalist Fascists), and I would still have to deal with the resistance posed by 15 years of the greater population dwelling on “Islamic Terrorism” with nary a look back at the Cold War, much less a look forward to Russia’s transformation into an ultra-national neo-imperial state.

BackChannels achieves some compression of ideas and observations, and it has broad reach — it’s accessed annually from more than 140 nations — but it barely “pings” in the Foreign Affairs, International Relations, Political Science] communities . . .

Although no one knows how Trump will embark on his newly informed foreign affairs journey, everyone knows that this may be Trump’s first “real job” in a long time, and it’s not, as we say here in the U.S., “at will”: the President will be stuck with the Oval Office and answering to a government far greater and more powerful than himself, not to mention the people it represents.

My glance at the headlines suggests you may have been disinformed.

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/309509-senators-urge-trump-to-be-tough-on-russia-in-ukraine

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/12/08/senators-urge-trump-to-provide-lethal-aid-to-ukraine/

It looks to me like Tass has been typing with rose-colored glasses:

http://tass.com/world/917932

It really underestimates how well the American professional political community — analysts, scholars, politicians — see Moscow as Putin has rebuilt it and sustained so much Soviet Era baggage and its inability to chart a middle course anywhere — but it may please those less engaged in politics.

This morning, I glanced at a Foreign Policy (Magazine) headline on how democracies fall apart. I should get to that article, but the official state remains quite robust. Trump may do the right great American things despite himself and, to lay in Churchill’s observation, without having to try all the wrong ones first.

This is a dangerous period for everyone as Putin with Khamenei and through Assad has chosen to demonstrate a depth in callousness, cruelty, dishonesty, and madness in Syria beyond anything witnessed anywhere else in the world in recent memory.

For five years or so I have seen repeated in untold visual analogs the image of a child’s hand gripping a mother’s forearm — no bodies — in relation to the indiscriminate bombing of noncombatants in Syria. Such murderers seem to be begging to be stopped — and maybe that would be a mercy — but the just poking along western response has been to watch the Russian economy wither while Assad burns Syria into an unsustainable nothing — except, perhaps, as a base for Russian military presence — and neither Moscow nor Tehran get anywhere with horrifying the world.

I’ll probably copy my response to an “FTAC” post on the blog. It has in it the prayer that the state prove stronger than its leading statesman, and I think the odds fair that it will do that if a President — any at any time — embarks on a dictator’s mission.

 

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Syria – Assad – ISIL – Background

09 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Syria

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Imagine turning one economically challenged and environmentally troubled middle eastern state into a complete theater of politics and war.

Imagine producing every element in that state and managing the same for political gains in the world beyond its borders.

Then put a label on the production:

Assad vs The Terrorists
&
Assad OR The Terrorists

Why put on such a show?

  • To assert the power of absolute power and demonstrate the maniacal ability to visit suffering on innocents with impunity.
  • To produce a terrorism center that helps goad the west toward patriotic but autocratic and xenophobic nationalism in a way that divides states and encourages the abandonment of core values, especially cultural pluralism and religious tolerance.
  • To blackmail the west toward choosing to having in power a tyrant as opposed to an equally criminal and tyrannical movement.
  • To threaten the west — the European Union and NATO — with the monetary, security, and social costs associated with mass migration infused with criminal elements.
  • To produce a useful tool — “The Terrorists” / ISIL and other al-Qaeda type bands and organizations — with which to demonstrate military prowess in line with a fascist state script.

Herewith, a brief listing of citations building up to the image, quite correctly, of a murderous totalitarian mentality in action in Syria.

BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/14/isil-groomed-for-a-role-in-assad-vs-the-terrorists/

International Business Times

The regime continued losing ground over the summer of 2015, provoking a direct Russian intervention in September 2015 that was explained, quite falsely, as an effort to destroy IS. Moscow trained its firepower on the mainstream armed opposition, systematically targeting the parts of the opposition supported by the West, which actually opened space for IS to expand. In July 2016, Russia even attacked US-supported forces that only fight IS.

Rather than counterterrorism, the actual Russian intention was to secure Assad militarily and then extinguish all workable alternatives, thereby rehabilitating Assad politically. To disguise this fact and rewrite the narrative of the intervention as one of anti-extremism, Russia’s ruler, Vladimir Putin, sought to end the major offensive phase of the intervention in March 2016 by pushing IS out of Palmyra.

Orton, Kyle W.  “We should not be shocked that Isis took Palmyra – Assad and Putin cannot hold back the jihadi hordes.”  IBTimes, December 12, 2016.

Newsweek

Bennetts, Marc.  “Putin’s War in Syria: Why Russians Don’t Seem to Care About It.”  Newsweek, October 10, 2016.

Cordall, Simon Speakman.  “How Syria’s Assad Helped Forge ISIS.”  Newsweek, June 21, 2014.

Hebbo, Mahmoud.  “U.S. Accuses Assad of Aiding ISIS Through Airstrikes.”  Newsweek, June 2, 2015.

Moore, Jack.  “ISIS’s Multimillion-Dollar Deals with Assad Regime Uncovered in U.S. Special Forces Raid.”  Newsweek, April 26, 2016.

The Daily Beast

Gutman, Roy.  “Assad Henchman: Here’s How We Built ISIS.”  The Daily Beast, December 1, 2016.  Part II: “How Assad Staged al Qaeda Bombings.”  The Daily Beast, December 2, 2016.   Part III: “How ISIS Returned to Syria”, The Daily Beast, December 5, 2016.

Weiss, Michael.  “Russia’s Double Game with Islamic Terror.” The Daily Beast, August 23, 2015

The National

Sands, Phil, Justin Vela, and Suha Maayeh.  “Assad regime set free extremists from prison to fire up trouble during peaceful uprising.”  The National, January 22, 2014.

The Tower

Decker, Benjamin T.  “Iran is More Deeply Tied to ISIS Than You Think.”  The Tower, December 2015.

Wikipedia

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

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

Miscellaneous

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2016/06/21/al-tanf-bombing-russia-assisted-isis-attacking-us-backed-fsa-group-cluster-bombs/ – 6/21/2016.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/01/politics/john-mccain-cia-russia-airstrikes/ – 10/1/2015

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/russia-strikes-more-u-s-backed-rebels-in-syria/ – 10/21/2015

Twitter

YouTube

Update on Orwell’s (Putin-Assad-Khamenei’s) Regressives

Orton, Kyle.  “The Coalition isn’t Defeating the Islamic State — But It’s Empowering Iran.”  The Henry Jackson Society, October 6, 2017.

Orton, Kyle.  “The Syrian Regime’s Funding of the Islamic State.” The Henry Jackson Society, October 28, 2017.

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Also in Media: Window on Eurasia — New Series: “Putin’s Language Doesn’t Threaten Russia’s Neighbors but Does Threaten Russia, Shchetkina Says” — December 1, 2016

01 Thursday Dec 2016

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

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  Unfortunately for Russians, what Putin is doing puts them and their culture under threat. “For Russia, the fate of their language is a question of life or death” because the language is in many ways a metaphor for Russia itself. “The Russian language, Russian culture and Russian literature are … what Russia is.”

Indeed, Shchetkina argues, Russia doesn’t exist anywhere beyond these things; and that explains why Putin has said that Russia has no borders because Russia is a “virtual” reality rather than a geographic one.  And in this is a problem: “this culture and language does not belong undividedly to a country which is now called the Russian Federation.”

Source: Window on Eurasia — New Series: Putin’s Language Doesn’t Threaten Russia’s Neighbors but Does Threaten Russia, Shchetkina Says – 12/1/2016.

Also in Media: “Why Vladimir Putin Hates Us” | Observer | November 22, 2016

29 Tuesday Nov 2016

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

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Predictably, the Kremlin maintains that moving state-of-the art missiles into Kaliningrad is a response to American ballistic missile defenses which have been deployed in Eastern Europe. As usual, Moscow depicts all its military moves, even ones which are destabilizing to regional security, as cosmically defensive, so great is the Western threat to Russia.

Source: Why Vladimir Putin Hates Us | Observer

Relevant on BackChannels: “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation”.

FTAC – A Note on ‘Trump – Manafort – Millian – Kilimnik’ and the Irrelevance of Old News

25 Friday Nov 2016

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

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In paraphrase, the prompt was how would Hitler have been viewed if he had not produced the genocide of the Jews of Europe, i.e., The Holocaust.

Hitler would not have been Hitler without the ‘racial” foundations of Nazism already laid through the 1920s.

I’ve noted only recently the near concurrence of Stalin’s installation as the leader of the Soviet Union, the establishment in 1928 of the Muslim Brotherhood (in response to western colonial abuses, but also accessing religious supremacist thought in defense of Egyptian Muslims), and the already-built intellectual ferment — papers circulating in universities — for Nazism.

I have tried venturing toward the kind of conversation Stalin may (!) have had with Hitler in the course of coming to a delusional agreement over the parsing of Europe between them and then Hitler’s treacherous move against the same.

It’s too soon to draw the comparison “Stalin : Hitler” as “Putin : ? ” 　 , but that there is a conversation between feudal powers may be something that cannot be either doubted nor overlooked nor in content — i.e., what’s the story behind the public’s glimpses of Manafort, Millian, and Kilimnik? — known.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/paul-manafort-ukraine-kiev-russia-konstantin-kilimnik-227181

What appears to my _imagination_ is a conversation involving medieval lords and their knights, who are today well paid “nobility” suited up in suits and carrying briefcases full of explosive agreements. 　

From the Politico article:

Joking aside, Trump has demonstrated more interest in Russia’s affairs than in perhaps any other area of foreign policy. And his laissez faire approach toward Russia’s confrontational relations with its neighbors, combined with his open admiration of its authoritarian President Vladimir Putin and his employment of Manafort, have led experts from across the political spectrum to predict that a Trump presidency would augur to the Kremlin’s benefit.

How far passed is the election season “past” as America moves toward the inauguration of its new President?

The conversation prompted here is only quasi-public or constrained by the social distribution chosen for the original topic post. Therefore, we may be of the public, but we may also note in passing that this now old “Trump-Manafort” news has been discarded from the public conversation.

As news, it’s old news.

As a theme (for foreign policy wonks) it may remain relevant, but as much becomes a conversation between specialized journalists and researchers, and therefore politically irrelevant.

The public will rush on to the next day’s headlines, and the same will overlay, blanket, and suffocate the previous day’s curiosity and its items of interest.

The powerful and wealthy of the world have always inhabited a world greater than their own family, clan, tribe, and nation-state: whether Chinese political elites or Forbes-listed billionaires, the world has no boundaries and its laws must suit them for them to keep them, provided, lol, they keep a lot of other interested parties — above the table and quite some distance beneath it — interested in their success and largesse.

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FTAC – Keith Ellison – Division and Information

22 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, United States of America

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Ellison stories speak to his relationships with CAIR, ISNA, Farrakhan, and others who have either articulated anti-Semitic and racist positions, especially Farakhan, or have been associated with questionable organizations, as for example CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood.

However . . . let the man speak.

In our online lives in the information ocean, all have been subject to surrounding currents and related choices in content selection. As I have had some time and understand that few have that luxury — and I don’t really have it (although I’m available for less public research tasking) — it may help at times to overview information about a subject and its tributaries. With that in mind, here also is an article about a 2016 Muslim Student Association (MSA, and in Minnesota) decision to REJECT BDS and anti-Semitic cant in its campus work.

http://www.mnrepublic.com/msa-avoids-divestment-and-anti-semitism-arguments/ – 3/8/2016.

Of course, there’s a slew of articles that analyze Keith Ellison’s leanings quite differently.

I may suggest that in the way of “reparative narcissists”, that their joining or including movements, organizations, or personalities with histories of discomfiting views — look up Farrakhan’s assistant Dr. Khalid Abdul Muhammad, and listen to his rant for a few minutes — intends drawing the same away from hate and violence because that is the character of a repairing personality.

Let the politician work — or even work his magic.

Here are a few “fast links” to opinions about politician and how he’s been seen in several ranks, especially the conservative and Jewish political communities.

BackChannels feels that if you listen to Keith Ellison in action and directly — and you have been informed of the role of the Soviet Union in forming up the PLO — then you understand something new about the generation of rhetoric in the politics of the middle east conflict and perhaps the promotion of internecine Jewish-Muslim conflict in the United States.

Additional Reference

Simon Wiesenthal Center.  “SWC: Congressman Ellison as DNC Chair is Wrong Signal at Wrong Time.” n.d.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/11/muslim_nationalist_keith_ellison_bad_news_for_women_children_gays_golden_retrievers.html – 11/21/2016.

http://www.meforum.org/2756/keith-ellison-stealth-jihad – September 2010.

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

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/218385/keith-ellison-supports-bds-and-admires-louis-farrakhan-so-why-are-jewish-democrats-supporting-him-for-chairman-of-the-dnc – 11/21/2016.

Dr. Khalid Abdul Muhammad’s 1993 Kean College Speech – 1:45:05 – Posted to YouTube August 29, 2014.  Khalid Abdul Muhammad had been an assistant to Louis Farrakhan, and, apparently, an angry one to the end.

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FTAC – Israel Not At War With the ‘Arab World’

19 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

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Well, the Jews are not “fighting the Arab World” — there’s a kind of defamation in that statement.

Israelis are defending themselves from those who wish to annihilate them — and considering who has been friendly toward and paying for Hamas and Hezbollah, well, gosh, it’s just not the Arab world after all.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

Moscow-Tehran as an axis appears to want to maintain a common interest in positively medieval political absolutism. Somebody has learned how to make a lot of money (for themselves, their cronies, their lackeys, and their tools) that way.

http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1

http://Politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-resurrects-the-kgb-moscow-security/

Of course the Arab and Muslim worlds have within them strong anti-Semitic currents, but let’s go back to the 1920s and endemic 19th Century Russian anti-Semitism  and the echoes of other medieval anti-Semitism, the same that compelled Herschel and others to entertain the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in Israel, and come forward to three distinct aspects in the character of the 1920s: Stalin’s installment in power in Russia as the dominant state in the Soviet Union; the development in the universities of an intellectual path leading to Nazism; and the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood (1928).

All mere coincidence?

Additional Reference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_and_the_Soviet_Union
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/140328/timmerman-disinformation – 8/7/2013.
http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/the_czars_and_the_jews/
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/protocols.html

The mercurial, paranoid seventy-four-year-old tyrant was certainly capable of ordering the mass deportations. During the Second World War, he removed Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, ethnic Germans, and Crimean Tatars from their homelands—more than two million Soviet citizens in all. He was no novice, either, when it came to purges and show trials. In the Pravda report, most of the accused “murderers in white smocks” were identified as Jewish and agents of the U.S. and Israel. There were further arrests of Soviet Jews, exemplars of “national and racist chauvinism.” Jews were dismissed from their jobs. They were insulted on the streets, in shops, and on public transportation, according to Arno Lustiger, author of “Stalin and the Jews.”

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/imagining-stalins-plot-to-exile-the-jews – 2/1/2016.

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Syria – Russia’s Barbarism – The Hospitals

18 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Syria

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The last children’s hospital in besieged Aleppo has suspended operations after a brutal “double-tap” bombing.

A wave of airstrikes targeted medics in the rebel-held eastern district as they treated dozens of children who had been hit with chemical attacks.

Doctors and patients fled to the basement as more than 20 barrel bombs pounded the centre on Wednesday morning.

But less than 48 hours later two missiles tore through the unit as staff carried-out a clean-up operation.

Video footage shows the terrifying moment nurses pulled new-born babies from their incubators and fought their way through the dust and debris in search of safety.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/last-childrens-hospital-aleppo-forced-9293119 – 11/19/2016.

The Independent Doctors Association, a medical group, said barrel bomb attacks had damaged two facilities it supports in eastern Aleppo — the children’s hospital and the only bloodbank in the area.

Medical facilities have regularly been hit, and sometimes completely destroyed, in the government’s fight against rebels, though Damascus and Moscow deny they target hospitals.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/11/17/world/syria-regime-russia-bomb-aleppo-food-runs-hospitals-believed-targeted/#.WC8VpNQrJlY – 11/17/2016.

Doctors Without Borders said the children’s hospital and a specialized surgical hospital were hit by Wednesday’s strikes.

“Hospital staff managed to move children – including prematurely born babies – from cots and incubators to the basement of the building in order to shelter them from the bombing,” said the aid group, which sponsors both hospitals.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/doctors-without-borders-hospitals-airstrikes-syria-aleppo/ – 11/17/2016.

https://news.vice.com/article/bombs-fall-on-aleppos-largest-hospital-as-russia-sends-more-warplanes-to-syria – 10/1/2016.

“You cannot imagine what we see every day: children who are coming to us as body parts. We collect the body parts and wrap them in shrouds and bury them,” said Bara’a, a nurse at one of the affected hospitals, who was present during the bombings.

“Tell the world to wake up, to wake their consciences. Where are you? When Palestine was being destroyed everyone got involved. Why are Syria’s children being forgotten? Nobody is doing anything to reduce this suffering.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/28/aleppo-two-hospitals-bombed-out-of-service-syria-airstrikes – 9/28/2016.

Monday saw yet another targeted strike in Syria. Not against Isis or against anyone threatening. No, the latest attack was another deplorable airstrike on a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital that was providing vital medical care to the region surrounding Maarat al-Numan.

According to a monitoring group in the area, the attack resulted in more than nine people’s deaths – including one child’s – and was carried out by Russian forces. Only two days earlier they had agreed to limit hostilities in Syria.

This was no accident. Four rockets hit the hospital: it was a targeted attack, and a cold-blooded one too.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/russias-airstrike-on-a-syrian-hospital-was-no-accident-it-was-a-cold-blooded-attack-a6877046.html – 2/16/2016.

Related Reference on the Moscow Axis Relationship with “The Terrorists” in  Syria

https://kyleorton1991.wordpress.com/2015/09/08/how-russia-manipulates-islamic-terrorism/ – 9/8/2015.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/if-assad-is-not-forced-out-isis-never-will-be-a6759251.html – 12/3/2015.

Of the 470,000 Syrians who have been killed in this terrible war, the overwhelming majority have been killed by Assad and his allies, and that’s even truer of the civilian casualties. The United Nations in February concluded that the Assad regime had violated the laws of war in six distinct ways and committed systematized atrocities — crimes against humanity — in seven separate categories, including rape and extermination. There is no cruelty IS has committed, from sexual violence to immolation, that the regime has not at least matched and usually exceeded.

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/we-should-not-celebrate-bashar-al-assads-victory-over-isis-palmyra-1552077 – 3/29/2016.

In relation to “Medieval Political Absolutism” and “Malignant Narcissism“, consider calling what Moscow-Damascus-Tehran have going in Syria the worst case of “Political Gaslighting” in history.

Readers who have made it this far with BackChannels KNOW that Assad incubated ISIL — to blackmail the west; to goad the west with refugees and a related terrorist threat; and to serve as a foil for demonstrating the latest and greatest out of Moscow’s updated military boom-boom: with Moscow central to the project, Syria has been made a win-win-win for each dictator’s ambitions and image.

BackChannels asks (along with Ukrainians) whether greater American cooperation (appeasement) with “Moscow-Tehran” will not herald the end of meaningful democracy and freedom worldwide.

Occasional Updates

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