Assad incubated the al-Qaeda types all the way to ISIL!
And he did exactly by preferring other strategies and targets — noncombatants, including the sniping of pregnant women, and, of course western-leaning Free Syrian Army (FSA) and others in the field. Providing leeway provided room for ISIL to develop and play the convenient foil in “Assad vs The Terrorists”.
Please don’t believe me, but rather check out the significance of “Russia is hitting the groups that we are backing” by using and questioning the same references and checking them as well.
I would beg conservatives not to ennoble Russian (Putin-Assad-Khamenei) barbarism in Syria.
Have conservatives been duped (along with everyone else) by Putin’s changing postures over time?
It’s a question worth asking this day.
Posted by Gladbecker, November 12, 2016.
Above — and within the “awesome conversation” — the inspiration for this post.
Beneath — what Assad, as flanked by Putin and Khamenei, have done to Syria in the “cause” of medieval political absolutism.
Posted by Muhammed Al Mousa, September 4, 2016.
BackChannels believes American and Israeli and other conservatives have been duped by Putin and the arc of a narrative that began 25 years ago with the dissolving of the Soviet Union and the initial touting of capitalism and democracy that produced confidence in Putin as a leader who would bring order and stability to Russia while producing a civil and free society.
In essence, Putin represents the rule of the strong as more powerful than the rule of law, and, ironically, the conservative “new nationalists” of the open democracies — those who should be fully supporting the rule-of-law and other classically liberal and western values — appear to be helping him do it.
But if the grass ever did look greener, which political party do you think you’d be more comfortable with? Well, if I ever ran for office, I’d do better as a Democrat than as a Republican–and that’s not because I’d be more liberal, because I’m conservative. But the working guy would elect me. He likes me. When I walk down the street, those cabbies start yelling out their windows.
It was too good a quotation not to share on this blog.
There are others nuggets as regards the Trump show, the promotion of extraordinary egotism (on this blog, the same may be interpreted and developed as a malign or reparative narcissism), admiration for the Chinese government’s show of strength at Tienanmen Square, and obsession with nuclear war:
I’ve always thought about the issue of nuclear war; it’s a very important element in my thought process. It’s the ultimate, the ultimate catastrophe, the biggest problem this world has, and nobody’s focusing on the nuts and bolts of it. It’s a little like sickness. People don’t believe they’re going to get sick until they do. Nobody wants to talk about it. I believe the greatest of all stupidities is people’s believing it will never happen, because everybody knows how destructive it will be, so nobody uses weapons. What bullshit.
Trump has also expressed interest in continuing to hold large rallies as he did throughout the campaign for “the instant gratification and adulation that the cheering crowds provide,” the Times wrote.
“As I have repeatedly said, it is not our fault that Russian – American relations are in that poor condition.”
If you’re a BackChannels regular or an enthusiast in political psychology, you know that the “malignant narcissist” — autocrat, bully, or dictator — is never wrong.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
Lest any forget, there’s plenty of reading at hand (these days: Amazon One-Click shopping may be the next best thing) for guarding against forgetting.
Posted by The Guardian, November 9, 2016.
BackChannels has framed contemporary conflict in terms of time, i.e., whether confronting Assad or, for a domestic example, the Ku Klux Klan, the modern person is actually rejecting the reappearance of the past in his own path.
For the most part, whether involving the aggressive Muslim Brotherhood aspect in contemporary Islam, the barbarism on display in Syria — and do “thank” Assad, Putin, and Khamenei for choosing that evil path — or the Russian invasion of Crimea, one is actually aiming the finger back at the world of Medieval Political Absolute Power, i.e., AKA the divine right of rule, rule by a presumptuously superior nature, rule by thuggery, and, most certainly, unquestionable authority, or authority beyond criticism and beyond law.
Putin : Medieval Political Absolutism
vs
Trump: Modern Democratic and Checked Distribution of Political Power
Choose.
Posted by VICE News, March 3, 2014.
While “western” political success and related productivity and affluence provide for western humanism and other aspects of idealism, “eastern” barbarism and suffering have left behind a world in which fear and insecurity appear to threaten those who should be in the most confident and secure of internal psychological states. Leadership in tribal cultures and states tend toward a winner-take-all — and loser-lose-all — position in their politics, and it may be that we mistake for a better politics and ennoble with the term “realpolitik”.
Our world pays a high price in general suffering — suffering associated horrors beyond imagining — for the emotional care and feeding of its “malignant narcissists” — its most damaged bad boys, the same that make themselves known as political and war criminals.
So:
Bashar al-Assad: war criminal?
Vladimir Putin: war criminal?
Ali Khamenei: political criminal?
As a class, dictators “exceed limits” — just as Muhammad warned 🙂 — and in doing so free themselves from other normative restraints while at the same time condemning themselves to remaining in political power at any cost (always to others).
In effect, the worlds of despots become worlds of political absolutes, and if for no other reason than the near impossibility of the retreat of their authors.
If over the past five years you had been a Syrian noncombatant, would you wish to see Bashar al-Assad a) remain in power, b) exiled, or c) hung in public?
If you had been swept off the streets of Tehran and dumped in Evin Prison (say for wearing that hijab a little to far to the back — or for being Baha’i or gay or western in outlook) , or if you had had family murdered by the Iranian regime, would you care to see Ali Khamenei’s term in power a) modified, b) truncated, c) “terminated with extreme prejudice”?
Has Putin a graceful retreat today — Syria was al-Assad’s war and armies, flyers especially, make mistakes; and Ukrainian autonomy was Khrushchev’s mistake, which was made with the confidence that Kiev would remain forever bent to Moscow?
Putin may have that.
And Trump may be wise to see that Putin, the Russian State, and the Russian People (of Russia proper) have that “out” — but to horse trade Ukraine, the European Union, the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization?
“Nyet” to all that!
(Liberal politics have come to mire judgment, unfortunately. Biography.com maintains a page titled “Political Criminals” but begs credulity by placing side-by-side J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, both of whom may have exceeded some boundaries in power, with Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Fidel Castro, and Idi Amin all of whom plainly represent the most reckless of minds and murderous of despots).
Historian John Bew suggests that much of what stands for modern realpolitik today deviates from the original meaning of the term. Realpolitik emerged in mid-19th century Europe from the collision of the enlightenment with state formation and power politics. The concept, Bew argues, was an early attempt at answering the conundrum of how to achieve liberal enlightened goals in a world that does not follow liberal enlightened rules.
If, as the poet says, America is not the world, then the world is surely owed an apology for the lack of attention paid to what ought to have been, and are, a series of alarming developments throughout Europe and the Middle East. Perhaps appropriately, all have involved or implicated a revanchist authoritarian power for which the incoming commander in chief has repeatedly professed his admiration and which, after having done all it could to facilitate an upset American electoral outcome—“maybe we helped a bit with WikiLeaks,” as pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov put it Wednesday morning—offers its hearty congratulations on his victory. Meanwhile, Russia’s alleged “wet work” and maneuvering outside the United States in the last two weeks has been even more impressive.
Reminiscent of Newspeak, the English language as applied to Israel and the Palestinians has been repeatedly bastardised and butchered beyond all recognition, and accepted by many people as “the truth”, without question or challenge.So below we helpfully present a dictionary of terms that have been as misappropriated as the Jews’ history in Israel. For practice, we suggest you go to Kia Ora Gaza’s Facebook page with this dictionary in hand. In no time at all, you will be a card-carrying Newspeaker!
Index
Apartheid. Colonise Fascism Flotilla Genocide Human rights activist Illegal Occupation Oppression Peace activist Pro-Palestinian Refugee Refugee camp Siege Stolen Terrorism Extra-judicial killing Zionist
And the other guy. And BackChannels hopes the “other guy” proves an American and very, very cool about it.
Despite the conservative grousing about it, we need our United Nations.
Despite “everything being negotiable” — but is everything really negotiable? — Syria needs peace and a program for detoxifying from old Soviet Era poison (including its famous promotion of anti-Semitism); and Ukraine needs to remain sovereign across all of its designated lands.
And NATO and the United States of America represent a necessary and unified concept for the defense of democracy and freedom in the world — real freedom, not state-approved bunk fashioned out of some idiot’s totalitarian mixture of intimidation and patronage.
As always with dictators, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” applies well to ethically, morally, and spiritually vacuous systems of power.
A fast glance online suggests that Stalin and Hitler hated one another and bought into their own heady non-aggression pact for practical (even if delusional) purposes.
Of course, in the BackChannels way of looking at some politics through the lens of related psychology (see “Malignant Narcissism” and other ideas in “Anthropolitical Psychology” on this blog), one may view Stalin and Hitler as two malignant narcissists explosively engaged with one another. It was not a pretty site, that World War II, but the basis for affinity between the two dictators in shared anti-Semitism, anger with the greater world (it’s always against them, non?), the “paranoid delusional reflection of motivation“, and so on may have less visibly bonded the two just as today Putin, Assad, and Khamenei would seem to have wildly different state interests while yet sharing in the creation of greater chaos, destruction, and injustice in the world (for confirmation, just ask any Syrian refugee you happen to meet).
The role of the Soviet Union and KGB “Active Measures” — a term of art that may be looked up online — in the amplifying anti-western anti-Semitic animus has been far overlooked by the public focused – by related political manipulation – on Islamic Terrorism. Whether following the timeline from the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood, the early appearance of Hitlerism, and the Stalin Era or coming forward to the Vietnam War Era or on to this day, you will find the Russian state deeply involved either with the sponsorship of terrorism (see Wikiepedia “Terrorism in the Soviet Era”) or the tolerance of it!
Today, Russia will not condemn Hamas, Hezbollah, or PFLP as terrorist organizations.
Soviet cartoons distributed in the Middle East to leverage “the masses” into the Soviet camp. This one may date from the early 1970s.
When the Soviet Union dissolved 25 years — December 8 (in secret), 25 (public declaration), 26 (Russian tricolor raised above the Kremlin), 1991 — the west may have been both too confident and too eager to establish business and cooperation with the new criminally wild but proto-democratic state, which unbeknownst to the west had already had in place a transition plan to attempt to maintain the architecture and privileges of the Party nomenklatura (reference _Putin’s Kleptocracy_ by Miami University scholar Karen Dawisha).
Vladimir Putin’s complete “pivot” at Syria — not to mention those “little green men” who invaded Crimea — tells of a Russian revanche this time as a feudal, neo-imperial totalitarian and ultra-nationalist state that may manipulate terrorism to suits its ends.
Pat Condell – what binds Putin, Assad, and Khamenei (to lesser extent Putin and Orban plus Putin and Erdogan) is the shared drive for absolute power, or medieval political absolutism, which might remind us of someone else. The malignant narcissists who become dictators — “different talks — same walk!” — appear to have an affinity for one another. As much would seem to inform the world’s code “Brown” “New Nationalism” and the familiar “Red-Green” alliance of old “comrade networks” and the strident among Muslims.
Thank Moscow for once again driving both Far Right and Far Left extremism — and with that, perhaps also our own division today in the United States. The rancor serves to weaken EU / NATO cohesion.
Echoing Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal scandalous post-September 11, 2001, remarks, global jihad by groups like Al Qaeda also elicited Western guilt from School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Dean Vali Nasr. After 9/11, “Islamophobia, in a way, was a policy deliberately pushed from the very top of the U.S. administration” as indicated by President George W. Bush’s use of “Islamo-fascism,” Nasr stated. “Islamophobia was a way of passing the blame back to the Muslims, put Islam itself on trial for its responsibility in promoting terrorism rather than put U.S. foreign policy on trial for creating some of the problems.”
BackChannels 