I would expect Americans to vote their judgment of character and their ideals, and neither candidate has appeal in character. That may be a function of this election’s relentless negative campaigning.
Think about it a moment.
The campaigners are the kind of people who would go microscopically digging in the past to scrape up a few moments of locker room braggadocio with which to scuttle a presidential contender’s campaign.
Vote Donald J. Trump!
But then . . . what does one do with Trump’s bankruptcies, “tax freedom” (one might call it), and the near routine stiffing of vendors who have delivered their work and then have had to sue to hold Trump’s side to its contract obligations?!
Vote Hillary Clinton!
Then li’l ol’ me goes dredging up — I’m a humble blogger, lowest of the low in journalism, a bum, so I’m allowed to go dredging (or is it “Drudging”?) — something out of Bill’s past, and there’s the Moscow connection.
Vote Donald J. Trump!
But Trump had the temerity or naivete to hire Paul Manafort, consultant to the world’s bloodiest dictators and political mafia, including Viktor Yanukovych whom Ukrainians ousted from power, so disgusted were they with the corruption associated with the regime. Yanukovych went crying to Moscow; Moscow sent in the “Little Green Men” and annexed Crimea against old agreements to leave Ukraine independent . . . .
Vote Hillary Clinton!
Feeling screwed either way?
Many of my fellow Americans may feel the same way.
On the 2016 American Elections, BackChannels has striven to either stay out of it or stay balanced, and it has possibly succeeded at both.
Come the day, many voters may feel they’re not voting for Clinton or Trump but rather voting against one or the other, i.e., blocking a perceived threat to America’s “domestic tranquility” — perhaps the entire election should be perceived as and rendered unconstitutional! — and its independent foreign affairs policies and practices.
While the surface may look calm — and in the above video positively modern and multicultural — here’s additional reference to what appears to lie beneath.
The president of Chechnya emerged from afternoon prayers at a mosque and with chilling composure explained why seven young women who had been shot in the head deserved to die.
Ramzan Kadyrov said the women, whose bodies were found dumped by the roadside, had “loose morals” and were rightfully shot by male relatives in honor killings.
Earlier this month, the leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, informed his more than one million followers on social networks that he had become “the happiest man in this land.” Something had come to pass that he never could have dreamed of, he said. He had had a transfusion, he said, from a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, so now he has the Prophet’s blood flowing through his veins.
RAMZAN KADYROV has few inhibitions. Last week, just before the first anniversary of the murder of Boris Nemtsov, a liberal Russian opposition leader, by a member of Mr Kadyrov’s security services, the Chechen strongman posted a video on his Instagram page. It depicted Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister, in the crosshairs of a sniper rifle. “Kasyanov is in Strasbourg to get money for the opposition,” Mr Kadyrov commented under the video, in a clear warning to opposition politicians. “Whoever still doesn’t get it, will.”
Vladimir Putin said when he first ran for president in 2000 that his “historic mission” was to resolve the situation in the North Caucasus. To do so, he oversaw a second war in Chechnya, already devastated by Russia’s failed attempt to subdue the republic in 1994-1996.
Instead of solving the North Caucasus issue, however, Putin created a monster. To end the fighting, he cut a deal with Chechnya’s rebel Kadyrov clan: In exchange for loyalty to the Kremlin, they received power and reconstruction aid.
This was a medieval deal that made Akhmad Kadyrov, a rebel commander and Sufi mufti, Putin’s feudal liege. The aim was to co-opt the more religiously moderate Sufis among Chechnya’s rebel fighters, marginalize the Salafist jihadists who appear to have fascinated the Boston bombers, and enable the Russian military to declare victory and draw down.
This subject is complicated by “Hizb ut-Tahrir”, a Tatar organization supportive of the Chechen rebels (presumably against affiliates of warlord Kadyrov) but not active itself with terrorism and, apparently, acting in the open.
The Pentagon has identified eight staging areas in Russia where large numbers of military forces appear to be preparing for incursions into Ukraine, according to U.S. defense officials.
As many as 40,000 Russian troops, including tanks, armored vehicles, and air force units, are now arrayed along Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia.
One could research and read through the many themes, but I like Ben Judah’s comment best regarding the compact between Putin and Kadyrov: “This was a medieval deal that made Akhmad Kadyrov, a rebel commander and Sufi mufti, Putin’s feudal liege. The aim was to co-opt the more religiously moderate Sufis among Chechnya’s rebel fighters, marginalize the Salafist jihadists who appear to have fascinated the Boston bombers, and enable the Russian military to declare victory and draw down.”
BackChannels has been singing medieval about “Putin, Assad, and Khamenei (and Baghdadi)” for ages, but the observation now begs another question: how modern is the west?
If we call what we have been witnessing in Syria a “New Medievalism”, we may well ask where is NATO on the timeline of political conventions?
BackChannels hopes there is such a thing as “Modern” in governance and that it is supported by the bravery in arms, integrity in character, and the honest research of the thoughtful.
He has previously served Jewish communities in France and Israel, and, according to the report, has been instrumental in aiding Jews of the former Soviet Union. He is believed to have been in Haditch at the gravesite over Rosh Hashanah.
The motive for the attack remains unknown. According to the report, violent antisemitic attacks in Ukraine are rare, and there is no indication at this time that the assault was antisemitic in nature.
BackChannels wishes not to become “Yellow Press”, but given the mysterious elements in the crime described in The Algemeiner, both Ukrainian detectives and global public now need to be aware of the possibility of being fooled by old KGB method in placing a cooked-up image before “the masses”.
Let the detectives do their work, and may they do it with exemplary conscience and integrity.
Putin’s Russia represents the medieval world revolving around Absolute Power. So does the Syrian Theater — no more true description than theater for that. And so do Hamas and Hezbollah and so many others bent on imposing their will on the free of the open democracies through the application of violence.
The Palestinian platform from within the unsettled territories has long been a Soviet project intended to block the west’s own liberation and security story and produce money for its figureheads and associates, but never the disenfranchised.
The problem has been Moscow’s connection with 20th Century terrorism and its perhaps cynical leveraging of the same in this still young century.
This 2014 Guardian article about Moscow’s expulsion of journalist David Satter may merely hint at Putin’s considerable success at trying to move Russia forward while turning the clock backward:
On Wikipedia and relevant to the long view of Russian history
I would much prefer a book walk me through time (recommendations may be welcomed), but for a browse-and-peruse session, or several, these entries found on Wikipedia provide an arc from the brigands of the feudal world to Putin’s surreal narrative predicated, at least partly, on massive information and perceptual control of the Russians.
Despite its occurrence at the height of World War I, the roots of the February Revolution date much further back. Chief among these was Imperial Russia’s failure, throughout the 19th and early 20th century, to modernize its archaic social, economic and political structures while maintaining the stability of ubiquitous devotion to an autocratic monarch. As historian Richard Pipes writes, “the incompatibility of capitalism and autocracy struck all who gave thought to the matter”
The IRA was in contact with Red Army intelligence officers in London and New York, and it was in the former that the monthly stipend was handed over. The IRA’s senior officer in London passed along military intelligence, including specifications of British submarine detection sonar and aeroplane engines for bombers, military journals and manuals, and gas masks. In addition he arranged false passports for Soviet agents and even for a communist operative to travel to Romania in the guise of an Irish woollens salesman! It was in New York, however, that the Soviets got the most valuable information, from an IRA agent code-named ‘Mr Jones’. Jones’s sources likely included serving members of the US military, as he was able to provide reports of the army’s chemical weapons service, state-of-the-art gas masks, machine-gun and aeroplane engine specifications, and reports from the navy, air service and army. In Jones’s estimation, Soviet intelligence in the US would have been ‘helpless’ without the information he supplied.
The document, which the University of Cambridge’s Churchill Archives Centre confirmed was authentic, was smuggled in to the UK by a defector called Vasily Mitrokhin.
It is entitled “KGB developments – Year 1983” and Mr Abbas identifies him by the codename “Krotov” or “mole”.
“‘Krotov’ – Abbas, Mahmoud, born 1935, origin Palestine, member of the executive committee of Fatah, PLO, Damascus, agent of the KGB,” says the brief entry.
The KGB, when I was still connected with it, went to great lengths to transform an Egyptian born Marxist, Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, nom de guerre Abu Ammar, into a Palestinian-born Yasser Arafat. It took the KGB — and my DIE — many years to endow Arafat with a credible Palestinian birth certificate and other identity documents, to build him a new past, and to train him at the KGB Balashikha special-operations training school east of Moscow.
How much of the intellectual poison delivered by Soviet-borne misinformation persists today in the Middle East Conflict?
Considering the looks of Syria, the miserable psychology shared between the dictatorships — on this blog, have a glance at the “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” — and the horrific results, a side by side glance at Hamas behavior in Gaza (x human rights) suggests the same malign narcissistic values continues to course through the governance in both locations.
Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has been extremely profitable for Arafat. According to Forbes magazine, he is today the sixth wealthiest among the world’s “kings, queens & despots,” with more than $300 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts.
A little more than four months before the news this week that tests on Arafat’s body in a Swiss investigation showed “unexpected high activity” of polonium, a book co-authored by former Romanian spy chief Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa was published documenting Arafat’s training by the communist Soviet Union and pointing out that the only other known case of polonium-210 poisoning was the death of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.
Yasir Arafat claims that he was born in Jerusalem, but he was actually born in Cairo. He claims to belong to the prominent Jerusalem family of Husseini, but he is at best only distantly related to it. He claims that he turned down a chance to go to the University of Texas, but according to one biographer, the Palestinian-born writer Saïd K. Aburish, it is highly unlikely that he was ever accepted. He claims to have disabled ten Israeli armored personnel carriers in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, but Israel didn’t even have ten APCs in the sector he was in. He claims to have made millions as a businessman in Kuwait, but this, too, is almost certainly untrue.
Obviously, Arafat is a congenital liar. But there’s more to it than that: his lies are all designed to create an aura of romance around himself and the Palestinian people.
The history of Palestine–Russia (and between 1917–1991, Palestine–Soviet Union) relations has been long and complex. For a number of historical and political reasons, it has been deeply interwoven with Russian (and between 1917–1991, Soviet) relations with the Zionist-Israeli enterprise, Palestinian nationalism, and Third World national liberation movements in general. However, at the same time, particularly between 1956 and 1990, Soviet-Palestinian relations were also part and parcel of the then ongoing Soviet-American confrontation, and even after the Cold War ended, the international and ideological role and importance of the Russian-Palestinian relationship always far exceeded its local and regional limitations. This relationship has continued even today. Russia remains an important player in the Middle East peace process and is a member of the Middle East Quartet.
The leader of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, established close collaboration with the Romanian Securitate service and the Soviet KGB in the beginning of the 1970s.[9] The secret training of PLO guerrillas was provided by the KGB.
According to Vasili Mitrokhin, a senior KGB archivist who defected to the UK in 1992, in early 1970 Haddad was recruited by the KGB as an agent, codenamed NATSIONALIST. Thereafter, in deep secrecy the Soviets helped to fund and arm the PFLP. The KGB had warning of its major operations and almost certainly sanctioned the most significant, such as the September 1970 hijackings. Haddad remained a highly valued agent till his death in 1978.
A letter by Yuri Andropov allegedly confirming Haddad’s role as an agent was independently discovered in Soviet archives by Vladimir Bukovsky and has since been published.
The Khaibar-1 (Arabic: خيبر-1) is a Syrian-made 302 mm [1] artillery rocket used by Hezbollah against targets in northern Israel. The name of the rocket was first revealed on July 28, 2006 by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a speech on Al-Manar television station.
In July, Russia’s Federal Security Service, successor agency to the KGB, released a list of 17 organizations the Russian Supreme Court had identified as “terrorist.” The FSB’s counterterrorism chief described all 17 groups as a threat to the Russian state and noted that almost all were linked in some way to the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the 17. Hamas, however, was not listed, though it openly describes itself as the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood and frequently features deceased Brotherhood dignitaries like Hassan al-Banna and Abdullah Azzam alongside Hamas leaders on its posters and pamphlets. The reason for not listing Hamas, the counterterrorism chief explained, was that Hamas was not engaged in violent activity in Russia, nor was it linked to illegal armed groups operating in the North Caucasus. But Hamas supporters do maintain a presence in Russia, and the group does express solidarity with Chechen fighters, including suicide bombers.
BackChannels 