Dictatorships – Putin’s, Erdogan’s – ‘Different Talks – Same Walk’

17 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Fast News Share, Political Psychology, Politics, Turkey

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coup, dictatorship, Erdogan, malignant narcissism, NATO, Putin's dictatorship, Turkey

Seldom nor so perfectly has the pot called the kettle black as at this moment. “Failed Turkey Coup May Signal Beginning of the End for NATO” crows Sputnik News:

The failed coup attempt in Turkey led by a faction of the military seeking the overthrow of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan citing the leader’s abysmal record on free speech, democratic freedoms, and human rights may be the final death knell for both NATO and the European Union who are holding onto the increasingly undemocratic leader for dear life.

Mirror, please.

When it comes to freedom of the press, Moscow fairly owns the other category — “state-controlled press” — and one may suppose poor Erdogan will just have to catch up (even though he may not have far to go).

Human rights?

Again, Russia (okay: Moscow-Damascus-Tehran) kills it (if it’s moving) in the Syrian Tragedy, the world’s most magnificent display — from Assad’s barrel bombs to Baghdadi’s beheadings — of contemporary barbarism.

How About “Rule of Law”?

Chaika.

Of course, it’s complicated and funny in a very serious way.

Also online:

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/13489/putins-judicial-vertical-russian-rule-of-law-takes-a-step-backward – 1/14/2014.

As perhaps echoes the Egyptian experience with Islamism in force, factions of the Turkish military may have harbored more of the values of modern and democratic life than the democratically elected “malignant narcissist” brought into power and attempted a coup (if the situation was not manipulated by Erdogan himself to strain out of the military the last of his opposition in that estate). Quite unlike the Egyptian experience, which appeared to have brought the very nation out into the streets in support of its military, the Turkish coup has failed, giving Russia finger-wagging power to point to NATO’s support of a dictatorship not unlike Russia’s own.

Putin’s Russian Nationalism : Erdogan’s Sunni Islamism: Different Talks – Same Walk.

“White Palace” – “Presidential Palace”, Ankara, 2014 – by Ex13, Wikimedia Commons.

BBC Europe reports, “Turkey has arrested 6,000 people after a failed coup, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowing to purge state bodies of the “virus” that caused the revolt.”

Way back in March, journalist Dexter Filkins writing for The New Yorker had reported on “Erdogan’s March to Dictatorship in Turkey”.

“Not long after his initial election, Erdoğan’s agents embarked on a large and sinister campaign to destroy his political opponents, jailing hundreds—journalists, university rectors, military officers, aid workers—on trumped-up charges and fabricated evidence,” Filkins wrote — and wrote some more about the arrests of journalists, the taking over of opposition press, the delivery of arms to Jabhat al-Nusra (an al-Qaeda affiliate), the easy go with ISIS in favor of unleashing his military against Kurdish interests.

Other journalists have weighed in with similarly cogent observations.

Alon Ben-Meir, Consortium News, May 13, 2016:

Not surprisingly, once Erdogan assumed the Presidency, he continued to chair cabinet meetings and even established a shadow cabinet with a handful of trusted advisers. He pointedly sidelined Davutoglu, who quietly resented Erdogan’s usurpation of the role and responsibility of the prime minister as if nothing had changed.

The premiership became a ceremonial post and the ceremonial presidency became the all-powerful office without a formal constitutional amendment to legally grant him the absolute authority he is now exercising.

Reuters (with staff contributors listed at the bottom of the piece), January 20, 2016:

A Turkish court on Wednesday sentenced a female teacher to almost a year in prison for making a rude gesture at President Tayyip Erdogan at a political rally in 2014, local media reports said on Wednesday.

Insulting public officials is a crime in Turkey, and Erdogan, the country’s most popular but most divisive politician, is seen by his critics as intolerant of dissent and quick to take legal action over perceived slurs.

Today’s Telegraph UK has laid out the timeline of the attempted coup and listed the sorry statistics involving general arrests, the slaughter overnight (“265 killed”), soldiers imprisoned, and judges facing arrest.

Breaking in Fox News: “Detention orders were filed for 53 more judges and prosecutors while 52 military officers were rounded up for their alleged roles in the plot, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency reported.”

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Oh Gulen Again . . . .

16 Saturday Jul 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Turkey

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Tags

American-Turkish Relationship, despotism, Erdogan, Fethullah Gulen, kleptocracy, malignant narcissists, NATO, political absolute power

If there’s the sniff of a Clinton tie to corruption and crime, the conservative press will find it. In the listings below, The Daily Caller shouts on that.

For any interested (including the FBI) in Fethullah Gulen, BackChannels has visited the presentation of the personality in online news at least twice (as listed) and somewhere on this blog there’s a related poem involving “winks ‘n’ nods” (you’ll appreciate it more if you find it on your own). 🙂

Erdogan the Malignant with the White Palace?

BackChannels has had some say (also as listed).

Psychological alignment: Erdogan along with Orban may share more with Putin as personalities than they may with other NATO leaders and the leaders of westward-leaning former Soviet states or clients.

That’s life with “malignant narcissists”.

Their people will be beaten up for a buck; their manipulated constituencies will drift toward fascist nationalism or some near equivalent (on this blog, keep in mind “Syndicate Red Brown Green“); but they will be glorious in wealth and treasure plundered from state coffers — just as Putin would have it (and has as much for himself as regards kleptocracy and absolute power).

Americans, often written off as being more concerned with Kardashians and sports scores, probably should immerse for a brief spell in Cold War and post-Soviet history, so as to get a grip not only on machinations driving contemporary foreign affairs but to check the state’s own Machiavellian preference for developing perhaps too much business and politics “behind the curtains”.

Appearances in BackChannels

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FTAC – ‘It’s Not Islam – It’s Moscow’

15 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iraq, Middle East, Political Psychology, Regions, Syria

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Tags

foreign affairs, malignant narcissism, Moscow, political manipulation, political psychology, political theater, politics, Putin, Putin-Khamenei, theater of politics and war

Posted to YouTube February 14, 2012.

The response-sparking comment had to do with yesterday’s attack in Nice, France: “Qaddafi was right.”

From the BackChannels side of the awesome conversation:

It’s not Islam — it’s Putin (he who has brought the Russian Orthodox Church back into state favor). Playing ends — Far Right and Far Left — against the middle, he has a special relationship with Islamic extremists. http://www.newsweek.com/us-accuses-assad-aiding-islamic-state-through-airstrikes-338582

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

The last piece posted in October 2015, and it may need an update. However: having incubated ISIS to blackmail and goad the west, Putin has now the option of demonstrating “revived” Russian military prowess by eating ISIS alive but not too much at a time. Khamenei-favoring Shiite militia in Iraq, long hosting Revolutionary Guard advisors, have also their convenient foil.

As regards Europe, Moscow-(Tehran) favors resurgent nationalism — le Pen or Orban (and Jobbik), which is exactly what terrorism compels or encourages in the states it targets.

It’s hard to imagine the kind of narcissism / malignant narcissism (and cowardice and — what sets off the narcissism — “narcissistic mortification”) that would build such a theater of politics and war as Syria-Iraq and a troubled Europe, but go back to the Cold War, which was supposed to have ended 25 years ago, and drag forward the Soviet / KGB Era methods in manipulating whole “chess boards” — both sides of any conflict to advantage.

Then look again at Moscow.

How has Moscow played both sides of a conflict?

There’s a related history lesson in this gem of a BBC video interview:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1 – 4/7/2016 “The Ogaden War”.

Fast Related Reference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_and_the_Soviet_Union – excerpt as viewed August 8, 2016:

Soviet secret services have been described by GRU defectors Viktor Suvorov and Stanislav Lunev as “the primary instructors of terrorists worldwide.”[4][5][6] According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, KGB General Aleksandr Sakharovsky once said: “In today’s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.”[7] He also claimed that “Airplane hijacking is my own invention” and that in 1969 alone, 82 planes were hijacked worldwide by the KGB-financed PLO.[7]

Lt. General Pacepa described operation “SIG” (“Zionist Governments”) that was devised in 1972 to turn the Arab world against Israel and the United States. According to Pacepa, the following organizations received assistance from the KGB and other Eastern Bloc intelligence services: PLO, National Liberation Army of Bolivia (created in 1964 with help from Ernesto Che Guevara), the National Liberation Army of Colombia (created in 1965 with help from Cuba), Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1969, and the Secret Army for Liberation of Armenia in 1975.[8]

http://www.politico.eu/article/le-pen-russia-crimea-putin-money-bank-national-front-seeks-russian-cash-for-election-fight/ – 2/19/2016;

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11515835/Russia-bought-Marine-Le-Pens-support-over-Crimea.html – 4/4/2015. There may be in these stories the KGB-style “framing” of Le Pen, but the “9 million euro” loan from First Czech-Russian Bank” seems uncontested, so one may ask what such loan approval buys, if anything.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/08/russia-europe-right-putin-front-national-eu – 12/8/2014 – “We should beware Russia’s links with Europe’s right” (by Luke Harding in The Guardian).

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4112/hungarian_neo_nazis_court_russia_as_inspiration_for_attacks_on_gays – 9/5/2013;

https://www.thenation.com/article/decrying-ukraines-fascists-putin-allying-europes-far-right/ – 5/21/2014

https://eu.boell.org/en/2015/05/05/i-am-eurasian-kremlin-connections-hungarian-far-right – 5/5/2015

http://hungarianspectrum.org/2016/01/20/is-the-hungarian-far-right-jobbik-party-financed-by-russia/ – 1/20/2016

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/30/opinions/russia-soviet-fighters-istanbul-bombing-bergen/ – 7/1/2016 – Note: ISIS has also served Moscow as a target to which to channel its own Islamists. In effect, ISIS by existing in numbers in Syria provides a “KZ” or “kill zone” in which to concentrate fighters for later warfare. HOW such fighters may then come to launch actions against NATO members forms a question beyond the means of this blog to address.

The last word on this post goes to Stratfor’s Scott Stewart:

In an earlier column, I briefly addressed the similarities between the utopian ideology of the Islamic State and that of the global communist movement. I have also compared the counterinsurgency efforts used against the two movements in the past. But as I was writing about the structure of the Islamic State last week, I encountered more and more parallels to the global Marxist movement.

https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/what-cold-war-can-teach-us-about-jihadism – 7/14/2016.

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Reading BC – Those Big Headlines

09 Saturday Jul 2016

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Notes On Reading BackChannels, Political Psychology

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BackChannels, blogging, news, perception, politics

This follows from the previous post.

What is the difference between “moderate” and “extreme” politics?

And how “packed” should a blog post be?

Closing in on “Syndicate Red Brown Green” works a little at a time, at least for those who care to overview the results from a search like “Ferguson and Gaza”.

Ferguson is not Gaza — and Gaza would not be Gaza without Hamas, and Hamas is just another Muslim Brotherhood / Muslim Botherhood organization like . . . ISIL, the gang of the day.

In some ways, suffering — hunger, indignity, inequality, injustice — is the same everywhere, but we all don’t point the fingers the same way.

“White police shot a black man!”

Uh huh.

Except it was a Latino policemen, neither “white cracker” or Yalie WASP.

Should we even notice the “white guy” was Latino?

Not really.

We only do it because we’ve been made to notice that the deceased was black.

Before this is over, more fingers will point to force personnel evaluation or training, one or the other, not the whiteness of the force or the blackness of the community.

Probably, Philando Castile was an American Everyman who could have been any man.

This is what courts are for: examination, second looks, reevaluations.

Those old Lefties (and, believe me, this is being written by an old liberal) — now the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left?: to hell with the courts!

It was murder — and don’t forget to show whitey what’s what downtown.

So here comes that long hot summer involving some kind of 1960s and 1970s American Revanche — Glory Days!

There’s a whole new generation ready to pick up the cudgels.

Parts of the Revolution will be televised.

Anything not televised will show up on the World Wide Web.

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Radicalization, Incitement, and Lone Wolf Violence

09 Saturday Jul 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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America's Far Left, American politics, Dallas mass shooting, perception, Philando Castile, police-involved shooting, political psychology, political rhetoric, racism, Syndicate Red Brown Gree

C-DR-press

What’s in a picture?

First, the source of the screen capture:

McLaughlin, Eliott C. “Woman streams aftermath of officer-involved shooting.” CNN, July 8, 2016.

A simple caption might do: Diamond Reynolds meets the press on the police-involved killing of her boyfriend Philando Castile in the Falcon Heights community outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

As Reynolds breaks into tears and is comforted by a pastor, another man comes forward wearing a “Day of Dignity” t-shirt that has come from an event sponsored by Islamic Relief USA (there are many Day of Dignity events annually).

BackChannels to this point has been “crayony” and superficial about “Moscow-Tehran” and “Syndicate Red Brown Green”, which one may infer from pictures at the intersection between the black nationalist movements and Palestinian Solidarity — raised fists and green flags — and it’s there in the latest attractive trope, “Ferguson-Gaza” — by way of examples online:

In Salon, August 22, 2014 (by Stanford University professor David Palumbo-Liu): “Ferguson and Gaza: The definitive study of how they are and are not similar”.

In the Middle East Eye: “Gaza and Ferguson: Can two struggles unite?” August 19, 2015.

“Ferguson-Gaza” — look it up 🙂 — loads up on the anti-Semitic New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left, of course, and the same is met (same search) by Jewish and other commentary questioning the comparison. Be that as it may, take this post as being about the motivation for hitching emotions to the readymade and head-nodding programs of the Far Left and potential Islamist Front, not that there’s anything in the least controversial about missionary sympathy from any religious quarter toward those to whom injustice has either been done or who perceive the same as being so.

Again, this post is about the motivation: the policeman looked white; the angel looked black.

That’s the way it looks and will probably be remembered as the way it looked.

If you have a Facebook account, I highly recommend Melissa Colorado’s footage of Diamond Reynolds’ say on the matter of the shooting of her boyfriend Philando Castile.

On the basis of surface events and visceral perception, those in politics and ambitious about picking up their legions know exactly how to exploit such misery to pick up their own numbers.

At its Facebook address, the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, an old stalwart, has lost no time producing language and action certain to motivate “the masses”:

“Black Lives Matter Chicago, the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and Trinity United Church of Christ calls upon all the various strands of the peoples movement to come out and join us in protest of the cold blooded, brutal murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. We will rally Monday, July 11, 2016 in Federal Plaza (Dearborn and Adams) at 4:30pm and march in the streets.”

In relation to Dallas, never mind the political incitement present, so might be inferred, in the head of sniper Micah Johnson. How did such an idea as shooting police from a parking garage in Dallas get in there in the first place?

Take another glance up this page.

The processes of law in the United States will diminish some of the passion involved in the coming understanding of the shooting of Philando Castile by (Latino) policeman Jeronimo Yanez.

Regarding “Syndicate Red Brown Green”, a term of art on this blog, this piece may be essential for understanding how Far Left movements do, in fact, collide:

Isaacs, Anna. “How the Black Lives Matter and Palestinian Movements Converged.” Moment, March-April 2016.

The point should be clear and for now remain: the proper framework for Far Left politics in the United States (and perhaps elsewhere) remains the Soviet, the Cold War, and the aftermath — the political phantoms — that have flowed down with both over time. If one wants to drive back even further in cultural-political history, one may through the lens of greater Asian and Russian history and the barbarism and feudal conquests associated with both. What for interest appeals to BackChannels is the extreme narcissism in play in history and in present politics where powerful personalities have placed themselves beyond criticism and law and immune to the suffering of others, especially when they themselves capriciously impose that suffering on others with impunity.

National Review writer David French has also weighed in on Black Lives Matter. Here are two pieces, one dating back to December 2015 and another posted yesterday.

French, David. “America is Driving toward the Abyss, and It’s Time We Hit the Brakes.” National Review, July 8, 2016.

French, David. “The Numbers are In: Black Lives Matter is Wrong About Police.” National Review, December 29, 2015.

Related in the News

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/dallas-police-ambush/dallas-shooter-micah-xavier-johnson-was-army-veteran-n606101 – 7/9/2016

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dallas-police-chief-david-brown-has-lost-his-son-former-partner-and-brother-to-violence/2016/07/08/01419ea8-451c-11e6-8856-f26de2537a9d_story.html – 7/8/2016

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/07/09/lawyer-minnesota-cop-reacted-gun-not-race/86894752/ – 7/9/2016

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FTAC – Clarity – An Observation About Russian Feudalism and the Middle East Conflict

30 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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21st Century Neo-Feudalism, absolute power, dictatorship, feudalism, middle east conflict, Palestinian politics, post-Soviet, Russia, Soviet history

The “single state” solution fails not for enmity but for comprehension of what is represented by the Hebrews living in the land of the Hebrews.

Language as a cultural technology evolves within a people in somewhat isolated social space sufficient to invent their way of getting along among themselves and with the surrounding earth. For each ethnolinguistic cultural cohort on the planet, there is a land, a someplace, from whence it came.

So the Hebrews are back in the Land of the Hebrews: Israel. There are also Baloch, Pashtun (“B’ni Israel”, self-defined), and Kurds who have a relationship with the land that made them, and they too have some political issues involving their autonomy and survival as a people.

The Jordanian Arabs and the migrant workers caught between armies in 1948 have been deeply manipulated by powerful forces within and outside of Arab culture. The Russian KGB’s invention of Arafat, an Egyptian, and the PLO either is or should be history well known to scholars who have devoted themselves to studying and solving the “middle east conflict” (never the others ongoing — and “hot” — at the moment). The contemporary and feudal Russian story, that which has had Mikhail Bogdanov entertaining PFLP in Moscow (Nov. 2014) while the state refuses to acknowledge either Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, should be taken into account.

It’s not the Israelis or Palestinian People (again: somewhat isolated in time and space — long enough to create new language 🙂 ) who sustain the middle east conflict: all along, it has been those who misinform, mis-educate, and maliciously “program” socially captive innocents in service to their own feudal-medieval aggrandizement (and financial enrichment).

This blog now has plenty of data for backing up its opinion about what has created and what sustains the “Middle East Conflict (MEC)”. From the vicious narcissism that would hold refugees in camps (Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt) and separated from general state populations (a genuinely apartheid policy) to the Soviet distribution of anti-Semitic propaganda and, yes, the invention of Arafat, the MEC has come to represent medievalism at its greed-laden best.

Look into UNRWA spending and tunnel smuggling, and then take another look at who got the loot.

We know who didn’t get wealthy.

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Video

FTAC – ‘This is Moscow’s Game’

29 Wednesday Jun 2016

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

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dictatorship, feudal absolute power, neo-feudalism, neo-imperialism, Putinism, Russia, Russian feudalism, Russian politics

This is Moscow’s game.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1*

Today, Putin plays “ends against the middle” by supporting Far Right and Far Left movements and personalities; he indulges in breathtaking political theater — Sochi or Syria, both have been about demonstration of political values; and he’s ruthless (poor Assad), enough so to have engineered through influence the incubating of ISIS (for the production “Assad vs The Terrorists”) and the creation of an EU / NATO stressing immigrant headache, to which the Brits have responded and played directly into his bid to keep restored feudal political absolute power.

Most of the public will keep Putin’s feudal revanche in Russia separate from the issues attending the Great Britain – European Union split, but the general weakening of the European Union and NATO would seem fit to his own image of himself as the unassailable primary political force in a state suspended between a secret police organization (FSB) to whom he refers to as the “New Nobility”, himself, and the financial oligarchy that he controls.

*In the above cited and linked video, attend to Moscow’s creation of a conflict that it chooses to manage from both sides.

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FTAC – Sideways on Brexit and Putin’s Medieval Theater

27 Monday Jun 2016

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

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21st Century Neo-Feudalism, Cold Struggle, political manipulation, political theater, post-Cold War, Russia

🙂

A fair part of the world is now The World x multinational business x communication x shipping x transportation, and while sovereign states must control their borders, few are able to ignore their neighbors, their neighbors’ ambitions, or bad habits and bad sectors. Probably the way to think about criminality, as determined by familiar western and modern precepts is to attach it to “filtration” — catch the “bad apples” — and osmosis from ungoverned conditions and space to governed.

At the moment, there’s a feudal-criminal world (psst: Moscow and its assortment of Far Right and Far Left helpers) continuing to drive chaos into the more civil, more “rule-of-law” west. While the west should (must!) push back, it should do so with other than reversion to its own feudal tendencies.

What Moscow / Putin promotes has been on full display between Sochi and Syria — immense accumulations of wealth and power beside the most inhuman of practices and the most thoughtless and provocative real behavior in foreign policy. I know I can’t keep going over how Damascus incubated ISIS, or, in Russia, (or Iran), how criminality / kleptocracy leak down through the justice systems and corrode their entire societies, but all of that is what is actually represented by ISIS and so many Syrian refugees.

I know as an editor (of possibly the world’s most obscure political blog) that similar specialists or academics “get” the post-Cold War “big picture” but for most with more parochial interests, it’s “ISIS” and what Putin’s sayin’ sounds about right — lower the portcullis!

BackChannels has developed a whole image of the “Post-Cold War – Cold Struggle” environment anchored yet in Moscow and Washington. In getting to this point, it has learned that “research analyst” (self-assigned, autodidact) knowledge and public impression and perception diverge often and quite, which fact of life may suit the treatment of the public as “the masses”, for as much fits with Moscow’s philosophy regarding information, “information space”, and political manipulation via, as with the handling of Syria, political theater writ large.

BackChannels

~ Conflict, Culture, Language, Psychology

Category Archives: Political Psychology

Oh Gulen Again . . . .

Appearances in BackChannels

Gulen

Erdogan

Erdogan and Gulen

In the News Today or Recently

FTAC – ‘It’s Not Islam – It’s Moscow’

Fast Related Reference

Reading BC – Those Big Headlines

Radicalization, Incitement, and Lone Wolf Violence

Related in the News

FTAC – Clarity – An Observation About Russian Feudalism and the Middle East Conflict

FTAC – ‘This is Moscow’s Game’

FTAC – Sideways on Brexit and Putin’s Medieval Theater

Related and Highly Recommended Summer Reading