Reminder: our species’ inventory of living languages stands at about 7,000; our inventory of most subscribed religions stands at about 16 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_religious_groups — and then one may get into counting sects and cults in any number. Each package –language and religion + language or religion — represents some human way of adjusting to a limited (!) ecological or social environment — they ways of a people in its place (a good reference for that thought might be Vine Deloria Jr.’s book _God is Red_).
Add some borrowing, from Moses to Hille, perhaps, from Hillel to Jesus, Paul, and Constantine, from Constantine’s example on to Muhammad. The thought about our intellectual history may not be magical or romantic but it makes sense of time, thought, and adjustment to changing wants and changed boundaries.
The popular and scholarly discussion of religion is not something that can be or should be forbidden as each human mind wrestles not only with immediate environmental and social survival — this, using language as a cultural tool — but with a sense known to most of humanity (atheists comprise but seven percent of the lot) of a greater metaphysical existence from the genius loci to the Master of the Universe.
That’s life.
Life with time changes some things.
Life with space preserves some things.
central –> marginal –> mixed <– marginal <– central may give us one way of thinking about ethnolinguistic cultural (and religious) survival (and co-evolution). I don’t want to live in an all English, all secular world. Who would? No matter: nature, by demonstration, prefers experiment and variety.
Let the years of violent cultural annihilation and conquest subside. We are capable of observing ourselves, speaking across immense cultural and physical space . . . the conversation cannot be avoided but can be had with much, much less grief.
Verbose, definitely.
Underappreciated, maybe.
🙂
Every day’s conversation and news transmitted around the world changes the world a little bit because it reaches into so many minds. In some social circles, one may talk of a New Global Intelligentsia, and while so many state leaders and generals may be “too busy and too important” to be in it themselves, have no doubt that they are looking it over in some compressed fashion and with varied ambitions and concerns.
The prompt had to do with questioning and discussing religion, which in the west is what the west does without inhibition. We annul and validate with our choice in subscription, some of which may be powerfully driven by the accident of birth and legacy, and in some other part the experience of discomfort leading to the development of choices — options — and the conscious and adult election to lend or withhold our energies from one set of beliefs or practices or another.
There should be no compulsion.
Where violence is needed to enforce obeyance, bold and earnest conversation may condemn, degrade, and diminish the medieval and uglier methods of political and religious control.
We talk.
The freedom to listen with compassion, empathy, and empirical and intuitive knowledge; the freedom to reason about, reflect on, and weigh ideas; and the freedom to speak responsibly about anything — about all things — is freedom.
Zubatov had long harboured plans for the restructuring and expansion of the political police, envisioning an elite and quasi-independent political police, acting under the direct order of its own Special Section and only indirectly under the orders of Fontanka; a truly secret police expanding and operating at the behest of the MVD‘s edicts, circulars, and regulations and not through the statutes of the Svod Zakonov (Digest of Laws).
Plehve dismissed Lopukhin’s plan and gave Zubatov’s proposals his full support. Zubatov’s ideas on police reform fitted comfortably within Plehve’s view of traditional tsarist bureaucratic behavior, satisfying both his belief in Imperial power politics and his secretive nature. He conceived of political police reform in the only way his experience allowed him to: not through decentralization of authority as Lopukhin believed, but through its deconcentration — the expansion of central authority in the provinces. Indeed, this strategy would permit Plehve to swell the size of the political police to ministerial proportions. As a result Plehve would in fact hold two very powerful ministerial portfolios: minister of internal affairs and the unofficial post of minister of internal security, enhancing his power and prestige within both ministerial circles and the court, making him the most powerful man in Russia next to the tsar.
Zuckerman, Fredric S. The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880-1917. Pp. 92-93. Washington Square, New York: New York University Press, 1996.
“Fontanka” refers to “Fontanka 16 Quai” (St. Petersburg), the central location, evidently of minimized importance at the above passage, for Tsar Alexander II’s secret police.
According to Wikipedia, “Many authors maintain that it was Rachkovsky’s agent in Paris, Matvei Golovinski, who in the early 1900s authored the first edition.[3] The text presented the impending Russian Revolution of 1905 as a part of a powerful global Jewish conspiracy and fomented anti-Semitism to deflect public attention from Russia’s growing social problems. Another Rachkovsky agent, Yuliana Glinka, is often cited as the person who brought the forgery from France to Russia.”
A rabbi said to me one afternoon in relation to religious zealots, “end times”, and terrorism: “Everyone’s in too much of a hurry to get to the end of the story.”
We were then looking forward.
At the moment, BackChannels has been looking backward and would say to the rabbi, “To the contrary, everyone wants to go back to the drawing board!”
For the Islamists, the “drawing board” appears to be 7th Century Medieval Barbarism.
For the Russian President, perhaps, it may be the political police serving Tsar Nicholas II.
1. Anti-Semitism serves feudal power. It is a tool for the manipulation and direction of mobs. Note: Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal are billionaires today, which begs the question: who has really occupied what? The PLO and PFLP have been Moscow projects from the beginning and the encouragement of an anti-Semitic middle east a major part of the Soviet program, which medieval / oligarchal phantoms we are fighting today.
2. Nationalism tends toward fascism (ask any of the more western-oriented opposition in Hungary about that). In Israel, the Hebrews, +5,000 years together, are back in the Land of the Hebrews, and they have been taught a long lesson by way of the leaders and fans of the “International Solidarity” and “Palestinian Solidarity” garbage (that’s the word for them): the complaint about Israel has never been about Israel — it has been always about Jewish existence itself, not only in Israel but anywhere on the planet.
3. Go back to Moses the Lawgiver and go forward to Hillel the Elder who to accommodate the restive of a decaying Rome made Judaism more about principle than ritual and more accessible to converts. Then: Jesus, Paul, Constantine; then: Muhammad. Those who really hate the Jews hate the law and humanity. The may hate themselves. Boco Haram, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah: call them the “God Mob” because intimidation, theft, and murder on one side and pandering and patronage on the other appears to be what each has best demonstrated in organizational lives short and long.
As much verbiage as BackChannels spools onto the threads of The Awesome Conversation, the social network chatyping fest, it wonders who compressed it may make a packet of thought.
Anti-Semitism : Feudal Mentality
Perhaps that should be enough.
It has been deeply disappointing watching some Syrians (for the most part, not friends, but others the “friends of friends”) refuse to struggle with the anti-Semitic expression that not only accompanies their suffering but plays directly into hands of the medieval troika, Putin – Assad – Khamenei, each of whom have pegged their survival on irrational mob behavior and, indeed, feudal wars that for being so intellectually bereft that they cannot resolve through violence.
Some prefer the engines of war to the machinery of peace.
A moderate Syrian opposition site had played a cartoon showing Putin, Khamenei, and Netanyahu in bed together while Assad lay on the floor. Never mind the nonsense in which the leader of an open democracy shares the same mattress as the two despots, the intent to harm Israel absent of reason stands signal of the too familiar sickness and the fascism to which it connects.
Anti-Semitic hate contributes directly to the medieval worldview promoted by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei. Israel’s arrangements with Russia over Syria have been defensive and perfunctory. Before the Soviet Union dissolved (December 1991), this is how it manipulated latent Jew Hate in the middle east into the Baathist dictatorships — from one of which Assad has descended. In fact, Assad is counting on Syrian anti-Semitism to contribute to his stay in power. https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/ftac-tip-to-the…/
The attached cartoon was generated by Putin’s former KGB culture and inserted (with many like it, also many field agents, and thousands of Party trained Russian workers) into the middle east to promote Arab anti-Semitism. It’s something to keep in mind with regard to historic relations between Moscow and Tel Aviv. The directing of anger and hate toward a convenient target suits a certain kind of criminal power and its will to manipulate and poison “masses”.
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The promotion of the Great Leader, the destruction of the individual, and the development of controlled media, pervasive propaganda, and political theater seem to BackChannels themes familiar to all dictatorships. Those operating in Syria today seem to BackChannels only the most recently hyperdestructive.
The cartoons were passed to BackChannels more than a year ago.
As always, “The Russian Section” of this blog’s library provides plenty of background as regards the political atmosphere and psychological mechanisms associated with the Soviet and the Soviet Era.
In context of The Awesome Conversation, encounters with anti-Semitic expression in the press of the post- or pseudo-communist “Solidarity” organizations and in numerous chat forums online seems unavoidable, but one may point out to the injured and angered the true source of their own indoctrination and manipulation in “helping” them bend to the will of a malign leadership.
While many observations may be made of anti-Semites — some criminally anti-authoritarian and anti-law of any kind but their own; some so obsessed as to suggest mental illness as a foundation for their rants — the idea that suggested content, like the above cartoons, has been conveniently packaged and made easy to swallow by the ugly among the powerful should tell the bigoted something about their own gullibility or intellectual vulnerability.
Related URLs on BackChannels
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/12/02/quote-manipulation-about-the-plo-leader-pacepa-and-rychlak-2013/ This provides a key example of Soviet meddling in middle eastern politics that resonates today with Mahmoud Abbas’s deeply anti-Semitic stance and the less remarked financial piracy that has made him wealthy ($100 million in estimated portfolio — of course, Hamas rivals Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires, all made on the backs of Palestinians and their suffering).
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/09/01/ftac-soviet-to-syria-now/ As bloggers may, BackChannels daily surveying of the news across the web — and it’s human labor here, not machine — occassionally gets ahead of the story. Mention was made of some Russian military incursion in Syria on this post (thanks to another source) and, lo and behold, it’s big news today.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/03/19/its-hard-helping-you-when-you-are-anti-semitic-among-other-things/ – 3/19/2014. In agony, Syrians have reached out to the world for rescue, but some in the political arena have surfaced with a problem: they hate Jews and they hate the west — and that animosity and beliefs and attitudes related to it has isolated them. As Assad, Putin, and Khamenei afford only the lengthening of their own medieval misdirection, subjugation, and enslavement — and too much of horror has been delivered by Assad for going back — Syrians chained and hobbled by anti-Semitism and related hatred of the west will have to remove those chains — habits of mind — themselves. In North America — no problems: the diaspora Syrian community may be as modern and plural as suits life in the United States and Canada. As regards life in the war zones of Syria, the matter of belief — about anything — would seem complicated by whatever force happens to be in town on any given day.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/ – 10/2/2015. Only the superficial news reader perceives of ISIS as entirely an autonomous movement, a scourge independent of other powers, but other powers, as in those now olden 20th Century days, have meddled to produce a piece of political theater: “Assad vs The Terrorists” or, as presented to the open democracies of the west, “Assad OR The Terrorists”!
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/06/02/assad-or-burn-it-assad-burns-it/ – 6/2/2015. The quotation more common online goes, “Assad, Or We Burn the Country”. It’s the same thing and goes back to the political blackmail “Assad OR The Terrorists.” Either Assad (Putin and Khamenei) continue to control (and plunder) Syria or the west gets the Black Flag Hornet’s Nest (of implied evil puns there has been no end since 9/11).
BackChannels may compile news and comment on it, but it has yet to acquire a crystal ball.
The links are probably not comprehensive but representative of the thought developed on this blog. There’s always more to look up on this blog, and probably, despite the author’s desire for brevity and compression, more to say about many “conflict, culture, language, and psychology” related things.
In childhood, the kid with the chessboard chooses his opponent. Why not in adulthood? And what if you could not only control you opponent but make the same another rival’s opponent . . . how cool would that be?
That would be so far beyond cool as to have arrived at deliciously evil.
Bashar al-Assad’s best defense, for the realpolitik theatrical “Assad vs The Terrorists” becomes for the general opposition, including NATO opposition to the tyrant’s rule, “Assad or The Terrorists” (mirroring slogan: “Assad, Or We Burn The Country”).
Related to the previous, ISIS becomes the primary military war-on-terror focus for the west, which comes with diplomatic, human, and financial costs to the west.
Incubated by its own enemy, the Assad regime and its backers, ISIS has been positioned in time and space to destroy the revolution once pressed by the Free Syrian Army and serve as a foil to the combined forces of Assad, Khamenei, and Putin, all of whom today may at will attack the same even if preferring other non-ISIS (and still noncombatant) targets.
In ISIS, Khamenei (he may thank Assad and Putin) has chosen a familiar Sunni opposition for Iran’s purchase in Iraq’s Shiite militia community. Once again, Iranian Revolutionary Guard get to get their boots into battle with their old Baathist foes, now serving as generals in Baghdadi’s cause.
Related Teasers, Links, and Reference
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, established in 1949, has 28 members devoted to the idea of collective security. Prediction: By the time President Obama leaves office in 2017, the NATO pledge of mutual defense in response to aggression will have been exposed as worthless. Objectively the alliance will have ceased to exist. The culprits? Vladimir Putin—and Barack Obama.
The long-term aim would be to defeat or demoralise the non-Isil opposition, so that Isil became the regime’s only enemy. That would force the West to back President Bashar al-Assad against it. “They want to clean the country of non-Isil rebels, and then the US will work with them as Isil will be the only enemy,” the Damascus source said.
Russia bombed Syria for a third day on Friday, mainly hitting areas held by rival insurgent groups rather than the Islamic State fighters it said it was targeting and drawing an increasingly angry response from the West.
The U.S.-led coalition that is waging its own air war against Islamic State called on the Russians to halt strikes on targets other than Islamic State.
Next came Russia’s move on Syria. The weapons that Russia is sending there are not an attempt to settle the conflict. They are there to protect the Assad regime, which is its cause. Moreover, ISIL does not have warplanes: Russia’s air defense missiles are in Syria for a different purpose.
This became clear on Wednesday, when America was given less than an hour’s warning that the Kremlin was imposing, in effect, a no-fly zone in Syria. With this the Russians not only mounted a direct challenge to American authority. They also ripped up the rulebook of military diplomacy. America was aghast, but had no response.
The Ba’ath regime was strongly anti-American, so it’s not surprising that–despite the unfortunate fate of the Iraqi Communist Party–it was primarily a client of the Soviet Union (not the US), and this relationship continued up until the moment when the Soviet Union collapsed.
That Baathists helped ISIS, before the declaration of the ‘Caliphate,’ to rush into Iraq last year, and assist in the battles for key nodes in Iraq, is indisputable. Even in the Second Battle of Tikrit, just fought in the past few weeks, Baathists were a prominent component of ISIS forces. The very fact that Saddam Hussein’s al-Tikriti tribe was tossed out of their tribal domain certainly bore the hallmarks of the ultimate revenge against the Baathist core.
Moscow’s action were in line with the strategy it had used to defeat the separatist movement in Chechnya, infiltrating the insurgency, driving it into extremism, and facilitating the arrival of al-Qaeda jihadists who displaced the Chechen nationalists. In Syria, Russia’s actions accord with the strategy adopted by the regime and its Iranian masters to present Assad as the last line of defence against a terrorist takeover of Syria and a genocide against the minorities. New evidence has emerged to underline these points.
Testimony from gendarmerie officers in court documents reviewed by Reuters allege that rocket parts, ammunition and semi-finished mortar shells were carried in trucks accompanied by state intelligence agency (MIT) officials more than a year ago to parts of Syria under Islamist control.
Four trucks were searched in the southern province of Adana in raids by police and gendarmerie, one in November 2013 and the three others in January 2014, on the orders of prosecutors acting on tip-offs that they were carrying weapons, according to testimony from the prosecutors, who now themselves face trial.
While the first truck was seized, the three others were allowed to continue their journey after MIT officials accompanying the cargo threatened police and physically resisted the search, according to the testimony and prosecutor’s report.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/links-russia-in…/ I’ve been using some of these Back-Channels pieces as boilerplate. The the two powerful dictators — Putin and Khamenei — and the tyrant in the middle — Assad — may be making a statement about their natural right to exist as they do: colonel, president, emperor, ayatollah, or tyrant. As criminals do, they’re refusing the authority of powers other than themselves; they’re acting fully without compassion or empathy for others, except, perhaps those favored through their patronage; and, as the malignant among narcissists do, they’re putting on a show using a simple self-serving script, “Assad vs The Terrorists”.
In the time-honored ways of the tyrannical, each has “exceeded limits” by practically any standards (save those of ISIS, perhaps), plundered their own states, and reveled in their own glory surrounded by those who cooperate in their madness.
In business, feudal arrangements involving inner circles, private and proprietary methods, and profit seem a confirmed part of how we do things. With “state capitalists” — in Putin’s own words, “New Nobility” — why should the possession of power and wealth prove different?
I don’t think these kinds of guys stop until stopped. There are few avenues of appeal to humanity or sentiment (Putin was spending about $50 billion on Sochi while Assad was preferentially bombing his moderate opposition and large noncombatant communities: no funds were applied for the general relief of Syrians caught in this version of Hell).
The thread starter: a CBS This Morning video:
Posted to YouTube 9/29/2015.
Plainly, and even if representing a post-Soviet neo-feudal Russian, President Putin, as unkind as language may be to him, is himself a power with whom to be reckoned. How that has had to have been approached may speculative, but, certainly, caution has been a large part of it. In 1991, when the Soviet dissolved itself, NATO and the Russian People had had in mind a different kind of Russia. The Cold War then seemed over — and it should have been over.
Behind each state government and system, democratic or despotic, exists an array of winners and losers, insiders and outsiders, privileged and needy. Each government handles the business of life, justice, and fate differently. Where the democratic open societies cultivate the distribution of political power along with the cultivation of individual ability and private fiefdom (we call them “businesses”), the medieval leadership concentrate power in the Great Leader and related favored and privileged insiders (for whom a “loyal lie” most certainly trumps “an inconvenient truth” — the child’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, always applies). The transitioning of such societies seems to have to come from within (as much has played out in British history) and probably will, but with the Big Red Tantrum Button — the unspeakable in latent power — always close by, change may have to come about indirectly and slowly.
The Syrian war and related conflict are about the persistence of feudal and medieval “absolute power” in the 21st Century. To maintain that illusion, but one bloody and miserable enough — I can’t imagine how it could be more miserable for Syrians — Colonel President Emperor Putin, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Tyrant Assad have had to produce on the ground a play and strategy fit to their own grandiose and inhuman delusions: “Assad vs The Terrorists”.
So far, they have brought about what they wanted — and needed — to create.
In the post-Soviet but neo-feudal Russian period, Putin now has an enhanced military position in Syria, and that presumably suits his desire for empire. Handily enough, Ayatollah Khamenei has gotten out of the deal a foil — a kind of chess opponent for him — in the creation of ISIS against which he may now set loose more Revolutionary Guard and Iraqi Shiite militia (the two are together in this): as long as the Great Shiite vs Sunni Battle burns between himself and Baghdadi, he’s in business and may continuing his plundering of Iran. Of The Tyrant Assad, what may one say? How glorious that it turns out himself standing off (in view of the west) the butchery of the al-Qaeda types, who themselves have also a dreadful program.
From an ethical and moral standpoint — from Pharaoh, another tyrant, to this day — everything is wrong about Syria, and the only people who can really fix conditions and themselves are . . . Syrians.
In the 20th Century: Stalin-Hitler (before Hitler betrayed Stalin). In this one: Putin-Khamenei (Assad depends on both). These men need to be seen for what they are, what they represent, and what they have hauled with them into our century, and Syrians would be wise, perhaps, to understand their own complicity in the development of their power. It’s good to leave them with their egomania, their cowardly hate, and their sadism.
Visual coverage of the Syrian Tragedy: lurid.
Painful.
The cause of it: a medieval “will to power” accompanied in the people by insularity and culturally transmitted contempt for others matched to fear and hatred of the Jews and of the west. When trouble came and the same raised a cry and reached out for help, it appears the world most hated stood aside while the curtain rose on “Assad vs The Terrorists” and darkness came to their seared land.
One hopes that for those who reached across borders and those who have reached back that those mental conditions — habits of mind, learned social grammar, misperception, and fear of the condemnation of one’s own perverse society — will change.
What the Soviet and Soviet-inspired did with mind — information and psychology — has to be addressed and reversed wherever it traveled.
I invite (name withheld) to watch this conversation and, at any point, join it.
The “loyal lie” — told or believed out of fear or want (because people lie primarily to get something or hide something) — has been pitted against “inconvenient truth”, and while the truth may not be favorable in a given instant, it is always more reliable than the lie.
The KGB program had been a program of mass mind control — control of the press; punishment of dissidents; for Stalin, the mass murder of critics — and it was sucked up into Baathist pan-Arabism: there is no mystery as to how and why Bashar al-Assad, with Putin and Khamenei’s blessing, chose to decimate the Syrian state (in area, half lost) and people (half the population displaced or refugee on top of countless thousands dead or maimed — and tens of thousands of those children) rather than cede the assumption of the right to absolute political control or power.
For the despotic, there is not a sucker in every crowd: the crowd is there to be suckered.
BackChannels 