Category Archives: Political Psychology

FTAC – A Comment on Attitudes and Beliefs and Religion

08 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Psychology, Religion

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I believe in Judaism, but I don’t want to see a religious court developed in place of a secular one.

As an American, I appreciate the symbolism of the Jordan River as depicted or used in the Torah, but my river is the Potomac and my soul altogether American.

_God is Red_ by (Native American) Vine Deloria, Jr. makes an interesting case in regard to the relationship between a land and its people.

Also of basic interest may be Daniel Everett’s _Language: The Cultural Tool_ and _Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes_, both of which tell about our use of language as a tool of survival.

Those “internal variables and functions” operate with and through language over a base of emotional turmoil and valence.

In “Attitude-Behavior Correspondence” studies (at least back in the 1980s), for some, “Attitude = Belief x (Affect x Intensity) / Primacy”. What needs looking at are the arrangements of multiple beliefs. In survey form with the Likert scale, “Do you believe in God?” (1 = Not At All, 5 = As Strongly as Possible” becomes one question and “Do you believe that Muslims can never be friends with Christians and Jews” (1 = Completely Disagree, 5 = Completely Agree).

Add 38 more questions, distribute to 150 students on one campus somewhere, apply regression analysis to the response set, and see how “beliefs” — or statements about beliefs — correlate with one another.

Recapitulate on another campus.

Recapitulate with another age group.

Such studies can go on a while, but I would suggest that through social science and other methods, one will find certain beliefs, like the belief in God, primary, and other beliefs, like that having to do with not being friends, either dismissible (“completely disagree”) or minimized in the mind of the surveyed subject, and, when aggregated (through survey method), also minimized.

“Attitude = Belief x (Affect x Intensity) / Primacy” may be the BackChannel’s author’s own addition to the more customary configuration, “Attitude = Belief x Affect”.  It simply adds in the intensity of good or bad feeling (“affect”) about a belief and it recognizes that some of what we believe about our existence — start with one’s own name, which is fairly “low level” or basic in the programming of our own personalities — may be more dear to us than other aspects of an object, including ourselves as our own possession.

As regards an “American religion” — might there be such a thing? — BackChannels may turn some attention to revisiting early American literature and the classic visitor commentaries.

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FTAC – Resistance is Feudal

04 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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Regarding the “Cold War”, the 24th anniversary of the dissolving of the Soviet Union took place December 26, 1991, which date places all of us in the 25th year out from the machinations of that abominable terror-supporting enterprise. Of Putin’s bid to sustain a modern security state and oligarchy — the “New Nobility” — it may be suggested that “Resistance is Feudal”, because it is. The open democracies and communicating systems of the modern world present an existential challenge to dictatorships worldwide that continue to rely on medieval methods for keeping themselves in power.

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Basijed! A Note on Saeid Golkar’s Comprehensive Overview of the Iranian Regime’s Scariest Cultural and Social Machine

23 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Religion

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Dystopian Imagination —

Three authors: William Golding,  Aldous Huxley, George Orwell.

Four books:  Animal Farm, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Nineteen Eighty-Four

In the American high school education of the 1960s, the above were part of the canon taught to all.  Any who missed mention of Golding, Huxley, and Orwell or failed to read Animal Farm (or the Cliff Notes) would have had to have missed school altogether.  Awareness and fear of absolute obedience before a tyrannical authority; of erasure beneath the wheels of an engineered, mechanical, repeating society; of cynical political manipulation and exploitation; and of savagery itself were built into the imaginations of the young.  As our own society could not be the dystopian nightmares observed in reading, we would have to wade back through history or wait for the Islamic Small Wars as they present online to let us know that somewhere our fictions were emblematic of somebody’s political and social reality in situ.

Dystopian Reality — 

Golkar, Saeid.  Captive Society: The Basij Militia and Social Control in Iran.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2015

Training a new generation of youth and inoculating them against the Western cultural invasion constitute another mission of the female Basiji, who should make their “children aware of the problems of threats through explaining outcomes and upshots of the soft war.”  To achieve this goal, the WSBA established the Babies’ Basij to indoctrinate children before they reach school age.  To establish the Babies’ Basij, the WSBO implemented the plan of Quranic kindergarten (mahdha-e mehrab).  Under this plan, a WSBO kindergarten was established at each mosque with a WSBO base.  Children between the ages of three to five years attend these kindergartens.  In addition, the organization designs a curriculum to be used in the home for instructing children who are younger than three years of age.  Female Basiji are encouraged to bring their children to Basij activities, in order to socialize with other children and train them for future posts in the Islamic regime (p. 117)

Columbia University Press provided BackChannels with a review copy a month or two ago, and while reading took place post-haste, reviewing has had to wait for the “what to say” about a book whose author, Saeid Golkar, has covered the subject thoroughly and done so in plain textbook prose that makes the telling of the tale — specifically, coverage of the layout and history of the most pervasive organizational element exploited by the Iranian regime to create, reinforce, and sustain a society obedient to its will  —  on each page all the more chilling.

Although Golkar balances his exploration of the Basij organizations (“Basij is a Persian word meaning “mobilization.”  The complete name of the group, Sazeman-e Basij-e Mostazafan, means “Organization for the Mobilization of the Oppressed”) with this-or-that modules (.e.g, “The Basij: Nongovernmental Organization, Administered Mass Organization, or Militia?”), there are portions focused on the regime’s impositions throughout the land, and as much comes out in subchapter titling: “Penetration in Society: The Organizational Structure of the Basij”; “Mass Membership and Recruitment Training”; “The Mass Indoctrination of Basij Members”; “The Basij and Propaganda”; “The Basij and Moral Control”; “The Basij and Surveillance”; “The Basij and Political Repression”; “The Basij and the Controlling of Families . . . Schools . . . Universities . . . the Economy.”  By the time one reaches “Islamic Warriors or Religious Thugs?” the drift in concern has been made abundantly clear.

Golkar, however, generously covers the contrary view: the Basij are part of the regime’s patronage system, and those who wish to earn some money and make way on their careers may join for the familiar and practical causes known well to western chambers of commerce and numberless academic and civic organizations.

Just don’t forget who’s boss!

Here’s the last paragraph before the appendix:

“With the expansion of the Basij’s involvement in Iran’s social, political, and economic life, the opportunity for the country’s peaceful transition to democracy will decrease dramatically.  Because many Basij commanders and members have been co-opted by the IRI, it is not implausible to think that they will resist any serious attempts at government reform that would jeopardize their positions” (p. 196).

Related Online

Parchizadeh, Reza.  “Iran Now Vets Academics for Ideological Commitment.”  The Algemeiner, November 9, 2016.

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FTAC – Egypt – Russian Airliner Crash

14 Monday Dec 2015

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

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The Kremlin’s cry that “the terrorists done it” has been challenged recently by Egyptian claims that no evidence of a bomb or bombing had been found in the related forensic investigation.  Says Egyptian Streets (Dec. 14, 2015), “Preliminary investigations into the Russian airplane that crashed in Egypt’s North Sinai killing all 224 passengers on board have revealed no signs of terrorism, said the Ministry of Civil Aviation.”

Oh what evil webs some may weave — one hedges where empiricism falters on ambiguous evidence or too little evidence: BackChannels would place Egyptian doubts regarding the Russian assertion of the plane’s having been sabotaged (by having a bomb put on board) before takeoff in Egypt within the following framework.

Post-Soviet, post-KGB neo-feudal now FSB Russia has developed its own “War On Terror” designed to destabilize and fracture NATO and allied or cooperative states.

Muslims may know the epigram, “All of the evil is in one room and lying is the key.”

Through the KGB, the Soviet established a reputation for deceitful and disingenuous action and speech, and in the post-Soviet environment, that nefarious spirit may be expressed, this with reference to the Moscow Apartment Bombings, through possible “false flag” operations designed to manipulate “the masses”. https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/ Karen Dawisha’s book may be especially helpful in untangling some of the real life detective mysteries produced by the post-Soviet regime.

On rare occasion, but it happens, the fireman is the arsonist, the hero the creator the monster to be subdued. So it may go with Putin’s feudal revanche in which “Putin vs The Terrorists” — the political display of power proven effective in producing the nationalist fervor that wins elections — is an important fixture and image in Russian politics.

So the motive may be there.

Still, I and most modern observers (as opposed to medieval ones who feel their loyalties constantly tested) would rather have an empirical analysis of the crash than any useless collection of bold political assertions.

Given that all politics involves presentation, i.e., some show-and-tell business, one might ask whether any, most, or some political organizations possess more integrity than others.

The question’s fair today, for the theme most central to a spectacle in which the modern world — and the modern soul — struggles with the medieval involves the relative weight of a “loyal lie” to the possession of a possibly lonely integrity as regards an authentic and solid cognizance of the truth.

In the old biblical story in which “God proves” Abraham, the test is never defined but potentially involves either a test of absolute obedience to God or, much more interesting, a test of Abraham’s conscience and courage to speak back to God in defense of the life of the son he and Sarah had waited so long to have.  God sees to it that Isaac lives (while a ram is made to die in his place) and never again speaks directly to Abraham.

BackChannels’ preferred argument: the test of conscience, courage, and, perhaps, Abrahams integrity as a father.

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FTAC – Ethnolinguistic Cultural and Religious Survival – The Greatest Conversation

06 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Religion

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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.

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Excerpt – On Tsar Nicholas II’s Political Police

23 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

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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.

Other and Related Reference and Terms

Holler, Lyman E., “They Shoot People, Don’t They?  A Look at Soviet Terrorist Mentality.”  Air University Review, September-October 1981.

Okhrana

Pyotr Rachlovsky

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.”

—The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Russian Social-Democratic Worker’s Party

The Frederic S. Zuckerman Prizes

Union of Liberation

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.

“Reset!” takes on new meaning.

Zuckerman’s book has been the reading on deck and under way, but there is another coming: “Fontanka 16” is not only a place but (in the wild literary ways of the west) the title of another book (and one incoming): (URL to Review of the same) Fontanka 16: The Tsars’ Secret Police, by Charles A. Ruud and Sergei A. Stepanov. Montreal, Quebec, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999.

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FTAC – Approaching Anti-Semitism and the Medieval Revanch

22 Thursday Oct 2015

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, Syria

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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…/

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FTAC – Tip to the KGB’s Amplification of Middle Eastern Anti-Semitism

12 Monday Oct 2015

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

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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/2015/04/29/soviet-anti-semitism-an-example-from-andrew-and-mitrokhins-the-sword-and-the-shield/ BackChannels tries to reduce some message to essence, but as evident in this post and many others, brevity leads only to more reading, and of reading there is no end.

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/syndicate-red-brown-green/ 😉

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/08/26/syria-assad-we-trust-the-russians/ – 8/26/2015.  The conflict from Assad’s perspective.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/09/15/bashar-barrel-bomb-assad/ – 9/15/2015 – the conflict from other than Assad’s perspective.

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).

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/05/24/syria-assad-belarus-red-brown-green/ – 3/24/2015 – Have we reached the end of the end of the Cold War, or will we now be saddled with War Without End by Russia, Syria, and Iran under the control of Putin, Assad, and Khamenei?

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.

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