Category Archives: Political Psychology

Islamic Small Wars – Distillations

17 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology

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General Conditions

  • Global communications and sub-state mafia and media;
  • Corruption and political criminality at state level and downward;
  • Within-state cultural and social fractiousness, incoherence and insecurity.

Whether Goodluck Jonathan’s Nigeria where Boko Haram runs riot or clannish Somalia where warlords reign and al-Shabaab roams wild, the above-stated conditions apply: the God mob and its criminal associates communicate and recruit at will while the reliability of official power seems questionable and other social variables attenuate the response to the presence of the problem.

General Population Divides

  • Criminal vs Just
  • Despotic vs Democratic
  • Loyalty to Local Power vs Integrity Before God
  • Medieval vs Modern
  • Shiite vs Sunni
  • Sub-National Culture vs National Identity

Choosing up sides is no game in war zones.

For many, the telling of a loyal lie would appear to feel both more comfortable and survivable than telling the truth (if this were not so, anti-Semitic libel would not exist); for as many more, political discomfort or greed — one, the other, or both — serve to influence immediate alliance: In fact, criminal actors all along the cutting edges of these conflicts leverage choice their way through direct confrontation, false praise, intimidation, and patronage, speaking of which . . . .

Methods

  • Assassination and Theft
  • Leverage and Intimidation
  • Manipulation and Patronage

Mafia is the way of both the “God Mob” and the “Anti-God Mob” — i.e., the communist drive to obtain control over the productive assets and capacities of others.

Tools

  • Banners, Scripts, and Programs
  • Committees, Gangs, Organizations, Patrols
  • Hardware and Software

Banners, scripts, and programs serve manipulation by piratical personalities.

Whether or not the same buy their own ranting, all despots amass immense power over others — and wealth thereby — on the basis of whom may be intimidated and who seduced to their designs.  The banner is their cover; the script is that which plays in their heads on the stage of which each is the star of their own show; and the program is what is to be sold to or imposed on others for control by themselves.

The rest is about social violence, much produced by way of the mouth, and in the theaters of war, much more effect produced by violence.

Call it “big picture” or merely “bloviating prose”, the world would seem to wade in blood beneath the elements noted.

To form up societies capable of expelling the criminal would seem to require first and foremost idealism and integrity — behavior and performance bound to the more magnanimous of time-honored principles — in whatever area-wide or regional security system exists, and then that element has to prove effective in securing a whole constituency to the effect that any may offer up intelligence or call in a crime with confidence in the institutional forces serving their own defense.

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FTAC – Offhand – Sociopathy and Narcissism

11 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology

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Sociopathy — lack of compassion, connection, empathy, feelings integrated with others — may feature in “narcissistic personality disorder” and what I consider its political relative, ‘malignant narcissism”, which are both interwoven with personality. Grandiose messianic delusion, manipulation (gaslighting is symptomatic of that), willful control of others (why it’s so important to own the press, put on a show, destroy rivals, and inhibit critics, educators, and journalists) become features of population- or state-exploiting dictators. The banners above them matter a lot less, lol, than how they’re wired on the inside. Overlooked feature in this area: “narcissistic mortification”. Whatever the injury was, the memory of it is private.

Oh, really?

Yes, really, but, sigh, also for this writer, intuitively.

I’ve no idea what the latest news may be from the psychology and social science sector, and, sans funding for research, I don’t care to look (but will take a glance in a few moments)

Empathy, imagination, and intuition serve this writer as well they may.

I have noticed online that articles showcased of deal with narcissistic personality within the context of intimate relationships, e.g., from the “Grace, Power, Strength” blog, “Is He a Sociopath? – 20 Signs”.

Surprising to me, and I meant nothing malicious by this, the Google search “Putin, narcissist” indeed yields results.  I had cringed with the thought that this blog might come up tops on that — having some ideas Out There is different from having some statement Way Up There 🙂 — but Joseph Burgo’s piece in The Atlantic took the top spot: “Vladimir Putin, Narcissist?”(April 15, 2014).

In second place: Ablow, Keith.  “Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin — Russian president no simple thug.”  Fox News, March 11, 2014.

Sam Vak’s page comes up third.

And BackChannels, the blog you’re reading: it doesn’t exist.

😉

Putin may do okay.  Transference . . . reparative narcissism . . . maturation — even the leaders of powerful states will grow older and may grow wiser (would that Obama would catch up with the Other Great Leaders in this regard).  Given the descriptions of the possible sources of Putin’s possible “narcissistic mortification”, self-preservation cathected to ethnolinguistic cultural security seems to me a clear good path.

Reparative.

And “reparative narcissism” is also a term of art in this arena.

“Reparative” or “destructive” narcissistic leaders:

“Narcissism,” of course, is not a “bad word” and is as normal in human psychology as are sexual or aggressive desires and natural anxiety about internal conflicts. Indeed, healthy narcissism is necessary for anyone to survive, work, and maintain a solid identity. But narcissism is also subject to frustrations, which may lead to unhealthy weakened or inflated self-love (Weigert, 1967.) It is when people have exaggerated love of self that they exhibit the repeated thought, behavior, and feeling patterns that in combination are called narcissistic personality. Such individuals think that they are unique and grand, which causes them to feel omnipotent and to act as though they are better than anyone else. But people with narcissistic personalities live in a paradox: while they love themselves too much and feel grandiose and omnipotent, they also, in the shadows so to speak, possess an aspect that is devalued and “hungry” for love. Periodically, this hunger asserts itself into awareness and creates anxiety, shame or humiliation in the person. Accordingly, such individuals’ personality organization splits between a grandiose self and a hungry self. The splitting in the personality organization reflects a lack of cohesive identity. The personality characteristics reflecting the grandiose self are overt, while those characteristics reflecting the hungry self are covert (Akhtar, 1992; Kernberg, 1975, and Volkan and Ast, 1994.)

Volkan, Vamik D.  “Some Psychoanalytic Views on Narcissistic Leaders and Their Roles in Large-Group Processes,” January 12, 2007.

That’s what happens when one noses into academese online.

Blocky text.

The style is much friendlier paper-based and supported by sofas, tables, highlighters, and coffee.

Nonetheless, and to access a Jewish trope, one has always the choice of making things a little bit better — not a great revolution, great war, great “grandiose delusional messianic” (an NPD term of art) image, but a little more fair and just, a little more comfortable and strong.

Much will be written about the Putin’s leadership psychology across the arc of his tenure, but I would suggest today that as rough as his childhood may have been, it had a little bit of magic and warmth somewhere in it, and while Moscow once again chats with terrorists (PFLP), the leader nonetheless promotes before his public education, health care, social security . . . integrity.

Additional Reference

Vamik D. Volkan (website)

Volkan has been practicing political psychoanalysis for over two decades. His first “patients” were high-level delegations from Israel and Palestine, with whom he engaged in “unofficial diplomacy” for six years. He credits the late Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, with opening the field with his 1977 declaration that 70 percent of the problems between Arabs and Israelis are psychological. Ten years later, Volkan established the Center for the Study of the Mind and Human Interaction, the world’s only conflict resolution organization housed in a medical center. Because Volkan’s brand of therapy depends on individual breakthroughs to affect mass behavior, it is difficult to quantify “progress.” The clinical effects of his work, by nature, may never be proven. Such is the persistence of man-made trauma.

Kiem, Elizabeth.  “Putting the War on Terror on the couch: Vamik Volkan’s Blind Trust.”  Review of Blind Trust: Large Groups and Their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror by Vamik Volkan.  Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone Publishing, 2004, pp. 367.  Review published in Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2004.

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FTAC – Theater of War – Iran Bombs ISIS

03 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iran, Iraq, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, United States of America

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There may be a lot of theater in the theater.

Doha-Washington may be competing with Tehran-Moscow (with Damascus between them), and the point of both would seem to be to have a scourge, accidentally or deliberately, worth elimination and the claim of rescue.

Assad managed to turn an “Arab Spring” revolution toward democracy and modernity into a deeply medieval and polarized civil war pitting his “secular” regime against Islamic extremists. It didn’t start out that way — and missing from the fields of battle: about nine million displaced Syrians.

On the Sunni side of this geopolitical knot (a knot because the Soviet Union was not finished off but merely transferred to the KGB, which has pursued a deeply feudal and equally thieving — internally and externally — course) stands an apparently duplicitous alliance that started out intending to knock Iran out of Syria (taking care of Hezbollah on the way) and produce an updated Islamic.

Things are just not working out the way they seem to have been planned — and much of that planning may have been to promote one appearance or another of a version of political reality. Again: there’s too much of theater in the combat.

The tail isn’t wagging the dog.

The whole dog is wagging the dog, from the tip o’ the nose to the end o’ the tail, U.S.-NATO and perhaps a Sunni-aligned alliance on one side while on the other: Neo-Feudal Russia, today a KGB/FSB Dictatorship, and its familiar “Axis of Evil” partners, Khamenei-Setad, Bashar the Butcher, and assorted anti-American and national socialist whatnot worldwide.

And hanging over every inch of the latest lightning in this storm: the immense and darker cloud of a nuclear umbrella.

Reference

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/03/iran-bombs-isis-in-iraq-says-us – 12/3/2014 (published about an hour ago):

In Tehran, the deputy chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Brigadier-General Massoud Jazayeri also denied any collaboration. Iran considered the US responsible for Iraq’s “unrest and problems”, he said, adding that the US would “definitely not have a place in the future of that country”.

http://www.businessinsider.com/us-believes-iran-is-carrying-out-airstrikes-against-isis-in-iraq–tehran-denies-2014-12 – 12/3/2014 (earlier today)

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FTAC – Comment on Brutality and Power

21 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by in Political Psychology

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Complete indoctrination and organization beneath the auspices of dictatorship. This is universal. Similar evil is just a fact of life worldwide but also arranged in discrete geopolitical space even though what I call the “Islamic Small Wars” doubtless produce the lion’s share of conflict misery globally. Other movements: drug cartels, which have a narcoterrorism edge to them; resource-based conflicts in Africa (where “warlords” may fight with elements of Islamic Jihad); and dictatorships like Robert Mugabe’s or Paul Biya’s where a “heavy hand” accompanies in-state plundering. All have their ugly moments.

When it hits close to home, it’s different, but no less horror has been visited on Muslims worldwide, the Christian community (visit Congo), Baha’i (iran), Yezidis (Iraq), and so on. It’s never only about the Jews; it is, however, always about a form of want for power and control of others.

The question before the answer ran along the lines, “How can anyone do that to someone?”

Well . . . .

It’s done worldwide, and (as you are reading BackChannels), not for cause but for expression of damaged personality, perhaps, and the want of limitless compensation, perhaps.

The term “malignant narcissism” belies a story taking place within the imagination and rationalizing reason of the autocrat or thug.  That part, which lives in the privacy afforded individual mind, remains always hidden while the cultural and political effects become ever more obvious, disturbing, and horrific.

Things get bad.

All on the cyber war tour have been treated to a limitless pit of dismal still images and “rolling stock” (even though the “stock” today is digitally recorded — a child’s forearm and hand grasping a woman’s elbow, and that’s all that rests in the street, the bodies having been obliterated by the bomb that took them; children, truly, bloodied and hung by their necks from rafters in a Burmese shack, allegedly, a part of the tragedy of the Rohingya Muslims; executions by rifle of women kneeling in burqa before a stadium crowd; two young brothers, maybe twelve years old, set before a wall and being read a declaration by a so-called “adult” before being shot by firing squad; Pakistani Frontier Corps troops lined up on a hillside, shot by firing squad and finished by pistol, moaning, crying, and all . . . .

The peaceniks who want the brutality and carnage of conflict to stop tend to focus — or to be manipulated and focused — on facets of the political issues involved, but most may be most often deflected from attending to the character of the stagemaster driving — or attempting to drive — the entire theater.

Reading Recommended (for a Start)

Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013.

Post, Jerrold M.  Leaders and their followers in a dangerous world: the psychology of political behavior.  Forward by Alexander L. George.  Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004.

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FTAC – There Are Handlers . . . .

13 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC, Political Psychology, Politics

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There are . . . “handlers”. The adversely aligned organizations are their tools. The power and wealth involved are immense — look up “Setad”; enjoy Karen Dawisha’s still new book — and the traceback from street violence to a number of palaces should start to become clear. Perhaps: confront not the UN but 21st Century Neo-Feudalism.

“Adversely aligned” to Israel, the west, rule of law, human rights, dignity, autonomy, freedom : aligned to barbarism, criminality, mafia, rule of might, and malignantly and viciously narcissistic aggrandizement.

I think N’s on the right track as regards the relationship between corruption at the top and the driving of ideological, nationalist, or religious violence in the field or on the street except where the violence is counter to political mafia and manipulation.

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FTAC – Observation on the Banu Qurayza Legend

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Religion

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http://www.pbs.org/muhammad/ma_jews.shtml

For many, the bottom line on the Banu Qurayza legend — Tarek Fatah denies its authenticity, others embrace it and like it — involves the unconditional surrender of the Jewish tribe followed by the mass slaughter of all of the males (down to the youngest with but a single pubic hair). It stands as the echo in history of what ISIS is doing today and right to the letter of the script as read by Baghdaddi (who may be dead by now . . . we are uncertain of that state of affairs today).

The above noted PBS piece starts this way:

“Judaism was already well established in Medina two centuries before Muhammad’s birth. Although influential, the Jews did not rule the oasis. Rather, they were clients of two large Arab tribes there, the Khazraj and the Aws Allah, who protected them in return for feudal loyalty. Medina’s Jews were expert jewelers, and weapons and armor makers. There were many Jewish clans-some records indicate more than twenty, of which three were prominent-the Banu Nadir, the Banu Qaynuqa, and the Banu Qurayza.

“Various traditions uphold different views, and it is unclear whether Medina’s Jewish clans were Arabized Jews or Arabs who practiced Jewish monotheism. Certainly they were Arabic speakers with Arab names. They followed the fundamental precepts of the Torah, though scholars question their familiarity with the Talmud and Jewish scholarship, and there is a suggestion in the Qur’an that they may have embraced unorthodox beliefs, such as considering the Prophet Ezra the son of God.”

There are now many contradictory renditions of the Banu Qurayza legend and analysis on the web, but that may serve to underscore my argument that part of the world is fighting over survival through corrupted allegiance — the telling of loyal lies — and the risks of promoting an integrity that has God and the ideal — the true — as its standard. We hope for the latter because it serves all universally. It’s better to have honest reporting, honest scholarship, research with integrity, and, perhaps with the Banu Qurayza, the wisdom to say one doesn’t know how the Qurayza lives.

Historically, the Jews as merchants developing wealth have done so because of a circumspect trustworthiness — i.e., people with whom one can do earnest business. The medieval persecutions inevitably apply leverage based in religion — the Spanish Inquisition and the Spanish Expulsion serve as example — to shun, murder, and plunder the Jews for the wealth they have developed. That’s how it works, has always worked, and probably how it worked in the 7th Century: simple theft and murder cloaked in religion.

The Awesome Conversation may become a clear conversation about power, loyalty, idealism, and God.

Within the context of the Islamic Small Wars, there’s political litmus in how one relates to certain symbols, and the Banu Qurayza Legend is one of them.  Some embrace the story — a great victory (met with unconditional surrender followed by mass slaughter) — and some, like Tarek Fatah, find it so inexecrable that it needs to be downplayed and written out of the lore being dragged into the future.

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