Category Archives: Political Psychology

FTAC – Totalitarian Propaganda Environment – A Note

07 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by in Philology, Political Psychology, Politics

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The refugee residents are boxed in primarily by their information environments that are deeply cordoned, enforced, and sustained by a smorgasbord of powerful handlers — family and state enterprises — whose intentions and power are enforced by violence.

Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh are reported to be billionaires today (Mashaal’s wealth specifically estimated to range between $2.5 and $5 billion). Khamenei’s “Setad” conglomerate, built partially on the theft of Iranian private property belonging to persons that could be targeted by the theokleptocracy, has today an estimated valuation of about $90 billion. The KSA and Qatar elements appear also to have within their range elements resistant to regulation when it comes to “donations” to Hamas or ISIS (reference: http://www.acc-co.com/content.asp?ContentId=598).

So there’s loose money, and most likely, some of that finds its way into “solidarity” type agitprop and anti-Semitic libel.

The head of the “Neturei Karta”, often trotted out by the regime in Iran, was noted to have been paid $50,000 annually by Tehran to have his group do their thing, i.e., Tehran pays to put on an evil show, and the extent to which it maintains or pays agents, whether through Hezbollah or in other organizations, isn’t something I’ve yet found on the web.

Adding post-Soviet totalitarian flavor to this may be Putin’s reversion to a feudal governing model for Russia. The FSB today employs more staff per capita than the old KGB, and following from its KGB roots also promotes state-controlled media and state-based lying. Frankly. Iran’s VEVAK has been also off the radar of the western press, but it too may be overwhelming in scale, at minimum internally to enforce the will of the regime as it exploits the state.

As the alternative histories of Gaza and Ramallah, if not other geopolitical space, fractures against histories carefully culled with integrity, the information operations of autocratic states should become more transparent and widely known.  As lies are told to hide things and get things, things that have been hidden nonetheless surface with time and things that have been stolen — including life itself — also come to light in the responsible historian’s accounting.

Reference by Title

“Doha Bank’s branch in New York is fined $5m for AML Non-Compliance” – 4/23/2009

“Report: UK fraud office to probe Barclays, Qatar Holding dealings” – 7/23/2013.

“Neturei Karta, Paid Agent of Israel’s Enemies” – 9/25/2004

“Khamenei controls massive financial empire built on property seizures” – 11/11/2013

Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (Wikipedia)

Addendum

Also as regards beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, much in the middle east and elsewhere may be complicated by the separation of loyalty (as to a crime family) and integrity (as to mom, apple pie, and the American way). Nothing’s perfect. However, where the Islamic Small Wars are concerned, whether ‘the masses” or the element in power, many prove that they would rather embrace a loyal lie than attempt to live with an uncomfortable truth. The distillation for this predicament may be “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. The want of survival, literally, life, may make fear of a capricious power a better choice than courage before the same.

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FTAC – Without Conscience

30 Thursday Oct 2014

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

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The world that needs to do something is the world itself, and there’s plenty of it to overwhelm every corner of Islamic Jihad. However, two of the superpowers are invested in despotism themselves — China, quietly; Russia, now famously — and whether in Syria or Iraq, the middle that wished to become modern either has not had the wherewithal to power itself or, as where ISIS has penetrated, remains deeply committed to a deeply medieval script and teleology. Add some Really Big Money to the formula plus bribes and intimidation — don’t leave out the most parochial interests — and no one moves.

In the lawless, also, there is of course an ethical and moral lostness. The Qur’an read as explicit instruction and untempered by the presence of a greater human conscience affords zero navigational assistance. The black flag of piracy flies where there is no conscionable law.

The inspiration for the above comment:

They have been subjected to physical and sexual violence, including systematic rape and sex slavery. They’ve been exposed in markets in Mosul and in Raqqa, Syria, carrying price tags.

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/10/30/world/meast/isis-female-slaves/index.html

Never Again?

Wake up.

Related Reference

That the Islamic State has enslaved Yazidi women and children it captured is an established fact. For example, a United Nations report found that “300 [Yazidi] women had been forced into slavery.” Now, in its slick multi-language journal Dabiq, the terrorist group offers its theological justification for this practice.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/390390/isis-boasts-its-yazidi-slaves-daniel-pipes – 10/16/2014

But one ugly, deadly and recurrent reality check persists: genocide. Genocide has occurred so often and so uncontested in the last fifty years that an epithet more apt in describing recent events than the oft-chanted “Never Again” is in fact “Again and Again.” The gap between the promise and the practice of the last fifty years is dispiriting indeed. How can this be?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/karadzic/genocide/neveragain.html – by Samantha Power, n.d.

“Early this morning we found those corpses and we have been told by some Islamic State militants that ‘those people are from Sahwa, who fought your brothers the Islamic State, and this is the punishment of anybody fighting Islamic State’,” an eyewitness said.

Tribal sheikhs from Albu Nimr say both sets of victims were among more than 300 men aged between 18 and 55 who were seized by Islamic State this week.

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/content/hundreds-iraqi-tribesmen-opposed-islamic-state-found-mass-graves – 10/30/2014.

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28 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Iran, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Ukraine

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The number of political groups that are inclined to support Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is growing, both in the ruling parties of the European countries and in the opposition; from Hungary’s Victor Orban and his ruling Fidesz party to the far-right opposition parties that are performing spectacularly well in national elections, such as Marie Le Pen and her Front National of France. Sympathy and support also comes from Hungary’s Jobbik radical nationalists, the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn, Austria’s Freedom Party, and Italy’s Lega Nord, just to name a few.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/28/-sp-ukraine-russia-europe-andrei-sannikov – 10/28/2014.

I would expect Russo-Iranian methods in the development of power and wealth to expand until stopped cold.  The interior mythology in both units, to be clinical about it, have zero incentive to stall or stop aggression on the basis of the political accommodations and levers owned by others.  That implacable will may be buttressed by an equally sociopathic view of humanity.  For evidence of that in addition to Ukraine (and how Yanukovych milked it): Bashar al-Assad’s behavior in Syria.

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FTAC – Take Down that Wall – Comment on Intellectual Poisoning

27 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics

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Here’s a suggested schematic for the big story behind so much indoctrination. Billionaires –> nationalist / religious state dictators –> control, enforcement, and expansion organizations that include elements that attend to intellectual development and resources, internal and external.

Out of that model and through separable national socialist and Islamist pipelines come old Fatah and Hamas and emerging Jobbik (Hungary) and obvious ISIS. At the evident top: Putin-Khamenei. Behind the scenes: extraordinarily wealth personalities much enriched by criminality in state politics.

The commandeering of intellectual resources, whether targeting the kindergarten or college campus, is a part of sustaining criminal power. Where audience is captive or deeply susceptible, indoctrination and training go deep, so much so that the poison turns the world upside down. Where less area (geopolitical space) is captive, then intellectual skirmishing takes place with perhaps discouraging results.

I think a part of the answer to kind of bigotry and conflict addressed here may be to drive highest-integrity information — most open, tested, reviewed, criticized, most probable, etc. — into otherwise closed societies and the minds that have been kept closed by them. “B” may be living in a world of lies and mirrors that she cannot see for having been deeply manipulated within it. Those who wish for peace, who want an honest future (and it may be different than immediately contemplated) may have to disassemble that intellectual wall.

A racket’s a racket.

Ali Khamenei

Mojtaba Khamenei

Putin’s Kleptocracy

Gold-flecked ice cream wasn’t part of the picture that Shiite Muslim clerics painted during the Iranian Revolution, when they promised to lift the poor by distributing the country’s vast oil income equally across society.

But more than three decades later, record oil profits have brought in billions of dollars, and some people here are enjoying that decadent dessert. The trouble is, it’s just a small group of wealthy Iranians. Despite the promises of the revolution, many here say the gap between rich and poor has never seemed wider.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/irans-rich-eat-ice-cream-covered-in-gold-as-poor-struggle-to-survive/2011/07/20/gIQAYKUmwI_story.html – 8/6/2011.

The economy bears more than a little resemblance to the crony capitalism that sprouted from the wreck of the Soviet Union. The 1979 revolution expropriated the assets of foreign investors and the nation’s wealthiest families; oil had long been nationalized, but the mullahs seized virtually everything else of value–banks, hotels, car and chemical companies, makers of drugs and consumer goods. What distinguishes Iran is that many of these assets were given to Islamic charitable foundations, controlled by the clerics. According to businessmen and former foundation executives, the charities now serve as slush funds for the mullahs and their supporters.

Iran has other lethal secrets besides its nuclear program, now the subject of prying international eyes. Dozens of interviews with businessmen, merchants, economists and former ministers and other top government officials reveal a picture of a dictatorship run by a shadow government that–the U.S. State Department suspects–finances terrorist groups abroad through a shadow foreign policy. Its economy is dominated by shadow business empires and its power is protected by a shadow army of enforcers.

http://www.forbes.com/global/2003/0721/024.html – 7/21/2003.

More than political criminality and cronyism are at play here.

The intellectual subjugation of entire constituencies is thematic throughout the range of the Islamic Small Wars and now in the development of a post-Hitlerian nationalism and national socialism in relation to the Russian nationalist stance on which Putin has relied for popular legitimacy.  Axes of power Khamenie-Putin and Putin-Orban (the same as would have been Putin-Yanukovych had there not been the revolution in Ukraine) and Putin-Assad represent the development and expansion of immense piratical wealth and power far at the expense of ordinary people.

So far, neither the European Union nor the United States nor anyone or anything else has gone so far as to explicate these drifts and relationships for popular overview although with Russia, the articles and books by academics and journalists have produced a handy few volumes for anyone’s home library (more on that later).

Related:

http://news.yahoo.com/bianna-golodryga-interviews-garry-kasparov-093317385.html – 9/30/2014.

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Link & Comment – On Islamist Violence and Mentality

27 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Religion

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I find it interesting that Muslims in the West who kill Christians, Jews, and soldiers in the name of their religion are referred to as “lone wolves” suffering from a mental illness. Are all those millions of people who belong to Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, al-Nusra al Qaeda and ISIS-are they mentally ill, too? Or poor? Or uneducated and disadvantaged?

When we go down a road of justification, root causes, we deny the fact that these people choose an ideology that promotes hate.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/67041 “We Will Remain Undaunted” by Diane Weber Bederman – 10/27/2014.

My note to the author:

Our conflict solution is to address a political psychology that does indeed derive from ideas in psychology proper. The malignant narcissism surrounding the political existence of Putin, Assad, and Khamenei as well as other dictators in the middle east and around the world cannot be avoided, nor with that recognition their arch-criminal, manipulative, and piratical skills that foster animus with the west, stage conflicts that then leverage them additional political power, and then underwrite their oligarch / billionaire handlers.

My most recent book read, _The Zhivago Affair_ on the trials of Pasternak and the CIA’s effort to get his book into Russia, and the one I’m reading now, _Putin’s Kleptocracy_, are frightening books about criminal political power radiating through state authority. It’s frightening reading, but it opens the eyes to the manner in which — perhaps as demonstrated by Muhammad — ideological and religious thought may be leveraged into boundless absolute power and wealth.

To back that comment on Islam, one may direct attention to the now contested presentations of the Banu Qurayza legend, a story so ethically and morally lost that Tarek Fatah has denied its authenticity and others, so I have read recently in the Facebook aquarium, have separated Muhammad from the beheading of 800 Jewish males who had surrendered unconditionally rather than lose additional life through fighting.  Also read: “the Jews were just as bad”.  I don’t believe that: I believe wealth obtained through earnest trade was simply obtained by a barbaric pushiness abetted by provocations that ended in capricious judgment, mass murder, rape, and plunder.

There may be more pleasant descriptions of the crushing of the Jewish Banu Qurayza, but none have any legitimacy in a caring, gracious, and merciful world.  It has appeared to me that those who want that world, as may Tarek Fatah, decry the legend while those who want the merciless and sadistic powers of that world for themselves extol and pursue it for themselves.

The Prophet had the husband of the Jewess Raihana Bint Amr hacked to pieces before her very eyes, hours after he had murdered her father. No doubt this was the Prophet’s perverted version of a wedding present, because after these atrocities he raped the mortified girl and tried to force her to convert to Islam.
Muslim historians still describe the savage rape of Raihana Bint Amr as her “willing submission to Islam and wifehood to the Prophet”

http://www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t=115614

One thing leads to another on the web.  This in The Huffington Post surfaced along a moderate-look at the challenge (here’s an excerpt):

We are a wounded nation, not a terrorized one.

Canada may have a benevolent exterior, but we all understand the steel at our core. We know that freedom exacts a steep price, because we’ve paid it before. And we know, as we enter military hostilities to confront ISIS in Iraq, that it won’t hesitate to exploit the stupid, the gullible and the deranged as a means of attacking its enemies in their own lands.

If we weren’t prepared for that on Monday, we should be now. And even without spurs from ISIS there’s no telling what these same people will do (or have done) on their own to bootstrap themselves into Canada’s history books.

Let’s not be their victim.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/sandy-garossino/nathan-cirillo-terrorists-patrice-vincent_b_6045168.html – 10/26/2014, updated 10/27/2014.

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Hypocrites: To Be Murdered by Ayatollah – Rayhaneh Jabbari; To Be Distracted by Rouhani

24 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by in Iran, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology

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Iran Human Rights, October 24, 2014: “They called from the prison office now. Told me to go to an address they gave me for the last visit. She (Reyhaneh) will be transferred tonight. Tomorrow is set for her execution”. Shole Pakravan, Reyhaneh Jabbari’s mother, wrote these phrases on her Facebook page at about 4 pm Tehran time.

http://iranhr.net/2014/10/urgent-reyhaneh-jabbari-at-imminent-danger-of-execution/ – 10/24/2014

“It is upon all Muslims to exhort love, respect for others and human dignity,” Rouhani reportedly said Wednesday, a comment that was widely perceived as being in support of the protesters.

Although Rouhani did not mention the protests or the acid attacks, the statement was remarkable, and it could be the latest public acknowledgement of an internal fight between Rouhani’s government and other, more conservative Iranian institutions. Rouhani has repeatedly clashed with religious hardliners in recent months, and he called them out again on Wednesday. “The sacred call to virtue is not the right of a select group of people, a handful taking the moral high ground and acting as guardians,” he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/10/24/why-president-rouhani-is-supporting-thousands-of-iranian-protesters/ – 10/24/2014.

It writes itself.

Update – October 26, 2014

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/breaking-iran-executes-reyhaneh-jabbari-26-year-old-woman-who-killed-her-rapist-1471698 – 10/25/2014

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/25/iran-woman-hanged-for-killing-rapist_n_6046350.html – 10/25/2014.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/10/amnesty-iran-set-hang-woman-at-dawn-2014102422855125759.html – 10/26/2014.

Additional Reference

Give me to the wind to take away.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/27/reyhaneh-jabbari-message_n_6054896.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000014 – 10/27/2014.

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FTAC – A Note on Approaching Fascist Movements Across Four Dimensions

21 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, Philology, Political Psychology

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Let me suggest four parts or elements that get the machinery working:

1. “Malignant Narcissism” / “Civilizational Narcissism” / relatives of “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” / “Bipolar Disorders” (“grandiose, messianic delusion”) –> each of the labels may represent a straying of innate human energy plus some craziness. The application to conflicts within the “Islamic Small Wars” context should be apparent with some meditation but outside of that, the same applies to variants of “National Socialist” presence, e.g., Putin in Russia, Jobbik in Hungary.

2. “Cultural Poetics and Social Grammar” — words do have a power and poison put in the ears or set before the eyes gets into children very early in the development of language plus self-concept. Good adults are careful with what they impart to their children, and, perhaps, good politicians must be careful with their words, but bad parents and bad politicians — there are lots of “BadDaddy’s” — may have cause to hide something shameful in themselves, to deflect attention away from themselves, to keep on stage a glorious image of themselves in the eyes of others, starting with their children.

3. Ideological Political Programming — the conservative’s abhorrence of dhimmi status, poll taxes, state discrimination speaks to that and may make something of a match between old Stalinist Soviet practices and some notes in Islam that seek the transformation of whole populations using central absolute authority and political torque to do it.

4. Cultural linguistics or language behavior –and as behavior, this may differ from “poetics” (the arrangements of symbols that make language possible). When we listen, when we read: how much do we memorize, parrot, ingest and sustain as stable? How much do we create, invent, question?

When Jews greet “The Binding of Isaac” (“The Akedah”, and bear with me on Isaac), a minority opinion notes that perhaps Abraham should have talked back to God (!) instead of setting off to carry out His instructions without hesitation.

Listen and obey? Listen and question?

Narcissism, cultural programming, political programming, and language behavior as behavior (we’re part of as wild a species as any) would be the four anchors of any approach or analysis of ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hezbollah.

Notably, both Putin and Khamenei operate deeply piratical regimes beneath the cloaks of nationalism and religiosity. They have different trajectories as persons and as representatives of very different states, but they are similar in the pursuit and maintenance of absolute power — absolute control, as if from God — and they apply the same sets of tools for doing that.

I fear overdoing the knowledge part of this kind of view for the fascism it might inspire, if as much has not happened already in the intellectual warrens of governments invested in part in social control.  However, considering the Loud Fascism evident in the wild and the necessity of reducing the same in number and force, the above suggests four useful ways of approaching rogue leaders, their psychology, and their movements.

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Putin’s Defense – Mearsheimer – Response, Note, Loose Reference

20 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

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“The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West.”

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141769/john-j-mearsheimer/why-the-ukraine-crisis-is-the-wests-fault – September-October 2014.

Dr. John J. Mearsheimer appears in the above-cited Foreign Affairs essay a tad confused about “locus of control” in regards to the wave of protest catchalled as “Euromaidan”

While the realpolitik may indeed include notice in Russia of a Soviet post-Soviet transition to a neo-imperial oligarchy bent on expansion through theft, the note received everywhere around it would seem to correspond to an intrinsic yearning for access to justice promoted by democracy.

Reference

The search engines of the World Wide Web have become so fast and reasonably accurate that a blog might skip URLs altogether: just block, right-click, and search.  Nonetheless, one has this option in compressing and shaping thought on the web to send a reader toward other information in both useful and whimsical ways (I’m not advertising for Amazon, and, in any case, this blog is accessed worldwide (including from Russia) daily.

As I post, I’m watching and listening to a Reuters production posted on Garry Kasparov’s web site — “Newsmaker: The Rise & Legacy of Vladimir Putin”, and it’s really quite refreshing and wonderful to experience.  The panel is a panel of live wires.

The Russians by Hedrick Smith

Mafia State by Luke Harding

The Man Without a Face by Masha Gessen

The New Nobility by Andrei Soldatov and Irini Borogan

Yanukovych Leaks

“Yanukovych Leaks: Read the Astounding Papers that Ukraine’s Ousted President Left Behind” by Linda Kinstler,  The New Republic, March 12, 2014.

Open Russia: The Return of Open Russia: Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Movement for Civil Society (campaign web site).

Reuters “Newsmaker: The Rise & Legacy of Vladimir Putin”, one-hour video, October 14, 2014, posted on The Official Website of Garry Kasparov.  Panel: Sir Harold Evans (Moderator), Garry Kasparov, David Remnick, Roger Altman, Masha Gessen.

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