Our “malignant narcissists” — self-aggrandizing, grandiose, messianic personalities who prize for themselves the absolute control of others (like that dictator “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”) — work hard to script and limit the intellectual experience of their marks. They do that by producing with force (intimidation) and wealth a pervasive information environment around themselves and in foreign states an alternative press, which is really their press.
When next we see a “Gaza Flotilla” or an “Apartheid Week” demonstration, it’s worth giving some thought to the character in personality involved in the mounting of the same.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve seen coordination lists for the kind of “actions” that “make the news”. There’s nothing spontaneous about them or actually mysterious as regards the motivations for involvement. The argument is only about power, not actually doing anything for anyone, and just back of that argument are despots and fascists who through their rhetoric convey perhaps love and family (of a sort) to those who would and do follow them.
However, the history of the same follows a familiar program, and none should be surprised by either the accumulation of wealth or ruin brought to others attending the life of, say, a Mugabe, the junta in Burma, a Putin with a “mafia state”, a Khamenei, a Khaled Mashaal (worth billions of dollars today), and so on.
A senior Cairo-based Hamas official said late on Wednesday there was no agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians over the extension of a 72-hour Gaza ceasefire that took effect on Tuesday.
“There is no agreement on the extension of the truce,” Moussa Abu Marzouk wrote on his Twitter feed.
What I have seen of “malignant narcissists”, secular as well as religious, engaged in conflict is that they are all-in with their chips (as long as other people are the chips they play — and their backers, bankers, and handlers are every bit as evil as themselves). In essence, they do not reason (why should they?), they have no off button (what would be the point if they had to modify their own aggrandizement?), and they draw destruction all around themselves (is that not glorious, grand, and romantic?).
In more constrained arenas, there’s only so much damage a nutcase of a narcissist can do — e.g., build and sink a business; make and break a Hollywood career — but in politics and in control of a fief or state, the breed is just cold bad news.
Cloaked in religion, seducing their marks with sweet words, pirating the wealth of a community, bathed in perfume and smiling kindly while blood wells up around their ankles, such seems to me the world of men who confuse themselves with God and get others to go along with them.
How bad does it get with one of these vampires and its minions inhabiting the body of your community?
(8/6/2014)
Addendum
A senior Israeli official told the BBC Israel had expressed its readiness to extend the truce under its current terms beyond its expiry on Friday.
However, a member of the Palestinian delegation at the Cairo talks, Moussa Abu Marzouk, wrote on Twitter: “There is no agreement to extend the ceasefire.”
The Syrian state view and opposition world view that have as a habit of mind ready and vicious (and vacuous) anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist rant haven’t a palatable program for the secular or humanist and post-Enlightenment drivers of the western mind.
The absence of a sympathetic modern human program for the state (Assad’s baggage) and the axis of power that represents political absolutism opposite NATO has tragically kept NATO in position to avoid nuclear Russia while also assigning permit for the disaster to Russia (which pledged $10 million for Syrian relief while spending $51 billion on Sochi).
At the end of each day, whatever our civilizational and religious affiliations may be and their related “self-concepts”, what the Jewish contingent and “Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian” civilization represents is the amassed historical weight of hard won western principles and values.
It’s not that a Jew is worth more than a Muslim, or vice versa, or that the Northern Hemisphere has ruthlessly enslaved the Southern Hemisphere or other such manipulative tripe. It — agape, love, the foundation of a good ethics and experience of a good life — is about dwelling on such an observation as, say, “whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world” (Hillel repeated by Muhammad) and dwelling on the meaning of that long enough to get it and develop some empathy and regard for other souls.
That empathy is not a given in nature: it’s cultivated.
These that get far astray do some damage — and then they do what they do under many ideological banners.
I’ll see how I feel about that on in the morning.
Maybe I’ll like it.
Maybe I won’t.
I don’t like the overuse of “dwelling” but will leave it as authentic verbal jazz.
A little more and I will drop the conversation.
Some social scientists believe that any attitude devolves to some set of beliefs having valence (good thing / bad thing) and intensity (not too bad . . . extremely bad) and primacy. Our legacies in culture and religion, in name and early acquired messages about ourselves (as early as “language uptake”) seem to me primary because we forget having learned such things and then we go an build on them throughout our lives. Our survival includes the perpetuation of these signifying elements of our existence. I think they’re important and believe in evolutionary cultural polyphony but a few have problems with that. Add greed, hormonal motivation, psychological problems, and so fascist dictators and followers are born, and when they grow up and become like BadDaddy with his Islamic Hate terrifying the neighborhood, they are hard to switch off.
Parties engaged in argument tend to their arguments. Viewers, however, may observe how each uses — or abuses — not only language but their conversational partners, and “talking over” a partner, mouthing the same to near death, is abuse.
Keeping in mind “malignant narcissism”, listen for and to the script — and note how the “transcript” has been altered from the video.
Seemingly, then, the only lasting effects of air strikes are civilian casualties. As a recent Washington Post editorial argues, “The latest mini-war between Israel and the Hamas movement is as unwinnable for either side as previous rounds in 2009 and 2012.”
As usual, Washington’s response to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza has been little more than justification and support of Israel’s “right to defend itself,” as exemplified by the U.S. Administration’s stock condemnation of Hamas rocket attacks on Tuesday. What White House spokesman John Earnest failed to clarify, however, is whether Palestinians are also afforded the right to protection — and who exactly Washington is expecting to provide that protection.
Evil starts with a lie, and lying has to do always with hiding something or getting something.
We may not think of failing to mention the Hamas tactic and strategy to place noncombatants between its weapons manufacturing and storage elements and the Israeli Defense Forces, but, and we call as much a “sin of omission”, that’s exactly what it is.
To even think that sacrificing families and their children to portray them as victims of so-called Israeli aggression should pull a sympathetic response from anyone in Washington — apart from the Muslim Brotherhood — seems to me breathtaking.
http://www.danielpipes.org/14574/israel-hamas-war – 7/11/2014: “What explains this role reversal? Are Islamists so fanatical that they don’t mind losing? Are Zionists too worried about loss of life to fight? / Actually, Hamas leaders are quite rational. Periodically (2006, 2008, 2012), they decide to make war on Israel knowing full well that they will lose on the military battlefield but optimistic about winning in the political arena. Israeli leaders, conversely, assume they will win militarily but fear political defeat – bad press, United Nations resolutions, and so on.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/hamas-human-shields/ – 7/14/2014; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-kohn/operation-human-shield_b_157837.html – 1/14/2009: ” When terrorists use areas such as schools to teach their children hatred and use places of worship to hide and store weapons, it is IMPOSSIBLE to keep civilians safe” (note from 2009 — the last time).
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/07/surreal_in_the_middle_east_hamass_human_shields.html – 7/14/2014: “As with previous assaults and conflicts orchestrated by an array of regional Islamic terrorist groups against Israel, not much attention is being paid to the way Hamas uses its own Palestinian citizens as human shields, or its deliberate and intentioned strikes on Israeli civilian neighborhoods and population centers.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28302539 – 7/14/2014: “Palestinian officials say at least 175 people in Gaza have been killed by Israeli air strikes since the offensive began last Tuesday. / Israel says nearly 1,000 rockets have been fired from Gaza in that time.”
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=18803 – 7/15/2014: “The piece, titled “Lowest deeds from loftiest heights,” disregards the extensive efforts made by the Israel Defense Forces to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza Strip, as well as Hamas’ repeated use of Gazans as human shields.”
Documentary producer Corey Gil-Shuster has a raft of clips on YouTube. I happened to be watching this one from February 2014 this afternoon and thought it might fit in here. The Islamist Muslim claim focused on the Jewish persecution of Muslims would seem to play primarily with and to the criminal, deluded, and ignorant — or some combination thereof. Are there issues? Yes. Are they civilizational? Not really. The Arab barbarism displayed by the artifice of the Palestinian liberation movement has been consistent over the years, but it would seem the liberation wanted is liberation from either a racist pan-Arab nationalism beloved of dictators or a religious fanaticism reliant on a deeply anachronistic and decontextualized approach to Islam. The refugees of 1948 have been drowned between those two political streams.
What I attempt to address, in general, is a deeply feudal intellectual environment and system that subjugates and destroys humanity by promoting and sustaining in its place the ruthless force that is the will of tyrants.
There’s portal enough right here for covering the region from “narcissistic mortification” to “malignant narcissism” to “narcissistic supply”.
We may not fully understand how or why fascists develop their “popularity” through the subjugation and sadistic control of their minions, but they do, and while events on the ground play out, some will circle these processes in mind — and processes in political psychology — to continuously draw down the reach and scope of that deeply anti-human, anti-God, and anti-social but globally distributed behavior.
From long experience, the Jews have a saying: “What starts with the Jews doesn’t end with the Jews.”
The signal in that is that the form in persecution is always barbarism — it’s bullying — and the bully’s problem cannot be solved merely by the disappearance of one of his targets. That kind of person and the mentality that person carries has its own internal narrative that can be hard to — and, look around at the fronts of the Islamic Small Wars, simply cannot be reached.
In the United States, Christian evangelicals form a political block of millions enthused by the support of Israel. In Ireland, despite Galloway’s best rhetoric, I suppose, “Irish for Israel” exists. Numerous other seemingly nominally antagonist blocks (including Nonie Darwish’s “Arabs for Israel”) _stand with Israel_ by way of their own idealism and self-interest. As much, I think, amounts to civilizational growth accompanied by declarations of independence.
The Jews may wish not to be “loved to death” either — we have some problems with, say, “Messianic Judaism”, which is an aesthetic Christianity latched to a Jewish holiday schedule.
As an American Jew — an American who is Jewish — I cannot question the ethnic identification on a personal level (Polish Jewish mother –> Jewish son) but I can question the relevance and role of ethnic exclusiveness in the adoption and comprehension of the tenets of the religion.
I just don’t believe that x nominal affiliation x cultural legacy that any here by cosmic definition are slated for lifelong or inter-generational enmity. That is what can, may, and perhaps is being stopped here with the broad spread of Zionist alliances of which this group is a part.
That we are each pioneering something new in mind . . . good.
We’ll all be a little bit different after facing those other forces that revel in blood and their own boundless self-aggrandizement.
Where the middle (mild and moderate) have proven without defenses of their own, the “political absolutists” — dictators and fanatics — had had a field day, and oh what a field of inhumanity and misery they have made all around themselves.
Hamas now uses the blood spatter of the children of families it has placed in harm’s way for its own anti-Israel propaganda. In fact, when it comes to “exceeding limits”, that mafia has proven particularly incapable of restraining itself.
Of the mirror opposite the god mobs, what need one say of Bashar al-Assad but to look at how he has “saved” Syria thus far: http://www.genocideinsyria.org/
As long as Assad is left to save Syria, there will one day be nothing left but its war torn stage for the perpetuation of infinite cruelty by those who believe themselves especially, in Mobarak Haider’s words, “God’s darlings”.
The infantile aspect of dictatorship is to view the whole world as a responsive extension to one’s own glory and power. http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/10/03/gaza-arbitrary-arrests-torture-unfair-trials The social architecture spun around the “malignant narcissist” occupies the core drive of the Islamic Small Wars in their every form, from the Brotherhood in America to the shifts in destruction wrought in Syria by the Assad regime and the assembly of opposed fanatics (of those two sets: different talk — same walk: they are of the same personality invested in their own over-the-top absolute authority).
Compression and distillation may make for good web talk but quite dissatisfying scholarly consideration.
However, our Global Awesome Conversation would seem predicated on our ability to package thought — call it “signal” — with exceptional brevity.
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