Category Archives: Politics

FTAC: A Note on War, Cultural Preservation and Transformation

28 Monday Aug 2017

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

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Some filling in on the intellectual history of Nazism and the spread of anti-Semitic myth seems in order:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

Plainly, the defeat of “Nazi Germany” neither displaced the German language nor the German People (in their majority) but it did transform Germany into a modern and multicultural state haunted by and reacting to the crimes of the mid-20th Century.

The brutal, cowardly, and underhanded methods developed by the Nazis in their achievement and expression of martial and political power may remain — and I hope they remain – unparalleled in intensity and scope in history. Lesser cabal, like ISIL, and some states, as with Russia’s behavior in Syria, may prove equally sadistic but lesser in reach, not that we don’t pay attention.

Regarding Islam and “how many Islamists” — Daniel Pipes has been publishing on that question since 2005 — there are some approaches to coming up with percentages, but the bottom line is that Muslims would seem first in the way of jihadi violence, and so much so that their own security interests focus on keeping the Muslim Brotherhood and their relations neutralized and largely out of power.

The Moscow-Tehran relationship with Hamas and Hezbollah and others and the histories both centers of power have had with terrorism might encourage a good look those two and their historic promotions of anti-Semitism plus participation (state sponsorship for) associated with terrorism.

The prompt: an Islamophobic tirade blanketing all absent of resolving observation and reflection.

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FTAC: Political Philosophy: An Inversion

24 Thursday Aug 2017

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

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I would suggest that feudal mafia may or may not be honest as regards politics within their closed circles, but that the same will lie for absolute power, which power becomes always sadistic — the power to visit suffering on others with impunity — should go without saying. By contrast, the idea of the “good society”, or great one, may be predicated on empathy (one foundational thought in law: “because it could happen to you”) and integrity. In the feudal mode, our cares may be restricted — me and mine and the rest of the world can go to hell — and in the modern, we note cruelty and suffering meted to others and try to address that in law and in policy.

For a while now, my context has been “Moscow v Washington” — the system of secret police, absolute central power, aristocracy v a modern democratic open society. In which world should one care most to live — as favored in the former where loyalty to power displaces principles and values; or as neglected in the latter where one may get a fair shake, or no “shake” at all?

Your original post asked for one idea. Perhaps two need consideration: empathy matched by integrity.

The cliche goes that where one stands has much to do with where one sits.

If yours is the campaign desk in the palace, the prince might be a good man; if it is the laborer’s bench downwind from “sanitation”, the prince might be a thoughtless one.

In general, liberal democracies strive to attenuate human caprice in the experience of good and bad fortune: law and reason may be slipped between the person and The Power.

In kleptocracy, The Power maintains the monopoly on law and reason — and the possession of all else.

However — and here’s the inversion repeated — would you rather live favored in the treacherous atmosphere produced by Power or at loose ends in a more or less just system that takes no special interest in your affairs,  your politics, or your fate?

Perhaps in hard times — or merely disappointing one — it may be more natural to seek favor than to extol the virtues of too clinical a system of justice and the “rugged individual” that may or may not make out well beneath it.

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Those Seeking to Divide Us . . . .

12 Saturday Aug 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics

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https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/12/trump-condemns-violence-at-charlottesville-alt-right-rally-says-country-must-come-together-as-one.html

Now who would seek to divide the American political campus against its own best interests?

The above played live on YouTube earlier today.  It’s now appears or sounds like a recording.  (Post-Publication Note: the YouTube poster revoked third-party replay (perhaps) because it knows its feed was designed to present Charlottesville and the United States of America as a House Mightily Divided, and while it has seemed that through the election season and this most turbulent of Administrations, we may not be so divided as confused by so much media devoted to the dramatizing of extremes.  “Active Measures”?  Could be.  The poster, “CCW News”, boasts (boasted) some arrangement with PressTV — and, reliably (if you click over to YouTube), listen to who is talking, masking away history, and framing the present.

Here, I will leave the copy as initially published.

*

We are told that we are divided.

Are we?

We’re “reminded” in the Jahi Issa interview that southern slavery was a colonial enterprise apparently absent of African and Arab practices in conquest and trade.

Here’s a block of URL’s on the history of the world’s most spiritually dismal industry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_the_Muslim_world http://autocww.colorado.edu/~toldy2/E64ContentFiles/AfricanHistory/SlaveryInAfrica.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Sudan https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/history/slave-trade.php

Contemporary (and a sad thing to note):

http://www.africanholocaust.net/articles/21stcentury%20slaves.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_contemporary_Africa http://www.dw.com/en/as-slave-trade-abolition-is-celebrated-millions-of-africans-continue-to-live-as-slaves/a-18337189 |
Portal Page: http://www.stoppingslavery.org/slavery-in-mauritania.html

Regarding the “southern” contribution, which seems archaic in this day and age: “blood and soil” and “the Jews will not replace us . . . .” — even absent of close-up evidence, the process has Moscow’s political “fingerprints” all over it.

Color codes previously noted and applied on Backchannels:

Red = Old Comrades (Soviet Era communists)
Green = Islamists (strident of Islam)
Black = Black Segregationists

“Red-Green Alliance” serves to represent the effort in the 20th Century to combine political forces to unseat the political intentions of the liberal democratic west.   The “Black” component flows down, imho, from older radical politics.

“ANTIFA” is a mystery organization with a global footprint, BackChannels wonders who is behind its development, recruitments, and evidently (and ironically) uniform counter-demonstration programming.

Regarding the New Nationalism (and resurgent feudalism and embrace of the medieval mode) in Europe and North America, BackChannels has suggested that Islamic Terrorism (“Allahu Akbar Terrorism”) has been channeled to goad Americans and Europeans toward the defense of their respective homelands.

Related Reference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Peace_Council

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FTAC: Antidote to What Poisoned the Palestinians

29 Saturday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics

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. . . the Palestinian street doesn’t learn because they’re disinformed and misdirected by leaders who have been “handled” by Moscow / and, since the Islamic Revolution in Iran, by Moscow-Tehran in their bid to sustain our world in their politically feudal mode.

Do those in the “middle east peace industry” really want to sustain the conflict by limiting the scope of observation to the Palestinian masses?

For the _earlier_ Arab world, post-WWII, latched previously to Hitler, and afterward courted by the Soviets who used anti-Semitism as a lever with which to seduce a few powerful leaders and their followers, the refugees as refugees conventionally managed would have been a lasting reminder of a lost war — a shame, in other words. The creation of a People’s Liberation Movement with a history to match handily solved that issue and “weaponized” the minds of the dislocated population.

Instead of continuing to reinforce negative Palestinian self-concept through condemnation, which is what write-offs do, perhaps moving better information into the main base of the community would undermine the sources of the kind of energy it puts on display when it “chest bumps” Israel on flimsy pretexts and outright lies.

We should be dismantling the political culture informed by the Nazis and later the Soviets. It’s the phantoms of those vicious political movements — plus the fascist or supremacist element in Islam — that may be keeping the Palestinians locked into too small a worldview and boiling with anger.

Almost an aside: a lot of these movements associated with dictators or dictatorship won’t concede their absurd positions until force or freedom alters their political perception.

I would prefer that it was freedom that reached the Palestinians.

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FTAC: On Governance and Realpolitik

21 Friday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics

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Okay — we know how smooth politics are with 300 million Americans — you design the system for 1.4 billion Chinese. 🙂

Possibly, Russia’s answer and part of the seduction of the EU / NATO states may be to protect the power of financial and political elites against the demands of great populations with needs to match.  Why not sew it all up with friends in the nomenklatura?

When the west demurred from engagement in Iran’s 2009 attempted revolution, I don’t know whether the decision was to buy time for Russia to run itself down or to capitulate to governments representing kleptocratic dictatorships. Instead of making the world safe for democracy (these days), we may be preparing it for governance by powerful and wealthy elites who think little of the liberties, lives, and happiness of others (who exist to serve them).

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FTAC: Anti-Semitism: On the Left Sidebar’s Earliest Statement

16 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics

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“Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner’s own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.”

The statement appears with many others down the left sidebar:

https://conflict-backchannels.com

The greater contest associated with anti-Semitism may be that between feudal power supported by the medieval worldview — power descends directly from God to some benighted human — and the modern image of our glorious and variegated humanity. Those that recognize that God, nature, and the universe have produced and sustained for us at this time about 7,000 living language cultures, each of them addressing their environmental and social challenges differently, should not be able to remain with or return to an inflexible absolutism. 

The supremacist values — out of any people anywhere at any time — defy nature and human nature, and where they’re forced to work — because it takes force to get them to work — people suffer . . . and it could be said that everyone suffers.

Indulgence in anti-Semitic cant may be a good signal of having chosen to march one’s people backward in time.

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Also in Media: On the Koch Brothers

16 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Politics, United States of America

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Oddly enough, the fiercely capitalist Koch family owes part of its fortune to Joseph Stalin. Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer who settled in Texas and ran a weekly newspaper. Fred attended M.I.T., where he earned a degree in chemical engineering. In 1927, he invented a more efficient process for converting oil into gasoline, but, according to family lore, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a threat and shut him out of the industry. Unable to succeed at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union. In the nineteen-thirties, his company trained Bolshevik engineers and helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries. Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration. He returned to the U.S. In the headquarters of his company, Rock Island Oil & Refining, in Wichita, he kept photographs aimed at proving that some of those Soviet refineries had been destroyed in the Second World War. Gus diZerega, a former friend of Charles Koch, recalled, “As the Soviets became a stronger military power, Fred felt a certain amount of guilt at having helped build them up. I think it bothered him a lot.”

In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover . . . .

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations

At a time when Americans are watching with some horror contests between the Trump Administration and responsible mainstream media, also between the Trump Administration and Congress, also between the Trump Administration and America’s ill and vulnerable, and, finally, between (not the Trump Administration) absurdly polarized American political parties, the Koch Brothers as cultural philanthropists and political activators seem ever an indirect part of the American experience.

Since reading a Mother Jones piece on the brothers, BackChannels has been compiling Koch Brothers articles without comment, but may here share the list and let that suffice for the time being.

Note: where date of publication appears embedded in the article URL, BackChannels will not repeat it in listing.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/05/koch-brothers-family-history-sons-of-wichita – 5/20/2014.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/02/opinion/woodhouse-koch-brothers/

http://www.npr.org/2016/01/19/463551038/dark-money-delves-into-how-koch-brothers-donations-push-their-political-agenda

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-The-Koch-Brothers-meet-the-crackpots-454481 – 5/19/2016

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/behind-make-america-great-the-koch-agenda-returns-with-a-vengeance – 11/21/2016.

http://www.exposedbycmd.org/2017/03/23/kochs-bankroll-movement-rewrite-constitution/

http://billmoyers.com/story/deep-history-radical-right/

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Americans_for_Prosperity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_family

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FTAC – A Note on Clinton’s Post-Cold War Knowledge

13 Tuesday Jun 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics

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The Soviet Union officially dissolved itself in bankruptcy on December 25, 1991. It did so with plans for the survival of the privileged of the Party — reference: Karen Dawisha’s groundbreaking book _Putin’s Kleptocracy_.

KGB Colonel and today President Putin has ditched the old banner, Communism, for “State Capitalism” and rebuilt essential elements of the Russian cultural-political experience: KGB/FSB, Centralized Power (that would be himself), and Aristocracy (“the oligarchs”).

The general public’s knowledge of the Cold War has been dimmed by time and the passing of a generation that needed to impart a base of knowledge in foreign affairs to the general public and failed to do that.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/23/moscows-rules-a-module/

Putin has displayed preference for other autocrats — Erdogan, Orban, Le Pen, Trump — and the cause for that has been the reinstalling of the feudalism and the medieval worldview in the states of the European Union and NATO, and he gotten far with that project using Islamic Terrorism as a goad to getting there.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

Read a little bit considerately, independently (no spin — your thoughts only), and quietly.

And look up “Zawahiri, Russia”.

Clinton, for all the many faults of the family and its character, knew the post-Cold War history and what it meant for the United States of America and the open democracies of the west. I don’t defend her; I didn’t vote for her. What I’ve come to observe — and I edit Back-Channels — are the processes by which my fellow Americans have been driven toward polarized extremes.

If BackChannels didn’t post it here, it would be lost somewhere beneath Sean Hannity’s latest Facebook comment about Susan Rice, a thoroughly partisan info-morsel for his hungry crowd — better to preserve it in an obscure blog that matters — or should matter — more and more as the free world, the European Union, and NATO approach Putin’s politically absolute and frequently criminal Moscow.

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