Category Archives: Politics

FTAC: Worlds Closer Together

17 Friday Mar 2017

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Inspiration for the response came from the “blame America first” community intent on demonizing the same for past horrors, and in this instance the horror was the “Halabja chemical attack” ordered by Saddam Hussein against the Kurdish community at the end of the Iran-Iraq War.

In the second part, an accusing and conspiratorial view of the United Nations came through in a question about its origins.  It’s BackChannels’ opinion that by way of sufficient financial loss and immense suffering, that the UN has provided deflection from “Great War” — not “Low Intensity Conflict” — as so much talk seems to want to precede and inform the same with a significance that matches design.  Failing that achievement, we, for the most part, refuse once again to destroy the world despite the common abundance in arms capable of doing so.  Instead, at this time, we have one state being eaten alive, as it were, and that would be Syria by way of nefarious design, and then on the western plate is another free state, Ukraine, fending off an aggressor proud of its own criminal mischief in the world, which same has become the consistent cause of the suffering of the greater portion of its population.

— The know-how and material for developing chemical weapons were obtained by Saddam’s regime from foreign sources.[23] Most precursors for chemical weapons production came from Singapore (4,515 tons), the Netherlands (4,261 tons), Egypt (2,400 tons), India (2,343 tons), and West Germany (1,027 tons). One Indian company, Exomet Plastics, sent 2,292 tons of precursor chemicals to Iraq. Singapore-based firm Kim Al-Khaleej, affiliated to the United Arab Emirates, supplied more than 4,500 tons of VX, sarin and mustard gas precursors and production equipment to Iraq.[24] Dieter Backfisch, managing director of West German company Karl Kolb GmbH, was quoted by saying in 1989 that “for people in Germany poison gas is something quite terrible, but this does not worry customers abroad.”[23] —

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

The Wikipedia entry goes on to cite U.S. involvement, but the basic principle in both geopolitical evil and transnational crime would seem to have applied: people in one place would not care too much about people far removed from themselves x space x culture x time.

Conditions involving boundaries and separation have changed.

—
http://www.un.org/en/sections/history/history-united-nations/

Moscow continues to explore and exploit war evidently believing it pays off financially and redounds to its glory. Here’s a BBC radio piece about Soviet Era manipulation to that effect — http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1 .

Today: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/04/syria-war-showroom-russian-arms-sales-160406135130398.html

A not too long ago yesterday for Ukraine: http://www.holodomorct.org/

Ukraine under assault today: http://uaposition.com/maps/russian-troops-attacked-ukrainian-position-donbas-197-times-past-48-hours-1-soldier-killed-10-wounded/

Greed expressed in lax regulation (first), then corruption outright followed by political or mercenary crime (“transnational crime” — all “black market” all of the time) may turn out the scourge of our own age. Boundaries and limits disintegrate before it where “actors” — engaged as here; powerful elsewhere — lose the internal brakes that involve conscience and empathy in relation to others.

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FTAC: A Comment on the Usefulness in Time of the United Nations

13 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, International Development, Islamic Small Wars, Politics

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Inspiration: the common conservative American claim that the United Nations has proven consistently anti-Semitic and anti-Western: why fund it?

Think of the UN as having organized an institutionalized tug-of-war, i.e., a war between the medieval world and the modern one. It is the medieval world that culturally preserves and leverages anti-Semitism. It does so to deflect attention from power while it mightily exploits its deeply subjugated constituents. The situation is no different for the Arabs of the Kingdom who support the absolute power of the royals; the poor of Russia, a class once again growing by the day, whose wealth in the patrimony of the land has been swept into the hands of the patronized by the “Vertical of Power” (Putin) who are spending it elsewhere; the whites of South Africa, all of a sudden, but who have been the target of communist-aligned Jacob Zuma’s ire; and, though you may not believe me, the Palestinians whose KGB-trained Arafat and KGB-affiliated Mahmoud Abbas have kept most right where they are because for political leadership and powerful clans, the middle east conflict has turned out a spectacularly good business!

The modern world fights the medieval world at the UN.

It’s a long process, or one best approached a little bit at a time, for “the world left behind” may well swallow the one that has advanced with increments of violence from everywhere. It’s better to have one place where the truth can be dragged out into the light whether or not the representatives of so many nations wish to accept it.

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FTAC – “Lost for Representation” – A Comment on the Plight of America’s Moderate Political Rank

13 Monday Mar 2017

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

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Inspiration: the canard repeated by foreign politico that America’s Republican Party represents the white, wealthy, and racist of the nation.

Actually, Lincoln was the Republican way back and the southern states Democrat, and so bad as regards race that it led the front for racial politics for many decades.

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

Credit Texas school teacher, first, and American President, later, Lyndon Baines Johnson and the launching of the Great Society programs with stealing the Republican cause and transforming the Democratic Party into the party best redressing equality issues and fighting toward the modern popular democracy that has proven an inspiration elsewhere — and been surpassed elsewhere as well.

The employment of Islamic Terrorism to drive the New Nationalism — that’s just the way I see it from Moscow’s feudal enterprise — seems to indeed have taken root among America’s conservative Republicans (while the the “Red-Green” response has holed up with the Democrats). Such politics seem foreign to Americans of my advancing age — as a class, we may be appalled with the depth of polarization and viciousness displayed during the past election season, and having our two major parties pushed toward extremes, those of moderate temperament would seem at the moment lost for representation.

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Murray at Middlebury

06 Monday Mar 2017

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

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Four days ago, conservative libertarian Charles Murray stood on a stage at Vermont’s Middlebury College to talk about his latest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, with political science students.  Instead of being heard out, this in Murray’s own words is what happened before a packed house:

Then I went onstage, got halfway through my first sentence, and the uproar began.

First came a shouted recitation in unison of what I am told is a piece by James Baldwin. I couldn’t follow the words. That took a few minutes. Then came the chanting. The protesters had prepared several couplets that they chanted in rotations—“hey, hey, ho, ho, white supremacy has to go,” and the like. It was very loud, and stayed loud. It’s hard for me estimate, but perhaps half the audience were protesters and half had come to hear the lecture.

BackChannels readers are by now familiar with terms like “Active Measures” and “Reflexive Control”(URL –> PDF) that connect the amplifying of America’s political polarization with Moscow and its efforts to destabilize the European Union and NATO to better establish the feudal worldview on which depends the greater promotion and sustaining of dictatorship in the world.

This blog’s readers know also the chains: Putin-Assad-Khamenei (or “Assad the Tyrant as flanked by Putin and Khamenei”); Putin-Orban; Putin-Erdogan; Putin-Le Pen.  Such relationships need not be too friendly, only merely authoritarian and encouraging of conditions favorable to a shared “malignant narcissism“.

The below referenced tweet packages reflexive control, Moscow’s continued dabbling with terrorism (for more of how that works, see BackChannel’s post on ISIS as Moscow’s tool — follow up by looking up “Zawahiri, Russia”), and the induction of a disturbing new American politics: Republican Party associated “Brown” New Nationalism v Democratic Party associated “Red-Green” Resurgent Socialism.

Some of us Conservative or Liberal but definitely, perhaps becoming stridently so, more Middle have not been pleased by the eruption of Fascism on the Left and the appearance of a hardening contempt for the public (and media) on the Far Right, the latter falling just a little all white, all male, and all superior short of the ranks of the white supremacists.

There’s the possibility that any effort to bring people together may begin by seeing them apart, Farthest Left to Farthest Right, and, later, in Keith Ellison fashion, curbing the indignant toward accommodation.  However, be that possibility as it may, Americans have most certainly experienced the development of a uniquely cant-ridden, contentious, uncivil, and unreasoning national politics.

As happens always in general combat, it’s those caught in the crossfire or whose turf — region, city, community, home — has been overrun that suffer most of all, and that whether in Syria (generated: 4.8 million refugees), Ukraine (generated: 1.7+ million Internally Displaced Persons), or the United States (okay, we’re a little uncomfortable here in the middle): for anyone else still hanging around the middle of the political aisle, this may be a good time to pull the wayward of the Parties back to reason — and then have a good push of the irredeemably immoderate back toward the margins where they have always been and, God willing, will return to grumbling.

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American Presidential Credibility, Integrity, Trust

04 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics, United States of America

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pkiss-nash-524x

Opening scene, Putin’s Kiss, 2012 documentary.

Think back a little bit.

Hicks also asked other superiors why Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN, had said the attack might have been a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Islamic video. That video was a “non-event” in Libya, Hicks said, adding that it seemed clear from the first that the assault was a terrorist attack.

“The sense I got was I needed to stop the line of questioning,” Hicks told the House panel.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Decoder/2013/0509/Benghazi-whistleblower-Has-diplomat-Gregory-Hicks-suffered-for-speaking-out-video – 5/9/2013.

Related more recently by former diplomat Gregory Hicks:

When asked about security at Benghazi on Sept. 11, Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly asserted her lack of responsibility. Initially, she said that she never read any of the reporting on security conditions or any of the requests for additional security, claiming that “she delegated security to the professionals.” More recently, she stated that “[I]t was not my ball to carry.” But the law says otherwise. Sound familiar?

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/09/11/what-benghazi-attack-taught-me-about-hillary-clinton.html – 9/11/2016.

The Benghazi attack and Hillary Clinton’s explanations — it was a video that did it, but no it wasn’t; security was left to the experts, she reportedly said, but the buck had been by law made to stop at her own desk . . . and she delegated downward and away from herself — became strong talking points for conservatives.

Now there comes a full suite of talking points for liberals questioning President Donald J. Trump’s (” . . . you grab ’em by the pussy”) character and the weight of complex business and political relationships involving “Moscow”, the metonym here for the “Russian State” as headed by Vladimir Putin.

Posted by mtvnations February 13, 2017.

Putin’s Kiss is available for viewing via Amazon by purchase or by subscription to Amazon Prime.

BackChannels assumes, or presumes, that readers wish not to live in President (Forever) Putin’s “Nashti” proto-fascist state (for further reference, enjoy in the World Affairs Journal  Malik Kalyan’s “Mysterious Circumstances Surrounding Russian Murders, Deaths” (March 3, 2017).

Well then . . . .

Are you making the allegation that President Obama conducted electronic surveillance of Trump Tower in your capacity as President of the United States based on intelligence or law enforcement information available to you in that capacity?

If so—that is, if you have executive branch information validating that either a FISA wiretap or a Title III wiretap took place—have you reviewed the applications for the surveillance and have you or your lawyers concluded that they lack merit?

https://www.lawfareblog.com/ten-questions-president-trump – 3/4/2017.

In Benjamin Wittes’ piece, eight additional question follow for President Trump as regards alleged wiretapping by former President Obama.

Let’s move on with moving back in memory.

There’s the Steele report —

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/01/17/address-christopher-steeles-2016-report-involving-president-elect-donald-j-trump/ – 1/17/2017 & https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/01/14/trump-vs-steele-an-emerging-credibility-gap/ – 1/14/2017

Add to the above, the continuing FBI investigation of Trump-associated relationships with “Moscow” (3/4/2017).

Add: The Flynn resignation.

Add: The Sessions recusal.

Worst of all: Rachel Maddow’s connecting the dots between a Russian mogul and a Trump real estate sale, which would not be so bad were Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross not at the center of (the art of) the deal (Feb. 27, 2017).

Trust me?

When an obscure blogger asks that question, it’s time to roll out the ROTFLMAO!

However, please do note this blog’s — this blogger’s — providing ample reference to many (most) of the most reliable sources in journalism and the think-tanks.

When an American President asks / demands trust, that’s something else.

Posted by The Guardian, March 3, 2017.

David Remnick’s most powerful bona fide: the Pulitzer Prize winning Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (1993).

Posted by CNN, February 28, 2017.

The complete quotation having to do with absolute power and corruption: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

Published February 8, 2017 in The Chicago Tribune (by Steve Chapman):

Asked about Melissa McCarthy’s portrayal of him on “Saturday Night Live,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer had some advice for the actress: “Dial it back.” May I suggest the president adopt that phrase as his administration motto?

So far, Donald Trump has made it a practice to obliterate every known limit and pump up every grievance. Harvard law professor and former Reagan administration official Charles Fried, marveling at the president’s Twitter volleys at federal judges, said, “There are no lines for him. There is no notion of, this is inappropriate, this is indecent, this is unpresidential.”

Perhaps the word order in this post’s title needs to be changed from the alphabetical “credibility, integrity, trust” to what comes first and last:

Integrity –> Credibility –> Trust

Although this piece would seem to end with Trump, it may be thought to go back some decades to Carter and Reagan (remember “Iran-Contra”?), to Mr. Clinton (how would you define what is and what is not sex) and forward to Obama and Clinton and the New Guy, but it’s that last with whose grandiose posturing and promises and tweets the nation awakes or falls to sleep.

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Information Space in the Feudal Mode

01 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Philosophy, Politics, Religion

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Posted by eOne Films, October 26, 2012.

Synopsis of a Different Kind of Script

Putin’s mission: sustain feudalism in service to political absolutism and reap the benefits of sustained conflicts and, eventually, subjugated and taxed populations.

KGB method: Reflexive Control via the indirect channeling of terrorism to promote the authoritarian nationalism certain to weaken EU / NATO cohesion and favor the development of political environments subject to the control by the wealthiest and most powerful of personalities.

Western Response Most Adverse to Democratic Modernity: in former Moscow-aligned organizations or personalities, adoption of “active measures” and forms of perceptual control, including the “false flag” painting of events, to channel popular perception in service to greater political power.

Western Response Most Favorable to Democratic Modernity: strongest possible emphasis on empiricism, integrity in investigation, and the promotion and retention of American and associated constitutional methods, principles, and values.

In the feudal mode, “the masses” — BackChannels finds the term itself degrading — may be controlled by disinformation, disingenuous information, framing, innuendo, rumor, and suspicion.

In the modern mode, the curious and the reasoning of the public may sift and evaluate for strong information — valid, reliable, significant, and straight.

North Americans and Europeans accustomed to political decency may wish to evaluate whether they really want to have the Feudal Mode installed in the future experience of their own presently democratic and modern rule-of-law states.

Whodunit?

The Fallen Headstones Mystery

Blake, Aaron.  “Trump is flirting with the idea that anti-Semitic incidents are false flags — yet again.”  The Washington Post, February 28, 2017.

BackChannel’s day began with related coverage in The Jerusalem Post “Trump reportedly questions authenticity of JCC bomb threats” (February 28, 2017)” and in the New York Daily News — “Trump suggests Jewish community is spreading anti-Semitic threats” (February 28, 2017).   This editor’s response:

I would question the authenticity of each posture or pretense presented, and I should think a good detective would start with the accuser. Again, we have been made to enter an era marked by the potential for KGB-style “false flag” and other manipulation. Where some people dare the improbable — do the unthinkable — the numbers (what are the odds?) may not help them.

I find the Linda Sarsour side of the story deeply suspect given her relationship with Hamas.

What if Jews and Muslims accomplished the vandalism together, and then made a show of amity in the wake of tragedy?

In the feudal mode — where power is concentrated by a force in personality that generates immense wealth and patronage without regard for common law — and in the mind supporting the feudal worldview (blessed with imagination but cursed by limited access to applicable data, critical research and reasoning skill, and relevant knowledge), what, however improbable, is not possible?

In this imbroglio, to accuse either Jews or Muslims — or representatives of either — of engaging in a “false flag” operations draws immediate condemnation as either anti-Semitic or Islamophobic — and therein lies the beauty of medieval manipulation and political theater and the greater horror of it as well.

What happens when power play magus?

Syria — and the incubating of ISIL as useful tool for Moscow and the depopulating of the state to present the west with a major headache.

Ukraine — and so-called “hybid warfare” to run Ukrainians off their land (a lesser known part of that conflict’s story) and regain a measure of control over the productive capacity of the state or state political criminals.

What will happen to the western public IF subjected to continued “reflexive control” and artifice in the presentation of political event?

Whatever the answer may be, it’s unknown to BackChannels.

However, BackChannels would attempt to armor the “American Mind” against so many feudal methods of perceptual control even though an obscure foreign policy / political science / political psychology blog cannot begin to do what perhaps the American Intelligence Community (IC) needs must do in defense of the Constitution and the related cohesion and integrity of the state itself: set the record straight.

Ellis, Ralph and Eric Levenson.  “FBI investigates Jewish cemetery vandalism in Philly.”  CNN, February 27, 2017.

How is it possible that an act of vandalism on the scale reported — in Philadelphia’s Mount Carmel Cemetery, some “75 to 100 headstones were topped” according to CNN — produced no claims (by person or organization), no witnesses — none that have been in any way publicized, at least — and to date no suspects.

What has been produced: innuendo, rumor, suspicion, each a part of the shifting — and at times easily manipulated — perceptions well known to feudal lords and their loyal subjects.

Addendum – March 4, 2017 and Forward

Greenfield, Daniel.  “Pro-Palestinian Black Muslim Leftist Arrested in Jewish Center Bomb Threats.”  FrontPage, March 3, 2017. The number of incidents associated with Juan M. Thompson: eight, a fraction of the total calls made to Jewish centers.

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FTAC: On the Edge of a Feudal American State

27 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, United States of America

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Context: in light of dozens of bomb threats and two acts of vandalism against Jewish targets, the chatter turned to the JDL, which in the United States remains an FBI designated terrorist organization (the same has been left to operate in Canada and Great Britain).  The matter of reevaluating the too obvious public appearance of anti-Semitic acts in America came up between Jews and here fits with the notion that a part of the nation seems now driven toward the revival of feudalism.

The commission of political violence before the Larger Force of the State renders the same very small and degrades and tarnishes the nobility of the actor. Now we reached a super-generational changing of the political guards. Angela Davis is 73 years old; Noam Chomsky is 88 years old. The Baby Boomers are counting on their retirement funding or the state to east them into death, and the New Guards of the Culture are climbing into their positions and making their marks.

In the framework of time, that is where these attacks on Jewish targets are taking place.

I have on Back-Channels noted an increasingly stark choice for modern bodies politic: do ye wish to remain “Modern” — cooperating, multicultural, mutually respectful beneath the benevolent and firm umbrella of secular-humanist / Greco-Roman / Judeo-Christian law developed atop much bloody argument about political power, or may ye wish to slide back into the feudal slime hoping to come out on top with the authoritarian who says he really likes you?

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/02/27/ftac-reflexive-control-feudalism/

Conflict — equipment, manpower, research — is a money-maker for a lot of people employed and invested in related fields. Give it a thought: to really be kind to our neighbors, perhaps we should all just thin ourselves out. God only knows Americans have the firearms to do it to themselves.

Maybe Black Lives Matter would like to weigh in on this business about an America / EU / NATO that trends toward feudalism and the potential for the conflicts of all-against-all. The same would make the Arab, “I against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin . . . .” sound awfully quaint.

BackChannels reach on Facebook has been broad and not terribly shy; however, hateful events — bomb threats, the desecration of cemeteries — promote suspicions, and one may now wonder at the purposes of those who commit such acts, which appear to no longer involve one city or community center and at least one mysterious miscreant.

The bomb threats number in the dozens; the attacks on two Jewish cemeteries now involve two cities.

Has someone been going down a call list?

Has someone been driving from one place to the next?

Many who follow politics at many levels — diplomacy, foreign affairs, international relations, warfare and terrorism — have picked on some far ahead or far out concepts, e.g., that Obama made the United States “post-Constitutional” or that we are living in a modern “post-fact” world — or a world comfortably supporting “alt-facts”.  How is one to reject the arrival of so ambiguous and ambivalent a political philosophy?

For the time being, the United States of America remains a “constitutional democracy”, and perhaps one with a security community that has its own backbone when it comes to the defense of the nation against “all enemies foreign and domestic”.

BackChannels suggestion to those vulnerable to being goaded into violence against pet targets on the basis of assumptions based on the constructs of swirling conspiracies or shadow and uncertain empirical evidence: cool it.  Let’s not drag ourselves backward several hundred years in the way of the ill-educated, ill-informed, and paranoid.

Reject manipulation.

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FTAC: Reflexive Control –> Feudalism

27 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, United States of America

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Moscow and Company — the dictatorships of the world — require that their loyal patriotic subjects live in a feudal information bubble (that’s what state-controlled press is all about) and view themselves as defending their homeland and majority religion. The encouragement of nationalism and religiosity — and the suppression of political competition and criticism — sustains the despotic in power, and that whether nominally “Brown” or “Red-Green”.

To manipulate the western competition — EU/NATO — I believe Moscow has “played” terrorist organizations or media (like Kavkaz Center) to produce the “Allahu Akbar Terrorism” that induces or pushes democracies toward nationalism.

In military and political science circles — and KGB — a part of the the technique of getting an enemy to do what is wanted without firing a shot is called “Reflexive Control”:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/02/07/ftac-the-new-nationalists-and-moscows-reflexive-control/

If you are democratic, freedom loving, liberal, politically engaged and you have bought into extreme conservative or ultra-liberal politics in the past ten years, you may just have been — as I believe I have been while traveling in the conservative ranks — duped and possibly partly so by “Active Measures”, another lovely term of art for political agitation and propaganda.

Now look again at America’s Trump Administration and its “Russian Question”, the subject of ongoing FBI investigation.

Active Reflexive Control Hypothesis

Stimulation of “Allahu Akbar Terrorism” –> “Patriotic Nationalist Response” (“Brown”)

Complement: “Defensive Socialist Response” (“Red-Green”) to Threatened Reappearance of Fascism)

Moscow’s intention: concentrate power and wealth in the familiar oligarch manner “above politics” as supported by an immense KGB/FSB political control element while producing sufficient division and turmoil in the EU/NATO states to degrade cooperative democratic politics and return power to wealthy and ruthless feudal cabal.

So far, so good for Mr. Putin.

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