18 Sunday Sep 2016
Tags
Posted to YouTube by Channel 4 News, September 18, 2016.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/05/01/russias-disinformation-history-elements/
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/08/04/ftac-medieval-vs-modern-one-more-time/
https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/06/01/syria-crimes-against-humanity-daraa – 6/1/2011
–33–
14 Wednesday Sep 2016
Posted to YouTube by Euronews, October 1, 2015.
As noted: http://www.newsweek.com/us-accuses-assad-aiding-islamic-state-through-airstrikes-338582 The bad guy catches a break, enough to put together an army. Assad’s priorities — always flanked by Putin and Khamenei — have shown up in the news over time.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/01/politics/john-mccain-cia-russia-airstrikes/ – 10/1/2015
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/russia-strikes-more-u-s-backed-rebels-in-syria/ – 10/21/2015
If you want to see what Assad had been fighting instead of western-back revolutionaries, have a look at the destruction of Homs (in the video at the bottom of this post).
BackChannels is not suggesting ISIL was never hit but rather that it has been groomed and shaped over the years for a role in “Assad vs The Terrorists”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Syrian_Civil_War_barrel_bomb_attacks
On this list, you will see that al-Nusra gets some early “licks” in in Damascus but, ISIL, which assembled into the “Islamic State” a couple of years into the war (around 2014), does not show up in association with Damascus until April of this year. Now there’s conspiracy-think: why not a 2014 or 2015 car bombing in Damascus credited to ISIL. And why this year? Perhaps they started taking hits from Russian jets. Finally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_Syria
Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/
WikiLeaks released an August 2014 e-mail from Hillary Clinton to John Podesta, who currently serves as her campaign chairman, stating that the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been “providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.” Evidently President Obama has not heeded Hillary’s concern, or chose to ignore it. In December 2014, Obama praised Saudi Arabia’s significant role in helping to fight ISIL (also known as ISIS and the Islamic State) during a meeting in Washington with the Kingdom’s Minister of Interior Prince Mohammed Bin Naif Bin Abdulaziz. And at a meeting he hosted with Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, at the White House in February 2015, Obama said, “Qatar is a strong partner in our coalition to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIL.”
BackChannels believes the post-Soviet Moscow axis — Moscow-Damascus-Tehran — chose, as it resisted the challenge to Assad’s authority, to emphasize fighting the west first by first combating the defecting officers who took up leadership of the Free Syrian Army while holding off, or shaping, the al-Qaeda-type organizations coming onto the field (reference, again, Lucy Westcott’s report in Newsweek, “U.S. Accuses Assad of aiding ISIS Through Airstrikes” (June 2, 2015) and compare that with more recent reports on Russia’s air campaigns both leading to the “Concert in Palmyra” (Russian jets appear to have bombed a refugee camp the next day) and the more recent barbarism, including the wanton destruction of hospitals taking place in Aleppo.
One might also have a glance a Michael Weiss’s “Russia’s Double Game with Islamic Terror” (The Daily Beast, August 23, 2015) —
Based on extensive fieldwork in one village in the North Caucasus, reporter Elena Milashina has concluded that the “Russian special services have controlled” the flow of jihadists into Syria, where they have lately joined up not only with ISIS but other radical Islamist factions. In other words, Russian officials are adding to the ranks of terrorists which the Russian government has deemed a collective threat to the security and longevity of its dictatorial ally on the Mediterranean, Bashar al-Assad.
Putin — and everyone else with a yard of the political science classroom — knows that every “Allahu Akbar Attack” induces some patriotic nationalist response, just as a bee sting causes the flesh to swell. The same therefore becomes a tool of a greater political force: what if you could get the “worst of the worst” to now and then hit a western target? Of course, each drama would amplify injured state’s existing political divisions by giving voice to the “defense leagues” and each state’s most conservative leaders while also reaching through the old comrade networks and combative Muslim defense circles in their hate-the-west-first presumptions.
It turns out the URL cited near the top of Klein’s piece says nothing about “. . . clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL . . . .” from Saudi Arabia or Qatar!
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3774
Here’s an excerpt from that source:
>> 2. It is important that once we engage ISIL, as we have now >> done in a limited manner, we and our allies should carry on until they are >> driven back suffering a tangible defeat. Anything short of this will be >> seen by other fighters in the region, Libya, Lebanon, and even Jordan, as >> an American defeat. However, if we provide advisors and planners, as well >> as increased close air support for the Peshmerga, these soldiers can defeat >> ISIL. They will give the new Iraqi Government a chance to organize itself, >> and restructure the Sunni resistance in Syria, moving the center of power >> toward moderate forces like the Free Syrian Army (FSA). In addition to air >> support, the Peshmerga also need artillery and armored vehicles to deal >> with the tanks and other heavy equipment captured from the Iraqi army by >> ISIL.
Unless “Leaks” changes — too late now! — the claim made about the URL doesn’t jive.
His fellow prisoners were members of ISIS. “Abu Muhammad al-Joulani, (founder of the Jihadist group, Jabhat al-Jabhat al-Nusra) was rumored to be there. Mohammed Haydar Zammar, (one of the organisers of the 9/11 attacks) was there. This is where the Syrian part of ISIS was born,” he said.
Alghorani is convinced that members of ISIS were released strategically by Assad. “From the first days of the revolution (in March 2011), Assad denounced the organisation as being the work of radical Salafists, so he released the Salafists he had created in his prisons to justify the claim … If you do not have an enemy, you create an enemy.”
Cordall, Simon Speakman. “How Syria’s Assad Helped Forge ISIS.” Newsweek, June 21, 2014.
–33–
14 Wednesday Sep 2016
Posted to YouTube by France 24 English, Sept. 14, 2016.
Anything is possible — for that, catch up with what lends itself to scrutiny on Snopes — but what is probable: Could there be a Russian connection to al-Qaeda today?
“It is not fashionable to accuse the Russians of having any ties to Middle East terrorism today. Indeed, some conservatives seem to think the U.S. and Russia can work together to defeat radical Islam.
“The analyst and author Jeff Nyquist asks, “When we learn that a leading commander in ISIL was born in the Soviet Union and trained in Russia, we ought to wonder what is really going on?” Omar al-Shishani, the Russian commander in ISIL (also known as ISIS or the Islamic State), has been reported to be the group’s overall military chief.” — Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy in Media, September 30, 2014.
To promote “political absolutism” — AKA “dictatorship” — worldwide; To weaken European Union and NATO cohesion and resolve.
By creating a problem only the “strong man” might resolve.
This time around, it may not be the cause of the terrorist that Moscow supports but rather the reaction to the same. In essence, every “Allahu Akbar Attack” promotes a patriotic and nationalist response in the receiving state. Every injured body politics swells with the insult to its security — and then it may take stronger measures to forestall the next. There may be an opposite heightened response as well from the feely-touchy sort that gamely adopt the sympathetic position and become a part of the heightened Far Left. The division created by “what to do?” then serves Moscow in its renewed existence as a medieval enterprise.
Applicable reference on this blog: “Syndicate Red Brown Green“; “FTAC – America’s Division Leans Toward Moscow“.
How many years of accumulated experience has Russia in these methods?
From the Soviet Era and NKVD forward: about 80 years experience using violence as a part of producing a Political Theater of the Real, which might be better thought of as medieval spectacle and tableaux.
Mikhail Bogdanov’s November 2014 meeting with PFLP in Moscow shortly before a PFLP attack on a Jerusalem synagogue.
Moscow’s refusal to designate either Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations plus evidence of direct Russian military support for Hezbollah operations in Syria.
Soviet Era Moscow’s exploitation of violence and terror in its own political expansion and long history as a state sponsor of terrorism.
Taras Kuzio’s analysis in “Is Russia a State Sponsor of Terrorism?” (New Eastern Europe, January 22, 2015) may bring readers up to speed on how it is that Iran is today a U. S. State Department designated state sponsor of terrorism and Russia is not.
That’s a tough question for BackChannels.
The democratic open societies of the west may be obligated to confront aggressive dictatorships but by using the broad suite of business, diplomatic, political, and social tools that might deflect all parties from open conflict and its amplification and expansion. Perhaps the Obama Administration has been doing as much all along. However, as this post-Cold War and now “Cold Struggle” aspect of western relations with Moscow comes into focus, western constituencies and representatives may have to ask about the development of state compromises and dependencies associated with Moscow’s feudal revanche.
The wealthy of the world — the one-half of the one percent, the world’s global business, financial, and political elite — may ask themselves (depending on how busy some may be with defense contracts) how the promotion of fear through state-driven displays of violence and terror suit the greater commercial viability of expanding non-defense business and consumer markets.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/how-the-soviet-union-transformed-terrorism/250433/ – 12/23/2011.
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/the-russian-roots-of-terrorism/ – 9/30/2014.
http://www.jrnyquist.com/the-dark-side-of-the-moon.html – 2/9/2015.
https://themoscowtimes.com/news/russia-says-hezbollah-hamas-arent-terrorist-groups-50783 – 11/16/2015.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/01/27/report-russia-actively-supporting-a-designated-terrorist-group-in-syria/ – 1/27/2016.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/ – 10/2/2015.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/08/29/ftac-americas-division-leans-toward-moscow/ – 8/29/2016
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_and_the_Soviet_Union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror
“It is now interesting to see in what way history repeats itself. And why should history not repeat? – Especially when successful strategies may be used again and again, with nobody the wiser. We were manipulated in 1939-45, and we have been manipulated in the period 2001-2014. Of course, it is not that Hitler and bin Laden were nice guys. It is merely that we allowed ourselves to become so absorbed in fighting a lesser enemy that we completely lost sight of the greater enemy. Worse, this greater enemy manipulated us in ways that are shameful to have permitted. Once again, we turned a blind eye to Russia’s preparations to take over Europe; that is to say, preparations to take full advantage of our distraction.” — From J. R. Nyquist, “The Dark Side of the Moon,” February 9, 2015.
“In the 1960s and 70s, the Soviet Union sponsored waves of political violence against the West. The Red Brigades in Italy and the German Red Army Faction both terrorized Europe through bank robberies, kidnapping, and acts of sabotage. The Soviets wanted to use these left-wing terror groups to destabilize Italy and Germany to break up NATO. State-sponsored terrorism was a deeply Soviet phenomenon, but its practice did not stop when the Soviet Union ended. While state sponsorship continues, terrorism has mutated into something even harder for us to understand and respond to. But some of the roots of today’s terrorism go back to the Soviet Union.” — Nick Lockwood, “How the Soviet Union Transformed Terrorism,” The Atlantic, December 23, 2011.
–33–
13 Tuesday Sep 2016
Tags
Assad, defending absolute power, defending political absolutism, dictatorship, malignant narcissism, medieval political theater, Putin, Syrian conflict, Syrian Tragedy
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/06/02/assad-or-burn-it-assad-burns-it/
Moscow-Damascus-Tehran chose a long time ago to sustain political absolutism and produce between themselves a medieval spectacle, “Assad OR The Terrorists” AKA “Assad vs The Terrorists”. To get “The Terrorists”, Assad chose to bedevil noncombatants and early FSA, whose officers defected from his own corps, while allowing al-Nusra and others greater space and time — an act of incubation, deselection for combat — to consolidate.
No one likes this story — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/ — because it suggests that Syria has been made into a complete theater of politics and war, courtesy of Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and, led into it by the early easing off, Baghdadi. The display or tableaux moves “the masses”, but it wasn’t necessary but to defend the politics of dictatorships (“different talks — same walk”) — and Syria has been all but destroyed by it.
We know there is such a thing as the medieval world because we look back on it.
The medieval takes up space in the world’s museums.
Is there such a thing as “modern”?
Perhaps time blends ages and experiences.
One may be certain, however, that what Assad has brought about in Syria combines modern aesthetic and social norms — recall that Concert at Palmyra — with a deeply medieval politics, one that feasts on blood and sets the other side up for doing as much. Driven from the land or killed: noncombatants and perhaps the more modern of revolutionary units.
Posted to YouTube by Al Jazeera English, September 12, 2016.
Posted to YouTube by AFP News Agency, September 12, 2016.
BackChannels feels that Assad flanked by Putin and Khamenei and accompanied in their medieval journey by Baghdadi are “all in” for “absolute power” — “Different talks, same walk” — and none have either “internal brakes” or personal incentives for compromise. However, external influences, starting with state (or “state”) money and either the want of it or the loss of it, might apply.
Also, for Putin, greater state interests plus, perhaps, interest in his reputation in history, may come to bear — no pun intended — for as the destruction of Syria intensifies and western intervention remains limited, it’s himself as much as Assad, the head of a Russian “client state”, who may in the world’s memory bear the brunt of responsibility for the horror of it.
CBS/AP. “Syria cease-fire — Assad’s “last shot” — seems to hold.” September 13, 2016.
–33–
13 Tuesday Sep 2016
Tags
authoritarianism, leadership, malignant narcissism, nationalism, political psychology, Putin, Russia, Russian economy
Dictatorships – “Different Talks – Same Walk” — they have nothing to do with any restricted political vision except to exploit language for the eventual attainment of “unlimited narcissistic supply.”
Truly, they flatter themselves, eventually leaving behind pyramids and billion-dollar mansions.
Many make themselves living hell for others, unfortunately.
Successful states — plenty of cash across the geopolitical space and plenty to do as regards work — seem to me often well put together combines of public commitments and privately realized opportunities. As all things are worked out between actual persons and organizations, the general rule — public-private compacts, from the provision of infrastructure to area-wide tax policy to real estate development through to public regulation of production (environmental and labor legislation) and trade (controls on distribution and tariffs) — dissolves into improved qualities in living x area-sq.
In good societies, “qualities of living” (economic, physical, psychological, social, spiritual) should produce the benchmarks (casually stated: “are you better off today than you were so many years ago? And how so? And why?) to which constituencies and politicians respond.
The despotic evade popular judgment.
I think we focus too much on the “isms” and not enough on leadership and related social practices, but that feature in cultures need the poets out front. Depending on where one lives, the critics of power, especially despotic power, may be made to suffer in situ or in exile a long time.
Re. education — avoidance of indulging too many in the humanities and social sciences, or doing so through too much of a Far Right / Far Left professoriate, may make a political body too easily disinformed and misled. As I have no relevant power in that realm, or elsewhere, reparative action seems way beyond my reach.
I think generalists among writers have at best subtle influence over time.
A good conversation may be mild and yet moving.
The conversational partner had called for the removal of former communists from Russian politics; however, and President Putin included, the whole have transformed from the Soviet outlook and ditched the CPSU worldview, a process well underway but out of sight in the 1980s when the privileged of the Party had begun work on plans for afterward. The “afterward” — December 26 of this year will mark 25 years of “afterward”) — has returned to Russians a deeply centralized national security state: FSB | Putin | Oligarchs.
Where the same has run the world into disturbing issues: Syria.
Barbarism, Corruption, and Cronyism v Rule of Law and Meritocracy
*
Medieval Political Absolutism vs Modern Democratic Distribution of Power
*
State-Based Development and Exploitation of Terrorists (as in the medieval realpolitik theatrical “Assad OR The Terrorists”) v Progressive Humanist Discipline in Military / Paramilitary Assessment and Response (as in modern Israel)
The items presented in “That v This” form need not be black-and-white in reality (or “realpolitik”) as the blend may be more the thing, but what’s on display in Russia- and Iran-enabled Syria is so bad as to make modern invention of the political themes involved very easy. Stopping at an expanded “Medieval v Modern” three should suffice.
Through President Putin, certain features (like that KGB/FSB thing) of the Soviet Union have enjoyed a period of “Soviet Reunion”. A number of characteristics associated with the period of dissolve around 1991 have been reversed, and the leader has returned to the people a certain boisterous quality. However, the ambitious neo-medieval neo-imperial state’s “numbers” — military expenditures, reduced oil revenues, incidence of corruption throughout, capital inflows, reduced reserves — may be keeping internal development comparatively suspended. That may do Putin’s popularity and reputation some damage over time.
. . . the majority of the population sees the Kremlin not as the reason for the current economic recession but as the central power making a relatively successful attempt to consolidate society against external enemies that seek to strangle Russia economically. Somehow, it is not hard for the Kremlin-controlled media to find proof and symptoms—Western sanctions are presented as a major instrument of destruction, causing severe harm to the Russian economy; the oil price decline is declared to be the result of an anti-Russian plot; and even the situation around Ukraine is treated as an attack on Russian foreign trade, on Russia’s ability to cooperate with a neighboring market of 45 million people, and on the traditionally close economic ties between Ukraine and Russia. Over time, economic hardships have become a reason for the increase in public support of the president and his policies, not a reason for protesting.
–33–
03 Saturday Sep 2016
When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad elected to bomb noncombatants and combat then moderate revolutionary forces like the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in preference to eliminating at the outset the al-Qaeda-type organizations (like al-Nusra), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi could not have known his own enterprise, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) was being groomed to first blackmail the western powers (political theatrical: “Assad Or The Terrorists”) and would later (about now: “Assad vs The Terrorists”) become exposed to Moscow’s most advanced, devastating, and lethal conventional firepower.
When in 1964, the Soviet KGB established Yassir Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the refugees of 1948, first caught between armies and then abandoned between states, could not have known of the Soviet mechanics behind what they would perceive as their own deeply anti-Semitic and violent “Palestinian” liberation movement, nor could they have known then that another 52 years of wasting enslavement to the Middle East Conflict, which they themselves have been made to sustain, would lay ahead of them.
The hidden hand in the more dramatic and recent history of despotism turns out that of a dark “privileged of the Party” (the Soviet State then) or “new nobility” (Putin’s state now) intent on producing conflict that it may then claim to control.
Between them, Moscow and Tehran appear to advise, fund, or otherwise influence Hamas and Hezbollah, whose leaders have done well for themselves — Ismael Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires — while those they purport to represent continue to suffer their constraints and their plundering.
In the medieval mode, power may be expected to be capricious and self-aggrandizing.
In reference, the reader will find a BBC Radio piece by Alex Last telling of the Soviet urging Somali militia in the 1970s into war with Ethiopia, then an American client state, over possession of the Ogaden. While doing that, Moscow was developing influence in Ethiopia, and as it succeeded in that purpose, it chose to betray Somalia, which troops had by then effectively conquered 90 percent of the contested space. Backing Ethiopia, its new client state, Moscow then produced for it a greater and more powerful army, one including thousands of Cuban troops and all the hardware necessary to push Somalia’s military out of the Ogaden.
Why?
Arms sales?
The pleasure of having displaced American influence in Ethiopia (for a while)?
For the pleasure of feeling in control?
While Moscow today may claim to be more concerned with Syria than with Jerusalem, Gaza, and Ramallah, one may ask to what extent Moscow appears concerned with the suite of UN-acknowledged human rights and values, for in Syria and just as with the “Palestinian Liberation Struggle” (and in the 1970s, Somali justice in the Ogaden), Moscow’s genuine concern seems very small for those whose interests it claims to have taken to heart.
“Cold War? –> Cold Struggle.” May 15, 2016.
“Quote — Manipulation — About the PLO Leader — Pacepa and Rychlak (2013).” December 2, 2014.
“Syria — “Assad vs The Terrorists” — How ISIS Defends Assad.” October 2, 2015.
Last, Alex. “The Ogaden War.” Interview with General Mohamed Nur Galal. BBC Radio, April 7, 2016.
Westcott, Lucy. “U.S. Accuses Assad of Aiding ISIS Through Airstrikes.” Newsweek, June 2, 2015.
Wikipedia. “Palestine Liberation Organization”.
–33–
30 Tuesday Aug 2016
“I don’t know if these people are acting on orders from Russia, but they are clearly what Lenin called ‘useful idiots,’” said Mika Pettersson, the editor of Finland’s national news agency and an organizer of the editors’ open letter. “They are playing into Putin’s pocket. Nationalist movements in Finland and other European countries want to destabilize the European Union and NATO, and this goes straight into Putin’s narrative.”
Imagine a person described as follows and excessive in each dimension:
arrogant
conceited
contemptuous
controlling
disingenuous
divisive
egotistical
fearful and suspicious
hubristic
judgmental
lacking in empathy
magical in thinking
narcissistic
possessed of fascist tendencies
suspicious
vulgar
Clone that person, place the clones in power, and call the assembly a state: how would such a state choose to “play” with others — or mess with them?
Consider the weapons —
ad hominem attack
agitation
anti-Semitic cant
assumptive “everyone knows” arguments
bold accusation lacking proof
confusion
defamation
deflection of attention (away from the speaker)
deflection of criticism (of the speaker’s thought)
false presentation (political theater)
framing
libel
misdirection
obfuscation
omission
sloganeering / parroting
questionable basis
On BackChannels, “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation“: what the aggressor has in mind for the victim he projects to the victim.
It plays this way (excerpted from the above cited article by Higgins):
Mr. Backman, who also represents the Donetsk People’s Republic, the breakaway state set up with Russian support in eastern Ukraine, denied targeting Ms. Aro as part of any “information war.” Rather, he insisted that Russia was itself the victim of a campaign of disinformation and distortion conducted by the West.
BackChannels first approached the topic of Russian disinformation through a compilation in “Russia’s Disinformation History — Elements” (May 1, 2016).
Highly recommended reading: Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013.
From the Soviet model for casting aspersions, a note from the Holocaust Encyclopedia on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Related: an excerpt from Walter Laqueur in the virtual pages of this blog: “Excerpt – 1920s – The Spread of Hate – Russia -> Germany | An Excerpt from Laqueur”.
From Ukraine: http://www.russialies.com/russias-top-220-lies-international-edition/
Also in The New York Times (published two days ago):
STOCKHOLM — With a vigorous national debate underway on whether Sweden should enter a military partnership with NATO, officials in Stockholm suddenly encountered an unsettling problem: a flood of distorted and outright false information on social media, confusing public perceptions of the issue.
The claims were alarming: If Sweden, a non-NATO member, signed the deal, the alliance would stockpile secret nuclear weapons on Swedish soil; NATO could attack Russia from Sweden without government approval; NATO soldiers, immune from prosecution, could rape Swedish women without fear of criminal charges.
They were all false . . . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/world/europe/russia-sweden-disinformation.html – 8/29/2016
https://news.vice.com/article/european-union-prepares-myth-busters-team-to-combat-russian-disinformation – 4/15/2015
http://warontherocks.com/2016/03/russian-hybrid-warfare-and-other-dark-arts/ – 3/11/2016
http://www.jamestown.org/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=42745#.V8WDVdQrJlZ – 8/18/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/vladimir-putin-russia-news-media_us_56215944e4b0bce34700b1df – 10/24/2015
http://hungarianspectrum.org/2016/08/27/russian-disinformation-in-the-pro-government-hungarian-media/ – 8/27/2016
http://www.stratcomcoe.org/next-phase-russian-information-warfare-keir-giles – (PDF) May 2016.
http://www.fiia.fi/en/publication/588/fog_of_falsehood/ – 5/10/2016:
This report analyses Russian propaganda and disinformation – here collectively called strategic deception – concerning the conflict in Ukraine. The strategic deception is not exclusively a Russian term, but it does capture what we think is an essential feature of the current Russian foreign and security policy. It is driven by attempts to put the adversary into a defensive posture and off balance, and thus, to create conditions for surprise.
The methods utilized in contemporary Russian strategic deception are partly the same that were already used in Soviet propaganda. But where Soviet propaganda was anchored in ideological truth claims, the contemporary Russian variant can be compared to a kaleidoscope: a light piercing through it is instantly transformed into multiple versions of reality.
http://understandrussia.com/russian-soul/ – as found.
The rise of Novorossya is the most significant political development since the collapse of the USSR. It is a new politics, one that combines nationalism and socialism into a Christian, humane and just political order that has not been seen before. That it rises on the ashes of “independent Ukraine” and on Orthodox territory is no accident.
Posted to YouTube by statewithinastate2, April 29, 2015. Lecturer: Fr. Matthew Raphael Johnson, Ph.D. Related pages:
http://www.rusjournal.org/
http://www.tradyouth.org/the-orthodox-nationalist/
After the talk, data from the related walk — here’s a record of Russian or Syrian air power associated with the bombing of Syrian hospitals:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/31/wave-of-russian-air-strikes-on-syrian-hospitals-leaves-60-dead/ – 5/31/2016
Posted to YouTube by DailyMilitary.News, Feb. 16, 2016.
The characteristics of Russian propaganda are: generating very strong emotions, aggression, and a dramatic departure from reality. Russian television stations, with very few exceptions, create a more and more complicated and unpredictable reality, ‘generate fears, bringing people to the brink of chaos and panic’. Once created, the huge stress damages the mechanism of rational thinking, people are herded into a crowd, where archaic instincts take over, triggered by the simplest of emotions’.[1]
In Russia, whoever is not with the Kremlin, whoever criticizes Putin, or even doubts the righteousness of his policies, is considered a traitor and an enemy. Against the very few who dare express minimal reservations towards official policy, a movement formed recently, with the blessing of power, the Anti-Maidan movement, with the express objective to combat any position, to wipe out the smallest trace of doubt towards Putin’s wisdom. Anti-Maidan fights against the ‘5th column’, the enemy within.[2]
–33–
29 Monday Aug 2016
Tags
21st Century Neo-Feudalism, foreign affairs, Islamist, new nationalists, political colors Red Brown Green, post-communist
It is an awful campaign as well as an awful politics for Americans.
Hillary Clinton – Red-Green alliance
Donald J. Trump – Brown new nationalists
Both themes go back to Moscow (but I may try to give up that obsession for a while). 🙂
Basically, we are too divided a nation, and we should really be wrestling with the sources of that division. They’re not necessarily in our lifestyles nor justified by the latest outrages appearing in the news.
We’ve been a compassionate people, a Christian-majority nation, with a secular Constitution and the courage to have come this far with much of the implementation of its ideals and sense of mission. Why the candidates and the public are whipping up so much mud — or getting into so much trouble — and spattering the same everywhere eludes answers.
Has our nation simply become bored with itself and in a mood to rumble?
Although the Obama Administration appears to be taking the pacifist tack of refusing enmity with Moscow (say, over the demise of Turkey as a NATO-spirited state and potential European Union partner), BackChannels finds it impossible to dismiss the presence of the Cold War’s “Russia v NATO” / “Moscow v Washington” contest over existence beneath the shadow of nuclear mutually assured destruction.
That argument seemed to have been settled in 1991 while functioning democracy and rule of law seemed also to have been on its way to the former Soviet communist state.
What perhaps has gotten in the way is an inherent medievalism characteristic of Russian political culture.
Flipping from the tsars to the Party to the “vertical of power” federation has changed primarily who is in charge, not produced (in the Soviet Era) any “dictatorship of the proletariat” or now in Putin’s era the distribution of power and expansion of economic development familiar to the more true democracies of the west.
One may ask what is happening to those democracies — as well as America’s — as each “Allahu Akbar attack” promotes xenophobic nationalism and post-Soviet disinformation produces legions of misdirected “old comrade network” politicos and strident (also anti-Semitic) Muslims and “Islamists” (on BackChannels, the two intertwine to become the “Red-Green Alliance” involving organizations as familiar as Black Lives Matter, Palestinian Solidarity, and International Solidarity).
This is really a “Syndicate Red Brown Green” post.
One should ask: what is Syndicate Red Brown Green doing in the United States?
How is it that whether generally aligned with the Democratic Party or the Republican, we appear — at least as portrayed through general mass media — to have become vicious toward one another?
While Russians in their majority continue on track with economic suffering (and Syrians not directly protected by Assad continue suffering Russians), “Moscow” appears to be getting “Washington” to look much like itself with breathtaking corruption associated with candidate Clinton and in Trump the now recognizable brawling, sprawling, and outsized narcissism more familiar to Moscow lackeys like Ukraine’s former president Viktor Yanukovych.
Trump, to his credit and perhaps innocence after all, has yet to rack up a record of scandals associated with a term in office, but for that odds may be even between Clinton, the consummate Washington insider, and himself, the very opposite as a Washington outsider.
Here at the beginning of this day, the heightened “Red-Green” presence in the Democratic Party and its reflection in the “Brown” resurgent populist nationalism of the Republican Party bode ill for the United States as we approach the November elections.
This online journal is a forum for some of the more recent academic essays of Professor Matthew Raphael Johnson. Given current events in eastern Ukraine and Russia’s extraordinary rebuke to American liberal arrogance internationally, alternative and revisionist work on Russian history and politics is sorely needed. He was the first among English speaking Orthodox writers to understand Putin as a needed balance to the American empire. This postmodern imperium, headquartered in the US, is a demonic, serpentine dominion that spreads the postmodern acid of American mass-zombification to the world. It is Antichrist.
The Soviet empire was malignant, but what replaced it in the 1990s was worse. The Russia that survived Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin almost disappeared under liberalism. It was the creation of the American postmodern Imperium. It is more insidious and sophisticated than the USSR because it is not based on state power. Instead, it is based on the rule of private capital. The cosmopolitan and neurotic American capitalist seeks to “liberate the individual” so as to more easily enslave him to his passions. Then, this isolated mass-man, this crippled, malformed cipher of a human being, is offered the satisfaction of his passions for a fee.
The rise of Novorossya is the most significant political development since the collapse of the USSR. It is a new politics, one that combines nationalism and socialism into a Christian, humane and just political order that has not been seen before. That it rises on the ashes of “independent Ukraine” and on Orthodox territory is no accident.
Johnson, Matthew Raphael. Selected Essays. (Website). The Russian Orthodox Medievalist.
Persuade Me Politics. “Donald Trump: Patriot, Savior or Tyrant? (Part 1). October 5, 2016.
–33–
BackChannels 