Category Archives: Psychology

Orwell in America – President Trump’s Sudden Firing of FBI Director Comey

10 Wednesday May 2017

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

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“It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission,” Mr. Trump wrote in a letter to Mr. Comey.

“The FBI is unlikely to regain public and congressional trust until it has a director who understands the gravity of the mistakes and pledges never to repeat them,” he wrote.  “Having refused to admit his errors, the director cannot be expected to implement the necessary corrective actions.”

Ballhaus, Rebecca.  “Trump Fires FBI Director Comey.”  The Wall Street Journal, A1, A4, May 10, 2017.

Comey’s errors?

Publicly commenting after close of investigation on Clinton’s e-mails, an act with which then candidate Trump and later President Trump appeared to have had no issue.

That’s one error.

That’s it.

One possible other, not cited as an error, might be Comey’s heading up the investigation into possible collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign effort and Moscow.

The format of Trump’s ire and its delivery appears to BackChannels that of j’accuse, the Jacobin’s pointing the finger at all suspected of political heresy.

Regarding the President’s claim of having had no business with Russia — it might be true; however, the query may be also complicated by Russia’s feudal gaming over time plus the business class in which he resides.

 

At this point, the reader may wish to keep in mind Moscow’s duplicitous and manipulative feudal character and its kleptocratic ends:

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

Motivation?

Feudal wealth; feudal power; absolute and above and beyond questioning — if not rule by divine right, then by way of most worldly thuggery.

Reminder: Flynn

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/04/donald-trump-2016-russia-today-rt-kremlin-media-vladimir-putin-213833 – 5-6/2016:

I saw the relation with Russia as necessary to the U.S., for the interests of the U.S. We worked very closely with them on the Sochi Olympics. We were working closely with them on the Iranian nuclear deal. We beat Hitler because of our relationship with the Russians, so anybody that looks on it as anything but a relationship that’s required for mutual supporting interests, including ISIS, … that’s really where I’m at with Russia. We have a problem with radical Islamism and I actually think that we could work together with them against this enemy. They have a worse problem than we do.

Flynn’s statement sounds true enough on the surface, but place it beside this analysis of ISIL and it’s role in the east v west, feudal v modern contest:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/04/09/ftac-reprise-how-isil-serves-moscow-damascus-and-tehran/

BackChannels thesis: Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran ditched a mild revolutionary opposition in favor of the al-Qaeda type organizations, so as to produce for themselves and the west a political spectacle, “Assad v The Terrorists”, certain to aggrandize themselves while blackmailing and goading the west in the direction of complicity with — or weakness in the face of — each their own totalitarian dictatorships and kleptocracies.

General Michael T. Flynn, proving less than one-hundred percent honest with Vice President Pence in relation to his Moscow-related experience got himself fired in much the same brusque manner as now former FBI Director Comey.

Here’s a smattering of related URLs, but the main thing here is to remind of Flynn’s connection to Trump’s denial of his initial team having had nothing to do with Russia.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/08/15/trump-adviser-michael-t-flynn-on-his-dinner-with-putin-and-why-russia-today-is-just-like-cnn/

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-michael-flynn-russia-money-20170316-story.html – 3/16/2017

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/russians-paid-mike-flynn-45k-moscow-speech-documents-show-n734506 – 3/16/2017

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/31/michael-flynn-new-evidence-spy-chiefs-had-concerns-about-russian-ties – 3/31/2016

Reminder: Manafort

The header alone should operate like Proust’s fabled taste of Madeleine, for Manafort falls into place with Yanukovych, Putin’s puppet deposed by cause of his own corruption in Ukraine, and then Sergei Millian — http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/donald-trump-russia-sergei-millian (1/19/2017), Konstantin Kilimnik — http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/trump-russia-manafort-235850 – 3/8/2017 – and on to the dreaded “Steele Dossier”, which has done Trump’s reputation some damage while being simultaneously dismissed for appearing itself beyond corroboration — http://dailycaller.com/2017/05/08/comey-intel-community-could-not-corroborate-trump-dossier/ – 5/8/2017.

Still, “kompromat” aside, there’s Manafort — and then question of how the leading consultant to the world’s bloodiest dictators got on to Trump’s campaign team in the first place.

One may leave that question in the shadows because that’s where it’s bound to live given the silence prized by political mafia and political consultants alike.  However, one may take note of this passage in the Politico article:

Manafort stressed that his work in Ukraine was intended to steer Yanukovych towards more pro-Western policies and more engagement with the European Union. And Kilimnik told POLITICO that “one thing that was grossly under-reported to date is the effort that Paul Manafort undertook to help Ukrainian leaders defend Ukraine’s interests and move the country towards [a European Union] Free Trade Agreement.”

Yet Yanukovych in 2013 backed away from a commitment to that agreement, and fled Ukraine for Russia under the protection of Russian President Vladimir Putin amid widespread protests over government corruption.

We’re a suspicious lot, we Americans, a condition amplified always by missing datum.

At the same time, we have been also subject to traditional KGB “Active Measures”, i.e., efforts to massively disinform and misguide EU / NATO constituencies, and it may take both an army of responsible editor-readers and plain curious and independent Americans to get a true measure on states of affairs.

Here’s the problem:

Manafort could be the “good guy”, a guy making great money transitioning the world’s worst leaders toward western and conscionable standards.  

How would BackChannels or the public know?

It seems in the President Trump “Trust Me” stories — on the economy, foreign affairs, immigration — that suspect alleys dead-end in political space.

It also seems to BackChannels that former FBI director Comey’s tenure has been particularly scrupulous as regards the investigator’s legal permit to share information with the public.  As much appeared in play before the public last month during the “House hearing on Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election.” The same may be shared in closed sessions with select elected public representatives: is the public to trust whom it has elected to oversight?

The public has no choice beyond what it has with its vote, and it either elects its officials for their integrity or it fails and suffers endless doubts.

The leftward Mother Jones has gone full tilt on news of Comey’s firing.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/05/donald-trump-james-comey-firing-watergate-russia-1 :

Not since Watergate.

How else can one start an article about President Donald Trump summarily firing FBI chief James Comey?

. . . This is reminiscent of when President Richard Nixon dismissed Archibald Cox, the special Watergate prosecutor who was getting too close to the truth. Nixon canned Cox rather than cooperating with his investigation.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/05/donald-trump-firing-james-comey-investigation-fbi-russia (by David Corn, May 10, 2017):

Last month, Comey appeared before the House intelligence committee, and his testimony put Trump in a bad spot. Comey noted that the FBI had no information to support Trump’s baseless charge that President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump before the election. He was practically calling Trump a nut or a liar. Then Comey, in an unprecedented move, revealed that the FBI had been investigating interactions between Trump associates and Russia since last July. It was a stunning moment: the FBI chief disclosing his bureau was running an investigation that could lead to his boss, the president. All of this showed the Trump-Russia scandal was still on fire.

If Trump fired Comey to impede the Russia investigation, he possibly engaged in obstruction of justice. That is a crime. That is a case for impeachment.

Naturally, Trump was enraged. He has dismissed the Russia story as fake news and a hoax. Comey said it was nothing but.

What don’t we know?

In an Orwellian society, the matter would end with authoritarian contempt, Orwell’s communist-socialist totalitarian “boot in the face”, a world in which the government’s monopoly on information and continuous diversion and suppression of criticism and truth were so notorious that interpreted through the work of the socialist George Orwell — Eric Arthur Blair — the same has left its stamp indelible on the informed western conscience.

 

http://www.george-orwell.org/

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

President Trump’s imperious and sudden decapitation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation smacks of the feudal approach to criticism and threat to authority.  Instead of allowing James Comey and his organization to come up empty handed, which result may have required only the President’s inaction, President Trump will now forever have appeared to have lashed out at someone he perceived as an actor and source intending to undermine this authority.

MOSCOW (AP) — He visited imperial palaces and construction sites. He presided at a Miss Universe pageant. He hobnobbed with city officials at gala functions and seemed to particularly enjoy dining on Russian sausage.

But Donald Trump did not strike any real estate deals here.

The New York real estate tycoon has his name on hotels, resorts and other properties from South Korea to Turkey to Panama, but none in Russia, though he repeatedly said he wanted to build a Trump tower in Moscow and discussed various deals in three visits dating back to 1987.

Vasilyeva, Nataliya.  “Russian real estate deals never materialized for Trump.”  AP, March 4, 2017.

One more excerpt, this from Reuters:

A Reuters review found that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses have bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida.

Layne, Nathan, Ned Parker, Svetlana Reiter, Stephen Grey, Ryan McNeill.  “Russian elite invested nearly $100 million in Trump buildings.”  Reuters, March 17, 2017:

The Reuters review of investors from Russia in Trump’s Florida condominium buildings found no suggestion of wrongdoing by President Trump or his real estate organization. And none of the buyers appear to be from Putin’s inner circle.

Addendum – Odd ‘n’ Ends

http://www.salon.com/2017/05/10/russia-is-trolling-the-u-s-over-james-comeys-firing-accusations-of-trumps-russian-connections/ 5/10/2017.

FTAC: A Note on Faiths, Political Attitudes, and Beliefs

23 Sunday Apr 2017

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

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What happens when friends talk and compare notes, and discover they’re no long “on the same page”?

Attitudes rest on beliefs, and beliefs don’t always rest on empirical evidence nor good conscience and empathy.  Beliefs may be grown on lies, and when it comes to the once Soviet-engineered “middle east conflict”, there is a cultural Petri dish loaded up with lies to induce, motivate, and sustain anti-Semitism in the Arab world and in the world at large with a focus on Zionism.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/social-grammar/

When a friend changes the conversation so abruptly, the conversation has a chance to change.

The sun did not revolve around the earth.

And the earth was found to be other than flat.

Lo and behold . . . .

In addition to the early and academically relaxed BackChannels page on “Social Grammar” — how we learn the ropes around family, clan, tribe, and nation in the process of language uptake and with it the ingestion of the culture into which we have been borne, there are couple of other pieces quietly alluded to the in above note from the awesome conversation:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/04/09/ftac-reprise-how-isil-serves-moscow-damascus-and-tehran/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

Online, there’s telling BBC interview involving the Soviet instigating of Somalia’s Ogaden War:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1

Around the world — and not least in the United States with President Donald J. Trump’s rants about “Fake News!” — the world may be having a quiet conversation — a social back channel consideration of which this post is a part– behind the storms of news that concerns itself with the authenticity, validity, and reliability of what is delivered to it in media.

For a few moments “back there” in time — perhaps only some months to years — I was getting word of a “post-constitutional America” and coming across such “lovely” (bogus) concepts as “illiberal democracy” (ain’t no such thing as the first principle in the establishment of democracy has been and remains that of embracing “classical liberalism”, a dignifying, loving, magnanimous, and magnificent view of humankind that speaks to every person’s potential nobility in freedom and in power) and “post-fact” world (facts, like red traffic lights and the dangers of leaping from heights) appear to persist despite their “post-modern” dismissal.

Democracies are not illiberal.

The world is not “post-fact”.

And while Muhammad may have had the final word on God as enforced by war in his place and in his day, the world with its nearly 7,000 living language cultures persists in proving greater than any one perspective on God, nature, and the universe or the many curses and miracles that accompany our human experience.  The evolution of our species — Homo Sapiens sapiens in its totality — and within it the emergence of human awareness, self-awareness, and the development of conscience may prove a thing greater than the observations and arguments of the many prophets and shaman who have accompanied and determined mankind’s cultural history.

–33–

From Correspondence – Frozen in Time – The Promise of the ‘Unreachable Untrue’

23 Thursday Mar 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion

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We think of refugees and displaced people in a spatial context.

Somebody has lost their home, their security, their purchase on the control of their own life, and so they wander in-country or beyond, and depending on their personal characteristics – the movies always say “character”, but social reality is much different – they’ll grow again where they plant themselves or suffer the indignity of loss and rootlesness.

The segment you’re interested in is wandering through time with an unhelpful toolkit, and the obedient base can’t figure out why it’s not working. They’re mired in conflicts wrought by mutual greed and jealousy, and, perhaps like Imam ______, the more clever of tongue thrive on the turmoil by offering the unreachable untrue.

I recall a Star Trek episode in which a “holodeck” (synthetic surround theater) Dr. Moriarty achieved sufficient mastery of his own artifice and cyber environment to threaten the ship. Spoiler Alert!  The solution at the end, which had to be negotiated because Moriarty really had interfaced with ship’s control, was to provide him and his woman (it’s complicated) with a cyber universe of their own. The world that would seem infinite to the evil couple was in the greater reality contained (and possibly ejected into space).

One might say of Catholic and otherwise conservative or orthodox observance in religion that all of it sustains something that took place a long time ago.

We do that with art –

Keats_urn

Sosibios Vase rendered by Keats.

The figures have been frozen in time. The particular above have been especially well preserved by Keats’s poem.

Most of the religious in the modern world who attend a service also leave it with something taken away, and that adds its part to their lives and their search for a place for themselves. The monastery exists too. Add pope and papacy, the “Christ Process” – got that one from a Jesuit supplying blankets to the Four Corners region – and the existence of a timeless space maintained in the mind with the volition of the thinker.

Muhammad and his Islam may have had issues with boundaries – related on BackChannels: “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” – just an opinion, of course, and that got into the patronizing and permits and orders produced within the Qur’an, not so complete for this world but ever so demanding in its build around injunction. The Muslims — the Islamists — that interest you may believe they are carrying out still relevant orders when they are raiding their targets – murder, theft, rape, and rapine – but in reality they are doing so much only for the aggrandizement of their chosen authority beneath the Eye of Heaven.

Ditto Putin.

What is the escape plan from the medieval worldview and its imposition – and impoliteness – today?

Also on BackChannels:

Malignant Narcissism

Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation

Universally, nature figures out how to destroy or mutate monocultures, whether in agriculture or in human existence.  While we may be in a divine sense of “One cloud, one earth, one sky”, we are nonetheless highly differentiated humans x person x family x clan x tribe x nation.

For agriculture, the related science industry strives to maintain comprehensive seed banks as part of the arsenal at hand to address natural mutations adverse to production — of the simple enjoyment of something gardened — in the growing environment.

For the discussion of culture, BackChannels promotes the view that our planet’s cultural inventory” links to fewer than 7,000 living languages, each of which represents how a group of people in comparative isolation — population-in-place — used human sound and sign to aid in perceiving and addressing from their perspective their own particular environmental and social challenges and opportunities.

Often, instead of typing “The Jews (live in Israel)”, the note may be similarly but more tellingly expressed as “The Hebrews are back in the Land of the Hebrews”.

Arab, Baloch, Kurds, Pashtun — same treatment.

As “The English” — and English — have gone everywhere in some fashion, the language today provides a modern medium for communication without the demand for the erasure of other language cultures.  And with the age of English colonial expansion now past, one may expect the resurgent greater being of other language cultures in their cores (x ethnolinguistic cultural density) and at their margins and finally in the mixing bowls of heterogeneous (multi-cultural) political spaces.

E pluribus unum.

Out of many, one.

The American slogan, well linked to the European invasion of or presence in — interpretation is moot — North America, well reflected the necessity of tolerance and varying degrees of separation and mixing in the New World beneath the benevolent and idealist umbrella of a secular and humanist vision of governance.  The delivery thereby of great personal freedom — to be Christian, Jewish, Muslim or of any other faith community — and to speak the new language, English, while retaining the power to speak also every other language on earth, to be multilingual by choice, has been also part of the bargain.  Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Pashto, Urdu, “Jamaican” — no problem, mon.

The American way has worked in America.

Other of the authentic open democracies of the world have found similar equilibrium and a key to prosperity and survival in related law and rule of law.

Other systems, much less liberal, some totalitarian, appear still invested in the feudal / medieval worldview and they “express” in nefarious methods (e.g., “Active Measures“, deception, disinformation, disingenuous speech, etc.) and vanguards their desire to impose their singular will — criminal, despotic, intolerant — far beyond their own context, and not only in space but in time as well.

For the most part for those preferring to live “back there” somewhere, the world goes on around them and evolves a both more inclusive but also widely varied cargo packed into the myriad cultures of humanity.

–33–

 

FTAC – Deranged Power

02 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Psychology

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The chat began with comment on the infamous Dr. Mengele and his demonic practices, but then it slipped a little sideways to talk about an inherent evil in procedures unrelated to the Nazi’s bent.

Again (again, again): the kind of power embraced by the despotic is the power to visit suffering on others with impunity and without conscience.

It may not be the procedure — e.g., abortion, sex change — that is evil but rather the removal of choice in its imposition.

Where abortion arguments are batted back and forth, the concern is not with procedure but the precedence of the “right” to choice on the mother’s part or advocacy for the fetus in its earliest phase.

Mengele and other famous sadists given the power to maim, torture, and murder with impunity do as the disturbed people they either were before their empowerment or have become as a consequence of it.

Much of this blog — perhaps all of it — has been concerned with the nature of political power in its most basic regions — “conflict, culture, language, and psychology” — and here it addresses the kind of extremist and vacuous force that gives way to wholesale theft and murder all the up the imaginable scale and beyond.

How could an ophthalmologist have created so much horror absent of conscience and shame?

Posted to YouTube by Muhammad Al Mousa on September 4, 2016.

How could the privileged and wealthy of Moscow — or Russia — have escaped the opprobrium associated with the most heinous irredeemable of war crimes?

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/18/syria-russias-barbarism-the-hospitals/
11/18/2016

–33–

Excerpt – 1920s – The Spread of Hate – Russia -> Germany | An Excerpt from Laqueur

27 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology, Religion

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Excerpted from Walter Laqueur’s Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (1965) in the interest of understanding anti-Semitic ideation as a transferable cultural technology useful for controlling and leveraging mobs.  Of course, for anti-Semitic theorists, expression may not be so cold but rather driven by their own malignant narcissism and related contempt, defensiveness, and paranoia  — and Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation — that goes with it.

Wikipedia has an entry on the benighted star of the following paragraph:  Fyodor Viktorovich Vinberg

Vinberg was a most loyal and devoted subject of his Tsar and his writings are full of invective against all Russian politicians, particularly of the centre and the right, who had been deficient in this respect.  Shortly before the October revolution, Vinberg took part in a conspiracy to overthrow the provisional government, was arrested and sent to the Peter and Paul fortress.  There he had ample time to write his diaries and to bring some order into his ideas; like Hitler in Landsberg prison, he then and there prepared himself for his future political and publicist career. Vinberg was released, or escaped, in 1918, and went first to the Ukraine and later to Germany, where he systematically developed his ideas in the short-lived Berlin newspaper, Prizyv, the yearbook Luch Sveta (A Ray of Light), published first in Berlin and subsequently in Yugoslavia, his book Krestny Put (Via Dolorosa), and a number of other writings.  Vinberg’s ideas can be summarized as follows:

  1. The Jews are the source of all evil.  They must be exterminated.
  2. The liberals and the constitutional monarchists are responsible for Russia’s ruin.  Any form of democracy and republican regime is bad.  A strong dictatorship is needed, for the people are stupid and bad and can never be trusted.
  3. Russia and Germany must unite in order to crush the revolution.
  4. The Catholic and Orthodox Churches must unite against the combined power of the Judeo-masonic sects now operating as a new International.

. . . In his ‘Berlin letters’ published in Luch Sveta, we learn that nature loves the strong, the brave, the agile, those who act and do not talk; she loathes weakness and democratic half measures.  Vinberg has only contempt for the masses, and his only criticism of Nicholas II is that the late Tsar unduly idealized the muzhik, and the Russian people in general, who are really a good for nothing lot and deserve to be punished for having betrayed their Tsar.  The people will always remain a blind, ignorant, senseless mass which has never and nowhere understood anything apart from the crudest material needs.

Laqueur, Walter.  Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict.  P. 115.  Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1965.

Starting well before Vinberg and moving far past him, Laqueur connects the dots between the Tsar’s White Russian loyalists and emigres who had carried from the experience of the royals the anti-Semitic cant and nurtured racial contempt and supremacism of that medieval world.  The transfer of thought from Vinberg to Germany’s Rosenberg ensues.

What Rosenberg says of Jews and Jewish history can be traced, chapter and verse, to Vinberg’s ‘Berlin letters’ of 1919: the Jewish religion is highly aristocratic; the Jews have been engaged for many hundreds of years in a struggle against the gentile aristocracies; they use in this fight democratic, liberal, and socialist doctrines which act as a poison in the non-Jewish body politic.  Thus they destroyed the Roman empire through the deadly injection of democratic-Jewish Christianity . . . . (op. cit. p 116)

And on goes Walter Laqueur’s documentation of the intellectual history involving the transfer of such thought from the Russian experience and invention into a German culture soon to embrace Nazism.

 Vinberg died in February 1927, and did not witness his ideas coming to fruition.  His views are of historical interest because they constitute something in the nature of a half-way house between the old Black Hundred and National Socialism (op. cit. p. 117).

Related Reference

Alpha History.  “19th Century Anti-Semitism”.

Kellogg, Michael.  The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; online 2009.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  “Pogroms”.

The Aufbau Vereinigung (Reconstruction Organisation) was a Munich-based counterrevolutionary conspiratorial group formed in the aftermath of the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1918 and of the Latvian Intervention of 1919. It brought together White Russian émigrés and early German National Socialists who aimed to overthrow the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union, replacing them with authoritarian régimes of the far right. The group was originally known as Die Bruecke (The Bridge). Aufbau was also the name of a periodical it brought out.[1]

According to Michael Kellogg,[2] the Aufbau Vereinigung was a vital influence on the development of Nazi ideology in the years before the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 as well as financing NSDAP with, for example, funds from Henry Ford. It gave Hitler the idea of a vast Jewish conspiracy, involving a close alliance between international finance and Bolshevism and threatening disaster for mankind.[3] Recent research on Hitler’s early years in Vienna (1905-1913) appears to have shown that his antisemitism was at that time far less developed than it became under the new influences.[4]

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

–33–

Also in Media: “Read Donald Trump’s Fiery Speech Calling Accusations Against Him ‘Outright Lies’” | TIME – October 13, 2016

14 Friday Oct 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, Political Psychology, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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This election will determine whether we are a free nation or whether we have only the illusion of democracy, but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system, and our system is rigged. This is reality, you know it, they know it, I know it, and pretty much the whole world knows it. The establishment and their media enablers will control over this nation through means that are very well known. Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe, and morally deformed.

Source: Read Donald Trump’s Fiery Speech Calling Accusations Against Him ‘Outright Lies’ | TIME – 10/13/2016.

Search results for “Trump, meltdown speech”

For context and for the record: BackChannels has been supported by curiosity, editorial and entrepreneurial zeal (it hasn’t raised a dime but it’s been rewarding nonetheless), and semi-retired time (its ageing editor is not done with striving in his arts).  America’s “Fourth Estate” — The Media — represents a still broad and independent multitude of national and international voices.  Some, as noted in these virtual pages, may be partisan and inclined toward steep slants propped up by disingenuous observations and worse, but most observe from the same world and comment on its various facets.

Today: is there a global intelligentsia?  Yes — and I’m certain BackChannels is not unique receiving viewers from more than 140 nations, including North Korea and Vatican City (once).  🙂

Are there intellectual elites?

Quora, an “answer site”, has an answer at least in affirmed and estimated numbers of Ph.Ds worldwide.

Note that for those PhDs employed in their fields, they are paid to contest one another in the advancement of knowledge.  As regards influence, attach each to academic and research institutions or to consultancies to known figures in power.

Are there global business, financial, and political “elites” as defined by their proprietary clout and wealth?  Yes — and you may look them up and read about them in Forbes (Forbes Billionaires)and the Wall Street Journal (“WSJ, billionaires” – search result).

Such powerhouses have names.

Add the titular but still present kings and queens of Europe, the still formidable same elsewhere in the world, then presidents and prime ministers and, perhaps, their “inner circles” and closest advisors.

Some, like Paul Manafort, may be shadowy figures, but none are themselves shadows.

Related on BackChannels:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/05/27/putin-yanukovych-manafort-trump/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/anthropolitical-psychology/

FTAC — A Wrap-Up on Mentality — Malignant/Medieval and Reparative/Modern Narcissism

11 Monday Apr 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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In our common malignancy, perhaps, our narcissism lends repair to psychological damage to self concept. Life’s rough and in part insults us, less or more, but, again perhaps, the greater the insult to esteem — the heavier the hand — the more passionate the want of self-aggrandizement, security, and wealth.

In the healthy, it’s good having basic and somewhat above good circumstance in freedom, money, and general security. In the malignant, the same wants get Up There and Out There. On Back-Channels, I’ve likened such qualities to the recognized psychological pathologies that are bipolar disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. In our general political psychology and related sociology, we aspire and trade up in comfort and prestige, and we do that through laws an practices that accommodate a healthy general development with concern spanning the distance from penthouse to street.

The malignant do things quite differently.

Muammar Qaddafi’s Mullah Shweyga story (easily looked up) tells the difference. Such leaders take full advantage of the possession of the power to visit suffering on others with impunity. All of the crimes that may be visited on one may as well be extended to others: capricious “justice” or detainments, imprisonments, hangings, tortures. Each dictator asks: “who is going to stop me?” And off each goes into the high life on the backs of the hungry, the powerless, and vulnerable.

I’m always happy to share the Reuters piece on Khamenei (“Assets of the Ayatollah”), but I think it better that others embark on similar journeys as regards the entire host of figures whose power has proven malignant and resides in the brutalities and related fears and levers (e.g., bribery and patronage; intimidation and murder) known more to the medieval mind than the modern one.

Yes, this may be the only blog on earth suggesting the reader continue doing the research.

🙂

Here’s a related comment on Moscow’s role in managing conflicts in a manner fit to destroy those it manages to manipulate and prize from the same conflict-related income and, at least in its own hive-mind, power and prestige.

Moscow, representing Putin’s political police, himself, and the oligarchs, may be a greater power than Tehran. It may barely be keeping its political image clean — remember: officially, Moscow is helping Damascus fight “The Terrorists” — but it may have the habit of manipulating political situations to its advantage.

From Somali General Galal, who is still alive, here’s a densely compacted recap of the Somali vs Ethiopian war over the Ogaden: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1

In the PROCESS of that war, Moscow apparently manipulated Somali leaders into laying claim or reclaiming the Ogaden, pitting first guerrilla then regular forces against Ethiopian control of the space. As advances pushed Ethiopia out of the contested space, Soviet Russia stepped in to arm Ethiopian forces, who then pushed back the Somalis. The Ogaden continues to host some related “low-intensity conflict”.

Who won?

Getting away from one’s own interests, in this instance Syria, and venturing to overview Moscow’s involvements in conflicts worldwide across time may help us more brightly resolve (accurately perceive) states of affairs in Syria and the Middle East Conflict.

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Hef & Holly – A Note on Malignant and Reparative Narcissism

30 Wednesday Mar 2016

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

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PERHAPS —

The Malignant controls, discourages, manipulates

&

The Reparative liberates, encourages, and grows

_____

Attempt to escape as he may, the editor of BackChannels returns to his themes even while journeying out to Hollywood between the pages of a hardcover, i.e., celebrity Holly Madison’s Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny (New York: Harper Collins, Dey Street imprint, 2015).

As ladies men go, some peacocks appear to have an image both to create and maintain, and not infrequently that at high cost to the cheerleaders seduced into hanging on to their elbows.

Now how different is that from the global politics — and the themes attending those “leaders and their followers in a dangerous world” written about by Jerrold Post (2004)  — visited here by way of the pack of contemporary autocrats?

🙂

I have seen the term “state capitalism” applied to Putin’s medieval revanch in the creation of the post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia now wrapped around his own “vertical of power”.  The idea has its appeal (and many related posts break into a BackChannels’ category ne “21st Century Feudal“).

In the American Wildness, distributed business-borne capitalism, which in North America could not be otherwise, appears to produce in part feudal competitions and related private environs as part of the nature of power arrayed between chairmen and presidents, members of the board, and shareholders and other stakeholders.  The degree to which those at the top embrace their own “vertical of power” and effectively promote their own cultural fascism around and beneath them needs must vary, but overarched by democratic governance, such private feudal behaviors have only the boundaries of a few legal papers (noncompete and nondisclosure agreements, for a start), the discipline of their accounting departments (no workee, no checkee), and their doors for fending off equally private but solitary revolutions: employees belittled, degraded, demeaned, denigrated, enslaved by their environments can, do, will outgrow their my-way-or-the-highway keepers — and walk across the street or do that highway thing and move one big town, state, or country over.

It’s a big world, and life’s too short to tolerate a capricious and irrational subjugation forever.

Of course, with governments operated as private businesses for authoritarian elites, the same problems are much, much greater for those suffering — and not individually: en masse — beneath them.

Additional Reference

BackChannels.  “Malignant Narcissism”.

Odell, Amy.  “The 14 Worst Things About Hugh Hefner, as Revealed in Holly Madison’s New Book: From his incessant mansplaining to the constant infighting he created among girlfriends, Madison describes her life in the mansion as anything but happy.” Cosmopolitan, June 22, 2015. 

Wikipedia.  “Presidency of Vladimir Putin”: About the same time, Vladimir Ryzhkov pointed out that a bill Medvedev had sent to the State Duma in late January 2009, when signed into law, will allow Kremlin-friendly regional legislatures to remove opposition mayors who were elected by popular vote: “It is no coincidence that Medvedev has taken aim at the country’s mayors. Mayoral elections were the last bastion of direct elections after the Duma cancelled the popular vote for governors in 2005. Independent mayors were the only source of political competition against governors who were loyal to the Kremlin and United Russia. Now one of the few remaining checks and balances against the monopoly on executive power in the regions will be removed. After the law is signed by Medvedev, the power vertical will be extended one step further to reach every mayor in the country.

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