Different talks — same walk! When it comes to dictators, all are malignant narcissists.
Many want to keep repeating old arguments, especially, yawn, “communism v capitalism” but the truth is more like “sweet words — foul deeds”.
Add incitement, the role played by anti-Semitic cant and libel by despots through the ages.
In the eastern tradition too — I have in mind the Golden Horde — there appears to have been no difference in treatment between persons and property, and, in fact, for some (reference Richard Pipes books on Russian history) proof of sovereignty might be made to lie in the senseless destruction of either with impunity. And I would cite as another characteristic of the “authoritarian” breed the ability to visit suffering on others at will and with impunity.
On the street, they’re bullies; in office, presidents for life.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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). 🙂
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.
Despite strong denials from Moscow, Russian airborne troops are preparing to land in Syria to fight Islamic State forces. The surprise attack on Monday, Aug. 31, by ISIS forces on the Qadam district of southern Damascus, in which they took over parts of the district – and brought ISIS forces the closest that any Syrian anti-Assad group has ever been to the center of the Syrian capital – is expected to accelerate the Russian military intervention.
Journalists in-country have an observation deck limited to their eyes and ears, but they may with accuracy report what they see and what they hear; journalists scouting the web for opinion and news in any area of interest necessarily receive all information one step removed from Being There and may be vulnerable to disinformation, in this instance information intended to change the character of the Syrian Tragedy — AKA either “Assad vs The Terrorists” or “Assad vs A Good Portion of the Syrian People” — and draw opposed powers into the field.
That noted, the world has seen also its share of barrel bombing videos and stills, read multiple reports involving at least one period of chemical warhead deployment — and seen Russia agree to neutralize and remove those munitions — and followed either the development of large Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon or Turkey, or, this week, witnessed the aftermath of drownings of ordinary people and their children, real people, Syrian refugees.
UNITED NATIONS — The morning after an aid convoy came under fire when it tried to reach a besieged Syrian city, a meeting here on a draft resolution that would force all parties in the bloody conflict to allow access for humanitarian organizations fell apart when representatives from Russia and China failed to show up, United Nations Security Council diplomats said.
Perhaps Syrians would do well to borrow some mid-20th Century Jewish wisdom: Never Forget.
New evidence proves Russian military directly engaging in Syrian Civil War
The regime’s offensive in the Lattakia Governorate continues to reveal previously unknown details about Russia’s involvement in the Syrian Civil War. Apart from the sighting of recently delivered Russian BTR-82A infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs), new evidence now confirmes Russian military personnel has a key role in leading the offensive on the ground.
“We are aware of reports that Russia may have deployed military personnel and aircraft to Syria, and we are monitoring those reports quite closely,” said spokesman Josh Earnest.
“Any military support to the Assad regime for any purpose, whether it’s in the form of military personnel, aircraft supplies, weapons, or funding, is both destabilizing and counterproductive.”
On August 22, the Bosphorus Naval News website showed the Alligator-class Russian ship Nikolai Filchenkov, part of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, two days earlier passing through Istanbul’s famed waterway en route to an unknown location in the Mediterranean (hint, hint).
But what was remarkable about the Filchenkov was that military equipment was visible on deck . . . .
Update: September 29, 2015 – From the Daily Beast, Aug. 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.
Update: October 19, 2015: From The New York Review of books, July 11, 2012 – By Michael Ignatius
The Syrian conflict has triggered something more fundamental than a difference of opinion over intervention, something more than an argument about whether the Security Council should authorize the use of force. Syria is the moment in which the West should see that the world has truly broken into two. A loose alliance of struggling capitalist democracies now finds itself face to face with two authoritarian despotisms—Russia and China—something new in the annals of political science: kleptocracies that mix the market economy and the police state. These regimes will support tyrannies like Syria wherever it is in their interest to do so.
Update: October 20, 2015: From The Guardian, October 3, 2015
Another FSA officer, Colonel Abdulsalam Almerei, commander of Talbeissa operations in northern Homs, told me two days ago after his brigade was attacked by Russian aeroplanes: “We have no Isis here, we are fighting for our freedom and dignity. We want a united Syria for all Syrians. We do not want to oppress any sect or change one tyranny with another.”
Assad and his backers have jeopardised the national and territorial integrity of Syria. Many Syrians have lost faith in the UN; they feel that the international community has abandoned them to the barbaric killing machines of Assad and Isis. The international law states that the principle of responsibility to protect civilians overrides the principle of sovereignty of states when a government kills its own people.
As jihadi recruitment has grown even more severe, I believe it is because we have failed to factor in early childhood development. This is where the prologue to violence begins including radicalization and recruitment later on . . . .
While a lot of money is being thrown at “de-radicalization,” reminiscent of the War on Poverty (and just think of where that has gotten us), we owe it to the public and to ourselves not to be terrified to address childrearing practices in these homes. They are different than in the West. Nevertheless, the Western converts who radicalized share a similar background of shame and troubled early childhoods.
The Banality of Suicide Terrorism: The Naked Truth About the Psychology of Islamic Suicide Bombing
Penetrating the Terrorist Psyche
Readers may finding themselves swimming in Kobrin’s sprawling style but with brights applied to sifting thematically while doing so will also develop insight into the building blocks of the “exploding iceberg”, i.e., enraged terrorist cool in personality.
Only once, I believe, has BackChannels addressed the formation of a psychologically teleological path from out of a simple childhood experience (with language): Guilt and Jealousy in Two Lines (September 26, 2013).
Generally speaking, children don’t — because they cannot frame their own case — write dissertations, and adults addressing adult displays of violence approach the same with the combines of hardware and legal tools known to military and paramilitary missions.
Message: quell it first; unravel the motivation afterward.
Posted to YouTube 2/7/2007 (views: about two million).
The mother has tremendous impact on a baby. These are women often isolated from the larger society. I always asked the prisoners about their mothers. Often their eyes would well up because they knew that I knew that they were Mama’s Boys, bullies. Yet these mothers should not be blamed because in a shame honor culture the female is at the eye of the storm. She is THE shock absorber of chronic emasculated male rage. If we do not deal with early childhood development, we will lose this war on radicalization.
Raising a child happens behind closed doors. Neighbors always say about the jihadi that he was such a nice boy without knowing what really went on. To air one’s dirty laundry in public is shaming for a clan culture. Nonetheless childhood development must be factored into a cohesive plan for “de-radicalization” if we want to foil the numerous ticking human bombs.
While cultural and ethnolinguistic self-invention and experience correspond to the exigencies of living in some place with some people — really: about 7,000 living languages wrap the earth in its humanly conscious expression and reflection — the strength of combined analytical, creative, empathic, and scientific effort in the conflict and crime arenas resides in the promise of the universal applicability of hard won insight, for we are natural observers of ourselves, individually and communally, and, in some part, healers as well.
The crime that is theft — including the theft of life itself — needs no introduction anywhere on earth, but that which programs the criminal and scripts the crime — what gets into a really nasty “piece of work” — begs a good looking over life’s earliest formative experiences, and it needs that examination in a way that produced universally accessible and understood insight. Kobrin, who in her works shares her own recollections of torment in this regard, lays out what might be called — so I may call it — “the terrorist’s tableaux”: despite the scatter in the writing, one finds in her explications about “exploding icebergs” and “maternal cameos” coherent narratives about the formation of criminal bullying and terrorizing behavior.
The oldest brother of the Toulouse scooter killer, Mohamed Merah, denounces the role of his own father, mother, sister and brother in spawning a “monster” in his new book.
Abdelghani Merah, 36, says the youngest of his four siblings was raised in an “atmosphere of racism and hatred” but also of violence and neglect. He has written the book – “Mon Frère, ce terroriste” (My brother the terrorist) – to try to counter the hero-worship of Mohamed, 23, among some young French Muslims. “I am the killer’s brother but I am on the side of his victims,” he says.
Tsarni told reporters assembled on his leafy street that day he had not seen his brother’s brood for years. “I wanted my family away from his family,” he said. It’s not hard to understand why he would distance himself from the two young men accused of engineering that murderous blast, but he insists the whole family is trouble—from welfare scams to bomb threats to jihad—and it all stems from their mother, who fled the United States and now lives in Dagestan.
Back on the phone, still thinking about his brother’s family, he apologizes for his outburst of profanity, and then launches into yet another condemnation of his sister-in-law. “That woman—she created evil spawn. Evil spawn from an evil woman.”
Appearing on the cover in which the above piece lives in the magnetosphere: “Twisted Sisters: As Dzhokhar Tsarnaev awaits trial for his alleged role in the Boston Marathon Bombing, many of the women in his life are still proclaiming his innocence . . . and pushing for jihad.”
Terrorism centers on the inability to mourn loss. It becomes obsessive about the inability to process the concept of death and dying— the persistent denial of death. Terrorists deny death and even claim to love it. In reality they are terrified and taunt death like bungee jumpers who taunt heights because they cannot accept their terror, their vulnerability, and their own mortality. The suicide bomber is the terrorists’ death-anxiety emollient. It is a bizarre kind of counterphobic activity. Terrorism becomes the celebration of death. Terrorists communicate their obsession with death to their children through peculiar rituals. Think of Hamas and Hizbollah and their death parades, dressing children in suicide bomber uniforms. Or selling little doll suicide bombers as toys, making the bizarre practice of killing off one’s own acceptable. Or consider the thousands of plastic keys that the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered from Taiwan to be placed around the necks of Iranian children who went to their death as human mine sweepers during the Iran– Iraq War. The “nice” Ayatollah slaughtered these innocents while telling them and their impotent, terrorized parents that this plastic key guaranteed their entry into paradise. The terrors of the terrorist’s “inner child” are literally and concretely projected into their own children. Terrorists feel dead and want others to feel what they feel. But they cannot put their feelings into words. In the world of terrorism everything is the opposite of what it should be.
Kobrin, Nancy Hartevelt (2013-11-12). Penetrating The Terrorist Psyche (Kindle Locations 482-493). Multieducator Inc. Kindle Edition.
Modern law enforcement may address terrorism as a physical process (e.g., sometimes involving “bombs on two legs”) and try to get in the way of it or forestall an act close to or at its commission.
The detachment, as it were, of contemporary psychoanalytic forces may delve back much, much farther into the beliefs and habits of cultures and families, what may be imparted through the infant’s period of language uptake, how children respond to abuse by way of the formation of “grammatical” or rule-based behaviors , and the ready political systems for culture-wide programming, intake, and operations that one finds with such as Hamas and Hezbollah. In those forces, which I presume always around (or we wouldn’t have “Officer Krupke” and its inverted psychobabble for entertainment) and always new, Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin has produced the voice of the damaged and injured by terrorism in the family — the exercise of sadistic will in the realm of the intimate — and welled that out into the portion of the human experience now embroiled in related conflicts and the singular and senseless tragedies that come of political terrorism and its inversions.
He sent out plenty of “signal” by way of prior crude verbal behavior and visible crime, but the targets of his mentality and those who share it have been slow to promulgate or reinforce sedition and treason laws and to inaugurate detention / investigation without charge in some form. In legally egalitarian liberal democracy, what is done to one must be applicable to all of a class of offender (abortion clinic bombers, for example, are terrorists too), and that may be impeding reaction.
I suspect Muslim-majority states have a deeper quandary as regards identification with these aggressors on two grounds: one is fear of mafia politics in force by these gangs — the feudal seem accustomed to doing away with critics and rivals; and the other involves buy-in and getting something out of the program (and that, apparently, equals some 63,000 Facebook “Likes” for a garden variety narcissistic murderer).
Carlos Bledsoe, Little Rock
Nidal Malik Hasan, Fort Hood
Dzhokar Tsarnaev, Boston Marathon (he’s in Yahoo news today)
Michael Zihaff-Bibeau, Ottowa
At best: an incomplete list.
I hesitate to coin a term in what seems to me, online at least, an ambivalent and confused field: the study of narcissism. However, in relation to Bledsoe, Hasan, Tsarnaev, and Zihaff-Bibeau, on might suggest the existence of internalized narcissistic scripting. Each discovered laid out (just for them) a ready made mission in “political Islam” (Erdogan’s Islam, Baghdadi’s Islam, Qaradawi’s Islam, all Islam where either autocratic official or dependent fascist follower endorse civilizational Islamic supremacism). Once convinced by example and much reinforced by al-Qaeda or Brotherhood-type community-wide communications composed to encourage and incite bloody murder, these “lone wolves” (it has been claimed Monis had more than 60,000 “Facebook buddies”) are primed to deploy themselves and steal from the world the lives of innocents.
‘‘Like I said’’ there’s an all out war against Islam and Muslims in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Waziristan, Chechnya, Somalia, Palestine, Phillipines, Yemen etc. And Muslims have to fight back. Like I said before in a past interview we believe in an eye for eye not turn the other cheek. Now it’s a all out war on America and I’m on the other side. The side of the Muslims Yes! The side of Al-Qāeda Yes! Taliban Yes! Al-Shabaab Yes! We are all brothers under the same banner. Fighting for the same cause which is to rid the Islamic world of Infidel and Apostate Hypocritic regimes and Crusader Invaders and re-establish the Caliphate, the Islamic Empire and Islamic Law as was ended officially in 1924 by the fall of the Ottomans.”
Update – December 23, 2014
We allowed Iranian Man Haron Monis into our country on a business visa and then welcomed him as a political refugee. Charged with fraud at home, the Iranian government asked for him back. But we said no to the Iranians. When Monis wrote inexcusable letters to the families of soldiers who died in Afghanistan, describing them as pigs and Nazis, we excused that — delivering only a slap on the wrist of 300 hours of community service. Some called for his Australian citizenship to be revoked. We said no to that, too. We allowed Monis to remain an Australian citizen, a gift sought out by millions of refugees who are keen to embrace and respect Australia as an open, generous and free country.
To the left of this tile, the reader may find the more formally correct version of the epigram that goes, “Those who would be kind to the cruel are in the end made to be cruel to the kind.”
As noted, The so-called “lone wolves” among terrorists are not quite alone nor unknown to authorities.
The one thing they are not before committing murder: stopped.
These days in our country, news is not good: to be a communist, to be a Christian (especially a Moslem converted to Christianity), to be a Zoroastrian or a Jew, to be a liberal or a secular … they are all castaway.
Even Moslems don’t have much security. The only accepted Moslems are those who are not reformist, not followers of Interuniversalism, not a Gonabadi Sufi, not an independent journalist, not a Moslem wanting separation of religion and politics, not an independent lawyer, and not anyone critical of state policies…
Indeed, with these designations, is there any Iranian who is safe from being detained for sure?
Quite possibly, the rejection of the bannered anti-Semitism of the piratical bastards who have infantilized, intellectually poisoned, suffocated and subjugated millions of their own constituents by lying — by way of deception and pandering — and by applying mafia methods in service to their own breathtaking criminal aggrandizement.
The world’s unrelenting focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an injustice to tens of millions of victims of tyranny and terrorism in the Middle East. As we speak, Yazidis, Bahai, Kurds, Christians and Muslims are being executed and expelled by radical extremists at a rate of 1,000 people per month.
How many resolutions did you pass last week to address this crisis?
Let me suggest four parts or elements that get the machinery working:
1. “Malignant Narcissism” / “Civilizational Narcissism” / relatives of “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” / “Bipolar Disorders” (“grandiose, messianic delusion”) –> each of the labels may represent a straying of innate human energy plus some craziness. The application to conflicts within the “Islamic Small Wars” context should be apparent with some meditation but outside of that, the same applies to variants of “National Socialist” presence, e.g., Putin in Russia, Jobbik in Hungary.
2. “Cultural Poetics and Social Grammar” — words do have a power and poison put in the ears or set before the eyes gets into children very early in the development of language plus self-concept. Good adults are careful with what they impart to their children, and, perhaps, good politicians must be careful with their words, but bad parents and bad politicians — there are lots of “BadDaddy’s” — may have cause to hide something shameful in themselves, to deflect attention away from themselves, to keep on stage a glorious image of themselves in the eyes of others, starting with their children.
3. Ideological Political Programming — the conservative’s abhorrence of dhimmi status, poll taxes, state discrimination speaks to that and may make something of a match between old Stalinist Soviet practices and some notes in Islam that seek the transformation of whole populations using central absolute authority and political torque to do it.
4. Cultural linguistics or language behavior –and as behavior, this may differ from “poetics” (the arrangements of symbols that make language possible). When we listen, when we read: how much do we memorize, parrot, ingest and sustain as stable? How much do we create, invent, question?
When Jews greet “The Binding of Isaac” (“The Akedah”, and bear with me on Isaac), a minority opinion notes that perhaps Abraham should have talked back to God (!) instead of setting off to carry out His instructions without hesitation.
Listen and obey? Listen and question?
Narcissism, cultural programming, political programming, and language behavior as behavior (we’re part of as wild a species as any) would be the four anchors of any approach or analysis of ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hezbollah.
Notably, both Putin and Khamenei operate deeply piratical regimes beneath the cloaks of nationalism and religiosity. They have different trajectories as persons and as representatives of very different states, but they are similar in the pursuit and maintenance of absolute power — absolute control, as if from God — and they apply the same sets of tools for doing that.
I fear overdoing the knowledge part of this kind of view for the fascism it might inspire, if as much has not happened already in the intellectual warrens of governments invested in part in social control. However, considering the Loud Fascism evident in the wild and the necessity of reducing the same in number and force, the above suggests four useful ways of approaching rogue leaders, their psychology, and their movements.
