Hitler was not a good-looking man, not tall, not prepossessing, not particularly intelligent, not a great orator — more a strident tub-thumper — yet millions of Germans loved him and died for him. In the end, Germany itself all but died for him.
Today, the romanticizing of sociopaths has not ended. However much we know about the clay-footed idols of the past, or the enormities committed by those demagogues and rabble-rousers and charlatans, many of us just transfer our allegiance to the next monster-in-waiting.
The title’s a bit heady and long for a brief compendium and observation on a blog . . . but on with it —
Old folk wisdom: “He who points the finger at others out to point it back at himself first.”
Mea culpa: the Israelis are not perfect, but in the site of God — or perhaps just one another, open courts, and an open democracy — they keep working on becoming better children of the universe and students of the universal in humanity.
Hamas, its associates, and its fans would seem to represent a different sort of unconscionable consciousness, one always accusing, deflecting, denying, and lying, for here is a short list of egregious accidental (on purpose?) and deliberately evil behaviors that have led to the injuring and killing of hundreds of residents of Gaza.
Shifa Hospital – Hamas Headquarters
On July 15, for example, William Booth of the Washington Post wrote that the hospital “has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” Back in 2006, PBS even aired a documentary showing how gunmen roam the halls of the hospital, intimidate the staff, and deny them access to protected locations within the building—where the camera crew was obviously prohibited from filming.
The station said that a “Hamas Fajr-5 rocket aimed at central Israel, which was fired from a playground outside the Shifa hospital and exploded on the site causing casualties, had at least a 100 kg (220 lbs) warhead,” according to The Times of Israel.
Reporter Nir Devori of Channel 2 and analyst Ehud Yaari confirmed the carnage was most likely the result of a failed Fajr rocket launch — aimed at central Israel.
What kind of a monster would deliberately “shield” a war room, a control room, a bunker, with a hospital of ill and injured patients above it?
Among this blog’s key terms, “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” takes a good run at the anomic aspect of Hamas, which appears not to care about the humanity of its constituents. From that alone, whether it cares much about God either: it shouts a lot, collects and keeps hundreds of millions of dollars in the pockets of its own, and it gets other people to die for its own grandiose delusions.
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Hamas said the explosions were a “direct” strike by Israeli drones, while Israel said they were caused by failed militant rockets. “A short while ago Al-Shifa hospital was struck by a failed rocket attack launched by Gaza terror organizations,” the IDF said in a statement, adding that “there was no Israeli military activity in the area surrounding the hospital whatsoever. “
UNRWA has admitted that a Hamas misfired rocket hit a U.N.-run school in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, according to Channel 2′s Ehud Ya’ari, but an errant IDF artillery shell also may have hit the facility, where Gaza sources claim an estimated 17 children and United Nations personnel were killed and 200 others were wounded Thursday afternoon.
I like my month/day/year style more than Israel’s day/year/month, but beyond that, these two items tells that the Big Media Story was suspect from near start.
The results of the IDF forensic investigation naturally follows, and while its conclusions may be displeasing to some and suspect by anti-Semites (because they are what they are), the data will be around for independent examination when the fighting concludes.
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The preliminary report indicates that militants fired anti-tank missiles at IDF soldiers, who then responded by firing several mortars in their direction.
The preliminary inquiry and footage indicate that a single errant mortar landed in the courtyard of the UNRWA school, when it was completely empty.
The Institute for Palestine Studies published a detailed report on Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon in the summer of 2012. It reported that tunnel construction in Gaza has resulted in a large number of child deaths.
“At least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials”
The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, “much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies”.
But there is no Iron Dome for tunnels. The tunnels give me real pause. It’s hard enough to imagine a situation in which your neighbours are quite intentionally trying to blow up your house and kill your children with rockets. But Hamas’s well-developed kidnapping strategy represents a whole other category of depravity. The handcuffs and tranquilizers are mere baroque, Pulp Fictionish details. The core depravity of Hamas is its longstanding policy of treating every Jew as a target for elimination.
Multiple media outlets report that Hamas’s offensive tunnel network – now known to have been composed of over forty attack tunnels dug underneath Israel’s border with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip – was set to be activated during the Jewish High Holidays (September 24th) as a mass terror attack.
The attack was meant to generate as many as ten thousand casualties, men, women and particularly children and hundreds of captives. Explosives were particularly placed underneath kindergartens to make certain that these “institutions” would be the first struck, even before any thing else.
The tunnel-building program involved 800 million tons of concrete, according to reports on the web, the deaths of 160 Palestinian children (that would seem the minimum number known), about $1 million per project, so now we’re about looking at $40 million or more dollars worth of wreckage — completely wasted Gazan money, except for those who got paid working underground — and that’s probably another dismal story about exploitation (I wonder how much line-level workers made).
Involving Hamas Earlier in Time
I would like to have seen more snap in this calmly narrated video, but the point of it is clear: a violent incident of some kind within Gaza and independent of the IDF took place, killing and wounding a “cast” reassembled on a beach and filmed for anti-Israel propaganda.
Again: where the data persists and the investigative method is empirical, the dead may well tell a different story than the malignant narcissist would have you believe.
The mentality: aggrandizing, bloodsucking greedy, unrestrained sociopaths.
The world has seen this pattern repeated around the world, and while it would seem to be waking up to it, it may not be doing so with the strongest hand, the ambitions of the venal outstripping efforts to get at them before they do real damage as has been deeply experienced in places as different as Pakistan, Somalia, and Iraq.
After the evacuation, Israel opened up border crossings to facilitate commerce. The Palestinians were also given 3,000 greenhouses which had already been producing fruit and flowers for export for many years.
But Hamas chose not to invest in schools, trade, or infrastructure. Instead, it built an extensive network of tunnels to house thousands upon thousands of rockets and weapons, including newer, sophisticated ones from Iran and Syria. All the greenhouses were destroyed.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-a-rizvi/post_8056_b_5602701.html – 7/28/2014. I don’t agree with the nastiness covered by political politeness in the first point (or similar ploys): “Yes, there’s an unfair and illegal occupation there, and yes, it’s a human rights disaster” — for, no, there has been no Israeli occupation of Gaza since surrendering it to the refugees in 2005: there has been only a military cordon to keep out arms (which cordon appears to have failed despite its naval blockade and inspections of overland shipping. And the same cordon has not been illegal by any internationally agreed upon basis in law. That the Arab states arrange gang-ups in the UN and such anti-Semitic spectacles as the Durban conferences is just a fact of life, but that it happens doesn’t make it right.
The infantile aspect of dictatorship is to view the whole world as a responsive extension to one’s own glory and power. http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/10/03/gaza-arbitrary-arrests-torture-unfair-trials The social architecture spun around the “malignant narcissist” occupies the core drive of the Islamic Small Wars in their every form, from the Brotherhood in America to the shifts in destruction wrought in Syria by the Assad regime and the assembly of opposed fanatics (of those two sets: different talk — same walk: they are of the same personality invested in their own over-the-top absolute authority).
Compression and distillation may make for good web talk but quite dissatisfying scholarly consideration.
However, our Global Awesome Conversation would seem predicated on our ability to package thought — call it “signal” — with exceptional brevity.
People, eventually will unite against any form of tyranny and dictatorship, be it religious fanaticism or other forms- as they did against puritans and the dictatorial rule of Oliver Cromwell, who was known as : a self-styled Puritan Moses-in England, the copy of which exists in Iran, the so called Khamenei; who ironically refers to himself as Supreme actually, and so on. However, it is the actual people of a country themselves that have to bring about and cause a democratic government rather than an outside force. This might be the main reason for people criticizing America, or any other country’s role for that matter, in terms of interfering in their internal affairs. Many Iranians, on the other hand, and here’s the irony; actually criticize America and other countries silence during the bloody green revolution that took place in Iran a decade ago and was against the tyranny of Ahmadinejad. They see America’s indifference to that secular movement as a green light to the continuation of the so called Islamic regime, which is not far from truth.
A big thank-you to my social network friend Tanit Nima Tinat.
My two-cent riff in reply —
The assumption that “regime change” and revolution may in order would seem to include the presumption that the change brought is what the people really wanted.
Americans have repeatedly given “blood and treasure” in the name of democracy and freedom for others, but once produced, whether in Iraq or in Afghanistan, it would seem up to The People and their own ethical and moral backbone to secure benefits obtained.
That may sound good to the ears, but the realpolitik of place includes themes not addressed by merely taking down a government.
Whether one speaks of Hamid Kharzai in Afghanistan or Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq, one confronts the sways of loyalties against the possession of integrity and merit, and the resulting nepotism undermines “equality, fraternity, and liberty” — and security most of all.
In the people, one also encounters various attitudes toward authority, which in the west turns up often skeptical and questioning, but elsewhere may be cowed or ingrained when it comes to obedience before the powerful. Such observation brings up the arch comment, “With democracy, people get the government they deserve!”
Of course, from the perspective of Christian-Greco-Judeo-Roman esprit, people may get worse than what they might be supposed to deserve. Some Germans may have well deserved Hitler, for example, but what Hitler brought to Germany and what Germans were made to suffer at his hands and then at the hands of the enemies made sails beyond comprehension.
And what to do about The People, many for whom the cleric’s words are yet today received as if from God Almighty himself?
Such faith — or fear, laziness, or weakness — makes obedience blind.
Note: in the Torah, while God sets out a test for Abraham, the purpose of the test is never defined, and the vaunted “test of obedience” may well have been equally a more a “test of conscience”, which Abraham fails.
Divine infallibility — caliphate, empire, kingdom, or papacy — ought to be left to just one indefinable, unreachable, irreducible, nearly inconceivable entity or symbol: God.
All else — and all others — are mortal.
If a constituency must assert, declare, and support a divine alliance and avatar with taxes, then perhaps too it should keep itself invested in its own freedom of conscience and armed with countervailing power as well.
Earlier today on Twitter, I asked in regard to Syria’s agony, “Who defended the humanity in the middle?”
Bashar al-Assad had an army; the al-Qaeda affiliates are armies: who was there to defend the interests of the happy homeowner?
For a while now, I’ve suggested that for the purposes of analytical political psychology, Bashar al-Assad and al-Nusra in Syria are of the same malignantly narcissistic personality: different talk — same walk.
With ISIS on the move in Iraq, the ability to entertain and perhaps recognize this thesis may be crucial to the future economic and spiritual well being of the large population beset with murderous forces all around them.
In effect the Islamic Small Wars may be reduced to the The Despotic vs The Democratic — and in realpolitik, absolutists and extremists against everyone else.
Whatever the despots win, they really do not give a shit about anyone, much less everyone, else. In fact, everyone else exists to serve them, adore them, aggrandize them. die for them, and generally keep them (and their families and favored old friends) in wealth and power beyond measure.
Remember: they are the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei, and together they are defending absolutism.
ISIS is defending that too.
Where the people have bought into what those people are selling, they’re done.
The Pakistani Taliban on Monday took responsibility for the Sunday assault on the country’s largest international airport in Karachi. In six hours of fighting at least 28 people died, including the 10 attackers. “It’s just the beginning,” said Shahidullah Shahid, a spokesman for the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, an offspring of the Afghan Taliban.
Since the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) launched a new offensive in Deir Al-Zor province 40 days ago, 634 people, mainly fighters, have been killed, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
A local police officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity — noting that he was not speaking in the name of the authorities — confirmed what the activist said. “Police cars that approach Arab and Muslim areas are regularly attacked with rocks,” he said. “At the moment, local Swedish authorities are not sure how to keep providing public services in those areas. They are even considering rolling back certain state services there. It is just too risky to operate in such a hostile environment. A few residents of the Arab-Muslim areas in Uppsala describe their neighborhoods as ‘Sharia areas where Sweden’s government is not welcome.'”
I don’t know if the world will get its caliphate, but it appears to be getting its global war.
Never mind, Mr. Zahran, what messages Muslims may be sending in and to Sweden and the west (or that other entity, Great Britain): what messages are Muslims sending to Muslims worldwide?
At the moment, it appears King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has decided to commit infanticide on the basis of his own capricious pique, and why not? Is he not infallible? Does his authority not rest on direct appointment by God? Where Allah may be merciful, must he be so as well? Who says?
And who cares about four girls anyway?
It’s true: I fear to list for their silence the “feminists” whom I’ve come to know through their writing in social media.
Christian, Jewish, or Muslim: in the face of what King Abdullah appears to have in mind for his disfavored daughters — silence!
For the malignant narcissist, whether Bashar al-Assad or King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia — or just the average mafioso — the whole world is their world (or will be), and they are to bathe in its adulation and love (“narcissistic supply”) without end. Whether met in family or on the grand tours known to statesmen, these same appear to have no “off button”. The path they take from manipulation to control to sadism is certain, and they exceed limits.
From out of his loins, the King of Saudi Arabia made his contribution to the conception and birth of four beautiful, healthy girls, and now he is killing them slowly, and it appears no power on earth has the power to forestall the crime.
When he is done, this one heinous act will stand for him — will represent him, his character, his image — for all time.
It will contribute as well to the message that Islam sends the west about its conception of power and what it does with its vision.
The “Gaza Boat Show” and Mavi Marmara incident trace back to deeply anti-Semitic and terrorist enthusiasms, and not only should there not have been a “compensation package” — plain political extortion! — drawn from Israel, but this drift in Turkish politics should have been stopped cold by the Turks themselves exactly when and where it started. God willing, most will understand the only true axis in conflict and conflicted Islamic-majority state politics has to do with the despotic vs the democratic. What PM Erdogan’s government and courts have done: despotic. Evil.
In politics, anti-Semitism has become the signal of the criminal and weak: it’s expressed through disingenuous speech enforced, when it can be, by the tactics of political mafia. In Turkey, Prime Minister Erdogan has been tripped in his tracks a time or two by a passionate Kamalist and otherwise mixed opposition, but when the heat in the streets diminishes, he returns to the comfort of his script.
Appeasement fails to appease the needs of such a personality, and, in fact, encourages its development.
Speaking to the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations forum in Vienna on Wednesday, Erdoğan made the following remark: “Just as with Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism, it has become impossible not to see Islamophobia as a crime against humanity.”
Whatever Prime Minister Erdogan may be thinking, and that may include possession of the favor of God as affirmed by Turkish realpolitik, his personality would seem to be asking a fair political question: why stop if not stopped?
This showed up a few days ago from the CAIR-friendly side, I suppose, with a different slant but the same theme. http://time.com/104804/debunking-the-extremist-myth-that-islam-is-anti-jewish/ Narcissistic “tenderness” promotes this full-blown anti-defamation response when in fact the “anti-Jihad” writers like Steve Emerson, Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer have plenty of historic and current material with which to work.
In 2003, Daniel Pipes asked “How many Islamists?” That was the concern in the ranks of the watching back then. I would hope that after so many years with the growth of the social networks and development of a wondrously broad global intelligentsia that we may see states of affairs more clearly, and perhaps that to the effect that one may see the secular dictator and religious zealot as sharing similar personality features and the “middle, mild, and moderate” (I have my tropes) have to bond across many boundaries — economic, political, religious — to get the reins on them.
Shalom. Moderation may be for the most religious among mankind.
One might ask, “what contributes to and defines the better humanity of humanity.”
I am an optimist who believes there is a “humanity of humanity” better served by a natural “moderate middle” that looks toward improved “qualities in living” — including psychological and spiritual qualities as well as those attending economics, justice, and health — than by deeply narcissistic extremists blinded by their own glory to the needs, privileges, and rights of others.
One hopes the world may be tiring of its tyrants and the followers who would most like to be tyrants themselves.
Is it all about word play?
Who gets to make the call?
Whose eye looks down the microscope?
Whose body wriggles on the viewing platform?
Is our condition one, the other, or both?
This kind of Facebook-inspired thought goes on throughout the course of an average day:
It’s not the “worldly gains”, Lakhkar, that are evil in and of themselves: it is how they’re gotten.
Regarding the dictator-kleptocrats that I also call “malignant narcissists” — they exceed limits and trap themselves in criminality and shame. and it is for those reasons they resent freedom of the press and strive to reject and suppress scrutiny and criticism.
As a class, dictators are weak, not strong, but, in fact, they are creative and the manipulation of belief, loyalty, and perception comprise a first set of intellectual tools for manipulation. At first, they will tell you what you want to hear; then they will tell you to agree with what you have heard. Or else. As a class, dictators come to power through various means but they all sustained eventually by a 1) treasury funded by resources over which they may assert control, 2) paid military and thugs down to street level, and 3) our old familiar, privacy attended by the deflection of scrutiny motivated by integrity.
Dictators subjugate humanity in service to their own aggrandizement associated with, in technical terms, “narcissistic supply”. They own their states and all of its resources, human or natural, and if you are unlucky enough to reside in such a place as Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, they own you too. Their worlds exist only to serve their own greatness, and that which doesn’t serve that end may be destroyed without a second thought.
It’s opinion.
It has some eloquence.
Perhaps there’s even some truth to it.
However, it may be getting a little old for the writer.
Men and women dream.
Some dream huge.
Some think so much of themselves and the God-given or godless and natural favoring of their will that throwing boiling water over a nanny’s head doesn’t give them pause for a moment’s empathy or reflection.
Or guilt.
Depending on the context and thrust of that dreaming, a dream or two might come true, myriad political and social barriers and boundaries (start with family) protecting the young on their journey to Hollywood, the old on their way to retirement aboard yachts.
And for a few, the material achievements accompanied by good enough products and services may want for the greater thrill of power among others, over others, or otherwise manipulated around themselves.
When as much develops in show business, the world goes around, and whether one likes the executive or entertainer, the two cannot grow moneyed and powerful but by charging a fee for an artifact or performance; when the same develops in the political sphere, the burden of the will of the little shit would seem today certain to become either deadly or soul deadening.
Take note: for all the devastation brought to Zimbabwe in the course of his tenure, Robert Mugabe has long achieved the dream of dying an old man: it is certain that he will do that; if he then dies peacefully in his sleep, well then, all the better testament to the validity of the venerable African political post that has been fashioned beneath the unspoken title that is “President for Life”.
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