In a recent Tweet, the high and not so mighty Dmitry Medvedev, chair of the Security Council of Russia, referred to Ukrainian President Zelensky as a “provincial clown”. After so many years of accumulating material about Russia, I had quite a bit to pack into one riposte–>
In the end, the darkness you believe surrounds you–that paranoia–is your own and fixed by a reliably delusional, grandiose, messianic, and malign narcissism that has no other purpose than the want of adoration (narcissistic supply).
#MikePence’s refusal to stop #Congress on #Jan6 effectively stopped #Trump’s #Jan6RealSteal. #Trump, who appears not to understand either #Democracy or #Integrity, had lied to his base and the #GOP every step of the way to the last election–and he hasn’t changed one bit. As a #MalignantNarcissist and #PoliticalCriminal slow-walking toward his grand jury reviewed #4FelonyCases91Counts, he’s incapable of serving other than his projected image.
#AINOS – Americans In Name Only. #TAKs – Trump’s Ass Kissers.
Latent Political Impact
Adult responsible Democrats and Republicans, critically thinking, reasoning, and reasonable in the constructing and fine tuning of good public policy, appear slow to comprehend how deep the attack on America’s way of life, domestic tranquility, and defense and moral strength among nations has gone. In fact, a portion of today’s GOP has traded its conservative Constitutional moorings for a reactionary feudal-medieval position in time and is fast floating away from the desires, hopes, and ideals of ordinary Americans who would not allow themselves to be dumb.
For Republicans, where are “the adults in the room”?
Where is the push-back from conservatives who should be mad as hell as regards the selfish and piratical theft of their democracy?
#FeloniousTrump #4FelonyCases91Counts well may be called #AmericanTraitorTrump–and no conservative Republican dares call him out to his face.
We have seen the brazen and greedy–where are the brave and free among the much less visible virtuous?
A Note on Nobility and Virtue
In Putin’s world, the fire sale of state assets into the pockets of former Communist Party nomenklatura had been set up by the mid-1980s as insurance and precaution against the possibility of bankrupting the state (hunt around in Karen Dawisha’s work for the scholarship). “A New Nobility” appears intended for the KGB/FSB and associated oligarchy that would become wealthy enough to live as it pleased without concerns for the development of Russia and its people. Private estates built on private wealth and power would become as unassailable as those who owned them. Putin would return Russia to feudal-medieval barbarism and the patrimonial authoritarianism in which the test of sovereignty and dominion would be the ability to destroy persons and property as alike and at will and with impunity.
For the west, that world awaits only inaction or passive and tacit popular American approval at the polls.
Anyone who is not constrained may wield power with a hammer and the fear of it, but in the better liberal democracies of the world, all hew to the ideals, laws, and principles of democratic order by constitution and by legal code, centuries of it and fine tuned by conflict, reason, and struggle for the greater good.
Whatever “the nobility”–who would themselves represent law in each their respective domains–may think of themselves, there are those around them–or placed beneath them–who judge quietly, perhaps sullenly, but with determination to set right the wrongs of merely vulgar power. The dimensions that matter: awareness and comprehension; compassion and empathy; good conscience and intents; courage and fortitude; goodness in spirit; good grooming and manners; inherent grace, justice, and magnanimity.
On Elon Musk’s X platform, all Xpression may as well be flushed down the digital river of tweeted communications: the appearance is brief and the flood mighty.
Countermeasure: copy-paste and blog the message as well.
Vladimir Putin using Viktor Yanukovych as his lackey had sorely abused Ukrainian business with time-honored mafia methods, i.e., plain skimming theft in the end:
#Putin & #RussianNazis #RusNazis spread chaos, degradation, deprivation, and desperation worldwide, and then cover their crimes with lies, specifically baseless accusations, deflections, denials, erasures of collective memory, fabrications, and omissions of facts.
#TrumpPutin’s shared basic psychology: Malignant Narcissism and Process. The lies told by both represent the “Covering” of deeply seated humiliation (“Narcissistic Mortification”) and the fear of its repeat. The psyche creates an alternative undamaged courageous-heroic self, and that becomes the leader’s principle project both in its assertion and its defense (in the psychology, “Splitting” or, together, “Covering/Splitting”). Complementary observation, term, or trope: “delusional, grandiose, messianic ideation absent of normal boundaries or limits, i.e., the parameters of conscience” (so I quote myself). The end of the process for the Russian dictator and the American wanna-be dictator: “Unlimited Narcissistic Supply”, i.e., the validating infinite love of millions without end in sight.
Charles Michel serves as the President of the European Council. When the news comes straight from the authority who makes it, no further confirmation would seem needed.
No more clear an example of #MedievalVModern may appear than the war that has broken out between #Hamas and #Israel. For Hamas, only the weapons are modern. The motivations have been deeply medieval, well rooted in directed misperception, i.e., disinformation, fabrications, lies promoted and sustained by edict and enforced by unquestionable and vicious authority. In essence-this on the Gaza Strip-the #Palestinians have been perceptually controlled by their own “leaders”, and they are now bound to be driven to destruction by them too.
Sviatoslav finally succeeded in destroying Khazar imperial power in the 960s. The Khazar fortresses of Sarkel and Tamatarkha fell to the Rus in 965, with the capital city of Atil following circa 967 or 969. A visitor to Atil wrote soon after the sacking of the city: “The Rus attacked, and no grape or raisin remained, not a leaf on a branch.”
Today’s Khazarian and Rus descendants and others who have come to define Ukraine’s cultural, ethnic, and tribal endowments in total have become #ModernPeople, overwhelmingly lawful, fair and just, and peaceful in business and in general comportment while the most corrupt of persistent medieval thugs, Viktor Yanukovych, had been booted back to Moscow by general popular revolution, e.g., https://world.time.com/2014/02/22/ukraines-president-flees-protestors-capture-kiev/ and with the moral support of Ukraine’s army.
Hamas X Russian Political Absolutism, Barbarism, and Mafia
While Russia professes good will daily through its X-platformed embassy sites, its claims inevitably belie its own horrendous evil in the realms of chaos and mass destruction. The at-hand BackChannels references: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2023/06/28/a-dark-mirror-in-language/. For those most evil, language may be perverted to cover crime in the present and humiliation in the past as the rogue malign narcissistic psychology fashions strategies in language to match.
#Putin, #TsarNobody in my #Zelensky-inspired desktop world, has with his KGB/FSB cohort proven immune to inconveniences posed by conscience (note: I’ve made a trope of “delusional, grandiose, and messianic ideation with an absence of normal boundaries, conscience, and limits” as shorthand for Narcissistic Personality Disorder and the political expression of the same beneath the label of “Malignant Narcissism”). For perhaps the most horrifying example of Putinesque stage management and perceptual control: #OperationStormInMoscow AKA #MoscowApartmentBombings, and here-https://conflict-backchannels.com/2023/05/03/reference-journalist-alexander-zhilin-operation-storm-in-moscow-aka-moscow-apartment-bombings/.
When it comes to bombing apartment buildings in the dead of night, none have done it better than #MadVlad who today threatens nuclear annihilation using the same methods in language inversion and psychological project to blackmail the west into the abandonment of Ukraine. And that’s “above the table”, i.e., in plain sight.
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The speech came after hardline political scientists and commentators in Russia said a return to nuclear testing could send a powerful message to Moscow’s enemies in the west. “I hear calls to start testing nuclear weapons, to return to testing,” Putin said.
Some in Russia have called for Putin to detonate a nuclear bomb to show the west that Moscow’s patience over its support for Ukraine and apparent unwillingness to negotiate is wearing thin.
Hamas has long found a sympathetic (or sympathetic-acting) presence in Mikhail Bogdanov, Moscow’s envoy to the Middle East. While it has been an independent actor, it appears to have also long-ingested the former communist state’s anti-Semitic rants and emphatic absolutism while holding itself n place with methods familiar to all dictatorships (for overview: https://freedomhouse.org/country/gaza-strip/freedom-world/2023).
Much has been written about the #RussianMafiaState. For quick reference->
Israel has been hampered in its assistance to Ukraine by a deconfliction arrangement with Russia over Syrian airspace (e.g., https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/russia-sees-military-coordination-with-israel-syria-continuing-2022-02-26/). Nonetheless, The Jewish State has arrived today with biblical, global, and modern histories. In Israel it has a homeland; around the world, it contains communities of all races and cultural strands bound together by Judaism, its Torah, and Jewish experience and lore across thousands of years; and it has so contributed to the ideas of the west that the entire political culture may refer to itself as “Judeo-Christian” as well as “Greco-Roman”. The barbarians from European North and Asian East have in Russia chosen to remain defined by whatever fear they may install in others and then tribute exact or steal in wealth. That’s what they did in the Byzantine and Medieval Eras, and that is what they are doing now.
In the Middle East, the Palestinians have served Russia as a block and goad to the west and the burgeoning and vibrant cultures associated with the democratic open societies of the world whose freedoms may be well symbolized by Israel’s vitality.
In Eastern Europe, Ukraine by revolution, election, and today war has in every possible way become part of the west, leaving Russia to attempt its capture and subjection or destruction even while “Muscovy” dies or destroys itself for its own archaic and deeply displaced, misguided, and perverse ambitions.
Putin has turned out a monster fairly bathing in blood; Trump has been all but declared a felon several times over–his image will lose the “alleged” before the charges against him; and here Musk, the world’s wealthiest industrialist appears ill-informed and lacking in insight. The first two I would cast as feudal-medieval thugs and in modern parlance “malignant narcissists”; the third has expressed concern for his fellow travelers in the most democratic terms, but while his platform, literally, and stature give him a mighty voice, he appears without background for the world he may view, also literally, from outer space.
Here follow three brief X-Riposte (I guess) to his callous and naive suggestion on Russia’s ethnocide in Ukraine: “Both sides should agree to a truce.”–>
I know I know my little bit of history in relation to Russia but am no match for Ph.D’s in Russian Studies–and to my own disadvantage, don’t speak a word of the language. On the other hand, inflection points and nodes may emerge from broad and general knowledge (plus boundless curiosity), and that much I have enjoyed in abundance. With respect to Russian history, I do know that those who crossed from what is today Scandinavia found the northern soil of the new continent thin and consequently would roam south for more fertile land (credit the thought to Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Old Regime: The History of Civilization. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974).
For vision, it helps to have background, engagement over time, an understanding of historic as well as present issues, and awareness–sometimes in depth–of variables contributing mightily to the way things look and, in fact, appear real and true with high confidence.
Packaged here for compression, all cited URL’s may be unpacked but perhaps not in a simple hour or a day, but to any devoted to seeing how things work and have worked, what matters a little more time?
For the technology-enabled future of greatest benefit to humanity, both Putin and Trump must be defeated as the anachronistic and far bent personalities each has become. For Ukraine, there will be no security for Russia left as a politically intact and ever ruthless and vicious kleptocracy with imperial ambitions; for the United States, there should be no drift into criminal horse dealing of its own and the compromising of the privileges, prerogatives, and rights of citizenship without bounds of the nation’s Constitution and established political and social ideals, processes, and traditions.
One step down, Retired European wrote, “Exactly, Russia is the new Nazis”, and to that I responded:
And the posts are still there for all who would be good to find courage.
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The same theme invited a more congenial follow-up:
For my followers in many social media quarters, the concept of “Malignant Narcissism” as a political interpretation of Narcissistic Personality Disorder needs no introduction.
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In the region of the Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova wrote, “Terrorist methods have become routine for the #Kievregime and the most odious terrorists in world history would envy the scale of it.”
Twitter lends itself most of all to squawking and very little to I-Thou conversational exchange. Here, #SovietPostSovietRussia claims human rights violations for traitors with heart, courage, and narcissistic leanings who may have–I’m not certain–been able to address their core issues (in order of mention: America is being run like a prison camp; intrusion into private lives is possible, undeniable, and probable; and there should be no state secrets-everything should be online) via other channels and methods. In any case, adult, cognizant, and sophisticated Americans should understand that all states have secret lives and ours in America fewer than others (although that’s a box always a little bit compelling for unpacking).
#TsarNobody and his crew have been the schoolyard bullies who want your lunch money and your lasting fidelity to their glory. So far, none but a pissed off Prigozhin, another former criminal, has dared question Putin’s military leadership. The idea of the Tsar right up there with God appears to remain fixed in the Russian psyche, which has also practical fear of so obviously criminal a power as Tsar Nobody knows all of their secrets, controls their careers and paychecks, has ways of assaulting (or murdering) any Russian, so far, anywhere in the world by means traditional–that would be defenestration, for example–and surreal, i.e., Polonium Tea.
In effect, Putin has all of Russia enslaved to and within his own delusional and malign narcissistic fantasia.
None dare leave who have “achieved” any stature within his realm.