The revolution of 1991 overturned the Soviet Union’s political, economic and social order and put 15 countries on the map where there had previously been only one. But like many revolutions in history, it was followed by a restoration.
The tsar the Kremlin most admires is Alexander III, who on taking office in 1881 reversed the liberalisation overseen by his father, who was assassinated, to impose an official ideology of Orthodoxy, nationalism and autocracy. His portrait and his famous saying, “Russia has only two allies: its army and its navy,” greet visitors to a revamped museum of Russian history at VDNKH, a prime example of Stalinist architecture in Moscow. Stalin himself has had a makeover too. Gigantic portraits of him line the roads in Crimea, proclaiming: “It is our victory!”
Third-party adoptions take place too, but let’s not add complications to the retelling of a parable involving the difference between authentic and inauthentic claims.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_gist/1997/05/selling_land_to_jews.html offers a brief look at the Arab sale of land to the Jewish State for the development of a new agricultural economy. As with most facets of the Middle East Conflict, the depth of the bickering has no bottom, lol, but the western principle elevating integrity in the telling of history should stand. The peaceful processes involved in the development of Israel, including the chartering by the United Nations (which then Soviet Russia, among a majority of other states, approved) should not be omitted from accounts of the “baby’s” birth.
As geopolitical space worldwide naturally compartments into politically separable and potentially distinct units — x nation, region, state, county, district, city, neighborhood, township, and individual private property — nonetheless sharing the earth, Solomon’s method fails for immediate relevance: the “baby” — the land — is greater than the “mothers”. In effect and regarding the basic service required for life, common security (policing), and for trade are in fact already co-administered.
The People — either, en masse, or by more parochial organization — may “see” things differently, but that, again (coming from me), devolves to methods in misinformation continuously driven by the “carrot” that is (reward for) tribal loyalty and the “stick’ that is intimidation.
As long as a loyal ruse trumps an inconvenient truth, that is as long as the conflict will last.
However, the conflict is already . . . tired. Old. Perhaps while the mothers were arguing, the baby grew up.
Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi, founder of Islam’s moderate Wasatia Movement, had posted a lovely personal history and parable about the middle east conflict and the biblical Solomon’s famous discerning of the birth mother of an infant laid claim to by another woman. The true mother, so Solomon decided, was the one who would rather give up her baby than see him divided in two.
Daoudi’s suggestion on behalf of the Palestinian Cause and peace: perhaps both mothers should raise the baby.
There’s probably no need here to suggest that one of the two moms would batter the other over the next step: naming the baby.
🙂
So, up top, there’s the response.
The truth of the matter, now long publicized on BackChannels, involves Soviet manipulation and misinformation in its efforts to use the Arab world through the refugees of 1948 to block the further western liberalization that would threaten the political absolutism and totalitarianism on which authoritarian, despotic, and tyrannical regimes sustain themselves in power.
If there’s an appropriate counterpoint, it would be this: all civil societies require principles of organization, and the spectrum most certainly includes elite authority — experienced, knowledgeable, and wise — in several forms, including royalty (rule by divine right). Even so, other principles involving ethics, human development, and morals needs must apply against the suite of politically criminal behaviors known to unbridled or “unchecked” authorities: capricious justice; corruption; kleptocracy.
Basically, the Palestinians cannot get to their oasis of peace through an ocean of lies, a body of speech that must include not only its fabrications but its own sins of omission.
Having rebuilt a small medieval world in Russia, President Putin has backed himself into his own paranoid corner as regards the “active measures” he has taken against the entire Russian constituency, which he has sewn up with state-controlled misinformation about western behavior.
Veteran nuclear defense analyst Jeffrey Lewis had this to say in Foreign Policy back in August:
Titter has been aflame with reports that the United States is moving the few dozen nuclear weapons stored at the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey to Deveselu military base in Romania. I am calling bullshit on this one — but it’s bullshit in a telling way.
It’s most likely Russian propaganda, all part of an elaborate strategy to build opposition to U.S. missile defense efforts and deflect criticism of Moscow for violating arms control treaties. This is a particularly irritating manifestation of the bullshit asymmetry principle: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
For Russia, the Cold War had never simply disappeared. It had resulted in defeat and the loss of empire, leaving Russia’s rival of more than 40 years to dictate the terms of peace in Europe. By the time Putin took power in 2000, the only vestige of his country’s superpower status was its nuclear arsenal, which was still the biggest in the world. So he began to use it as a crutch.
“Even in the darkest days of the Russian military, when they weren’t able to afford to pay their soldiers and fly their airplanes, they paid close attention to the readiness and modernization of their nuclear forces,” says David Ochmanek, who served as a U.S. Air Force officer during the Cold War and, between 2009 and 2014, was the Pentagon’s top official for force development. “Their doctrine reflected this,” he says.
Nuclear proliferation destabilizes the equilibrium of mutually assured destruction. In a multipolar nuclear world, in which many countries have a few nukes and threaten to use them, the possibility of a “limited” nuclear war—one in which all of civilization is not obliterated—begins, for some people, to appear feasible. The truth, however, is that there’s no such thing as limited use of nuclear weapons. Retaliation and escalation are extremely likely.
Cogent and published the day after the previous excerpt:
Grievances against the West and predictions of militaristic doom are not new in Russia—they have run through all sixteen years of Vladimir Putin’s rule. But they took on a heightened intensity in early 2014, after Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and the U.S. sanctions that followed. Suddenly the question of war was in the air in Moscow. If nothing else, the spectre of a conflict with Washington served as retroactive justification for the Kremlin’s policies, and a ready-made excuse for why the Russian economy had sunk into recession. At home, Russia’s ostracization was spun as a sign of its righteousness.
As he has done in Syria, which damage so far has been largely contained in Syria and spilled out primarily in mass migration to the west, Putin and Company may well produce a complete medieval and totalitarian theater of politics and war by way of the state’s central control of media and the manipulation of what appears on the surface of so much turmoil.
“Anti-Americanism,” Vladimir Pastukhov says, “is the Marxism of ‘the Russian spring’ and the religion of the ‘post-modern’ post-communist rebirth. It is the guide to any action and at the same time a universal indulgence” and explanation of all problems Moscow faces.Vladimir Pastukhov (Image: polit.ua)It is in short, the Russian historian at the London School of Economics says, “the new cult of Putin’s Russia,” reflecting the fact that “Russia no longer loves America but as before cannot live without her. If the Americans did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them.”
In 1972, I had a breakfast with then-KGB chairman Yury Andropov in Moscow. The Kremlin, he told me, had decided to transform Arab anti-Semitism into an anti-American doctrine for the whole Muslim world. The idea was to portray the United States as a war-mongering, Zionist country financed by Jewish money and run by a rapacious “Council of the Elders of Zion” (the KGB’s derisive epithet for the U.S. Congress) intent on transforming the rest of the world into a Jewish fiefdom. Andropov made the point that one billion adversaries could cause far greater damage than could a mere 150 million. Even Muhammad, he said, had not limited his religion to Arab countries.The KGB boss described the Muslim world as a waiting petri dish
Ion Mihai Pacepa’s comments are, of course, historical as are the impressions made by the nonfiction works in the “Russian Section” of BackChannel’s in-house library, including the 2013 volume detailing the KGB “framing” of Pope Pius XII: Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013.
While the surface may look calm — and in the above video positively modern and multicultural — here’s additional reference to what appears to lie beneath.
The president of Chechnya emerged from afternoon prayers at a mosque and with chilling composure explained why seven young women who had been shot in the head deserved to die.
Ramzan Kadyrov said the women, whose bodies were found dumped by the roadside, had “loose morals” and were rightfully shot by male relatives in honor killings.
Earlier this month, the leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, informed his more than one million followers on social networks that he had become “the happiest man in this land.” Something had come to pass that he never could have dreamed of, he said. He had had a transfusion, he said, from a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, so now he has the Prophet’s blood flowing through his veins.
RAMZAN KADYROV has few inhibitions. Last week, just before the first anniversary of the murder of Boris Nemtsov, a liberal Russian opposition leader, by a member of Mr Kadyrov’s security services, the Chechen strongman posted a video on his Instagram page. It depicted Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister, in the crosshairs of a sniper rifle. “Kasyanov is in Strasbourg to get money for the opposition,” Mr Kadyrov commented under the video, in a clear warning to opposition politicians. “Whoever still doesn’t get it, will.”
Vladimir Putin said when he first ran for president in 2000 that his “historic mission” was to resolve the situation in the North Caucasus. To do so, he oversaw a second war in Chechnya, already devastated by Russia’s failed attempt to subdue the republic in 1994-1996.
Instead of solving the North Caucasus issue, however, Putin created a monster. To end the fighting, he cut a deal with Chechnya’s rebel Kadyrov clan: In exchange for loyalty to the Kremlin, they received power and reconstruction aid.
This was a medieval deal that made Akhmad Kadyrov, a rebel commander and Sufi mufti, Putin’s feudal liege. The aim was to co-opt the more religiously moderate Sufis among Chechnya’s rebel fighters, marginalize the Salafist jihadists who appear to have fascinated the Boston bombers, and enable the Russian military to declare victory and draw down.
This subject is complicated by “Hizb ut-Tahrir”, a Tatar organization supportive of the Chechen rebels (presumably against affiliates of warlord Kadyrov) but not active itself with terrorism and, apparently, acting in the open.
The Pentagon has identified eight staging areas in Russia where large numbers of military forces appear to be preparing for incursions into Ukraine, according to U.S. defense officials.
As many as 40,000 Russian troops, including tanks, armored vehicles, and air force units, are now arrayed along Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia.
One could research and read through the many themes, but I like Ben Judah’s comment best regarding the compact between Putin and Kadyrov: “This was a medieval deal that made Akhmad Kadyrov, a rebel commander and Sufi mufti, Putin’s feudal liege. The aim was to co-opt the more religiously moderate Sufis among Chechnya’s rebel fighters, marginalize the Salafist jihadists who appear to have fascinated the Boston bombers, and enable the Russian military to declare victory and draw down.”
BackChannels has been singing medieval about “Putin, Assad, and Khamenei (and Baghdadi)” for ages, but the observation now begs another question: how modern is the west?
If we call what we have been witnessing in Syria a “New Medievalism”, we may well ask where is NATO on the timeline of political conventions?
BackChannels hopes there is such a thing as “Modern” in governance and that it is supported by the bravery in arms, integrity in character, and the honest research of the thoughtful.
The IRA was in contact with Red Army intelligence officers in London and New York, and it was in the former that the monthly stipend was handed over. The IRA’s senior officer in London passed along military intelligence, including specifications of British submarine detection sonar and aeroplane engines for bombers, military journals and manuals, and gas masks. In addition he arranged false passports for Soviet agents and even for a communist operative to travel to Romania in the guise of an Irish woollens salesman! It was in New York, however, that the Soviets got the most valuable information, from an IRA agent code-named ‘Mr Jones’. Jones’s sources likely included serving members of the US military, as he was able to provide reports of the army’s chemical weapons service, state-of-the-art gas masks, machine-gun and aeroplane engine specifications, and reports from the navy, air service and army. In Jones’s estimation, Soviet intelligence in the US would have been ‘helpless’ without the information he supplied.
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