Tags
Posted to YouTube 5/9/2016.
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Ukraine – About That Russian ‘Hybrid’ Vehicle
04 Saturday Jun 2016
Category Archives: Eurasia
All For Show – Russia’s Comeback – High Culture and Lowest Barbarism
31 Tuesday May 2016
Tags
21st Century Neo-Feudalism, Assad, foreign affairs, political theater, Putin, Russia, Syria, Syrian Tragedy
Posted to YouTube 2/8/2014
Posted to YouTube 1/1/2015
While Bashar al-Assad in Damascus must take responsibility for the casualties of 2014 and the shaping of the war to that date, it would seem Vladimir Putin in Moscow — or in Sochi — during that same winter has only sustained in that season the legacy of the Soviet alignment.
Posted to YouTube 5/7/2016
Posted to YouTube 5/6/2016
Related
Ellis, Ralph and Holly Yan. “Airstrike at Syrian refugee camp kills at least 28.” CNN, May 6, 2016:
At least 28 people were killed when warplanes struck a refugee camp Thursday in Syria, the monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported, with many of the dead women and children.
Rami Abdul Rahman, director of the London-based group, told CNN it was not immediately clear whether Syrian or Russian planes conducted the airstrike.
BackChannels — and so BackChannels feels — has been wrong about cozy relationships between dictators, perhaps, but probably right about their colluding in their own practical interests as regards sustaining feudal absolute power.
Kleptocrats, apparently (this inspired by the pieces in the reference section) need not be in love but only realistic about their mutual dependencies.
By incubating the al-Qaeda types in Syria, especially ISIS, by selecting other targets for bombing earlier in the Syrian Tragedy (see in reference BackChannels 2015), Assad and Putin may have developed an unrealistic plan for both blackmailing and goading the west, which appears to be taking refugees, filtering criminals (over time), and fighting ISIS separately. With “Assad vs The Terrorists” backfiring, the two, Assad and Putin, are stuck with one another and Assad needs Putin to get to an endgame that makes sense.
Frederic C. Hof, whose essay for the Atlantic Council has appeared in Newsweek winds through an excellent and most clinical analysis of the options at hand. Here’s a little part of that:
Secretary of State John Kerry nevertheless seeks common ground with Russia on political transition involving a non-Assad, negotiated Syrian consensus.
Is common ground achievable when Moscow sees Assad as personifying a state to save, while Washington sees him as a war criminal and ISIS’s top recruiting asset in the region?
Read Hof — for the boys who made the mess, who produced “Assad vs The Terrorists”, there may be no good exits yet in sight.
The slogan “Assad or We Burn It” has won the day, for now much of Syria has been burned, and Assad has only more to answer for and much, much less to claim.
For Mr. Putin’s part in the Syrian Tragedy, the Russian President may not have been able to direct Assad as regards so many “barrel bombs”, but he has control of Russian air power in the space, and perhaps he should use it to spare noncombatants from assaults, Syrian and Russian, that have built antipathy worldwide for the post-Soviet Moscow-to-Tehran arc of power.
Additional, Cited, and Related Reference
AFP. “Chief Syria opposition negotiator quits over failed peace talks.” ABC News, May 30, 2016.
BackChannels. “Syria — “Assad vs The Terrorists” — How ISIS Defends Assad.” October 2, 2015.
Hof, Frederic C. “We Must Reject Putin’s Shabby Deal to Work with Assad.” Newsweek, May 30, 2016.
When Pieniążek arrived in Kiev in November 2013 as a young man of twenty-four, he was observing the latest, and perhaps the last, attempt to mobilize the idea of “Europe” in order to reform a state. Ukrainians had been led to expect that their government would sign an association agreement with the European Union. Frustrated by endemic corruption, many Ukrainians saw the accord as an instrument to strengthen the rule of law. Moscow, meanwhile, was demanding that Ukraine not sign the agreement with the EU but instead become a part of its new “Eurasian” trade zone of authoritarian regimes.
At the last moment, Russian President Vladimir Putin dissuaded the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, from signing the EU association agreement.
Tilghman, Andrew. “No U.S. combat advisers for Fallujah invasion.” Military Times, May 23, 2016.
Trofimov, Yaroslav. “Russia’s Long Road to the Middle East.” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2016:
“The Middle East is a way to showcase that the period of Russia’s absence from the international scene as a first-rate state has ended,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, the head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow, which advises the Kremlin and other government institutions.
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FTAC – A Response to Advocacy for Putin’s Russia
27 Friday May 2016
Tags
anti-Semitism, dictatorship, Judaism, liberation teleology, liberation theology, political corruption, political criminality, political psychology
Re. democracies and monarchies: a dozen European states remain monarchies but tempered by their democratic complements in power (parliamentary systems).
Re. bigotry in the west — the point is the people fight it in concert with their governments. The real tension is between ethnolinguistic cultural majorities and their interest in preserving themselves and evolving as they themselves determine. As much has given rise to what I call the “New Nationalism” and, like Viktor Orban in Hungary, “New Nationalists”. Those on the Far Right in relation to those movements are often anti-Semitic, which goes with the defensiveness and, probably, patronage. Even in Hungary, however, such as Jobbik may become prominent but make the final climb into political leadership.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/a-note-on-hungarys…/
With Jobbik in Hungary, the revision is just weird, but explained some by the persistence of Soviet politics in the post-Soviet Era.
Regarding Ukraine, Alexander J. Motyl has been arguing for the ceding of Donbas, but it’s not about being Russian in any case. The truth is ordinary people resent state-enabled criminality and related criminal aggrandizement. Yanukovych worked to get himself shoved out of office, and some of Russian heritage with whom I’ve spoken — and some I have read about in Grigas’s book, resent being used by Moscow as “compatriots”. The claim of protection is seen as a pretext for aggression that either expands or strengthens Russia’s area of control and influence or that results in a “frozen conflict” lending itself to criminal enterprise (where there is no effective and functioning sovereign, there’s a lot of space available for mischief).
Even while posting about Nadiya Savchenko’s liberation, I have wondered about both inherent and legacy politics plus what the effect of fame and public interest may have on her political vision as she necessarily updates herself.
In the British sphere, I’ve unconditionally accepted Naz Shaw’s “turnaround” or present stance and, with either, her repudiation of the anti-Semitic facet of the Labour Party.
Finally, regarding criminality, we have all got some vanity, and our personal mixes of “reparative” and “malignant” narcissism generally fill out a moderate life. With the criminal class, immoderation becomes either desirable or habitual, partly because of what we think of as criminal has lost its brakes in conscience, busted through normative boundaries, and, here invoking the Islamic concept, “exceeded limits.” When these people are small and surrounded by a lawful society, the wind up in jail; when they’re large, they may go a long time in business before hitting any walls; and in politics, they can ruin states — and they do that in profound ways.
The want of the power to impose suffering on innocent others with impunity becomes, I believe, a facet of that political criminality we call “dictatorship”. It’s not just the firm hand that one may dislike to the point of loathing: it’s the dispensing of sadism that comes through those that the good find aberrant and abhorrent.
Welcome to Virtually New World.
Now that we’re all here and furiously chatyping, what are we (and leaders old and new) going to do with it?
We may try to recognize some things we don’t like about our Newest Age.
Also deeply related on this blog: “Why the Jews?”, a piece that is at bedrock about one human response to “absolute power” — within which concept BackChannels would include the power to make others suffer with impunity — that has worked its way around the world.
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BackChannels Pass Along — “The Wars of Vladimir Putin” by Timothy Snyder | The New York Review of Books
27 Friday May 2016
But was the West coming to the East, or the East to the West? By 2014, a quarter-century after the revolutions of 1989, Russia proposed a coherent alternative: faked elections, institutionalized oligarchy, national populism, and European disintegration. When Ukrainians that year made a revolution in the name of Europe, Russian media proclaimed the “decadence” of the EU, and Russian forces invaded Ukraine in the name of a “Eurasian” alternative.
Source: The Wars of Vladimir Putin by Timothy Snyder | The New York Review of Books, June 9, 2016.
Savchenko Freed!
25 Wednesday May 2016
Fast Reference
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/05/ukraine-russia-savchenko-freed/484277/ – 5/25/2016/0800 ET – “Russia and Ukraine Swap Prisoners” by Krishnadev Calamur.
http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-savchenko-russia-consul/25460100.html – “Ukrainian Officer Detained in Russia Details Her Capture to Consul.” – 7/17/2014
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/11772178/Nadia-Savchenko-All-you-need-to-know.html – “Nadia Savchenko: All you need to know” – by Roland Oliphant – 9/29/2015
Other Related Reference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Sentsov – “After the November 2013 breakout of the Euromaidan protests Sentsov became an activist of “AutoMaidan” and during the 2014 Crimean crisis he helped deliver food and supplies to Ukrainian servicemen trapped in their Crimean bases.[1] Sentsov stated that he did not recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea and the “Russian Federation military seizure of the Crimea”.[5][nb 1]”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/26/world/europe/russian-court-sentences-ukrainian-filmmaker-to-20-years-in-prison.html – “Russia Gives Ukrainian Filmmaker Oleg Sentsov a 20-Year Sentence” by Sophia Kishkovsky – 8/25/2015.
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FTAC – A Comment on Obama, The Islamic Small Wars, and the Syrian Tragedy
25 Wednesday May 2016
Tags
foreign affairs, Iraq, ISIS, Islamic Small Wars, Russia, Russian political and military strategy, Syria, Syrian Tragedy
Let’s try this model . . . .
We, including Muslims, have before us the archaic manifestation of a legacy in religion owned by about 1.6 billion souls. Some, and for reasons ranging from how they were raised to the possession of the adolescent messianic narcissism known to dictators, would place themselves somewhere beneath the Muslim Botherhood (intentional) umbrella.
Wouldn’t the moderate and peaceful, truly peaceful, want the hotheads and the improvident to get up and go where they might be seen and subjected to the horrors of their own dreams?
As I have argued elsewhere (any may feel welcome to ask), the incubating of the al-Qaeda types, including ISIS, in Syria appears to have been designed as political theater — a theater of the very real — to both blackmail and goad the west into concessions before the Assad regime. It was a good KGB-style plan, and, please note, Russia got to channel the worst of its own Chechnya rebels to the fighting (and it slipped in a few spies as well); however, update: NATO may sting post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia and its alignments (Damascus, Tehran) with its own wasps.
While ISIS has been growing or distilling out of other populations those most prone to join the fight as 7th Century barbarians in Syria, the greater world has been witness to the we’re-not-those-Muslims Muslim repudiation of the al-Qaeda types, the common use of the terms “Islamist” and “jihadist” and such to separate the same from the greater Ummah going forward, and, of late, the appearance reform-minded discussions (e.g., New Age Islam) and organizations (e.g., Muslim Reform Movement). Expect traction to take some time.
There are other facets . . . like that of getting the Iraqi military to hold itself together against not only ISIS, from whom it has been wresting territory this past month, but also from Khamenei’s aggression through Iraq’s more “fiery” Shiite militia, long infested with Revolutionary Guard officers.
Archaic | Feudal-Toward-Modern Main Body | Cultural Avant Garde –>
Quite possibly for the public accustomed to ironic simplifications, what Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran have developed in Syria looks a little like the mirror image of CIA’s support for the Taliban in association with Zia Haq’s own conservative Islamism pitched against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In today’s Syrian Tragedy, it’s Moscow, essentially, that appears to manipulate the Sunni-aligned jihadists munching away on the landscape (and enriching itself with oil sales by way of whoever hands over the cash for it).
Be that as it may, it’s looking like the west has been neither blackmailed nor goaded by “Assad vs The Terrorists” has instead absorbed the fallout in finger-wagging (for not intervening) and refugee migration, and may well stick Moscow (Damascus and Tehran) with “The Terrorists”. It may be toward that purpose that the Russian military has strengthened it presence in Syria.
The inspiration for the response: claim that ISIS had been strengthened under the Obama Administration in relation to the Administration weak response to terrorism.
BackChannels counterpoint: the strategy to move the medieval world (and the representatives of political absolute power) toward the modern one (and distributed, checked, and representative power) has a slow track, and in relation to the Islamic Small Wars involves making the feudal world sufficiently visible for fighting. IF that idea works, THEN the post-Soviet axis (Moscow-Damascus-Tehran) has done a right thing for the wrong reasons: intending to get at the west, it has helped produce an enemy in space that can be addressed with conventional forces from every side opposed to it.
Reference
BackChannels. “Syria — ‘Assad vs The Terrorists’ — How ISIS Defends Assad.” October 2, 2015.
BCC. “Syria conflict: IS ‘destroyed helicopters’ at Russian base.” May 24, 2016 — (breaking story today, May 25, and still frequently updated).
Fox News. “ISIS claims female Russian spy infiltrated terror network.” May 9, 2016.
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Noting Iranian Forces in Syria
19 Thursday May 2016
Tags
Moscow-Tehran, Russian military presence, Russian Neo-Imperialism, Syrian Civil War, Syrian Tragedy
Beirut- Asaad al-Zoubi, head of the Syrian opposition delegation of High Negotiations Committee (HNC) in Geneva, said that Iranian forces are gradually arriving to battle zones in Syria. Over 11 thousand Iranian fighters had recently, boarding cargo jets, arrived at the Damascus International Airport and to Hama city, located on the banks of the Orontes River in west-central Syria.
Almost 700 Iranian soldiers and militia fighters have been killed in Syria’s civil war, laying bare the scale and cost of Tehran’s intervention to preserve Bashar al-Assad’s grip on power.
Blair pegs the total Iranian commitment of troops, Quds Force and IRGC at 3,000.
For some years now, BackChannels has chained together Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran as equal co-defenders of the “medieval absolute power” on which their respective kleptocracies depend for existence. That balance of nefarious power may be changing:
“Russia has reduced its air strikes Syria, and so all those Iranians are getting killed because of a lack of air cover,” Kamhawi said. “This seems to be part of a Russian strategy to marginalise Iran’s role in Syria and make its influence unparalleled.”
Although RT may deny it, Russia’s military presence in Syria appears in the news alternatives (like AP, Fox News — those “alternatives”) to be expanding.
As “scrape and comment” hasn’t lasting appeal to this blog’s editor — even though at a computer, one naturally looks things up — this post will stop about here and on this note: While Iran has produced a greater fighting presence in the Syrian Tragedy, it may be the Phantom of the Soviet that has irrevocably planted new military assets in the state.
Additional Reference
BackChannels. “FTAC — Russia’s Not So Appealing Turn in Syria.” March 6, 2016. The piece contains additional reference to Russia’s expanded military presence in Syria.
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Cold War? –> Cold Struggle.
15 Sunday May 2016
Call it “Putin’s Theater”, a publicly viewed juxtaposition of sweetened and soured politics, a program in which the best and the worst have been put up for view at the same time.
The Winter Olympics at Sochi | The Syrian Tragedy Unfolding
The Concert at Palmyra, reported May 5, 2016 | A Refugee Camp Bombing, reported May 6, 2016.
Good and Evil | White and Black | Moscow and NATO
Singular Absolute Power | Representative Distributed Power
In Putin’s world, the “singular absolute”of his feudal realm appears to hold sway over the west’s “distributed relative” approach to managing political power, while the capricious barbarism on display in Syria and the compulsive character of the foray into Crimea may serve as a deterrent to NATO intervention in either place. The dissolving of the insolvent Soviet may have reduced the scope of Russia’s threat potential, but with Putin in charge, deeply threatening it remains.
The Phantom of the Soviet that lurks in Putin’s revanchist neo-feudal Russia has brought to the fore a variety of terms representing the methods of his state’s aggression plus partiality to corruption and crime.
Ready for look-up when you are:
Putin, Corruption
Putin, Far Right, Far Left
Putin, International Crime
Russia, Frozen Conflicts
Russian Hybrid Warfare
Russian Energy Politics
Russian Information Warfare
Russian Nationalism
Russian Reflexive Control
Russian Passportization
This post may have to be the first of several on the theme, as the editor prefers having (or implying) his say at one sitting.
In reference, readers will find a smattering of discoveries based on searching up the above listed terms. Each is a gem and possibly telegraphic enough to suggest that Moscow-centric control, corruption, political manipulation, and political theater in service to a despotic feudalism frames the renewal of conflict with NATO, not that NATO has yawned all the way through the Rise of Putin. There’s more to that story, of course, but the alliance has avoided confrontation in Syria, in essence allowing the tragedy to develop nearly to its full measure in misery, and in Crimea, where Ukraine now struggles to exert sovereignty and move forward with practical governance.
The once hoped for transformation of Russia from the feudal state of other eras appears to have failed with Putin’s ascent from colonel to president to possibly emperor with the full array at his fingertips — the Okhrana to post-KGB FSB, a revived active military presence beyond its borders, and (equivalent to the privileged of the Party) the host of the moneyed and favored by the “vertical of power”.
The west may have gotten a breather at the end of 1991, but it has been challenged this past year with the fallout from events — again: Crimea; the Syrian Tragedy — approved, driven, engineered, or inspired by Moscow.
General Reference
BackChannels. “Books — Agnia Grigas Tours Putin’s Neo-Imperial Russian Revival.” May 6, 2016.
BackChannels. “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy”.
BackChannels. “FTAC — Synopsis — On the Medieval Struggle.” December 27, 2013.
BackChannels. “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation”.
BackChannels. “Syndicate Red Brown Green”.
BackChannels. “The Big Fade — Or Not? Where Goes the Phantom of the Cold War?” June 23, 2015.
BackChannels. “The Russian Section”.
Grigas, Agnia. “Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire.” New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.
Herszenhorn, David M. “In Crimea, Russia Moved to Throw Off the Cloak of Defeat.” March 24, 2014.
Krastev, Ivan. “Why Putin Tolerates Corruption.” The New York Times, May 15, 2016.
Tharoor, Ishaan. “Europe’s far right still loves Putin.” The Washington Post, February 18, 2015.
Addendum – July 18, 2016
Turkey’s failed and possibly false-flag coup, i.e., an event manipulated by President Erdogan to soak out the last of his capable opposition — has altered NATO’s character for the worse and left some untidy and dangerous “poker chips” beneath the ground:
Schlosser, Eric. “The H-Bombs in Turkey.” The New Yorker, July 17, 2016.
BackChannels has just published a post-Cold War comment on the failed Turkish coup in relation to the “medieval vs modern” political processes competition between Russia and NATO: “FTAC – Turkey (and Hungary) – Medieval Absolute Power vs Modern Distributions” (July 18, 2016).
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BackChannels 