22 Wednesday Jun 2016
Suggested: “Interest” x “Values” x “Value” | Rationale.
From a humanist’s standpoint, the Syrian Tragedy hasn’t looked at all rational, but viewed through a lens that takes in “absolute power”, “feudalism”, “malignant narcissism”, and the wholesale producing of a theater of war as a demonstration of power, well then it makes perfect sense, horrific though that may be.
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09 Thursday Jun 2016
Two points of reference:
Shinkman, Paul D. “Beware Appeasement With Russia.” U.S. News & World Report, June 9, 2016.
Keep in mind the extreme duality presented by the Concert in Palmyra, for example, and the savaging of Syria by a tyrant accompanied by the incubation and encouragement of ISIS as a useful foil and poker chip for playing over the course of perhaps the World’s Grandest and Most Romantic Political Theater.
While burdening the west (and NATO) with the fallout in refugees and terrorists from the Syrian Tragedy and pestering the same through its activities in Ukraine, an assortment of “frozen conflicts”, and its investment in “information warfare” online, Russia has been also (as Obama long ago suggested) growing its economy, the first fruits of which have been given pretty good play in Bloomberg.
About to this point, the image of a Moscow hard hit by dramatically reduced oil revenues and sanctions and by years of capital flight driven by corruption has held steady, but now we see The Bear has been planting all along.
Neither Russian artistic and intellectual high culture nor developing business success (finally!) can or will ethically or morally offset what Putin’s regime has done to degrade the lifestyles of Russians en masse (so far) nor erase the barbaric and contemptible way it has measured the worth of the lives and freedoms of others in Crimea, Syria, and elsewhere.
For whatever may have happened to Putin early in life, one may glimpse a Putin’s revenge taken against the enemies of the Soviet, perhaps old imperial Russia as well, and what he might brand as traitors to Russia in Eastern Europe — those who have joined with NATO — for while he has delivered refugees and terrorists and the confusions of RT and other state-controlled media operations to their lands and airwaves (and computers), he has placed the productive capacity of the state in the state-controlled private hands, and as the same wish to make a lot money, the tomatoes are going to be pretty good for eating (or throwing).
Note too that in the encouragement of Far Right and Far Left political organizations worldwide, Putin & Co. have blended with the tomatoes a heady mix of hippie values — what could be more pure than tomatoes irrigated by mountain waters? — and fascist nationalist dreams rooted in ethnolinguistic pride.
While NATO may prepare for and block greater Russian imperialist adventure, its more immediate and perhaps more real headache may involve meeting the challenge posed by Moscow’s autocratic, barbarous, and criminal “allowances” within Russia and far beyond its borders.
Posted to YouTube 2/3/2016.
AFP. “Millions more Russians living in poverty as economic crisis bites.” March 21, 2016.
Pomerantsev, Peter. “Russia and the Menace of Unreality.” The Atlantic, September 9, 2014.
Ragozin, Leonid. “Putin’s Core Support Begins to Waver.” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 9, 2016. (Added 6/10/2016).
Tolokonnikova, Nadya. “Criminal Godfathers and Dirty Birds.” Huffington Post, February 3, 2016.
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05 Sunday Jun 2016
Posted to YouTube 6/5/2016.
Apparently somewhat related:
““Essence of Time” unit informed about the shelling of Donetsk, Gorlovka, and Dokuchaevsk outskirts by Ukrainian artillery on their official page in the social networks in the evening of June 2nd. The destruction of the civilian infrastructure was reported.” http://eu.eot.su/2016/06/03/essence-of-time-unit-report-donetsk-gorlovka-dokuchaevsk-are-shelled-again/ – 6/3/2016
Related to the above report: “The Essence of Time Movement (Russian: “Суть Времени”) is an international organization with headquarters in Moscow and departments in all of Russia, in countries of Europe, as well as in USA, Canada and China.” — http://eu.eot.su/about/
Apparently also related:
“The night was tense in the zone of the ATO. Pro-Russian illegal armed groups continue to resort to more intense armed provocations,” reads a statement. “Militants opened fire 49 times at the Ukrainian defenders. In the Donetsk direction, the enemy shelled the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine 15 times. Positions near Opytne, Pesky, Nevelske, Avdiyivka, Novoselivka Druga came under 82mm and 120mm mortar fire, and at about 23:00 Kyiv time, the Russian mercenaries fired on the defenders of Pesky another 20 artillery shells of a 122mm caliber,” the press service said.
UNIAN: http://www.unian.info/war/1365631-intensity-of-enemy-fire-remains-high-ato-hq.html – 6/4/2016
Also related: http://112.international/conflict-in-eastern-ukraine/over-the-past-day-militants-shelled-ukrainian-positions-44-times-ato-hq-5623.html – 6/5/2016.
BackChannels cannot fact check either the latest in video recordings from Ukraine nor claims or reports interpreting the same. However, BackChannels may note the Moscow-based initiative taken to reach BackChannels and others on the Internet with the spin that “Ukrainian fascists” comprise the opposition.
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04 Saturday Jun 2016
Tags
Posted to YouTube 5/9/2016.
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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
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.
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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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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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.
25 Wednesday May 2016
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
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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BackChannels 