Category Archives: Eurasia

FTAC — A Wrap-Up on Mentality — Malignant/Medieval and Reparative/Modern Narcissism

11 Monday Apr 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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In our common malignancy, perhaps, our narcissism lends repair to psychological damage to self concept. Life’s rough and in part insults us, less or more, but, again perhaps, the greater the insult to esteem — the heavier the hand — the more passionate the want of self-aggrandizement, security, and wealth.

In the healthy, it’s good having basic and somewhat above good circumstance in freedom, money, and general security. In the malignant, the same wants get Up There and Out There. On Back-Channels, I’ve likened such qualities to the recognized psychological pathologies that are bipolar disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. In our general political psychology and related sociology, we aspire and trade up in comfort and prestige, and we do that through laws an practices that accommodate a healthy general development with concern spanning the distance from penthouse to street.

The malignant do things quite differently.

Muammar Qaddafi’s Mullah Shweyga story (easily looked up) tells the difference. Such leaders take full advantage of the possession of the power to visit suffering on others with impunity. All of the crimes that may be visited on one may as well be extended to others: capricious “justice” or detainments, imprisonments, hangings, tortures. Each dictator asks: “who is going to stop me?” And off each goes into the high life on the backs of the hungry, the powerless, and vulnerable.

I’m always happy to share the Reuters piece on Khamenei (“Assets of the Ayatollah”), but I think it better that others embark on similar journeys as regards the entire host of figures whose power has proven malignant and resides in the brutalities and related fears and levers (e.g., bribery and patronage; intimidation and murder) known more to the medieval mind than the modern one.

Yes, this may be the only blog on earth suggesting the reader continue doing the research.

🙂

Here’s a related comment on Moscow’s role in managing conflicts in a manner fit to destroy those it manages to manipulate and prize from the same conflict-related income and, at least in its own hive-mind, power and prestige.

Moscow, representing Putin’s political police, himself, and the oligarchs, may be a greater power than Tehran. It may barely be keeping its political image clean — remember: officially, Moscow is helping Damascus fight “The Terrorists” — but it may have the habit of manipulating political situations to its advantage.

From Somali General Galal, who is still alive, here’s a densely compacted recap of the Somali vs Ethiopian war over the Ogaden: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1

In the PROCESS of that war, Moscow apparently manipulated Somali leaders into laying claim or reclaiming the Ogaden, pitting first guerrilla then regular forces against Ethiopian control of the space. As advances pushed Ethiopia out of the contested space, Soviet Russia stepped in to arm Ethiopian forces, who then pushed back the Somalis. The Ogaden continues to host some related “low-intensity conflict”.

Who won?

Getting away from one’s own interests, in this instance Syria, and venturing to overview Moscow’s involvements in conflicts worldwide across time may help us more brightly resolve (accurately perceive) states of affairs in Syria and the Middle East Conflict.

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Links – On Russian Economic Disaffection

28 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Links, Russia

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The actions of the long haul truckers show this, she says, and others may follow. “What did the government do in this situation?” It made concessions that had the effect of showing that its earlier actions were “unjust” and should not have been taken in the first place. Russians can see that.

“Now, legislation should be very carefully considered, for numerous laws that have been adopted are putting additional burdens on business and on the population. “Unfortunately, in the government, they continue to accept laws” designed to extract more resources from the population and are imposing them to try to cope with the crisis.

http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/12/russia-may-be-close-to-revolution-but.html – 12/28/2015

The share of poor families in Russia—those with not enough income to buy food or clothing—in the past year has almost doubled from 22 percent to 39 percent, according to the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center.

https://meduza.io/en/news/2015/12/28/the-number-of-poor-families-in-russia-almost-doubles-in-2015 – 12/28/2015

Freedom, it so happens, carries with it a great many temptations and pitfalls, and no one among Russia’s powerful and propertied today has managed to resist these temptations. Impunity has made it impossible to cure Russia’s corruption with a simple outpatient procedure.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2015/12/25/opinion-how-russians-became-radicals – 12/25/2015.

Twenty-four years and two days ago, the Soviet Union dissolved itself, a fact of political life and history that today places Putin, the oligarchs, the Russians, and the rest of the world in the 25th year past the monumental failure of the communist experiment.  Today’s apparent “experiment” in place of the last one: feudalism in the form of a medieval revanche harking back to the days of Nicholas II and his establishment of the grandaddy of Russian political police, the Okhrana.

Same old, same old — and the Russian People will bear the costs before the “New Nobility” does (the “Oligarchs” appear to have been already politically compromised, this according to a Dec. 10, 2014 piece by Masha Gessen in The New York Times).

In a possibly Orwellian turn of events, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, so pleasingly pardoned before the Winter Olympics at Sochi has been returned (by Putin’s regime) to the status of an accused enemy of the Russian state, and “arrested in absentia” (the courts and defense are starting to kick around the absurdity — although Putin denies involvement, the state’s reputation developed under his auspices undermines claims to forthright character, i.e., too much has taken place “behind the curtains”).

Addendum

In relation to the expansion of capricious justice in Russia comes this from World Affairs’ “Spotlight on Russia” by Vladimir Kara-Murza: “Putin ‘Outlaws’ European Justice in Russia” (December 24, 2015).

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FTAC – Post-Soviet, Neo-Feudal – Related Remarks of ISIS Defectors

24 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Syria

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The Russian power model sustained by Putin today may hearken directly back to Tsar Nicholas II’s “Okhrana” — Russia’s original “political police”. There are a few books out on the topic, but the idea of infiltrating and co-opting the opposition (to the absolute power represented by the tsar) starts early, the transformation of some police into political agents channeling, derailing, or subverting protest would seem to have become inseparable from the standard operating procedures of today’s political Russia.

This is “cutting edge” as distribution of the PDF precedes the publication of a related book:

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Many nationalities are represented among the foreign fighters. “I have seen people from the USA, the UK, Germany, France, Russia, Chechnya, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Palestine [limited numbers]), Lebanon, China, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan,” Abu Jamal stated. He recalled that they were suspicious of the Russians. “We would consider them as agents because they were blonde, real Russian-blooded people and we would not trust them as they would mostly claim that they had been in the Russian Army and then converted to Islam and retired from their posts and came to fight for IS. They were also mostly military strategists and were making the plans for assaults and battles. They were effective on making strategic military decisions in IS.” Some of our informants wondered whether these Russians were plants (i.e. spies or agents), coordinating things with Assad’s forces.

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Source: Eyewitness Accounts from Recent Defectors from Islamic State: Why They Joined, What They Saw, Why They Quit by Anne Speckhard and Ahmet S. Yayla

The PDF is available online. Just search it up.

ISIS defector remarks dovetail nicely with the participation of Baathist Generals working with ISIS to plan assaults. The Soviet may have officially dissolved itself on December 26, 1991 but perhaps its methods have been sustained.

Media moves fast these days, and the sharing of information through the conflict and psychology community probably competes with the latest sports scores for rapid distribution.

The cause for ISIS suspicions regarding Russian convert-recruits certainly fits with the greater than century-long history of Russia’s political police elements.  How well present relationships may be traced is another matter, secrecy, of necessity, providing the foundations for every facet of conflict development and response (with perhaps the exception of making public the frank observations of terrorist defectors).

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FTAC – Egypt – Russian Airliner Crash

14 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Egypt, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

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The Kremlin’s cry that “the terrorists done it” has been challenged recently by Egyptian claims that no evidence of a bomb or bombing had been found in the related forensic investigation.  Says Egyptian Streets (Dec. 14, 2015), “Preliminary investigations into the Russian airplane that crashed in Egypt’s North Sinai killing all 224 passengers on board have revealed no signs of terrorism, said the Ministry of Civil Aviation.”

Oh what evil webs some may weave — one hedges where empiricism falters on ambiguous evidence or too little evidence: BackChannels would place Egyptian doubts regarding the Russian assertion of the plane’s having been sabotaged (by having a bomb put on board) before takeoff in Egypt within the following framework.

Post-Soviet, post-KGB neo-feudal now FSB Russia has developed its own “War On Terror” designed to destabilize and fracture NATO and allied or cooperative states.

Muslims may know the epigram, “All of the evil is in one room and lying is the key.”

Through the KGB, the Soviet established a reputation for deceitful and disingenuous action and speech, and in the post-Soviet environment, that nefarious spirit may be expressed, this with reference to the Moscow Apartment Bombings, through possible “false flag” operations designed to manipulate “the masses”. https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/ Karen Dawisha’s book may be especially helpful in untangling some of the real life detective mysteries produced by the post-Soviet regime.

On rare occasion, but it happens, the fireman is the arsonist, the hero the creator the monster to be subdued. So it may go with Putin’s feudal revanche in which “Putin vs The Terrorists” — the political display of power proven effective in producing the nationalist fervor that wins elections — is an important fixture and image in Russian politics.

So the motive may be there.

Still, I and most modern observers (as opposed to medieval ones who feel their loyalties constantly tested) would rather have an empirical analysis of the crash than any useless collection of bold political assertions.

Given that all politics involves presentation, i.e., some show-and-tell business, one might ask whether any, most, or some political organizations possess more integrity than others.

The question’s fair today, for the theme most central to a spectacle in which the modern world — and the modern soul — struggles with the medieval involves the relative weight of a “loyal lie” to the possession of a possibly lonely integrity as regards an authentic and solid cognizance of the truth.

In the old biblical story in which “God proves” Abraham, the test is never defined but potentially involves either a test of absolute obedience to God or, much more interesting, a test of Abraham’s conscience and courage to speak back to God in defense of the life of the son he and Sarah had waited so long to have.  God sees to it that Isaac lives (while a ram is made to die in his place) and never again speaks directly to Abraham.

BackChannels’ preferred argument: the test of conscience, courage, and, perhaps, Abrahams integrity as a father.

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FTAC – The “Medieval Time Bubble” Mentioned

28 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Syria

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Imagine such a thing as a “Medieval Time Bubble” — a place where heads of state hold “absolute power” over their plundered and subject people. It’s in that bubble, today post-Soviet and neo-feudal, that Putin, Assad, Khamenei, AND Baghdaddi need one another for keeping on display “Assad vs The Terrorists” and sustaining eadh their own portion of the medieval worldview.

I believe Daesh autonomous in its operations and spirit but manipulated to serve the ruling feudals as a foil for their militaries or their politics, to serve as leverage (“Assad OR The Terrorists” is the name of that play), and to serve as a goad to the west and related western defense spending.

The response to Daesh AND other medieval enterprises may have to come from the world that most immediately surrounds them.

Trolls online — paid? not paid?  who knows — regularly credit the United States with having developed ISIS / ISIL / Daesh.  For cause based in news, BackChannels has taken the opposite stance, and Daesh, although autonomous in its own mind and in its own workings, serves the medieval designs of Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran for the furtherance of despotism, fascism, and militarism — and endless war — far into the 21st Century.

In essence, the dissolving of the Soviet, almost 24 years ago, led not to democracy but to a feudal revanche benefiting primarily the ultra-privileged of Russia.

Today’s axis Moscow-Tehran may boast not only autocratic governance but with the help of Daesh’s presence in Iraq and Syria, a pretty good engine for the promotion of “New Nationalist” urges elsewhere and amplified and broadened divisions between people based on legacy in nationality, race, and religion, an anti-NATO strategy that appears to be working as post-KGB / KGB-Style Theater (“Assad vs The Terrorists”) proves that perception at a glance may create a useful target’s impression of reality.

Related on BackChannels

Syria – “Assad vs The Terrorists” – How ISIS Defends Assad

https://conflict-backchannels.com/syndicate-red-brown-green/

Ali Khamenei and the Letter from Near Mosul – A Speculation

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Excerpt – On Tsar Nicholas II’s Political Police

23 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

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Zubatov had long harboured plans for the restructuring and expansion of the political police, envisioning an elite and quasi-independent political police, acting under the direct order of its own Special Section and only indirectly under the orders of Fontanka; a truly secret police expanding and operating at the behest of the MVD‘s edicts, circulars, and regulations and not through the statutes of the Svod Zakonov (Digest of Laws).

Plehve dismissed Lopukhin’s plan and gave Zubatov’s proposals his full support.  Zubatov’s ideas on police reform fitted comfortably within Plehve’s view of traditional tsarist bureaucratic behavior, satisfying both his belief in Imperial power politics and his secretive nature.  He conceived of political police reform in the only way his experience allowed him to: not through decentralization of authority as Lopukhin believed, but through its deconcentration — the expansion of central authority in the provinces.  Indeed, this strategy would permit Plehve to swell the size of the political police to ministerial proportions.  As a result Plehve would in fact hold two very powerful ministerial portfolios: minister of internal affairs and the unofficial post of minister of internal security, enhancing his power and prestige within both ministerial circles and the court, making him the most powerful man in Russia next to the tsar.

Zuckerman, Fredric S.  The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880-1917.  Pp. 92-93.  Washington Square, New York: New York University Press, 1996.

“Fontanka” refers to “Fontanka 16 Quai” (St. Petersburg), the central location, evidently of minimized importance at the above passage, for Tsar Alexander II’s secret police.

Other and Related Reference and Terms

Holler, Lyman E., “They Shoot People, Don’t They?  A Look at Soviet Terrorist Mentality.”  Air University Review, September-October 1981.

Okhrana

Pyotr Rachlovsky

According to Wikipedia, “Many authors maintain that it was Rachkovsky’s agent in Paris, Matvei Golovinski, who in the early 1900s authored the first edition.[3] The text presented the impending Russian Revolution of 1905 as a part of a powerful global Jewish conspiracy and fomented anti-Semitism to deflect public attention from Russia’s growing social problems. Another Rachkovsky agent, Yuliana Glinka, is often cited as the person who brought the forgery from France to Russia.”

—The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Russian Social-Democratic Worker’s Party

The Frederic S. Zuckerman Prizes

Union of Liberation

A rabbi said to me one afternoon in relation to religious zealots, “end times”, and terrorism: “Everyone’s in too much of a hurry to get to the end of the story.”

We were then looking forward.

At the moment, BackChannels has been looking backward and would say to the rabbi, “To the contrary, everyone wants to go back to the drawing board!”

For the Islamists, the “drawing board” appears to be 7th Century Medieval Barbarism.

For the Russian President, perhaps, it may be the political police serving Tsar Nicholas II.

“Reset!” takes on new meaning.

Zuckerman’s book has been the reading on deck and under way, but there is another coming: “Fontanka 16” is not only a place but (in the wild literary ways of the west) the title of another book (and one incoming): (URL to Review of the same) Fontanka 16: The Tsars’ Secret Police, by Charles A. Ruud and Sergei A. Stepanov. Montreal, Quebec, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999.

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FTAC – Approaching Anti-Semitism and the Medieval Revanch

22 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Syria

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1. Anti-Semitism serves feudal power. It is a tool for the manipulation and direction of mobs. Note: Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal are billionaires today, which begs the question: who has really occupied what? The PLO and PFLP have been Moscow projects from the beginning and the encouragement of an anti-Semitic middle east a major part of the Soviet program, which medieval / oligarchal phantoms we are fighting today.

2. Nationalism tends toward fascism (ask any of the more western-oriented opposition in Hungary about that). In Israel, the Hebrews, +5,000 years together, are back in the Land of the Hebrews, and they have been taught a long lesson by way of the leaders and fans of the “International Solidarity” and “Palestinian Solidarity” garbage (that’s the word for them): the complaint about Israel has never been about Israel — it has been always about Jewish existence itself, not only in Israel but anywhere on the planet.

3. Go back to Moses the Lawgiver and go forward to Hillel the Elder who to accommodate the restive of a decaying Rome made Judaism more about principle than ritual and more accessible to converts. Then: Jesus, Paul, Constantine; then: Muhammad. Those who really hate the Jews hate the law and humanity. The may hate themselves. Boco Haram, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah: call them the “God Mob” because intimidation, theft, and murder on one side and pandering and patronage on the other appears to be what each has best demonstrated in organizational lives short and long.

As much verbiage as BackChannels spools onto the threads of The Awesome Conversation, the social network chatyping fest, it wonders who compressed it may make a packet of thought.

Anti-Semitism : Feudal Mentality

Perhaps that should be enough.

It has been deeply disappointing watching some Syrians (for the most part, not friends, but others the “friends of friends”) refuse to struggle with the anti-Semitic expression that not only accompanies their suffering but plays directly into hands of the medieval troika, Putin – Assad – Khamenei, each of whom have pegged their survival on irrational mob behavior and, indeed, feudal wars that for being so intellectually bereft that they cannot resolve through violence.

Some prefer the engines of war to the machinery of peace.

A moderate Syrian opposition site had played a cartoon showing Putin, Khamenei, and Netanyahu in bed together while Assad lay on the floor.  Never mind the nonsense in which the leader of an open democracy shares the same mattress as the two despots, the intent to harm Israel absent of reason stands signal of the too familiar sickness and the fascism to which it connects.

Anti-Semitic hate contributes directly to the medieval worldview promoted by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei. Israel’s arrangements with Russia over Syria have been defensive and perfunctory. Before the Soviet Union dissolved (December 1991), this is how it manipulated latent Jew Hate in the middle east into the Baathist dictatorships — from one of which Assad has descended. In fact, Assad is counting on Syrian anti-Semitism to contribute to his stay in power. https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/ftac-tip-to-the…/

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FTAC – On Separating from the Medieval World

20 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Regions, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Syria

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Those deep into the polarization(s) don’t understand that what Putin, Khamenei, and Assad are trying to cement for the future and for themselves is the medieval worldview. The tough decision shouldn’t be where to stand up, i.e., against feudalism and fascism, but rather how to lead or navigate the medieval world into a more productive — helpful, peaceful, prosperous — and modern global reality.

Conflicts consume attention and destroy time, so the drivers and engines leading to political polarization have to be impeded or slowed down as well.

Some BackChannels posts function as markers — brief remarks; “scraped” reference to other publications that become teasers (made you click!); commentary that turns old the moment read but remains as a snapshot of response to a part of the news of the day — and that above serves as a marker.

Via BackChannels — perhaps especially in the section “21st Century Feudal” — one catches a glimpse of 19th Century Russia revisited in Putin’s Moscow, the same as alluded to or referenced in the volumes of “The Russian Section”.  The New Russian Security State is a medieval complex promoting spectacle (like the $51 billion Winter Olympics at Sochi) and political theater (like “Assad vs The Terrorists” AKA “Assad OR The Terrorists”) while failing to produce government responsive to Russians (some would add the term “outside of Moscow”) or responsible to humanity in general.  It has taken BackChannels, which is not edited by an hoary Cold Warrior or newly sprung political science major, some time to see the Great Picture aligning a malignant narcissism with an epic that has laid waste to a nation before a horrified and benumbed global audience.

Projected against the backdrop of this bizarre stage: an image of a Russian bishop (unidentified) blessing rockets intended to kill moderate and modern Syrians, not “The Terrorists” incubated into today’s “Daesh”.  The exact context of the image (in the linked Business Insider piece) has been contested but the message — there mere act of Christian religious authority blessing weapons intended for extremist Muslim targets — cannot but endorse the medieval script, would that history itself have kept its most bloody religious wars contained.

On stage, center and right: an endless, horrific, and obscene stream of the momento mori of war brought to the innocent, infant and adult: beheaded, burnt, crushed, mangled, poisoned, riddled, and sliced.

The post-Soviet, neo-feudal arc of power connecting Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran continues to blame the bloodletting on the west (even though last November — 2014 — it was Moscow entertaining the listed terrorist organization “PFLP”; even though it was then Assad’s, and today Russia’s, bombing priority to preference the mixed and moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA) as targets in bombing runs and spare Daesh as hornets to fill up Syria and lash against her neighbors should the Assad regime be plainly overrun).

Responsible oligarchy focused on internal development may survive Syria by way of the complexity of the numbers subject to authoritarian systems and the difficulty, for example, of offering the methods of democracy to such as the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization ever ready for elections followed by proving itself as demonic as advertised (in Egypt in 2013: so done), but the Moscow story now differs quite from that: Bloomberg Business has spotted the contraction of the Russian economy at 4.6 percent (8/10/2015).

Related and published about 30 minutes ago: Kolesnikov, Andrei.  “Russia Chooses Bombers Over Pensioners.”  The Moscow Times, October 20, 2015.

Related: Stadnik, Alexander.  “Russia’s startup migration could help repair relationship with US.”  Russia Direct, October 15, 2015; McKenzie, Malgorzata.  “Why start-ups are Really leaving Russia.”  Russia Direct, October 15, 2015; Murashova, Olesya and Elena Novoselova.  “Employment: Recruitment Shortly Before 2016.”  The Moscow Times, October 20, 2016; Whitman, Elizabeth.  “Russia Unemployment Soars Under Putin Amid Sanctions, Falling Oil Prices: 4.1 Million Out of Work.”  International Business Times, September 23, 2015.

However one may read or skim the above cited articles, business life (and employment) appears simply more tenable, perhaps even pleasant, in the west: more markets for high tech innovators, whether as labor or the heads of new businesses; the power to passively contribute to reduced global oil pricing — by way of North American Energy Independence for Canada and the United States — and, in relation to conflict, imposing sanctions that could only be imposed by the lawful (in banking, business, and trade) on the unlawful — and “unlawful” is what medieval “absolute power” — the rule of the despotic and piratical — has been always about.

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