Blame Berezovsky (the wealthy man who effectively upgraded Putin’s political clout — http://www.thedailybeast.com/…/how-boris-berezovsky…). The Russians, as a people, and Afghanistan as a financial black hole for military expansion, managed to derail the Soviet (dissolved December 26, 1991); however, hardline privileged had already produced a plan to outlive the Soviet (reference: Karen Dawisha – http://www.miamioh.edu/…/cultural…/putins-russia/ – and the results of that today plus the Islamist stance of the opposition (Assad needed “the terrorists” for his play, “Assad vs The Terrorists”) has led to today’s mass murder and destruction in Syria.
Compression and distillation matter.
The ability of the average victims of fascist and feudal sociopaths may depend on a quick pickup on critical information — accurate, clear, complete (delivered honesty and with the highest integrity) — and the independent discernment and both personal and public political decision making it enables.
A good telegraphy should open on to new worlds, truth revealing and trustworthy.
For those with the necessary time and resources (and intellectual freedom), the Russian Section of the Library of this blog provides ample reference for seeing the Putin machinery as it worked across the president’s years in power and across the arc of the impositions of the Soviet Era.
For those horrified by the destruction wrought by Assad in Syria and determined to address it, BackChannels suggests addressing first endemic Syrian anti-Semitism and anti-westernism, which may contribute to blocking greater western intercession — actually, at the moment, any intercession — in Syria.
The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) has prepared a dossier laying out evidence for what it calls “Russian aggression against Ukraine.”
The report alleges there are some 9,000 Russian troops deployed in Ukraine, forming 15 battalion tactical groups. The force includes about 200 tanks, more than 500 armored fighting vehicles, and some 150 artillery systems, according to the dossier.
In today’s Washington Post, Jackson Diehl notes Russia’s suspension of gas deliveries to Ukraine and the west’s distractions with Greece and Iran, asking at the end of his piece “Will this be remembered as the summer when the West let Ukraine die?”
I won’t give away his answer.
My hope: I hope not.
Remember Yanukovych Leaks and the state-borne internal piracy that drove Ukrainians to give Putin’s stooge the boot.
Remember Putin’s $52 billion Sochi Winter Olympics, which obscene spending ignored and masked off the hundreds of thousands dead in Syria and the nearly 10 million displace while Putin-Assad-Khamenei fairly cultivated “The Terrorists” for Assad’s Big Political Theater and Khamenei’s teleological commitment to bringing forth the Great Shiite vs Sunni Battle.
“I want you to know why thousands of people all over my country are on the streets,” she said to the global audience, her voice full of feeling. “There is only one reason: They want to be free from a dictatorship. … We are civilized people but our government are barbarians. This is not a Soviet Union.” The video has since been seen by more than 8.3 million people.
Remember Milan Kundera’s famous statement about remembering: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
The main purpose of keeping the Donbas conflict in a smoldering state is to let Putin remain in power. The Donbas war will distract the Russians and help Putin stay in power, the ex-FSB officer said.
The BackChannel’s term for what Putin (and Putin and Khamenei together) represent in contemporary political possibility: “21st Century Neo-Feudalism”.
Dzerzhinsky may be a Communist saint, but the symbolism of the prince’s statue is inescapable. It will celebrate the new Vladimir, not just the old one. This may be obvious, but the subject is avoided in polite conversation.
There are other topics — rising prices, the fighting in Ukraine, the shape of things to come — that people don’t like to think about, even though these subjects are at times unavoidable. The economy is entering “a full-fledged crisis,” former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin told Parliament recently. He warned that Russia’s gross domestic product is forecast to be 4 percent lower this year than it was in 2014. Meanwhile, food prices are rising. Official figures indicate a 23 percent jump for the year ending in March, but an informal survey of grocers in my neighborhood suggests a 30 percent jump is more realistic.
But Vyrypaev’s wider summing-up was admirably succinct: “This means that [the state] has the right to intervene, to control, direct, grow, regulate, monitor, and finally to develop the cultural process. It means that the state assumes the role of a kind of spiritual and educational shepherd for the people.”
While Obama has for the public paired Putin with Soviet revanche, it’s not the Soviet that Putin (and the KGB cum FSB organization) have brought to Russia: “feudalism”, “state capitalism”, “neo-feudalism” better describe what Putin has done — is doing — to the Russians.
Avedissian, Karena. “The power of Electric Yerevan.” Open Democracy, July 6, 2015: “The corruption and mismanagement of ENA reflect wider problems of governance and the political environment in Russia. When Russian state-owned companies (in which theft is not the exception but the norm) take over infrastructure in neighbouring countries, this is, in effect, ‘exporting corruption’.”
Popova, Polina. “Freedom of speech under fire in Ukraine.” The Hill, June 16, 2015. (The story becomes convoluted as official Ukraine responds to the assault of Russian propaganda: writes Popova, “Some journalists fear that the ministry was actually created to muffle internal opposition, rather than tackling Russian propaganda. It’s not surprising that it has earned the Orwellian nickname “the Ministry of Truth”).
Not a few Russian intellectuals, depressed by the Orwellian state of Russian public discourse, have come to see Ukrainian cities as the hope for the future of Russian culture. In this light, the Russian invasion of Ukraine to protect freedom of speech in the Russian language is perhaps better compared to America invading Canada to save the welfare state or North Korea invading South Korea to protect capitalism.
Sanctions have been up for a while; oil prices have been down for a while: such broad conditions brought about by large maneuvers, like “North American energy independence“, may have effects.
As a trading partner, Erdogan may have a little more edge with Putin these days; as a Sunni Muslim looking over the border and watching Daesh and other al-Qaeda-type groups continuing to rough up and tear apart Syria’s landscape, he has cause to let the scouring continue. The teleology on which he has campaigned pits him against Putin-Assad-Khamenei’s interests on the Hezbollahian (militant Shiite) side of the great divide most immediately applicable to the continuing Great Struggle of Evil Against Evil in Syria, the modern and moderate, whoever they may be (ye shall know them one still distant day by their pro-Semitic / pro-Zionist lingo), having been killed, dispersed, rendered irrelevant, or otherwise sidelined for some years now.
While generally attaching Erdogan to Putin-Khamenei as another medieval-minded autocrat with strong interest in sustaining feudal models of power against the democratic west, there may be some unraveling within this drift as depressed oil revenues (for Russia), other punitive measures (like sanctions), and some military repositioning take place in response to Russia’s aggression in Crimea. For Erdogan, whether he likes it or not (I’m starting to appreciate that phrase), Turkey remains a NATO member with a significant modern constituency. While Erdogan wants his White Palace — I think he’s moved in, I’m not sure — the whole world is watching in an open and robust global information environment. For that, both leaders may have a little less operating room as despots than they may have had 25 years ago.
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The “big picture” — how the feudal world may change as the modern one moves around it — is easier (for me) to see today than was the case just a few years ago.
From an amateur’s perspective, the smaller pictures might require country specialization and language ability. It’s just easier following heads of state than the numerous personalities, agencies, and committees involved in producing the world’s political landscapes and their narratives.
In September 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted that he could, at will, occupy any Eastern European capital in two days. This apparently spontaneous utterance reveals, probably more than Russia’s new official defense doctrine, Moscow’s true assessment of NATO’s capabilities, cohesion, and will to resist. In an echo of Soviet tactics, it also reflects Putin’s reflexive recourse to intimidation—e.g., unwarranted boasting about Russian military capabilities and intentions—as a negotiating strategy. In 2014 alone, Moscow repeatedly threatened the Baltic and Nordic states and civilian airliners, heightened intelligence penetration, deployed unprecedented military forces against those states, intensified overflights and submarine reconnaissance, mobilized nuclear forces and threats, deployed nuclear-capable forces in Kaliningrad, menaced Moldova, and openly violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987.
Such combat proves not a fast game but an agonizingly slow grind.
Where the finger-pointing takes place — how could it not be taking place offstage? — some portion must point back to Moscow and Tehran — Putin and Khamenei — for perverting a mild people’s revolution in Damascus to hold together the Ghosts of the Soviet and the maintenance of old and new privileged through time-honored and familiar but perfectly despicable feudal practices.
War robs you of everything including your humanity. After the war, things are never like they used to be – it takes several generations to eradicate or simply to forget its tragic consequences.
However, all the valuable things, including peace, have their price. Most Europeans naively believe that it’s been paid by their grandparents and great-grandparents during WWI and WWII, but the truth is that this valuable thing is extremely fragile and requires continuous work to keep it alive.
By contrast, Cockburn takes a generous view of the regime’s belated and brief confrontation with ISIS. He has pronounced Assad’s army its “main military opponent,” deserving of Western support. But facts tell a different story. According to a Carter Center study, the regime has spared ISIS in 90 percent of its attacks; and an IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center (JTIC) study finds that in 2014, the regime targeted ISIS in only 6 percent of its attacks. (ISIS in turn directed its fire on the regime in only 13 percent its operations.)
Since Aboud Dandachi laid out the shaping of the battle by Assad forces in his refreshingly honest and entertaining history and polemic, The Doctor, The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between the World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict (2014), the feudal perversion of a modest pro-democracy protest in 2011 into a brutal epic one might title “Assad vs The Terrorists” has been apparent but the statistics on how it was done never so well relayed.
BackChannels (oh the bias!) commonly invokes the term “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” in place of Bashar al-Assad alone to play up the axis, its Russo-Iranian core, and define the conflict in Syria as other and greater than “civil war”, a mere internal dispute, the greater dispute being that between medieval absolute power and modern democratic distributed or popular power.
In reacting to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine in early 2014, the US government did not call the Sixth Fleet into action; it did not ban all exports to Russia; it did not stop all cultural and educational exchanges. Rather, key elites close to “a senior Russian government official”—President Vladimir Putin—were targeted with asset seizures and visa bans.
Probably the most serious international crisis since the end of the Cold War, and the White House targets individuals? It seemed an odd response to some observers. But it made sense. At last, after 14 years of dealing with Putin as a legitimate head of state, the US government has finally acknowledged that he has built a system based on massive predation on a level not seen in Russia since the czars. Transparency International estimates the annual cost of bribery in Russia at $300 billion, roughly equal to the entire gross domestic product of Denmark, or many times higher than the Russian budgetary allocations for health and education. Capital flight totaled $335 billion from 2005 to 2013, or about 5 percent of GDP. But then in 2014, with the ruble and oil prices tumbling, it reached more than $150 billion—a figure that has swollen Western bank coffers but made Russia the most unequal of all economies, in which, according to Credit Suisse, 110 billionaires control 35 percent of the country’s wealth.
There’s now plenty of BackChannels opinion on “Syndicate Red Brown Green”, a clever collection of books (in the “The Russian Section” of the library), but no prescriptions and not much hope for those in the Russian oppositions being ground away or controlled for irrelevance by the “Vertical of Power”. The states of affairs may be ascertained swiftly with a glance at the web sites of well known critics.
Let BackChannels know when the outlook of each brightens.
The report, titled Putin. War, asserts that at least 150 Russian military personnel were killed during a Ukrainian offensive in August 2014. A further 70 — including 17 paratroopers from the city of Ivanovo — were reportedly killed during fighting near the bitterly contested town of Debaltseve in January and February.
Families of those killed in 2014 were given 2 million rubles ($39,000) by the government in exchange for signing a promise not to discuss the matter publicly, the report claims.
The great forces today are not in the “masses” or the “voting public” but in the construction and intentions of “adventurous governments” and otherwise integrated and stable ones. Among the “adventurous”: Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Orban, Erdogan, among others; “integrated and stable”: the classically liberal democracies of the world. The figure of “Everyman” shrugs before, sometimes beneath, these altogether large forces.
In January 1953 the MGB was officially accused of “lack of vigilance” in hunting down the conspirators. The Soviet news agency Tass made the sensational announcement that for the past few years world Zionism and Western intelligence agencies had been conspiring with “a terrorist group” of Jewish doctors “to wipe out the leadership of the Soviet Union.” During the final two months of Stalin’s rule, the MGB struggled to demonstrate its heightened vigilance by pursuing the perpetrators of this non-existent plot. Its anti-Zionist campaign was, in reality, little more than a thinly disguised anti-Semitic pogrom. Shortly before Stalin’s sudden death in March 1953 Mitrokhin was ordered to investigate the alleged Zionist connections of the Pravda correspondent in Paris, Yuri Zhukov, who had come under suspicion because of his wife’s Jewish origins. Mitrokhin had the impression that Stalin’s brutal security supremo, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, was planning to implicate Zhukov in the supposed Jewish doctor’s plot. A few weeks after Stalin’s funeral, however, Beria suddenly announced that the plot had never existed, and exonerated the alleged conspirators.
Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Sword and The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. Page 2. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
In the “Russian Section” (of the in-house library), the above title is appended “UR” for unread. BackChannels hopes to update that status soon. Even so, with the theme of anti-Semitism emerging on the second page of a mighty classic, so it appears, among the scholars, the same may inform the character of today’s “Solidarity” organizations and their updates on Soviet disinformation and propaganda programs that produced the privileged and the privileges of the Party.
These historic incidents and the portent of books like The Sword and The Shield may be easily accessed by the lay public as well as scholars, but time having become the new space, information has become the vegetation on the landscape, and large packages so easily spied on Amazon may not be so easily opened. With each passing year — the volume was published in 1999 — fewer and fewer readers, lay or scholar, are likely to have the experience of seminal works. For the most part, the public won’t know, won’t have personal or transmitted historic memory, giving cognizant autocrats freedom to deliver the past to their constituents.
The ultimate goal of state censorship is self-censorship among the citizenry. If you can get the people to police themselves, and each other, it takes part of the burden off the state and also makes people complicit in their own oppression. And so it’s disturbing to see things take this turn in Putin’s Russia. As the New York Times reports, Moscow bookstores removed from their shelves–voluntarily (sort of)–their copies of Maus, the pathbreaking graphic novel of Nazi crimes against the Jews. It’s the “voluntarily” part of this that stands out, and makes it clear that Putinism has not been, and will not be, good for the Jews of Russia.
UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said on Jan. 15 that the continued violence in Syria is a “disgrace” and that the Syria conflict is “the largest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War.” Syrians have replaced Afghans as the world’s largest refugee population, with 7.6 million displaced and 3.3 million refugees, in addition to a death toll estimated at 200,000, and the return of typhoid, measles and polio to the country.
On Jan. 14, de Mistura got a boost from US Secretary of State John Kerry, who praised UN and Russian efforts to broker a settlement in Syria.
This blog has supported the notion that yesterday’s communist elite are today’s state capitalists backed and defended by security fascists motivated by money and a new fascist nationalism. That’s a complicated way of suggesting that “Old Red has met New Brown” — and the old Soviets are today’s New Nationalists.
Along that line, and while scanning, collecting, posting, and commenting on news from journalism’s “second row seat to history”, one cannot help but note that certain relationships seem defined by common interest in “political absolutism”: Putin – Assad – Khamenei | Putin – Orban – Erdogan – (Khamenei). The dry outer skin of the onion wants another story: secular vs religious power; Sunni vs Shiite teleology; Iran vs Iraq. However, lo and behold, as the Internet helps political wonks tear back the layers of the onion, Iran is in Iraq in a large evident way (and given the malignant psychology involved in men who would be as if gods — or just one — themselves, the Russo-Syrian-Iranian alliance may be what was in back of Daesh, for if one is to be as God, one would naturally manage the entire battle, not just one side of it.
As Putin was in the business of spending about $51 billion on the winter olympics in Sochi (the figure is disputed but still well into the tens of billions), he appears to have been thoroughly out of the business of tempering Assad’s response to a moderate, modern, and democratically updating revolutionary “Arab Spring” challenge or, Mr. Nice Guy, offering Russian aid to ameliorate the damage, displacement, and injury brought to millions of innocents. After all, it really wasn’t his concern, was it, whatever happened to Syrians.
The suggestion that Assad chose to bomb the daylights out of noncombatant zones while holding off on the al-Qaeda-types who came into theater of war may be borne out in the casualty, IDP, and refugee figures created in the monstrosity that is today the deeply polarized and globally signal “Syrian Civil War”, for while NATO and the western world press for classical liberal values in governance, it appears Putin, Assad, and Khamenei together press for immense systems of abuse, coercion, enslavement, and exploitation on the mighty piers of fear and patronage.
Call Syria an “axle of power” 🙂 — if the three dictators get away with driving over the state’s constituents to an inherently fascist conclusion, they might well drive the same anywhere else — and the end of that kind of power: the power to make others suffer capriciously, with impunity, without heart, without justice, without limits.
Still, Secretary of State John Kerry declared on Wednesday that the United States welcomed both initiatives. He made no call for Mr. Assad’s resignation, a notable omission from Mr. Kerry, who has typically insisted on it in public remarks. Instead, he spoke of Mr. Assad as a leader who needed to change his policies.
“It is time for President Assad, the Assad regime, to put their people first and to think about the consequences of their actions, which are attracting more and more terrorists to Syria, basically because of their efforts to remove Assad,” Mr. Kerry said.
Name the tyrants — communist, nationalist, Islamist (red-brown-green) — who have with grace backed away from or stepped down from power.
The Kremlin may be the main winner in the Lebanon war. Israel has been attacked with Soviet Kalashnikovs and Katyushas, Russian Fajr-1 and Fajr-3 rockets, Russian AT-5 Spandrel antitank missiles and Kornet antitank rockets. Russia’s outmoded weapons are now all the rage with terrorists everywhere in the world, and the bad guys know exactly where to get them. The weapons cases abandoned by Hezbollah were marked: “Customer: Ministry of Defense of Syria. Supplier: KBP, Tula, Russia.”
BackChannels 