The Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) split off from Al Nusra in 2013 as the Syrian Civil War progressed. Geopoli.info has extensively documented its origins, where its fighters come from, parties that benefit from its action, unholy alliances and Russian-speaking commanders. In June 2014, as ISIS was making gains in Iraq, getting widespread publicity we came across a video from Eastern Ukraine – introducing “Islamic state of Donbass and Lugant” (“Lugant” is made up of words “Lugansk” and “Levant”) in Eastern Ukraine.
Dear colleagues, health care, education, social support, social security must become issues of true public good, true public value. They need to serve our entire society.
We cannot imitate education.
We cannot imitate health care or social security.
We cannot imitate caring for people.
We need to learn to respect ourselves.
We need to look at this important notion such as reputation and that reputation of a specific hospital, school, institution, or social office is a building stone in the overall reputation of our country . . . .”
Education, healthcare, and the social welfare system should become a true public benefit and serve all citizens of the country. Attention to the people cannot be faked. You cannot simulate teaching, medical assistance or social care. We have to learn to feel respect for ourselves and honour reputation. It’s the reputation of individual hospitals, schools, universities and social institutions that form the country’s overall reputation.
Mama NATO may withstand some kvetching as and if President Putin makes good on this pivotal gambit to now transform around his “vertical of power” a breathtaking neo-feudal oligarchy into a rule-of-law abiding and meritocratic capitalist social democratic society.
That’s pretty good advertising for $4.8 million, but there’s a long way to go on establishing a right way, and that way might include revisiting the politics attending 1) more than nine million Syrian refugees in a “show” (not really) designed to transform a modest revolution into a viciously polarized civil war, 2) the creation of a deeply anti-Semitic and nearly nuclear armed Iran, 3) a spiteful incursion into Crimea, Ukraine presenting itself as Russian nationalist fascism, and 4) perhaps some still post-Soviet meddling in the middle east (no one watching has missed Mikhail Bogdanov’s chat with the PFLP – nor missed the related murderous assault in a Jerusalem synagogue) as well as in Hungary where Viktor Orban has pursued an increasingly despotic course aligned with Putin’s outlook.
Still, whether “imitate” or “simulate” was the verb invoked, the want of integrity, of observable-measurable progress, and the want of a good reputation (on top of the bad assed one) seems to have found a place at the top on Russia’s public agenda.
The Russian government strives to paint the current Ukrainian government as fascist, to justify their aggression in Ukraine. In fact, when synagogues in Odessa were covered with Nazi graffiti, it was the leader of the Right Sector who joined the Rabbi in painting over the offensive marks.
Also during his lecture, English showed a photo of a man with a swastika on a sign and a flag, to show how many Nazis are in Ukraine. But the flag was not a Ukrainian flag, it was the flag of the pro-Russian separatists of Donetsk.
“The gunmen were armed quite seriously, they had everything they needed in their arsenal including machine guns and grenade launchers,” Kadyrov said in an interview on the radio station Echo of Moscow. He added that authorities had been expecting an attack and were prepared, though the assault was anticipated for Dec. 12, Russia’s Constitution Day.
Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013.
Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Michael Henry Heim, translator. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
It isn’t simply that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” as the novel’s most famous line has it. Kundera was showing us not only how one major event sweeps away another, but just how hard it is to remember at all, how disorienting to our own point of view and sense of time it is to try to follow what is going on around us.
In retaliation for losing Ukraine in the Russian-dominated CIS, Putin seized control of Crimea after a bogus referendum in which 97 percent of the population allegedly voted. The same thing was about to happen in the heavily Russian populated East of Ukraine but halted due to International Sanctions.
Corruption is a major obstacle to doing business in Russia, and petty corruption is common. The business environment suffers from inconsistent application of laws and lack of transparency in public administration. The public procurement sector is notoriously corrupt, with fraud related to government tenders costing the state billions of dollars each year.
http://www.business-anti-corruption.com/country-profiles/europe-central-asia/russia/snapshot.aspx – September 2014.
Corruption claims related to the 2018 Russia and 2022 Qatar World Cups have been circulating. In mid-November, FIFA cleared Qatar and Russia of any wrongdoing following an in-depth report by Michael Garcia, FIFA’s leading U.S. investigator and chairman of the investigatory chamber of the FIFA Ethics Committee. After FIFA cleared both nations, Garcia slammed the organization for not properly representing the facts. FIFA is once more reviewing his report.
Inexplicably, President Zeman called on his EU and NATO partners to accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea on the grounds that the 1954 decree that transferred the region to Ukraine was “stupid.” He went on Russian television and denounced the sanctions as counterproductive. As far as the fighting in eastern Ukraine was concerned, Zeman argued, the West had no right to interfere since it was a civil war.
Igor Luke’s piece fits with BackChannel’s own observations about despotic power (e.g., “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”) and drifts toward it (e.g., “Putin-Orban”) and explanations for the same developed in the books listed in the “Russian Section” of this blog’s incredible library.
I started this post close to the start of Putin’s address (in the above RT video) and may have 30 minutes left before the same draws to a close. 🙂 The Russian President’s emphasis returning capital flight from Russia and developing technology may correspond both to sanctions and reduced oil prices as well perhaps to either desire (that would be nice) or the purchase of time (more likely, chatyping here as a skeptical blogger) to continue developing neo-feudal nationalism and avenues of export for it in eastern Europe.
With loose reference here to political psychology, one may apply the notion that autocrats understand one another better than they do their natural enemies: democratic modern socialists and open society humanists. Still, as I listen to Putin’s translator – about 56 minutes in — and remarks about population and health care, the turn westward (don’t tell him!) is unmistakable. Inside of two minutes (and a little more), capitalization, equality, health care, economic and industrial forecasting, education and training, human development and achievement have been injected into the address.
Will Putin — and the oligarch super billionaires, all 110 or thereabouts — walk the turnaround talk?
Transcribed:
Dear colleagues, health care, education, social support, social security must become issues of true public good, true public value. They need to serve our entire society.
We cannot imitate education.
We cannot imitate health care or social security.
We cannot imitate caring for people.
We need to learn to respect ourselves.
We need to look at this important notion such as reputation and that reputation of a specific hospital, school, institution, or social office is a building stone in the overall reputation of our country . . . .”
If Putin’s neo-feudal and vertical-around-the-power inner circle, nomenklatura, and FSB turn about to embrace integrity and place it in value one step above loyalty — now that will take courage! — well, hell, I’d campaign and vote for him!
*
Psychology treats persons in part in their capacity as problems unto themselves, never mind their effects on others — everyone may need help, but there’s just one patient and experience of mind at a time.
Political psychology by definition needs must deal with both the vagaries of personality and the social organization of the same. By inference, we may expect the individual reprobate to consider and find a way of cleaning up his act and at practically any cost: as much becomes for a person an ethical, moral, and spiritual matter, a matter between himself and God or himself, history, nature, and time.
That is man confronting himself and how that story goes matters most to himself.
Putin’s reflection, as I am listening to it, involves the society he has created around himself, and that society has displaced immense wealth from the Russian people: will the owners of the state now return their stakes and set off the process of redistribution down through a new meritocratic Russia?
Noblesse oblige?
It might work.
One notices with people that efforts to improve in one area often yield improvements in other areas as well.
Best advice (if anyone’s reading): draw down the curtain on political theater. Locally. Globally.
Become real.
And please stop entertaining the PFLP, using the middle east to distract from eastern Europe, and much else that confuses intimidation, pandering, and patronage — and the fuller suite of degrading, demeaning, and dehumanizing methods — with legitimate power.
Remember what you said: you cannot imitate education, healthcare or social security, or caring for people.
I’ll add my two cents: you cannot imitate integrity either.
Take your time, for time has time in abundance for change.
Doha-Washington may be competing with Tehran-Moscow (with Damascus between them), and the point of both would seem to be to have a scourge, accidentally or deliberately, worth elimination and the claim of rescue.
Assad managed to turn an “Arab Spring” revolution toward democracy and modernity into a deeply medieval and polarized civil war pitting his “secular” regime against Islamic extremists. It didn’t start out that way — and missing from the fields of battle: about nine million displaced Syrians.
On the Sunni side of this geopolitical knot (a knot because the Soviet Union was not finished off but merely transferred to the KGB, which has pursued a deeply feudal and equally thieving — internally and externally — course) stands an apparently duplicitous alliance that started out intending to knock Iran out of Syria (taking care of Hezbollah on the way) and produce an updated Islamic.
Things are just not working out the way they seem to have been planned — and much of that planning may have been to promote one appearance or another of a version of political reality. Again: there’s too much of theater in the combat.
The tail isn’t wagging the dog.
The whole dog is wagging the dog, from the tip o’ the nose to the end o’ the tail, U.S.-NATO and perhaps a Sunni-aligned alliance on one side while on the other: Neo-Feudal Russia, today a KGB/FSB Dictatorship, and its familiar “Axis of Evil” partners, Khamenei-Setad, Bashar the Butcher, and assorted anti-American and national socialist whatnot worldwide.
And hanging over every inch of the latest lightning in this storm: the immense and darker cloud of a nuclear umbrella.
In Tehran, the deputy chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Brigadier-General Massoud Jazayeri also denied any collaboration. Iran considered the US responsible for Iraq’s “unrest and problems”, he said, adding that the US would “definitely not have a place in the future of that country”.
I telegraph online impression via schematics like “mouth –> ear –> mind –> heart system” to get a much larger constellation in thought down to something almost memorable.
🙂
Nonetheless, reduction goes only so far: “overviewing” picks up some of the slack, which is often what happens here, and then, well, one must turn off the computer in favor of lengthier reading, which lately for me has been Pacepa & Rychlak’s Disinformation, an account of KGB’s accomplishments in the black arts accompanying libel, misdirection, misguidance, slander, and — I say this with “malignant narcissism” in mind — theatrical production.
Writing for The Guardian, Simon Tisdale recently commented on Putin and “The New Cold War” (11/19/2014) — “Last weekend’s G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, showed just how raw nerves have become – over Ukraine and, more broadly, over what the west has come to see as a pattern of expansionist, confrontational and often illegal behaviour by the Putin regime . . . ” — but perhaps not (yet) as aggression on two fronts.
In fact, my sources suggest that PFLP representatives met with Mikhail Bogdanov, the Russian President’s Special Representative for the Middle East and Deputy Foreign Minister, earlier in November (possibly Sunday, November 2, 2014) and discussed, among other things, S300 missile shipments placed on hold in 2013.
“I suggested to Foreign Minister Lavrov that we intensify intelligence cooperation with respect to ISIL and other counter-terrorism challenges of the region and we agreed to do so,” Kerry said just after the meeting, using an alternative name for IS jihadists.
As Sarajevo would ultimately like to join NATO and the European Union, they understand that every few years the Americans and the EU will put pressure on them to reduce their ties to Iran, particularly to its intelligence services. A sort of Balkan kabuki theater inevitably follows, with promises by the SDA to crack down hard, this time. A few Iranian “diplomats” are discreetly asked to leave the country, some of the more overt Iranian intelligence fronts in Bosnia shut their doors, usually only temporarily, and the Americans and Europeans are bought off for a couple years. And the Iranians remain.
It is believed that MOIS cooperates with other intelligence agencies. One of these agencies is the Russian SVR, the KGB’s replacement. Despite the two agencies’ dissimilar doctrines and the complicated relationship between Iran and Russia in the past, they managed to cooperate in the 1990s, based not only on their intention of limiting U.S. political clout in Central Asia but also on their mutual efforts to stifle prospective ethnic turbulence. The SVR trained not only hundreds of Iranian agents but also numerous Russian agents inside Iran to equip Iranian intelligence with signals equipment in their headquarters compound. It is unclear whether this relationship is ongoing and whether the two intelligence agencies continue to cooperate.
From page 41 of the above cited piece: “Bin Laden’s phone records, obtained by U.S. investigators working on the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, show that 10 percent of phone calls made by Bin Laden and his lieutenants were to Iran.”
Khamenei, South America
The Mexican law student was surprised by how easy it was to get into Iran two years ago. By merely asking questions about Islam at a party, he managed to pique the interest of Iran’s top diplomat in Mexico. Months later, he had a plane ticket and a scholarship to a mysterious school in Iran as a guest of the Islamic Republic.
Next came the start of classes and a second surprise: There were dozens of others just like him.
While Iranian South American “feed and seed” programs may be continuing, the gist of a 2014 Congressional Research Service summary (by Mark P. Sullivan and June S. Beittel) suggests Khamenei’s regime may not be making as much progress as it would like. Rather than excerpt, I’ll leave it to the reader to look-see on this document: Latin America: Terrorism Issues. August 2014.
Dawisha, Karen. Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013.
Soldatov, Andrei and Irena Borogan. The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB. New York: Public Affairs, 2010.
The delegation stressed that Syria has been exposed to a U.S.-western-Zionist conspiracy, which is backed by some regimes in the region with the aim of liquidating the Palestinian issue since Syria is the main supporter of the cause.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán openly admires the ‘illiberal’ models of Russia and China. Critics say his Fidesz party is using Putin-like tactics to cut the funding of newspapers and NGOs that conflict with the Orbán government.
Putin is clearly the dominant force in the relationship. Orban may be currently the master of all he surveys within his own borders but externally, he looks increasing like the leader of a client state that is gently but perceptively gravitating towards Moscow’s sphere of influence. Which in itself is a remarkable state of affairs considering the residual concerns over the 1956 invasion by the Soviet Union.
The radicals, of course, are most vocal. Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP, the U.K.’s anti-immigrant, anti-EU party, has expressed his admiration for Putin “as an operator, not a human being.” Farage has demanded that the West stop opposing Russian actions in Ukraine and ally itself with Putin in the fight against Islamic extremism. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s ultranationalist Front National, is another Putin admirer. And Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, has praised the Russian leader as a “pure democrat.”
I want to confess that I did something foolish once when I was young. Back in 1993, I abandoned my university studies in California and returned to Moscow. European nations had signed the Maastricht Treaty and I dreamed that Russia would join the European Union.
While the U.S. and Russia have pledged to share intelligence on the group, Russia—one of the main international backers of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government—is not a member of the U.S.-led “broad coalition” against ISIS announced last month. As one Russian foreign ministry official recently put it, “We do not expect any invitations and we are not going to buy entry tickets.”
Like others of his generation, he is part of a cadre of men who came of age in a massive, multinational, nuclear-armed superstate in the early 1970s. The faceless cogs who made this system work were unremarkable people like Putin, trained in ideology and imbued with the false faith that the USSR’s greatest days were yet to come.
In their later years, these men have experienced the normal anxieties and embarrassments of middle age. (In Putin’s case, she’s a gymnast young enough to be his daughter.) But middle age for the sovoks also brought many to realize they spent their lives serving a state based on lies and held together almost entirely by force.
So spend a moment imagining the better time for which these men yearn.
“In the issue of oil, the economy has not been the sole important factor,” Rouhani said. “International politics and plots” have also affected prices, he said, without elaborating.
NCRI – The Iranian regime is facing a deepening financial crisis as the price of crude oil plunges on international markets.
The regime’s budget deficit was reported by the state-run Ebtekar daily newspaper on November 8 issue as totalling 1.5 billion dollars. But economists believe the true figure is much higher.
Russia, whose economy is forecast by the central bank to run zero growth next year, is struggling under the weight of a plummeting ruble and sanctions imposed over the conflict in Ukraine. Brent crude, the grade that underpins prices for Urals, Russia’s main export blend, is set for a record losing streak amid speculation that OPEC will refrain from cutting production to ease concern of a supply glut.
A pressing question lies in determining what effects considerable cuts in the price of oil, the glut in oil supplies, and the remarkable growth of the U.S. oil industry, has and will have on international politics as well as on the global economy. Almost certainly, the United States and Western countries will benefit both politically and economically, while most of the members of OPEC, and countries including Russia, Iran, and the Islamic State of Iraq, and Syria, will be hurt. More broadly, there will be a global economic benefit as lower energy costs will help both producers and consumers.
Abductions, beheading, mass slaughter — headline grabbers!
Commodity pricing?
Squint.
While post-feudal North America has been working on greater achievement in energy independence, it appears some oil cash flow addicts have puffed and bluffed their way into an anticipated but unaddressed cash crunch with consequences looming on the near horizon, this perhaps despite deep pocket brags.
Dawisha, Karen. Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Gessen, Masha. The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012.
Harding, Luke. Expelled: A Journalist’s Descent Into the Russian Mafia State. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Judah, Ben. Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013.
Remnick, David. Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. New York: Random House, 1993.
Smith, Hedrick. The Russians. New York: Times Books, 1983.
Soldatov, Andrei and Irena Borogan. The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB. New York: Public Affairs, 2010.
Our iddle biddle web has gurgled and Googled long enough for anyone to block text, right-click the mouse, and find on the web the alphanumeric string wanted and in the form desired.
The contemporary URL takes you to something the author specifically wants to show you.
As I would rather write blog posts, I suppose, than catalog the 2,000+ volumes that surround me, the library section of this blog remains sparse. However, in the way of web-driven and curiosity-based fate, it appears I’ve got some linear shelf space supporting a “Russian Section” and that listed above this section is it.
How about naming names (which from — I will call it “MoscVegas”– Karen Dawisha does in abundance)?
For this simple blog, a reduction to a few of the simple popular nouns of the opposition might suffice: Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov, Gary Kasparov, Michael Khodorkovsky, Yevgeny Roizman, Pussy Riot, etc. (the abbreviation of laziness, but on the web, nouns lead to nouns: one cannot compete with that comprehensive aspect of machine compilation given the labors of scads of academics and journalists contributing daily to wealth in knowledge).
A few moments ago, the search string (using the Google engine) “Putin, journalists” brought this gem to the top of the list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya – “We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it’s total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial—whatever our special services, Putin’s guard dogs, see fit.[17]”
The number of political groups that are inclined to support Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is growing, both in the ruling parties of the European countries and in the opposition; from Hungary’s Victor Orban and his ruling Fidesz party to the far-right opposition parties that are performing spectacularly well in national elections, such as Marie Le Pen and her Front National of France. Sympathy and support also comes from Hungary’s Jobbik radical nationalists, the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn, Austria’s Freedom Party, and Italy’s Lega Nord, just to name a few.
I would expect Russo-Iranian methods in the development of power and wealth to expand until stopped cold. The interior mythology in both units, to be clinical about it, have zero incentive to stall or stop aggression on the basis of the political accommodations and levers owned by others. That implacable will may be buttressed by an equally sociopathic view of humanity. For evidence of that in addition to Ukraine (and how Yanukovych milked it): Bashar al-Assad’s behavior in Syria.
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