01 Wednesday Aug 2018
22 Friday Jun 2018
Posted in Books, Journal, Library, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Russia
Tags
contemporary Russia, Jehovah's Witnesses, Orwellian state, Pentacostal Christians, refuseniks, religious persecution, Soviet Era, Soviet history, Soviet injustice, Soviet intolerance
In the news at the time:
At the unusual session, General Shchelokov was said to have told the Jews that he had heard of the alleged beatings on a newscast by the British Broadcasting Corporation. He insisted that he was not in charge of security at the reception office.
“I would never permit beating,” Mr. Shcharansky quoted the minister as having said. “If it were my affair, I would arrest the organizers.”
Four of the Jews were missing tonight. They were Boris Chernobylsky, a radio engineer; Arkady Polishchuk, a former editor of the magazine Asia and Africa Today; Viktor Yelistratov and Mikhail Kremen, both also radio engineers. It was not known whether they had been arrested.
Simpler, David K. “Jews in Moscow Resume Visa Sit-In.” The New York Times, October 22, 1976.
The missing “refuseniks” plus one — Arkady Polishchuk notes in his account of that distant day that he had not applied for a visa but was with a crew that had — knew where they were, and the one doing the remembering through his memoir was in that place called pain.
A doctor in the Sklifosofsky Institute said that I had two cracked ribs and recommended to wind a towel around my trunk. He refused to give me an x-ray film or a written reference. An exhausted night nurse of this principal trauma center muttered, “If we give a reference to every hoodlum beaten in a street fight the country would soon run out of ink and paper.”
They certainly had shortages of x-ray films and painkillers.
p. 211
Having been Jewish but not at the time a refusenik, Polishchuk would similarly take up the cause of Pentacostal Christians persecuted by the Soviet Union for their possession of faith. With empathy and wry humor, he conveys what it’s like for the criminalized pious:
“The local KGB should pray for you every day,” I said. “Without you, they would’ve stagnated here, without an increase in rank and salary.”
After this lively exchange of views on the role of light and darkness in the spiritual life of mankind, we all crossed the kitchen garden planted with heavenly potatoes, passed by green onions and fragrant dill, and, through a narrow opening in the fence, began making our way to the house of Vera Shchukin. One by one or in pairs, we used the most roundabout paths between houses. The village was asleep. Almost all windows were now unlit.
I wiped sweat from my forehead and whispered to Goretoi, “Muggy.”
He said nothing. I couldn’t stop talking. “For how long have you been aware that this gathering is prohibited by articles 142 and 227 of the Criminal Code?”
“For as long as I’ve believed in my Savior,” he whispered.
p. 244
Near the time of this writing, Polishchuk’s telling of the plight of Pentecostal Christians may take on an eerie resonance as Capo, Colonel, President, Emperor Vladimir Putin’s government goes after the community of Jehova’s Witnesses in today’s Russia:
“It began about 10 o’clock in the evening and didn’t wind up until 4 a.m.,” Tatyana Petrova said of the raid. “I didn’t see how it started because I was in the kitchen, but I heard my husband go to the door. I heard a woman introduce herself as someone from the electric company. She said she needed to read the meter. My husband opened the door and then a whole crowd of people pushed into the apartment.”
In Polishchuk’s day:
Children giggled and jostled each other in the ribs. The men were pushed up against the walls. Two old women sat close to the invisible gap between the door and its frame, in hope of catching a breath of fresh air. On stools sat an old man, white as chalk, and two pregnant women. One of them, with a hand-copied New Testament, offered me her chair, but I shook my head and clung to the wall. When nearly forty persons had squeezed into the house, the deacon turned on the light, and ducked outside to check if it escaped to the street.
p. 244
Life’s a long enough journey for most, but in the Soviet Union, the unutterable sadness of situations posed against the boasted heroic strength of the state must have made it seem so much longer. “Alik”, when referred to with affection, sent to write about a community for the blind discovers instead of a refuge for those so afflicted a familiar metaphor and dismal reality: “. . . a leper colony. There was nothing I could write about them. I was frantically looking for a way to say at least half-truths about their everyday concerns instead of reporting on the contribution of the blind to our common cause of building socialism.”
In the wings always and frequently spotlighted: spooks . . . KGB — as colleagues (around whom to be cautious) on publications; as agents sent to disconnect his home phone before the refusenik Natan Sharansky could relay a statement by Andrei Sakharov to a listener in Canada; as minders, followers, and thugs.
The games played in Putin’s courts today seem no different then they were then. Polishchuk covered one of the trials of Dr. Mikhail Stern whose latest crime had been to give his son “a written permission” required in support of the application of the same to emigrate. The whole becomes an absurd nightmare of examinations of minute evidence to none.
While the phantoms of the Soviet live on in the spiritual descendants of the KGB, perhaps the haunting swirls on in the earlier victims of their omnipresent bureaucracy, observation, manipulation, sabotage, entrapment and framing, capricious “justice”, and punishment.
Wikipedia. “Soviet Dissidents”.
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23 Wednesday May 2018
Tags
kleptocracy, malignant narcissism, medieval v modern, political absolutism v democracy, Political Perceptual Control, realpolitik, Russia, Vladimir Putin
Putin: leader of nationalist Russia, master of “realpolitik” — leverage, punishment, reward — the Boss of bosses, capricious and absolute.
Whatever the game, why play one side or the other when you can own the whole board?
KGB Colonel, President, Emperor Putin has taken Russia back the one giant step to an authoritarian system reinforced by secret police — today’s FSB supports more staff per capita than ever did the KGB — capable of presenting events for public political perceptual control as with the Moscow Apartment Bombings and the Russian Army’s after-hours (deeply unofficial) brutalizing of Chechen villages in such a way as to drive the men into the waiting camps of Chechen rebels. He has succeeded in abetting greater chaos and conflict in the world, especially in Syria, while balancing the tension between adversaries that may stall change but keep all of the businesses, licit and perhaps illicit, running.
BackChannels credits Putin with turning Erdogan’s pretty little head back toward the feudal glory of the sultanate — or something like it — with the help of Turkish Stream, encouraging the family business in Hungary, and aiding with the election of the formerly more autocratic President (“Fake News”!) Trump in the United States (the French, better knowing what they’re about, didn’t quite go for his Marine Le Pen; Trump, BC presumes, has been tempered by having gotten himself into a job involving personalities as large as himself and powers greater than known in his organization — America’s democracy has not been overwhelmingly wowed or easily walked over). The popular perception of Putin may respond opposite the viewer’s interests: for old lefties, he’s the world’s greatest reactionary and using revived militarism and the Russian Orthodox Church to assuage bad feelings attending the insult of expanding financial hardship associated with related ambitions in Syria and Ukraine and, ultimately, the way the guy at the top gets his hooks into the best performing businesses.
Why not?
In Russia, there’s protest and resistance to Putin, but there is no competition for the power he has amassed and his ability to . . . rearrange the world along feudal lines.
And for “righties”, he’s still the go-to for “socialist” dictatorships like Assad’s.
Never mind that Assad via the KGB-style political theatrical “Assad v The Terrorists” has been building Syria down, enough so, and so desperately so, for Putin to permanently expand Russia’s military footprint in Hafez’s old sandbox.
After the one step backward into 19th Century and earlier Russian paternal authoritarianism, aristocracy, imperialism, and resurgent nationalism, one may wonder what may be the “two steps forward” if any are ever taken as needs must be: whether Putin likes it or not, the Russian Federation is, alas, multicultural and perhaps yearning — as Navalny might have it — for the liberal devilishness that are “rule of law” and “responsive and responsible governance”.
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15 Tuesday May 2018
Tags
exploiting the masses, Hamas, medieval v modern, middle east conflict, Palestinian, Palestinian history, PLO, political blackmail, Soviet Era, totalitarianism
The Palestinian liberation movement descends directly from the Soviet Era and Moscow’s interest in leveraging grievance into the political power familiar to the world’s most piratical dictatorships. This is not to excuse western perfidy on parts of the global far right in the 20th Century, but to note where the phoniness in Palestinian politics originated.
At the end of WWII, what Adolph could not hold, Uncle Joe picked up and although representing a very different system from that of the German fascists, the feudal authoritarianism was there to encourage similar drift associated with absolute power — or “political absolutism” — in the middle east. (Note regarding Moscow: two major revolutions, three governments, one-hundred years — and The Bear remains absolutely authoritarian, criminal, and totalitarian).
We know today the KGB’s relationship with Arafat and the PLO (also the pride Yuri Andropov took in the airline hijackings of the 1970s) and we have learned within the past couple years of Mahmoud Abbas’s own KGB record.
Keep loving Moscow — and you will love even more Palestinian suffering by way of its designs.
Note well that ALL Palestinian top leaders have become multi-millionaires while Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh long ago developed reputations as billionaires.
The seduction, captivity, and suffering of the Palestinian main base has turned out a long-lived and powerful business for thieving elites and their systems of patronage.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftacantidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/
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14 Monday May 2018
Posted in 21st Century Feudal, Books, Political Psychology, Russia
Tags
Arkady Polishchuk, Christian persecution, Communism, Dancing on Thin Ice, disinformation, Soviet Era, totalitarianism
https://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Thin-Ice-Travails-Dissenter/dp/099877703X/
From the publisher’s promotion:
In this memoir, replete with Jewish humor and sardonic Russian irony, exiled Russian journalist and human rights advocate Arkady Polishchuk colorfully narrates his evolution as a dissenter and his work on behalf of persecuted Christians in 1970s Soviet Russia. Told primarily through dialog, this thrilling account puts the reader in the middle of a critical time in history, when thousands of people who had been denied emigration drew international attention while suffering human rights abuses, staged show trials, forced labor, and constant surveillance.
From 1950–1973, Polishchuk worked as a journalist for Russian state-run media and as an editor at Asia and Africa Today, where all foreign correspondents were KGB operatives using their cover jobs to meddle in international affairs. His close understanding of Russian propaganda makes this memoir especially eye-opening for American readers in today’s political climate.
https://doppelhouse.com/dancing-on-thin-ice/
–33–
09 Wednesday May 2018
Tags
Authentic Popular Democracy, feudalism v democracy, global financial elite, illusion of political control, medieval v modern, money and global political influence, Money for Money, Potemkin Democracy, Reflexive Control, Viktor Vekselberg
Brooke Seipel’s piece in The Hill, “Trump threatens to remove news networks’ press credentials over negative coverage” (May 9, 2018) provided the remark on the BackChannel’s reading page that inspired the following — and rather drifting — comment.
Trump should not have stepped off with denouncements of the Fourth Estate. However, BackChannels believes the location of tension in the world is that between the Modern and Medieval political worlds, and in the 21st Century, the medieval is a world of lies and manipulations. Motivation: money — for its own sake.
I need to update this piece —
The observation a year ago was that Islamic Terrorism had been prodded, channeled, and used _by Moscow_ to produce a reflexive “New Nationalism” in the EU / NATO states as part of Moscow’s efforts to degrade cohesion among the western democracies and within the military alliance defending them.
In an update, I would want to look over the potential integrating and related interference and shaping of Russo-American relations at highest levels. I’m a little tired as a volunteer poli-sci / poli-psy blogger, but were there encouragement plus a few $$$, that’s where intuition would send me.
There is obviously — and from the start with this Administration — a global class of immensely wealthy business personalities who appear to help one another along while also moving their hosting nations around in ways that address a number of issues.
BackChannels has to this point generally promoted “Authentic Popular Democracy” (APD) — not Potemkin Democracy operated by global elites. The guys (generally speaking) mixed up in these “Russian connection” investigations seem to believe otherwise, and that their money may purchase controlling influence.
Is that a world that is wanted from a democratic perspective?
President Trump’s “Russian Thing” becomes ever more complex and deep with the latest explorations into the working of financial clout by one of Russia’s wealthiest men, Viktor Vekselberg (the look-up may be left to the reader because the web has made that part of the blogger’s work almost superfluous).
–33–
03 Thursday May 2018
First things first: wake up!
Let the Palestinians — the refugees of 1948 — know their real history.
For Gaza as an interim measure brought out any which way: Egyptian and Israeli suzerainty until the Hamas civil thug and terrorist culture is no more a burden to the Palestinian population.
For the West Bank, treatment as an in-holding similar to Quebec in Canada with security measures corresponding (as they have for many years) corresponding to threat.
Moscow-Tehran (Red-Green / Old Comrades and Neo-Islamists): that is to be taken care of now, or the “phantoms of the Soviet” will indeed haunt another generation of Israelis and Palestinians.
We know Mr. Khamenei’s cards; Mr. Putin may only hold his close — and sustain his power in potential threat — for so long. He needs to move Russia forward of Imperial and KGB Russian history. I have no idea whether he’s up to doing that or not.
There’s a little craziness in believing — or accepting — that either the PLO or Hamas have been helping the Palestinians as a People (after 70 years of Arab Apartheid in the camps of Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria plus the same as a suspended culture in their space and much bedeviled by official corruption and feudal patronage systems, they’re a cohort, but as a people perhaps a little different than presented). For those in the world a little tired of the post-WWII Stalinist project (Hitler’s loss back then: Stalin’s gain), the Palestinians may be thought of as deserving of honest, responsible, and responsive government.
–33–
16 Monday Apr 2018
” . . . they are making a show to other countries . . . “
True. The action taken to forestall additional Chemical Weapons (CW) attacks was conducted as a deliberate and open demonstration of capability (imho) and not as one blow among others launched without warning in the chaos and fury of combat.
Russo-American cooperation in “optics” has been a theme in the Syrian Tragedy from the beginning and in current form dates back at least to the end of the Cold War in which Moscow and Washington in a presumptive peace were to work on terrorism and transnational crime together.
It is uncertain that that is not taking place!
🙂
How would one know?
In that Moscow sustains numerous “frozen conflicts”, operates its war machinery against noncombatants in Syria and Ukraine, and that it has long cherished (by not reforming itself much) the title, “Mafia State”, I may suggest the west had been snookered by old political criminals or a mentality in Moscow befitting the same.
In the too-fast press associated with blogging, there may be a little bit of post-first-read-later taking place here. Even if so, the main point is to look into what happened between Moscow and Washington in their respective thematic characters — paternal authoritarian for one; liberal democratic for the other — in the nearest shadows of the Cold War.
PDFs cited go straight to the BackChannels Kindle and may be read on that platform soon afterward.
Elliott, Dorinda. “Lifestyles of Russia’s Filthy New Rich.” Newsweek, December 18, 1994:
Where did all the money come from? Most of the new robber barons — an estimated 61 percent of Russia’s richest people, according to one study — simply turned the socialist empires they managed into their own private companies. Others built their fortunes on the roots of criminal trading they were doing secretly during Soviet times. The result is a pervasive sense of unfairness — particularly since Russia still has no real middle class. But Russian society for centuries has been driven by envy.
Hockstader, Lee. “Russia’s Criminal Condition.” The Washington Post, February 26, 1995.
“In Western Europe and the United States . . . organized crime controls only criminal activities such as prostitution, drug trafficking and gambling,” wrote Pyotr Filippov, a former adviser to President Boris Yeltsin, in a report to the president last year. “In our country, it controls all types of activities.”
In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, an alleged criminal leader with a long prison record and a private militia loyal to him is the right-hand man to the country’s leader, former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze. In Russia’s Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, an ex-convict named Vladimir “The Poodle” Podiatev, who spent 17 years in prison, is said by police to be the city’s foremost power broker, allegedly controlling his own television station and much commerce in the city.
Russia’s attempt to subvert Ukraine cannot, however, be seen in isolation.Russia’s attempt to subvert Ukraine cannot, however, be seen in isolation. Its tactics are part of a wider pattern in which the Kremlin uses separatist conflicts as engines for corruption and criminality, and as Trojan horses to block progress in reform-minded countries on Russia’s periphery.
Organized crime has penetrated most of the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union at all governmental levels, and is assuming an important role in the political , economic and social evolution of these states, with consequences already being felt in Europe , the United States and parts of Asia . The collapse of communism may not lead to democratization and the transition to a competitive capitalist economy. Instead, the pervasiveness of organized crime may lead to an alternative form of development — political clientelism and controlled markets. Domination by the Communist Party may be replaced b y the controls of organized crime.
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