Category Archives: Russia

War | East-West | Abomination | Syria | Bombing Hospitals

24 Saturday Feb 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Politics, Russia, Syria, United States of America

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2/21/2018

At first, it looked like an ordinary dictator’s response to a little criticism and a comparatively polite people’s request for a little consideration and power, but in 2011, what looked like a civil war masked the deeper, more prolonged, and vicious desire to sustain medieval absolute power — the power of the tyrant — against the entire Christian, humanist, and liberal experience and political philosophy of the western world.

2013-fetusWBullet-432x.jpg

Are there to be no differences between property and persons?

Are such malign narcissistic personalities, uniquely limited in conscience and that mysterious thing we call heart, to be given free reign to assert themselves as powerful primarily with false flag theater (e.g, “Moscow Apartment Bombings“, “Assad v The Terrorists”) followed by an expressed cruelty and sadism in power that encounters neither boundaries nor limits?

Know thy tyrants.

Putin-Assad-Khamenei-524x.jpg

This east-west conflict between thieving barbarians and the just nobility of western civilization has been brewing in the post-WWII region in time, and the world that won’t massacre refugees is being drawn into the vortex.

This morning, Americans were vilifying a policeman who stood outside a school in Florida while a mass killing was taking place within.

Should he not have acted?

Perhaps we should now ask about the nations watching from similar sidelines the horror on continuous display in Syria: where has been their courage, humanity, and resolve as Russian and Syrian air power directly bombed nearly two dozen hospitals and other medical facilities in the vicinity of East Ghouta, Syria?

Reference

Alsaafin, Linah and Zouhir Al Shimale.  “‘Survive or die together’: More than 400 killed in Eastern Ghouta.” Al Jazeera, February 7, 2018.

Chulov, Martin.  “Medical crisis in east Ghouta as hospitals ‘systematically targeted'”.  The Guardian, February 23, 2018.

Khadder, Kareem.  “Ghouta residents now face being burned out of their destroyed homes.”  CNN, February 23, 2018.

Williams, Sara Elizabeth.  “UN poised to vote on ceasefire to end deadly bombing in Syria’s Ghouta.”  The Telegraph, February 24, 2018.

Addendum to Reference From March 15, 2024.

Triebert, Christiaan, Evan Hill, Malachy Browne, Whitney Hurst, Dmitriy Khavin, Masha Froliak.  “How Times Reporters Proved Russia Bombed Syrian Hospitals.”  The New York Times, October 13, 2019, updated April 7, 2020.

Addendum to Reference – Update June 15, 2024

Hill, Evan, Christian Triebert, Malachy Browne, Dmitry Khavin, Drew Jordan, Whitney Hurst.  “Russia Bombed Four Syrian Hospitals.  We Have Proof.”  The New York Times, September 15, 2020.

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FTAC: East-West Conflict: Take the Longer Post-Cold War View

16 Friday Feb 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Russia

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Many conversations in the social networks rely on partisan politics for argument — Democrats this, Republicans that.  For the most part, the framing it time involves the period set by the run-up and aftermath of the Clinton v Trump election.  BackChannels suggests that the greater challenges associated with “Islamic Terrorism”, America’s political polarization, and the advent of vicious Far Left and Far Right fascism span Administrations all the way back to the last day of the Cold War (Dec. 25, 1991) and therefore beg Americans to broaden their scope accordingly.

Try to set aside partisan information and opinion and look at the present international relations in the greater frame of the post-Cold War period begun on the morning of December 26, 1991, the day after the Soviet Union dissolved. Rather than write long (e.g., “We know today through writers like David Satter and scholars like Karen Dawisha . . . .”), I’d rather share one link to what has been really taking place with “Islamic Terrorism” and the “New Nationalism” x Russia’s interest in sustaining dictatorships and much of the related political dynamics of the medieval world.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/reflexive-control…/

Putin | Assad | Khamenei comprise a package, as it were, from the Soviet Era: they are each in their way a part of what has been left of it.

Putin | Orban | Erdogan | add the leadership in some former satellites reengaging with anti-Semitism — should open the window wide on the medeival revanche.

I feel quite Quixote-like fighting this post-Soviet battle for liberal democracy because what Putin has done is brought back authoritarian and fascist (Turkey) or nationalist (elsewhere in EU / NATO) leaders in a way way that has damaged interstate democratic cohesion.

Russia from before the Bolshevik Revolution and to this day has had a long history as a promoter of anti-Semitic ideas and as a host, motivator, manipulator, and sponsor of terrorism. I hope the “Reflexive Control” piece will open a window for greater curiosity that may then lead to greater perception of an east-west conflict in which Israel very much represents a democratic and humanist future where other forces have kept installed medieval tyranny.

The Obama-Trump Punch and Judy gets and takes a lot of attention, but the struggle for western democracy against Moscow’s eastern sham spans American (“I looked into his eyes”) Administrations.

At the closing press conference, in response to a question about whether he could trust Putin, Bush said, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy – I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Bush’s top security aide Condoleezza Rice later wrote that Bush’s phrasing had been a serious mistake. “We were never able to escape the perception that the president had naïvely trusted Putin and then been betrayed.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovenia_Summit_2001

In her book, No Higher Honour, Condoleezza Rice would go on to say, “There was little room to convince critics that the circumstances of 2001 and the relationship with Vladimir Putin then were very different from what would come to pass.”

BackChannels submits that Putin was perceived differently in the White House by KGB design in those years and was not all different from the soul of the Soviet Union that had collapsed ten years earlier.  For reference to the Soviet transition plan developed in the 1980s for the event of dissolving, I would recommend reading Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy.

For an overview of Russian history and related authoritarian paternalism, BackChannels recommends from the Russian Section of its library the two volumes by Richard Pipes.

Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Old Regime: The History of Civilization. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974.

Pipes, Richard. The Russian Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knop, 1990.

Also in Media

Posen, Barry R.  “The Rise of Illiberal Hegemony.”  Foreign Affairs, March/April 2018.

America as led by President Trump appears to be winning its battles but altogether losing its war against a potential tyranny in the making that has come in the form of a “New Nationalism”, i.e., a populist president who is himself autocratic and seemingly enthrall to and reliant on feudal aggrandizement, cunning, and dumb strength in both personal and public realms.  As quoted from the Awesome Conversation and worth inserting here, the BackChannels piece on “Reflexive Control” and the rule of the manipulative and wealthy (like Medvedev) applies as regards the greater torque exerted by Russia, principally, and China as representing each their own politically unassailable business and leadership elites.

If Moscow believes it has taken the world forward by turning history’s clock backward, what has Washington done to freeze that totalitarian regress — and is it doing enough to keep from sliding into its own Orwellian (“Fake News!”) hell?

The American President — but not America’s governments in their totality — appears enmeshed in what ails most authoritarian regimes: questionable policies serving elites more than constituents, a host of political scandals, especially that “kompromat” thing that has come to associate the Trump brand with money laundering  (for more, web search, say, “Trump, Felix Sater”) and philandering.

11/14/2010

3/29/2016

4/21/2017

Ours is a competitive world but also one bound by our human awareness of self and related facets of conscience, empathy, ethics, and morality.  We’re aware of what we do and, perhaps, at the same time fearful of what we are capable of doing.

BackChannels believes that the Russian experience of the Mongol Invasion and related administration left their marks within Russian princes who would fear what any show of weakness might invite from the world around them while in the subjugated inspiring a festering crude anger and resentment.  The vaunted “realpolitik” would then seem to have evolved from doing what works, and if criminality and main force and leverage appear to have worked, then then those devices may remain installed but deeply redolent of despair and disaffection and far opposite the inspiriting benefits of higher-integrity and rule-of-law democracy.

–33–

FTAC: Putin, Terrorism, Autocracy, and the New Nationalism

14 Wednesday Feb 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Hungary, Middle East, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics, Russia, Turkey, United States of America

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When Russian jets first overflew Turkish airspace in 2015, Erdogan stood fast in his refusal of apology.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/11/26/middleeast/syria-turkey-russia-warplane-shot-down/index.html

Six months later, he did what Netanyahu had done in relation to the Mavi Marmara: he apologized.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/27/kremlin-says-erdogan-apologises-russian-jet-turkish

Setting aside the Israeli story a moment, points of leverage may have involved the “Turkish Stream” energy project, a piece of “realpolitik”, and an appeal to the narcissistic concept of cultural leadership and state in which the “Great Leader” is the embodiment of the living state concept _and entitled_ to aggrandizement and glory without limit (or, clinically, “unlimited narcissistic supply). Putin’s vision appears to me to be that of the medieval world sustained with raw power put in place of democracy.

The look of the mode — big palaces, nepotism on a royal scale, confusion in relation to the boundaries of person and state (and the state’s treasury) — marks the medieval mind and related revanche.

Men like Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Erdogan, Orban may consider true popular democratic government as impeding their own authority, sovereignty, and will. While the term “autocrat” sounds quite bureaucratic, similar concepts — caliph, emperor, king, sultan — fit these guys.

Because we know of the “Moscow Apartment Bombings” and that Russia has been arming the Taliban in Afghanistan — and there’s more back there with Zawahiri and others — it may not be too far fetched to suggest that Moscow has manipulated terrorism to induce in struck targets a predictable patriotic new nationalism and that “the terrorists” — ISIS or PKK — now provide a platform for conflict, all against all, and without end. Where Putin has held sway, he has turned back history’s clock.

Our President Trump has had no issues bearing and wearing the mantle of authority, but it would be facile to say he hasn’t had some issues with the “Estates” of a matured democracy.  In that regard, he may fit the world to which Putin has wished to return the world.

Inspiration for the above note:

–33–

Statement Regarding a “Military Parade”

08 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Russia

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 American holidays and strong community interaction with the military honor the military. Related concerts and parades are today legend for binding the nation into a coherent and cohesive entity worth defense and worthy of respect all around.

There are ancillaries in air shows and show components, e.g., Blue Angels, in other events.

The parading of missiles and tanks has been for most who produce that spectacle a boast and a threat associated with lesser power, not greater.

The Vietnam generation of military cannot be compensated nor, perhaps, repaired adequately, but all have been permanently honored, memorialized, remembered on the Mall and beyond that in America’s communities. If and where long-term disservice has been done, perhaps that conversation is the one that should be led by an American President.

“A Needle in the Rain”


(c)1996 J. S. Oppenheim & DRB Productions

Brief History Lesson Regarding the Vietnam Era and the Present

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Peace_Council

Hey, old college kids, remember the fatigue jackets, the grass, the Mobilization on the Mall, and the whole trippy deep ecology and far out peace thing?

Know that the Soviet Union invested $1 billion in the environmental and peace movements of the day (perhaps labor was already under way), and it got its money’s worth in the sabotaging of domestic will for that war.  It would also come to lose influence with the hip when it demonstrated its true methods in “realpolitik” as it drove tanks into the Soviet satellite states that it had completely demoralized with its own narcissistic claptrap and thuggery.

I was young at the time — the last of the babies of the baby boomers — and on the draft rolls only briefly before our troops were brought home.

The “Active Measures” part of the Vietnam War is active today on Moscow’s part: disinformation, election meddling, war by proxy in support of kleptocratic dictatorships.  If you approve of such methods and ends — much including the ownership of other humans as mere property and as well demonstrated by Moscow-aligned Bashar al-Assad and Iranian Grand Ayatollah Ali (“Hang ‘Em High”) Khamenei — do nothing, say nothing.  If that’s not the world in which you wish the next generations to live, look back, get caught up on Orwell — or Hitchens on Orwell — for a start — and look forward to engaging in this now really different kind of war.

BackChannels reminds: Putin appears to have bombed Moscow apartments with interest in blaming Chechen rebels for the deeds (“false-flag operations”) and then gone on to brutalize Chechen villages into pushing their men into the ranks of experienced and ready Chechen rebels.

Big Deal

The Soviet Union dissolved in bankruptcy with official finality on December 25, 1991.

The moment had a backstory, one well worth the reading.

The west may have been too quick to believe Russia would then evolve into a capitalist democracy, free and vibrant.  Instead, and much as scholar Karen Dawisha has unearthed, it became by design an elitist’s kleptocracy and one that now apparently revolves around its own “Vertical of Power”.

BackChannels believes the strong have cause to celebrate through national holidays and shared American events, but it is the weak that needs must put their muscle on display in parades.

The strong?

End Note

When one works a few ideas around to a compressed or distilled state, one hates to lose them in cascades of commentary published through the social networks.  Blogging helps preserve such thoughts and keep them available via keyword searches.  This passage comes from an earlier take on the same theme:

With President Trump, the American public faces three deep challenges:

1) how do deal with disinformation in the long term — “Active Measures” from Russia’s machinery, deflection and related strategies involving information and (“Fake News!”) rhetoric;

2) how to resist our own deepening divisions to return to quintessential American ideals, principles, and values, starting with the valuing of integrity in business and government and consequent distaste for corruption; 

3) how to address enemies that have found ways to blend and practice war indirectly, not only by proxy but with “frozen conflicts” aiding the movement of arms and narcotics worldwide and ability to deeply manipulate terrorism (e.g., see “Moscow Apartment Bombings”; read Anna Politkovskaya’s observations on the brutalizing of Chechen villages).

We may be in a little bit of trouble because the Cold War didn’t end quite where we thought it had and not much has prepared EU / NATO constituencies for its apparent phantoms and their still medieval political ambitions and views.

–33–

Yuri Dmitriev Goes Home, But Trial Remains Open

30 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Russia

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Dmitriev2007ByMediafond-522x-2President Vladimir Putin’s paranoid and punitive Russian state had taken Soviet Era type action against the fellow to the left, Yuri Dmitriev, in apparent retaliation for Dmitriev’s investigations of Stalin Era mass graves, the final evidence of the mass murdering that must have filled them.  The manner of action taken: “kompromat” — pictures of his undressed daughter framed by the regime as illicit for a show trial and consignment, for a while, to a psychiatric facility for evaluation.

Excerpt from the latest press release circulated by human rights advocate Elizabeth Childs:

His attorney, Victor Anufriev, says that Dmitriev is not out of danger yet. The date of the next hearing in the trial has not been announced, and it is not known if the Serbsky Institute also assessed whether nine photographs of Dmitriev’s daughter submitted in evidence should be considered pornographic in nature — a sticking point in the trial, as the prosecution has failed in several attempts to have expert analysts deem them as such. “I am sure that the prosecutor’s office will continue to pursue its goal of imprisoning Dmitriev at any cost and find some grubby organization that will give them the results they want,” Anufriev told the 7×7 news site.

Husband and Father Yuri Dmitriev at Home

DmitrievAtHome

Included with the Childs’ press release: Anna Artemyeva’s photo for Novaya Gazeta, January 27, 2018.

Previously in BackChannels

Dangerous History: Russia Slides Backward: A Note on Yuri Dmitriev and Moscow’s Return to Politically Directed “Punitive Psychiatry” (Jan. 11, 2018).

Additional Background and Update

Nechepurenko, Ivan.  “Gulag Historian Ordered to Undergo Psychiatric Testing in Russia.”  The New York Times, January 11, 2018:

At the end of December, an expert group found no pornographic content in the pictures, and the court, in Karelia, a region in northwestern Russia, refused to extend his detention beyond Jan. 28.

But at the same time, the court took a chapter from the Stalinist past, ordering that Mr. Dmitriev be sent to Moscow for psychiatric tests while also asking for a new review of the photographs by other experts.

Reuters.  “Russian Stalin-era Great Terror exposer freed from jail pending trial.”  January 27, 2018.

Memorial Human Rights Center (Old Web):

The Human Rights Center “Memorial” is a self-governed noncommercial civil organization, whose members are united by humanistic and moral principles and the aspiration to assist the defense of human rights and the formation of people’s civil dignity.

Foundation date: April 1st , 1993.

European Network: Remembrance and Solidarity.  “Russian society “Memorial”.  October 16, 2014.

Further Reference Ongoing

English language updates: The Dmitriev Affair 

Faceook: Free Yuri Dmitriev (English)

Twitter: @FreeYuDmitriev

MEMORIAL: An International Historical, Educational, Human Rights And Charitable Society

Related on site: “Yuri Dmitriyev Released from Detention.”  January 1, 2018.

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Read and Weep: Signal of the Return of Endemic Russian Anti-Semitism: Bausman: Russia Insider: January 15, 2018

17 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Fast News Share, Political Psychology, Russia

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RussInside-JewishHostility-180118

Bausman, Charles.  “It’s Time to Drop the Jew Taboo.”  Russia Insider, January 15, 2018.

Chosen link for a look-see: “Hostility to Putin’s Russia is largely a Jewish phenomenon”:

Russia Insider’s mission is to explain and describe Russia and her role in the world. As soon as you begin to drill into how other nations relate to Russia, and Russian history, it becomes obvious that the unreasonable hostility towards Putin’s Russia, particularly coming from the US and the UK, is very much a Jewish phenomenon, and has been for centuries.

And yes, ‘Jewish’ is the only term that accurately describes it, and not one of the many euphemisms we frequently see used.

The most vitriolic and obsessive Russia-bashing journalists in the media are mostly Jewish. The publications which push these writers most energetically are ALL Jewish-owned, and as a publisher, I know very well, that is where the buck stops.

BackChannels most respectfully suggests that Colonel President Emperor and Pharaoh Putler — if that is how he wishes to be known — may consider either disassociating his godliness from so cliche and puerile a revanche of the Imperial style in Jew Hate or now let the world know now he endorses it!  

Excerpt About the Forgery that Became Through the Agency of Russia’s 19th Century Okhrana — Tsar Nicholas II’s Secret Police — The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

A few months ago he bought a number of old books from a former officer of the “Okhrana” (Political Police) who had fled to Constantinople. Among these books was a small volume in French, lacking the title-page, with dimensions of 5½in. by 3¾in. It had been cheaply rebound. On the leather back is printed in Latin capitals the word Joli. The preface, entitled “Simple avertissement,” is dated Geneva, October 15, 1864. The book contains 324 pages, of which numbers 315-322 inclusive follow page 24 in the only copy known to Mr. X, perhaps owing to a mistake when the book was rebound. Both the paper and the type are characteristic of the “sixties and seventies” of the last century. These details are given in the hope that they may lead to the discovery of the title of the book [See Preface]. Mr. X. believes it must be rare, since, had it not been so, the “Protocols” would have speedily been recognized as a plagiarism by anyone who had read the original.

That the latter is a “fake” could not be maintained for an instant by anyone who had seen it. Its original possessor, the old Okhrana officer, did not remember where he obtained it, and attached no importance to it. Mr. X, glancing at it one day, was struck by a resemblance between a passage which had caught his eye and a phrase in the French edition of the “Protocols” (Edition de la Vieille France, 1920, 5, Rue du Préaux-Clercs, 5, Paris 7th Arrondissement). He followed up the clue, and soon realized that the “Protocols” were to a very large extent as much a paraphrase of the Geneva original as the published version of a War Office or Foreign Office telegram is a paraphrase of the ciphered original.

Before receiving the book from Mr. X, I was, as I have said, incredulous. I did not believe that Sergei Nilus’s “Protocols” were authentic; they explained too much by the theory of a vast Jewish conspiracy. Professor Nilus’s account of how they were obtained was too melodramatic to be credible, and it was hard to believe that real “Learned Elders of Sion” would not have produced a more intelligent political scheme than the crude and theatrical subtilties of the Protocols. But I could not have believed, had I not seen, that the writer who supplied Nilus with his originals was a careless and shameless plagiarist.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_truth_about_The_Protocols

Related on BackChannels in No Particular Order

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

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/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftac-antidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/12/29/ftac-middle-east-conflict-back-to-max-erwin-von-scheubner-richter-and-forward-to-the-plundering-of-palestinian-misery-by-palestinian-leadership-elites/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/12/16/excerpt-first-political-terrorist-organization-in-history/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/23/moscows-rules-a-module/

Related Reference

StopFake.  “Is Russia Insider sponsored by a Russian oligarch with the ties to the European far right?”  November 23, 2015.

Update: January 19, 2018: Lavrov Speaks Out Against Anti-Semitism

Source of First Encounter: Hanish, Seraphim.  “Russia’s top diplomat SLAMS anti-Semitism, calling it ‘the most horrible crime against humanity.”  The Duran, January 19, 2018.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov seems unable to separate the good intent shown in producing this overdue course correction from the seeking of advantage yet against Ukraine and the nationalist posture once taken against the Jews.  In fact, the Scheubner-Richter and Hitler relationship tells of a larger Russian history in the generation and dissemination of anti-Semitic libel and myth.  Nonetheless, Lavrov’s stern comments may pave the way for a long overdue pivot westward and away from the crimes against humanity of the Stalin years, the Soviet Era, and, most recently the same delivered with horrific brutality by Assad — as flanked by Putin and Khamenei –to noncombatant Syrians across the course of the civil war.

–33–

Dangerous History: Russia Slides Backward: A Note on Yuri Dmitriev and Moscow’s Return to Politically Directed “Punitive Psychiatry”

11 Thursday Jan 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Free Speech, Journalism, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology, Russia

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Dmitriev2007ByMediafond-522x

Yuri Dmitriev by Mediafond (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.

ManuPsy-1974-App-VI-524

Bukovsky, Vladimir and Semyon Gluzman.  A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissenters. (URL is to PDF). 1974.

The BackChannels editor has to wear “readers” too, but to spare some squinting here’s the most critical pull from the small print in the above image:

Dissenters, as a rule, have enough legal grounding so as not to make mistakes during their investigation and trial, but when confronted by a qualified psychiatrist with a directive from above to have them declared non-responsible, they have found themselves absolutely powerless.

Kafka comes to mind.

So does Milan Kundera’s famous statement: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

President Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship has chosen for Russians the erasure of their memory and gone after the culturally healing human rights organization Memorial.

While Yuri Dimitriev’s dark adventure into Putin’s Hell gains traction in the western human rights community, another Memorial notable has been apparently framed (here relayed in shortest form):

Oyub Titiev

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/01/russia-rights-defender-arbitrarily-arrested-in-chechnya/ – 1/11/2018
–
https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2018/01/276951.htm – 1/11/2018
–
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/10/chechnya-under-fire-after-human-rights-activist-held-for-drugs-possession – 1/10/2018

BackChannels wishes not to dilute the singular and stunning insult to the world that is the “Dmitriev Affair”, but it’s evident the Phantom of the Soviet has in mind the planting and rooting of Old Totalitarian Poison even with the world’s entire New Intelligentsia taking notice.

A Loose Note on Related Poli-Psy

Expressed as a personal trope: “Absolute Power” becomes inevitably the power to visit suffering on others with impunity.

Expressed as a personal trope: according to Richard Pipes (and now I shall have to relocate the reference), as the power of the Mongols receded, Russian princes had nonetheless internalized the idea that property and person could be (and should be) treated as the same thing, and proof of sovereignty was to be found in the permit to destroy either at will and without consequence.

For the malignant among narcissists, it would seem the suffering of another should have no consequence other than to affirm the power of the narcissist’s own blind will.  All the techniques of theater — for controlling family, if small; for controlling nations, if large — may apply to the artifice of presenting “reality” with the intention of framing and creating popular — and a neither too bright nor curious nor politically empowered — perception.

Reference Related to Yuri Dmitriev

ABC News.  “Fears Russian historian who exposed Stalin’s crimes may be falsely declared insane.”  January 10, 2018:

Some of Russia’s leading cultural figures say Mr Dmitriev was framed because his focus on Stalin’s crimes — he found a mass grave with up to 9,000 bodies dating from the Soviet dictator’s Great Terror in the 1930s — conflicts with the latter-day Kremlin narrative that Russia must not be ashamed of its past.

The narrative has taken on added importance ahead of a March presidential election, with polls showing incumbent Vladimir Putin, who uses his country’s World War II victory when Stalin was in charge to bolster national pride, is on track to win.

Mr Putin asserted last year that what he called an “excessive demonisation of Stalin” was being used to undermine Russia.

Activatica.  “The Arrest of Karelian ‘Memorial” Head Yuri Dmitriev: What is Known.”  March 22, 2017:

In general, the situation in Karelia is complex. On one hand, Karelia is a region where many exiles are left, the whole region was filled with camps and exiles, and the memory of this is alive at the personal level. And the authorities of Karelia have, for a rather long time, supported the activities of “Memorial” and various structures for perpetuating memory. When Dmitriev discovered the Sandarmokh burial site, the Karelian authorities cooperated and held a contest to landscape this place. But at the same time, there were efforts to conceal and obstruct the receipt of information on the side of the secret services. They also tried to pressure Dmitriev six years ago. On one side the authorities helped, but on the other side, some power structures interfered. And in the past couple years, pressure on Dmitriev has intensified, as an independent historian.

Ayres, Sabra.  “An outspoken research of Stalin’s crimes fights for his own fate and freedom in Russia.”  Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2017:

A small clearing in a dense northwestern Russian forest marks the site where, 20 years ago, Yuri Dmitriev discovered a group of mass graves containing victims of Josef Stalin’s Great Terror.

Using detailed documents uncovered in KGB archives, Dmitriev was able to piece together the location where Stalin’s execution squads killed and buried more than 9,500 people from 1937 to 1938. The documents contained the dates and names of those killed, as well as the executioners’ names. During the next two decades, Dmitriev worked meticulously to document every victim’s story.

Bukovsky, Vladimir.  “Punitive Psychiatry (1977).”  The Bukovsky Archives.  Vladimir Bukovsky’s foreward to Russia’s political hospitals (1977) by Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway.

Luhn, Alec.  “Gulag grave hunter unearths uncomfortable truths in Russia.”  The Guardian, August 3, 2017:

“For our government to become … accountable, we need to educate the people,” Dmitriyev said of his efforts to uncover details of Soviet repression.

But not everyone wants to remember this forgotten history, especially amid Russia’s current patriotic fervour. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said in June that “excessive demonisation” of Stalin has been a “means of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia”, and several branches of Memorial have been declared “foreign agents” in recent years.

U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Russia.  “U.S. Mission to Russia Concerned with Charges Against Yury Dmitriev.”  May 31, 2017:

The U.S. Mission to Russia is concerned by what appear to be politically-motivated criminal charges against prominent human rights activist and historian Yury Dmitriev. Mr. Dmitriev is a respected historian whose work has been instrumental in uncovering mass burial sites and founding the Sandarmokh Memorial Complex in Karelia. We call on Russia to transparently uphold the rule of law and respect human rights and fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We also call on Russia to respect its international human rights obligations, including those related to the prohibition on arbitrary arrest or detention and respect for fair trial guarantees.

Osborn, Andrew.  “Russian historian who exposed Stalin’s crimes faces enforced psychiatric testing.”  Reuters, January 9, 2018:

A previous psychiatric evaluation declared him to be of sound mind and a court-sanctioned expert group found no pornographic content in nine photographs of his daughter that are at the center of the case against him, overturning the earlier findings of other experts commissioned by prosecutors.

Yarovaya, Anna.  “The Yuri Dmitriev Affair”.  The Independent Barents Observer.  March 11, 2017:

What always struck me about Dmitriev was his enthusiasm, which materialized less in the help he gave me and more in his attitude to history, to events that had occurred many years ago. For example, in the same cemetery where I shot the film, he found the remains of a POW. None of the local authorities was in a hurry to bury the exhumed “youth,” as Dmitriev called him. So Dmitriev put the bones in his garage. A while later, he secured a spot in Peski Cemetery, found a sponsor to help him buy a gravestone, and asked the philologist Valentina Dvinskaya to translate the phrase “To the victims of war, disappeared but not forgotten” into German so that it could be engraved on the headstone. He did all this for an unknown man who had been killed over sixty years ago.

It was only later I realized that Yuri Dmitriev was the same Yuri Dmitriev who had founded the Sandarmokh Memorial Cemetery, who was involved in investigating the Krasny Bor Forest NKVD execution site in Karelia, who had catalogued over 13,000 names of victims of the Great Terror of 1937–1938 in Karelia and published them in The Book of Remembrance, which runs to thousands of pages.

Wikipedia.  “Memorial”.

The Dmitriev Affair (Website)

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Syria: The Horror: 2011

29 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Politics, Russia, Syria

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Putin-Assad-Khamenei

Bashar al-Assad By Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44378508 | Vladimir Putiin By Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60759727 | Ali Khameini By Tasnim News Agency, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57953266

Related Reference

Asher-Schapiro, Avi.  “The Young Men Who Started Syria’s Revolution Speak About Where It All Began.”  VICE News, March 15, 2016:

Omar first heard about the graffiti at morning recess. It was winter, he was 14, in the middle of 10th grade, and his friends said it was just a prank. The day before, just after school, a handful of Omar’s classmates found some red paint and scrawled, “Your turn doctor,” on the school’s wall. Under most circumstances, in most places, such behavior might provoke a slap on the wrist — perhaps a stern visit from the police. But in Daraa, Syria, in February 2011, those words could get you killed.

Macleod, Hugh.  “How schoolboys began the Syrian revolution.”  CBS News / Global Post, April 26, 2011:

The local secret police soon arrested 15 boys between the ages of 10 and 15, detaining them under the control of Gen. Atef Najeeb, a cousin of President Bashar al-Assad.

In a gloomy interrogation room the children were beaten and bloodied, burned and had their fingernails pulled out by grown men working for a regime whose unchecked brutality appears increasingly to be sowing the seeds of its undoing.

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