#AINOS – Americans In Name Only. #TAKs – Trump’s Ass Kissers.
Latent Political Impact
Adult responsible Democrats and Republicans, critically thinking, reasoning, and reasonable in the constructing and fine tuning of good public policy, appear slow to comprehend how deep the attack on America’s way of life, domestic tranquility, and defense and moral strength among nations has gone. In fact, a portion of today’s GOP has traded its conservative Constitutional moorings for a reactionary feudal-medieval position in time and is fast floating away from the desires, hopes, and ideals of ordinary Americans who would not allow themselves to be dumb.
For Republicans, where are “the adults in the room”?
Where is the push-back from conservatives who should be mad as hell as regards the selfish and piratical theft of their democracy?
#FeloniousTrump #4FelonyCases91Counts well may be called #AmericanTraitorTrump–and no conservative Republican dares call him out to his face.
We have seen the brazen and greedy–where are the brave and free among the much less visible virtuous?
A Note on Nobility and Virtue
In Putin’s world, the fire sale of state assets into the pockets of former Communist Party nomenklatura had been set up by the mid-1980s as insurance and precaution against the possibility of bankrupting the state (hunt around in Karen Dawisha’s work for the scholarship). “A New Nobility” appears intended for the KGB/FSB and associated oligarchy that would become wealthy enough to live as it pleased without concerns for the development of Russia and its people. Private estates built on private wealth and power would become as unassailable as those who owned them. Putin would return Russia to feudal-medieval barbarism and the patrimonial authoritarianism in which the test of sovereignty and dominion would be the ability to destroy persons and property as alike and at will and with impunity.
For the west, that world awaits only inaction or passive and tacit popular American approval at the polls.
Anyone who is not constrained may wield power with a hammer and the fear of it, but in the better liberal democracies of the world, all hew to the ideals, laws, and principles of democratic order by constitution and by legal code, centuries of it and fine tuned by conflict, reason, and struggle for the greater good.
Whatever “the nobility”–who would themselves represent law in each their respective domains–may think of themselves, there are those around them–or placed beneath them–who judge quietly, perhaps sullenly, but with determination to set right the wrongs of merely vulgar power. The dimensions that matter: awareness and comprehension; compassion and empathy; good conscience and intents; courage and fortitude; goodness in spirit; good grooming and manners; inherent grace, justice, and magnanimity.
On Elon Musk’s X platform, all Xpression may as well be flushed down the digital river of tweeted communications: the appearance is brief and the flood mighty.
Countermeasure: copy-paste and blog the message as well.
Vladimir Putin using Viktor Yanukovych as his lackey had sorely abused Ukrainian business with time-honored mafia methods, i.e., plain skimming theft in the end:
#Putin & #RussianNazis #RusNazis spread chaos, degradation, deprivation, and desperation worldwide, and then cover their crimes with lies, specifically baseless accusations, deflections, denials, erasures of collective memory, fabrications, and omissions of facts.
#TrumpPutin’s shared basic psychology: Malignant Narcissism and Process. The lies told by both represent the “Covering” of deeply seated humiliation (“Narcissistic Mortification”) and the fear of its repeat. The psyche creates an alternative undamaged courageous-heroic self, and that becomes the leader’s principle project both in its assertion and its defense (in the psychology, “Splitting” or, together, “Covering/Splitting”). Complementary observation, term, or trope: “delusional, grandiose, messianic ideation absent of normal boundaries or limits, i.e., the parameters of conscience” (so I quote myself). The end of the process for the Russian dictator and the American wanna-be dictator: “Unlimited Narcissistic Supply”, i.e., the validating infinite love of millions without end in sight.
No more clear an example of #MedievalVModern may appear than the war that has broken out between #Hamas and #Israel. For Hamas, only the weapons are modern. The motivations have been deeply medieval, well rooted in directed misperception, i.e., disinformation, fabrications, lies promoted and sustained by edict and enforced by unquestionable and vicious authority. In essence-this on the Gaza Strip-the #Palestinians have been perceptually controlled by their own “leaders”, and they are now bound to be driven to destruction by them too.
Sviatoslav finally succeeded in destroying Khazar imperial power in the 960s. The Khazar fortresses of Sarkel and Tamatarkha fell to the Rus in 965, with the capital city of Atil following circa 967 or 969. A visitor to Atil wrote soon after the sacking of the city: “The Rus attacked, and no grape or raisin remained, not a leaf on a branch.”
Today’s Khazarian and Rus descendants and others who have come to define Ukraine’s cultural, ethnic, and tribal endowments in total have become #ModernPeople, overwhelmingly lawful, fair and just, and peaceful in business and in general comportment while the most corrupt of persistent medieval thugs, Viktor Yanukovych, had been booted back to Moscow by general popular revolution, e.g., https://world.time.com/2014/02/22/ukraines-president-flees-protestors-capture-kiev/ and with the moral support of Ukraine’s army.
Hamas X Russian Political Absolutism, Barbarism, and Mafia
While Russia professes good will daily through its X-platformed embassy sites, its claims inevitably belie its own horrendous evil in the realms of chaos and mass destruction. The at-hand BackChannels references: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2023/06/28/a-dark-mirror-in-language/. For those most evil, language may be perverted to cover crime in the present and humiliation in the past as the rogue malign narcissistic psychology fashions strategies in language to match.
When it comes to bombing apartment buildings in the dead of night, none have done it better than #MadVlad who today threatens nuclear annihilation using the same methods in language inversion and psychological project to blackmail the west into the abandonment of Ukraine. And that’s “above the table”, i.e., in plain sight.
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The speech came after hardline political scientists and commentators in Russia said a return to nuclear testing could send a powerful message to Moscow’s enemies in the west. “I hear calls to start testing nuclear weapons, to return to testing,” Putin said.
Some in Russia have called for Putin to detonate a nuclear bomb to show the west that Moscow’s patience over its support for Ukraine and apparent unwillingness to negotiate is wearing thin.
Hamas has long found a sympathetic (or sympathetic-acting) presence in Mikhail Bogdanov, Moscow’s envoy to the Middle East. While it has been an independent actor, it appears to have also long-ingested the former communist state’s anti-Semitic rants and emphatic absolutism while holding itself n place with methods familiar to all dictatorships (for overview: https://freedomhouse.org/country/gaza-strip/freedom-world/2023).
Much has been written about the #RussianMafiaState. For quick reference->
Israel has been hampered in its assistance to Ukraine by a deconfliction arrangement with Russia over Syrian airspace (e.g., https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/russia-sees-military-coordination-with-israel-syria-continuing-2022-02-26/). Nonetheless, The Jewish State has arrived today with biblical, global, and modern histories. In Israel it has a homeland; around the world, it contains communities of all races and cultural strands bound together by Judaism, its Torah, and Jewish experience and lore across thousands of years; and it has so contributed to the ideas of the west that the entire political culture may refer to itself as “Judeo-Christian” as well as “Greco-Roman”. The barbarians from European North and Asian East have in Russia chosen to remain defined by whatever fear they may install in others and then tribute exact or steal in wealth. That’s what they did in the Byzantine and Medieval Eras, and that is what they are doing now.
In the Middle East, the Palestinians have served Russia as a block and goad to the west and the burgeoning and vibrant cultures associated with the democratic open societies of the world whose freedoms may be well symbolized by Israel’s vitality.
In Eastern Europe, Ukraine by revolution, election, and today war has in every possible way become part of the west, leaving Russia to attempt its capture and subjection or destruction even while “Muscovy” dies or destroys itself for its own archaic and deeply displaced, misguided, and perverse ambitions.
Putin has turned out a monster fairly bathing in blood; Trump has been all but declared a felon several times over–his image will lose the “alleged” before the charges against him; and here Musk, the world’s wealthiest industrialist appears ill-informed and lacking in insight. The first two I would cast as feudal-medieval thugs and in modern parlance “malignant narcissists”; the third has expressed concern for his fellow travelers in the most democratic terms, but while his platform, literally, and stature give him a mighty voice, he appears without background for the world he may view, also literally, from outer space.
Here follow three brief X-Riposte (I guess) to his callous and naive suggestion on Russia’s ethnocide in Ukraine: “Both sides should agree to a truce.”–>
#RussiaOutOfUkraine#TsarNobody has made an art of murdering families in their sleep-https://t.co/9SO99Ig1T4 Is that criminal and politically criminal mentality one you would engage in gentlemanly diplomacy, a slight adjustment of borders?
I know I know my little bit of history in relation to Russia but am no match for Ph.D’s in Russian Studies–and to my own disadvantage, don’t speak a word of the language. On the other hand, inflection points and nodes may emerge from broad and general knowledge (plus boundless curiosity), and that much I have enjoyed in abundance. With respect to Russian history, I do know that those who crossed from what is today Scandinavia found the northern soil of the new continent thin and consequently would roam south for more fertile land (credit the thought to Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Old Regime: The History of Civilization. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974).
For vision, it helps to have background, engagement over time, an understanding of historic as well as present issues, and awareness–sometimes in depth–of variables contributing mightily to the way things look and, in fact, appear real and true with high confidence.
Packaged here for compression, all cited URL’s may be unpacked but perhaps not in a simple hour or a day, but to any devoted to seeing how things work and have worked, what matters a little more time?
For the technology-enabled future of greatest benefit to humanity, both Putin and Trump must be defeated as the anachronistic and far bent personalities each has become. For Ukraine, there will be no security for Russia left as a politically intact and ever ruthless and vicious kleptocracy with imperial ambitions; for the United States, there should be no drift into criminal horse dealing of its own and the compromising of the privileges, prerogatives, and rights of citizenship without bounds of the nation’s Constitution and established political and social ideals, processes, and traditions.
One step down, Retired European wrote, “Exactly, Russia is the new Nazis”, and to that I responded:
#Russia had been the inspiration for Germany's Nazis via Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter. This is basic-https://t.co/3z7Hgmdvcf It's only history and change for the #ModernWorld is inevitable. https://t.co/lBhnpdgrsv needs unpacking, but it's there to help all good find courage.
For my followers in many social media quarters, the concept of “Malignant Narcissism” as a political interpretation of Narcissistic Personality Disorder needs no introduction.
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In the region of the Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova wrote, “Terrorist methods have become routine for the #Kievregime and the most odious terrorists in world history would envy the scale of it.”
Twitter lends itself most of all to squawking and very little to I-Thou conversational exchange. Here, #SovietPostSovietRussia claims human rights violations for traitors with heart, courage, and narcissistic leanings who may have–I’m not certain–been able to address their core issues (in order of mention: America is being run like a prison camp; intrusion into private lives is possible, undeniable, and probable; and there should be no state secrets-everything should be online) via other channels and methods. In any case, adult, cognizant, and sophisticated Americans should understand that all states have secret lives and ours in America fewer than others (although that’s a box always a little bit compelling for unpacking).
Chelsea, Edward, and Julian hacked, extracted, and delivered top secret data to Russia, so of course they're Russian heroes.
#TsarNobody and his crew have been the schoolyard bullies who want your lunch money and your lasting fidelity to their glory. So far, none but a pissed off Prigozhin, another former criminal, has dared question Putin’s military leadership. The idea of the Tsar right up there with God appears to remain fixed in the Russian psyche, which has also practical fear of so obviously criminal a power as Tsar Nobody knows all of their secrets, controls their careers and paychecks, has ways of assaulting (or murdering) any Russian, so far, anywhere in the world by means traditional–that would be defenestration, for example–and surreal, i.e., Polonium Tea.
In effect, Putin has all of Russia enslaved to and within his own delusional and malign narcissistic fantasia.
None dare leave who have “achieved” any stature within his realm.
Putin may believe himself the personification of Russia, i.e., that Putin is Russia, but Putin is not Russia, and the cognizant and educated among Russians know it and know furthermore the Kremlin feeds Russia’s public–“The Masses” given Putin’s weird Imperialist-Stalinist revanche–garbage.
Given the dangers, including nuclear blackmail as evidenced by the mining of the Zaporizhzha Nuclear Power Plant, the possession of so-called “tactical nukes”, and the inveigling of Belarus in nuclear threat ambition, Putin may be expected to fail from within.
This morning, I posted two notes to European and global security expert Nicolas Tenzer’s Twitter feed–>
“My hope is you’ll see that Ukraine makes significant progress on their offensive and that it generates a negotiated settlement". Highly misleading words from @POTUS.#Russia must be fully defeated. There cannot be "pease talks" with #Russia. Period.https://t.co/ryZZO9lEts
I may have shared this with you already but it's appropriate here-https://t.co/Er9BwQ6Psl Putin's power resides in slavish obedience, not esteem; while he's made clear the price of disobedient intent, he may not have the internal support he believes he has and may yet be refused.
Putin's ascent to power, Moscow Apartment Bombings & all, may have been predicated on the discomforts of disaffected KGB at the end of the Cold War. Those weren't going to be left out of power & muscled back.
What is a feudal tyrant doing as the head of a still powerful and promising Russia?
Part of the answer involves a cosmic “Why not?”
As a gang, disaffected KGB–out of power, out of work in suddenly post-Communist Moscow–may have had a thick-as-thieves coordination and ruthlessness fit to their former secret policing mission and experience. Then too, they would have garnered the cooperation and interest of the post-Cold War peaceful of a productive Europe and North America.
“Why not?” for that as well.
Add condemnation, disapproval, and strong “red line” talk–TALK!–for aggression or barbaric actions undertaken on behalf of absolute power from Chechnya to Afghanistan to Ukraine and the United States (remember the Internet Research Agency!)–all squawk on the part of The West while all remained barbaric and criminal on the part of Moscow and its favored circles of disreputable mediocrities.
Left to grow Russia in his own mafia, mercenary, parochial, post-Soviet, rapacious, and ruthless manner, Putin put Russia’s army and his own demented narcissistic will on the big step into Europe, first Crimea in 2014 in response to the big “Nyet!” and boot given his lackey Viktor Yanukovych, and then the greater portion of the Breadbasket of Europe herself in February 2022.
Have Russians the will or wish themselves to be made criminal, desperate, dumb, and enslaved?
Have the less evident “forces of order” the intent and will to embrace and support those ends?
Perhaps Putin has finally gotten a certain attention secretly craved.
For the narcissist, there is a dark mirror in language. He looks at his reflection in the pond, sees the sky behind him, and he believes he is gazing up toward heaven-and he goes on living in his own reflection.#MalignantNarcissists#PoliticalCriminals#MaligNarcs#PolitCrims
More may be involved than being merely vain or having some egotism in need of some judicious but also liberating trimming: most of us–all of us–wish most of all to be what we call “ourselves” at our best, and each according to his own best assessment of abilities–and if we become too full of ourselves (offstage), we may encounter reminders, including from our own self-observing selves, that we are not all that.
Let us sit and sip more quietly.
On the other hand, the clinically (NPD) and politically (malignantly) narcissistic have a tougher self-assignment, and that is to 1) hide the damage done to them when they were helpless or incapable of their own effective defense and 2) cover it with an undamaged and much more competent and greater courageous-heroic image that would be and which becomes their own New Person–The Greatest.
The greater achievement for The Greatest: validation confirmed by love, but a capital-V “Validation!” confirmed by the Applause and Roar of the Crowd–High-Powered VALIDATION!, Limitless and MIGHTY!
We have all the right to transform from children into pretty good adults, but The Greatest want a greatness beyond the boundaries of the good.
Terms one encounters for the malign: delusional, grandiose, messianic.
In casual description: beyond limits; without boundaries.
Eventually: criminal.
“Those who conceived this war want only one thing — to remain in power forever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian Navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity,” Mr. Bondarev said in his email. “To achieve that they are willing to sacrifice as many lives as it takes.”
In the dark mirror of language, the most primary lie in service to the speaker’s image may be the inverted accusation–on this blog, the “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation”. The narcissist is always beautiful, good, and right, and the targets unfailingly bent and ugly even though by every objective measurement and view, the narcissist is the evil.
The Greatest must be the greatest as well–not merely pretty good or, son of a gun, lucky!
Image matters and the means to produce it may be obfuscated and covered over, and in the dark mirror, the lies–the lying–really takes off. Putin, poker faced, insists that Russia attacks only military targets.
The Greatest lie to aggrandize and enrich themselves, their cronies, families, and networks; to confuse the judgments of others; to perceptually control their fans, marks, and targets–and they lie most of all to hide their crimes.
Under the guise of “liberation movements”, Russia’s “caretakers”, like Arafat and Abbas, plunder their own communities. The Palestinians remain both too vulnerable as weak parties before western power and its modern character and consequently too egotistical and proud themselves to believe it. In essence, they have imprisoned themselves in the dogma of “resistance”, and there they keep themselves ideologically, intellectually, financially, and, for the most part, physically trapped and suffocated.
“Bogdanov, Palestinians” serves as a useful starting search string on both the assertion, topic, and theme involving Russia’s power of persuasion in keeping the Palestinians hooked on a liberation theology that has no true foundation in anyone’s reality, not even that of the Palestinian leadership. All Russia has known through the 20th and 21st Centuries has been the horror that comes with the “leadership” of delusional thieves, Stalin to Putin with just a moment of post-Cold War sunlight between.
For seriously curious, independent, and industrious Palestinians, there’s a lot to unpack, a lot of Muscovian agitprop (intellectual infection) to address, and then only repairs to be done in relation to community-wide financial arrangements, security, and transparency.
For political philosophy in relation to the bullshit Moscow has been selling for decades to dictators, extremists, and useful idiots all along, I would suggest there is no justice but rather a better and happier side to history, and that it is more the true history of the assertion of human dignity, freedom, liberation, inclusion, and security. For Palestinians, it would be better to cross over to the happier side of history–and the future–than remain mired in the darkest and deepest pools of confusion, hate, and resentment.
BackChannels 