Before Donald J. Trump does anything else, he’s going to have to articulate and navigate a position with Putin and a re-medievalized Russian security state.
One day, BackChannels will collect the books around the place and write a 3×5 card for each and by category — there are more volumes in “The Russian Section” than appear online. Nonetheless, and especially online for readers who arrive, much like the editor, with more curiosity than formal background in foreign affairs, international studies, and political science, there may be greater value in a short list — a short hallways with half a dozen doors — than in a comprehensive one.
In the online environment, such posts are stepping stones — no need to dwell: click on a selection and move on!
“As I have repeatedly said, it is not our fault that Russian – American relations are in that poor condition.”
If you’re a BackChannels regular or an enthusiast in political psychology, you know that the “malignant narcissist” — autocrat, bully, or dictator — is never wrong.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
Lest any forget, there’s plenty of reading at hand (these days: Amazon One-Click shopping may be the next best thing) for guarding against forgetting.
Posted by The Guardian, November 9, 2016.
BackChannels has framed contemporary conflict in terms of time, i.e., whether confronting Assad or, for a domestic example, the Ku Klux Klan, the modern person is actually rejecting the reappearance of the past in his own path.
For the most part, whether involving the aggressive Muslim Brotherhood aspect in contemporary Islam, the barbarism on display in Syria — and do “thank” Assad, Putin, and Khamenei for choosing that evil path — or the Russian invasion of Crimea, one is actually aiming the finger back at the world of Medieval Political Absolute Power, i.e., AKA the divine right of rule, rule by a presumptuously superior nature, rule by thuggery, and, most certainly, unquestionable authority, or authority beyond criticism and beyond law.
Putin : Medieval Political Absolutism
vs
Trump: Modern Democratic and Checked Distribution of Political Power
Choose.
Posted by VICE News, March 3, 2014.
While “western” political success and related productivity and affluence provide for western humanism and other aspects of idealism, “eastern” barbarism and suffering have left behind a world in which fear and insecurity appear to threaten those who should be in the most confident and secure of internal psychological states. Leadership in tribal cultures and states tend toward a winner-take-all — and loser-lose-all — position in their politics, and it may be that we mistake for a better politics and ennoble with the term “realpolitik”.
Our world pays a high price in general suffering — suffering associated horrors beyond imagining — for the emotional care and feeding of its “malignant narcissists” — its most damaged bad boys, the same that make themselves known as political and war criminals.
So:
Bashar al-Assad: war criminal?
Vladimir Putin: war criminal?
Ali Khamenei: political criminal?
As a class, dictators “exceed limits” — just as Muhammad warned 🙂 — and in doing so free themselves from other normative restraints while at the same time condemning themselves to remaining in political power at any cost (always to others).
In effect, the worlds of despots become worlds of political absolutes, and if for no other reason than the near impossibility of the retreat of their authors.
If over the past five years you had been a Syrian noncombatant, would you wish to see Bashar al-Assad a) remain in power, b) exiled, or c) hung in public?
If you had been swept off the streets of Tehran and dumped in Evin Prison (say for wearing that hijab a little to far to the back — or for being Baha’i or gay or western in outlook) , or if you had had family murdered by the Iranian regime, would you care to see Ali Khamenei’s term in power a) modified, b) truncated, c) “terminated with extreme prejudice”?
Has Putin a graceful retreat today — Syria was al-Assad’s war and armies, flyers especially, make mistakes; and Ukrainian autonomy was Khrushchev’s mistake, which was made with the confidence that Kiev would remain forever bent to Moscow?
Putin may have that.
And Trump may be wise to see that Putin, the Russian State, and the Russian People (of Russia proper) have that “out” — but to horse trade Ukraine, the European Union, the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization?
“Nyet” to all that!
(Liberal politics have come to mire judgment, unfortunately. Biography.com maintains a page titled “Political Criminals” but begs credulity by placing side-by-side J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, both of whom may have exceeded some boundaries in power, with Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Fidel Castro, and Idi Amin all of whom plainly represent the most reckless of minds and murderous of despots).
Historian John Bew suggests that much of what stands for modern realpolitik today deviates from the original meaning of the term. Realpolitik emerged in mid-19th century Europe from the collision of the enlightenment with state formation and power politics. The concept, Bew argues, was an early attempt at answering the conundrum of how to achieve liberal enlightened goals in a world that does not follow liberal enlightened rules.
If, as the poet says, America is not the world, then the world is surely owed an apology for the lack of attention paid to what ought to have been, and are, a series of alarming developments throughout Europe and the Middle East. Perhaps appropriately, all have involved or implicated a revanchist authoritarian power for which the incoming commander in chief has repeatedly professed his admiration and which, after having done all it could to facilitate an upset American electoral outcome—“maybe we helped a bit with WikiLeaks,” as pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov put it Wednesday morning—offers its hearty congratulations on his victory. Meanwhile, Russia’s alleged “wet work” and maneuvering outside the United States in the last two weeks has been even more impressive.
The Russian state’s history of political criminality — that which has driven the upending of its governments twice in the past 100 years — has sat at the base of the middle east conflict and helped kept it collecting money for those it blessed: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, Ismail Haniyeh, and Khaled Mashaal.
I don’t know if the state of affairs will straighten out with Donald J. Trump in office, but the more word gets around, the more likely it will.
Once you know — and perhaps once Moscow knows the popular west knows — and once the Palestinians know — this game with the refugees should be over.
Noting the KGB history may not change Arab culpability for sustaining the refugees as an apartheid population in relation to their own states, but two legs of the old table have been removed by time — Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, both state sponsors of terrorism.
If the 1920s may be noted as the launch period for the Muslim Brotherhood, the umbrella organization beneath which al-Qaeda and others have developed, then this new way of looking at the old conflict also starts to put away an entire era of warfare that needs finally to be consigned more largely to the 20th Century.
Both the creation of the document, commentary on it, and the voting that ensued refused to acknowledge Moscow’s old hand in the creation of the Middle East Conflict.
The role of the Soviet Union and KGB “Active Measures” — a term of art that may be looked up online — in the amplifying anti-western anti-Semitic animus has been far overlooked by the public focused – by related political manipulation – on Islamic Terrorism. Whether following the timeline from the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood, the early appearance of Hitlerism, and the Stalin Era or coming forward to the Vietnam War Era or on to this day, you will find the Russian state deeply involved either with the sponsorship of terrorism (see Wikiepedia “Terrorism in the Soviet Era”) or the tolerance of it!
Today, Russia will not condemn Hamas, Hezbollah, or PFLP as terrorist organizations.
Soviet cartoons distributed in the Middle East to leverage “the masses” into the Soviet camp. This one may date from the early 1970s.
When the Soviet Union dissolved 25 years — December 8 (in secret), 25 (public declaration), 26 (Russian tricolor raised above the Kremlin), 1991 — the west may have been both too confident and too eager to establish business and cooperation with the new criminally wild but proto-democratic state, which unbeknownst to the west had already had in place a transition plan to attempt to maintain the architecture and privileges of the Party nomenklatura (reference _Putin’s Kleptocracy_ by Miami University scholar Karen Dawisha).
Vladimir Putin’s complete “pivot” at Syria — not to mention those “little green men” who invaded Crimea — tells of a Russian revanche this time as a feudal, neo-imperial totalitarian and ultra-nationalist state that may manipulate terrorism to suits its ends.
Pat Condell – what binds Putin, Assad, and Khamenei (to lesser extent Putin and Orban plus Putin and Erdogan) is the shared drive for absolute power, or medieval political absolutism, which might remind us of someone else. The malignant narcissists who become dictators — “different talks — same walk!” — appear to have an affinity for one another. As much would seem to inform the world’s code “Brown” “New Nationalism” and the familiar “Red-Green” alliance of old “comrade networks” and the strident among Muslims.
Thank Moscow for once again driving both Far Right and Far Left extremism — and with that, perhaps also our own division today in the United States. The rancor serves to weaken EU / NATO cohesion.
Echoing Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal scandalous post-September 11, 2001, remarks, global jihad by groups like Al Qaeda also elicited Western guilt from School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Dean Vali Nasr. After 9/11, “Islamophobia, in a way, was a policy deliberately pushed from the very top of the U.S. administration” as indicated by President George W. Bush’s use of “Islamo-fascism,” Nasr stated. “Islamophobia was a way of passing the blame back to the Muslims, put Islam itself on trial for its responsibility in promoting terrorism rather than put U.S. foreign policy on trial for creating some of the problems.”
For the “Kingdom”, al-Qaeda and others represent challenges to royal authority. In that too much takes place “behind the curtains” in the medieval states, it’s hard to defend the whole “family”, but certainly the official position has for some time been one of enmity toward the Brotherhood umbrella. Basically: we’re not at war with Saudi Arabia.
Another approach to the same matter would stem from my pet peeves with Soviet / post-Soviet political manipulation and Moscow’s history of encouragement for terrorism going back to the 1920s and forward to the grand old time had in the 1970s with the PFLP and so many others aligned or working with winks from the Soviet enterprise. Today, of course, Hezbollah is in Syria fighting on behalf of Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran; Hamas remains okey dokey as far as Mikhail Bogdanov is concerned, and as often noted in my tout for Back-Channels, ISIL itself may unwitting serve Moscow-Damascus-Tehran by having been less bombed and combated than western-associated rebel organizations and Syrian noncombatants throughout the earlier years of that civil war.
Given my take on Putin’s world, which is turning out fairly awful by humanist standards, much less western ones, Trump’s earlier relationship with Paul Manafort and what he has going today with Sergei Millian — http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-suffers-bout-russian-amnesia/story?id=42325517 — should be as troubling to the public as Hillary Clinton’s taking of tribute in relation shepherding law and policy.
Things are never so simple as they may look, but the public may look twice — and needs to look twice — online to better comprehend true states of affairs.
The thing to really keep in mind on Trump vs Clinton | Moscow is Putin’s timing between the dissolving of the Soviet Union 25 years ago and his transforming the nascent democracy into a fascistic ultra-nationalist enterprise. Syria may be turning out one of those “hinges of history”, and the American position should be to lay to rest the barbarism and totalitarianism represented through Putin today in Syria and other phantoms associated with Soviet behavior.
Hypothesizing with a Crayon
When the Soviet dissolved, western businessmen and diplomats may have been quick to get in (early) and forgive. The general lawlessness of the stateless state then quickly dampened that enthusiasm but not the hope for the development of a capitalist open democracy with a modern approach to law. Blame Berezovsky — who would come to blame himself — but that’s not how things developed even though the thaw produced unprecedented cooperation in the Moscow-Washington relationship.
We are today in a different place, and Syria and Crimea may stand signal of exactly where that is in political time.
The response within the Awesome Conversation began with a rejection of official Saudi collusion in events leading to 9/11.
As the Kingdom regards itself as the truest authority on Islam and with that the imprimatur to rule by divine right, the Brotherhood organizations may be regarded primarily as challengers to the authority of the royals. As noted, much may go on “behind the curtains” or just plain out of sight.
In reference below, the reader will find in Andrei Soldatov’s writing for Foreign Policy a recap of Putin’s most recent reconstruction of a KGB-like organization. Add to Soldatov’s observations the demonstration of a merciless barbarism in Syria — long commented on by this blog — and an aggression, as unjustified as it has been plain sneaky, exhibited in Crimea. Credit such handiwork to the “phantoms of the Soviet” brought back to life by none other than Putin.
Since Peter the Great, Russia demonstrated a highly selective approach to utilizing the European experience in various fields. For more than three centuries Russian rulers from the Romanov’s dynasty to Politburo members, tried to borrow from Europe the needed technologies, experts and managerial models without importing European social and political practices. This approach produced mixed results: the Russian modernization trajectory had its historic highs and lows; it was constantly criticized from both liberal and conservative sides, but in most cases it reflected an attempt by the authorities to keep a delicate balance between the urgent economic needs and the commitment to a political and social status quo.
The KGB, it should be remembered, was not a traditional security service in the Western sense — that is, an agency charged with protecting the interests of a country and its citizens. Its primary task was protecting the regime. Its activities included hunting down spies and dissidents and supervising media, sports, and even the church. It ran operations both inside and outside the country, but in both spheres the main task was always to protect the interests of whoever currently resided in the Kremlin. With this new agency, we’re seeing a return to form — one that’s been a long time in the making.
The medieval way of doing business — commercial or political — may have relied on a kind of personality that we today call “authoritarian” or “autocratic” and possessed of some predictable characteristics especially when found demonstrably bullying and strutting. By contrast, the America mid-west ethic favors hard work, humility, and a quiet if firm demeanor.
Putin’s lines of power — Putin-Assad-Khamenei — and of influence — Putin-Orban, Putin-Erdogan – leverage the affinity between authoritarian leaders, who, not so surprisingly, aggrandize themselves at great cost to the finances and freedoms of their constituents.
From Washington’s standpoint, both Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump present “strong personalities”, but Trump’s earlier association with Paul Manafort, a major political consultant to the world’s dictators, and Sergei Millian, a Russian businessman — http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/russia-trump-political-conflict-zone/story?id=42263092 (“Trump, Millian” is also an easy look-up online) — signals the idea that a kind of authority may present to the public, in old socialist language, “the masses”, a public reality that masks off personal interests.
Not too long ago, the Russian state could have been described as “post-Soviet” and on its way toward democracy as known in the open societies of the west. Putin’s more evident narrative starts out that way, and in fact with the endorsement of a powerful Russian billionaire — Berezovsky. The west was back then quick to forgive and get in, but adjustments by Putin over time — this December will mark the 25th anniversary since the dissolving of the Soviet Union — have transformed the state into a familiar authoritarian system, this time ultra-nationalist and imperial in its actions and intents. Trump, hardly alone in this, may have been inveigled in the earlier “glasnost” state of affairs — the same in which the “Uranium One” deal developed — but even so soon after so much east-west cooperation, today is very different as regards Moscow’s resurgent anti-western stance and Trump’s entanglements.
The piece looks a little off-hand as to how Americans prefer themselves as personalities and, by extension, what may have been preferred in those most divisive and raucous of election seasons. If there had been a Harry Truman in the mix (or if ever there was) — someone who shouldered responsibility quietly and returned to a modest life — he would have been steamrolled and buried beneath the machinery of Big Politics (say, whatever happened to Rubio?).
An Aside on the Coming Election
Syndicate Red Brown Green has made a loud appearance in this election round, and BackChannels interprets the color code this way:
Brown – New Nationalists – Trump – Representative Portion of Loud Republican Moral Authoritarianism
Red–Green – Old Comrades and Neo-Islamists – Clinton’s Party and Its Portion of the Fascists on the Far Left
The extreme divisions in America’s body politic serves Moscow, and BackChannels wonders to what extent over time (decades) and today KGB-style FSB “Active Measures” (Wikipedia) have contributed to the nation’s very own mud fest of an election season. As regards that suspicion, let it include the cultivation of the Far Left on campus and in the think-tanks across decades, as the Wikipedia page referenced asserts the following: “According to Stanislav Lunev, GRU alone spent more than $1 billion for the peace movements against Vietnam War, which was a “hugely successful campaign and well worth the cost”.[3] Lunev claimed that “the GRU and the KGB helped to fund just about every antiwar movement and organization in America and abroad”.[3]”
BackChannels 