Whatever the state of affairs may be, the staging is in for the next Administration.
Putin has reinvented Russia as a neo-imperial power with privileged classes anchored by the “New Nobility” (FSB) and the oligarchs with himself a level or two above all he has leveraged (in service to his own unlimited narcissistic supply).
The United States has managed to force Putin to attempt to produce a national economy based on other than oil revenues and skimmed proceeds from others states — and Putin has produced law for punishing the oligarchs from exporting their capital (capital flight in Russia over many years plus the loss of anticipated oil revenues plus sanctions have had good effects).
NATO has moved its machinery into place to stall additional inroads against former Soviet clients, and it has recently put on a demonstration of power against Russia’s own parading of nuclear might.
I got to tell you have so many years of tracking the Islamic Small Wars and discovering the “Phantoms of the Soviet” in contemporary foreign affairs, this is scary stuff!
Of course, there are “Phantoms of the Soviet” also in American domestic affairs.
Start with Black Lives Matter and the Chicago Coalition Against Racism and Political Repression along that line and end in the murky affection between V. Putin and D. Trump and the oddness of Trump’s having for his political advisor the same Paul Manafort as Ukraine’s deposed President Yanukovych.
Let me suggest this: we see opposed medieval forces in “Russia vs Turkey” but we don’t so easily discern “Medieval vs Modern” in Russia and Turkey vs NATO (I know Turkey is a NATO member but it may no longer be what a NATO member should be — distributed power, secular, reasoning).
Peacocks vs The People
While NATO focuses on the military defense of the democratic open societies of the west, its opposition, including NATO members Hungary and Turkey, appear to focus on authoritarianism, corruption (encouraged), cults of personality, and the greater encouragement of medieval conflicts involving modern weapon systems.
Troika Putin-Assad-Khamenei-(Baghdadi) have produced a whole theater of politics and combat (BackChannels titles the production “Assad vs The Terrorists”, also “The Syrian Tragedy”), and while the analyst’s perception may be that of a wickedly callous totalitarian and tyrannical bid to control the public perception of events, the public appears to be buying it: those who have incubated ISIS have now to enjoy the glory of destroying it over as long a period of time as may please them.
With Putin having extracted an apology from Erdogan over the Turkish response to aggressive Russian piloting (akin to Netanyahu’s apologizing for the defense of Israel against the Gaza Flotilla and weapons stored aboard the Mavi Marmara), Erdogan has appeared to stiffen his resolve to destroy democracy in Turkey and replace it with himself.
However, it will still be free and fair with an entire electorate free to publish and speak as it may, demonstrate where it may wish (with equal and fair permitting and wondrous order, for the most part, considering the emotions involved), and talk itself through its own national issues and sense of purpose, which is not to “rule the world” but perhaps produce a world less given to self-aggrandizing tyrants.
I’ve reserved “Fascist” from “Nationalism” with Trump because . . . he’s an American: BackChannels expects him to reject his role in the development of his own idolatrous cult of personality and to put Americans first in the representation of the many cultures, manners, and personalities that have co-produced America’s magnificent tapestry and its related wealth.
These attacks — Dallas, Nice / Black Lives Matter, ISIS (et al) — should not be seen separately. Each devolves to familiar Soviet / post-Soviet agitation, manipulation, and misinformation, at least. With “terrorist-type” “actions”, direct relationships (or “orders”) are not needed as “actor” compulsions pushed by incitements, and permissions plainly work to produce attacks.
Moscow’s Themes
Confusion Through a Massive Agitprop Press — e.g., Information Clearinghouse, Mint Press, RT, etc. — confusing or inverting issues — developing and promulgating disinformation that may weave into more moderate but still far liberal press like Democracy Now and Mother Jones, legitimate stalwarts on the west but perhaps also a little seduced;
Corruption, Kleptocracy, State Mafia — “Chaika” may be all that needs to be signaled to find the entrance to that rabbit hole;
Ends-Against-the-Middle throughout NATO-aligned and westward-leaning states — “Syndicate Red Brown Green” — Old Comrades, New Nationalists, Islamists;
Political Absolute Power — centralized governance; state aristocracy; sustained secret police state (read through the “Russian Section” of this blog’s library);
Terrorism – Moscow refuses to designate Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, and in recent years it has hosted representatives of the infamous PFLP.
BackChannels places conflicts involving Iraq in the post-Cold War framework and suggests that military engagements were part of “containment” and the “building down” of Soviet alliances that remained in character authoritarian and openly supportive of terrorism.
Basically, Russia then and Russia today criminally manipulates foreign political constituencies to suit its own kleptocratic appetites. Hussein (and Gaddafi) were part of that enterprise, and perhaps as God willed it, both are gone (and thank God).
Yesterday’s BBC report on the Chilcot report keeps itself narrowed on the image of Iraq as an oasis of stability, however miserable, under the rule of a strongman, and the report itself reasserts at face value the idea that “regime change” in Iraq linked to direct threats posed by WMDs, which imbroglio BackChannels would shove into a bin labeled “Potential Convenient Pretexts” (sorry the same don’t really work out) and the more general “Global War on Terror,” which period of observation appears to start on September 11, 2001:
10. After the attacks on the US on 11 September 2001 and the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in November, the US Administration urned its attention to regime change in Iraq as part of the second phase of what it called the Global War on Terror.
It is unfortunate that governments most devoted to “classical liberalism” and democracy should feel the need to resort to manipulating their “masses” (instead of free constituencies) because they have failed to publically educate the same in the longer-lived themes of geopolitics and history — or worse, lost that battle to the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left that relies on short memories to promote their own ultimately authoritarian, fascist, and totalitarian outlooks.
I don’t know what BackChannels is going to do when the 25th Year Anniversary of the Dissolving of The Soviet passes on December 26, 2016, but as that day is still coming up, it’s going to harp on it with the hope that other “English” and Europeans and others less free or more so catch a glimpse of Putin’s Excellent World (PEW), the world from which it has emerged, and the malignantly narcissistic worldview it continues to promote or install wherever it may.
“Estonia is a small country,” Col Rebo continues. “But we are stronger than many people think. This is the actual land. This is where I will fight, and where my enemies will die. I know every bridge, every river. I know what is needed to stop the Russians.”
Putin’s clawing into NATO, and he’s going to use Erdogan, a natural authoritarian (with his own White Palace) to further establish “absolutism” around a feudal Russian core.
In the today’s news:
The Kremlin accepted a letter from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as an apology this week.
Mr Putin spoke to Mr Erdogan by phone on Wednesday, telling him he planned to lift the travel sanctions.
The lifting of non-travel trade sanctions will depend on the outcome of the trade talks, the Russian leader said in his decree.
In news analysis appearing in The Atlantic about three years ago:
The Turks suffer from a deep-rooted, historic reluctance to confront the Russians. The humming Turkish economy is woefully dependent on Russian energy exports: More than half of Turkey’s natural gas consumption comes from Russia. Consequently, Turkey is unlikely to confront Moscow even when Russia undermines Turkey’s interests, such as in Syria where Russia is supporting the Assad regime, even as Ankara tries to depose it.
Historically, the Turks have always feared the Russians . . . .
Moscow has so far been able to separate itself from such wondrous moves as the incubation of ISIS (through “deselection” for bombing and combat early in the Syrian Tragedy) and the related development of Syrian mass migration, and with Turkey and the latest airport bombing — and where the terrorists come from but Russia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan — the same channeling applies and to similar effect: Russia has been channeling its extremists to ISIS, and when they do what they do in the NATO community, it may lay claim to being tough on the same.
If terrorists should wreak havoc on a renewed Russian flight to Turkey, well then: Moscow and Washington may then mutually share sorrows and perhaps move toward rapprochement (on counterterrorism cooperation, say) while Assad the Tyrant and the familiar Soviet / post-Soviet (now neo-feudal) arrangements remain in place.
There’s a greater problem with such a rosey “what-if” or outcome, and that is the modern world’s ceding itself to the sustained “feudal absolute power” that today, as in medieval days, lends itself to despotism, kleptocracy, and the war of all against all without end. Unfortunately, “Red Brown Green” applies: to have within NATO nationalist or Islamist authoritarians (Hungary’s Orban, Turkey’s Erdogan, for starters) lends itself to Russia’s feudal revanch and its imperial ends.
The “single state” solution fails not for enmity but for comprehension of what is represented by the Hebrews living in the land of the Hebrews.
Language as a cultural technology evolves within a people in somewhat isolated social space sufficient to invent their way of getting along among themselves and with the surrounding earth. For each ethnolinguistic cultural cohort on the planet, there is a land, a someplace, from whence it came.
So the Hebrews are back in the Land of the Hebrews: Israel. There are also Baloch, Pashtun (“B’ni Israel”, self-defined), and Kurds who have a relationship with the land that made them, and they too have some political issues involving their autonomy and survival as a people.
The Jordanian Arabs and the migrant workers caught between armies in 1948 have been deeply manipulated by powerful forces within and outside of Arab culture. The Russian KGB’s invention of Arafat, an Egyptian, and the PLO either is or should be history well known to scholars who have devoted themselves to studying and solving the “middle east conflict” (never the others ongoing — and “hot” — at the moment). The contemporary and feudal Russian story, that which has had Mikhail Bogdanov entertaining PFLP in Moscow (Nov. 2014) while the state refuses to acknowledge either Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, should be taken into account.
It’s not the Israelis or Palestinian People (again: somewhat isolated in time and space — long enough to create new language 🙂 ) who sustain the middle east conflict: all along, it has been those who misinform, mis-educate, and maliciously “program” socially captive innocents in service to their own feudal-medieval aggrandizement (and financial enrichment).
This blog now has plenty of data for backing up its opinion about what has created and what sustains the “Middle East Conflict (MEC)”. From the vicious narcissism that would hold refugees in camps (Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt) and separated from general state populations (a genuinely apartheid policy) to the Soviet distribution of anti-Semitic propaganda and, yes, the invention of Arafat, the MEC has come to represent medievalism at its greed-laden best.
Look into UNRWA spending and tunnel smuggling, and then take another look at who got the loot.
Today, Putin plays “ends against the middle” by supporting Far Right and Far Left movements and personalities; he indulges in breathtaking political theater — Sochi or Syria, both have been about demonstration of political values; and he’s ruthless (poor Assad), enough so to have engineered through influence the incubating of ISIS (for the production “Assad vs The Terrorists”) and the creation of an EU / NATO stressing immigrant headache, to which the Brits have responded and played directly into his bid to keep restored feudal political absolute power.
Most of the public will keep Putin’s feudal revanche in Russia separate from the issues attending the Great Britain – European Union split, but the general weakening of the European Union and NATO would seem fit to his own image of himself as the unassailable primary political force in a state suspended between a secret police organization (FSB) to whom he refers to as the “New Nobility”, himself, and the financial oligarchy that he controls.
*In the above cited and linked video, attend to Moscow’s creation of a conflict that it chooses to manage from both sides.
BackChannels 