No need to date links in this compilation: I believe all were published today, and some within a few hours or an hour of this news watching typing that goes on around here most days.
Footage of violence in the Ukrainian capital was beamed almost non-stop into Russian homes by state television on Wednesday, accompanied by apocalyptic warnings of civil war next door and accusations of meddling by foreign states.
Russians well know this form in lying through accusation.
They have been through it right to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, about 24 years ago, and here they have again arrived captive (fewer than 7 percent of Russians speak English) to state media and “covered” by a state security apparatus employing more than 400,000 of their neighbors.
I cannot yet vet videos, much less receive them independently. Nonetheless, one may see through them to the contact point between worlds of deception reliant on narcissistic manipulation for wealth and the self-aggrandizement it affords and the other of integrity that insists on speaking truth to power and on political conversation in the open.
President Janos Ader and Prime Minister Viktor Orban in separate messages felicitated the anniversary of victory of the Islamic Revolution to President Hassan Rouhani and First Vice-President Eshaq Jahangiri.
In his message, President Ader underlined the efforts of both countries in expansion of bilateral cooperation in all fields, which secure interests of the two countries.
There have been additional references to Hungary in relation to other subjects, e.g., European reparations to the Jewish community, but it’s the drift into nationalism that catches play here and with it movement within the European aligned NATO state to cement relationships with the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
As as happened over the course of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s tenure, drift toward fascism may draw a strong liberal response from the middle and thereby stall a conservative state movement.
Similar dynamics have also surfaced in Kiev — Ukraine protests take center-stage at EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels | News | DW.DE | 10.02.2014 – which population has found itself in The Bear Trap, i.e., aesthetically, politically, and spiritually aligned with European modernity and its social values but beholden to a state in which the “vertical of power” — the Autocrat — determines the character, position, and values of the state and states it makes its buffer.
Hungarians may express themselves, take to the streets, and throw fits, but Papa Putin with the checkbook and gas tap has sufficient clout for leaving the Ukrainian government to shrug off its liberal critics.
That particular Bear has also aligned itself with Iranian interests — the better to drum up defense and nuclear sales business — and to the extent that it also holds Hungarians in its paws by way of energy supply and sales, it may stalls Hungary’s westward inclinations and, possibly, encourage those who feel comfortable with thuggish mafia-style Putinesque Russian politics.
The effects of the axis — Putin-Assad-Khamenei — made visible by the collapse of Syria, a lingering post-Soviet artifact may be just emergent in the discussion eastern European politics.
If I had budget plus swift graphic arts I would do this with clusters, but a linear verbal illustration might suffice:
Where tanks may once have been dispatched, cash and energy may suffice — and money gets around without conscience.
Additional Reference
Hungary
Viktor Orbán in Moscow: “Putin’s new little kitten”? | Hungarian Spectrum – 2/1/2014: “Moreover, one must keep in mind that for Hungary Russia is a much more important partner than vice versa. In trade relations the Hungarian share of Russian imports is only 2%. On the other hand, Hungary because of its dependence on natural gas and oil is heavily dependent on Russian goodwill.”
Putin $14 Billion Nuclear Deal Wins Orban Alliance – Bloomberg – 1/15/2014: “The deal shows Putin’s ability to use Russia’s control over energy resources to extend his sway beyond the former Soviet Union. Last month, he pledged a $15 billion bailout and a cut in the price of natural gas to Ukraine and promised to lend as much as $2 billion to Belarus.”
From the above cited BBC news link: “Washington’s European envoy Victoria Nuland was heard using an expletive to disparage the EU’s handling of the crisis and revealing Washington’s determination to influence the outcome of the Ukrainian struggle.”
Obama cancels meeting with Putin amid Russia tensions – NBC News.com: “Given our lack of progress on issues such as missile defense and arms control, trade and commercial relations, global security issues, and human rights and civil society in the last twelve months, we have informed the Russian Government that we believe it would be more constructive to postpone the summit until we have more results from our shared agenda,” the White House said.
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The collapse of the Soviet Union left Soviet business and political relationships as well as Soviet style in place: at least as much would seem embodied in the post-KGB, now FSB person of Russian President Putin who has accepted the defeat of Russian communism — or the armored covering of it — but not of Russian empire and the idea of a Russian way of doing things, even if regress to a 19th Century stance with class empowerment through patronage and equal footing with despots similarly endowed becomes the price paid by Russia’s constituency for the privilege of being different, quintessentially Russian, and now as in the Romanov-then, also cut out of the money but restored in pride.
SOCHI, Russia — A Russia in search of global vindication kicked off the Sochi Olympics looking more like a Russia that likes to party, with a pulse-raising opening ceremony about fun and sports instead of terrorism, gay rights and coddling despots.
And that’s just the way Russian President Vladimir Putin wants these Winter Games to be.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and the world will in about eight to ten hours bear witness to peaceful competition among nations by way of the winter Olympic games in Sochi; however, while they are doing that, Bashar al-Assad and forces beneath his command may continue prosecuting their war as they have since spring 2011; the other side may be mixed with forces still loyal to Idris — there’s a Quixote story somewhere down there in that beleaguered company — but they too will be at play in the killing fields, and one cannot make such as al-Nusra or ISIS / ISIL (I get so confused) look better than they have proved themselves in battle against bakeries and truck drivers.
According to reports received by “Human Rights Activists for Democracy in Iran”, despite Mr. Boroujerdi’s serious and worrisome health conditions, and instead of transferring him to a hospital, Movahedi, deputy prosecutor to Special Clerical Tribunal went to his cell to harass and psychologically torture Mr. Boroujerdi.
Ayatollah Hossein-Kazamani Boroujerdi, a senior member of the Shiite Muslim clergy, is presently serving the eighth year of an 11-year sentence handed down to him by the Islamic Republic’s courts for advocating the separation of state and religion inside Iran. He has also spoken against political Islam and its leaders.
For the regime, one may imagine, the political prisoner is a thorn set aside and safe from creating further botheration.
For opponents to the regime, the same political prisoner may be treated as a convenient perennial.
It would appear then that Ayatollah Seyed Hossein Kazemeini Boroujerdi has become a reliable fixture as a prisoner of conscience.
As anarchy and civil war grind on in Syria — and the major politicians mouth sock puppet platitudes — Boroujerdi, even in prison for many years, stands signal for the manners and values promoted by Ayatollah Khamenei’s: autocracy, imprisonment, kleptocracy, subjugation.
Earlier this morning, the issue of Iran’s nuclear development programs came up on Facebook with the posting of this piece, which pointed toward disinformation in the U.S. – NATO perception of Ayatollah Khamenei’s kleptotheocracy.
“At present, Iran can best be described as a country determined to preserve for itself the option of acquiring nuclear weapons capability at some future date: to shorten, to the greatest extent possible, the time it will take to build these weapons (and to warn the world) once the decision is made to do so, by developing dispersed, hardened dual-use nuclear fuel cycle capabilities; and to seek shelter from international nonproliferation pressure in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty’s (NPT) promise of access to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.” 2012 – CFR – http://www.cfr.org/iran/iran-nuclear-challenge/p28330?excerpt=1
As no one pays me anything, lol, I’m definitely not paid enough to sift data on Iran’s nuclear development programs, whether for civilian grid distribution or fast warhead or other weapons system delivery.
It takes time to dig up and dig into intelligence themes (even in what is becoming called “Open Source Intelligence). Try not to be swayed by the latest in claims without evaluating them with other data broadly compiled and at hand.
Deeply controlling and narcissistic personalities suffer from the hubris that they alone may control an entire information environment, and so they may but with gaps and holes streaming in data of greater integrity.
To misinform an enemy’s intelligence gathering apparatus while refusing third-party inspections in an area critical to regional and world peace has its own disingenuous and hideous cast: controlling a lie is not control: in fact, it is opposite as it invites aggression and seeds chaos.
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The former “Evil Empire” will host the Winter Olympics starting Friday. As then, as now: Russia, whether its constituents like it or not, has to keep buried beneath tons of glamour, glitter, ice, and snow the fact that it has supported an incredibly brutal dictatorship in Syria and just a step beyond it the same Ayatollah that has kept in prison and tortured another senior cleric for advocating what Russians prefer: a secular society separating church from state.
Russians online, I am certain, read the news too and doubtless follow the Syrian Civil War and its many themes, including the anachronistic Shiite-Sunni rivalry that energizes a certain portion of humanity while enriching beyond wildest dreams the dictators who profit on mass murder and suffering, albeit, lucky for them today, as sponsors of war of benefit to themselves.
Addendum
In addition to the routine imprisonment and torture of a political rival, the kindly-looking Ayatollah Khamenei via his client against the west Bashar al-Assad also supports (whether he knows it or not — but then how could he not know it?) this kind of behavior: UN quietly documents Syria’s war against children | The World – Financial Times blog – 2/5/2014.
What Russians are doing aligned with the Assad and Khamenei regimes today, I leave to Russians to answer for themselves.
“This is not a ‘business as usual’ summit,” said one EU ambassador. “It is time to take stock of where we are in relations with Russia. We will not be discussing any of the nuts-and-bolts issues.”
Kiev may represent the edge of Putin’s reinvigorating of the Russian state as an entity made larger than itself with a ring of buffering client states.
At 5:19 in the above clip, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt notes, “We have European values, we have European principles, we have European rights, that we must uphold in each and every European country.”
President Putin’s sumo wrestling on behalf of the future of resurgent Russian empire runs into numerous modern issues, starting with the neglect of the Russians themselves outside of the circles of immediate cooperation, influence, and power, which, of course, is part of what makes an autocracy what it is. In earlier days — the good old days! — tanks may have handily quelled the rioting in Kiev; today, those tanks may turn against the imposition of a new Ukrainian-Russian cooperative in the absence of a genuinely transformed Moscow.
However, as one friend has reminded me several times this winter, Russia (Putin) owns the cash and gas supplies and has used them for political leverage. Kiev’s own heavy-handed laws (who taught them how to be so tough and stupid?) have mightily encouraged the hard line in the state’s opposition:
“Everyone here’s looking at a 10-year jail sentence — the laws are in place,” said Vladimir, a 53-year-old entrepreneur from Kiev who’s been at the camp from the start and declined to give his last name for fear of reprisal. “We’ll be here until we win, otherwise our fate is sealed. There’s no third option.”
The conversion of Ukraine’s discomfort into stark black-and-white terms devolves directly to the government, which by imposing draconian measures eliminated the Ukrainian people’s post-Soviet customary sense of freedom of speech.
The new law, which bans all forms of protests, was published in the official Golos Ukrainy, or Voice of Ukraine, newspaper, raising fears that the government would use excessive force to quell dissent.
The opposition and the West have condemned the bill, demanding that it be reversed, but the Interior Ministry said at least 32 protesters had been arrested in the most recent round of demonstrations.
As he has with Syria, Putin has handily kept himself out of the spotlight. Of course, RT’s in no position to pursue this line of analysis, and then too . . . what’s he done but helped Ukraine with money and kept the gas supply moving?
In an open letter to President Obama, the two featured in the video, Fiona Hill and Steven Pifer, stated the following:
Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine look to the United States, not just the European Union, for support. A joint U.S.-EU stance has the greatest prospect of countering Russian actions. We recommend that you instruct the State Department to coordinate policy steps with the European Union and key members, including France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom, to bolster the “targeted” states and assist them as Russia increases its economic and political pressures.
Batkivshchyna – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “The party wants to prosecute “Law enforcement involved in political repression”[79] and to impeach current Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his “anti-people regime” to “return Ukraine to the path of European integration”.
There’s a mighty page ahead of the statement quoted.
My impression is that the Soviet Era really is just ending and it has brought Ukraine — as it has Syria — to a crossroads. Ukraine’s position is much easier than Syria’s, of course, but The Bear isn’t going away either although by way of Putin the leadership has taken a detour (the big one step backwards) into the 19th Century, God bless him, and that leaves Russia’s future — the two steps forward! — quite open as regards its becoming a responsible state genuinely devoted to internal pan-Slavic interests.
According to party leader Oleh Tyahnybok, Svoboda is not an ‘extremist’ party; he said that “depicting nationalism as extremism is a cliché rooted in Soviet and modern globalist propaganda”.[46] He also stated that “countries like” Japan and Israel are fully nationalistic states, “but nobody accuses the Japanese of being extremists”.[46] According to Tyahnybok, the party’s view of nationalism “shouldn’t be mixed with chauvinism or fascism, which means superiority of one nation over another”, and that its platform is called “Our Own Authorities, Our Own Property, Our Own Dignity, on Our Own God-Given Land”.
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When I sat down post on BackChannels this morning, I thought I would wrap up global turmoil in a page, starting with Ukraine but moving swiftly to Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and so on, and one might do that from journalism’s “second row seat to history”, which is the World Wide Web, but in depth and expanse, even the smallest conflict in the world turns out incredibly rich, and what the reader-writer is going to get is a snapshot, a glimpse along the surface of political reality.
In schematic, to say Putin –> Ukraine : Ukraine <–> Europe might prove out and be all one needs, but oh the devils in the details! Nonetheless, I believe it has fallen to Vladimir Putin to return Russia to Russian glory in a Russian manner — and we’re going to see that extraordinary effort and expense in some Bond movie glamour at Winter Olympics in Sochi very soon (not “hot off the press” these days, but one-hour cool on the web: Welcome to Sochi, the security Games – CNN.com – 1/27/2014) — and to question the democratic socialist values of the west with an assertion about feudal power and aristocracy.
“Is he powerful, rich, happy?” Putin is powerful and wealthy, but it’s doubtful that he’s happy; divorced, alone, secretive, controlling, malignantly narcissistic, he has grandiose and self-aggrandizing ambition absent — one may take the cue from Syria’s tragedy — of sufficient empathy to produce either an appropriate humanitarian or military intervention to east the civilian suffering within the state.
The other hand: he’s cautious and shrewd.
Notably, quietly, he fairly evacuated Russian citizens from Syria, removed his navy, and reduced support to arms contract fulfillment and advisement. Doubtless he’s got Russia in for more, but he’s not reviving the Soviet. He appears to have reset his nation in the 19th Century and seems to be positioning for empire in the manner of an emperor. He has got more control of the oven in Syria than Obama or anyone else, but he’s also paying tribute to Kadyrov, more or less — and Kadyrov does as he wants (and it’s not good) in any case — so it’s a little iffy as to how long before he bugs out for Marbella or the Black Sea, but at the moment and for a while measured in years, he’s the man in control.
It’s an opinion, and we know that every whatever has one, including me, but it tells too that without producing a great humanitarian deed in association with the tragedy in Syria — in addition to disassembling those chemical weapons, thank you very much, Mr. Putin — the support given Bashar Assad the sabotage of the central liberation motif by the appearance and at least temporal success of the al-Qaeda affiliates in the state will be as ghosts through the course of the Olympic Games in Sochi.
Even if not mentioned close to the sports page or in Russian media, the Syrian Civil War will be as a phantom presence in the air.
How beautiful the games!
But keep the door closed on that other stuff associated with the producer’s will and vision.
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Kadyrov is the only leader in any of Russia’s 21 republics to have his own militia. So sure is he of his indispensability to the fragile Pax Putina in the North Caucasus that he once strode into the Kremlin wearing a tracksuit and jogging shoes. Few others would risk such a mark of disrespect to Putin.
Nineteenth-century radicals loathed Russia above all other states because it had a quasi-religious mission to preserve autocracy at home and promote reactionary regimes abroad. To true believers, the “Third Rome” of Christian tsarism defended the divinely ordained old order against the threats of liberalism, socialism, nationalism and modernity.
After reading Nick Cohen’s relay of Pat Buchanan’s words about Vladimir Putin, it turns out that I am a part of a movement characterized as the “militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.”
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Ya ha!
I have found my place.
You know my lowest common denominator standards:
— Compassion | Humility | INCLUSION | Integrity —
Buchanan, if he’s now enamored of Putinism, and Putin, who would seem by the show of affection proffered in weapons deliveries and benevolent shadowing, remains committed to Bashar (The Butcher) Assad may be counted on for the grossest callousness, pride, exclusion, and — no secret where so many secret and nepotist arrangements would seem to be involved — corruption.
The same as (gasp!) Al Qaeda.
OUR problem, me hearties, me droogies, me Facebook best buddies from Riyadh to Islamabad, is that whether having to do with Assad vs. the Islamist Edge or Putin vs. Obama, it would seem similar mentalities wish to occupy the same space or shine in the same lights — not exactly atypical of “malignant narcissists” — while driving everyone else into misery or just plain out of their mirrored spheres!
THEIR problem, Mr. Obama, Mr. Putin, may have to do with escaping their own glorious selves. Of the two, Obama, being of the Christian compassionate honest humble and generously inclusive democratic and open society west, may lay claim to having done less harm in the short term than his superpower counterweight; Putin, however, would do well to look over the Assad combat doctrine and its effects on once disinterested Syrians who have by the effects of extensive bombing and indiscriminate fire been turned out of their homes or cheated of their lives while the Al Qaeda affiliates’ advance seems to have remained out of range and sight of the same.
Post-Soviet Syria was post-Soviet Putin’s to influence and transform.
Well, some, I suppose, both milk the cow and starve it until it keels over.
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In Putin, the past fights mightily with the future.
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In my own recurring themes, Putin and I might share the appreciation of what I call “19th Century Modern”, an aristocratic and noble notion reinforced by the appearance of affluence and wealth. Living in the 19th Century with 21st Century appointments and appliances seems to me pretty cool, although I’ve had to stuff my mansion into a cabin (or cottage) based in about 1,000-sq.ft. of garden apartment walk-up, and things are not looking so good for drives in the country and claret before one or another of the ever glowing electronic hearths.
Still, the situation here is 19th Century (Modern), and it’s pretty good but for the worry.
For the narcissist, reparative or malignant (guilty, I confess, of one or the other or a bit of both), there’s much to recommend it and one may bet on the intelligentsia’s buy-in, Georgian brick, ivy, tweed, and elbow patches and all.
So is the fighting about castle and keep?
It could be so, at least symbolically.
It takes a castle, a manor, a very many of them to create and sustain a great language and culture. If perhaps in his mind, his peacock charm, ambition, dreams at night, and hail fellow well met — and now and then stabbed! — President Putin has had to step back a century, the same may serve to remind of the magic of that era as well.
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It’s almost Christmas.
Winter returns tonight to my home in western Maryland — ice and snow, wool blankets and sweaters, steaming pots of tea (someone else in the family got the samovar) — so I may offer this bit of in-solidarity to my unknown Muscovy doppelganger, reasonably appointed and of good temper: let’s enjoy the show because, sooner or later, for Christianity or fashion designers, for the Jews who work harder for humanity than anyone else, and for humanity served, we’re going to have to do something about Syria and soon, and we don’t want it to be either of the two pariahs busying themselves this evening with the other’s destruction.
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