Category Archives: Europe

Europe Medieval or Europe Modern?

20 Monday May 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, France, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Ukraine

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DW, posted to YouTube May 20, 2019.

Europeans who may wish to see fewer “3rd world country people” in their neighborhoods would do well to address the state leaders who sent them: Putin, Assad, and Khamenie.

How?

By applying “Reflexive Control” in the manipulating of Islamic Terrorism and the shaping of their wars.

—

http://www.businessinsider.com/exploring-al-qaedas-murky-connection-to-russian-intelligence-2014-6

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/09/syria-assad-isil-background/

Method #1: detect and amplify any present national, racial, or religious suspicion into self-righteous anger and resentment — and crank it up;

Method #2: develop and deploy appropriate agitprop and agent provocateur — and for the Devil’s sake, don’t worry about anything having to do with ethics, ideals, principles, or values: in fact, dispense with the possession of conscience altogether and reduce all complexities — also, all cultural richness and intercultural relations to two essential dimensions: will and survival.

Method #3: Prepare the violence to come: arm convinced militia and move the same toward perceiving slights or promoting provocations, for either will serve the dual purposes necessary for the inhabiting of a renewed medieval world governed by feudal arrangements in support of “absolute power” (to be shared between political criminals and similar life forms).

Method #4: In hybrid, highbrow, and lowest manner, infiltrate target organizations and states for purpose of abetting their destabilization, perpetuating disinformation, and for ultimately exploiting legitimate business and labor for gain leveraged by bribery or extortion / reward for cooperation and threat for independence in either thought or action.

Also accessed in the writing of this blog:

Hinnant, Lori. “French yellow vest movement dogged by intolerance, extremism.” Daily Herald (Chicago), January 29, 2019.

Oltermann, Phiip. “Austria’s ‘Ibiza scandal’: what happened and why does it matter?” The Guardian, May 20, 2019.

Centrist leaders across Europe hope the fallout from the “Ibiza scandal” will be felt beyond Austria in the European parliament elections this week, in which populist, nationalist and far-right parties have been forecast to make gains.

Strache’s apparent eagerness to embrace corruption is in stark contrast to the “drain the swamp” rhetoric populists routinely deploy in their attempts to portray politics as a battle by decent ordinary people against a venal elite. The FPÖ is a key member of an alliance of European nationalist parties led by Matteo Salvini of Italy’s League.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/20/austria-ibiza-scandal-sting-operation-what-happened-why-does-it-matter

Sheldon, Michael. “The Small World of French Foreign Fighters.” Medium, February 4, 2019. Primary Source: Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab.

Add to the title: “We want to be free.” Posted to YouTube on February 10, 2014.

BackChannels has embedded with many posts the key word or phrase, “medieval v modern”, and that has worked for the editor, but what has emerged in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and elsewhere also could be called a “Reactionary Conservatism” that fits with the anti-democratic and piratical renewal of feudal absolute power. Where such has succeeded, so far, the same has devolved into patently criminal cronyism.

Added 5/23/2019 —

BBC on Orban’s Hungary and its “Populism” — Posted to YouTube May 22, 2019.

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FTAC: Brief Note Re. Poland and the Holocaust

21 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Poland, Russia

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The topic is perennial: “The Poles did nothing to stop Hitler”; “The Poles murdered the Jews”; “The Poles were the worst of anti-Semites”; etc. So here is one fast response to all of that.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shtetl/ –> Marian Marzynski’s documentary on PBS “Frontline”.

The Holocaust may be unique in this overlooked way: it was an event so damning of the character of our species that it has been and may remain visited universally over time. The experience of it has given over to the memory of it. Each soul that visits The Holocaust, and there are many ways now, will experience and respond to it differently.

Compiled by the Polish American Librarians Association, a new list of recommended reading emphasizes books that effectively examine inflammatory questions that may never be fully answered or understood but continue to be asked: Did Poles collaborate with the Germans? Why did Poland have the largest Jewish population of any country in Europe? Why did the West disbelieve information about the death camps that was gathered by the Resistance? Why didn’t more Jews resist? Why was Poland the only country in which the death penalty was imposed for Christians harboring Jews? Why was the response of the Catholic Church so meek? Why, by far, are there more Polish names on the roll at Yad Vashem of Righteous Gentiles who saved Jews than any other nationality?

http://palalib.org/collection/poland/ (current)

Three million Poles were also taken by the Holocaust.

And there’s no denying the theft and inhabiting of Jewish property by the Poles.

Nonetheless, lose the black-and-white thinking.

For the energetic, two lesser known proper nouns might be worth a look-up in relation to The Holocaust: “Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter”; “Michael Kellogg” (The Russian Roots of Nazism).

Kellogg’s book: https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/111/5/1618/14004

I had left the nouns — Kellogg and Scheubner-Richter — without URLs to encourage readers of the thread to make a little bit of effort to know the true kernel of The Holocaust.

Additional basic reference online: http://www.holocaustchronicle.org/ | https://www.yadvashem.org/ | https://www.ushmm.org/

Recommended for viewing: “Image Before My Eyes: A History of Jewish Life in Poland before the Holocaust”.

https://www.amazon.com/Image-Before-My-Eyes-Holocaust/dp/B000CRR3J2

Addendum in Response to Comment

The Polish experience of the Holocaust had been mixed and not in any small or trivial way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_crimes_against_the_Polish_nation tells a part of the story of horror for those in whom the Nazis found no value.

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FTAC: Obama, State Secrets, Public Apprehension, and BREXIT

21 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Europe, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Great Britain and United Kingdom, Journalism, Middle East, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Syria, United States of America

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Inspiration: Josh Meyer’s “The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook” (Politico, circa January 2018) and the idea that using the article as mud pie material for the Obama Administration may be invalidated by the lifespan and volume of state secrets migrating across Administrations. This was the question: “Reporting how Obama shut down a Major Hizbullah investigation is ‘slinging mud’?”

Because . . . state secrets span Administrations.

” . . . requires a public that can access, understand, and use the information . . . ” https://www.nfoic.org/transparency-obama-administration —

The problem is with “understand“.

In the way of professional journalism, much condensed and simplified, every editor and reporter must ask about his story: “Is it clear? Is it accurate? Is it complete?”

All authoritarian / autocratic / dictatorial governments diminish the power of the press because . . . they are keeping secrets and intend not to share the reality of their political space with their subjugated populations.

How honest, for example, can Maduro be with Venezuelans when he is operating a criminal state?

He can’t share anything having to do with his circles of criminal enterprise. Instead, he has to tell the people fairy tales in a loud voice.

However, and in defense of secrets keeping and to criticize popular democratic self-determination — or perhaps point out the limits of the same — the British governing class got a strong lesson when it allowed nationalist forces, induced by Moscow-backed Islamic Terrorism and Migration — I “read” Syria as a deliberate underhanded assault on Europe — to make an issue of integration with the European Union, which has been Great Britain’s nearest and greater market and trading partner. Some part of the voting public had had no idea about where its state really was. Instead, they were focused on the degrading of British life by jihadists and needy migrants coming out of the middle east. They chose to lower the portcullis in an attempt to insulate themselves from what they believed was happening in Europe and happening to them because of a unified Europe. They’re now on the cusp of paying for their misjudgment.

Related: Graff, Garrett M. “The Government Secrets Trump Is About to Discover.” Politico, January/February 2017.

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Munich Security Conference: Pence’s Silent Moment; Brief Nod to Russian and Norwegian Energy Sourcing

18 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, International Development, Politics, Russia

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The whole liberal world order appears to be falling apart – nothing is as it once was. When Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and started the bloody conflict in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, many considered him to be the major cause of global destabilisation. Nobody could have known that just a few years later the US President, of all people, would seriously challenge the current international order. Donald Trump questions free trade just like he questions the Western set of values or NATO. This has massive consequences – not just for us Europeans.

https://www.securityconference.de/en/publications/food-for-thought/single-view/article/food-for-thought-who-will-pick-up-the-pieces/ – 2/13/2019

Remarks by German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger covered a full palette of issues at this month’s Munich Security Conference, but as he has noted without defining the most central problem, i.e., that of placing the Feudal world in the future of the Modern one, an American President (“of all people”), a feudal lord himself in his more familiar domains, has come to lead a part of the charge right back into a bloody and barbaric western civilizational past.

Mike Pence, now associated with a glowing encomium about his leader that brought no applause — ” . . . I bring greetings from the 45th President of the United States of America, President Donald Trump” –> dead silence — delivered a bit of a mashup for the “Inaugural John McCain Ceremony”

Politico (“Munich Insecurity Conference”), caught a comment on Turkey that seems to BackChannels positively surreal given the distance President Erdogan has created between the potential of a democratic Turkey and the reality of an Islamist sultanate:

“We will not stand idly by while NATO allies purchase weapons from our adversaries,” he said, in an apparent reference to Turkey’s plan to buy the Russian S-400 missile defense system.
“We cannot ensure the defense of the West if our allies grow dependent on the East.”

https://www.politico.eu/article/munich-security-conference-angela-merkel-mike-pence/ – 2/18/2019.
Screen capture from 2015 RT video covering Moscow’s Inaugural Grand Mosque Ceremony.

Pence may have been taking sideways aim at Nord Stream 2, a perhaps more delicate matter than the selling of Russian defense missiles to a “NATO alley” for the purpose, one might suppose, of defending itself from the seller.

Then too, BackChannels wonders if enthusiasm may have been expressed for the development of other energy sources and pipelines, i.e., Baltic Pipe Project (related: “Polish, Danish grid firms give final nod to pipelines link to Norway gas fields.” Reuters, November 30, 2018).

Related Online: “Impressions from the Munich Security Conference 2019”.

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French President Macron’s Address to the United States Congress, April 25, 2018

25 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Fast News Share, France, Free Speech, United States of America

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Also Relevant

9/11 –

http://www.businessinsider.com/exploring-al-qaedas-murky-connection-to-russian-intelligence-2014-6

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

New Threats – New Powers and Criminal States

https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/

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

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/02/02/united-states-of-america-basic-training/

The Illusion of Nationalism

Here!  Here!

BackChannels has been fighting the New Nationalism from the moment it detected its origins in the stimulus produced by Islamic Terrorism as manipulated by Moscow and Tehran worldwide.

The blog has also associated America’s deep and frequently extreme political polarization with “Active Measures” and related “hybrid” and “information” warfare designed by the dictatorships running Moscow and Tehran against the will of their people.  It seems surreal that a French President would now stand before the American Congress and underscore those points while a populist American President stands some to the side and between as regards accommodating, so far, aggression in Ukraine and an  unspeakable horror show for humanity in Syria, which has been strengthened also for Iranian and Russian forces as well as their proxies and “little white men” (same as those “little green” ones who literally walked into Crimea).

Best Solution – Digital Data and Artificial Intelligence

SophiaOnCosmoIndia

Screenshot: Sophia AI on the cover of an Indian edition of Cosmopolitan.

BackChannels heartily endorses fair and free trade, global cooperation that is constructive for all — no zero-sum games or negotiations — and, of course, due attention to the psychological and social ramifications of exchange involving Big Data and. God bless Sophia and her engineers, the revolutions to come in artificial intelligence.

There Is No Planet B

Fake News

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/10/23/fake-news-genuine-fake-news-the-real-fake-news-get-your-fake-news-here/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/28/a-short-page-referencing-works-by-or-associated-with-ion-mihai-pacepa/

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

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/10/01/the-active-measures-links-page/

I was drawn away from the desktop during this morning’s speech, but am very glad here to have returned to a recording of it (thank you Fox 10 Phoenix for fair use and fine editing) and spent the afternoon with it.

I think it safe to say that America LOVES French President Macron.  At the end of this clip, I seen no one sitting in protest.  I don’t know if that’s a rare occasion (another remark made about this event and one best left unremarked), but I’m going to be feeling it — feeling its goodness — for a while).

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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:

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FTAC: FEMEN, Lady Liberty, Modesty, and Civil Disobedience

17 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, France, Free Speech, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Kurdistan, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Ukraine

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Inspiration: an image with FEMEN topless, of course, up top and below examples of accomplished female professionals and the charge was that FEMEN were not feminists but the workers were.

I like FEMEN.

The Atlantic ran a Pro-Con set on them in 2013:

Pro: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/05/topless-jihad-why-femen-is-right/275471/

Con: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/05/put-your-shirts-back-on-why-femen-is-wrong/275582/

Where women enjoy security beneath the umbrella of reasonable and sound laws, it should not make a difference how one or the other choose to bring attention to political or social issues that concern them.

Free to work; free to bare the breast (at times); free to choose: free.

***

The hidden principle and cultural value behind this discussion is “modesty”. In civil and day-to-day life, most may agree that modesty is a virtue.

Keep your clothes on.

🙂

However, in the liberal western democracies that adjust themselves with thought and thoughtfulness, there’s been ample room for peaceful civil disobedience and protest. It’s in that context that a passionate defense of persons against wrongdoing my be interpreted. Perhaps where attention is needed — perhaps we should discuss FEMEN’s causes more than its methods — attention is gotten.

The Eugene Delacroix painting is famous and here somewhat between camps because she is “Liberty” herself leading the charge against tyranny.

Le 28 Juillet. La Liberté guidant le peuple

Eugene Delacroix, “Le 28 Juillet. La Liberté guidant le peuple.” Source: Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives via artsy.net

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On President Trump’s ‘Jerusalem Declaration’

12 Tuesday Dec 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, Europe, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, North America, Palestinia, Politics, Regions, Russia, Ukraine, United States of America

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The prompt: opprobrium for much of President Trump’s other actions and utterances with glowing exception for announcing the moving of the American Embassy to Jerusalem.

Trump has to respond to internal personal as well as external political pressures. He has to make decisions with those two universes somewhat in balance.

The “Jerusalem Declaration” sense a message to (you know what I’m going to say 　 — fill it in), and the timing is right as Israel is somewhat surrounded by PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and Russia (which has military stationed about eight miles from the Golan).

The West has symbolically re-planted its flag at the Israeli bridgehead with what used to be more predictable despotic “eastern” dictatorships or “politically absolute” governments (some of them, of course, plainly hideous).

Russo-Iranian imperial aggression in the middle east has pushed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia westward, and the same has focused the remaining liberal states of EU / NATO (so perhaps not Turkey or Hungary or Poland) on resistance to extremist and tyrannous politics). The President’s move in Jerusalem nudges the other side to back off or up its game. We hope that Moscow axis will “hold” where it is and reconsider its ambitions and the means now applied — including election meddling and real fake news — toward achieving them.

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