Dear colleagues, health care, education, social support, social security must become issues of true public good, true public value. They need to serve our entire society.
We cannot imitate education.
We cannot imitate health care or social security.
We cannot imitate caring for people.
We need to learn to respect ourselves.
We need to look at this important notion such as reputation and that reputation of a specific hospital, school, institution, or social office is a building stone in the overall reputation of our country . . . .”
Education, healthcare, and the social welfare system should become a true public benefit and serve all citizens of the country. Attention to the people cannot be faked. You cannot simulate teaching, medical assistance or social care. We have to learn to feel respect for ourselves and honour reputation. It’s the reputation of individual hospitals, schools, universities and social institutions that form the country’s overall reputation.
Mama NATO may withstand some kvetching as and if President Putin makes good on this pivotal gambit to now transform around his “vertical of power” a breathtaking neo-feudal oligarchy into a rule-of-law abiding and meritocratic capitalist social democratic society.
That’s pretty good advertising for $4.8 million, but there’s a long way to go on establishing a right way, and that way might include revisiting the politics attending 1) more than nine million Syrian refugees in a “show” (not really) designed to transform a modest revolution into a viciously polarized civil war, 2) the creation of a deeply anti-Semitic and nearly nuclear armed Iran, 3) a spiteful incursion into Crimea, Ukraine presenting itself as Russian nationalist fascism, and 4) perhaps some still post-Soviet meddling in the middle east (no one watching has missed Mikhail Bogdanov’s chat with the PFLP – nor missed the related murderous assault in a Jerusalem synagogue) as well as in Hungary where Viktor Orban has pursued an increasingly despotic course aligned with Putin’s outlook.
Still, whether “imitate” or “simulate” was the verb invoked, the want of integrity, of observable-measurable progress, and the want of a good reputation (on top of the bad assed one) seems to have found a place at the top on Russia’s public agenda.
The Russian government strives to paint the current Ukrainian government as fascist, to justify their aggression in Ukraine. In fact, when synagogues in Odessa were covered with Nazi graffiti, it was the leader of the Right Sector who joined the Rabbi in painting over the offensive marks.
Also during his lecture, English showed a photo of a man with a swastika on a sign and a flag, to show how many Nazis are in Ukraine. But the flag was not a Ukrainian flag, it was the flag of the pro-Russian separatists of Donetsk.
A button on the homepage of the JMI website links to a related website where the work-product of JMI’s own cadre of young journalists is published. Naturally, it’s in Arabic only; these contents are not meant for the Western sponsors and international partners. But intentionally or not, it is these pages – along with the invaluable help of Google Translate’s Arabic-to-English service – that shine a revealing light for non-Arabic speakers like us on what all that NGO money and European inspiration is enabling for this “unparalleled centre of excellence in the Middle East”.
If you visit it today, as we did, you will notice that on every page of the site, under the headline “Success Models”, a journalist called Tamimi is profiled. She is the murderer of my daughter Malki.
Duplicitous talk has been always thematic in the middle east where “sweet words” often mask evil intentions (or the Jews most certainly would not have left Gaza in 2005).
While past need not be prelude, and one hopes that one day it will not be so in the middle east, a bad rap sheet — as bad as it gets — does not pretty up without proof of sea change conversion, reformation, transformation. Writers know the bad girl isn’t always bad and the good one not always good, but for purposes of the plot, the evil bitch is going to play out her script — the one programmed most deeply in her head — more likely than not.
Still, and beyond track records, there remains the matter of what is opined and reported today.
The accolade given a convicted terrorist, a mass murdering personality incapable of discerning innocents or noncombatants from military, may indicate detente, inclusion, or solidarity with a large force within Jordanian society. The insight provided by Arnold Roth, the writer of the quotation presented at the top of this post, indeed may indicate how far Arab attitudes and beliefs about others and general contempt may be from global standards.
A few major difficult languages — Arabic, Chinese, Russian — have by being so defended their ethnolinguistic communities with a strength greater than mountains: democratic high-integrity ideas and news cannot obtain mass access without state-based approval, and despotic nefarious designs may be protected by the restriction of access to them by multilingual communities, often with vested interests either in business or defense.
That may change as the expansion of social relationships online necessarily add to machine translation human bilingual pairs and multilingual virtual communities.
Wildcard: within the context of a progressing open society, one that encourages freedom of expression, civic and civil responsibility, and an open discourse free of intimidation and one prizing “ethos, logos, and pathos” together in adversarial exchange, a community or state may start hearing what it does not wish to hear and either tolerate it and struggle with challenges presented, or, as has been true of Iran and Russia, it may revert to state-controlled media and the throttling of democracy.
The term “illiberal democracy” — there is no such thing — belies fascism beneath the banners of autocratic moral entrepreneurs, starting with the Muslim Brotherhood (who in Egypt made plain their agenda in that state and thereby inspired an extraordinary, deeply populated, and widespread revolt). Wherever that kind of “putsch” takes place, reassertion of the military state may be welcomed, but over time, by and large, a good people, one inclined to promote the “humanity of humanity” and include themselves within rather than above it, may congregate and argue around central and familiar near universal ideals and values.
“The gunmen were armed quite seriously, they had everything they needed in their arsenal including machine guns and grenade launchers,” Kadyrov said in an interview on the radio station Echo of Moscow. He added that authorities had been expecting an attack and were prepared, though the assault was anticipated for Dec. 12, Russia’s Constitution Day.
Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013.
Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Michael Henry Heim, translator. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
It isn’t simply that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” as the novel’s most famous line has it. Kundera was showing us not only how one major event sweeps away another, but just how hard it is to remember at all, how disorienting to our own point of view and sense of time it is to try to follow what is going on around us.
In retaliation for losing Ukraine in the Russian-dominated CIS, Putin seized control of Crimea after a bogus referendum in which 97 percent of the population allegedly voted. The same thing was about to happen in the heavily Russian populated East of Ukraine but halted due to International Sanctions.
Corruption is a major obstacle to doing business in Russia, and petty corruption is common. The business environment suffers from inconsistent application of laws and lack of transparency in public administration. The public procurement sector is notoriously corrupt, with fraud related to government tenders costing the state billions of dollars each year.
http://www.business-anti-corruption.com/country-profiles/europe-central-asia/russia/snapshot.aspx – September 2014.
Corruption claims related to the 2018 Russia and 2022 Qatar World Cups have been circulating. In mid-November, FIFA cleared Qatar and Russia of any wrongdoing following an in-depth report by Michael Garcia, FIFA’s leading U.S. investigator and chairman of the investigatory chamber of the FIFA Ethics Committee. After FIFA cleared both nations, Garcia slammed the organization for not properly representing the facts. FIFA is once more reviewing his report.
Inexplicably, President Zeman called on his EU and NATO partners to accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea on the grounds that the 1954 decree that transferred the region to Ukraine was “stupid.” He went on Russian television and denounced the sanctions as counterproductive. As far as the fighting in eastern Ukraine was concerned, Zeman argued, the West had no right to interfere since it was a civil war.
Igor Luke’s piece fits with BackChannel’s own observations about despotic power (e.g., “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”) and drifts toward it (e.g., “Putin-Orban”) and explanations for the same developed in the books listed in the “Russian Section” of this blog’s incredible library.
I started this post close to the start of Putin’s address (in the above RT video) and may have 30 minutes left before the same draws to a close. 🙂 The Russian President’s emphasis returning capital flight from Russia and developing technology may correspond both to sanctions and reduced oil prices as well perhaps to either desire (that would be nice) or the purchase of time (more likely, chatyping here as a skeptical blogger) to continue developing neo-feudal nationalism and avenues of export for it in eastern Europe.
With loose reference here to political psychology, one may apply the notion that autocrats understand one another better than they do their natural enemies: democratic modern socialists and open society humanists. Still, as I listen to Putin’s translator – about 56 minutes in — and remarks about population and health care, the turn westward (don’t tell him!) is unmistakable. Inside of two minutes (and a little more), capitalization, equality, health care, economic and industrial forecasting, education and training, human development and achievement have been injected into the address.
Will Putin — and the oligarch super billionaires, all 110 or thereabouts — walk the turnaround talk?
Transcribed:
Dear colleagues, health care, education, social support, social security must become issues of true public good, true public value. They need to serve our entire society.
We cannot imitate education.
We cannot imitate health care or social security.
We cannot imitate caring for people.
We need to learn to respect ourselves.
We need to look at this important notion such as reputation and that reputation of a specific hospital, school, institution, or social office is a building stone in the overall reputation of our country . . . .”
If Putin’s neo-feudal and vertical-around-the-power inner circle, nomenklatura, and FSB turn about to embrace integrity and place it in value one step above loyalty — now that will take courage! — well, hell, I’d campaign and vote for him!
*
Psychology treats persons in part in their capacity as problems unto themselves, never mind their effects on others — everyone may need help, but there’s just one patient and experience of mind at a time.
Political psychology by definition needs must deal with both the vagaries of personality and the social organization of the same. By inference, we may expect the individual reprobate to consider and find a way of cleaning up his act and at practically any cost: as much becomes for a person an ethical, moral, and spiritual matter, a matter between himself and God or himself, history, nature, and time.
That is man confronting himself and how that story goes matters most to himself.
Putin’s reflection, as I am listening to it, involves the society he has created around himself, and that society has displaced immense wealth from the Russian people: will the owners of the state now return their stakes and set off the process of redistribution down through a new meritocratic Russia?
Noblesse oblige?
It might work.
One notices with people that efforts to improve in one area often yield improvements in other areas as well.
Best advice (if anyone’s reading): draw down the curtain on political theater. Locally. Globally.
Become real.
And please stop entertaining the PFLP, using the middle east to distract from eastern Europe, and much else that confuses intimidation, pandering, and patronage — and the fuller suite of degrading, demeaning, and dehumanizing methods — with legitimate power.
Remember what you said: you cannot imitate education, healthcare or social security, or caring for people.
I’ll add my two cents: you cannot imitate integrity either.
Take your time, for time has time in abundance for change.
Doha-Washington may be competing with Tehran-Moscow (with Damascus between them), and the point of both would seem to be to have a scourge, accidentally or deliberately, worth elimination and the claim of rescue.
Assad managed to turn an “Arab Spring” revolution toward democracy and modernity into a deeply medieval and polarized civil war pitting his “secular” regime against Islamic extremists. It didn’t start out that way — and missing from the fields of battle: about nine million displaced Syrians.
On the Sunni side of this geopolitical knot (a knot because the Soviet Union was not finished off but merely transferred to the KGB, which has pursued a deeply feudal and equally thieving — internally and externally — course) stands an apparently duplicitous alliance that started out intending to knock Iran out of Syria (taking care of Hezbollah on the way) and produce an updated Islamic.
Things are just not working out the way they seem to have been planned — and much of that planning may have been to promote one appearance or another of a version of political reality. Again: there’s too much of theater in the combat.
The tail isn’t wagging the dog.
The whole dog is wagging the dog, from the tip o’ the nose to the end o’ the tail, U.S.-NATO and perhaps a Sunni-aligned alliance on one side while on the other: Neo-Feudal Russia, today a KGB/FSB Dictatorship, and its familiar “Axis of Evil” partners, Khamenei-Setad, Bashar the Butcher, and assorted anti-American and national socialist whatnot worldwide.
And hanging over every inch of the latest lightning in this storm: the immense and darker cloud of a nuclear umbrella.
In Tehran, the deputy chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Brigadier-General Massoud Jazayeri also denied any collaboration. Iran considered the US responsible for Iraq’s “unrest and problems”, he said, adding that the US would “definitely not have a place in the future of that country”.
The Palestinians know very well that if and when they have a state of their own, they will never be able to rely on their Arab brethren.
The Arab countries have a long record of turning their backs on the Palestinians, not only with regard to financial aid promises, but even when it comes to basic needs such as medical treatment.
But what will happen after the creation of a Palestinian state? Palestinians say they do not have high expectations that the Arab countries will help them build their state.
Responding to the uprisings which surrounded the 1977 general elections in Papua, several military operations were launched in the Papuan highlands around Wamena. The response caused a further breakdown in the Papuan–Indonesian relations which had fallen apart at that time. The operations resulted in mass killings of, as well as violence against civilians. The stories of survivors recall unspeakable atrocities including rape, torture and mass executions. Estimations of the number of persons killed range from 5,000 up to tens of thousands. The research done for this report is consistent with these numbers, although restricted access to the area and ongoing intimidation of witnesses makes it difficult to confirm an upper limit of the number of victims.
Despite assurances made to the contrary, there is nothing under the pacific sun that is new regarding Indonesia’s deadly and demoralizing tactics used to terrorize anyone who would dare exercise any small amount of press freedom.
These days in our country, news is not good: to be a communist, to be a Christian (especially a Moslem converted to Christianity), to be a Zoroastrian or a Jew, to be a liberal or a secular … they are all castaway.
Even Moslems don’t have much security. The only accepted Moslems are those who are not reformist, not followers of Interuniversalism, not a Gonabadi Sufi, not an independent journalist, not a Moslem wanting separation of religion and politics, not an independent lawyer, and not anyone critical of state policies…
Indeed, with these designations, is there any Iranian who is safe from being detained for sure?
Quite possibly, the rejection of the bannered anti-Semitism of the piratical bastards who have infantilized, intellectually poisoned, suffocated and subjugated millions of their own constituents by lying — by way of deception and pandering — and by applying mafia methods in service to their own breathtaking criminal aggrandizement.
The world’s unrelenting focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an injustice to tens of millions of victims of tyranny and terrorism in the Middle East. As we speak, Yazidis, Bahai, Kurds, Christians and Muslims are being executed and expelled by radical extremists at a rate of 1,000 people per month.
How many resolutions did you pass last week to address this crisis?
