Category Archives: Regions

Video

FTAC – ‘This is Moscow’s Game’

29 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

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This is Moscow’s game.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1*

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.

Related in the news: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/06/29/post-brexit-the-u-k-is-in-its-worst-political-crisis-since-1940-and-the-e-u-may-be-about-to-unravel/ – 6/29/2016.

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.

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Truth Telling about Israel by Think Tank EMET

27 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Israel, Middle East, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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Dershowitz focused on largely unsuccessful efforts to promote Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel among American universities, campaigns that nonetheless helped “mis-educate a generation of future leaders.” BDS leaders admitted to wanting “to destroy Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people” contrary to rhetoric of pressuring Israel to conclude a peace settlement with Palestinians. Simultaneously the “very anti-peace” BDS movement “sends an erroneous message to the Palestinian street and the Palestinian leaders that says you don’t have to compromise…we will get you your state through extortion.”

Read more: Family Security Matters – 6/23/2016

FTAC – Sideways on Brexit and Putin’s Medieval Theater

27 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Russia

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🙂

A fair part of the world is now The World x multinational business x communication x shipping x transportation, and while sovereign states must control their borders, few are able to ignore their neighbors, their neighbors’ ambitions, or bad habits and bad sectors. Probably the way to think about criminality, as determined by familiar western and modern precepts is to attach it to “filtration” — catch the “bad apples” — and osmosis from ungoverned conditions and space to governed.

At the moment, there’s a feudal-criminal world (psst: Moscow and its assortment of Far Right and Far Left helpers) continuing to drive chaos into the more civil, more “rule-of-law” west. While the west should (must!) push back, it should do so with other than reversion to its own feudal tendencies.

What Moscow / Putin promotes has been on full display between Sochi and Syria — immense accumulations of wealth and power beside the most inhuman of practices and the most thoughtless and provocative real behavior in foreign policy. I know I can’t keep going over how Damascus incubated ISIS, or, in Russia, (or Iran), how criminality / kleptocracy leak down through the justice systems and corrode their entire societies, but all of that is what is actually represented by ISIS and so many Syrian refugees.

I know as an editor (of possibly the world’s most obscure political blog) that similar specialists or academics “get” the post-Cold War “big picture” but for most with more parochial interests, it’s “ISIS” and what Putin’s sayin’ sounds about right — lower the portcullis!

BackChannels has developed a whole image of the “Post-Cold War – Cold Struggle” environment anchored yet in Moscow and Washington.  In getting to this point, it has learned that “research analyst” (self-assigned, autodidact) knowledge and public impression and perception diverge often and quite, which fact of life may suit the treatment of the public as “the masses”, for as much fits with Moscow’s philosophy regarding information, “information space”, and political manipulation via, as with the handling of Syria, political theater writ large.

Related and Highly Recommended Summer Reading

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev, 2014.

Vovochka: The True Confessions of Vladimir Putin’s Best Friend and Confidant by Alexander J. Motyl, 2015.

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Committee for Russian Economic Freedom » Putin’s Regime Thumbs its Nose

23 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Russia, Ukraine

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On May 23, during a visit to Crimea, Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev made a fool of himself with a cynical and provocative phrase that quickly became one of the most popular hits on Russian Internet. Answering the question from an elderly lady about why pensions are not being raised, Medvedev, without so much as a thought, retorted: “There’s simply no money. If we find the money, we will raise pensions. You hold on here, I wish you all the best, good spirits and good health.” But the money is lacking not only for pensioners: all those who had for years depended on the needle of “Putinomics” are experiencing problems.

Source: Committee for Russian Economic Freedom » Putin’s Regime Thumbs its Nose – 6/16/2016.

FTAC – A Reductionist Rationale for War

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iran, Russia, Syria

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Suggested: “Interest” x “Values” x “Value” | Rationale.

From a humanist’s standpoint, the Syrian Tragedy hasn’t looked at all rational, but viewed through a lens that takes in “absolute power”, “feudalism”, “malignant narcissism”, and the wholesale producing of a theater of war as a demonstration of power, well then it makes perfect sense, horrific though that may be.

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FATC – Comments on Gaza Between the Medieval and Modern Worlds

11 Saturday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Palestinia, Politics

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The Palestinians have been at the mercy of powerful Palestinian families and politicians for decades, and the same have kept refugee generations captive or enthralled or leveraged by brutality , disinformation, and outrageous promises.

Part of the story starts here — https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/quote-manipulation…/ — with the foreign policy practices of the Soviet Union and its promotion of anti-Semitic message and conflict. While Putin has worked on “anti- anti-Semitism”, his government has nonetheless met with PFLP in recent years (2014) and has refused to designate Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, which is how they’re officially viewed in the United States.

Districts in poverty are vulnerable to many kinds of exploitation, criminal and political — and sometimes both — through recruitment into programs that are not in their interest.

http://www.tabletmag.com/…/hamas-killed-160-palestinian…

http://www.padico.com/public/English.aspx?Lang=2…

Feudal methods from patronage to brutalization, intimidation, and murder help keep conditions in Yatta exactly as they are. The talk, whether of nationalism or Islam, enrage or mollify the dispossessed to the advantage of those who purport to represent their interests.

I’ve included PADICO, a Gaza-based development corporation, because its board of directors is listed elsewhere on the site, and each name may be researched as regards education and experience. In outline, many are modern — cosmopolitan, well educated — but perhaps no less than Hamas’s tunnel digging children, they too have been hamstrung between the medieval and modern worlds, or that is where they have maintained themselves.

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

One should refuse contextless gambits like the KDH (King David Hotel) bombing but might suggest that in 1946, the greater armies had barely stopped moving, the mess in destroyed and disrupted lives moving on the landscape must have been immense if not easily seen, and military and paramilitary action on the part of the British, whom I am sure wanted to be done with World War II and its aftermath, were still undertaken in the near shadows of other combat theaters.

The simplifications disservice multiple rich histories.

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Zionism – Wistrich on Herzl – Excerpt from an Essay

10 Friday Jun 2016

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Israel, Political Psychology

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According to the account which he gave to the Hebrew writer, Reuben Brainin, less than a year before his death, Herzl was attracted to the Messiah legends of the Jews from early adolescence. At the age of twelve, he had a “wonderful dream,” which he recounted as follows:

The King-Messiah came, a glorious and majestic old man, took me in his arms and swept off with me on the wings of the wind. On one of the shining clouds we encountered the figure of Moses. The features were familiar to me out of my childhood in the statue by Michelangelo. The Messiah called to Moses: “It is for this child that I have prayed!” And to me he said: “Go and declare to the Jews that I shall come soon and perform great wonders and great deeds for my people and for the whole world!” 19

Shortly after this dream Herzl read a popular science book which presented electricity as the new King-Messiah which would liberate the nations and all mankind from servitude. At first he was indignant but then he began to wonder if electricity might not be the promised redeemer and decided to become an engineer—a childhood ambition which he never fulfilled. What is striking in this dream is the strong identification with Moses, with the Exodus from Egypt and technological advances that could totally transform the lives of humanity. It is precisely such a fusion of tradition and modernity, the idea of a new Jewish exodus and the Promethean redemption of mankind through the Zionist enterprise, that provided the élan vital of Herzl’s project.

Wistrich, Robert S.  “Theodore Herzl Between Messianism and Politics”.  PDF. Page 25. Essay republished online at Goodnewsto blog, n.d.

Such essays are passed to BackChannels along with the day’s feed in news.  Although so much reading online makes for a fragmented educational and informational experience, the fragments, when they are true — valid and reliable — do come together in three-dimensional mosaic.  The Torah, commentaries, histories far and near, and current events test each sentence.

Are dreams such as that of the “King-Messiah” poppycock?

Having attained and age in which cynicism and skepticism greet sentimentality too often, the BackChannels editor might say, “Probably so”, but let’s see where it goes.  However, the sentence, “It is precisely such a fusion of tradition and modernity, the idea of a new Jewish exodus and the Promethean redemption of mankind through the Zionist enterprise, that provided the élan vital of Herzl’s project” has its weight supported by Israel’s exuberant contributions to the world in the creation and manufacturing of the broadest spectrum of new and continuously improved technologies.

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