The actions of the long haul truckers show this, she says, and others may follow. “What did the government do in this situation?” It made concessions that had the effect of showing that its earlier actions were “unjust” and should not have been taken in the first place. Russians can see that.
“Now, legislation should be very carefully considered, for numerous laws that have been adopted are putting additional burdens on business and on the population. “Unfortunately, in the government, they continue to accept laws” designed to extract more resources from the population and are imposing them to try to cope with the crisis.
The share of poor families in Russia—those with not enough income to buy food or clothing—in the past year has almost doubled from 22 percent to 39 percent, according to the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center.
Freedom, it so happens, carries with it a great many temptations and pitfalls, and no one among Russia’s powerful and propertied today has managed to resist these temptations. Impunity has made it impossible to cure Russia’s corruption with a simple outpatient procedure.
Twenty-four years and two days ago, the Soviet Union dissolved itself, a fact of political life and history that today places Putin, the oligarchs, the Russians, and the rest of the world in the 25th year past the monumental failure of the communist experiment. Today’s apparent “experiment” in place of the last one: feudalism in the form of a medieval revanche harking back to the days of Nicholas II and his establishment of the grandaddy of Russian political police, the Okhrana.
In a possibly Orwellian turn of events, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, so pleasingly pardoned before the Winter Olympics at Sochi has been returned (by Putin’s regime) to the status of an accused enemy of the Russian state, and “arrested in absentia” (the courts and defense are starting to kick around the absurdity — although Putin denies involvement, the state’s reputation developed under his auspices undermines claims to forthright character, i.e., too much has taken place “behind the curtains”).
The Russian power model sustained by Putin today may hearken directly back to Tsar Nicholas II’s “Okhrana” — Russia’s original “political police”. There are a few books out on the topic, but the idea of infiltrating and co-opting the opposition (to the absolute power represented by the tsar) starts early, the transformation of some police into political agents channeling, derailing, or subverting protest would seem to have become inseparable from the standard operating procedures of today’s political Russia.
This is “cutting edge” as distribution of the PDF precedes the publication of a related book:
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Many nationalities are represented among the foreign fighters. “I have seen people from the USA, the UK, Germany, France, Russia, Chechnya, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Palestine [limited numbers]), Lebanon, China, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan,” Abu Jamal stated. He recalled that they were suspicious of the Russians. “We would consider them as agents because they were blonde, real Russian-blooded people and we would not trust them as they would mostly claim that they had been in the Russian Army and then converted to Islam and retired from their posts and came to fight for IS. They were also mostly military strategists and were making the plans for assaults and battles. They were effective on making strategic military decisions in IS.” Some of our informants wondered whether these Russians were plants (i.e. spies or agents), coordinating things with Assad’s forces.
ISIS defector remarks dovetail nicely with the participation of Baathist Generals working with ISIS to plan assaults. The Soviet may have officially dissolved itself on December 26, 1991 but perhaps its methods have been sustained.
Media moves fast these days, and the sharing of information through the conflict and psychology community probably competes with the latest sports scores for rapid distribution.
The cause for ISIS suspicions regarding Russian convert-recruits certainly fits with the greater than century-long history of Russia’s political police elements. How well present relationships may be traced is another matter, secrecy, of necessity, providing the foundations for every facet of conflict development and response (with perhaps the exception of making public the frank observations of terrorist defectors).
Oh what evil webs some may weave — one hedges where empiricism falters on ambiguous evidence or too little evidence: BackChannels would place Egyptian doubts regarding the Russian assertion of the plane’s having been sabotaged (by having a bomb put on board) before takeoff in Egypt within the following framework.
Post-Soviet, post-KGB neo-feudal now FSB Russia has developed its own “War On Terror” designed to destabilize and fracture NATO and allied or cooperative states.
Muslims may know the epigram, “All of the evil is in one room and lying is the key.”
Through the KGB, the Soviet established a reputation for deceitful and disingenuous action and speech, and in the post-Soviet environment, that nefarious spirit may be expressed, this with reference to the Moscow Apartment Bombings, through possible “false flag” operations designed to manipulate “the masses”. https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/ Karen Dawisha’s book may be especially helpful in untangling some of the real life detective mysteries produced by the post-Soviet regime.
On rare occasion, but it happens, the fireman is the arsonist, the hero the creator the monster to be subdued. So it may go with Putin’s feudal revanche in which “Putin vs The Terrorists” — the political display of power proven effective in producing the nationalist fervor that wins elections — is an important fixture and image in Russian politics.
So the motive may be there.
Still, I and most modern observers (as opposed to medieval ones who feel their loyalties constantly tested) would rather have an empirical analysis of the crash than any useless collection of bold political assertions.
Given that all politics involves presentation, i.e., some show-and-tell business, one might ask whether any, most, or some political organizations possess more integrity than others.
The question’s fair today, for the theme most central to a spectacle in which the modern world — and the modern soul — struggles with the medieval involves the relative weight of a “loyal lie” to the possession of a possibly lonely integrity as regards an authentic and solid cognizance of the truth.
In the old biblical story in which “God proves” Abraham, the test is never defined but potentially involves either a test of absolute obedience to God or, much more interesting, a test of Abraham’s conscience and courage to speak back to God in defense of the life of the son he and Sarah had waited so long to have. God sees to it that Isaac lives (while a ram is made to die in his place) and never again speaks directly to Abraham.
BackChannels’ preferred argument: the test of conscience, courage, and, perhaps, Abrahams integrity as a father.
The Red mosque was a spiritual centre of the Jihadi wing in the ISI and the ISI’s Jihadi wing provided their support and aid to Maulana AZ in retaliation against Pak Army. GAR Brigade had links with Al-Qaeda’s international network and soon after when ISIS emerged, they maintained a connection with them.
Last year, in 2014, the chief cleric of Lal Masjid Maulana Abdul Aziz made it clear that he respects Islamic State (IS) because of similarity in their missions and has no repentance over supporting IS.
This is just not a story about a hothead who had an argument with someone at work, steamed home to get his gun, came back, and shot the bastard with whom he’d been fighting. This is a story about a couple with a developed arsenal, pipe bombs, and bomb-making supplies. Add: her passport; his recent beard; foreign travel.
The White House has consistently refused being drawn into the position of the “crusader west”, and we as a nation, so I hope, have refused agitation from the Left / Far Left and the provocation of division such acts promote; however, people take steps that aggregate to alter the political landscape.
The Putiin-Khamenei assault on NATO involves — just my opinion — the encouragement of fascist nationalism (as has been seen in Hungary throughout Orban’s leadership and made more clear in relation to that state’s treatment of the Syrian refugees) in line with the feudal statement implicit in Russian, Syrian, and Iranian politics — “mafia states” each one. Few things promote a Far Right response quite like events associated with “Islamic Terrorism”. The “Feudalists” use someone else’s terrorist ambitions (model: “Assad AND The Terrorists”) to manipulate the political atmosphere in the states they have targeted.
One expects authorities to drag out the call on the deadly assault in San Bernardino, but BackChannels would be surprised if the tactical costuming, the SUV gunship, and the arsenal at home turned out to be hobby related. 🙂 Nonetheless, one expects and therefore leaves the involved governments to lead in criminal matters and any associated foreign affairs.
As noted in the excerpt From the Awesome Conversation, the national response to injury is to swell — as does the body with a wound — but with nationalist pride and determination.
Imagine such a thing as a “Medieval Time Bubble” — a place where heads of state hold “absolute power” over their plundered and subject people. It’s in that bubble, today post-Soviet and neo-feudal, that Putin, Assad, Khamenei, AND Baghdaddi need one another for keeping on display “Assad vs The Terrorists” and sustaining eadh their own portion of the medieval worldview.
I believe Daesh autonomous in its operations and spirit but manipulated to serve the ruling feudals as a foil for their militaries or their politics, to serve as leverage (“Assad OR The Terrorists” is the name of that play), and to serve as a goad to the west and related western defense spending.
The response to Daesh AND other medieval enterprises may have to come from the world that most immediately surrounds them.
Trolls online — paid? not paid? who knows — regularly credit the United States with having developed ISIS / ISIL / Daesh. For cause based in news, BackChannels has taken the opposite stance, and Daesh, although autonomous in its own mind and in its own workings, serves the medieval designs of Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran for the furtherance of despotism, fascism, and militarism — and endless war — far into the 21st Century.
In essence, the dissolving of the Soviet, almost 24 years ago, led not to democracy but to a feudal revanche benefiting primarily the ultra-privileged of Russia.
Today’s axis Moscow-Tehran may boast not only autocratic governance but with the help of Daesh’s presence in Iraq and Syria, a pretty good engine for the promotion of “New Nationalist” urges elsewhere and amplified and broadened divisions between people based on legacy in nationality, race, and religion, an anti-NATO strategy that appears to be working as post-KGB / KGB-Style Theater (“Assad vs The Terrorists”) proves that perception at a glance may create a useful target’s impression of reality.
Assad’s central strategy, this with the probable collusion of its partners, has been to produce an interesting piece of post-KGB-style political theater: “Assad vs The Terrorists”, which becomes also “Assad OR The Terrorists.” First, however, he needed “The Terrorists”, and he needed bad enough terrorists to confuse the moderate opposition with them. He had a few ways of accomplishing this effect. He could spill Islamists out of his jails (I’ll refer to a piece on that bit of data in a moment) and he could focus his air and ground forces against FSA (the initial revolutionary force while giving the al-Qaeda Typicals (like al-Nusra and ISIS) time to incubate.
Mission accomplished.
With “The Terrorists” fully present, Assad could then make the demand, “help me, or help them.”
The same system makes way also for the Assad-side slogan, “Assad, Or We Burn the Country.”
The western position: help neither, but try to help other forces strong enough in their own moral and fighting fiber to fight both — and the same have been fighting on their two fronts — against Assad’s forces and against Daesh.
Max Fisher’s piece attends to the complicated political nuts and bolts where I have emphasized a larger struggle between the medieval world of political absolutism, of which Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdaddi form a whole: the first three have in the fourth the enemy they need to write the future of the world their way. None appear possessed of any compassion sufficient to forestall their own inability in restraining themselves.
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What has come from this has been a steady stream of “war porn” — indescribable images of death, dismemberment, maiming, and mutilation having for their subject tens of thousands of Syrian noncombatants. All who have watched the “Syrian Tragedy” — that’s my term for it — online have seen this horrific feed.
While we have also seen — and in some ways been made to see — Daesh atrocities conveyed in pictures and text, what we have seen also without end have been the targets and effects of Assad’s barrel bombing of whole areas. A portion of Homs today looks like Nagasaki after the ashes have cooled. Famously, the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp has been devastated between Assad’s forces and those of the Islamic State — http://www.longwarjournal.org/…/islamic-state-releases…
Fundamentally, the struggle between the post-Soviet feudalists (“absolute powers” each of them) and the Islamic feudalists is medieval in a particularly barbaric way: both are using modern weapons absent of any apparent compassion or conscience.
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The medieval screed wants the division of all against all — and those who benefit from it have to promote that division as part of their own archaic, faulted, or otherwise misguided ambition — and for shame or honor, none dare admit fault.
Worse, the medieval of mind align differentially — according to national, religious, or sectarian nominal affiliation. Because you were born . . . Shia . . . because you were born . . . Sunni . . . because you were born Russian Orthodox . . . because you were born Arab . . . . because you were born Turkish . . . . these obligations (to bully, demean, and diminish others, to pick fights with others, the more helpless, the better, etc.) are incumbent upon thee.
The medieval world had been constrained by slow transportation, primitive methods of distant communication (runners with notes or messages) and personal weaponry. These medieval elements in the modern world are not so constrained and are both borrowing and leaking themselves into the platforms, as it were, of the progressive manufacturing of devastating weapons as well as other sectors generating the modern experience of community and technology.
Start with Assad’s planes.
The barrel bombs might be basic in various ways, but the flying machines are not.
Now: Russian cruise missiles launched from air and sea; on the ground, anything that can be gotten and carried.
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Part of the online crowd supports the Russian position coupled with affinity for the Christian Church (which church matters less at the moment: whatever the true political topology may be, Assad’s opposition — “The Terrorists” — are all Islamists in the Baghdaddi tradition. Often reached for in objection to that position are the many images of dead, injured, maimed, and mangled children or their parents. In Assad’s war, the same have not been “collateral” or “in the way” of “The Terrorists”: by all appearances and by way of general barrel bombing most of all, they have been the certain targets of Assad’s so-called “defense”.
This video post on YouTube on May 3, 2011 appears among the earliest statements of the Assad concern for any opposed to its absolute authority in Syria:
Related from 2013:
“It’s more horrific than any other war zone I’ve worked in. Most civilians are caught in crossfire, they are never really caught in direct fire. It is direct fire this time” he told BBC News.
Such state-generated terrorism encourages sympathy for the Syrian opposition, including in the confusion “The Terrorists” that the Assad regime allowed to incubate.
There are many other and similar observations and arguments having to do with “Assad and The Terrorists” and the medieval barbarism put on display before the world. The escalation attending Russia’s entry into the combat area, the side-by-side mix of Russo-NATO (U.S.) cooperation and “proxy war” have no effect on the kind of inhuman consciousness involved in sustaining the conflict.
It has been and remains BackChannel’s thesis that Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdaddi and what they represent — on this blog, 21st Century Feudalism — require one another for survival.
Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/ – 10/2/2015.
Zubatov had long harboured plans for the restructuring and expansion of the political police, envisioning an elite and quasi-independent political police, acting under the direct order of its own Special Section and only indirectly under the orders of Fontanka; a truly secret police expanding and operating at the behest of the MVD‘s edicts, circulars, and regulations and not through the statutes of the Svod Zakonov (Digest of Laws).
Plehve dismissed Lopukhin’s plan and gave Zubatov’s proposals his full support. Zubatov’s ideas on police reform fitted comfortably within Plehve’s view of traditional tsarist bureaucratic behavior, satisfying both his belief in Imperial power politics and his secretive nature. He conceived of political police reform in the only way his experience allowed him to: not through decentralization of authority as Lopukhin believed, but through its deconcentration — the expansion of central authority in the provinces. Indeed, this strategy would permit Plehve to swell the size of the political police to ministerial proportions. As a result Plehve would in fact hold two very powerful ministerial portfolios: minister of internal affairs and the unofficial post of minister of internal security, enhancing his power and prestige within both ministerial circles and the court, making him the most powerful man in Russia next to the tsar.
Zuckerman, Fredric S. The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880-1917. Pp. 92-93. Washington Square, New York: New York University Press, 1996.
“Fontanka” refers to “Fontanka 16 Quai” (St. Petersburg), the central location, evidently of minimized importance at the above passage, for Tsar Alexander II’s secret police.
According to Wikipedia, “Many authors maintain that it was Rachkovsky’s agent in Paris, Matvei Golovinski, who in the early 1900s authored the first edition.[3] The text presented the impending Russian Revolution of 1905 as a part of a powerful global Jewish conspiracy and fomented anti-Semitism to deflect public attention from Russia’s growing social problems. Another Rachkovsky agent, Yuliana Glinka, is often cited as the person who brought the forgery from France to Russia.”
A rabbi said to me one afternoon in relation to religious zealots, “end times”, and terrorism: “Everyone’s in too much of a hurry to get to the end of the story.”
We were then looking forward.
At the moment, BackChannels has been looking backward and would say to the rabbi, “To the contrary, everyone wants to go back to the drawing board!”
For the Islamists, the “drawing board” appears to be 7th Century Medieval Barbarism.
For the Russian President, perhaps, it may be the political police serving Tsar Nicholas II.
BackChannels 