Category Archives: Syndicate Red Brown Green

FTAC: This Sunday

23 Sunday May 2021

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Gaza Suzerain, Iran, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Palestinian Territories, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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With little ado and much copy-and-paste, I’ve again engaged the narrative — and truth — about the “Middle East Conflict” and the idea that the Palestinian leadership has over time served other than the Palestinians.

As mentioned in previous posts, any Palestinian today may look up “Palestinian, corruption” or “Palestinian, political repression” with a simple search request.

(Referenced further on in comment: https://inthesetimes.com/article/jewish-anti-zionism-israel-palestine-colonialism-annexation-apartheid — if the Israelis have become Nazis [one among many hideously cruel falsehoods in circulation around the Far Out Left] — then the best remedy for the Palestinians would be the defense of their own state]). Here’s my response –>

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The argument for Palestinians is for the refuge of a Palestinian state.

Unfortunately, the Palestinian governments remain proxies to Moscow and Tehran and, through both, corrupt and suffocating in the cause of political absolutism. The Palestinians will not find their freedom through Israel but through loss of faith in the PLO/PA and Hamas as their representatives.

Some background on East Jerusalem issues:

Shuafat: On the Edge Between Good and Evil
Broadened Scope and Future Vision: A Note on Sheikh Jarrah, Whipped Mobs, and Middle East Peace

Palestinians will be free (“from the river to the sea”) when those who claim most to represent them — while effectively neglecting and plundering them by turns — are finished in the eyes of the Palestinians themselves.

Note too with the original article, the authentically genocidal Arab wars against Israel appear avoided. The long arc of Jewish agricultural capitalization and trade brought Arab labor into Palestine — it took Arab wars to rearrange the map and produce Arab refugees.

“The solidarity of Syrian revolutionaries with Palestinians . . . .”

The Palestinians are the victims of the same forces that sustain Putin, Assad, and Khamenei. While the deflections may be toward “The Jews” and western political will and technology, the simple fact is that the Syrians have only to look at the financially or morally failed states — dictatorships — associated with Soviet Era circles of control and regions of influence. Of the choices given by Yassin Swehat, I would choose for the PLO/PA and Hamas “ideological contortions” as they continue to serve the phantoms of the Soviet more than 30 years after the death of the same.

Regarding the west’s moral failures involving Moscow and the Syrian Tragedy: fear of direct nuclear exchange has probably been part of it; global warming and displacement without financial or political mechanisms in place beyond the shaping of migrant policies has certainly been part of it — as has the reflexively controlled turn toward proto-fascist New Nationalism in some democracy-degraded EU/NATO states (Hungary and Turkey, foremost; Poland and Italy mumbling along); finally, perhaps especially in the middle east, “disinformation” must be considered poison and lazily “missed information” something of its antidote. Arabs and Jews quick to come to their feet and raise their fists in anti-western solidarity often choose not to acknowledge authentically genocidal wars against the “Jewish State” nor look into the differing situations for enfranchised Israeli Arabs and those who would reject Israeli governance or influence at all costs nor, in the end, comb over the history of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist incitements and the long history of horrific acts of terrorism associated with them.

Everyone, even Israel, may be with the Palestinians this time but not the once KGB-guided PLO/PA (still) and Iran’s proxy Hamas. The same forces in Moscow and Tehran that produced them have sustained Assad the Butcher and other miserable post-Soviet “leaders” (Venezuela’s worth a look) around the world.

I absolutely support democracy, freedom, and rule of law for the Palestinians, and no less for them than any living in the west.

How is it then that Palestinians should be subject to PLO/PA and Hamas corruption, lies, and repression without end?

And how much of the world’s information (in English) should be withheld from Palestinians by evidently more powerful Palestinians (for their own good)?

Why shouldn’t Palestinians enjoy the privileges attending “free and fair elections” with plenty of responsibly vetted, cogent, and reliable information (on par with the best investigative journalism published anywhere else in the free world) with which to make political policy and representation decisions in their own right?

Shouldn’t Palestinians be able to evaluate for themselves their near state relationships with Moscow and Tehran?

Is there any reason for Palestinians not enjoying the benefits of democratic, liberal, and modern responsible and responsive governance subject to impartial internal auditing?

Or do the same need to be subject somehow to other less modern, less “western”, less universal, and less savory principles?

(The statement responded to essentially declared freedom a universal right, irreducible and recognizable).

Not so strangely, I agree.
However, not all who are powerful agree, and some in charge of substantial communities, from Beijing to Gaza City, seem to believe their people need more authoritarian control and guidance — backed by repressive measures and violence — than others elsewhere, especially in the open societies of the Wild West.
What is it about Palestinian Freedom that Palestinian leaders fear?

Putin, Assad, and Khamenei — I have their pictures in one place: https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/syria-the-horror-2011/ — have cut adrift the conventions of medieval absolutism. Their worlds — and the worlds attached to them! — should be fading behind us, and “us” includes the Palestinians.

For Iran — https://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 — the fig leaf’s slipping, and that will be a very good thing for the Palestinians who may be — or will be — free to question the dogma that has attended their existence — their very breathing in situ, in fact — for more than 73 years.

Screen capture from Twitter exchange on May 23, 2021.

The medieval competition between monarchies would seem about finished by World War I and made additionally irrelevant by the rise of an angry and industrialized Nazi Germany and its ravages through World War II (most of Europe’s monarchies have become constitutional enterprises), and yet Stalinism, ordinary dictatorship, and brutal theocracy have persisted into first fifth of the 21st Century. Along the way, the Soviet Union courted and used Arab power plus the Palestinian Refugees of 1948 to goad and block the expansion of western liberalism, democracy, and rule of law. When presented the choice between supporting the “Arab Spring” in Syria in 2011 or backing a dictator, Putin chose the dictator — and for himself on the way into power, a most manipulative and feudal-medieval Russian revanche.

While Assad’s slaughter drove down Syria’s population by 5 million between 2011 and 2018, the Palestinians, who had been handled since 1948 by an array of “revolutionary” personalities and organizations, were pinned in place, and eventually kept so by Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, each of which today maintains special-status Palestinian camps. While each “Arab war” against Israel has been lost, the Palestinians have not been treated as normal refugees, dispersed, resettled, or settled in place but rather meanly kept intellectually clouded with anger and incitements and weaponized for war against the “Zionist entity”. That strategy now regularly erupts in acts of terror or acts of war, drawing to Palestinians Israel’s defense operations that while securing Israel create the world’s most awful memories for Palestinians. The strategy works some on the post-Soviet Communist Far Out Left, but as western governments do their homework — and perhaps independent Palestinians will too — the “strategy” fails reliably.

The lies — the poison slipped into ears for decades — will eventually fail too.

As the “Greatest Generation” (WWII) has largely passed away in the United States and the liberal professoriate has grown lax with the acceptance of all stances and thought, however absurd, the Palestinians have found themselves in the pleasant but miserable condition of getting themselves killed by way of delusional encouragements and bitter incitements cooked up by their own medieval leaders.

I believe modern Palestinians wish to live modern lives but do not have modern leaders who would serve them first and with integrity before serving themselves and their relationships elsewhere.

Also on this blog and most cogent: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2019/02/24/shuafat-on-the-edge-between-good-and-evil/ | https://conflict-backchannels.com/2021/05/21/what-he-said-israeli-ambassador-gilad-erdan-before-the-united-nations/ .

Related Online Today:

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/hamas-played-the-world-like-a-fiddle/

https://www.israellycool.com/2021/05/23/report-on-gazan-fatalities-during-first-two-days-of-operation-majority-were-terrorists/

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FTAC Verbatim: American Laziness & Intellectual Poisoning

26 Friday Feb 2021

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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From the Awesome Conversation

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2020/07/01/fbi-antifa-and-swamp-gas/
That something may be believed doesn’t mean it exists, at least not in a format known to investigators.
Re. BLM: of the three founders, Patrisse Cullors has — or has had — issues related to the Far Out Left’s group-think with the Palestinians and related BDS. BDS has been well debunked by representatives of the Far Left, i.e., i.e., at least Finkelstein and Chomsky — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/ (as much has been shared with Ms. Cullors, but where her hinge is in relation to the demystification of Palestinian myth, I don’t know). The Israel Action Network has an in-depth PDF on BLM: https://www.jcouncil.org/sites/default/files/documents/BLM%20and%20M4BL%20%28002%29%206.30%20.pdf For the most part, Blacks and Jews share minority status in the United States and may be regarded as equally worth lynching (more or less) by the White Supremacist faction of more the general Far White Right politics that drifted into the Republican quarter with the development of the Civil Rights and Great Society movements and programs of the mid-early 1960s.
The Far Out Left flows down from Russia’s Soviet Communist Era and remains likely to ignorantly fly and sport the image of “Che” — or Red-Green art. Look up Danish illustrator Rune Agerhus who may be in Yemen with the Houthis these days.
Where the center — moderate and reasoning — has not held in American politics, the drift toward OLD extremism has been distinct and polarizing.
Rx for the confused (or prepared to be bigoted): dive into real intellectual and political history.
Useful reference regarding our long-lived enmity with Stalinesque political psychology:
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4874089,00.html
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2020/07/22/russian-active-measures-donald-trump-and-either-evil-or-gullible-americans-or-both/
Moscow’s “Active Measures” programs and other assaults — critical western cybersystems hacking — remain quite active.

Related Online

“The Party of Lincoln” Swapped Roles with the Invasion of the Dixiecrats

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Dixiecrat | https://www.history.com/news/how-the-party-of-lincoln-won-over-the-once-democratic-south

Accusation in a Mirror

Kenneth L. Marcus, Accusation in a Mirror, 43 Loy. U. Chi. L. J. 357 (2012).
Available at: https://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj/vol43/iss2/5 (a good reminder of the adage, “He who points the finger has three pointing back at himself”).

Active Measures

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Measures_Working_Group | https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/28/a-short-page-referencing-works-by-or-associated-with-ion-mihai-pacepa/

While the Communist Party Soviet Union (CPSU) dissolved into history, more or less, on December 25, 1991, what emerged in the character of the Russian Federation could not be called “democratic” in any modern sense. The renewal of the Russian State under Vladimir Putin’s aegis has been regarded — by those who have looked! — as feudal as mafia and heartbreaking for Russians in the breadth and depth of related state-bound corruption. Putin challenger Navalny’s nationalism now lends itself to national pride but with the hurdle of overcoming Russia’s complex networks of undeniably criminal relationships.

Here is another form of “Active Measures” – whether or not by intention, a true “Manchurian Candidate” and President: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2020/07/22/russian-active-measures-donald-trump-and-either-evil-or-gullible-americans-or-both/

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2018/02/06/set-palestinian-kgb-and-other-backchannels-observations-related-to-the-middle-east-conflict/

In which political realm do you wish to live — medieval with ignorance (and ignorant mobs) serving political absolutism? Or modern with democracy propelled by higher integrity and empirically reasoning souls?

Your choice.

Americans now floundering in the vicinity of the Far White Right have got to be some kind of anti-intellectual dumb and lazy to avoid substantial — and substantiated — tracts online related to broad cultural, intellectual, and political history. Exactly that, however, appears to have happened — and to be happening — with the continued defense of Trump’s largely miserably (politically) arrested and fixated “conservative” (in Self-Labeling Only [SLO]) and now self-distilling medieval base (for support of that assertion, watch the volunteered testimonials still arriving at the old “Republicans Voting Against Trump” cum “Republican Accountability Project” on YouTube).

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Hebron, Where the Mouths Go Off Before Investigation Begins

03 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Israel, Palestinia, Palestinian Territories, Political Psychology, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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Where are the gun and shooter?

How convenient for the camera to have followed the tug-of-war over the generator and not the assault (by whom) on Harun Abu Aram.

The unholy choir or practiced propagandists have weighed in with their headers – Middle East Eye: “Israeli forces shoot Palestinian in neck as they attempt to confiscate generator”; +972: “He grabbed his generator. They shot him in the neck” (note: the generator was far out of the victim’s hands when shots were fired); Al Jazeera: “Palestinian man left quadriplegic by Israeli shooting: Ministry” (at least the publication attributes the call — “A Palestinian man was paralysed from the neck down after being shot by the Israeli army on Friday in the West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said”).

Of course, The Jerusalem Post hedges —

“The claim that a Palestinian was wounded by live ammunition is known and the incident is being investigated,” the IDF said.

Channel 12 reported on Friday night that an initial investigation indicated that Abu Aram was shot unintentionally when the weapon of one of the soldiers at the scene discharged accidentally.

https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/eu-demands-probe-into-idf-shooting-of-palestinian-during-generator-brawl-654074
Screen capture at 0:31 seconds on January 3, 2021.

The generator and its owner had been separated, albeit not entirely in the IDF’s direction. Still, what would have been the point?

I’m inclined to leave the original header in place on this post even while changing its course, a reminder to myself to have the hard independent look first and shill neither Left nor Right.

While “Palestinian Resistance” picks up with its habitual protests — and those are certain to draw others toward injury — the facade covering Iranian involvement (backed by Moscow) will slip mightily as Sunni Arab states further cement their both new and strategic relationship with Israel. Those that have done that are no fans of Hezbollah or the Muslim Brotherhood. They’re not behind the Red-Green Far Out Left either. That pack of howling hyenas has worked as hard as the Palestinian “leadership” to encourage and sustain Palestinian self-destruction via abuse and corruption, disingenuous (the fix is always in!) speech, old Soviet communist (KGB) alliance, and deep exploitation (from use as “Pallywood” actors to child tunnel diggers to human shields).

In the Middle East as well as elsewhere across the world’s conflicted regions, appearances may be deceiving. Here, however, I would be surprised if IDF investigation were to refuse IDF fault in the injuring of Harun Abu Aram. The case now seems other — at least at this desktop — than a my-side-your-side thing. Still, states and territories have their agreements and understandings for the everyday working of their respective societies, and the suspended Palestinian semi-state and its residents should know better than to build where Israel has refused permit.

If there’s another fact irrefutable on the Palestinian side, it is just exactly that.

Posted to YouTube by polka23dot, March 22, 2012.

What kind of person would want to see Palestinian misery sustained in service to his own aggrandizement?

Have a look at the Middle East’s chief sponsor of extraordinary Palestinian discontent —

Stecklow, Steve, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Yeganeh Torbati. “Assets of the Ayatollah: The economic empire behind Iran’s supreme leader — Khamenei controls massive financial empire built on property seizures.” Reuters Investigates, November 11, 2013.

No one understands self-serving impositions of injustice and theft quite like Ali Khamenei.

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FTAC: Pashtun Resistance to Chinese Imperialist CEPAK Projects, PakDef, and Taliban

28 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Afghanistan, Asia, China, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, International Development, Islamic Small Wars, Pakistan, Regions, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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This assassination campaign began in the aftermath of 9/11 when Pakistan allowed Taliban fighters and other allied fighters who were forced to flee Afghanistan to resettle in parts of former FATA. Over the years, these groups systematically eliminated tribal leaders and politicians who raised their voices against them. To this day, the Pakistani state has not solved any of these murders, perhaps because it has been tacitly using these unlawful groups to foment instability in Afghanistan and consolidate its influence over the region.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/6/12/pashtuns-struggle-for-rights-cannot-be-silenced-through-violence/
6/12/2020

Inspiration for this post: a conversation anchored in South Waziristan involving political chaos and violence believed supported by Pakistan’s military accused of supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan and paying thugs to upset tribal order in the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA). Now it has so happened that Pakistan’s Defense suffered two casualties at a remote outpost last week, which may have given license to the state to increase the force of its containment of its complement of the indigenous Pashtun whose population spans the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The restiveness has been complicated lately by the development of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (see also https://www.brookings.edu/research/at-all-costs-how-pakistan-and-china-control-the-narrative-on-the-china-pakistan-economic-corridor/ – June 2020).

From the Awesome Conversation

What follows are thoughts from the lengthiest of observations having to do with the Pashtun’s natural position between state forces and processes having to do with international development and war much, much larger than themselves.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/14/were-peacefully-demanding-change-pakistan-military-says-were-traitors/ – 2/14/2020

https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/asim-bajwa-expose-underlines-the-corruption-linking-the-pakistan-army-and-cpec/ – 9/4/2020

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2020/11/27/a-short-note-on-chinas-contemporary-political-sins/ – 11/27/2020

When our President Nixon (a long time ago) initiated a new relationship with China, it was with hopes to offset Soviet Russian power and bring China closer to the normative behaviors of the modern world expressive of global compassion supported by international trade. On the topside, we do things for one another. Rather on the surface, well, we do things for money — and that makes “big picture” sense of Asian labor and western raw goods and Asian finished goods sold (for good profit — good markup — in western markets).

Mercantilism has been much the way of the world.

In the modern open democratic and liberal west, the abuses and excesses of business have been tempered through the actions of elected administrations, legislatures, and courts in the interests of electorates and justice. In the west, capitalists and wealthy have not gotten free rides from popularly elected governments even if seeding political careers and wins with their own money. There are just too many with too many differing motives for playing that game broadly.

In Asia, perhaps, money — and with China, now overwhelming wealth — does its work between elites and military behind closed door (“behind the curtains” goes the phrase fit to medieval politics) — and guess who’s in the way of the greater enrichment and glory of the disinterested or remote powerful?

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It doesn’t help the Pashtun — and whoever and for whatever reason — to attack PakDef military posts (IF that is what has actually happened recently), for that gives the military excuse to bother or maraud the Pashtun community.

With regard to some Larger Forces — here, Chinese and Pakistani trade interests representing government, military, and private entities — “anomie” (worth the looking up) may be a real issue.

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Don’t look to Russia for help — that state has minted defense sales using Syrians as targets for demonstration of its wares. In the AfPak region, its arms, however acquired, have helped sustain what looks to me an unfathomable misery borne of endless low-intensity conflict that has no end without financial, political, and religious insight plus political will and near immediate reconciliation.

Related Online

Aamir, Adnan. “Pakistan Belt and Road chief under pressure to resign: Corruption allegations spark rare criticism of point man in China relations.” Nikkei Asia, September 11, 2020.

China Pakistan Economic Corridor

Dawar, Mohsin. “Pashtun’s struggle for rights cannot be silence through violence.” Al Jazeera, June 12, 2020.

Pauley, Logan and Hamza Shad. “Gwadar: Emerging Port City or Chinese Colony: Pakistan must take care that Gwadar doesn’t become a Chinese “state within a state.” The Diplomat, October 5, 2018.

The draconian nature of the FCR lies in the concept of “collective punishment”, where a whole tribe can be punished for the crime of one member of the tribe. It is telling that even after British India got its independence in 1947, the people of ex FATA were still facing the same colonial legal injustice till the year 2018. And while things definitely have changed on paper, there still is a long way to go before there is a change in the situation on the ground.These draconian punishments have always served a purpose, whether it was British India of the 20thcentury or the Pakistan of the 21stcentury. These laws are meant to subdue a population into giving up their rights, so that they can be sacrificed on the altar of “greater good”. Goes without saying that this greater good, has never been good for us, the people of ex FATA.

Dawar, Mohsin. PDF. Hudson Institute Roundtable Presentation, Washington, D.C., October 19, 2018.

Launched in 2015, CPEC is a logical partnership for China and Pakistan—two close allies keen to cooperate on much-needed infrastructure projects in Pakistan, while contributing to China’s strategic goal of facilitating access to far-flung markets and expanding its global footprint.

However, when Prime Minister Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party took control in 2018, the Belt and Road Initiative was coming under increasingly sharp global criticism for a lack of transparency, for burdening host countries with high debts and for questionable investment practices that included excessive use of imported Chinese labor.

Kugelman, Michael. “Can Pakistan Reboot Its ‘Belt and Road’ Partnership with China?” World Politics Review, September 25, 2020.

Cryptic Impressions

Chinese Banking and Development Worldwide : flexes China’s financial muscle while leveraging infrastructure building expertise into a gateway for Chinese labor — which accompanies its projects — and through that mechanism Chinese cultural influence agents. As much would update the Cold War Era Soviet practice of sending thousands of Communist agents into the Middle East as embedded in the labor contingents attached to development contracts in targeted states.

PakDef | ISI –> Taliban encouragement : goad to Kabul : encouragement of “Islamism” within : further marginalizing of the Pashtun as a coherent and cohesive political force.

The above two paragraphs represent my thinking in cryptic fashion. If the world were practical and less inclined to fear and threat — as well as deeply dependent on international arms sales that support manufacturing bases and untold wealth in related Research & Development competitions — the promotion of dogma into violence — or “extremist dogma” — would be less attractive. As it is, “The Terrorists” (wherever “who” has become both ambiguous and ubiquitous) have turned out handy for some elites in the world’s more corrupt and cynical circles of military and political power.

Posted to YouTube by Caspian Reports, January 10, 2019.
Posted to YouTube by New China TV, May 15, 2018.

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FTAC: A Bid for the Lost and Missing of America

13 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Canada, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, Political Psychology, Syndicate Red Brown Green, transnational crime, United States of America

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Inspiration for the post: a tirade against the specter of Democratic Socialist America in the fashion of the Soviet Communist sphere of influence and the detritus of the irresponsible authoritarian mafia states left behind for western conscience and vision to address.

” . . . who despite enjoying the benefits and protections of a free society . . . ” (would vote the Democratic ticket).

What happened to these, especially our approximately 490,000 missing Americans under age 21?

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2019/10/04/an-american-report-card/ — the page provides a glance at the numbers associated with America’s most troublesome social pathologies–cocaine use, homelessness, missing persons, opioid addiction, prostitution.

Life has its hooks, ladders, and chutes, of course, and will never be perfect for everyone, but the numbers represent some systematic decimation of a modern — not 1950s white bread — culture. Are those of the middle class and of the privileged supposed to completely turn away from the social epidemiology swirling around the apparently Lost of America?

We should know who is in the mix — and why — and get that unholy street stew separated and channeled in some helpful way.

If Americans hadn’t “social conscience”, there would be no laws involving environment, health, labor, housing, or much else that has brought and held the nation together as a unified polity. Politicians on the Left / Far Left have walked down their own streets and asked about the same questions for the same reasons. Now it would seem up to radically responsible moderates to steal that flame to produce an overall healthier state, not an environment fit to elite, rapacious, and ruthless personalities.

Some Red-Green elements that have flowed down from the Soviet Era machinery have infected America’s Democratic Party with the familiar Far Left cocktail of anti-capitalist, radical, and anti-Semitic (anti-Zionist) cant that in effect poisons their own projects before they can progress. The social conscience of the Democratic Party as stamped by Presidents Roosevelt in the 1930s and Johnson in the 1960s appears well under attack by the vanguard of a bullying old White Right political culture that really doesn’t care to address the misery it has learned to overlook.

Far be it, however, for BackChannels to overlook Hollywood’s role in the glamorizing and promoting of the very scourges that have both enriched the world’s mafia and — with dollars cleaned and spiffy — spilled back into working communities — here: read about Vancouver’s pleasant (not really) influx of wealth — as to make economic retreat and the decoupling from evil virtually impossible.

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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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Venezuela: Bella Dodd’s Arch 1954 Observation and Maduro’s “Mafia State”

04 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, International Development, Politics, South America, Syndicate Red Brown Green, transnational crime, Venezuela

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In the Party I was beginning to see many people of a different stripe. During the war period I saw how opportunism and selfishness engulfed many comrades. They wore expensive clothes, lived in fine apartments, took long vacations at places provided by men of wealth. There was, for one, William Wiener, former treasurer of the Party, manipulator for a score of business enterprises, who wore Brooks Brothers suits, smoked expensive cigars, and lunched only at the best places. There were the trade union Communists who rubbed elbows with underworld characters at communist-financed night clubs, and labor lawyers who were given patronage by the Party by assignment to communist-led trade unions and now were well established and comfortable.[1]

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

Communist Party USA leader Bell Dodd’s 1954 remark as relayed by Wikipedia may have special resonance today in the socialist’s disaster continuing to unfold — or perhaps preparing to fold — in Venezuela.

While it had been one thing to share Venezuela’s good fortune and wealth with the public, perhaps especially with massive revenues pumped out of the ground, it has been another for the socialist government to suppress the private ownership of productive ideas and resources while utterly failing to diversify a national economy with the intent to forestall a one-market boom-or-bust (it busted) disaster.

For BackChannels, the cite-quote-cite-quote method has grown tiresome, so the reader may take this post as a reference page but with the suggestion that Maduro’s now patently criminal junta — access the OCCRP and InSight Crime reports cited in reference — may choose to loot and flee the country having proven themselves unable to judiciously and responsibly govern the same — or, in the manner demonstrated by Assad in Syria, they may enjoy being carved up by similarly predatory trade partners.

BackChannels’ humanism in relation to economic development would counsel the damping of dogma in the search for a good mix of private incentives for economic diversification x public policies and programs fit to constituent needs for “basics” plus psychological enthusiasm, fitness, and growth. From the same stance, the messianic self-aggrandizement associated with dictatorships would be viewed as damaging and limiting the greater public experience and potential for good things, starting with community-wide and personal security.

(For related exploration or some meditation on dictatorship, this blog offers portals for “Malignant Narcissism” and its own proposed concept, “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy“. Neither would differentiate between Far Left and Far Right authoritarianism or kleptocracy — and it would place both as more appropriate in the operating environments of the feudal world and fit to related medieval worldviews associated with “political absolutism” and sovereignty. Wherever placed x space x time, the absence of conscience looms large with dictatorships and the related criminality associated with power becomes glaring and, eventually, beyond bearing).

Bella Dodd, by the way, would renounce Communism toward the end of her journey and again embrace the Catholicism with which she had been born.

Reference

Aslund, Anders. “Venezuela is Heading for a Soviet-Style Collapse.” Foreign Policy, May 2, 2017.

Ayres, Sabra. “Russia and China, heavily invested in Venezuela, warily watch the political turmoil.” Los Angeles Times, January 25, 2019.

Doyle Liam. “Venezuela gold: 20 tons of GOLD BARS ‘shipped out’ of Venezuela on Boeing 777.” Express, January 30, 2019.

Faiola, Anthony and Karen DeYoung. “In Venezuela, Russia pockets key energy assets in exchange for cash bailouts.” The Washington Post, December 24, 2018.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “Oil-Producing Countries and Debt”. Podcast with the bank’s public affairs content coordinator Kristie Engemann and Fed economist Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria detailing results of her research on the subject of interest. May 4, 2018.

Fox Business. “Venezuela is worse than the Soviet Union was: Lt. Col. Peters.” June 28, 2017.

Johnson, Keith. “How Venezuela Struck It Poor.” Foreign Policy, July 16, 2018.

Kew, Ben. “OAS: 10 Million Venezuelans Could Flee Country Within Next Four Years.” Breitbart, December 27, 2018.

Martin, Jorge. “US Tightens the Noose on Venezuela: Will the Coup Succeed?” Venezuela Analysis, February 4, 2019. On Venezuela’s travail (and America’s Far Right Imperialist Aggression) from the Marxist perspective.

McLaughlin, Eliott C. “Maduro says a US-led ‘coup’ is behind the political upheaval in Venezuela.” CNN, January 27, 2019.

OCCRP. “2016 Man of the Year in Organized Crime and Corruption”.

Trevithick, Joseph. “Venezuela Agreed to Let Russia Set Up a Bomber Outpost On This Caribbean Island: Reports.” The War Zone, The Drive, December 18, 2018.

Venezuela Investigative Unit. “7 Reasons for Describing Venezuela as a ‘Mafia State’.” InSight Crime, May 16, 2018. Related off this article: “Venezuela: A Mafia State?” — A three-year project producing an eight-part series and full 84-page report. Herewith an excerpt from “7 Reasons . . . .”:

What is clear from our investigations is that the following institutions are staffed at the higher echelons by individuals we believe are, or have been, engaged in criminal activity:
The Vice Presidency, the Ministries of Interior (Ministerio del Poder Popular del Despacho de la Presidencia y Seguimiento de la Gestión de Gobierno), Defense (Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Defensa), Agriculture (Ministerio del Poder Popular de Agricultura Urbana), Education (Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Educación), Prison Service (Ministerio del Poder Popular para el Servicio Penitenciario), Foreign Trade and Investment (Ministerio de Estado para el Comercio Exterior e Inversión Internacional), Electricity (Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Energía Eléctrica), the National Guard (Guardia Nacional Bolivariana), the Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas Bolivarianas), the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional – SEBIN) and PdVSA.

The penetration of so many key institutions, and the fact that they constitute the state’s main organs in the fight against organized crime, means that Venezuela cannot even contain organized crime, let alone effectively fight it. With so many state actors with interests in criminal activity, be it fuel smuggling, the black market sale of food and medicines or the trafficking of cocaine, this factor alone suggests that Venezuela qualifies as a mafia state.

https://www.insightcrime.org/investigations/seven-reasons-venezuela-mafia-state/

Wikipedia. “Bella Dodd”.

Wikipedia. “Corruption in Venezuela”.


Posted to YouTube February 3, 2019.
Posted to YouTube February 2, 2019
Posted to YouTube February 4, 2019.

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FTAC: A Note on President Trump and the Prospect of a Feudal Modernity

11 Monday Jun 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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Trump’s support of Israel is about respect for tribal identification and the narcissism related to it. It matches Putin’s views of a renewed and sustained feudal world — a feudal modernity — featuring absolute authority, fated and unquestionable, placed in the future rather than left to history.

Accompanying that vision: a low-intensity war of re-conquest in Crimea, Ukraine and the tragic obscenity that has been made of Syria.

Most of us carry what we value of our pasts with us through life, but we try also to leave our futures open for good things to come.

These “malignarcs” (malignant narcissists), by comparison, wish to force the future forward into the past. Their personal visions — and behavior — have been dreadful, myopic, selfish as have been the habits, in lesser and greater measures, of caliphs, dictators, emperors, and feudal lords through time: for the mafia-type power and wealth, their methods, willful and thuggish, have been more known to history than those of democracy.  However, our Mr. Trump has a powerful employer and a job defining his position, and whether he personally likes it or not, he is duty-bound to promote democracy — the systems of checked and distributed power — against the political absolutism known to dictators.

As has been my habit with BackChannels, the titles promise greater and lengthier articles while format and inclination keep the verbiage down to a paragraph bloc.

Related on this blog —

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

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2018/04/04/ftac-reinforcement-reflexive-control-islamic-terrorism-and-perceived-threat-newest-nationalism-and-renewed-feudal-conflict/

With the public focused on the air assault of “9/11” (see the gems placed in reference) and numerous “Allahu Abkar” attacks worldwide across many years, the patriotic reaction has permanently altered the west’s political and security societies — and yet we wish to defend authentic democracies against the potential for the rise of the Orwellian police state and with it, indeed, a “new nobility”, an invisible, unimpeachable, unquestionable (“military-industrial”) aristocracy.

Reference: Related on the Web

http://www.businessinsider.com/exploring-al-qaedas-murky-connection-to-russian-intelligence-2014-6 – 6/10/2014

http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/02/security-brief-russia-providing-arms-to-taliban-chinas-global-kidnapping-campaign/ – 4/2/2018

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