Category Archives: Syndicate Red Brown Green

Link – Iranian Provocation – Persian Gulf

14 Thursday May 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Islamic Small Wars, Links, Middle East, Political Psychology, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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The incident began with the Iranians ordering the ship into Iranian waters. When the ships master refused, the Iranians began to fire in a way to try to disable the ship, not just as warning shots, the U.S. official said.

Several shots hit the cargo ship, but did not disable it. The ship went into UAE waters and the Iranians followed it into those territorial waters, continuing to fire, before breaking off.

Starr, Barbara.  “First on CNN: Five Iranian boats fire shots in the Persian Gulf.”  CNN Politics, May 14, 2015.

The Khamenei style makes for a bad movie, but, nonetheless, a movie in the making appears to be what the chest-thumper script follows.  Repeatedly.  Recall the 2007 header, “Iran seizes 15 British marines and sailors” (Aref Mohammed, Reuters, March 23); drift back to 2004 (thanks, Wikipedia): “2004 Iranian seizure of Royal Navy personnel”; and more recently in the news: Maersk Tigris, a cargo ship (the incident took place between April and May this year), Maersk Kensington (CNN URL dated April 29).

A senior Iranian military official warned that any effort to board a Yemen-bound ship – supposedly filled with aid supplies – would “spark a fire,” amid speculation that Tehran is using the shipment to try to provoke an incident.

One U.S. official told Fox News the Iranian ship has media aboard.

“Iran is begging for us to board the ship. This is all for show,” he said.

Fox News.  ‘All for show’? Iran warns against boarding Yemen-bound ship, US questions motives.”  May 13, 2015.

From the same piece: “”I bluntly declare that the self-restraint of Islamic Republic of Iran is not limitless,” Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, the deputy chief of staff, told Iran’s Arabic-language Al-Alam state TV late Tuesday.”

There should be no question about the defects in personality involved in Iranian belligerence and its version of military and political reality testing in service to extraordinary kleptocracy and political manipulation in turn associated with an equally ambitious and piratical expansionism.

Connect the dots:

The Ayatollah appears incapable of restraint except when confronted with the prospect of main force — and the smaller parts of “main force” — “diplomacy”, sanctions, excoriations — appear of little concern given the regime’s comfortability with its criminality, limitless ambitions, and largely unimpeded operating style.

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Link – Operating in the Good Old Red (Brown)

14 Thursday May 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Politics, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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In reacting to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine in early 2014, the US government did not call the Sixth Fleet into action; it did not ban all exports to Russia; it did not stop all cultural and educational exchanges. Rather, key elites close to “a senior Russian government official”—President Vladimir Putin—were targeted with asset seizures and visa bans.

Probably the most serious international crisis since the end of the Cold War, and the White House targets individuals? It seemed an odd response to some observers. But it made sense. At last, after 14 years of dealing with Putin as a legitimate head of state, the US government has finally acknowledged that he has built a system based on massive predation on a level not seen in Russia since the czars. Transparency International estimates the annual cost of bribery in Russia at $300 billion, roughly equal to the entire gross domestic product of Denmark, or many times higher than the Russian budgetary allocations for health and education. Capital flight totaled $335 billion from 2005 to 2013, or about 5 percent of GDP. But then in 2014, with the ruble and oil prices tumbling, it reached more than $150 billion—a figure that has swollen Western bank coffers but made Russia the most unequal of all economies, in which, according to Credit Suisse, 110 billionaires control 35 percent of the country’s wealth.

Dawisha, Karen.  “The Putin Principle: How it Came to Rule Russia.”  World Affairs, May/June 2015.

Red.  Brown.  Green.

Fascist.

Lawless.

Thieving.

And getting away with it!

There’s now plenty of BackChannels opinion on “Syndicate Red Brown Green”, a clever collection of books (in the “The Russian Section” of the library), but no prescriptions and not much hope for those in the Russian oppositions being ground away or controlled for irrelevance by the “Vertical of Power”.   The states of affairs may be ascertained swiftly with a glance at the web sites of well known critics.

Alexey Navalny

Gary Kasparov

Mikhail Kodorkovsky

Let BackChannels know when the outlook of each brightens.

The report, titled Putin. War, asserts that at least 150 Russian military personnel were killed during a Ukrainian offensive in August 2014. A further 70 — including 17 paratroopers from the city of Ivanovo — were reportedly killed during fighting near the bitterly contested town of Debaltseve in January and February.

Families of those killed in 2014 were given 2 million rubles ($39,000) by the government in exchange for signing a promise not to discuss the matter publicly, the report claims.

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.  “Nemtsov Reports Says More Than 200 Russian Soldiers Killed in Ukraine.”  May 14, 2015.

Gratuitous.

Posted to YouTube July 2013.

The great forces today are not in the “masses” or the “voting public” but in the construction and intentions of “adventurous governments” and otherwise integrated and stable ones.  Among the “adventurous”: Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Orban, Erdogan, among others; “integrated and stable”: the classically liberal democracies of the world.  The figure of “Everyman” shrugs before, sometimes beneath, these altogether large forces.

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Soviet Anti-Semitism, An Example from Andrew and Mitrokhin’s _The Sword and The Shield_.

29 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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In January 1953 the MGB was officially accused of “lack of vigilance” in hunting down the conspirators.  The Soviet news agency Tass made the sensational announcement that for the past few years world Zionism and Western intelligence agencies had been conspiring with “a terrorist group” of Jewish doctors “to wipe out the leadership of the Soviet Union.”  During the final two months of Stalin’s rule, the MGB struggled to demonstrate its heightened vigilance by pursuing the perpetrators of this non-existent plot.  Its anti-Zionist campaign was, in reality, little more than a thinly disguised anti-Semitic pogrom.  Shortly before Stalin’s sudden death in March 1953 Mitrokhin was ordered to investigate the alleged Zionist connections of the Pravda correspondent in Paris, Yuri Zhukov, who had come under suspicion because of his wife’s Jewish origins.  Mitrokhin had the impression that Stalin’s brutal security supremo, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, was planning to implicate Zhukov in the supposed Jewish doctor’s plot.  A few weeks after Stalin’s funeral, however, Beria suddenly announced that the plot had never existed, and exonerated the alleged conspirators.

Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin.  The Sword and The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB.  Page 2.  New York: Basic Books, 1999.

In the “Russian Section” (of the in-house library), the above title is appended “UR” for unread.  BackChannels hopes to update that status soon.  Even so, with the theme of anti-Semitism emerging on the second page of a mighty classic, so it appears, among the scholars, the same may inform the character of today’s “Solidarity” organizations and their updates on Soviet disinformation and propaganda programs that produced the privileged and the privileges of the Party.

These historic incidents and the portent of books like The Sword and The Shield may be easily accessed by the lay public as well as scholars, but time having become the new space, information has become the vegetation on the landscape, and large packages so easily spied on Amazon may not be so easily opened.  With each passing year — the volume was published in 1999 — fewer and fewer readers, lay or scholar, are likely to have the experience of seminal works.  For the most part, the public won’t know, won’t have personal or transmitted historic memory, giving cognizant autocrats freedom to deliver the past to their constituents.

Related on BackChannels: “Rhetorical Objects — Anti- Anti-Semitism & Anti-Semitism” (April 20, 2014).

Addendum

This crossed my desktop late this afternoon:

The ultimate goal of state censorship is self-censorship among the citizenry. If you can get the people to police themselves, and each other, it takes part of the burden off the state and also makes people complicit in their own oppression. And so it’s disturbing to see things take this turn in Putin’s Russia. As the New York Times reports, Moscow bookstores removed from their shelves–voluntarily (sort of)–their copies of Maus, the pathbreaking graphic novel of Nazi crimes against the Jews. It’s the “voluntarily” part of this that stands out, and makes it clear that Putinism has not been, and will not be, good for the Jews of Russia.

Mandel, Seth.  “Dark Days Ahead for the Jews of Russia?”  Commentary, April 28, 2015.

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FTAC – Advertising by the Different Jihad’s Anti-Jihad

23 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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If the screenshot banner copy is unclear or too small to read, it says, “‘Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah’ — Hamas MTV.  That’s His Jihad, What’s yours?”

 Comment From The Awesome Conversation

The Geller and Spencer and other anti-Jihad shows ask of Islam sufficient introspection and courage emphasize virtue, reform if necessary, and put both the 20th Century inspiration for the “Muslim Botherhood” and related poison-in-the-head out of business so that more of the world can get to work on other things.

However, the conflict and violence that assaults us daily by way of global media — and investment in this region of discussion — hasn’t only to do with Islam: it has to do with the interpretation of power — absolute and feudal or distributed and democratic. “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” are of a type, and Islam, especially in the middle east, has been “played” (ref.: Pacepa and Rychlak) and plays to their deeply medieval world vision and the image they have of themselves in it.

The Jews continuously, famously, remove themselves from cults of godlike personality and continue eternally in search of the Promised Land. Instead of imposing, the commune invites, and perhaps after Hillel, some ideas about a common humanity become borrowable but also political and little bit crooked (in Judaism, for example, all of the prophets are drawn as faulted humans, deeply so, and kept separate from God). For our grandiose delusional dictators fascists malignant narcissists, the limitation perhaps seems a deep affront and “control”, sadistic and total, becomes their thing. Must we have them? “Syndicate Red Brown Green” and NATO, more or less, are wrestling over it. Hamas is way down on the food chain (thank Khamenei, among others, for keeping it in business) but it’s leveraging some Islamic zeitgeist to produce chaos, fear, and sorrow around itself serves the larger press of the feudal mode.

Not only “the awesome conversation” elicits the above but also simply visiting these themes — conflict, culture, language, psychology — day after week after month after years: things come to the surface.  Some become so familiar as to become blog-based tropes:

No Moses — no Muhammad

Hillel the Elder –> Jesus, Paul, Constantine –> Muhammad

The Torah begins with God

The Torah, closely read, compels progressive ethical and moral argument

Syndicate Red Brown Green (post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia; new national socialists; Islamists)

Expect some items to show up on the “Alpha – Zulu” page of this blog.  Others may be simply plugged into meditative political writing as fit.

The tests of will in conflict that BackChannels has come to perceive has been very much within the medieval vs modern template, which would be fine if the medieval proved good.  The matter, however, has been complicated by a dark portion in psychology, i.e., the compulsive, endless, and helpless fascism and sadism of the malignant narcissist.  Too often, capricious power — power considering itself above all natural laws and inclined to create and make the same to suit itself without limits — comes to impose suffering on others with impunity.  It (!) appears to prize the annihilation of others and the erasing of time out of the urge to exist in a timeless world entirely of its own fashioning — and doing so it dooms itself to annihilation.

Additional Reference

Miller, Michael E.  “Killing Jews is worship posters will soon appear on NYC subways and buses.”  The Washington Post, April 22, 2014.

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Two Videos: Aayan Hirsi Ali on Israel | Anti-Semitism on Campus

15 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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April 12, 2015.

February 25, 2015.

Associate the theme of this blog, “malignant narcissism”, with “bullying, deceiving, and sabotaging.”

Two videos plus one:

February 24, 2015.

Addendum

The missing Hirsi Ali video had recorded her observations in relation to watching the video that followed.  BackChannels does not (yet) know what happened with regard to that video.  By way of the spirit of this post and the blog that surrounds it, here is a more recent YouTube video featuring Ayaan Hirsi Ali and consistent with the role she has carved out as a public intellectual critical of Islam.

Posted to YouTube April 12, 2015.

Original Post: http://www.c-span.org/video/?325228-1/ayaan-hirsi-ali-national-press-club-luncheon-remarks – 4/7/2015.  (Note: 9/3/2015: the video continues to appear and may be accessed on the C-Span site).

Mentioned in the above video:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/meet-the-honor-brigade-an-organized-campaign-to-silence-critics-of-islam/2015/01/16/0b002e5a-9aaf-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html

A broad and unique Islamic reform conversation may be accessed at New Age Islam.

While the Jewish Virtual Library maintains a page on “Ethical Monotheism”, BackChannels has yet to see a de-ethnicized (set apart from originating ethnolinguistic culture) Jewish option in belief and faith apart from the Ethical Culture Movement launched by Felix Adler.

Published last year, April 4:

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FTAC – Against Despotism

14 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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“So, what do we do?” The answer: continuous jihad against despots.

Know them for “malignant narcissists”.

Know them for their autocratic criminality — for Iran, start with the “chain murders” and dwell a while on Evin and the dismal business of hanging even children on trumped or insufficiently investigated charges.

Know them for what they do for money — and how much (look up Reuters on Setad and Khamenei and have a look at what “Wiki” states about Ali and his brother [$60 billion in amassed wealth]).

Know them for their own feudalism and the company they keep: Putin-Assad-Khamenei + Orban + Erdogan.

And then keep them out of power.

Forever.

God, nature, and the universe are everywhere around and in us, and we humans tend to embrace a conscionable evolution and revolution across time.

May the monster that leads one day look back over his shoulder for followers and find himself surprised to find none.

Fine words, those, but we’ve come to an age in which for each Yanukovych (who got booted from power by way of popular revolt) there seem to be half a dozen copies of Mugabe, who has stayed in power long enough to become an old man and one most likely to die peacefully in his sleep, guilty of nothing in the protective bubble of his kind of consciousness and narcissism.

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From Correspondence – “And that is the end of the middle east conflict . . . .”

13 Monday Apr 2015

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

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The MEC suffers beneath enormous evolutionary and global pressures, the transition from feudal absolute to modern democratic power foremost among them. At the same time, with each language culture its own library (humanity supports about 7,000 living languages today, and we are losing quite a few annually), It’s important that the Baloch, Hebrews, and Kurds and others hold their own even while “updating” away from the primitive to feudal aspects of governance. The Hebrews, of course, have turned out hypermodern and other issues external to them account for conflict.
Islamic narcissism and locus of control factor heavily in “permitting” the Jews to exist, and that appears a position heavily promoted along the “Islamist” fronts and its frontmen. 

Religious succession along the path sparked by Hillel (Hillel –> Jesus, :Paul, Constantine –> Muhammad) accounts similarly for attempts to neuter the Jewish community, null the religion as a corrupt precursor to the true and final words of God. In that the first gifts given to his children — or recognized by themselves and worthy of ancient mythification — are human consciousness, self-consciousness, and conscience, the Jews seem to prefer evolving themselves with God alone, a personal and ever progressing relationship.

Finally, the national socialists, the “red-brown” thugs, appear to tolerate religion while enthrall to themselves, and the Jewish ethos, starting with Moses as lawgiver, appear to get in the way of malign narcissistic emotional incontinence — and that suffices for anti-Semitic hate from not only that camp but the Islamist one as well. What I refer to as “Syndicate Red Brown Green” is always in solidarity with politically criminal mafia, the thirst for “absolute power” — the power to impose suffering on others with impunity — and limitless violence (so well displayed by Khamenei’s toy, ISIS, and others).

The Russian power elite approach to governance, from czar to Soviet to today’s neo-feudal arrangements have had a profoundly evil effect on the middle east (let’s not forget that Stalin-Hitler Pact either). https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/12/02/quote-manipulation-about-the-plo-leader-pacepa-and-rychlak-2013/ The pincers from the Far Out Left and from the bloodiest and cruelest quarters of Islam, the PLO and Hamas, are the only real impediments to peace — but behind them are the manipulations of the aforementioned “estates”.

Between Egypt and Israel, both at peace today and possibly warming up after all these years, Gaza should be treated as a suzerainty, not a forward base for Iran’s feudal ambitions.

Ramallah may be Israel’s Quebec, an in-holding held dear.

And that is the end of the middle east conflict.

To old communists, new “state capitalist” fascists, and that part of Islam that has pursued a deeply feudal politics, apply the BackChannels concept that is the Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation: what they would accuse the Jews and Israel of wishing turns out what they have in mind for others themselves.

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Link: KGB –> Saddam –> DAESH

05 Sunday Apr 2015

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Abu Hamza, who became the group’s ruler in a small community in Syria, never discovered the Iraqis’ real identities, which were cloaked by code names or simply not revealed. All of the men, however, were former Iraqi officers who had served under Saddam Hussein, including the masked man, who had once worked for an Iraqi intelligence agency and now belonged to the Islamic State’s own shadowy security service, he said.

Sly, Liz.  “The hidden hand behind the Islamic State militants?  Saddam Hussein’s.” The Washington Post, April 4, 2015.

The correspondent: Alexander, who, in your opinion, is the originator of this terrorist attack?

A. Litvinenko: You know, I have spoken about it earlier and I shall say now, that I know only one organization, which has made terrorism the main tool of solving of political problems. It is the Russian special services. The KGB was engaged in terrorism for many years, and, in mass terrorism. At the special department of the KGB they trained terrorists practically from all countries of the world; these courses lasted, as a rule, for a half-year. Specially trained and prepared agents of the KGB organized murders and explosions, including explosions of tankers, captures of passenger air liners, strikes on the diplomatic, state and commercial organizations practically worldwide.

Chechenpress Department of Interviews. “The originator of the acts of terrorism in London was standing near Tony Blair.”  Indymedia, July 19, 2005.

Additional Reference

BackChannels.  Search “Syndicate Red Brown Green”.  Live.

BackChannels.  “The Russian Section”.  Live.

Chechen Center.  “Russian FSB and Al-Qaida as Teamwork.”  April 23, 2013.

Rubin, Barry.  “The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World — by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (New York: Basic Books, 2005).”  Book review.  The Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2006, pp. 69-71.

SANA.  “Bogdanov, PFLP-GC discuss dangers of terrorists displacing Palestinians from camps in Syria.”  March 11, 2014.  Note: BackChannels places the Bogdanov-PFLP meeting in November 2014 based on a video clip of the same (but will leave it to readers to locate that data using search string “PFLP, Moscow”).

The Saudis view the Muslim Brotherhood, which took over Egypt for a year from June 30 2012 to July 3, 2013, as a political cult, as a set of secretive revolutionary cells attempting to take over one country after another, rather as Stalinist cells took over Hungary and Czechoslovakia after the end of WW II. I.e., the Saudi leadership now looks at the Brotherhood rather as the American Right wing looked at Communism in the McCarthy period. And it looks at Qatar as the patron of the Brotherhood.

Cole, Juan.  “A New Arab Cold War: Saudi Arabia Pressures Qatar on Muslim Brotherhood, American Think Tanks.”  Informed Comment, March 10, 2014.

From 2002:

In overcoming traditional Shiite-Sunni divides, Gunaratna said bin Laden’s ability to forge relations between Shia and Sunni terrorist groups indicated what he called the terror mastermind’s “goal-oriented rather than rule-oriented doctrine.”

Iran has also been able to bridge Shiite-Sunni divisions, noted Cannistraro, citing Iranian support for Sunni Muslim-dominated groups involved in the Palestinian struggle, including Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Jacino, Leela.  “Is Iran Supporting Al Qaeda?”  ABC News, May 22, 2002.

Rafizadeh, Majid.  “Complex double game: Iran supporting Assad AND al-Qaeda?”  Al Aribya, February 14, 2014.

Rafizadeh, Majid.  “Why ‘Operation: Decisive Storm’ is Iran’s worst nightmare.”  Al-Aribya, March 28, 2015.

Tanter, Raymond.  “Tehran’s Offer to fight al-Qaeda is Like the Arsonist Offering to Put Out the Fire.”  Foreign Policy, January 9, 2014.

Related Drag-and-Drops

http://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2015/04/05/The-calm-that-preceded-the-Decisive-Storm-.html – 4/5/2015.

http://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2015/04/05/How-can-an-unshackled-Iran-be-confronted-.html – 4/5/2015.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5493/arabs-blast-obama-deal-with-iran – 4/4/2015.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/03/30/saudi-arabias-hostile-relationship-with-russia-is-leaving-egypt-stuck-in-the-middle/ – 3/30/2015.

http://en.delfi.lt/central-eastern-europe/putins-russia-do-traces-of-kgb-fsb-and-gru-lead-to-islamic-state.d?id=66856642 – 1/9/2015:

In general, the links between Chechen terrorist and Russian secret services cannot be denied even by those Western experts and commentators who tend to call these links a conspiracy theory.

The fact that the famous Shamil Basayev, Ruslan Gelayev and some others Chechen terrorist commanders began their career not only fighting on the Russian side during the Georgian-Abkhaz war, but were directly trained by the special forces of Russian military intelligence (GRU), was basically never even denied in Russia. The traces of GRU agents were not a secret as well.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-threatens-to-use-nuclear-force-over-crimea-and-the-baltic-states-10150565.html 4/2/2015.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/03/20/saudi-arabias-muslim-brotherhood-predicament/ – 3/20/2014.

From correspondence today:

I’ve always said and continue to say that the Cold War was inf fact a “Hot” War by proxies. Also all the Third World anti-Colonialist so-called “Liberation Movements”, primarily “nationalistic” supported by Moscow and Beijing (Peking at the time) were born just before World War II and were for the great majority supported and financed by Nazi Germany in the context of the Geo-Political war (essentially for Oil and strategic positioning)) of the time. When Nazism collapsed, the Soviets took over where the Nazis left off…Aj Ali Husseini Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the PLA (founded by the remnants of the Balkan Arab SS Brigades) being examples. The Baath Parties of Iraq (Sunni) and Syria (Shiite), or the Egyptian National Party of Gamal Abdel Nasser, were all Nazi proxies before Moscow proxies. And so was the Indian National Party of Ghandi, “the prince of peace”, was financed and its military arm armed by Nazi Germany… When Hitler died Nazism morphed into Arab Nationalist movements and the PLA. Today, Hezbollah and Hamas being the spitting images of proto-Nazism, from their goose stepping to their arm stretched salutes…and anti-Semitic agenda.

The author of the above observation, Eric Claessens, grew up in Belgian family that while living in the Belgian Congo became direct witness to the ascent of Patrice Lumumba, which affair has been also back in the news of late (http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141523/stephen-r-weissman/what-really-happened-in-congo – July / August 2014; http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-death-in-the-congo-by-emmanuel-gerard-and-bruce-kuklick-1428089156 – 4/3/2015).

 

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