The recent “ides of July” coup attempt was the fifth since the 1923 founding of the Turkish republic, an indication of Turkey’s recurring instability. While “Turkey is, at least in name, a constitutional democracy … Turkey’s government is quite literally in a state of emergency,” Rough said, and Kennedy added that the foiled coup quickly became overshadowed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his allies’ “incredible seizure of power.
”Erdoğan has publicly called the coup a “gift from heaven,” and Hillel Fradkin commented that “it has already given him a great deal, and he means to make it a gift that keeps on giving.” The three-month state-of-emergency that Erdoğan declared may end up being renewed. In the name of restoring order and suppressing coup supporters, Erdoğan had received an opportunity to complete his “transformation of the Turkish political system such that all power resides with him.” He is purging opponents from institutions like the military, judiciary, police and universities, while intimidatingly calling for ongoing demonstrations of supporters and reporting of opponents.
Left defenseless, Iraqi minorities often perceived their own Sunni Muslim neighbors in the area of ISIS’ advance as more of a threat than ISIS foreign fighters, Talabany stated. As these minorities would recount, “our neighbors came to the Christian family and said, ‘you have lived next to us for 100 years and so for that reason I am going to give you and your family ten minutes to go and I won’t kill you.’” She noted Yazidi ISIS sex slaves often knew their captors and dismissed trying to “re-integrate people with their torturers,” while segregation often helped pacify refugee camps. Benoka asked of treacherous neighbors “how could we continue living in peace with them.”
“Different Talks – Same Walk” is the conclusion I’ve come to with “malignant narcissists”.
The Hamas leaders don’t care about the Palestinians at whose expense — and the expense of lives — they have aggrandized themselves. We’re numb to the labels: “autocrats”, “dictators”, “kleptocrats”. Each — Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Orban, Erdogan, Haniyeh, Mashaal, et al. — starts from a different positions, but using criminal means, each winds up a tyrant.
Hamas may be sold as a Utopian movement, but . . . it’s a criminal enterprise, and its idea of power is the power to impose suffering on others with impunity.
Our democracies are fragile by comparison to feudal kingdoms, but as they have their differences between them, we — North America, Europe, for the most part, and others — have been able to navigate between them as peace pays off with prosperity. What the dictatorships do please the privileged, but they don’t really pay for themselves. They don’t shift for themselves. They, in fact, devour themselves.
There’s no need to defend this post.
The privileged of Russia know how much they depend on Putin for favor — and the “outer rings” (“rings” referring to driving belts around Moscow) know that no matter what they do if they’re out of favor — complete unknowns — there isn’t much new for them. The economy simply hasn’t fare well under kleptocracy — golly gee — and the distribution of capital and gains from capital remains deeply skewed.
Investment continues to decline, both industrial and in residential construction. Private consumption declines as well, while Russian people say they are cutting their purchases of goods and services to survive. Then again, industrial production is stable, agriculture continues to grow, export is growing slightly in physical terms, despite the drop in commodities prices.
This economic dialogue will continue for a long time, but the main conclusion we can make is already visible.
The difference between the two strategies is fundamental. Kudrin’s formula is “business environment first, private investment later,” while his opponents want “public investment first, business environment later or never.” The two visions cancel each other out and this is exactly what Vladimir Putin seems to like about it. Both projects emphasize domestic growth based on either private initiative (Kudrin) or public spending (Titov). The first path means backpedaling on aggressive foreign-policy projects and depends on reviving and empowering the urban middle class. This poses a problem however, since the Kremlin is convinced that professionals who are paid more than 1500 U.S. dollars a month are a potential threat as proved by the protest movement of 2011-2012. The second path, exemplified by large public-works projects, will inevitably lead to even more corruption than currently exists in Russia.
Was “Vegas” better in its wild mafia days?
I don’t know.
I was too young for all that.
I didn’t exist.
🙂
“Moscow” — used here as a metonym — has suffered years of capital flight and frankly fearful foreign investment.
The state appears to leverage other states amenable to a medieval worldview of competition and political absolutism; it certainly has projects like “Turkish Stream” and a few hefty nuclear programs going with Turkey’s Erdogan and Hungary’s Orban, but get right down to it, the “good” despise “the criminal” and wear out on coughing up payola.
“This is not a hybrid regime!” shouted Andrei Illarionov as the conference wrapped up. Illarionov is an economist who was an economic advisor to Putin in 2000–2005—though he was never fully integrated into the regime—and now lives in Washington. “Thinking about it that way is a mistake, and analytical mistakes like that can have long-term tragic consequences.”
Capital flight from Russia looks dramatically reduced this year from where it was last year, but the prior years of losses may anchor the greater “longitudinal” picture in time.
In the past couple years, Russian hackers have launched attacks on a French television network, a German steelmaker, the Polish stock market, the White House, the US House of Representatives, the US State Department, and The New York Times.
And according to press reports citing Western intelligence officials, the perpetrators weren’t rogue cyber-pranksters. They were working for the Kremlin.
Cybercrime, it appears, has become a tool of Russian statecraft. And not just cybercrime.
Vladimir Putin’s regime has become increasingly adept at deploying a whole range of practices that are more common among crime syndicates than permanent members of the UN Security Council.
Hamas infiltrated a large international aid organization operating in Gaza and redirected tens of millions of dollars – 60 percent – of the organization’s budget to its “military” wing, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) announced on Thursday, following an investigation that lasted almost two months.
The World Vision organization, which operates in 100 countries and employs 46,000 people, fell victim to a complex Hamas takeover scheme, a senior Shin Bet source said, adding that Hamas’s armed wing stole $7.2 million a year from the budget, which was supposed to pay for food, humanitarian assistance, and aid programs for disabled children, and channeled the funds to buy weapons, build attack tunnels, and to other preparations for war with Israel.
“World Vision’s cumulative operating budget in Gaza for the past ten years was approximately $22.5 million, which makes the alleged amount of up to $50 million being diverted hard to reconcile,” the statement read.
On August 5, the Israeli Army released copies of an official Hamas manual that it discovered in the Shuja’iya neighborhood of Gaza, where one of the fiercest battles of the war was fought.
It’s titled “Urban Warfare,” and it was produced by Hamas’s Shuja’iya Brigade.The manual includes detailed instructions on how to use the civilians of Gaza against Israel. It explains how because of Israel’s concern about civilian casualties, Hamas can use the “presence of civilians” to its military advantage. Having civilians nearby causes the Israelis “(1) Problems with opening fire; (2) Problems in controlling the civilian population during operations and afterward; (3) Assurance of supplying medical care to civilians who need it.”
The “Urban Warfare” manual also emphasizes the benefits of damage to civilian property: “The destruction of civilian homes: This increases the hatred of the citizens towards the attackers [the IDF] and increases their gathering [support] around the city defenders (resistance forces[i.e. Hamas]).”
The promotion of conflict seem to me inseparable from the invention and promotion of cultural, political, religious, and social discriminators, and those who stand to gain in prestige or wealth by leveraging such differences will certainly do so in the cause of their own aggrandizement, messianic delusion, and glorification. Note, please, the Putin promotes both Far Left and Far Right political organizations and personalities aligned roughly “Red-Black-Green (old “comrade networks”, Black Power movements, and Islamists) AND Brown, i.e., “New Nationalists” like Donald Trump and Viktor Orban, although Trump may not wish to nor be able to pervert constitutional basics as Orban has done (for himself) in Hungary.
Writing here as “an American of Jewish descent” and somewhere along the spectrum of “secular humanists”, the recognition of the world’s 7,000 living languages, each representing beliefs and spirituality — or none — in the process of using sound and signal to address in some place the challenges of living with the earth and with one another — I should think the retreat from too zealous a passion for one belief a part of “live and let live”.
I wouldn’t incline as the Soviets toward doing away with religion but rather promote tolerance for beliefs embraced privately and confined to behaviors and practices within each faith community. In essence, it’s that outlook that produces the modern multi-cultural, multi-religious open and secular democratic societies.
The sustained presence of anti-Semitism in the world and the possible emergence of either latent or new anti-Semitic movements involves the presence of the medieval world in the 21st Century.
Putin’s post-Soviet neo-imperial revanche in Russia has reemphasized medieval values certain to produce “wars of all against all” that then may contribute to his appearance as a strong force for stability — he’s the fireman who sets the fire and then shows the world how to put it out.
It’s very difficult for the general public to perceive that story, but I believe, with cause, that the projection of a Total Political Theater is and has been what Moscow has been about for generations to, perhaps, centuries. Today, it remains hampered by its own medieval urges — and to put a cap on that, one may note the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is not a bad thing but part of a larger package in the Kremlin’s worldview.
The modern soul would rather religion persisted and thrived with both a sense of prudent social constraint and volunteered boundaries. Most modern people recognize there are many things between the person, family, and community and God — or the possession of a compassionate and ethical happiness — but the same want for a socially healthy sense of community and personal boundaries.
Must couples, for example, hetero or homo, display affection in public? How intensely? How much “signal” is needed or wanted? To what end?
There are a lot of questions like that, and because we really can’t solve them species-wide, it’s better to go about our business privately but with awareness also of the impact our behavior may have on the earth and on others.
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Hitchens only found out he was Jewish by birth when his mother died. It didn’t change how he felt about the improbable existence of God, but I believe it made his writer friend Martin Amis a little jealous.
Posted to YouTube 4/17/2013.
The above post was prompted by a Muslim’s complaint about having atheism and secularism foisted on the same by such luminaries as Dawkins, Geller, Hitchens, and others.
BackChannels simply hews to its observation of Putin’s re-medievalization project in Russia and attached to former Soviet client states, political enterprises (like the PLO), contested spaced and, as with Turkey, old enemies. In essence, Russia’s president wants to keep playing old movies in realpolitik in realspace. It behooves the open democracies of the west — or their constituencies, from the least informed on the streets to the ivory tower set — to reconsider what it took to produce (and shame on Brexit) peace and prosperity x political integrity, rule of law, and functioning and reliable courts across Europe and North America.
Moscow and its partners have raced backwards — of course, in their heads forward — into the worst of medieval absolutism.
Syria should today serve as an example of how that world works and what it looks like.
Russian economic officials seem to be working to instill a sense of quiet resignation in the population. They readily admit the economy is not in good shape and promise nothing. They habitually talk expectations down, not up. Their favorite debate subject is whether the recession has bottomed out. Their favorite expression is “the new normal” of lower oil prices and sluggish growth.
“This makes us sad. What more do Americans need? Their strategic ally is facing a coup and it takes them 45 days before sending anyone over? This is shocking.”
Former Istanbul Metropolitan Mayor Recep Tayyip Erdogan has entered prison to serve his four-month prison sentence. A convoy of 2,000 vehicles accompanied Erdogan to the prison HAKAN ASLANELI Istanbul – Turkish Daily News Istanbul’s former Islamist Mayor Recep Tayyip Erdogan has gone to prison to serve a conviction for “inciting hatred based on religious differences” in a speech he made in Siirt nearly a year and a half ago.
The now famous declaration from the 1997 speech delivered in Siirt:
Our minarets are our bayonets
Our domes are our helmets
Our mosques are our barracks
We will put a final end to ethnic segregation. No one can ever intimidate us.
If the skies and the ground were to open against us
If floods and volcanoes were to burst
We will not turn from our mission.
My reference is Islam.
If I am not able to speak of this
What is the use of living?
(BackChannels has interpreted “, Cap” as a line break from the 1999 Hurriyet Daily News report).
As may be typical of the malignant, Erdogan, in his latest statement (at the top of this page), takes the spotlight to chide the United States for not shoring up his rapidly developing Islamist dictatorship.
States of affairs may be complicated, what with the “Kurdish Question” — Syria’s Kurds have been the best “boots on the ground” fighters against ISIS, but Erdogan has preferred to see and bomb them as Turkish rebels — numerous corruption scandals, from a massive AKP imbroglio that broke in 2013 to smuggling oil from ISIS, a claim generated by Moscow that may or may not be true — but not to worry: Assad, who incubated ISIS, has also received oil from his baby (the links section of this piece has a New Yorker piece on the matter as well), and Erdogan’s early patterns, with the persecution of journalists, for example, and latest actions in political repression, but viewed through the filter of political psychology, all becomes simple: Erdogan has transformed his NATO member state into a nascent Sunni dictatorship in business with like-minded personalities.
Different Talks – Same Walk
“He came into office with a promise of democracy and Turkey has historically been a country in which deep Islamic faith has lived side-by-side with modernity and an increasing openness, and that’s the legacy he should pursue,” Obama said. He warned Erdogan against the “repression of information and shutting down democratic debate.”
Obama made the above observation a little more than five months ago.
Published last month in Politico:
“We basically have turned a blind eye to Erdogan’s drive towards an authoritarian, one-man system of rule in Turkey,” said Eric Edelman, a U.S. ambassador to Ankara from 2003 to 2005 and a deputy secretary of defense under George W. Bush. “The president has acknowledged it, but we haven’t really done much about it, if anything.”
That needs to change, Edelman said. “If there’s anything we’ve learned from the last six years in that part of the world, it’s that one-man rule isn’t very stable.”
Erdoğan wasted little time arresting those suspected of plotting against him. His purge, however, goes beyond the requirements of justice, removing thousands of military personnel not directly involved in the coup. Such “coup-proofing,” designed to instill fear and dissuade future putsches, is common in authoritarian states.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13746679 – “Recep Tayyip Erdogan: Turkey’s Ruthless president.” – 7/21/2016 – Article summarizes Erdogan’s rise to power and covers the signs and signals of his dictatorship.
Ahmed Mohamed brought an “invention” to school, showed it off several times, and finally made it beep in a classroom. In America’s “See something? Say something” culture, the teacher felt obligated to confiscate and report the box. The rest is history.
Ahmed’s father is now trying to prove that the city and school district have made, as a racial and religious class, black Muslims fair game for state-based discrimination.
No one knows WHY Ahmed chose to build a clock — or “timing device” — but all recognize that if the same thing had been armed with plastic explosive (very small, very potent material), we’d be chatyping about some other kind of story. As the state’s writ demands the same protect its citizens, sending / bringing a box jammed with electronics into the classroom raises questions and compels the making of some choices.
Hoax bomb?
Maybe it was.
Maybe it wasn’t.
Where should the public set its sensitivity to threat?
When Ahmed set off the clock’s alarm, it interrupted – or disrupted — the classroom. The teacher took the box and alerted the next official.
This small Texas incident took off with the help of the local NAACP leader Anthony Bond and in a matter of days became both a cause celebre and reviled part of the history of terrorism and related threat in the U.S. and around the world.
