A Universe of One’s Own: “The Russian Section”

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Books, Russia

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Dawisha, Karen. Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Gessen, Masha. The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012.

Harding, Luke. Expelled: A Journalist’s Descent Into the Russian Mafia State. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Judah, Ben. Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013.

Remnick, David. Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. New York: Random House, 1993.

Smith, Hedrick. The Russians. New York: Times Books, 1983.

Soldatov, Andrei and Irena Borogan. The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB. New York: Public Affairs, 2010.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/

Our iddle biddle web has gurgled and Googled long enough for anyone to block text, right-click the mouse, and find on the web the alphanumeric string wanted and in the form desired.

The contemporary URL takes you to something the author specifically wants to show you.

As I would rather write blog posts, I suppose, than catalog the 2,000+ volumes that surround me, the library section of this blog remains sparse.  However, in the way of web-driven and curiosity-based fate, it appears I’ve got some linear shelf space supporting a “Russian Section” and that listed above this section is it.

Should one add to it web resources?

Miami University.  “Putin’s Russia”.  Havighurst Center, Russian and Post-Soviet Studies.

How about naming names (which from — I will call it “MoscVegas”– Karen Dawisha does in abundance)?

For this simple blog, a reduction to a few of the simple popular nouns of the opposition might suffice: Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov, Gary Kasparov, Michael Khodorkovsky, Yevgeny Roizman, Pussy Riot, etc.  (the abbreviation of laziness, but on the web, nouns lead to nouns: one cannot compete with that comprehensive aspect of machine compilation given the labors of scads of academics and journalists contributing daily to wealth in knowledge).

A few moments ago, the search string (using the Google engine) “Putin, journalists” brought this gem to the top of the list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia

Related:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya – “We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it’s total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial—whatever our special services, Putin’s guard dogs, see fit.[17]”

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11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in FTAC, Islamic Small Wars

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Switch axis: “The Israeli citizen, identified by the station only as 31 years old and a resident of Tel Aviv, said she had contacted Kurdish fighters over the Internet before travelling through Iraq to train at one of their camps on the Syrian border.

“They are our brothers,” she told the radio station. “They are good people. They love life, a lot like us, really.”

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/fighting-isis-canadian-israeli-woman-joins-kurds-in-syria-1.2830122

There have been a lot of volunteer irregulars involved in the Islamic Small Wars, and most reports cover the rush to join al Qaeda and its affiliates. However the “choose sides” has this side too – lovin’ life and updating and upgrading whole societies.

The Kurds have been reported to have turned their backs on the Yezidis — and certainly left a few on a mountain surrounded by ISIS militants — but perhaps with a good influence, they too will become a little more universal.

Johnny and “Johnette” go off to war either to fight with barbarians or against them (and, sigh, some have been a little confused about which is the barbarian).

While it may be refreshing to read a story in which the cultural existence and self-determination of another people has attracted support, as it should, the “Islamic Small Wars” may widen by the measure of who is participating in open combat field operations.

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10 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars

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“Eleven-year old girls are raped, and the males are massacred,” Hoenlein said with obvious pain in his voice, “yet you don’t hear the outcry… it is so horrific, yet the indifference of the world continues, and no steps are being taken; very few countries are interceding with aid and the like… I cannot understand: Where are the demonstrations? Where is the UN Security Council? It just reminds you [of what happened during the Holocaust]…”

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/187235#.VGFVzzTF98E – 11/9/2014.

The UK Daily Mail published a price list for the going rate of slaves in the IS market. The prices range according to age, with 40 to 50-year-olds going for only 50,000 dinars (about $43 US), while children under nine fetch 200,000 dinars (about $175).

http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/24058/isis-sex-slave-market-shows-plight-yazidi-girls/#pjZFXjEFT7l1wZVp.99 – 11/10/2014.

This unusual article — FSA cooks infiltrate and poison ISIS fighters — piggybacked the slave market video on the end of the story:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/dozen-isis-fighters-killed-after-4590573 11/8/2014.

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10 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Politics

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The complaint against Mashaal was not directed at Hamas rocket attacks on Israel, but at alleged war crimes Hamas perpetrated against the Gazan population.

The complaint alleged that on August 22, 2014, Hamas “executed 18 so-called collaborators who had been convicted of no crime,” including “publicly execut[ing] seven of these ‘collaborators.’” Moreover, the complaint said that on July 28, 2014, Hamas summarily executed 20 Gazan civilians for engaging in anti-war protests against its rule in the Strip.

http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Shurat-Hadin-files-war-crimes-complaint-against-Abbas-with-ICC-381312 – 11/10/2014

FTAC – On False Cause

10 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philosophy, Politics

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The “Palestinian Cause” has left refugee residents stranded in Gaza and around Ramallah while failing to produce anything — anything — beyond “martyrs”, not that billionaires Mashaal and Haniyeh would wish to join them.

The failure over the summer of “Gaza Fortress” — credit Robert Satloff at TWI for that term — appears to have pushed Hamas to push itself where it has outside of (Judenrein) Gaza. Still, no matter what Hamas does, the cause is done, the encampments — as inholdings in Israel, as ghettos like Yarmouk in Syria — are maintained entirely not by disaffected Arab hands but by Arab kleptocrats hiding what they really do (how else become a billionaire on the backs of the impoverished?) behind cloaks, screens, and walls of disingenuous words.

Suzerainty might serve for Israel’s area of control to recognized international borders. The camps elsewhere want for a sea change in Arab heart and outlook. The twined ropes of national socialism and a strident Islamism have repeatedly served to aggrandize autocrats while failing, and in fact killing, their constituents.

It was never a real estate problem.

It isn’t one today.

It’s a problem about enmity founded in avarice and religious successionary ambition, old ropes tangled together by perhaps the Soviet encouragement of a thieving while patronizing “pan Arab nationalism” — of the sort pursued by Saddam Hussein (count the palaces built at the expense of the hunger of his constituents) — and a klepto-theocratic Islamism, the kind that sacrifices children to tunnel building and tells the mothers to regard their own innocent young as “martyrs”.

It should be over.

Someone needs to call it “over”.

No interest vested in sustaining the middle east conflict.

None, perhaps, hooked on one- and two-state real estate arguments care much for a responsible and, actually, liberating suzerainty with public courts and a press in which the tolerant among the curious are well defended and the reportage — clear, accurate, and complete — routinely notes not only the arrest but the cause of it as well.

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