23 Monday Jun 2014
Iraqi Kurdish President Massoud Barzani gave his strongest-ever indication on Monday that his region would seek formal independence from the rest of Iraq.
22 Sunday Jun 2014
Blindly
Obedient?
Finished
Owned
Subjugated
Enslaved —
And not by God
Oh no —
Jerks
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22 Sunday Jun 2014
People, eventually will unite against any form of tyranny and dictatorship, be it religious fanaticism or other forms- as they did against puritans and the dictatorial rule of Oliver Cromwell, who was known as : a self-styled Puritan Moses-in England, the copy of which exists in Iran, the so called Khamenei; who ironically refers to himself as Supreme actually, and so on. However, it is the actual people of a country themselves that have to bring about and cause a democratic government rather than an outside force. This might be the main reason for people criticizing America, or any other country’s role for that matter, in terms of interfering in their internal affairs. Many Iranians, on the other hand, and here’s the irony; actually criticize America and other countries silence during the bloody green revolution that took place in Iran a decade ago and was against the tyranny of Ahmadinejad. They see America’s indifference to that secular movement as a green light to the continuation of the so called Islamic regime, which is not far from truth.
A big thank-you to my social network friend Tanit Nima Tinat.
My two-cent riff in reply —
The assumption that “regime change” and revolution may in order would seem to include the presumption that the change brought is what the people really wanted.
Americans have repeatedly given “blood and treasure” in the name of democracy and freedom for others, but once produced, whether in Iraq or in Afghanistan, it would seem up to The People and their own ethical and moral backbone to secure benefits obtained.
That may sound good to the ears, but the realpolitik of place includes themes not addressed by merely taking down a government.
Whether one speaks of Hamid Kharzai in Afghanistan or Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq, one confronts the sways of loyalties against the possession of integrity and merit, and the resulting nepotism undermines “equality, fraternity, and liberty” — and security most of all.
In the people, one also encounters various attitudes toward authority, which in the west turns up often skeptical and questioning, but elsewhere may be cowed or ingrained when it comes to obedience before the powerful. Such observation brings up the arch comment, “With democracy, people get the government they deserve!”
Of course, from the perspective of Christian-Greco-Judeo-Roman esprit, people may get worse than what they might be supposed to deserve. Some Germans may have well deserved Hitler, for example, but what Hitler brought to Germany and what Germans were made to suffer at his hands and then at the hands of the enemies made sails beyond comprehension.
And what to do about The People, many for whom the cleric’s words are yet today received as if from God Almighty himself?
Such faith — or fear, laziness, or weakness — makes obedience blind.
Note: in the Torah, while God sets out a test for Abraham, the purpose of the test is never defined, and the vaunted “test of obedience” may well have been equally a more a “test of conscience”, which Abraham fails.
Divine infallibility — caliphate, empire, kingdom, or papacy — ought to be left to just one indefinable, unreachable, irreducible, nearly inconceivable entity or symbol: God.
All else — and all others — are mortal.
If a constituency must assert, declare, and support a divine alliance and avatar with taxes, then perhaps too it should keep itself invested in its own freedom of conscience and armed with countervailing power as well.
Earlier today on Twitter, I asked in regard to Syria’s agony, “Who defended the humanity in the middle?”
Bashar al-Assad had an army; the al-Qaeda affiliates are armies: who was there to defend the interests of the happy homeowner?
For a while now, I’ve suggested that for the purposes of analytical political psychology, Bashar al-Assad and al-Nusra in Syria are of the same malignantly narcissistic personality: different talk — same walk.
With ISIS on the move in Iraq, the ability to entertain and perhaps recognize this thesis may be crucial to the future economic and spiritual well being of the large population beset with murderous forces all around them.
In effect the Islamic Small Wars may be reduced to the The Despotic vs The Democratic — and in realpolitik, absolutists and extremists against everyone else.
Whatever the despots win, they really do not give a shit about anyone, much less everyone, else. In fact, everyone else exists to serve them, adore them, aggrandize them. die for them, and generally keep them (and their families and favored old friends) in wealth and power beyond measure.
Remember: they are the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei, and together they are defending absolutism.
ISIS is defending that too.
Where the people have bought into what those people are selling, they’re done.
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20 Friday Jun 2014
As similes go, I think “time is a river” is done.
Iraq suggests to me that time, as here humans may conceive of it, may resemble something more like a table riven with canyons.
Some come to the edge of the end of something: if they turn back, they go backward while time continues advancing others around them; if they look toward the edge out ahead of themselves, they have to devise a crossing – and then take it.
Sometimes, I refer to Hillel the Elder (circa 35 BCE to 10 CE) who said in the course of arguing the meaning of Judaism with his rival Shammai, “whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”
🙂
Hillel has been reputed to have said a few other good things as well (I believe three epigram have been listed to the left of this post), but that just quoted is the one that suggests a story about how we got to this edge.
If the Next Poetry looks difficult for writing (someone, please, channel Rumi), the separation of a kind of personality from the encouragement of a more human and natural ethics may want for sophistication greater than immediately available.
Simply pointing the finger at the despotic and spitting out the words “malignant narcissist!” might not do the trick.
Suggesting that the world is full of “bad daddies” might be more helpful: at least it would focus on the nature of some men and that of most men and women in light of the appearance of relationships between dictators, control of others (starting with what others hear and what they say), the exertion of power over others (whether they like it or not), and, always, the exploitation of the same for “narcissistic supply” accompanied by spectacles of murder and plunder undertaken with the greatest cruelty imaginable and achievable.
Now I / you / we can see them: The Despotic.
The Democratic stand opposed, but, alas, not quite put together themselves. In Iraq, in fact, it appears they may be getting mauled, and the story in Syria tells exactly what happens to undefended good deed doers.
Time spreads out always to the end of things with a moment of division before the beginnings of new things. That “now” may be short — somebody made a decision! — or it may be very long and tortuous as with forty years in a wilderness.
For some, perhaps myself included, time is also an island.
Every day is yesterday but a little different, but then — at my age — not too much so.
I have read that there are no longer “uncontacted people” — isolated tribes entirely untouched by the world beyond themselves — on our small planet, but some who may flee from further contact, probably with good practical reasons in mind, may live similarly.
The rest of us have to deal with one another in some way, and the “some way” we do that brings with it change — and better change we want than that assumed by a handful of tyrannical others.
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20 Friday Jun 2014
When does one stop looking?
Some might ask me, when does one stop talking (chatyping)?
As I type, I’m listening to the Brookings forum noted (in bold) in reference.
I’ve also seen more than I would have wished. The new answer to “Do you see what I see?” — click through.
While I may suggest that Islam in Iraq has come to a rift in time, a place where the Sunni and Shiite communities may turn their backs on the future and race backward in civil war, or they may bond in their inherent sense of decency, dignity, and humanity and evict ISIS and wrestle with the host of issues that revolve around a habit of deep and mortal discrimination that lives primarily in the head suspended in the language and related mythos of the culture.
The future will unfold for others all around the Iraqi Islamic world (and similar), and it will wait for Iraqis to gather at this edge in time in preparation for making the crossing.
Breitbart. “ISIS’s Gruesome Iraq Propaganda Includes Severed Heads, Music Videos.” June 19, 2014.
Fassihi, Farnaz. Waiting for an Ordinary Day: The Unraveling of Life in Iraq. Public Affairs, 2008.
O’Hanlon, Michael. “Iraq needs a new team at the top: Column.” USA Today, June 16, 2014.
ISIS. “Criminality Daash with the general Muslim elders and children .. ..!!” Firing Squad. YouTube, June 20, 2014. Encountered by BackChannels on Facebook and on Twitter, June 20,2014.
Brookings Events regularly delivers conference and forum webcasts and after-the-fact videos from the same.
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20 Friday Jun 2014
I don’t know if it’s true, but some things seem to work along these lines.
I do believe in the idea of expanding incitement in conflict, i.e., start with a fairly healthy society and do it some damage of a type associated with discrimination. Call that a dent and watch the dent become a hairline crack, a fissure, a fracture, a great rending of the social fabric, and continue to play the conflict — after all: you started it, it’s your game — until it comes to you for a moderated peace beneath the understanding aegis of your own capacious robes.
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19 Thursday Jun 2014
It was a rape (perpetrated on the Rohingya side) that set off this escalated vendetta. In a healthier society, imho, or one with an active and responsive government, a crime is a crime and not only treated with our kit of measures rapidly advanced in the common — investigation, arrest, trial, etc.– but protected from public emotion too: no lynching. However . . . that’s civilization.
The wild is different, and Burma has been that for a long time.
I tend to view the conflict as tribal warfare conflated with religious animus, but perhaps that’s the way I would rather feel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Rakhine_State_riots
In that the Central African Republic has been experiencing similar tribal driven warfare with a distinctly religious cast, the phenomenon becomes a template or pattern.
It doesn’t matter that most on either side would rather not be bothered, for the character of the fighting is never confined to fighters or consigned to politics: what starts as a dent in community relations becomes a hairline crack, a fissure, and as atrocity escalates, a fracture, a Great Divide.
There may be “hidden hands” in setting one against another (certainly, the images I posted from the Rohingya experience were compelling and visceral — and I’ve since removed them from display on my blog); there may be great wealth in the offing, no pun intended; but that the center does not hold in any of the Islamic Small Wars may tell something about the character of the places involved (I like to note that Assad had an army and al-Nusra et al were armies of a sort, but the main constituency of Syria had NOTHING for its defense from any violent actor) and the character of the process that heightens long-overlooked differences in communities and moves from incident (all are like blasting caps in these wars) to feud to open conflict to genocidal putsch. To arrest that process, it has to be stopped in the “mouth-ear-mind-heart system” all around. That might take place if the “mild, moderate, and middle” (I’ve a lot of tropes for this stuff) can get its act together and restore civil society (that’s Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite-in-it-together challenge today), but if they can’t, it gets worse x distribution x intensity x sadism.
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In the 20th Century, generals and politicians certainly understood bad mouthing, pushing and shoving, dirty tricks, and ambush (and blitzkrieg); in this one, I’m not sure whether those being swept up into animus- and conflict-producing processes understand how they are being manipulated to increase their own tendency toward violence and decrease their ability to observe, reason, and weigh essential criminal acts.
Whether it starts with the massive lying generated by Hamas and the increasingly and morally lost “Palestinian Cause” or a few words over the radio in Rwanda, the pathway — etiological, just like disease — becomes clear, and the wholesale destruction of the innocent plus whatever comprises humanity within the perpetrators (what do you think of Bashar al-Assad now?) is where it ends.
Senseless slaughter.
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With a hazy sense of the conflict, I mentioned as analog the fighting in the Central African Republic. Conveniently found in the web (this kind of look-up takes less than four seconds, and the keyboard operator uses up 3.5 second or so of those):
“Ndele isn’t far away” is the wishful name of a small Islamic shop selling prayer beads and copies of the Koran in Miskine, a bustling district in the Central African Republic’s capital Bangui. Ndele, in the country’s north, some 650 kilometers (400 miles) from Bangui, was the first city captured by the Seleka, an alliance of various Muslim rebel groups. In March, they marched into the capital, overthrowing the government.
Miskine has traditionally been the Muslim district in the predominantly Catholic capital. Before the coup, Muslims used to live in peace alongside Christians, with their giant mosque standing alongside three churches. Today, it is the scene of a civil war, with Christian militias fighting to the death in an attempt to drive out the Muslim rebels.
http://www.dw.de/car-conflict-about-power-religion/a-17315017 – 12/21/2013.
On the other hand, if you think you have looked at (or into) something, look again:
Djotodia was the first Muslim leader of the mostly Christian CAR − Muslims account for approximately 15% of the population − and the Séléka mostly comprised of Muslims from the north, though bolstered by some Chadian and Sudanese mercenaries.
Under Djotodia, the Séléka engaged in looting, rape, and murder of civilians. In response, various communities formed self-protection brigades. These so-called anti-balaka forces are believed to be mostly Christian, but their origins and leadership are largely unknown − some speculate that former president Bozizé and his supporters control more than half the forces.
http://thinkafricapress.com/central-african-republic/identity-politics-coding-religion – 2/26/2014.
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For BackChannels, I suggest the Islamic Small Wars (well, Islam’s the world that’s hosting or involved in most of the open conflict and conflict-drive on the planet at the moment) have to do with personality (of dictators — and the psychology of dictatorship distilled, somewhat, to “malignant narcissism“). The way that works, however, may be akin to how a part of Hollywood works: the place needs showoffs! It breeds them, draws them, encourages them (I’ve rather been one of them myself in spirit).
And in Hollywood, it’s not so bad.
Mel Gibson may do some damage, but compared to, say Russia’s President Putin or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad (or “the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei”), Mel’s okeydokey with just about whatever he does.
In other realms, one might get a flamboyant but egalitarian, just, and thoughtful president – or a tyrannical king.
This theme, small time thug to mafia don to president of a nuclear state, runs all the way up and down the line. Where it doesn’t, where it won’t work, is where something central in the character of the humanity of the place — or the surrounding humanity if “containment has become an objective — keeps it caged and makes it smaller.
And smaller.
Until it’s gone.
And elected lawmakers, disciplined police, and open courts remain to handle the leftovers of their societies’ violent fringes.
It may just be me who sees personality and psychological issues where others see political ones, often related to resources; nonetheless, I would submit that while the wealth in the ground or in the labor may be a prize, the malignant have interest in the control of others in the process of dealing themselves “narcissistic supply” — they’re not playing just for gold or oil or their political survival or the welfare of their people: they’re out to steal the dignity, freedom, and good spirit of their adversaries, and those — that’s the whole world (whether it likes it or not).
That kind of poisoned drive destroys communities and deadens the souls across which it sweeps its black angel’s wings.
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19 Thursday Jun 2014
BackChannels 