In paraphrase, the prompt was how would Hitler have been viewed if he had not produced the genocide of the Jews of Europe, i.e., The Holocaust.
Hitler would not have been Hitler without the ‘racial” foundations of Nazism already laid through the 1920s.
I’ve noted only recently the near concurrence of Stalin’s installation as the leader of the Soviet Union, the establishment in 1928 of the Muslim Brotherhood (in response to western colonial abuses, but also accessing religious supremacist thought in defense of Egyptian Muslims), and the already-built intellectual ferment — papers circulating in universities — for Nazism.
I have tried venturing toward the kind of conversation Stalin may (!) have had with Hitler in the course of coming to a delusional agreement over the parsing of Europe between them and then Hitler’s treacherous move against the same.
It’s too soon to draw the comparison “Stalin : Hitler” as “Putin : ? ” , but that there is a conversation between feudal powers may be something that cannot be either doubted nor overlooked nor in content — i.e., what’s the story behind the public’s glimpses of Manafort, Millian, and Kilimnik? — known.
What appears to my _imagination_ is a conversation involving medieval lords and their knights, who are today well paid “nobility” suited up in suits and carrying briefcases full of explosive agreements.
From the Politico article:
Joking aside, Trump has demonstrated more interest in Russia’s affairs than in perhaps any other area of foreign policy. And his laissez faire approach toward Russia’s confrontational relations with its neighbors, combined with his open admiration of its authoritarian President Vladimir Putin and his employment of Manafort, have led experts from across the political spectrum to predict that a Trump presidency would augur to the Kremlin’s benefit.
How far passed is the election season “past” as America moves toward the inauguration of its new President?
The conversation prompted here is only quasi-public or constrained by the social distribution chosen for the original topic post. Therefore, we may be of the public, but we may also note in passing that this now old “Trump-Manafort” news has been discarded from the public conversation.
As news, it’s old news.
As a theme (for foreign policy wonks) it may remain relevant, but as much becomes a conversation between specialized journalists and researchers, and therefore politically irrelevant.
The public will rush on to the next day’s headlines, and the same will overlay, blanket, and suffocate the previous day’s curiosity and its items of interest.
The powerful and wealthy of the world have always inhabited a world greater than their own family, clan, tribe, and nation-state: whether Chinese political elites or Forbes-listed billionaires, the world has no boundaries and its laws must suit them for them to keep them, provided, lol, they keep a lot of other interested parties — above the table and quite some distance beneath it — interested in their success and largesse.
Of course, the citizens of every state needs must care about their own lives first — biological, familial and otherwise social, financial, emotional, spiritual. Security and stability in those aspects of life are generally part of everyone’s quality of living.
That Putin has been able to sustain and transform many aspects of the defunct Soviet Union tells a story about the kind of political power exercised in relation to malignant narcissism. In effect, he has got Russia revolving around himself, and for the discomforts he has caused, the Russians have channels today for faith and patriotism. The “Communists” are gone but the essence of the old nomenklatura has been transformed into an ultra-nationalist and neo-imperial enterprise.
The public that has wished to take an interest in foreign affairs has plenty of information — responsible, valid, and reliable — for working, but large constituencies may only attend to so much in aggregate. I would not think of such as “ignorant masses” but rather people with families and jobs and struggles and worries of their own. They may find what they need to know WHEN it matters to them, when the dots circle back to their own interests, and they perceive that.
The stimulus for the response made note of the people voting Putin into power.
While the surface may look calm — and in the above video positively modern and multicultural — here’s additional reference to what appears to lie beneath.
The president of Chechnya emerged from afternoon prayers at a mosque and with chilling composure explained why seven young women who had been shot in the head deserved to die.
Ramzan Kadyrov said the women, whose bodies were found dumped by the roadside, had “loose morals” and were rightfully shot by male relatives in honor killings.
Earlier this month, the leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, informed his more than one million followers on social networks that he had become “the happiest man in this land.” Something had come to pass that he never could have dreamed of, he said. He had had a transfusion, he said, from a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, so now he has the Prophet’s blood flowing through his veins.
RAMZAN KADYROV has few inhibitions. Last week, just before the first anniversary of the murder of Boris Nemtsov, a liberal Russian opposition leader, by a member of Mr Kadyrov’s security services, the Chechen strongman posted a video on his Instagram page. It depicted Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister, in the crosshairs of a sniper rifle. “Kasyanov is in Strasbourg to get money for the opposition,” Mr Kadyrov commented under the video, in a clear warning to opposition politicians. “Whoever still doesn’t get it, will.”
Vladimir Putin said when he first ran for president in 2000 that his “historic mission” was to resolve the situation in the North Caucasus. To do so, he oversaw a second war in Chechnya, already devastated by Russia’s failed attempt to subdue the republic in 1994-1996.
Instead of solving the North Caucasus issue, however, Putin created a monster. To end the fighting, he cut a deal with Chechnya’s rebel Kadyrov clan: In exchange for loyalty to the Kremlin, they received power and reconstruction aid.
This was a medieval deal that made Akhmad Kadyrov, a rebel commander and Sufi mufti, Putin’s feudal liege. The aim was to co-opt the more religiously moderate Sufis among Chechnya’s rebel fighters, marginalize the Salafist jihadists who appear to have fascinated the Boston bombers, and enable the Russian military to declare victory and draw down.
This subject is complicated by “Hizb ut-Tahrir”, a Tatar organization supportive of the Chechen rebels (presumably against affiliates of warlord Kadyrov) but not active itself with terrorism and, apparently, acting in the open.
The Pentagon has identified eight staging areas in Russia where large numbers of military forces appear to be preparing for incursions into Ukraine, according to U.S. defense officials.
As many as 40,000 Russian troops, including tanks, armored vehicles, and air force units, are now arrayed along Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia.
One could research and read through the many themes, but I like Ben Judah’s comment best regarding the compact between Putin and Kadyrov: “This was a medieval deal that made Akhmad Kadyrov, a rebel commander and Sufi mufti, Putin’s feudal liege. The aim was to co-opt the more religiously moderate Sufis among Chechnya’s rebel fighters, marginalize the Salafist jihadists who appear to have fascinated the Boston bombers, and enable the Russian military to declare victory and draw down.”
BackChannels has been singing medieval about “Putin, Assad, and Khamenei (and Baghdadi)” for ages, but the observation now begs another question: how modern is the west?
If we call what we have been witnessing in Syria a “New Medievalism”, we may well ask where is NATO on the timeline of political conventions?
BackChannels hopes there is such a thing as “Modern” in governance and that it is supported by the bravery in arms, integrity in character, and the honest research of the thoughtful.
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.”
Putin has proven genius in leveraging at least two NATO states his way using both his state cards — energy and technology — and affinity-based appeal to the egotism — malignant narcissism — of his targets in political “bromance”. Both Viktor Orban and Recip Tayyip Erdogan appear to have the Ceausescu strain of self-concept: one-of-a-kind brilliance, each God’s gift to mankind, to be nested in mighty impressive mansions as among the world’s Presidents-for-Life.
“Different Talks — Same Walk.”
Competition and warfare for each has become a state technology that can be governed to good effect and made a part of totalitarian political theater, the same as on display today in Syria.
Putin knows “the masses” are not going to see what he has created in its totality, and those that may will be in no position to challenge his authority and worldview. The same applies to Erdogan, who has been making certain that there will be no opposition to his will as he turns history’s clock backward in Turkey.
Is renewed medievalism our future?
Considering the forces of corruption in modern governments and the amplification of political passions along the Red-Black-Green (Marxist) and Brown (Nationalist) axis, it’s very likely that a state of violent conflict has been cultivated (I would blame Russo-Iranian agitation and influence for that) and we will exist in states of wars of all against all.
I think I’m on the right track — and I could turn this into another Awesome Conversation post on Back-Channels — but the public may not take it up and rediscover and reaffirm their own investment in a modern worldview.
Another thought expressed in the awesome conversation online and now entombed on this blog.
The worlds that keep dictators in business are those of fear and greed as projected by the dictator himself. “Putin’s World” may be “Russian Nationalist” today and Khamenei’s representative of “Shiite Islam”, and the Christian should be at war with the Muslim, but, lo, at the top: kleptocracy.
The possession of absolute power defines each “autocrat”, and what they must have of interstate fighting are the wars that change nothing, wars that generate income and heat and good headlines — glory for themselves! — but have the effect of keeping each in business to the natural end of their days.
(2006) During the Cold War, the world was divided into two camps: one aligned with the United States, the other aligned with the Soviet Union. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, America emerged as the sole superpower. But another camp is again emerging to challenge the United States and its allies. It is not a great superpower like the Soviet Union, but a loose coalition of forces united by a common opposition to the United States and its policies.
Islamist groups like al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are part of this movement against the United States, but it is neither a religious movement, nor one comprised of Muslims alone. Today, these groups are increasingly making common cause with anti-U.S. forces in Latin America and elsewhere. They are rethinking their rhetoric to appeal to a broader audience at home and their new allies abroad.
Readers will find eight virtual pages to the end of the piece, and they appear to agree with what this blog has been saying about “Red-Black-Green (Marxist) and Brown (Nationalist)” impulses and related Russo-Iranian influence.
“The counter-coup is not over yet,” said Soner Cagaptay, a Turkey expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He said he believes that Erdogan is using the coup attempt as a “one-time window” to consolidate power and lead Turkey toward being a single-party state.
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“But the president also made clear a couple of other things,” Earnest said. “The first is that the United States doesn’t support terrorists, the United States doesn’t support individuals who conspired to overthrow democratically elected governments. The United States follows the rule of law.”
The first paragraph has to do with a policy analyst’s prognosis for Turkey as an open democracy, the kind more familiar to Washington than to Moscow.
The second — the speaker is White House press secretary Josh Earnest — indicates Washington’s equivocal stance toward Turkish President Erdogan’s consolidation of power with Fethullah Gulen as a “chip” being played in the diplomacy.
So the United States “doesn’t support individuals who conspired to overthrow democratically elected governments”.
How “democratically” was Morsi elected in Egypt — and how democratic proved his administration?
Perhaps it was best the Egyptian people answered with their army, and the Muslim Brotherhood has been rightly purged from power in Egypt.
Similar dynamics apply to coup and countercoup in Turkey, which to BackChannels looks awfully manipulated in the state’s favor before it began, but that’s another story for exploration in a later post.
For the time being, Washington promotes “rule of law” — but look at how Turkey’s ruler has treated the same concept to effectively suppress the same throughout his nation and invest it all in . . . himself.
It appears that in Erdogan’s idea of the Turkish state, what democracy was designed to prevent it has instead enabled.
The detentions reported by Anadolu news agency come hours after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared a three-month state of emergency that is expected to expand the crackdown.
Already, nearly 10,000 people have been arrested while hundreds of schools have been closed. And nearly 60,000 civil service employees have been dismissed from their posts since the failed coup Friday.
Nearly one-third of Turkey’s roughly 360 serving generals have been detained. The Defense Ministry is investigating all military judges and prosecutors and has suspended 262 of them, broadcaster NTV reported, while 900 police officers in Ankara were also suspended on July 20.
Turkey’s education system has been hit particularly hard during the ongoing crackdown. The Education Ministry on July 20 added more than 6,500 new names to the list of 15,200 school employees suspended, state media reported.
Imagine such a thing as a “Medieval Time Bubble” — a place where heads of state hold “absolute power” over their plundered and subject people. It’s in that bubble, today post-Soviet and neo-feudal, that Putin, Assad, Khamenei, AND Baghdaddi need one another for keeping on display “Assad vs The Terrorists” and sustaining eadh their own portion of the medieval worldview.
I believe Daesh autonomous in its operations and spirit but manipulated to serve the ruling feudals as a foil for their militaries or their politics, to serve as leverage (“Assad OR The Terrorists” is the name of that play), and to serve as a goad to the west and related western defense spending.
The response to Daesh AND other medieval enterprises may have to come from the world that most immediately surrounds them.
Trolls online — paid? not paid? who knows — regularly credit the United States with having developed ISIS / ISIL / Daesh. For cause based in news, BackChannels has taken the opposite stance, and Daesh, although autonomous in its own mind and in its own workings, serves the medieval designs of Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran for the furtherance of despotism, fascism, and militarism — and endless war — far into the 21st Century.
In essence, the dissolving of the Soviet, almost 24 years ago, led not to democracy but to a feudal revanche benefiting primarily the ultra-privileged of Russia.
Today’s axis Moscow-Tehran may boast not only autocratic governance but with the help of Daesh’s presence in Iraq and Syria, a pretty good engine for the promotion of “New Nationalist” urges elsewhere and amplified and broadened divisions between people based on legacy in nationality, race, and religion, an anti-NATO strategy that appears to be working as post-KGB / KGB-Style Theater (“Assad vs The Terrorists”) proves that perception at a glance may create a useful target’s impression of reality.
Assad’s central strategy, this with the probable collusion of its partners, has been to produce an interesting piece of post-KGB-style political theater: “Assad vs The Terrorists”, which becomes also “Assad OR The Terrorists.” First, however, he needed “The Terrorists”, and he needed bad enough terrorists to confuse the moderate opposition with them. He had a few ways of accomplishing this effect. He could spill Islamists out of his jails (I’ll refer to a piece on that bit of data in a moment) and he could focus his air and ground forces against FSA (the initial revolutionary force while giving the al-Qaeda Typicals (like al-Nusra and ISIS) time to incubate.
Mission accomplished.
With “The Terrorists” fully present, Assad could then make the demand, “help me, or help them.”
The same system makes way also for the Assad-side slogan, “Assad, Or We Burn the Country.”
The western position: help neither, but try to help other forces strong enough in their own moral and fighting fiber to fight both — and the same have been fighting on their two fronts — against Assad’s forces and against Daesh.
Max Fisher’s piece attends to the complicated political nuts and bolts where I have emphasized a larger struggle between the medieval world of political absolutism, of which Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdaddi form a whole: the first three have in the fourth the enemy they need to write the future of the world their way. None appear possessed of any compassion sufficient to forestall their own inability in restraining themselves.
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What has come from this has been a steady stream of “war porn” — indescribable images of death, dismemberment, maiming, and mutilation having for their subject tens of thousands of Syrian noncombatants. All who have watched the “Syrian Tragedy” — that’s my term for it — online have seen this horrific feed.
While we have also seen — and in some ways been made to see — Daesh atrocities conveyed in pictures and text, what we have seen also without end have been the targets and effects of Assad’s barrel bombing of whole areas. A portion of Homs today looks like Nagasaki after the ashes have cooled. Famously, the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp has been devastated between Assad’s forces and those of the Islamic State — http://www.longwarjournal.org/…/islamic-state-releases…
Fundamentally, the struggle between the post-Soviet feudalists (“absolute powers” each of them) and the Islamic feudalists is medieval in a particularly barbaric way: both are using modern weapons absent of any apparent compassion or conscience.
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The medieval screed wants the division of all against all — and those who benefit from it have to promote that division as part of their own archaic, faulted, or otherwise misguided ambition — and for shame or honor, none dare admit fault.
Worse, the medieval of mind align differentially — according to national, religious, or sectarian nominal affiliation. Because you were born . . . Shia . . . because you were born . . . Sunni . . . because you were born Russian Orthodox . . . because you were born Arab . . . . because you were born Turkish . . . . these obligations (to bully, demean, and diminish others, to pick fights with others, the more helpless, the better, etc.) are incumbent upon thee.
The medieval world had been constrained by slow transportation, primitive methods of distant communication (runners with notes or messages) and personal weaponry. These medieval elements in the modern world are not so constrained and are both borrowing and leaking themselves into the platforms, as it were, of the progressive manufacturing of devastating weapons as well as other sectors generating the modern experience of community and technology.
Start with Assad’s planes.
The barrel bombs might be basic in various ways, but the flying machines are not.
Now: Russian cruise missiles launched from air and sea; on the ground, anything that can be gotten and carried.
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Part of the online crowd supports the Russian position coupled with affinity for the Christian Church (which church matters less at the moment: whatever the true political topology may be, Assad’s opposition — “The Terrorists” — are all Islamists in the Baghdaddi tradition. Often reached for in objection to that position are the many images of dead, injured, maimed, and mangled children or their parents. In Assad’s war, the same have not been “collateral” or “in the way” of “The Terrorists”: by all appearances and by way of general barrel bombing most of all, they have been the certain targets of Assad’s so-called “defense”.
This video post on YouTube on May 3, 2011 appears among the earliest statements of the Assad concern for any opposed to its absolute authority in Syria:
Related from 2013:
“It’s more horrific than any other war zone I’ve worked in. Most civilians are caught in crossfire, they are never really caught in direct fire. It is direct fire this time” he told BBC News.
Such state-generated terrorism encourages sympathy for the Syrian opposition, including in the confusion “The Terrorists” that the Assad regime allowed to incubate.
There are many other and similar observations and arguments having to do with “Assad and The Terrorists” and the medieval barbarism put on display before the world. The escalation attending Russia’s entry into the combat area, the side-by-side mix of Russo-NATO (U.S.) cooperation and “proxy war” have no effect on the kind of inhuman consciousness involved in sustaining the conflict.
It has been and remains BackChannel’s thesis that Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdaddi and what they represent — on this blog, 21st Century Feudalism — require one another for survival.
Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/ – 10/2/2015.
BackChannels 