Tag Archives: 21st Century Neo-Feudalism

Political Myopia – Chilcot in the Post-Soviet Context

07 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, Fast News Share, Great Britain and United Kingdom, Iraq, Middle East, North America, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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BackChannels places conflicts involving Iraq in the post-Cold War framework and suggests that military engagements were part of “containment” and the “building down” of Soviet alliances that remained in character authoritarian and openly supportive of terrorism.

Note too that Russia today refuses to designate either Hezbollah or Hamas as terrorist organizations; that is has met in recent years with PFLP (easily looked up online), well recognized for the hijacking of airliners in the 1970s; and, sigh, that it is most responsible for allowing / enabling / encouraging Assad to incubate ISIS — by deselection for bombing and combat — in Syria as that conflict got under way.

Basically, Russia then and Russia today criminally manipulates foreign political constituencies to suit its own kleptocratic appetites. Hussein (and Gaddafi) were part of that enterprise, and perhaps as God willed it, both are gone (and thank God).

Yesterday’s BBC report on the Chilcot report  keeps itself narrowed on the image of Iraq as an oasis of stability, however miserable, under the rule of a strongman, and the report itself reasserts at face value the idea that “regime change” in Iraq linked to direct threats posed by WMDs, which imbroglio BackChannels would shove into a bin labeled “Potential Convenient Pretexts” (sorry the same don’t really work out) and the more general “Global War on Terror,” which period of observation appears to start on September 11, 2001:

10. After the attacks on the US on 11 September 2001 and the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in November, the US Administration urned its attention to regime change in Iraq as part of the second phase of what it called the Global War on Terror.

Source: “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry: Executive Summary: Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors: Ordered by the House of the Commons to be printed on 6 July 2016”, PDF, page 5, Item 10).

It is unfortunate that governments most devoted to “classical liberalism” and democracy should feel the need to resort to manipulating their “masses” (instead of free constituencies) because they have failed to publically educate the same in the longer-lived themes of geopolitics and history — or worse, lost that battle to the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left that relies on short memories to promote their own ultimately authoritarian, fascist, and totalitarian outlooks.

I don’t know what BackChannels is going to do when the 25th Year Anniversary of the Dissolving of The Soviet passes on December 26, 2016, but as that day is still coming up, it’s going to harp on it with the hope that other “English” and Europeans and others less free or more so catch a glimpse of Putin’s Excellent World (PEW), the world from which it has emerged, and the malignantly narcissistic worldview it continues to promote or install wherever it may.

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Putin’s Swipe at NATO Via Erdogan

30 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Russia, Turkey

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From the Awesome Conversation:

Putin’s clawing into NATO, and he’s going to use Erdogan, a natural authoritarian (with his own White Palace) to further establish “absolutism” around a feudal Russian core.

In the today’s news:

The Kremlin accepted a letter from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as an apology this week.

Mr Putin spoke to Mr Erdogan by phone on Wednesday, telling him he planned to lift the travel sanctions.

The lifting of non-travel trade sanctions will depend on the outcome of the trade talks, the Russian leader said in his decree.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36676516 – 6/30/2016

In news analysis appearing in The Atlantic about three years ago:

The Turks suffer from a deep-rooted, historic reluctance to confront the Russians. The humming Turkish economy is woefully dependent on Russian energy exports: More than half of Turkey’s natural gas consumption comes from Russia. Consequently, Turkey is unlikely to confront Moscow even when Russia undermines Turkey’s interests, such as in Syria where Russia is supporting the Assad regime, even as Ankara tries to depose it.

Historically, the Turks have always feared the Russians . . . .

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/05/turkey-fears-russia-too-much-to-intervene-in-syria/275571/ – 5/6/2013

Moscow has so far been able to separate itself from such wondrous moves as the incubation of ISIS (through “deselection” for bombing and combat early in the Syrian Tragedy) and the related development of Syrian mass migration, and with Turkey and the latest airport bombing — and where the terrorists come from but Russia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan — the same channeling applies and to similar effect: Russia has been channeling its extremists to ISIS, and when they do what they do in the NATO community, it may lay claim to being tough on the same.

If terrorists should wreak havoc on a renewed Russian flight to Turkey, well then: Moscow and Washington may then mutually share sorrows and perhaps move toward rapprochement (on counterterrorism cooperation, say) while Assad the Tyrant and the familiar Soviet / post-Soviet (now neo-feudal) arrangements remain in place.

There’s a greater problem with such a rosey “what-if” or outcome, and that is the modern world’s ceding itself to the sustained “feudal absolute power” that today, as in medieval days, lends itself to despotism, kleptocracy, and the war of all against all without end.  Unfortunately, “Red Brown Green” applies: to have within NATO nationalist or Islamist authoritarians (Hungary’s Orban, Turkey’s Erdogan, for starters) lends itself to Russia’s feudal revanch and its imperial ends.

Fast Related Reference (URL + Date)

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/ – 10/2/2015.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/04/19/turkish-autocrat-erdogan-on-track/ – 4/19/2016.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/30/opinions/russia-soviet-fighters-istanbul-bombing-bergen/ – 7/1/2016

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FTAC – Clarity – An Observation About Russian Feudalism and the Middle East Conflict

30 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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The “single state” solution fails not for enmity but for comprehension of what is represented by the Hebrews living in the land of the Hebrews.

Language as a cultural technology evolves within a people in somewhat isolated social space sufficient to invent their way of getting along among themselves and with the surrounding earth. For each ethnolinguistic cultural cohort on the planet, there is a land, a someplace, from whence it came.

So the Hebrews are back in the Land of the Hebrews: Israel. There are also Baloch, Pashtun (“B’ni Israel”, self-defined), and Kurds who have a relationship with the land that made them, and they too have some political issues involving their autonomy and survival as a people.

The Jordanian Arabs and the migrant workers caught between armies in 1948 have been deeply manipulated by powerful forces within and outside of Arab culture. The Russian KGB’s invention of Arafat, an Egyptian, and the PLO either is or should be history well known to scholars who have devoted themselves to studying and solving the “middle east conflict” (never the others ongoing — and “hot” — at the moment). The contemporary and feudal Russian story, that which has had Mikhail Bogdanov entertaining PFLP in Moscow (Nov. 2014) while the state refuses to acknowledge either Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, should be taken into account.

It’s not the Israelis or Palestinian People (again: somewhat isolated in time and space — long enough to create new language 🙂 ) who sustain the middle east conflict: all along, it has been those who misinform, mis-educate, and maliciously “program” socially captive innocents in service to their own feudal-medieval aggrandizement (and financial enrichment).

This blog now has plenty of data for backing up its opinion about what has created and what sustains the “Middle East Conflict (MEC)”.  From the vicious narcissism that would hold refugees in camps (Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt) and separated from general state populations (a genuinely apartheid policy) to the Soviet distribution of anti-Semitic propaganda and, yes, the invention of Arafat, the MEC has come to represent medievalism at its greed-laden best.

Look into UNRWA spending and tunnel smuggling, and then take another look at who got the loot.

We know who didn’t get wealthy.

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FTAC – Sideways on Brexit and Putin’s Medieval Theater

27 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Russia

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🙂

A fair part of the world is now The World x multinational business x communication x shipping x transportation, and while sovereign states must control their borders, few are able to ignore their neighbors, their neighbors’ ambitions, or bad habits and bad sectors. Probably the way to think about criminality, as determined by familiar western and modern precepts is to attach it to “filtration” — catch the “bad apples” — and osmosis from ungoverned conditions and space to governed.

At the moment, there’s a feudal-criminal world (psst: Moscow and its assortment of Far Right and Far Left helpers) continuing to drive chaos into the more civil, more “rule-of-law” west. While the west should (must!) push back, it should do so with other than reversion to its own feudal tendencies.

What Moscow / Putin promotes has been on full display between Sochi and Syria — immense accumulations of wealth and power beside the most inhuman of practices and the most thoughtless and provocative real behavior in foreign policy. I know I can’t keep going over how Damascus incubated ISIS, or, in Russia, (or Iran), how criminality / kleptocracy leak down through the justice systems and corrode their entire societies, but all of that is what is actually represented by ISIS and so many Syrian refugees.

I know as an editor (of possibly the world’s most obscure political blog) that similar specialists or academics “get” the post-Cold War “big picture” but for most with more parochial interests, it’s “ISIS” and what Putin’s sayin’ sounds about right — lower the portcullis!

BackChannels has developed a whole image of the “Post-Cold War – Cold Struggle” environment anchored yet in Moscow and Washington.  In getting to this point, it has learned that “research analyst” (self-assigned, autodidact) knowledge and public impression and perception diverge often and quite, which fact of life may suit the treatment of the public as “the masses”, for as much fits with Moscow’s philosophy regarding information, “information space”, and political manipulation via, as with the handling of Syria, political theater writ large.

Related and Highly Recommended Summer Reading

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev, 2014.

Vovochka: The True Confessions of Vladimir Putin’s Best Friend and Confidant by Alexander J. Motyl, 2015.

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FTAC – Brexit Vote and Putin’s Feudal Revanche

25 Saturday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Putin in his own feudal revanche has played extremes against the middle, backing both Far Left and Far Right movements, including “new nationalists” and related personalities. Dictatorships want for cause and revel in creating the instability against which they may make themselves look good. In the struggle between the medieval worldview and absolute power and the modern democratic distribution and “checking” of power, this unwitting vote plays to Moscow’s feudal intents.

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FTAC – A Reductionist Rationale for War

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iran, Russia, Syria

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Suggested: “Interest” x “Values” x “Value” | Rationale.

From a humanist’s standpoint, the Syrian Tragedy hasn’t looked at all rational, but viewed through a lens that takes in “absolute power”, “feudalism”, “malignant narcissism”, and the wholesale producing of a theater of war as a demonstration of power, well then it makes perfect sense, horrific though that may be.

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FTAC – Putin’s Rosneft ‘Balloon’ and Syria

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Politics

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Yesterday, OilPro reported, “Putin Reportedly Considers Selling $11bn of Rosneft To China & India” (June 21, 2016), and I was asked for an opinion:

It could be a ruse or an easy play to encourage the feudalism he needs to keep his state where he has placed it as a new and kicking feudal homeland, but the ruling cultures — FSB and Big Oligarch Money — continue to confuse Russians and otherwise devour the state (that’s what kleptocracies do). I no longer know how true to form the “mafia state” and “Putin’s Kleptocracy” may be as Putin has for some years tried forcing the oligarchs to invest and spend within Russia. Now Russia has the “T-34 Tank Tomato” for export. What else is in the pipeline? And how “unreformed” may Russians and others, especially the open democracies, expect Russia to be, say, five years from now?

As regards Syria: it appears Putin, Assad, and Khamenei had expected to defend “feudal absolute power” with a great demonstration of barbarism plus the development of ISIS. The west’s refusal to intervene, which matter might and will be argued for a while, I’m sure, has left the problems created in the hands of those who fashioned them. Call it divine justice — or not — the three dictators have now to seriously diminish ISIS and reclaim Syrian space for the privileged of the state whose interests Assad represents. They were so smart in 2011 that here in 2016 they are draining their own pockets.

Related on BackChannels: “Syria — ‘Assad vs The Terrorists’ — How ISIS Defends Assad”, October 2, 2015.

The Obama Administration’s apparent policy of “least (visible) war possible” has forestalled interventions certainly noted as possibilities deep down in the government’s soul while it forged ahead with strategic maneuvers ranging from the achievement of energy independence to the buttressing of NATO elements where needed to stave off Russia’s renewed but “neo-imperial” ambitions.  Perhaps the point has been to strengthen the “western” (oh, come on: let’s call it the “human”) hand (naturally politically coherent, democratic, integrating, self-actualizing, self-organizing across broad polities) while receiving the survivor-refugees coming off the “Syrian Tragedy”, BackChannel’s term for what has been observed since 2011 in the Syrian theater of war.

Additional and Cited Reference

BackChannels.  “Cold War? –> Cold Struggle.”  May 15, 2016.

BackChannels: “Syria — ‘Assad vs The Terrorists’ — How ISIS Defends Assad”, October 2, 2015.

Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School and the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute.  “MARO: Mass Atrocity Response Operations: A Military Planning Handbook.”  PDF.  Published by The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2010.

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FTAC – Moscow-Tehran – Far Left Connection – Distilled

15 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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One might agree with the sentiment in “BDS is mainly the invention of self-hating Israelis and Jews” but the truth is it’s mainly the invention of historic Russian anti-Semitism ported through the Soviet Union to the “comrade networks” that today have morphed into the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left.

Here’s one of their portals, and I think a glance at the names still on the marquis, as it were, tells of the “longer game” being played on the world stage.

http://www.blackforpalestine.com/

In the wings, imho, but not without cause: the Russo-Syrian effort to sustain their systems of feudal absolute power far into the 21st Century. As KSA realigns westward, or follows its massive investments in the west, Moscow and Tehran may remain committed to installing in the west greater chaos, dissension, and threat.

It’s a big picture view, but the connections between so-called “liberation movements” (add the Far Right New Nationalists like Viktor Orban to the mix) seem to me unmistakable. Possibly, Obama and his subaltern Shapiro are giving signal, whether lip service or sincere, back to Moscow, as the Palestinians remain incapable of challenging the PLO / PA (set up by the KGB way back when) and Hamas (whom Moscow today refuses to designate a terrorist organization).

Does the suggested political architecture work?

Test it.

Directly related on BackChannels, which is now well woven: Syndicate Red Brown Green.

Addendum – 7/6/2016

Golding, Shenequa.  “Ray Lewis Blasts Black Lives Matter Over Silence On Black-On-Black Crime.”  Vibe, April 7, 2016.

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