Tag Archives: 21st Century Neo-Feudalism

FTAC: 9/11 – Sixteen Years of Accelerating, Expanding Conflict Between Archaic Worlds and the Modern One

11 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Religion, transnational crime

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The medieval worldview and its marriage to financial and political power may be archaic in the modern world.  Faith in God and religion may be good things, but as demonstrated by the Islamists, by the Saudi Royals and their spreading of Wahhabi madrasas, and by related clerical wealth dependent on subscription plus political repression, too much of that kind of “religion” suffocates creativity, freedom, and economic exchange.

I believe the modern world wishes not to be dragged back into the “medieval mode” — or your nation should have a new King with his legitimacy validated by Bishops and the Pope.

Yours has also a different kind of contest going with archaic systems: the tribal systems (with chiefs) are absolute and often worlds unto themselves, and they may well be discomfited by seeing their children yanked into mines and (perhaps) abused.

The Third World War seems to me quite healthy and under way as regards barbarism and the most cynical and evil worship of money by those encouraging horrific acts worldwide.  

Thank Putin who has been most visible in relation to the barbaric horrors of Syria, the creeping warfare ongoing in Ukraine, numerous “frozen conflicts”, which become transfer points for smuggling, potentially on a nearly unimaginable scale, and today the support of al-Qaeda-like Taliban in Afghanistan.

When, and since we woke up sixteen years ago this day, has the modern world — the civilization of open democracies — not been at war with barbarism?

My South American correspondent counseled the various forms of “sword” against the evils wrought by bankers who sought deregulation that invited the 2007/8 financial meltdown, by the godless forces of still nominal and virulent communist and socialist politics, and by indigenous either living in older worlds or lost in this one.

Since 9/11, a curtain in time has come up on the world that surrounds all of us as we have come to casually and commonly access cultural activities and political news around the world via Internet.  Perhaps the community of foreign affairs and international relations enthusiasts as well as professionals has been grown as a consequence of access to . . . the online universe of media, political institutions, and, of course, fellow travelers — and, perhaps, we have become or started on the path toward greater cognizance and sophistication about the world’s myriad conflicts and their true underlying drivers.

For brevity, BackChannels will leave this post “airy” — short on specifics — but note that we — “the west”, “EU / NATO”, “the open democracies of the world” — may be more at war today with feudal despots and medieval illusion and “The Terrorists” — the global network of clerical power bound to media production and incitement and transnational crime (arms, diamonds, drugs, for a start) and related and active cells than was the case before this day sixteen years ago.

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FTAC: “At War Every Day”

09 Saturday Sep 2017

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

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Paraphrasing the famous lecture from “Behind Enemy Lines” — “Every day we wake up, we’re at war!”

With the Russo-Sino axis engaged in sub-nuclear military activity and provocation with intent to produce imperial gains in business or area of influence, I think we’re indeed being played.

Moscow has a long acknowledged history as a polity endorsing or exploiting terrorism and practicing totalitarian theater.

Regarding al-Qaeda, any may look up “Zawahiri, Russia, 9/11” and “Afghanistan, Russia, Taliban”.

What do today’s most feudal societies defend?

Answer for yourself.

If you have been leveraged and enriched without soul or, alternatively, dispossessed by political anachronism and barbarism, consider what has been stolen by the latest editions in dictatorship.

Check pulse for signs of conscience and integrity.

For western military and politicians and assorted analysts and planners, the “war by other means” would seem now to include the spreading of intellectual confusion (“Active Measures!” “Disinformation!” “Fake News!”); intellectual infiltration (big on campus and off, Farthest Left, Farthest Right); frozen and low-intensity conflicts (like the middle east one, which has proven great for criminal businesses, corrupt politicians, and entrenched families — and not too great for the Palestinian People enthralled by power while being themselves kept from it); provocations eliding engagements (stimulates worry in the targets and thereby promotes greater allocations in broad and continuous defensive spending); “Little Green Men” charades and possible manipulation of noncombatant elements, like commercial or private boats, to produce situations that produce damage to western military assets.

Beijing, Damascus, Moscow, Pyonyang, Tehran.

Nice people up top.

The best.

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FTAC: On Arrogance, Religion, and Related Political Rhetoric

04 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology, Religion

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The prompt came also from the Qur’an (“5:82-83”) as presented this way: “You will surely find those closest in friendship to the believers to be those who say, “We are Christians.”  That is because among them are priests and monks who are not arrogant.”

Response —

“O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you – then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people”. – https://quran.com/5/51-61

Apparently, if one is not close to a monk or priest (or perhaps a recluse with a library), one may be in danger of trusting an untrustworthy friend.

Note: one might ask whether caliphs, kings, and emperors are not inherently arrogant in their assumptions of power over all others, and therefore particularly sensitive to arrogance in those whom they would subjugate.

Compact between shaman and chief and cleric and king spans the ages but may not be a permanent feature in humanity’s intellectual and political evolution. That may be something to think about in the experience of language, both in political rhetoric and in scripture (no matter to whom the words belong), and that of power as dominion over others.

The region of the Qur’an cited, 5:82 and 5:83 presents in English through several well-remarked translations — and of a standard four — Asad, Malik, Pickthall, and Yusuf Ali — the conveyances of none would seem as sweet as the statement quoted as the prompt.

Here is the presentation of the verse as translated by Yusuf Ali:

“Strongest among men in enmity to the believers wilt thou find the Jews and Pagans; and nearest among them in love to the believers wilt thou find those who say: “We are Christians:” because amongst these are men devoted to learning and men who have renounced the world and they are not arrogant.”

Source: http://www.alim.org/library/quran/ayah/compare/5/82/disbelievers-among-the-children-of-israel-were-cursed-by-the-tongues-of-david-and-jesus-and-christians-are-closer-to-muslims-than-the-jews-and-pagans

One thought attending the description of “men devoted to learning” and “who have renounced the world and are not arrogant” is that such men would seem less than challenging to martial or political power and therefore dismissible by any speaker intent on monopolizing and wielding such power.

Qur’an 5:83 although cited in the prompt appears not present in the statement at the top of this post.  Here is that verse in the Yusuf Ali translation from the Alim library URL noted:

“And when they listen to the revelation received by the Apostle thou wilt see their eyes overflowing with tears for they recognize the truth: they pray: “Our Lord! we believe; write us down among the witnesses.”

If thou woulds’t be apostle, caliph, king, or emperor would though not note the sweetness of the complete and grateful surrender of thine greatest potential resistance?

Given that question and thought, one might appreciate attempts at transitional revisionism.

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Those Seeking to Divide Us . . . .

12 Saturday Aug 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics

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https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/12/trump-condemns-violence-at-charlottesville-alt-right-rally-says-country-must-come-together-as-one.html

Now who would seek to divide the American political campus against its own best interests?

The above played live on YouTube earlier today.  It’s now appears or sounds like a recording.  (Post-Publication Note: the YouTube poster revoked third-party replay (perhaps) because it knows its feed was designed to present Charlottesville and the United States of America as a House Mightily Divided, and while it has seemed that through the election season and this most turbulent of Administrations, we may not be so divided as confused by so much media devoted to the dramatizing of extremes.  “Active Measures”?  Could be.  The poster, “CCW News”, boasts (boasted) some arrangement with PressTV — and, reliably (if you click over to YouTube), listen to who is talking, masking away history, and framing the present.

Here, I will leave the copy as initially published.

*

We are told that we are divided.

Are we?

We’re “reminded” in the Jahi Issa interview that southern slavery was a colonial enterprise apparently absent of African and Arab practices in conquest and trade.

Here’s a block of URL’s on the history of the world’s most spiritually dismal industry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_the_Muslim_world http://autocww.colorado.edu/~toldy2/E64ContentFiles/AfricanHistory/SlaveryInAfrica.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Sudan https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/history/slave-trade.php

Contemporary (and a sad thing to note):

http://www.africanholocaust.net/articles/21stcentury%20slaves.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_contemporary_Africa http://www.dw.com/en/as-slave-trade-abolition-is-celebrated-millions-of-africans-continue-to-live-as-slaves/a-18337189 |
Portal Page: http://www.stoppingslavery.org/slavery-in-mauritania.html

Regarding the “southern” contribution, which seems archaic in this day and age: “blood and soil” and “the Jews will not replace us . . . .” — even absent of close-up evidence, the process has Moscow’s political “fingerprints” all over it.

Color codes previously noted and applied on Backchannels:

Red = Old Comrades (Soviet Era communists)
Green = Islamists (strident of Islam)
Black = Black Segregationists

“Red-Green Alliance” serves to represent the effort in the 20th Century to combine political forces to unseat the political intentions of the liberal democratic west.   The “Black” component flows down, imho, from older radical politics.

“ANTIFA” is a mystery organization with a global footprint, BackChannels wonders who is behind its development, recruitments, and evidently (and ironically) uniform counter-demonstration programming.

Regarding the New Nationalism (and resurgent feudalism and embrace of the medieval mode) in Europe and North America, BackChannels has suggested that Islamic Terrorism (“Allahu Akbar Terrorism”) has been channeled to goad Americans and Europeans toward the defense of their respective homelands.

Related Reference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Peace_Council

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FTAC – Middle East Conflict (MEC) – The Big Wrap

24 Monday Jul 2017

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

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https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

In the bridge between the medieval and modern eras, Germany’s Luther had at least opened the coffin’s lid:

“Luther’s influence was not decisive, and certainly not neutral, but ambivalent. So, for example, his writings communicated a generalized distrust, describing Jews as thieves in his preface to the 1528 edition of the influential 15th-century handbook for policing vagrants, the Liber vagatorum. This “evolved into a powerful and all-embracing stereotype—‘that of the Jews as a people of thieves and robbers extraordinaire,’” except that Luther by no means propagated this message alone.”

http://religion.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-312

We shouldn’t be writing with crayons, but on the web where ideas move quickly in these small tiles, broad statements and telegraphing are what we do.

The intellectual history of modern “Jew hate” appears to move from Russia (with the “Protocols”) via White Russian emigre fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution; at the end of WWII, the Soviet Union was in position to amplify and leverage anti-Semitic sentiment in the middle east into political influence and power.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

The Arab World could not have hated the Jews quite so much prior to WWII and Nazi and later Soviet influence for it’s states sustained a population of (that well-known figure) 800,000 Jews and their businesses and synagogues. There’s certainly a minority experience contained in the memory of that population, but that it was there and working tells us that the politics of the World War and its immediate aftermath set the stage both for the birth of Israel and the Arab expulsion of the Jews.

IF the Kingdom represents today’s Arab world, it is heavily invested in western success through Kingdom Holdings. It has taken small steps toward updating its culture (I have yet another blog piece standing signal to that), and it has taken interest in developing technology requiring the western interface. Nonetheless, the narcissistic medieval worldview needs must prevail for the time being, and cultural inertia continues to leverage anti-Semitism. (just a little more).

Rival Iran — Moscow / Moscow-Tehran — challenges the liberalism of the west with “absolute power” — the rule of the emperor or king for his own desired ends and with sufficient contempt and cruelty to enforce a malign will. One may consider the destruction of Syria by a tyrannical Assad as flanked by Putin and Khamenei merely a demonstration of the “principle” of absolute ownership of an entire people.

In 2011, Barack Obama offered President Putin a gambit: lean west — and Putin rejected the role of tempering Assad and instead embraced the KGB past — that which groomed Arafat and approved Abbas — and here we are. By focusing on ISIS and some on Tehran while “working with Russia”, we avoid a fast disaster.

For the Palestinians, all of the above involving Russia’s historic influence, has been a disaster, and this view — I don’t think I’m the only one propagating it — may be reaching the Arab World on the “Anglo and western axis”. The other channels and manipulates and incites along medieval lines that it means to sustain, and it wants the wars of all against all that lend it glory.

An earlier post noted social media’s unsuitability for “long copy”.

In “Life Online”, readers much prefer epigrammatic statements and slogans to digested narratives or overviews — we want to get the message quickly and then get back to the next social moment or breaking news.

I’ve tried with BackChannels to find a place between the scholarly tract and the lay observation with hope that other journalists — more powerful — and some in the generally interested public would pick up on the blog’s themes.

Of course, I place some faith and hope in each post at the moment it’s published, and often that is all a writer may do.

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FTAC: On Governance and Realpolitik

21 Friday Jul 2017

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

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Okay — we know how smooth politics are with 300 million Americans — you design the system for 1.4 billion Chinese. 🙂

Possibly, Russia’s answer and part of the seduction of the EU / NATO states may be to protect the power of financial and political elites against the demands of great populations with needs to match.  Why not sew it all up with friends in the nomenklatura?

When the west demurred from engagement in Iran’s 2009 attempted revolution, I don’t know whether the decision was to buy time for Russia to run itself down or to capitulate to governments representing kleptocratic dictatorships. Instead of making the world safe for democracy (these days), we may be preparing it for governance by powerful and wealthy elites who think little of the liberties, lives, and happiness of others (who exist to serve them).

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Module: Moscow and the Middle East Conflict

18 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Philology, Political Psychology

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The story begins in the feudal mode with medieval anti-Semitism.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Peace_Council

The story may end with the Palestinian’s own recovery of integrity. 

Path

19th Century Russian Anti-Semitic Obsession –> Developing Nazi Germany –> Middle East –> Development of Yasser Arafat | Development of an Orwellian Political Method | Encouragement of Left / Far Left Peace and Sunshine Organizations | Masking off the Violence (Political Repression) Applied to the Defense of Privileged Elites (from Czar to Party to Putin).

Organizations representing the Cultural Left appear to have split the scene with Moscow (man) each time Soviet tanks appeared in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere.

If what the Soviet was selling was so good . . . why the intimidation and force?

The Soviet Union dissolved itself in history more than 25-1/2 years ago (Dec. 25, 1991).  However, in the course of Putin’s tenure, Moscow has continued to meet with Hamas and PFLP leadership and through war — direct, hybrid, or by proxy — continued to battle western integrity and liberal democracy in Syria and Ukraine — and if connected through cooperation with Tehran, than Yemen also.

How are things going for the Phantoms of the Soviet?

Have a look at Syria (start with Homs).

Have a look at Moscow’s financials.

Orwellian Politics and Palestinian Suffering

George Orwell’s Animal Farm turns out the template for how corrupt power manages (with totalitarian methods) “the masses” (AKA “the street”, “The People”) for its own aggrandizement and enrichment.

In politics, disinformation poisons cultures, and here it may be suggested that what the Soviets, the PLO, and Hamas have accomplished is neither the creation nor preservation of Palestinian anything but rather the destruction and impoverishment of Gaza City and Ramallah while growing their respective systems of patronage on skimmed funding and a host of shady enterprises.

Of course, after 70 years of cultural and political separation from the Arab world by way of the camps, which are now small cities, and by way of apartheid Arab social policy — that which set up the Yarmouk Camp in Syria for devastation by the Arab and Muslim forces of Syria and ISIS — the refugees of 1948, much abused by the Arab world itself, may now be truly a “Palestinian People” in need of detoxification from Soviet Era disinformation and manipulation and an Arab people nonetheless apart from the Arab politics that has so abused their existence.

Today, “The Occupation” may be better stated as “The Preoccupation with the Jews”.

The principle misnomer — and misguidance — needs a complete and permanent deconstruction.

BackChannels has previously commented on the Boycott Divestitures and Sanctions (BDS) Movement — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/ — and what it senses to be the Palestinian main base:  https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/ .

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Live at Posting: Atlantic Council, “Disinformation Week”

29 Thursday Jun 2017

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

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How Putin’s Moscow and its information  warfare work.

Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/23/moscows-rules-a-module/

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