Tag Archives: absolute power

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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FTAC: “Claims regarding Iran’s innocence . . . .”

14 Wednesday Jun 2017

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

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Claims regarding Iran’s innocence in relation to global terrorism are fallacious. The state supports Hezbollah and Hamas and is itself an immense kleptocracy — http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 .

As regards Sunni-based terrorism, a fair look-up of “Zawahiri, Russia” should straighten that out. In the wake of the Soviet defeat in the 1980s, the criminals appear to have picked up on the CIA/ISI method of producing a treasury-draining proxy (Charlie Wilson’s Taliban) and throwing it back at the west.

The Kingdom has invested heavily in western success (via Kingdom Holdings) and has embarked on cultural updating sufficient to produce an iconic set of accomplished women — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/02/sixteen-women-the-kingdoms-most-powerful/ . However, sigh, in the medieval worldview, the legitimacy of kingdoms rest on the persuasive power of clerics.

My trope for all dictatorships: “Different Talks — Same Walk!”

They all produce leaders who look good on the outside — well, maybe Qadaffi’s a stretch on that — but turn out irredeemably ugly on the inside. I call them “MaligNarcs”, short for “Malignant Narcissists”.

The greater east-west framework: feudal methods, medieval worldview v modern democratic rule of law and the constraint of power by representative means. On that, the House of Saud has a long history with “the English” and may be expected to lean westward with time. The same may not be said today of Moscow / Moscow-Tehran and all the related phantoms of the Soviet Era.

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FTAC – Deranged Power

02 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Psychology

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The chat began with comment on the infamous Dr. Mengele and his demonic practices, but then it slipped a little sideways to talk about an inherent evil in procedures unrelated to the Nazi’s bent.

Again (again, again): the kind of power embraced by the despotic is the power to visit suffering on others with impunity and without conscience.

It may not be the procedure — e.g., abortion, sex change — that is evil but rather the removal of choice in its imposition.

Where abortion arguments are batted back and forth, the concern is not with procedure but the precedence of the “right” to choice on the mother’s part or advocacy for the fetus in its earliest phase.

Mengele and other famous sadists given the power to maim, torture, and murder with impunity do as the disturbed people they either were before their empowerment or have become as a consequence of it.

Much of this blog — perhaps all of it — has been concerned with the nature of political power in its most basic regions — “conflict, culture, language, and psychology” — and here it addresses the kind of extremist and vacuous force that gives way to wholesale theft and murder all the up the imaginable scale and beyond.

How could an ophthalmologist have created so much horror absent of conscience and shame?

Posted to YouTube by Muhammad Al Mousa on September 4, 2016.

How could the privileged and wealthy of Moscow — or Russia — have escaped the opprobrium associated with the most heinous irredeemable of war crimes?

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/18/syria-russias-barbarism-the-hospitals/
11/18/2016

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FTAC – Muslims – “No to Hatred, No to Violence, No to Terrorism”

17 Wednesday Aug 2016

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

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On Monday, The Independent had run a piece online by Matt Payton titled, “More than 30,000 Muslims from across the world meet in the UK to reject ISIS and Islamic extremism” (August 15, 2016).  Some in the Awesome Conversation were pleased by the sight of women in full abaya holding placards reading

NO TO HATRED
NO TO VIOLENCE
NO TO TERRORISM

The things the “Islamists” do go against the grain of humanity — that’s just how I feel about that criminality — and the appropriate response by Muslims is repudiation.

What next?

Cultural blending, differentiation, and separation — there’s wisdom in recognizing and maintaining boundaries and margins in a world supporting about 7,000 living languages and what each represents. (Note that Putin plays the ethnolinguistic cultural defense and evolution card _against_ political boundaries, effectively violating margins. Also: Back-Channels credits Assad with the incubation of ISIS through deselection for bombing and combat earlier in Syria and also notes that Russia continues to maintain Soviet Era relationships with at least Hamas, Hezbollah, and PFLP. Muslims have not only to repudiate the fascist ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood organizations — that’s in that “No” to hatred, violence, and terrorism — but also to grasp Moscow’s role in the grooming and manipulation of such organizations as weapons focused toward the modern democracies).

Posted to YouTube by the Daily Mail, Aug. 4, 2016.

BackChannels argument that Assad incubated ISIS rests on a Newsweek report and successive and validating news coverage coming out of the Syrian Conflict and Tragedy.

In the following video clip, President Putin notes, “That if you would like to stop the flow of migrants into Europe, if you want for them to live in their own countries, then you must return sovereignty to those countries where it has been taken away.”

Think about that.

Under whose sovereign command were Syrian children arrested and tortured in 2011?

Whose sovereign air force “barrel bombed” Syrian noncombatants?

Because of the incubating of ISIS as useful tool, BackChannels has long regarded the “Syrian Conflict and Tragedy” as a complete theater of politics and war managed off the post-Soviet Moscow hub, i.e., by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei, and by each to their own advantage but the common cause of sustaining medieval political absolutism in their respective states.

Different Talks?

Same Walk.

Perhaps this is where that “walk” always leads:

Posted to YouTube by RT, January 20, 2016.

Under whose sovereignty were the airplanes flown, the tanks driven?

At time mark 1:44 on President Putin’s April 2016 St. Petersburg address, the President says of western criticism and opprobrium associated with both the incursion in Crimea and the conduct of the Syrian Civil War, “They realised that such destructive behaviour against our country was never going to work but nevertheless they’d like to silence our success.”

With a small nod toward conciliation, one may note of the YouTube video of Homs and the link immediately following that leads to an L.A. Times piece about the city that it had indeed been occupied by rebel forces and would be subject to state assault.  Nonetheless, the intertwined battles for Syria and against the open democracies of the west have not gone so well for Moscow and its clients IF measured by areas of control, community wellbeing, and economic contribution or so many other benchmarks familiar where peace prevails and governments abet development.

Links

http://www.businessinsider.com/nearly-80-of-russias-syria-strikes-dont-target-isis-2015-10 – 10/22/2015

http://syriadirect.org/news/russian-jets-purportedly-target-relatives-of-fsa-affiliated-fighters-on-jordan-border/ – 7/13/2016:

“There were families members of Usud a-Sharqiya there,” said spokesman Younis Salama. “But does that justify them bombing the camp?”

Jaysh Usud a-Sharqiya primarily fights the Islamic State in Syria’s eastern desert region.

Last month, Russian aircraft reportedly targeted another FSA group, the New Syrian Army, in Deir e-Zor province. Moscow did not comment on either attack.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-schoolboys-began-the-syrian-revolution/ – 4/26/2011:

The local secret police soon arrested 15 boys between the ages of 10 and 15, detaining them under the control of Gen. Atef Najeeb, a cousin of President Bashar al-Assad.

In a gloomy interrogation room the children were beaten and bloodied, burned and had their fingernails pulled out by grown men working for a regime whose unchecked brutality appears increasingly to be sowing the seeds of its undoing.

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

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FTAC – Medieval vs Modern – One More Time

04 Thursday Aug 2016

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

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You missed what happened.

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

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/05/27/putin-yanukovych-manafort-trump/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/08/04/ftac-he-vs-she-elections-medievalism-democracy-and-the-american-way/

So have the American and international publics.

The “Phantoms of the Cold War”, including Moscow-driven deflection and disinformation, have run through the Syrian Tragedy.

We may have a medieval world in which political experience involves broad illusion and perception managed by very powerful and wealthy personalities.

That’s life.

At this point, we should have had neither the Tyrant nor The Terrorists. I happen to believe — I’m the editor of the blog — that the two are of a whole “theater of politics and combat” in which the victims — dead, displaced, injured, or deeply manipulated — had no inherent value but to serve a new master or collection of them.

If there’s a positive observation to be made, cynically perhaps, or ironically, Syria may be interpreted as a demonstration project of the medieval worldview. The more established that becomes, the more widespread the potential for conflict and similar tracts of death and mass destruction.

BackChannels rests its case.

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FTAC – “He” vs “She” – Elections, Medievalism, Democracy, and the “American Way”

04 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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I’ve been waffling because I think whether “he” or “she”, it’s Putin who may pick up a round in the “re-medievalizing” of the west’s portion of global politics. He has helped damage political NATO through Hungary (Orban) and Turkey (Erdogan) and, of course, has manipulated terrorism

— and by the way, look up “Moscow, PFLP —

to goad westerner toward a rightly defensive nationalist response, but in the process we lose both a part of our democratic, modern, and tolerant soul.

Despite the Trump-Manafort-Yanukovych experience, Trump, who seems to be trying to figure these politics out from a cold start — and he knows he’s a beginner as politician, but he’s a fast learner too — may well stand up for American constitutional arrangements and values and temper the demagoguery with our culturally INCLUSIVE ethos, related ideals, and extensive development of law and policy across years.

Hillary might wind up in the same place — there is an “American Way”.

Missing from public popular perception: the Cold War — check out BackChannels for that (https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/ftac-interpreting…/) and how business and politics among the world’s most powerful and wealthiest people, Putin and the oligarchs among them, hew themselves to feudal models. Perhaps we are doing that now — and Hillary, by way of the necessity of delivering a Constitutional American experience to the American people, will also have to confront Putin (and the Phantoms of the Soviet in the Middle East and around the world).

Muslims – this from an American of Jewish descent who has tired of religious cant: no one “wins” anything with either a supremacist or totalitarian outlook and permit for barbarism.

The medieval worldview, fully on display in Syria, promotes political absolute power.

Whether Putin, Assad, or Khamenei or Baghdadi — “Different Talks — Same Walk!” applies.

Also, Center-of-the-Universe Christian, Jewish, or Muslim self-concept seems to me a remnant of medieval history.

The enemies of the west — extremists Red-Black, Brown, and Green / old comrades, new nationalists, and Islamists — need that worldview sustained, but the democratic open societies of the west, also secular in governance and humanist in ideals, simply don’t need that anymore.

We have all to make this choice about which world we would prefer to live: the medieval world (let it go, please) or the modern one (where we investigate issues and address problems every day in the interest of greater peace and prosperity plus human dignity and freedom).

I’ve edited some between the “Awesome Conversation” and this post, but in essence feel we need greater distinction in time between medieval worldviews and related governance and the same under the umbrella of the modern worldview.

The argument between Russia — a revanchist neo-imperial state — and its allies and clients and NATO, God bless that old alliance — may be distilled as “Medieval Absolute Power” vs “Modern Democratic Distribution”.

We may have a long way to go with that “argument”, but at least we should see it for what it is.

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FTAC – A Note on Global Consciousness and Conscience

04 Thursday Aug 2016

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

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There is no justice.

There is money.

There SHOULD be conscience, principles, virtues, and values tempering HOW we earn / produce money and apportion its spending, but nature has no rules and languages within which we culturally define and suspend ourselves may offer or encourage awful options for channeling behavior.

Juxtapose the Glory of the Sochi Winter Olympics with the then Early Destruction of Syria.

For the tyrant and the civilization represented: what’s wrong? Where’s the problem?

The mass murdering of challengers and rivals confirms power.

That’s natural, isn’t it?

Of course, it’s not the only way to go, and the developed open societies and diversified economies of the west have proven that.

Perhaps our experience of the world only picks up the reflection of the character of its global business and political elites.

The talk-about inspiration for the post was a piece by Kevin Sieff on Luanda, Angola appearing in The Washington Post, August 2, 2016: “An oil boom made it the most expensive city in the world.  Now it’s in crisis.”  The poster had complained about petro-state corruption and celebrity perfidy in accepting gigs at private parties paying $2 million in fee.

(Perhaps BackChannels and its editor should take a break right about here — and both may but will forge on another moment).

Who is to say that states from Angola to Burma to Moscow to Tehran should not be feudal or medieval in character?

Should there not be dictators — or other singular powerful personalities — who build worlds around themselves and produce spectacles — in Syria, an entire theater of politics and war — for others?

The “responsive and responsible” governments of democratic open societies (of the west — but, really, anywhere similar ideals and related practices prevail), don’t just obtain money and spend it capriciously or selfishly, and while they certainly produce in their constituencies people who would do that, they may also demand greater virtue on the part of their own business and political elites.

In the modern atmosphere, economic development and urban and rural planning PLUS the integration of public and private interests in development becomes so common and transparent as to become invisible to most people most of the time.

The modern Everyman need not worry about roads and sewers, water pipes, electrical supply, and communications infrastructure  and all other such basic building blocks because all contribute some (and many do work in related industries) all of the time.

Boom-and-bust has always been the rule for mining towns and “petro states” but more responsible spending around them may also ease conditions when prices fall or the lode done run out.

The modern communities of Democratic open societies get a very different effect from that kind of broadened cooperation and inclusion.

Posted to YouTube October 20, 2014.

Result: no “ghost towns” — real ones or sets — that aren’t productive.

And fun!

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Six of Six – To Russia, Ever So Politely, U.S. Embassy Syria Tweets Advice

29 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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USEmb6-6Tweets

BackChannels best guess for “CoH” — “Cessation of Hostilities”.

That “weakness invites aggression” or “peace through strength” should be concepts well known, but even so, the circumstances in total want for someone’s “good gamble”.

Are we there yet?

For NATO, the headlines from countercoup Turkey are not looking so good: NYT: “With Army in Disarray, a Pillar of Modern Turkey Lies Broken”; Reuters: “Turkish military a fractured force after attempted coup”; Fox: “Turkish military faces overhaul after failed coup”.

It was good to have won the war and the peace in 1945, but that was 66 years ago, and most of that Great Generation that fought are today permanently at rest, and what the present generation — raised on football and Kardashians — has on its plate in Moscow, Damascus, Tehran, Pyongyang, Beijing, and a few elsewheres are the kind of “Great Leaders” capable of producing what has been witnessed in Syrian and what has been recorded in the histories of their own states in their rise to power.

Posted to YouTube 7/24/2016.

Addendum – August 1, 2016

Gutman, Roy.  “As Obama Dithers, Syrian Rebels in Aleppo Brace for Putin’s Onslaught.”  The Daily Beast, August 2, 2016:

In several days of phone conversations with Moscow, Kerry was unable to obtain clarifications of how the new decision was compatible with the talks he’s been holding with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.

European diplomats said Kerry’s current initiative, which involved a highly controversial concession to share intelligence with Russia and to conduct joint and coordinated attacks on Jabhat al-Nusra, could collapse in short order.

According to Assad’s political opponents, that is not the worst of it.

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