After the Gaza war in 2014, the Jewish community all around the world especially in the UK was targeted by extremists. Some cases were highlighted in the media and many disappeared as usual but the Police tried hard to bring the offenders to justice. One of the cases was about 52 year old Mr. Yisro’el Shalom, who brought his case to me. Mr. Shalom had been living in the Borough of Newham in East London for nearly 22 years and in the last three years, he was attacked 340 times and verbally abused nearly 60 times. He was physically tortured, kicked and punched in his face by a gang of Asians (most probably Pakistanis) because he was a Jew living within the Muslim community.
In my book “Fighting Hamas, BDs and Anti-Semitism” I detail the discovery of a new strain of anti-Semitism that I noticed in Europe, namely the urge by haters to drive a wedge between the local Jew and the Jewish State.
I wrote of several examples of the modern form of Jew hatred in the section entitled “The Malmo Symptom.”
I named it that to reflect the experience suffered by the local Jews of Malmo when their mayor, Ilmar Reepalu, insisted that they must “denounce Israeli violations against the civilian population in Gaza. Instead, it decides to hold a (pro-Israel) demonstration in the Grand Square, which could send “the wrong signal.”
This veiled threat that his Jews must toe his anti-Israel line, at a time when Israeli civilians (some related to the Malmo Jews) were being targeted by intense Hamas rocket bombardments from Gaza, is shockingly revealing.
Always a little differently than expected: perhaps our New Global Intelligentsia has now to deal with a more visible and powerful Global Business and Political Elite.
The epigrammatic thought springs from yesterday’s wrestling with a draft about the “Black Led Movement Fund” and foundations flowing down from Henry Ford’s enterprise and George Soros’s success.
It also stems from about ten years of personal growth in the region of international affairs abetted by the uptake of broadband, social networking (Facebook), and blogging ability (a new artform) and the development by affinity of a pretty good and English chatyping “international club” online. With that growth has come the recognition, at least on BackChannels’ part, that our “Awesome Conversation” has obscure nodes (like this one) and virtual public stars (too many to name) that comprises a still new and virtual thin band of global intelligentsia.
We’re thinking. We’re talking. We’re having a great conversation. And perhaps by doing so, we’re changing our world.
Beside (and above, I’m sure) the thinker-talkers exists another connected community, altogether more institutional, more private in its outlooks and its workings, but at the head of so many enterprises and institutions are real people, and one may well wonder about their cultural and political ambitions and visions.
Now back to the Black Lives Matter movement and its chief financial enablers and enthusiasts . . . .
In his day, Henry Ford had developed the strongest reputation as an anti-Semite, and in this day George Soros appears to have developed an atheist’s contempt for the Jews and Israel as part of an anti-nationalist atheist-socialist globalization program. Today, both Ford and Soros foundations have stepped in to fund the nostalgically Marxist Black Lives Matter movement and related Black Led Movement Fund with upwards (or beyond) a newsworthy $100 million.
While Americans and others in the world have been busy considering their election season options in the empowering of a next set of public of representative public leaders, the uber-wealthy have been applying money to political issues in their own way.
BackChannels wonders how much cultural and political “clout” the world’s wealthiest individuals exert and what kind of world are they fashioning (for the rest of us) as powers in their own right?
Note that George Soros with his portfolio valued at about $8 billion (but Forbes says “$24.9 billion”) has been estimated as being merely the 80th wealthiest person in the world: who are the 79 wealthier individuals ahead of him, and how are they involved with the world’s cultures and political themes?
On this post, BackChannels has certainly more questions than answers.
What each wants — these are not beauty pageant youngsters — is a big other and open question.
Reference
Regarding Henry Ford, Anti-Semite
Hitler was very aware of Henry Ford, of Henry Ford’s writings, and praised them. He turned to the same documents. There’s a common thread. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a cherished text for both. And there were certainly business connections between Ford Motors and the Nazi regime.
In the period from 1910 to 1918, Ford became increasingly anti-immigrant, anti-labor, anti-liquor and anti-Semitic. In 1919, he purchased a newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. He installed Charles Pipp as editor and hired a journalist, William J. Cameron, to listen to his ideas and write a weekly column, “Mr. Ford’s Page,” to expound his views.
Ford wanted to assert that there was a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. He blamed Jewish financiers for fomenting World War I so that they could profit from supplying both sides. He accused Jewish automobile dealers of conspiring to undermine Ford Company sales policies. Ford wanted to make his bizarre beliefs public in the pages of the Dearborn Independent. For a year, editor Pipp resisted running anti-Jewish articles, and resigned rather than publish them. Cameron took over the editorship and, in May 1920, printed the first of a series of articles titled “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.”
Regarding George Soros, “Anti-Semite”? Or “Atheist Social Democrat”?
According to Connie Bruck of The New Yorker, George Soros told her that “I don’t deny the Jews their right to a national existence — but I don’t want to be part of it.” According to Joshua Muravchik, Soros has publicly likened Israel to the Nazis. According to the Jerusalem Post, “Soros and his wealthy Jewish American friends have now decided to aim their fire directly at Israel . . . to form a political lobby that will weaken the influence of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.”
Russia’s General Prosecutor’s Office essentially banned two branches of Soros’ charity network in November, placing the Open Society Foundations (OSF) and the Open Society Institute (OSI) on a “stop list” of foreign non-governmental organizations whose activities were deemed “undesirable” by the Russian state.
OSF first came into trouble with the Russian government in July 2015, when it hinted it might ban the foundation along with a number of other pro-democracy organizations accused of launching “soft aggression” in the country.
Sussing George Soros as “narcissist / malignant narcissist” may take much greater time. However, the early impression formed by BackChannels is that he’s trying to hybridize Red-tinted socialism away from Putin’s imperial and nationalist revanche while buying into the Green (Political Islamic) mythology driven by the Soviet KGB early in the middle east conflict (related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/12/02/quote-manipulation-about-the-plo-leader-pacepa-and-rychlak-2013/).
Magui Rubalcava Shulman, Director, Immigration — served as program director for Hispanics in Philanthropy; worked on an evaluation of the Grants for Schools program of the Mongolian Foundation for Open Society Institute.
Hamas – Muslim Brotherhood (way out of step with Wasatia Moderation and Reconciliation) – and wealthy: Haniyeh and Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires.
The “camps” of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt: Arab-created and managed.
For partial isolation in geopolitical space, the refugees of 1948 may become an ethnolinguistic cohort — a “People” — by (x) beliefs x calendar x customs x language (!) x rituals — but in clinical overview, the same have been abused by Arab powers and by Moscow.
In the efforts of the Soviet to establish and sustain power in the middle east, endemic Russian anti-Semitism became a message promoted by the same to encourage an Arab bond.
The Soviet Union self-dissolved almost 25 years ago, but the character of its political existence did not leave Russia, and continued disinformation plus promotion or tolerance for terrorism (Moscow has in recent years hosted PFLP and refuses to this day to designate Hezbollah or Hamas as terrorist organizations) have remained a part of Putin’s “neo-imperial” Russia.
The common bond and cause for a still reckless mythology — Jew hate and discomfort in general with “the west” — the generally higher-integrity, democratic, humanist, and open societies.
Fatah and Hamas have their “track records” as governments. Why they serve as the interlocutors of the Palestinians – now isolated and subject to the same post-Soviet and Muslim Brotherhood forces — should be a difficult question to answer in retrospect.
The twin basis for the middle east conflict: the “Zionists” stole their property from “The Palestinians” and Israel “occupies” the land.
The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 “brought about the appropriation by the influential and rich families of Beirut, Damascus, and to a lesser extent Jerusalem and Jaffa and other sub-district capitals, of vast tracts of land in Syria and Palestine and their registration in the name of these families in the land registers”.[8] Many of the fellahin did not understand the importance of the registers and therefore the wealthy families took advantage of this. Jewish buyers who were looking for large tracts of land found it favorable to purchase from the wealthy owners. As well many small farmers became in debt to rich families which led to the transfer of land to the new owners and then eventually to the Jewish buyers.
In 1918, after the British conquest of Palestine, the military administration closed the Land Register and prohibited all sale of land. The Register was reopened in 1920, but to prevent speculation and insure a livelihood for the fellahin, an edict was issued forbidding the sale of more than 300 dunams of land or the sale of land valued at more than 3000 Palestine pounds without the approval of the High Commissioner.[9]
There’s more to the stories of indigenous Jewry in Palestine, the capitalization of agriculture in Palestine, and the purchasing – not stealing – from Arab leaseholders of serious tracts of property in Palestine. To overlook that part of history, one must lie about how capital and labor developed on the land and peacefully and productively changed its demographics, both Jewish and Arab.
As regards “The Occupation”, the comment tells the truth about the KGB, Arafat, and the PLO; about the role played by the famously anti-Semitic Soviet in the “winning” of the Arab world (for a short while); and about Hamas and its most famous billionaires.
When it comes to Arab intransigence over the “middle east conflict” (never mind what’s going on in Syria and Iraq – the term obsessively refers to the conflict forced on Israel), one must suppose some fathers would rather lie to their children — and have their children lie as well — than disappoint them.
Addendum – Principal or Transactional Regard? – Choose Principal – Regard Will Come of That
Although the awesome conversation on the middle east conflict strives for “balance” Israeli and Palestinian interest, the actions of the old KGB and its approach to the manipulation of information plus, perhaps, the Arab leadership’s own language behavior across time have left the Arab world and the Palestinians arguing through the invention of multiple alternative narratives, all of which devolve to the delegitimizing of the presence of the Hebrews in the Land of the Hebrews. Basically, if one does not recognize the “Palestinian People”, why should the same recognize the “Jewish People”? The question begs for the “I’m okay – you’re okay” hug that it cannot and must not receive, the difference between the effects of “magical thinking” and empiricism and reason being what it is: one leads “the masses” in an abyss; the other keeps individuals en masse from it.
Also from the awesome conversation —
None contest links to the land by Arabs resident on it at the time of Israel’s chartering.
None contest the status of the same as refugees of war caught between armies, as none contest the role of the Arab armies as intending the annihilation of the Jews on the land, and thereby placing Jewish militia in the historic defensive position.
None contest the Jews as having for all functional intents militarily and politically secured _their_ state in 1948.
What happened to the proposed Arab state for the areas that are today “contested” — but not so much: Gaza, I’ve heard, has been “Judenrein” since 2005.
A “People” can be many things these days. After all, who are the “American People”? 🙂
Still, one might ask: how do the Palestinian People differ from the Arab People?
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.
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).
This curriculum is informed and inspired by many sources, including the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Standing on the Side of Love campaigns, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, Churches for Middle East Peace, World Council of Churches, the American Friends Service Committee, the Israel-Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Just Vision, Jewish Voice for Peace, Open Hillel, Nakba Education Project, Zochrot, many Palestinian organizations working for peace with justice, the UUJME Newsletter, Kairos Palestine, Steadfast Hope, Zionism Unsettled, Middle East Research and Information Project Primer, and Phyllis Bennis’s Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer. Links to information about these and other resources are in the lessons and/or the Resource page at the end of the guide and the UUJME website. We are inspired also by those who choose to implement this part of the UUJME Reflection & Learning Project, and wish you the best in this endeavor to stand on the side of love with the people of Israel-Palestine.
However, and with all that love accepted, let’s have a look at some of the other contributors to the curriculum promoted by the Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East (UUJME).
To advance their “justice and peace” initiatives, they collude with Islamic and Palestinian friends in a covert scheme to sabotage Israel. Their web of anti-Zionism extends throughout Europe, the Americas and Africa. While this may seem a bold assertion, it is nonetheless worth examining some undeniable evidence.
WCC is among the many coalitions of Christians that embrace the extreme left and the jihad agenda as appeasers and collaborators.
In 2008, the AFSC, along with other similarly minded religious groups, hosted a gala dinner with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the guest of honor, despite Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, and genocidal threats against the Jewish state. Ahmadinejad, however, is only the most extreme example of the AFSC making dubious friends. The participants in its BDS summer camp were mostly Palestinians or Palestinian-Americans associated with the group Students for Justice in Palestine—an organization notorious not only for its vicious rhetoric against Israel, but for going so far as shouting down pro-Israel speakers on campus and harassing Jewish students.
Washington Presbyterians who engage in dialogue with Jewish groups are scrambling to undo what they say is the damage caused by a congregational study guide assailing Zionism distributed by a group affiliated with their denomination.
Related: NGO Monitor. “The Role of Antisemitism in the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Decision to Support Divestment.” June 25, 2014, updated March 31, 2016; Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reporting on tension within the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the offshoot Israel-Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church: “Polling data consistently show that “mainline” Protestants overwhelmingly support a safe and secure Israel, even while also being concerned about the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The efforts at the PC(USA) and other churches to pass divestment resolutions reflect the views of a minority of activists within those churches who take advantage of the structures of those churches to press their agenda.”
JVP, like other prominent Jewish anti-Zionist individuals and groups, uses its Jewish identity to deflect allegations of anti-Semitism leveled against the anti-Israel movement in order to provide it with a greater degree of legitimacy and credibility. In this guise JVP views itself as the “Jewish wing of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement (PSM)” and is an integral part of this anti-Israel coalition, serving as its “Jewish shield”, espousing the belief that if there are Jews demonizing Israel, it can’t possibly be anti-Semitic.
Also like other aggressively anti-Israel organizations, JVP members regularly attempt to shut down dissent by disrupting pro-Israel events such as a 2010 talk by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the events at a 2011 Taglit Birthright reunion in New York and the 2012 AIPAC conference. Brandeis University Prof. Ilan Troen, who calls JVP “self-appointed saints with no mass following”, explains that “If you’ve ever dealt with the JVP, they themselves are a semi-terrorist group, promoting the disruption of free speech and the inability of others to conduct public discourse.”
The JVP advisory board includes leaders in anti-Semitic and anti-Israel hate, such as Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, and Sarah Schulman. All three of these anti-Israel advocates deny the Jewish right to self determination, legitimize the internationally recognized terrorist group Hamas, and support the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.
Related in the news: Shahmoon, Shani. “Jewish Woman Forced to Hide From Anti-Israel Activists at UC-Irvine.” Observer News & Politics, May 20, 2016: “Earlier this month, Jewish and pro-Israel students found themselves caught in what they describe as a “fire of hate” and feelings of mourning as they observed Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Muslim Student Union, Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine and the American Indian Student Association just happened to organize a week of anti-Israel activity marketed under the title, “Anti-Zionism: The Roots of Oppression,” during the same week.”
. . . while Open Hillel phrases their intentions in the context of a free and unfettered debate (hence “open”), their events, speakers and partners actually seem to be far more interested in institutionalizing a set of radical opinions—and browbeating the mainstream into accepting it: That far from being a lonely liberal democracy facing daunting challenges from without and within, Israel is actually an illegitimate, oppressive, colonial state that might be better off not existing; and that Jewish students cannot truly understand it without teaming up with extreme pro-Palestinian groups.
While “Nakba” points to disaster it also brings up the uncomfortable matter of whipping legions to genocidal war and losing the same. In the immediate aftermath of “1948”, the Arab world took revenge on the Jewish residents of Arab states, and that history may be read about on this blog: Point of No Return.
. . . the group’s founder has written the following about his vision of the future:
When the refugees return, Jews will become a minority in the country. Israel as a Jewish state will change radically, and it will no longer be defined as such. Jews will no longer be able to determine their future…by themselves…. There may be Jews, most of them of European origin, who won’t be able to adjust to a non-Zionist reality, and prefer to use their other passport to move elsewhere…”
What’s a nice Jewish girl like Phyllis Bennis doing at the head of the class of anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, (anti-Semitic) leaders, the kind who stand shoulder to shoulder with those inclined to label the Jewish-majority state “Israhell”?
Here’s a partial transcript leading to Bennis’s becoming swept up in the radical politics of the Vietnam Era — her further transformation into parroting the catechisms of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left comes in the back half of the video:
The short answer is the Vietnam War. I grew up right through highschool with this focus on Zionism. That was my social environment. Those were my friends. That’s who I hung out with. And then I went away to college. And I started college in 1968, the big year, if you will, and in that context, I spent my first year being very much a serious student . . . you do grow up as a Jewish kid with . . . it’s all about education, all about getting good grades . . . so here I am, a seventeen year old kid, showing off, linking up with a group of graduate students and taking their courses, their postdoctoral seminars, thinking of myself as quite the intellectual, but by the end of my freshman year I’m suddenly immersed in the student movement, anti-war stuff . . . the Black Student Union had taken over the computer center the year before in the struggle to get an ethnic studies department on campus — I’m at the University of California in Santa Barbara — and suddenly I’m joining SDS [Students for Democratic Society], I’m part of the new student government . . . we have an alliance with the Latino movement and the Black Student Union, and we take over student government, and suddenly I’m the chair of the lectures committee . . . you know what the hell is that? I didn’t really know, but I had a budget of ten thousand dollars, which at that time was really a lot of money, to bring people to campus. So I brought Angela Davis, I brought half the defendants of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, and the lawyers from the trial, and suddenly I was involved with meeting all these people I had only heard about, and school suddenly was not really about going to classes . . . none of us went to class very much. We were publishing an underground newspaper, and we were doing radio — we took over the campus radio station . . . .
In the region of historic anti-Semitism associated with Christianity and Islam resides the concept of “religious succession”, i.e.,the idea that one true church — one true connection with God — will and must displace less authentic, less true competitors, and that includes the Judaism from which Jesus emerged.
BackChannels believes Constantine and Muhammad have made their points and that a medieval portion of their following in legacy continues to take unholy license in the doing of their bidding.
What is to give the new fascists (whether out of the Christian Far Right, the Islamist camps, or the Far Left) pause for reconsideration?
Look to 21st Century sophistication in ethnology, linguistics, and psychology to help us appreciate and comprehend how our species develops and sustains its cultures. That dawning self-awareness and knowledge may well improve general resistance to medieval manipulation and unintentional support of the ambitions, martial powers, and sadism of feudal tyrants — the most malign of narcissists — in their contemporary forms.
This post started with but a single paragraph from the introduction to a full multi-part curriculum developed to lead Unitarian Universalist congregants in the discussion of the middle east conflict, but a glance back at the contributors to that program may tell what its politics are really about. As had a large portion of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 2014, those most responsible in the Universalist Unitarian Association may wish to investigate who — and what — may be served by the subgroup curriculum disseminated through their organization.
Waitstill Sharp was a minister in the Unitarian church in Wellesley, Massachusetts. His wife, Martha, was a noted social worker. During World War II, Martha and Waitstill Sharp helped hundreds of people escape from Nazi persecution.
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel, honored the Sharps as Righteous Among the Nations in 2006.
The Soviet was not only a power structure. It had a mentality — and the same has been transitioned by Putin into the nationalist format — that served the intellectual and political engines of the Far Left. The Tired Old Politics of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left grind on absent of the Soviet, and Haaretz.com, among others, may be dropping those politics while flailing around for a distinct new social liberalism.
Inspiration for the writing: “Ironic that Haaretz is reporting this story, considering that most of the BDS animus is fueled and justified by Haaretz writers.”
Those “Tired Old Politics of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left” keep duped and misdirected possibly millions of well-intentioned Americans (as well as anti-Semites) sitting politely in dozens to hundreds of organizations hooked up to representatives of the the BDS Movement, the International and Palestinian Solidarity organizations, and every other post-Soviet comrade tank.
While BackChannels continues to note that this year will mark the 25th year out from the dissolving of the Soviet Union, the notion that inherently anti-Semitic pro-BDS furor represents the ghosts of another era, one may find online (with relation to “Cold War — Cold Struggle“) a most cynical partisan-to-Moscow approach the modern world’s wrestling with the medieval mind:
‘Independent’ does not mean non-partisan. You can find a statement of our broad views in the antiwar declaration approved at a conference in Yalta, Crimea approved on 7 July 2014 at a meeting of activists from Ukraine, Europe, Russia and North America. We believe great injustices are being committed by the government installed in Kiev in February against the whole Ukrainian people.
On the web, it’s too easy to surf off the BDS issue (in America and globally) and over to Moscow’s maneuvering in Syria and Ukraine, and yet these very different themes — BDS, Cold War, Syria, Ukraine, and Politics on the Left — would seem very much connected by a massive update on old agitation and propaganda methods. (As always, the sense of how the Soviet state worked may be obtained through any number of volumes relayed in the “Russian Section” of this blog).
The poison — anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist; pro-mob, pro-power without warrant — spreads down to American villages in countless “activist” newsletters. Here’s a glimpse from the calendar page of the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter:
Friday, June 3, KINGSTON: There will be a 7 p.m. screening of the documentary The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel’s Public Relations War in the United States at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Catskills, 320 Sawkill Rd. This film offers a sophisticated analysis of the Zionist strategy to keep Washington policymakers and the U.S. public on Israel’s side despite its subjugation of the Palestinian people.
Hamas governs Gaza — from examination of its constitution to human rights to billionaire status for both Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal, there’s no lack of information online or in books for its goals, its history, its methods, its human rights record, and so on.
Similarly, the Palestinian Authority is the political authority in the West Bank. While Israel and its Defense Forces have defensive control over who and what moves in the disputed territory, the working police serve Abbas. In fact, the timbre of life — how things work within — are defined by the behavior of the Palestinian Authority in concert with others with whom it does business.
Reduction: Hamas occupies Gaza; the PLO / PA occupies the West Bank.
And those “poor Palestinians” may be read about on websites like these: Palestine Real Estate Investment Company, Padico Holding — find the boards of directors online and follow each mogul to related career terminals within the region.
For the Hate-America-Firsters”, perhaps some Americans should take another look at America.
Re. democracies and monarchies: a dozen European states remain monarchies but tempered by their democratic complements in power (parliamentary systems).
Re. bigotry in the west — the point is the people fight it in concert with their governments. The real tension is between ethnolinguistic cultural majorities and their interest in preserving themselves and evolving as they themselves determine. As much has given rise to what I call the “New Nationalism” and, like Viktor Orban in Hungary, “New Nationalists”. Those on the Far Right in relation to those movements are often anti-Semitic, which goes with the defensiveness and, probably, patronage. Even in Hungary, however, such as Jobbik may become prominent but make the final climb into political leadership.
With Jobbik in Hungary, the revision is just weird, but explained some by the persistence of Soviet politics in the post-Soviet Era.
Regarding Ukraine, Alexander J. Motyl has been arguing for the ceding of Donbas, but it’s not about being Russian in any case. The truth is ordinary people resent state-enabled criminality and related criminal aggrandizement. Yanukovych worked to get himself shoved out of office, and some of Russian heritage with whom I’ve spoken — and some I have read about in Grigas’s book, resent being used by Moscow as “compatriots”. The claim of protection is seen as a pretext for aggression that either expands or strengthens Russia’s area of control and influence or that results in a “frozen conflict” lending itself to criminal enterprise (where there is no effective and functioning sovereign, there’s a lot of space available for mischief).
Even while posting about Nadiya Savchenko’s liberation, I have wondered about both inherent and legacy politics plus what the effect of fame and public interest may have on her political vision as she necessarily updates herself.
In the British sphere, I’ve unconditionally accepted Naz Shaw’s “turnaround” or present stance and, with either, her repudiation of the anti-Semitic facet of the Labour Party.
Finally, regarding criminality, we have all got some vanity, and our personal mixes of “reparative” and “malignant” narcissism generally fill out a moderate life. With the criminal class, immoderation becomes either desirable or habitual, partly because of what we think of as criminal has lost its brakes in conscience, busted through normative boundaries, and, here invoking the Islamic concept, “exceeded limits.” When these people are small and surrounded by a lawful society, the wind up in jail; when they’re large, they may go a long time in business before hitting any walls; and in politics, they can ruin states — and they do that in profound ways.
The want of the power to impose suffering on innocent others with impunity becomes, I believe, a facet of that political criminality we call “dictatorship”. It’s not just the firm hand that one may dislike to the point of loathing: it’s the dispensing of sadism that comes through those that the good find aberrant and abhorrent.
Welcome to Virtually New World.
Now that we’re all here and furiously chatyping, what are we (and leaders old and new) going to do with it?
We may try to recognize some things we don’t like about our Newest Age.
Also deeply related on this blog: “Why the Jews?”, a piece that is at bedrock about one human response to “absolute power” — within which concept BackChannels would include the power to make others suffer with impunity — that has worked its way around the world.
BackChannels 