NATO’s “New Nobility” – Erdogan, Orban, (Trump?) – and Peonage

11 Wednesday Jul 2018

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

Tags

aristocracy, autocracy, contemporary feudalism, Donald J. Trump, medieval v modern, New Nationalism, New Nobility, plutocracy, political analysis, political science, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Viktor Orban

BackChannels acknowledges the book in which it first encountered the term:

Soldatov, Andrei and Irena Borogan. The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB. New York: Public Affairs, 2010.

However, this post is not going to be about powerful and self-enriching KGB/FSB spies and their bureaucracies.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, and Donald J. Trump seem to this blogger more the “New Nobility” that Russian President Vladimir Putin may have had also in mind as he launched his revenge on the western world for the demise of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991 — a very good Christmas morning indeed for the United States of America and in the defunct godless realm then represented by the Kremlin a not very special day at all.

In the 26 years that have passed since that morning (for political purpose, it was over at noon), Russia and her leadership have had to think about what it has meant to be “Russian”.

“Old Vikings”?

Formed of conquest, contracting and expanding through the brutality of feudal wars, unable ever to police — mere civil policing — its territorial writs, Russia has been a state that has better known barbarism and the depths of inhumanity through violence (give a nod for the extra special dose brought by the Mongols) than civility through accommodation and trade. In that regard, the “Vory”, the once brutalized mafia within, may in their inglorious legend represent the pure expression of the heart of the state.

Backing the tyrant in Syria?

Invading a settled Ukraine and baldly lying to the world about its purpose?

Bombing hospitals?

Pursuing feudal absolute power — unquestionable ownership of persons as things — with the Assahola in Tehran?

All of the above: true.

So what good new things has Russia brought to the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization?

Applying the concept of “Reflexive Control” with “Islamic Terrorism” for the convenient stimulus, BackChannels may suggest the four infamous retrogrades:

BREXIT: While Great Britain has been happy to pile on “Asian” labor, it has not been so happy with grooming gangs, suspect neighborhoods, and “Allahu Akbar” explosions, much less the impositions posed by the refugees of war in Syria. Response: the Newest Nationalism expressed in renewed insularity and refreshed Anglican pride.

While it’s good for a state to recall what it’s about, some among the most zealous should factor in how they have been played by Moscow.

Erdogan: Prime Minister, President, and now, apparently, President for Life has never encountered serious resistance for his taking apart what Mustafa Kemal Atatürk bequeathed in bureaucratic and military legacy. The empire’s back, baby, and dig the symbolic significance of the leaders new crib.

Impressed?

Dig this cool new statistic on press freedom in Erdogan’s new estate (italics added).

The 2018 index ranking marked Turkey’s 58 point-decrease over the past 13 years, lagging just behind Rwanda, Belarus and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkey-ranks-157-in-rsfs-press-freedom-index-down-two-places-from-last-year-130898 – 4/25/2018.

Pretty cool, huh?

If Erdogan’s New Old Turkish estate makes it all the way down to the bottom of the list, BackChannels will certainly make note of the prize.

Orban: In addition to other self-aggrandizing and self-enriching schemes, this NATO president has been working on an old home and estate. Fave header from related online searching: “How Viktor Orban will tap Europe’s taxpayers and bankroll his friends and family: Plans for a lakeside development show how Hungary’s leader enriches those who stand behind him” (Reuters, Martin Dunai, March 15, 2018).

Trump: “You all just got a lot richer,” Trump tells friends, referencing tax overhaul (CBS News, Kathryn Watson, December 23, 2017). Who else: “Ivanka Trump’s Fashion Brand Will Not Be Impacted by Donald Trump’s Chinese Trade Tariffs” (Teen Vogue, Amira Rasool, July 9, 2018). While the “optics” don’t look good in relation to nepotism, let’s be fair: negotiating business is a continuous process for both sides in complex transactions: other variables may apply to setting tariffs in Ivanka’s region of commercial interest: other brands are in the mix too.

https://shenglufashion.com/2018/02/09/pattern-of-u-s-textile-and-apparel-imports-updated-february-2018/

Nonetheless, the American President’s behavior, personal as well as political, has left him also, as with the Erdogan and Orban, associated with the terms “autocratic”, “narcissistic”, and “nationalist”. While it’s good to take pride in one’s nation and defend her interests with tough negotiations, it may not be so good for the head of a modern democratic state to promote the image of himself as a feudal lord, securing prizes for family and friends on the basis of loyalty, and doing out favors (“You all just got a lot richer”) to surrounding nobility.

President George W. Bush also made light of the “have and have mores”, but for Americans struggling with fixed retirements, healthcare premiums, perhaps the full suite of basic and complex costs of survival, and, for the young, jobs that fail to deliver even a modicum of financial independence and pride, much less security, the implied further reduction to peonage must sting.

Posted to YouTube December 26, 2017.

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FTAC: Absent of Boundaries; Absent of Conscience: Dictatorship

17 Friday Nov 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, China, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

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Tags

Active Measures, agitprop, aristocracy, authoritarianism, Chinese and Russian Totalitarianism, dictatorship, Global Information Space, information space, information warfare, malignant narcissism, oligarchy, propaganda

The prompt from my conversational partner: “. . . to solve these problems, we need cooperation, not war. And the main question is why does the government not understand this?”

The response:

Paper, scissors, stone, and “paper” (money) covers and suffocates all beneath it while “liberating” those who have it and, perhaps (I don’t want to find out!), those who might believe themselves above it – or those of merely modest material ambitions.

My personal approach has been “Money Matters!” but is not everything; however, and this especially with our health care industry, there are forces producing polices I can’t field, and of course that inspires a yet impotent resentment.

Our government should be Christian, good-willed, and muscular (academic term “muscular Christianity” works in this regard), but it’s bending toward the criminals in the great mansions and penthouse suites, and I’ not talking about Bill Gates or most “plutocrats” but rather those who believe there are no boundaries between their perfect embodiment of the “isness” (I will find the word, literally) of their state and themselves. The businesses, the courts, the military and paramilitary elements, and legislatures are all theirs to exploit and manipulate on behalf of their preferred . . . associates. That’s dictatorship.

Let me see if I can find the word for existence as the authentic expression of spirit . . . .

“Esse” and “essence” were not what I was looking for but for an esoteric term having to do with the being of the thing within the thing. Believing in the singularity of person and state (as Ceausescu had; as Erdogan and Putin do) may comprise part of the messianic delusion suffered by dictators but unfortunately visited (with fist in the velvet glove, at best) on their subjected people.

I’m finding my reading of Russian history steeped in punitive control, and that doesn’t come with interest in “the masses” half so much as in the developing and sustaining of wealth beneficial to the image and power of the central figure in power.

Related, Recent, and Singular

On today’s Chinese and Russian totalitarian aggression in Global Information Space:

Walker, Christopher and Jessice Ludwig. “The Meaning of Sharp Power”. Foreign Affairs, November 16, 2017.

BackChannels maintains a brief bibliography of accessible and general volumes on Russia’s political history in the “Russian Section” of this blog. For greater insight into the authoritarian-patrimonial experience of the political culture from the 9th Century forward, I would recommend Richard Pipes’ fine history, Russia Under the Old Regime.

Punitive control: in geopolitical space and in the various ages of the “rule of the strong”, including for Russia and surrounds domination by the Mongols, the power to control space produces arrangements with in to produce wealth. Pipes’ — in the above cited volume — steps off with economic variance in the productivity of Russian land compared to soil fertility to the south to explain motivation for the social arrangements that would ensue in history and effect Russian political arrangements to this day. What Pipes appears to find essential — and what most concerns this blog — is the prince’s (or equivalent or greater in power) considering the ownership of property and persons the same thing. Worse — the test of sovereignty becomes the permit to engage in the wholesale destruction of both!

Now have another look at Assad’s destruction of Syria and incubation of ISIS as a useful foil and political tool (“Reflexive Control’s” little helper) as well as the very emblem of the worst of the worst of destructive forces.

Who has the control of it?

Moscow-Tehran.

Note: keyword tags are related this time but not directly addressed except beneath the category that is “Dictatorship” and its essential and unfailingly malign narcissism.

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Putin, While Messing With the West, Grows a New Russian Economy

09 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, International Development, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

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21st Century Neo-Feudalism, aristocracy, political psychology, Putin, Russia, Russia vs NATO

Two points of reference:

Medetsky, Anatoly, Matthew Campbell, Yuliya Fedorinova. “Putin is Growing Organic Power One T-34 Tank-Tomato at a Time.” Bloomberg, June, 7, 2016.

Shinkman, Paul D. “Beware Appeasement With Russia.” U.S. News & World Report, June 9, 2016.

Keep in mind the extreme duality presented by the Concert in Palmyra, for example, and the savaging of Syria by a tyrant accompanied by the incubation and encouragement of ISIS as a useful foil and poker chip for playing over the course of perhaps the World’s Grandest and Most Romantic Political Theater.

While burdening the west (and NATO) with the fallout in refugees and terrorists from the Syrian Tragedy and pestering the same through its activities in Ukraine, an assortment of “frozen conflicts”, and its investment in “information warfare” online, Russia has been also (as Obama long ago suggested) growing its economy, the first fruits of which have been given pretty good play in Bloomberg.

About to this point, the image of a Moscow hard hit by dramatically reduced oil revenues and sanctions and by years of capital flight driven by corruption has held steady, but now we see The Bear has been planting all along.

Neither Russian artistic and intellectual high culture nor developing business success (finally!) can or will ethically or morally offset what Putin’s regime has done to degrade the lifestyles of Russians en masse (so far) nor erase the barbaric and contemptible way it has measured the worth of the lives and freedoms of others in Crimea, Syria, and elsewhere.

For whatever may have happened to Putin early in life, one may glimpse a Putin’s revenge taken against the enemies of the Soviet, perhaps old imperial Russia as well, and what he might brand as traitors to Russia in Eastern Europe — those who have joined with NATO — for while he has delivered refugees and terrorists and the confusions of RT and other state-controlled media operations to their lands and airwaves (and computers), he has placed the productive capacity of the state in the state-controlled private hands, and as the same wish to make a lot money, the tomatoes are going to be pretty good for eating (or throwing).

Note too that in the encouragement of Far Right and Far Left political organizations worldwide, Putin & Co. have blended with the tomatoes a heady mix of hippie values — what could be more pure than tomatoes irrigated by mountain waters? — and fascist nationalist dreams rooted in ethnolinguistic pride.

While NATO may prepare for and block greater Russian imperialist adventure, its more immediate and perhaps more real headache may involve meeting the challenge posed by Moscow’s autocratic, barbarous, and criminal “allowances” within Russia and far beyond its borders.

Posted to YouTube 2/3/2016.

Reference

AFP. “Millions more Russians living in poverty as economic crisis bites.” March 21, 2016.

Orttung, Robert and Christopher Walker. “Putin’s Frozen Conflicts: Each of Russia’s reform-minded neighbors is plagued by separatism. It’s no coincidence.” Foreign Policy, February 13, 2015.

Pomerantsev, Peter. “Russia and the Menace of Unreality.” The Atlantic, September 9, 2014.

Ragozin, Leonid. “Putin’s Core Support Begins to Waver.” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 9, 2016. (Added 6/10/2016).

Tolokonnikova, Nadya. “Criminal Godfathers and Dirty Birds.” Huffington Post, February 3, 2016.

# # #

One for the Putinistas (and Ballet Lovers)

23 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by commart in Philosophy, Politics, Russia, United States of America

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19th Century Modern, aristocracy, NATO, Obama, politics, Putin, Russia, Syria

Nineteenth-century radicals loathed Russia above all other states because it had a quasi-religious mission to preserve autocracy at home and promote reactionary regimes abroad. To true believers, the “Third Rome” of Christian tsarism defended the divinely ordained old order against the threats of liberalism, socialism, nationalism and modernity.

Vladimir Putin is outflanking the west at every turn | Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Observer – by Nick Cohen – 12/21/2013

After reading Nick Cohen’s relay of Pat Buchanan’s words about Vladimir Putin, it turns out that I am a part of a movement characterized as the “militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.”

* * *

Ya ha!

I have found my place.

You know my lowest common denominator standards:

— Compassion | Humility | INCLUSION | Integrity —

Buchanan, if he’s now enamored of Putinism, and Putin, who would seem by the show of affection proffered in weapons deliveries and benevolent shadowing, remains committed to Bashar (The Butcher) Assad may be counted on for the grossest callousness, pride, exclusion, and — no secret where so many secret and nepotist arrangements would seem to be involved — corruption.

The same as (gasp!) Al Qaeda.

OUR problem, me hearties, me droogies, me Facebook best buddies from Riyadh to Islamabad, is that whether having to do with Assad vs. the Islamist Edge or Putin vs. Obama, it would seem similar mentalities wish to occupy the same space or shine in the same lights — not exactly atypical of “malignant narcissists” — while driving everyone else into misery or just plain out of their mirrored spheres!

THEIR problem, Mr. Obama, Mr. Putin, may have to do with escaping their own glorious selves. Of the two, Obama, being of the Christian compassionate honest humble and generously inclusive democratic and open society west, may lay claim to having done less harm in the short term than his superpower counterweight; Putin, however, would do well to look over the Assad combat doctrine and its effects on once disinterested Syrians who have by the effects of extensive bombing and indiscriminate fire been turned out of their homes or cheated of their lives while the Al Qaeda affiliates’ advance seems to have remained out of range and sight of the same.

Post-Soviet Syria was post-Soviet Putin’s to influence and transform.

Well, some, I suppose, both milk the cow and starve it until it keels over.

______

In Putin, the past fights mightily with the future.

______

In my own recurring themes, Putin and I might share the appreciation of what I call “19th Century Modern”, an aristocratic and noble notion reinforced by the appearance of affluence and wealth. Living in the 19th Century with 21st Century appointments and appliances seems to me pretty cool, although I’ve had to stuff my mansion into a cabin (or cottage) based in about 1,000-sq.ft. of garden apartment walk-up, and things are not looking so good for drives in the country and claret before one or another of the ever glowing electronic hearths.

Still, the situation here is 19th Century (Modern), and it’s pretty good but for the worry.

For the narcissist, reparative or malignant (guilty, I confess, of one or the other or a bit of both), there’s much to recommend it and one may bet on the intelligentsia’s buy-in, Georgian brick, ivy, tweed, and elbow patches and all.

So is the fighting about castle and keep?

It could be so, at least symbolically.

It takes a castle, a manor, a very many of them to create and sustain a great language and culture. If perhaps in his mind, his peacock charm, ambition, dreams at night, and hail fellow well met — and now and then stabbed! — President Putin has had to step back a century, the same may serve to remind of the magic of that era as well.

* * *

It’s almost Christmas.

Winter returns tonight to my home in western Maryland — ice and snow, wool blankets and sweaters, steaming pots of tea (someone else in the family got the samovar) — so I may offer this bit of in-solidarity to my unknown Muscovy doppelganger, reasonably appointed and of good temper: let’s enjoy the show because, sooner or later, for Christianity or fashion designers, for the Jews who work harder for humanity than anyone else, and for humanity served, we’re going to have to do something about Syria and soon, and we don’t want it to be either of the two pariahs busying themselves this evening with the other’s destruction.

_____

From Saint Petersburg — and the 19th Century.