Tag Archives: book review

In Retrospect: Jon Ronson’s “The Elephant In The Room”

14 Tuesday May 2019

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

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At a high school basketball game in Indiana in March, white students chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” at Latina students. Everyone knew what that meant: It was a new way to be racist.

But the alt-right’s appeal remains marginal because the huge majority of young Americans like multiculturalism. They aren’t paranoid or hateful about other races. Those ideas are ridiculous to them. The alt-right’s small gains in popularity will not be enough to win Trump the election. This is not Germany in the 1930s. All that’s changed is that one of Alex’s fans — one of those grumpy looking middle-aged men sitting in David Icke’s audience — is now the Republican nominee.

But if some disaster unfolds — if Hillary’s health declines further, or she grows ever more off-puttingly secretive — and Trump gets elected, he could bring Alex and the others with him. The idea of Donald Trump and Alex Jones and Roger Stone and Stephen Bannon having power over us — that is terrifying.

Darcy, Oliver. “Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones and other ‘dangerous’ voices banned by Facebook and Instagram.” CNN Business, May 3, 2019.

For the record, BackChannels supports as broad a spectrum of political speech as possible bounded by criminal law associated with conspiracy and incitement.

While Facebook Civilization as Zuckerberg may shape it has no monopoly on speech conveyed via the web, it’s notable that Alex Jones and Louis Farrakhan made the same grade.

In the gonzo escapade that produced dish for The Elephant In the Room, Ronson manages to get in some quality time with Alex Jones and Roger Stone in Jones’ production trailer. The “in” with the talk show host had been crashing Bohemian Grove years earlier with him.

Barrett, Devlin, Rosalind S. Helderman, Lori Rozsa, and Manuel Roig-Franzia. “Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone indicted by special counsel in Russia investigation.” The Washington Post, January 25, 2019.

CNN, same day —

CNN, posted to YouTube January 25, 2019.
DW, posted to YouTube April 13, 2019.

Agent provocateur as Roger Stone refers to himself? Moral crusader for the west as befits Steve Bannon’s “populism” in the surrounds of the books collected and gardens cultivated by Italian monks? Or clowns found out and moved off the Oval Office’s carpet?

Trump stole the election and the aforementioned demons were unable to remain attached to his glory: so why read Ronson’s book?

Take it in for background — $1.99 for the Kindle — for delight in language, and for the prescient glimpse of a campaign x personality yesteryear that really does seem just like yesterday.

Having quoted from the end of the book, here’s the sound of the beginning:

The TV’s at the EQUINOX were showing a Donald Trump rally. Hillary Clinton might have been holding her own rally somewhere but, if so, it wasn’t on any of these screens. In fact, a few weeks ago MSNBC, Fox News and CNN had ignored a Hillary Clinton speech entirely, choosing instead to broadcast a live feed of the empty podium from which Donald Trump would soon speak. His empty podium: that’s how insatiable our appetite was to hear Donald Trump say staggering things in the spring of 2016, back when it was new and strange.

I plugged in my headphones and heard someone in the crowd shout out to Trump: “Are you going back on the Alex Jones show?”

“Alex Jones? Trump said. “He was a nice guy! You like him?”

“It was a GREAT interview!” the man called back.

“Oh good,” Donald Trump said. “Alex Jones. Nice guy.”

I was so jolted by this exchange I almost fell off my elliptical. Donald Trump knows Alex Jones?

I AM BASICALLY ALEX JONES’S Simon Cowell. I star-spotted him in the late-1990s . . . .

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Mafia “Don”? Laundering the Authoritarian President’s Image

07 Friday Sep 2018

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

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Trump-Helsinki2018-moment

all I can do is ask the question my people came to me dan coates came to me and some others they said they think it’s Russia I have president putin he just said it’s not russia i will say this i don’t see any reason why it would be I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today and what he did is an incredible offer he offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators with respect to the people I think that’s an incredible offer

Guardian News. “Key moments from the Trump-Putin press conference.” Start: 0:0:07.  Transcript machine generated.  July 16, 2018.

BackChannels has lived long enough to see “Active Measures” become a movie, “alternative facts” obtain traction in the arguments of some lost souls, and the “Fake News!” rise up en masse to denounce the source of the accusation.  Now the whole ugly stain attending the deeply foreign influenced election of America’s president has begun to seep and spread from the infernal nucleus of the Russian marriage between State and Mob and now a hint of the presence of the same in the United States of America.

How soon will the journalists be asking of the Russian mafia — and mafia generally — in America, “How broad, how deep, how high, how powerful?”

cover-HouseOfTrumpHouseOfPutin

“Dear friends, respected colleagues!” Nikonov said.  “Three minutes ago Hillary Clinton admitted her defeat in US presidential elections and a second ago Trump started his speech as an elected president of the United States of America and I congratulate you on this.”

Even though Nikonov did not add what many in the Kremlin already knew, his brief statement was greeted by enthusiastic applause.  Donald J. Trump had just become Vladimir Putin’s man in the White House.

Unger, Craig. House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia. Page 1.  New York: Dutton, 2018.

While readers may not find evidence quite so “hard” as a memo or recording between “Don” and “Vlad”, the darkly glittering atmosphere brewed by dirty or shady businesses, related events, FBI and other investigations, and innumerable lawsuits in all directions (with Trump Administration scandals, even the lawyers have needed lawyers) the preponderance of the evidence — in the worlds of investigators and journalists alike, the character of personal associations and relationship — becomes inescapable.

***

The art of reading has been changed by “broadband Internet”: these days, one may snooze between the hardcovers but also depart from any event or noun mentioned to find source and related materials online — or to chat with the “journo” should the same be so nice and unhurried as regards giving up a piece of his time o’ day.  With a book as rich in coverage as Craig Unger’s, there are mentions aplenty for mining.  Page 147, for example, a simple flip-open (it could have been any other page or chapter), makes mention of somebody “Nogueira” and a Reuters investigation — and a minute later, now listed in reference, Brad Brooks’ piece comes up (and may be read separately).  Of the man noted, here’s one more excerpt from Unger’s new book:

According to conversations secretly recorded by a former business partner, in 2013 Nogueira said he had laundered tens of millions of dollars through real estate.  “More important than the money from real estate was being able to launder the drug money — there were much larger amounts involved,” he said in the recording.  “When I was in Panama I was regularly laundering money for more than a dozen companies.”

Nogueira told Reuters that he became the leading broker for the project thanks in part to the support of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who appeared in a promotional video with him.

What did Donald Trump do?

Trump licensed his name — attractive and synonymous with glamour, power, and wealth — to the project of interest and many others worldwide.  What crime could there have been in that?  His organization also held management contracts on real estate projects, but here BackChannels will leave the details to the curious among readers; however, the same litmus applies: he nailed a service contract: so what?

On the other hand, perhaps the “so what?” is in the “with whom” and the true “for what”.

At the end of his book, Unger notes, “Donald Trump has repeatedly said he has nothing to do with Russia.  Below are fifty-nine Trump connections to Russia” (p. 265).  “Below” begins with Roman Abramovich and ends with Viktor Yanukovych.

Reference

Brooks, Brad. “Former broker in Trump Panama project under investigation in Brazil.” Reuters, November 17, 2017.

Drehle, David Von. ” Trump resume is rife with mob connections.” Op-ed. The Washington Post, August 10, 2018.

Goldberg, Jeffrey. “Donald Trump’s Mafia Mind-Set: Listening to a legendary American mobster and hearing the president of the United States.” The Atlantic, August 23, 2018.

Graham, David A. “The Many Scandals of Donald Trump: A Cheat Sheet.” The Atlantic, January 23, 2017.

Hettena, Seth. “Michael Cohen, Lanny Davis and the Russian Mafia.” Rolling Stone, August 28, 2018.

Johnston, David Cay. “Just What Were Donald Trump’s Ties to the Mob?” Politico Magazine, May 22, 2016.

Layne, Nathan, Ned Parker, Svetlana Reiter, Stephen Grey, and Ryan McNeill.  “Russian elite invested nearly $100 million in Trump buildings.”  Reuters Investigates, March 17, 2017.

Locker, Ray. “New book looks into ties between Donald Trump, Russia, but there’s more smoke than fire.” Review. USA Today, August 14, 2018.

O’Harrow, Jr. Robert and Shawn Boburg. “The man who showed Donald Trump how to exploit power and instill fear.” The Washington Post, June 17, 2016.

Unger, Craig. House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia. New York: Dutton, 2018.

Unger, Craig. “Trump’s Russian Laundromat.” The New Republic, July 13, 2017.

Vesoulis, Abby. “Trump’s Team Keeps Using Mafia-Inspired Language — to Defend Itself.” Time, August 1, 2018.

Waldman, Paul. “President Trump brings mafia ethics to the GOP.” Op-ed. The Washington Post, August 23, 2018.

Addendum

Keatinge, Tom. “We cannot fight cross-border laundering with local tools.” Op-ed. Financial Times, September 9, 2018.

Unger, Craig. “Understanding Trump vs. Bruce Ohr: Think Russia’s top crime boss, Semion Mogilevich.” Just Security, August 30, 2018.

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Guest Post by Mitchell Gray: Reflection on _L’Etranger_, by Albert Camus

11 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, International Development, Islamic Small Wars

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Camus-CVR-TheStranger.jpg

Every US military leader ought to study the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962. The problems in Indo-China and Southwest Asia could have been reduced. Here was insurgency, terrorism, asymmetric warfare and the “eastern” method of warfare.

This novel was published in 1942 and is set in Algeria, a French colony since the 1830’s. France encouraged French citizens to colonize in Algeria and France also brought Algerians to France.

Camus won a Nobel Prize for literature for The Stranger in 1957 during the uprisings.

The end of WWI in 1918 ushered in a wave of anti-colonialism and this included Algeria. Independence was craved.

The novel focuses on the “antihero” Mersault who is a simple man who impulsively shoots and kills a nameless Arab on a beach on a blinding day. He is tried for murder.
After WWII France was very weak and began to lose contested colonies such as in Southeast Asia. The Front de Liberación Nationale (FLN) in Algeria spearheaded the fight and brutalities occurred on both sides as the French resisted independence.

The “absurdity” (Camus rejected that he was an Existentialist) of the trial was that Meurault was depicted by the prosecutor as “uncaring” or indifferent towards his dying mother. The outrage was not that he murdered an Arab but that he was not an appropriate son. That was his real crime.

Finally, in 1962 Algeria achieved independence and hundreds of thousands had been butchered. The fighting was extreme violence and cruelty. Hatreds fueled the inhumanity.
Critics point out the Arab victim was never named nor developed by Camus. This was seen as the French snobbery towards the native Arabs.

Algeria suffered an extremely brutal and cruel civil war in the 1990’s with ISIS like brutality. The Islamic party won elections in 1991 but the government canceled them.

Blood flowed. Heads fell. Flesh burned. Fear ruled.

Algeria is a major natural gas supplier. France still has great influence and al Qaeda has large cells there. Terror attacked still occur.

Europe battles problems with its Muslim populations especially from Algeria and neighboring Morocco. For decades the Algerians were marginalized and they claim treated as inferiors by France. Many joined ISIS.

We must learn from history and this includes novels that capture popular moods. We must learn better ways to live among ourselves and realize every human life is equal.
Meursault was a murderer. His crime was not being a bad son. But in this novel, much is learned about French attitudes towards their colonial possessions. We still deal with these attitudes today.

Mitchell Gray is the author of I Heard You Were Going on Jihad: How a Minnesota FBI agent may have prevented a second wave of attacks before 9/11 and exposed the Oklahoma terror network (Minneapolis: Mill City Press, 2015).  An Iraq War veteran, he previously provided valuable information to counter-intelligence agencies after 9/11, had practiced as an attorney, and taught as an adjunct professor on matters having to do with the oil and gas industries.

Reference

Above: cover of and Amazon link to the graphic novel adaptation.

Camus, Albert.  The Stranger.  New York: Vintage Books, 1946.

Related Online

Film trailer: The Battle of Algiers (film with subtitles), released September 1967 in the United States (IMDB).

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Rediscovery, Renewal of Devotion – Bederman’s _Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values_

11 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Books, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Religion

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BTE_Front_Cover_BSP2_120915_jpg_not_reducedBederman, Diane Weber.  Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values.  Canada, Mantua Books, 2015.

The belief in an ethical God makes it possible over time, to move from a society of tribes to a society of many tribes, held together with commonly shared beliefs, stories, and traditions, because this God demands that we care for the other, the stranger, because we know how a stranger feels; we were once strangers in a strange land (see Exodus 23:9) (p. 60).

Canadian author Diane Weber Bederman, a friend of BackChannels’ editor, has put together a brief compelling volume about the origins of compassion, empathy — a pervasive thoughtfulness most of all — in contemporary western thought by way of Biblical language and lore and the interaction of the Judeo-Christian vision of God and man as woven through the western experience.

Although composed as defense and reminder of western values, it may turn out the right book at the right time as regards broadening the channels for the appreciation of a number of aspects of cultural and intercultural survival:

Ethical monotheism is not the enemy.

Belief in the ethical God of the Christians and Jews counterbalances egoism and the idolization of another human being.  I cannot place belief in any man perfecting himself.  The evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary.  I wrote about that earlier, in my chapter “The Snake Tempted Me,” about the Enlightenment and the rise of secularism.  More people have died from wars that embraced secular fundamentalist propaganda than have been killed in wars based on religious differences.  Encyclopedia of Wars authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare.  From their list of 1,763 wars, only 123 are classified as involving a religious cause; these wars account for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare.  It is estimated that more than 160 millions civilians were killed in genocides in the twentieth century alone, with nearly 100 million killed by the Communist states of USSR and China.  Think of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Kim Jong-il, and Adolph Hitler. 

Why do we allow ourselves to give up our free will and instead by swayed by others?  Why do we so easily forget God’s admonition, “Beware of letting your heart be seduced; if you go astray, serve other gods and bow down to them . . . you will quickly perish”? (Deuteronomy 11:16-17) . . . . (p. 101)

Bederman is right and rightly quotable, page after well researched and thoughtfully written page, for her book reminds of basic principles and tenets that form the bulwark of a healthy and productive western society.

The tour begins close to the thought, “Before ethical monotheism and the revelation at Mount Sinai, there was little concept of the intrinsic value of a human being.  There was little concept of the sacredness of human life” (p. 11).

Given the spectacle created by dictator and “eye doctor” Bashar al-Assad in Syria with the help of Putin, Khamenei, and Baghdadi, one cannot discount Bederman’s observation of history and its present corollaries, for conscience, empathy, kindness, human rights, freedom, and love itself may not be givens in human affairs but transmitted through the oral and written traditions in language of a civilization born of suffering beneath the words, whips, and yokes of tyrants.  For that, the Judeo-Christian experience has been (from Pharaoh to Hitler) immense.

Where Bederman quotes Thomas Paine — “Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man” — she precedes the presentation of it with an observation drawn from commentary on the God of the Torah:

There is a commentary in one of the many books about the Bible that imagines God’s response to the happiness of the Israelites after the drowning of the Egyptians.  God hears the angels singing and celebrating His great victory.  But instead of rejoicing weeps and rebukes them.  “Why are you singing?”  He asks.  “Why are you rejoicing?  The Egyptians are My children, too, and they are dead, drowned in the sea.  There is no cause for you to sing.  Their deaths are not to be celebrated” (p. 38).

True, and to BackChannels’ mind memory of a passage in an old Haggadah serves up the same lesson.

We — of the Jews and the “mixed multitudes” that joined the flight from Pharaoh, of “the west”, of the world’s democratic open societies, of the realms of the considerate and lawful (as opposed to those more familiar with capricious justice) — don’t rejoice at death, not even the death of mortal enemies.

As a philosophy of ethics, Bederman takes on abortion, utilitarianism, geneticism, too accepting a multiculturalism, and, of course, moral relativism: “If ethics have no extrinsic or intrinsic substantive base, then ethical decisions will be made by those in power who can impose their beliefs on others” (p. 75).

Again, page after page, Back to the Ethic proves a rich and thoughtful reading, one also at times personal as when Bederman encounters her own passage through hell in the form of a costly medical misdiagnosis and the path she takes in response to it. However, the author does not dwell in the region of her own mortality but rather in the realm of the universal and its reflection in scripture and the defense through time of Judeo-Christian belief in the structuring of the western tradition and today’s compassionate, democratic, open, and most vibrant societies.

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Book Note: _October 16, 1943: Eight Jews_

02 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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For more than fifty years, Giacomo Debenedetti’s October 16, 1943 has been considered one of the best and most accurate accounts of the shockingly brief and efficient roundup of more than one thousand Roman Jews from the oldest Jewish community in Europe for the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

October 16, 1943/Eight Jews // Books // University of Notre Dame Press

October 16, 1943: Eight Jews: Giacomo Debenedetti, Estelle Gilson: 9780268037130: Amazon.com: Books

* * *

The earliest documentary evidence relating to Jews in Rome is Valerius Maximus’ Factorum ac Dictorum Memo­rabilium stating that the Praetor Gnaeus Cornelius His­panus expelled the Chaldaeans, astrologers, and some Jews from Rome in 139 B.C.  In 63 B.C. Pompey con­quered Jerusalem and brought an unknown number of Jew­ish prisoners of war to Rome. Trastevere was the chief Jewish quarter: (STET)

*

There is a brighter side to the story of the Holo­caust in Rome though. The Nazis arrested only 1,259 Jews in the October 16 raid. In the following months, they were able to ar­rest only a few hundred more, even after offering cash rewards. The total num­ber of Roman Jews exterminated was approximately 1,970.20 Over eighty percent of the Roman Jews survived the Holo­caust. None were killed be­fore the German oc­cupation. The total number of Ital­ian Jews known to have been killed during the Holo­caust is 7,922 out of approxi­mately 40,000. Again, over eighty percent survived.

The Holocaust in Rome: 1943-1944 | REPUBLK – 10/23/2012.

There was no “brighter side to the story” — what if only “1,259” (and “1,970.20” is not an approximation) persons had included your family, friends, associates?

The perhaps inherent youth factor implicit in Daniel T. Murphy’s Masters thesis (1993) may fit with how the Jews of Rome on October 16, 1943 were rounded up by lists developed in accord with Italian racial laws enforced under the fascist government preceding the interim government of Prime Minister Pietro Badoglio, who in his flight from imminent German army occupation would leave the same intact —  “Badoglio’s bureaucrats refused to destroy their many lists of Jewish names and addresses” says historian Susan Zuccotti as quoted by translator Estelle Gilson, translator of Debenedetti’s book — for their Nazi successors.

Enriching the experience of reading Giacomo Debenedetti’s gem in Holocaust lore are Estelle Gilson’s introduction plus an end-note, “The Fate of the Roman Jewish Libraries”, and an historic preface by Alberto Moravia.

______

Contrary to general opinion, Jews are not distrustful by nature.  Or to put it more clearly, they are distrustful in the same degree that they are perceptive about small matters, but credulous and disastrously ingenuous when it comes to large ones.  In regard to the Germans, they were ingenuous, almost ostentatiously so.  There are several possible reasons for this.  Convinced by centuries of experience that it is their fate to be treated like dogs, Jews have a desperate need for human sympathy; and to solicit it, they offer it.  To trust people, to rely on them, to believe in their promises, is precisely such a proof of sympathy.  Will they behave this way with the Germans?  Yes, unfortunately.  With the Germans there would also come into play the classic Jewish attitude toward authority.  Even before the first fall of Jerusalem, authority has exercised absolute, arbitrary, and inscrutable power of life and death over Jews.  This has operated in such a way that both in their conscious and unconscious minds authority has assumed the form of an exclusive, jealous, and omnipresent God.  To distrust His promises, whether good or bad, is to fall into sin for which sooner or later one will have to pay, even if that sin remains unexpressed, and is only an intention, or a mumbled complaint.  And finally, the fundamental idea of Judaism is justice.  The mission of the Jews was to bring this idea to Eastern civilization.  Renan makes this expressly the theme of his interpretation of the entire history of Israel, including the great eschatological statements, including the Messianic wait, and the promise that on that Day of the Lord, tomorrow or who knows when, He will light His dawn at the height of the millennia precisely to bring back the reign of justice upon this earth.

For these reasons, Rome’s Jews had a certain kind of faith in the Germans . . . .

So sad, so tragic, so horrifying a story as Debenedetti tells continues today in the anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist rants and machinations of political movements as diverse as Arab Baathism and resurgent eastern European nationalism.

Enlarged in scope, the same immense black cloud descends on the Christian west, on the Christian communities of the middle east under assault today by the forces funded along the Muslims Brotherhood and Wahhabi fronts with their black flags flying where once stood crosses, and on Muslim communities worldwide as a red death explodes in unpredictable but numerous roadside and suicide bombings, assassinations, and countless beheading.

Before the onslaughts of al-Qaeda and Company, who is not a Jew?

This blogger, having read this extraordinary book, October 16, 1943 / Eight Jews, is to return to the news of similar persecutions taking place right now worldwide.

Additional and Related Reference

incunabula (printing) — Encyclopedia Britannica

Pietro Badoglio – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Italian Racial Laws – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ernest Renan – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Susan Zuccotti – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Giacomo Debenedetti – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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From Syria – _The Doctor, the Eye Doctor, and Me_ – A Damning Statement

28 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Political Psychology, Politics, Regions, Syria

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In the months that followed, it became very clear that the Eye Doctor was counting on attitudes like mine. His airforce bombed every part of the country, except those towns occupied by ISIS. His army fought every opposition brigade, but made sure to leave ISIS units well alone. ISIS in turn abducted even more opposition activists, murdered the commanders of other brigades, and generally left the regime’s forces to do as they liked.

The Eye Doctor and ISIS feed off one another; the existence of one legitimized the continued existence of the other.

Amazon.com: The Doctor,The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between The World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict.  eBook: Aboud Dandachi: Kindle Store – Kindle Edition, 94-101, 2/17/2014.

Also: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/409862 (free).

______

This wry and lived history must surely become one of the classics of political science.

“The Doctor” is “Doctor Who” of perpetuated BBC legend, a doctor who in earthly television series years also happens to be 50 years old.

“The Eye Doctor” is, of course, ophthalmologist and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Dandachi, trapped in a hotel room in Tartus, Syria for 18 months becomes a Netizen hooked on the BBC program and able to apply his mad software skilz to watching it and helplessly drawing parallels between The Doctor’s and The Eye Doctor’s differing ways.

Should you be cursed with an ounce of sentiment for either al-Assad or the Islamist “armies” hanging off the stinging Medusa jellyfish that is al-Nusra and companions, Aboud Dandachi’s book will cure you of that.

Note: the author of this blog is an independent writer beholden to none, but I have had contact with Aboud Dandachi and learned about his book through him.  I risked my own $0.99 on obtaining it.

Dandachi sells his work quite well too:

Now, a word on politics. There will be political opinions expressed in this book . And they will be expressed strongly. They will be anti-Assad, and very much for the idea of his removal and that of his regime.

And if any reader should find that objectionable, then I’m sorry.

Actually, I’m not. Because nothing can come close to matching the offensiveness of hearing a murderous dictator who made refugees out of millions of Syrians, be described and pitied as a “victim of Zionist/ Wahabi/ CIA Imperialist Empire Building Neo-Con conspiracies. Now let’s go Occupy Wallstreet or something”.

This book is not meant to be an exhaustive review of either Doctor Who or the Syrian revolution-turned -conflict.

So, inadvertently, the reader will have in Kindle hand a thorough, if perhaps not exhaustive, overview of how things got to be so thoroughly stupid in Syria.

______

If the pro-regime areas in Homs felt under threat and under siege, fearful of retaliations for crimes committed by the regime they had become associated with, then with any luck, they would instinctively look to the regime for protection.

Dandachi, Aboud (2014-02-17). The Doctor,The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between The World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict (Kindle Locations 1198-1199). Aboud Dandachi. Kindle Edition.

Assad’s “overreaction” to schoolkid heckling?

Knee jerk, possibly (my call after reading), for as Dandachi makes clear and with forceful argument, the proven more than ruthless dictator deliberately turned up the barbarism dial at the outset to inspire the armed insurrection for which his army had been built!

No wonder so many military officers and state officials have jumped ship across the years.

With no greater force majeure to intervene and all facets seemingly anti-western (not to mention deeply anti-Semitic, at least at face value), what has become an Assad vs Islamist war continues to burn through the productive center of Syrian society.

______

. . . what was needed was for a way for the very people the regime depended on to suppress the demonstrations, to feel that they weren’t so much defending the regime, as defending their very lives, the lives of their communities and families. The men who made up the armed forces and security agencies had to be made to believe that the revolution posed an existential threat to them and all they held dear.

Going on and on about “foreign conspiracies” involving everyone from Zionist-Salafis to the NATO-Wicked Witch of the West could only be effective for a limited amount of time . . . .

Dandachi, Aboud (2014-02-17). The Doctor,The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between The World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict (Kindle Locations 1145-1149). Aboud Dandachi. Kindle Edition.

Every sentence, paragraph bloc, page, and chapter read as well, much fulfilling Aristotle’s dictum “to educate, entertain, and delight.”

The Doctor (sort of) – Vid’ and URL to the Doctor Who Share List (YouTube)

Sonic Screwdriver (Trock Parody of Telephone by Lady Gaga) – YouTube

The Eye Doctor

Bashar al-Assad Interview with Fox News Part 4Syria: Syrian President Bashar al Assad Charlie Rose – YouTube – 2/26/2014:

“It doesn’t matter what they say, whether he is a dictator or a reformer.  Today you have propaganda.  Do they say the same word about their allies in the Gulf states?  Do they talk about dictatorship in the Gulf states? — We’re talking about Syria now — I know, but I have the right to answer about the other regimes, er, states, that they are much far from democracy than the Syrian state.”

Dandachi talks about the private money funding al-Nusra and ISIS and here in the above clip, Assad himself draws the convenient and logical comparison between his absolute rule and the same astonishingly narcissistic construct working through the wallets and minds of the forces arrayed against him.

Why should the President of Syria rollover to democracy when the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Qatar and others retain equal interest in the similarly despotic accretion and expression of wealth?

No wonder there has been no intervening force of magnificent Doctor Who-like scale in Syria.

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William Boyd’s Bond Book: “Solo”

15 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Books

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Solo: A James Bond Novel: William Boyd: 9780062223128: Amazon.com: Books

Military guys and screenwriters may want to throw this Bond saga across the room for the writer having made some things — many things — too easy, but Bond fans of old — or of a forgiving youthful curiosity — might enjoy this visit with a Bond in the image of Ian Fleming plus alter ego set to work in the 1960s’ post-colonial but not yet post Grand Game era.

The series’ signatures from Bond Girls to arch evildoers are in the volume but written down a notch, more human scale than stellar, and, thank God for it, unbelievably low tech (with one exception).

For the reading addict struggling to carve time for the indulgence, Boyd’s Bond seems also a romance that in the spy thriller mode spiced with sex moves right along, the author’s nods to Graham Greene (Bond’s reading him) and Jamaica — the location of Fleming’s plain but once glamorized island escape — notwithstanding.

Bonded English old Bond, chain smoking, whisky swilling, Scottish white warrior with a penchant for the terribly pale British and equally cafe au lait exotic in women seems also to have immunity from contemporary political correctness as he encounters Africans with names like “Christmas” and “Sunday” while loving, losing (the hard way), and leaving the babes with but the briefest spells of deep regrets.

Of course.

Other quintessential Bond: the Africa of interest is a plantain republic — something like Eritrea meets Somalia meets Nigeria — with verandas made for drinking and smoking and common global consciousness of the global encounter with the Islamic Small Wars still 40 years in the future.

Also, fans of Washington’s George Pelecanos, a writer of detective thrillers employing real spaces around the city, may enjoy Bond’s walkabouts downtown and drives into northern Virginia.  Boyd knows and reinvents the atmosphere, culture, and landscape of the capital and surrounds a fair 50 years back, and that part of the fun.

Call Boyd’s Bond grandpa’s Bond — a low tech Scotsman come of age in WWII working Her Majesty’s interests in a post-colonial African state, and encountering in America the two hottest signals of the age: the Afro hairstyle and the 300 horsepower Mustang.

Also notable: when Bond’s in Washington and needs sophisticated weaponry, there’s need neither for Q, background checks, or a drive out of the District of Columbia:  the counter keeper of the gun depot on the corner happily, legally, offers up the ready-to-assemble and concealable death delivering technologies of choice.

Ah, me hearties, those were the days!

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Mobarak Haider’s Diagnosis — Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg

17 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Library, Religion

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Civilizational Narcissism

Everything you wanted to know about why what is wrong with Islam — that abysmal present soaked in blood, dependence, hate, ignorance, and failed or failing or drifted states from Asia to Africa to the Middle East — may be covered in Mobarak Haider’s 2008 (Urdu version; English version, 2010) Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg.

“Narcissism is a psychic state of extreme subjectivity.  The civilizational narcissists have mostly two alternating mental states: either they are perfectly unaware of the role of the world around them or if they are aware, they are sure that it admires or envies them.  This infatuation with their own charm renders them totally impervious to the beauty and merit of others.  Civilizational narcissism is therefore collective to the extent that all the admirers of their own civilization admire only abstract concepts; no living human or the existing pattern of civilization impresses them.”

With Pakistani street cred and cosmopolitan ivory tower brights and insight, Haider walks the reader through each dimension of cultural, geopolitical, linguistic, psychological, and social history and thought in laying out the case for an unbridled narcissism as the core component promoting the misery the Muslim Ummah continues to deal to itself and to others in the name of Allah.

In addition to the psychology, which I regard as rich and spot-on, Haider’s honesty and integrity in scholarship in and of itself stands signal to the kind of change the whole world wants as regards Islam’s ability to accept criticism, to develop by first developing itself (through other than alms and arms) and to enjoy — now these are my words — the world’s present and most assuredly future “cultural polyphony”.

I have found an implacability in conservative Muslim and American circles in which one party or the other is not only being victimized by the other, but reverting, or stuck, in the mechanics of the most woeful prejudice, which may be reduced to the statement, “they are all like that.” For some, every Muslim is a Jihadi-head (and it may be tragic for Muslims that whatever potential lay in the term “Jihad”, it really has become synonymous with “bombs on two legs” and the like); and for some opposite, every “right-winger” is Pamela Geller  or Robert Spencer (I like them both): my way out of that debacle has been through the window of a term I refer to as “shimmer” — i.e., for what’s coming over the berm, uncertainty as to who, in impassioned numbers, really wants what.

Not to be the “useful idiot” in this crowd, I have at this point engaged many Muslim friends (around the world too), most of whom I genuinely enjoy in an atmosphere as generous in mutual regard as I have ever experienced in conversation.

Nonetheless, in the hands of clerics, the Taliban, and the Arabs who profit mightily on religion — the Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, may be valued at $30 billion annually according to a Gulf News report — the culture produced within the vaunted “religion of peace” has serious social issues with the rest of the world.

And it can’t stand to hear about them.

After so much delving into contributing cultures and history, Haider makes this general observation, which I feel should be taken to heart:

“In all these forms of contact — individual, tribal, and civilizational — supremacy of one over the other, i.e., ascendancy of one sex over the other, of one tribe over the other, or of one civilization over the other, is a bad arrangement.  It is less productive and cannot hold forever.  It has been observed that if clash is less frequent than kindness, in these forms of relationships, the resulting posterity is healthier and happier.  The concept of dominance seems to be the less developed form of behavior in human history.  That is perhaps why all doctrines and philosophies of wisdom preached against it.” (p. 174).

I would suggest our species more gregarious than not and altogether more inclined toward real goodness and good relationships than not.

However, be that as it may, a little farther on in a chapter titled, “Hate the Jew: And Do Not Ask”, Haider notes, “The tragedy does not lie in the inability of Muslims to learn or think” — here I interrupt to note my friends do learn and do think, wonderfully, but they may be neither representative of all nor few, a subject to be taken up at another time . . . but back to Haider’s telling sentence — “it lies in the absolute dominance of Islamic dogma that has been carefully defended, so that no critical approach could ever raise a finger . . . .  In Saudi Arabia, even now geocentric astronomy is taught as syllabus; Abdul Rahman bin Baaz, the head of Medina University received award of merit for his thesis that the Earth is static while the Sun and the Moon move.”

I believe the veracity of Haider’s anecdotal evidence.

Those who believe Abdul Rahman bin Baaz’s theory would seem capable of believing anything, not that anyone dare tell them that.

Reference

American Psychiatric Association. Personality disorders. In: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc; 2000:717-731.

Ali, Jasim.  “Sweeping economic impact of the Haj.”  Gulf News, November 7, 2011.

Altaf, Waseem.  “We need multiple measures to start a return: Mobarak Haider.”  Viewpoint, n.d.

Ambardar, Sheenie and David Bienenfeld.   “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”  Medscape Reference, updated May 24, 2011.  (References 2000 DSM-IV-TR).

Kreger, Randi.  “Don’t Diss the Narcissists!”  Psychology Today, May 24, 2010.