The most general thing that might be done with Syria has to do with the development of the Army of the Middle Temperament, which General Idris possibly represented. The reality is it’s not going very well, and the deeply fragmented character of revolutionary forces (anti-Assad) may be additionally hampered by anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, anti-western thought . . . in short a whole complex of attitudes and beliefs that having made clear what the revolution is against — i.e., the Assad dictatorship and the horror it has brought to Syria, and the entire free world is against that (by reduction: the kleptocratic Putin-Assad-Khamenei art of power) — it may be having a more difficult time articulating what it is FOR.
Perhaps much of the twisting nature of the conflict may be approached in terms of the divide or split between traditional loyalties, including that implied by Arab pan-nationalism, and dawning principles about mankind. It takes a lot of work on the inside to become coherent about what the revolution is fighting for. The extremists have a ready-made program, or believe they day, but they are of the same malignantly narcissist personality as the Assad regime.
The reader may imagine the prompt for the comment.
Of course, what is happening to Syria and the Syrian People in their totality has to stop.
Getting power to the people, however, proves just about impossible given 1) the fragmentation of the revolution, 2) the requirement that a revolution must be fought FOR the installation of better ideas and healthier people as well as against a tyrannical presence, and then 3) in the less than perfect world, with good relationships forged atop strong foundations, the kind of commitment to common cause sorely compromised by the self-defeating habit of a heady contempt and enmity for others who might have been more helpful otherwise.
If there were a “true religion” God, perhaps, would have created fewer of them for waging wars that seem to pit all against all. However, despite mankind’s many religions and near 7,000 living languages, there may be a sufficient progressive tendency to bond toward the mild, moderate, and virtuous middle however we may conceive — of have conceived — of the meaning of our existence. Developing that bond, tending toward good, minimizing the power and impact of dogmatic absolutists may be our common struggle.
While mentioning the Soviet, now post-Soviet, vision accompanied by the familiar oligarchies of kleptocrats mad for power and wealth (and their display), one should not overlook elements of the Christian mythos in Hitlerism and its propagation in the Muslim world during and after World War II. This old fighting is not only or always about belief and religion: it is about the language-shaped character of humanity and the idea of human virtue and dimensions, ideals, and values associated with the same, e.g., “dignity, equality, fraternity”; human rights, equal justice; the balance between communitarianism and individualism; idealism itself.
As some doors may open on a new world, others may close, and we hope — I hope together we hope — that the door closes firmly over time on absolutism, dictatorship, terrorism, and totalitarianism.
Pretty words.
Across social divides, the human heart suffers from a sympathetic astigmatism: “the good” are in about the same place emotionally — please stop the fighting! — but also a different place for each language-informed and poetry-embracing mind and spirit. Nonetheless, the horror meted out in such as the Syrian Civil War, where the razory madness of a brutal dictatorship matched to an implacably evil fascist religious movement — just set all those millions in the middle aside for a moment — have been out on full display, tells that an end is wanted and the vision need not be Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or atheist or Arab or anything other than the largest possible human response to the twin obscenities of the unrestrained greed and sadism of the unconscionable and ruthless.
Now return to those millions traumatized at least, displaced most likely, maimed at worst — although the worst, the dead, number beneath the first million on the grim statistician’s abacus — and their inability to date to grapple with the twinned evils noted. They can do it, they can stand up on their own land, but only if — IF — they can arrange themselves with others, including those they may have believed competitors, enemies, rivals, and threats.
As with Syria, so the world: the want is for a bonded middle force that today does not exist.
Attitude-belief systems have organic qualities. The Assad regime believes it owns Syria and Syrians on an absolute autocratic and kleptocratic basis; opposition leadership within the Syrian National Coalition, however, carries forward the intellectual poison that is anti-Semitism masked as anti-Zionism plus, reverse engineer it, an Islamic contempt for the world that isn’t itself, i.e., other than Muslim. To traverse the distance from the defensive position they’re in (as trapped between Putin-Assad-Khamenei and assorted bands with varying affiliation or affinity or practical alliance with Islamic Jihad, they have got to do some things within their own poetics or intellectual programming. While they discover, mull, or wait on that, they’re living through a hell that will not recede if either Assad or Islamic Jihad ascend to clear “victory” of any kind.
If attitudes (about others) are predicated on beliefs, which have affect (+/-) and structure in terms of primacy — some beliefs are more fundamental to self-concept than others — then revisiting the earliest linguistic “wiring” or programming demands effort on the part of the soul so slowly but with certainty poisoned.
With extremes provided by a tyrant on one hand and Islamic Jihad on the other, the state of affairs on the field seems impossibly inverted: one would think an inclusive, responsive, and responsible democratic way would have been embraced and pursued by most Syrian, but even if embraced, most Syrians caught unprepared for civil war have fled the fighting and those remaining “in-country” may not dare to speak so, again, captive between armies and uncertain as regards who might prevail.
In Syria, the center simply did not hold.
Of late, some online have conflated the inhumanity of the Assad regime with “genocide” even though the Assad cause is Assad and not particularly focused on any single ethnic, racial, or religious community. The bastards — the dictator “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” — stand together against the aspiring democratic forces (we could have a talk about that phrase as well) that would undo them and their type permanently.
While the revolution in the field bogs down with some escalation in firepower — Russian tanks vs American TOWs — the revolution in the heart seems barely to have gotten a start.
To my Syrian friends, whether established or latent, I would suggest this epigram (doctors write prescriptions –poets must make do with witty remarks): “The whole world may be against what you are against; however, the whole world may be also against what you are for.”
What does Syrian liberation mean . . . now?
What are “moderate” Syrian forces for?
It’s not ping-pong (although I do my sharing of “pinging”) going on in Syria or in Washington’s diplomatic circles. These matters in political psychology — about national and personal self-concept, about motivation, about attitude-belief systems and their suspension within language and its social grammar — may have an as yet unformed weight as powerful as barrel bombs and Russian tanks.
Syrian attitudes toward Jews and Israel, also “the west” — all that hateful politics — may temper or discipline outsider reception, but that does not keep the spectacle of the aftermath — or in the second video around Jobar, the recording of combat footage — from being unutterably sad.
One may put a price on reconstruction — demolition, recovery of materials, regrading, pouring new platforms, setting in new infrastructure and roads, the redevelopment of some kind of society, and God please make it a better, more human, more modern one, even Jew-friendly — but one cannot account the lives that once animated every inch of space apparent in the above recordings.
There may be younger ethnic Russian Crimeans who wanted to stay in Ukraine, having never known any other country, he accepts. But he believes the “overwhelming majority” wanted reunification with Russia.
For him, Ukraine is a “wicked stepmother” who promised Crimean Russians a better life after independence in 1992, then “deceived” them. In all those 22 years, he says, he “never felt Ukrainian”.
The news seems full of reflection about Crimea, Ukraine, and Russia and how political life patches states together. What seems to me ugly beneath the surface of this interest are two themes: to what extent may or should nationalist ethnic and racial interests drive the definition of a state? The question is asked knowing well that all states have a majority population representing affiliation with an ethnic or religious body. The other question is whether human ideals and virtues can continue to inform the politics of powerful states when the same have been raided or shaped to serve military or monetary elites, who then operate the levers of the same with their own ambitions and appetites uppermost. a question that may apply as much in Crimea and Russia today as it may have and should have long ago in Syria.
If it has to do with mind, it has also to do with language and language culture, and that in turn has to do with listening behavior (programming) and learned expressive behavior (scripting). If that could not be changed, we would all be speaking Latin or Lithuanian.
Poets work to change the cultural and intellectual technology we call “language”; however, poets seldom agree on how one should read or listen (except in awe of their own overwhelming intellectual powers, perhaps) or what stance one should acquire in life and course take.
However, if conflicts were primarily about “whose programming” and “whose script”, they would peter out for the distribution of populations across the globe: as many as we are, Russia is not crowded, Mongolia is lonely, practically, and one may still find solitude within an hour or two of the boundaries of a great city. If “my kind vs your kind” drove conflict on the basis of proximity, I should think it India that would be constantly embroiled in fighting, but, no.
Today’s primary driver: criminal willfulness.
I want your land too.
I want the proceeds from your gas and oil wells and from your creativity and productivity in business, also your illegal tunnels, arms, and heroin trades, and perhaps too, your building rents.
It seems there’s a lot of wealth Out There for a few who have brought themselves up to do business with a grasping hand and a ready fist.
When it’s just one guy alone, call the cops or a psychiatrist and isolate the same in criminal or other institutional confines; when it’s one guy alone with an army, a treasury, and, perhaps, a state, cordon the country, send in humanitarian aid, trade with it delicately, and leave the same and the people of the place to miserable fate, although most tyrants who keep it in the house make it to old age and the privilege of dying in their sleep (I can’t name any but could put a few dictators on the waiting list for that).
When the whole culture has gone sociopath rotten, THEN someone might want to fiddle with the sound of the music of the language seducing their ears. Perhaps as children they should not have listened so meekly or passively to garbage; perhaps they are living a bad dream — as bad as it gets in Syria, in the Central African Republic, in Somalia, etc. — and need to wake up either to their better humanity or to their tormentors.
Earlier this month, Richard Spencer writing for The Telegraph took note of a recent tweet out of Syria:
Here is what one jihadist wrote recently as a caption to a photograph of some blindfolded captives: “Got these criminals today. Insha’Allah will be killed tomorrow. Cant wait for that feeling when U just killed some1.”
Hormones, one might say, with naturally unstable young teenagers.
With adults, I would suggest that as children, even as infants, they picked up on something early, later heard or read something to add to it, and then in their late teens and early twenties and beyond arrived somewhere to play a part in an inside-out theater and thereby fulfill their programming and their scripting.
A week before the vote just 41 percent of Crimeans wanted their land to be a part of Russia, yet the returns came back showing 96.6 pecent approval. The electoral commission, such as it is, released numbers indicating 474,137 people voted in the port city of Sevastopol, which would be 123 percent of the registered population there.
Over the weekend about 5,000 pro-Russian protesters roamed central Donetsk in eastern Ukraine smashing doors and windows and forcing entry to government buildings.
By late Monday afternoon, Crimea’s leaders had stripped all references to Ukraine from the government’s website and made it clear that Ukrainian institutions, assets and state agencies in the peninsula now belonged to the Republic of Crimea.
I’ve doubts about the “long way around” — appeals for “diplomatic measures”, years to decades of protracted hot air (“negotiations”), the tolerance, first, then institutionalization of barbaric Russian imperial expansion.
Dictators are machines without brakes: they don’t stop on their own as self-restraint would seem not to become them.
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The main alarming uncertainty of this day is the fate of the Ukrainian military in Crimea. They are being presented with ultimatums and coerced into betrayal, but they keep standing firm. But their future is unknown, which is particularly frightening.
. . .
The good news:
1. The Ukrainian authorities finally announced partial mobilization. It came as a response both to the Crimean “referendum” and to the Moscow-provoked events in the Southeast of Ukraine.
Mobilization will simultaneously strengthen two armed formations with considerably different tasks – namely, the army and the National Guard. The former would be used to fight the enemy’s regular army, and the latter, to destroy gangs. This means that Kyiv is demonstrating that it’s preparing for all possible operations of Moscow, be it an armed invasion or the “Crimean scenario” (actions of the so-called “self-defense” supported by mysterious “little green men”). Such foresight on the part of Kyiv is reassuring.
The revolutionary government in Kiev knows well Russian duplicity, and, perhaps, it is learning about the relationship between post-WWII, post-Hitler European comfortableness, productivity, and to this date largely unchallenged security.
Apart from the infiltration of Islamic Jihad within overall Muslim migration, Europe has seen nothing like an old fashioned 19th Century military invasion — but it would seem its radars detect something like it now.
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As anger at the corrupt government expands through Russian society, the experience of Ukrainian revolutionaries could prove invaluable. It revealed that demonstrations led by activists willing to risk their lives can topple a regime that looks impregnable. Ukraine’s success might encourage similar attempts to unseat a corrupt Russian regime.
STUTTGART, Germany — NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Philip Breedlove asserted Tuesday that soldiers surrounding Ukrainian bases in Crimea are Russian forces, dismissing accounts that the troops are pro-Russia local militia.
“After extensive review of multiple information sources, we believe these are Russian military forces acting on clear orders to undermine Ukraine forces in Crimea,” Breedlove wrote in his blog, From the Cockpit.
It’s hard to believe that it has been a quarter of a century since Ronald Reagan began to dismantle the ideological wall that divided Europe. Harder still to believe that American politicians, Right and Left, are trying to resuscitate the Cold War — or something hotter. Recent events in the Ukraine seem to be giving the citizens of Europe and America hot flashes of deja-vu.
As with the Islamic Small Wars, of which Putin has made himself a part in the middle east’s unholy troika that is Putin-Assad-Khamenei, the European Theater with the curtain coming up on the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine revolves around the simplest of democratic open society concepts: integrity.
Putin, who appears to fit well the concept that is “malignant narcissist”, invests in deceits and lies, in under-the-table (“behind the curtains”) dealing, in control of entire information atmospheres. In the post-Soviet, post-KGB era, the ideology may have been thrown out the window but not the unbridled urge for absolute control and power over all others (and for the purpose of, yawn, obtaining unlimited “narcissistic supply”).
Today’s post-KGB FSB employs more staff per capita than the KGB; the media of Glasnost has returned to “glass? No!” as regards independence and rendering key elements within the state transparent.
Putin’s Russia is no more a benign dictatorship than would be a pirate’s cove dominating the Caribbean — or, look to that mansion in Marbella, Gibraltar.
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MOSCOW —Russia effectively absorbed Crimea Tuesday afternoon, moments after President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia has no designs on any other parts of Ukraine.
As Russia and the rest of the world move ever closer to a cold war footing over Vladimir Putin’s ill-advised Crimean invasion, an important dimension of this conflict has received scant coverage, in both Western and Russian media: how do Russian citizens feel about this escalating conflict?
Now, as Vladimir Putin sends troops into Crimea and hints at following up on this cruel gambit with further moves into eastern Ukraine, he is, step by step, turning back the clock on information. It is a move of self-protection. The latest step came on Wednesday, with the announcement that Galina Timchenko, the longtime and much admired editor of the news site Lenta.ru, has been fired, and replaced by Alexei Goreslavsky, the former editor of Vzglyad.ru, a site that is far more sympathetic to the Kremlin.
Ten years ago Christine Spolar reported on the Iraq war. Last month she returned to find her old colleagues and friends living in fear, and a city traumatised by spiralling violence
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