Here’s a suggested schematic for the big story behind so much indoctrination. Billionaires –> nationalist / religious state dictators –> control, enforcement, and expansion organizations that include elements that attend to intellectual development and resources, internal and external.
Out of that model and through separable national socialist and Islamist pipelines come old Fatah and Hamas and emerging Jobbik (Hungary) and obvious ISIS. At the evident top: Putin-Khamenei. Behind the scenes: extraordinarily wealth personalities much enriched by criminality in state politics.
The commandeering of intellectual resources, whether targeting the kindergarten or college campus, is a part of sustaining criminal power. Where audience is captive or deeply susceptible, indoctrination and training go deep, so much so that the poison turns the world upside down. Where less area (geopolitical space) is captive, then intellectual skirmishing takes place with perhaps discouraging results.
I think a part of the answer to kind of bigotry and conflict addressed here may be to drive highest-integrity information — most open, tested, reviewed, criticized, most probable, etc. — into otherwise closed societies and the minds that have been kept closed by them. “B” may be living in a world of lies and mirrors that she cannot see for having been deeply manipulated within it. Those who wish for peace, who want an honest future (and it may be different than immediately contemplated) may have to disassemble that intellectual wall.
A racket’s a racket.
Gold-flecked ice cream wasn’t part of the picture that Shiite Muslim clerics painted during the Iranian Revolution, when they promised to lift the poor by distributing the country’s vast oil income equally across society.
But more than three decades later, record oil profits have brought in billions of dollars, and some people here are enjoying that decadent dessert. The trouble is, it’s just a small group of wealthy Iranians. Despite the promises of the revolution, many here say the gap between rich and poor has never seemed wider.
The economy bears more than a little resemblance to the crony capitalism that sprouted from the wreck of the Soviet Union. The 1979 revolution expropriated the assets of foreign investors and the nation’s wealthiest families; oil had long been nationalized, but the mullahs seized virtually everything else of value–banks, hotels, car and chemical companies, makers of drugs and consumer goods. What distinguishes Iran is that many of these assets were given to Islamic charitable foundations, controlled by the clerics. According to businessmen and former foundation executives, the charities now serve as slush funds for the mullahs and their supporters.
Iran has other lethal secrets besides its nuclear program, now the subject of prying international eyes. Dozens of interviews with businessmen, merchants, economists and former ministers and other top government officials reveal a picture of a dictatorship run by a shadow government that–the U.S. State Department suspects–finances terrorist groups abroad through a shadow foreign policy. Its economy is dominated by shadow business empires and its power is protected by a shadow army of enforcers.
http://www.forbes.com/global/2003/0721/024.html – 7/21/2003.
More than political criminality and cronyism are at play here.
The intellectual subjugation of entire constituencies is thematic throughout the range of the Islamic Small Wars and now in the development of a post-Hitlerian nationalism and national socialism in relation to the Russian nationalist stance on which Putin has relied for popular legitimacy. Axes of power Khamenie-Putin and Putin-Orban (the same as would have been Putin-Yanukovych had there not been the revolution in Ukraine) and Putin-Assad represent the development and expansion of immense piratical wealth and power far at the expense of ordinary people.
So far, neither the European Union nor the United States nor anyone or anything else has gone so far as to explicate these drifts and relationships for popular overview although with Russia, the articles and books by academics and journalists have produced a handy few volumes for anyone’s home library (more on that later).
Related:
http://news.yahoo.com/bianna-golodryga-interviews-garry-kasparov-093317385.html – 9/30/2014.
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