Tag Archives: democracy

Active Measures

13 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Psychology

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As BackChannels Would Define It

Active Measures — The collection of Russian Agitation, Disinformation, and Propaganda Methods made evident through covert or subtle Influence Campaigns applied to wrecking the political coherence and cohesion of EU/NATO for the purpose of reestablishing Political Absolutism in the same and then using the most thuggish of feudal and medieval methods to leverage loyalty and wealth from them for contribution to the Greater Imperial Glory of Moscow, the Russian “mafia state” it has come to represent, and the immense enrichment of its oligarchy.

Indeed the west, the melange of classically liberal democratic open societies built and structured around fair dealing, freedom, and integrity and related humanist and liberal ethics, principles, and values has been unprepared for covert agent provocateur, e.g., covert agitators Far Right and Far Left, disingenuous publications, false front organizations, trolls, etc.

I’ve chosen to demur from producing “long copy” and a lengthy reference section for this post. Awareness of “Active Measures” — the kernel of Russia’s covert campaign to degrade and ruin the democracies of the west — should suffice for both the interested and the unwittingly vulnerable.

Related Online

Linville, Darren and Patrick Warren. “That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It.” Rolling Stone, November 25, 2019.

Lipton, Eric, David E. Sanger and Scott Shane. “The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.” The New York Times, December 13, 2016.

Shane, Scott. “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election.” The New York Times, September 7, 2017.

Wikipedia. “Active Measures”.

Addendum — From the Awesome Conversation

Through the Cold War Era and now with Putin leading the Russian Federation, the purpose of Soviet / post-Soviet “Active Measures” has been to fragment EU/NATO for the purpose of Russian expansion and its feudal practices. A video like this one — the same as above on this page — will help a little bit with understanding the greater east-west politics and the tension between the worlds of “Absolute Power” and the open democracies of the west.

Active Measures” represents an international (RF v EU/NATO) dispute over the future, not only an American one.

If we are at one the other’s throat, Moscow will have succeeded in exploiting our natural political arguments and issues by heightening them and undermining our national political cohesion and coherence, thereby weakening our state and degrading our democracy.

Regarding “Far Out Left” and equally distant Far Right tendencies, the related foreign and disingenuous domestic manipulations of political perception targets us all.

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George Will: Independent

05 Wednesday Jun 2019

Posted by in American Domestic Affairs, Books, Philosophy, Politics, United States of America

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Charles Lane: . . . . that brings us to the present day and present President whose name, by the way it’s Donald Trump, does not appear in your book. Now that can’t be an accident.

George Will: The names of Charlemagne and Audrey Hepburn and Duke Ellington don’t appear in the book either [Lane: That’s true] because this is a book about ideas and the current president is not part of that discussion. He has nothing to do with conservatism. He really to his credit has never pretended to be a conservative. He’s an entrepreneur in politics and he’s maximizing whatever he wants to maximize. This is a book about important arguments, and he’s not part of that.

Lane, Charles. “George Will wrangles with God, the conservative sensibility and the dangers of progressivism.” YouTube, 9:33-10:15. The Washington Post, June 2, 2019.
Posted to YouTube by Washington Post, June 2, 2019

BackChannels will leave to others, especially the young, familiarization with one of America’s most iconic of conservative opinion makers: George F. Will.

Curious about “important arguments”, BackChannels has made the purchase.

Related Online

East, Kristen. “George Will leaves the GOP”. Politico, June 25, 2016.

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/02/02/united-states-of-america-basic-training/

Also Related on YouTube

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Venezuela: Putin’s Choice

19 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, International Development, Political Psychology, Russia, South America, Venezuela

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Venezuela is of limited strategic importance to Russia, though it offers symbolic significance in demonstrating Putin’s reach into a region seen as Washington’s backyard. Russia doesn’t have the capacity to send forces there as it did to support Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, limiting itself to publicity stunts like a December visit by two nuclear-capable bombers.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-06/russia-starts-to-worry-maduro-s-grip-is-slipping-in-venezuela – 2/6/2019

Big Crayon BackChannels suggests that nominally socialist Venezuela indulged its leaders in breathtaking kleptocracy while failing to develop its oil industry with care and taking measures to free and diversify the licit potential of its national economy (for coverage of the illicit potential possessed by Venezuela’s present leadership, one may click over to InSight Crime‘s eight-part series, “Venezuela: A Mafia State?”).

Moscow reads the news too, and while perhaps absent of conscience but mindful of money, it’s confidence in the success of the political societies once aligned, captivated, or enthralled with their relationship to the Soviet may be dimming. While perhaps putting a “little” money in the under-the-table pockets of its own, it has also watched parts of Central and South American states churn into cesspool of competing cartels and gangs destroying communities, exporting the nasty — the full smorgasbord of contraband — and for hundreds of thousands producing flight en masse anywhere that hasn’t become a personal no-security hell. Now the chief Phantom of the Soviet appears to be having a look-see at the future of at least one portfolio of debt accumulated by a once ideologically favored son and the picture just isn’t so wonderful as it must have once appeared.

Related Online

Aris, Ben. “Russia’s National Wealth Fund can withstand one more crisis vows Kudrin.” bne Intellinews. August 22, 2018.

InSight Crime. “Venezuela: A Mafia State?” Eight-part series, May 16, 2018 to May 25, 2018.

Johnson, Keith. “How Venezuela Struck It Poor: The tragic — and totally avoidable — self-destruction of one of the world’s richest oil economies.” Foreign Policy, July 16, 2018.

Laya, Patricia. “Maduro’s Bid to Fly Gold Out of Venezuela is Blocked.” Bloomberg, February 1, 2019.

Meyer, Henry and Ilya Arkhipov. “Russia Starts to Worry Maduro’s Grip May Slip in Venezuela.” Bloomberg, February 6, 2019.

Paraskova, Tsvetana. “Russia Begins to Fear Maduro May Lose”. Oil Price, February 7, 2019.

Rapoza, Kenneth. “Could Russia Be Subject to Venezuela-Style Sanctions”” Forbes, February 19, 2019.

The Moscow Times. “Russia’s Reserve Fund Ceases to Exist: Budget deficits have exhausted the rainy day fund.” January 11, 2018.

Trading Economics. “Russia Cash Reserve Ratio”. Current.

Banning the trading of Russian bonds have been tossed around ever since Trump got elected. Anti-Russian politicians on both sides of the aisle have taken full advantage of Trump being caught in a Russian scandal to force the president to play super hardball with Vladimir Putin and anyone within a country mile of him.
Since taking office, Trump has already signed harsher sanctions against Russian individuals and Russian companies, making some of them extra-territorial. Extra-territorial means sanctions apply to non-U.S. citizens and entities transacting with the sanctioned firm subject to penalties.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2019/02/19/could-russian-bonds-be-subject-to-venezuela-style-sanctions/#9aa301d75664 – 2/19/2019

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Shameless Promotion –> Radical Acts of Love

05 Monday Nov 2018

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, American Domestic Affairs, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Fast News Share

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mlk-promo-01

mlk-promo-02

https://secure.civilrights.org/page/s/unite-against-hate

Signatories

Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council
NAACP
National Action Network
National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity (NAPE)
National Association of Human Rights Workers
National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund
National Association of Social Workers
National Center for Learning Disabilities
National Center for Transgender Equality
National Council of Jewish Women
National Council of Jewish Women, Pittsburgh
National Council of Teachers of English
National Disability Rights Network
National Down Syndrome Congress
National Employment Law Project
National Employment Lawyers Association
NATIONAL FAIR HOUSING ALLIANCE
National Immigration Law Center
National Legal Aid and Defender Association
National LGBTQ Task Force
National Organization for Women
National Partnership for Women & Families
National Urban League
National Women’s Law Center
New York City Anti-Violence Project
OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates
People For the American Way
PFLAG National
PolicyLink
SEIU
Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF)
South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT)
Southern Poverty Law Center
The Campaign to TAKE ON HATE
The Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law
The Sikh Coalition
The United Methodist Church-General Board of Church & Society
UnidosUS
Union for Reform Judaism
YWCA USA

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FTAC: Ocasio-Cortez: Re. The “Closed” Meeting

18 Saturday Aug 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Journalism, Political Psychology, United States of America

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Reference: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/08/17/ocasio-cortez-bans-press-from-covering-campaign-event.html

Stimulus: a Facebook-based accusation to the effect that Ocasio-Cortez will come to resemble Castro and other socialist dictators.

Baloney.

The event in question appears to have been designed for partisan listening and not for open public discourse:

——
She said the journalist ban “was designed to protect + invite vulnerable populations to PUBLIC discourse: immigrants, victims of domestic abuse, and so on.”

“We indicated previously that the event would be closed to press,” she said. “Future ones are open.”
——

I think all political organizations have the prerogative to determine their meeting doors open or closed to facilitate policy planning and research. To amplify the decision to avoid the media circus and actually listen to the underserved or, in some ways, people with problems that are nonetheless a part of our communities seems to me execrable — but if that’s the way Fox wants to operate, well that says a lot about Fox News.

BackChannels agrees with the explanation.

Dictators, not “isms”, have killed millions, and therefore having a look at the psychology of dictatorship — and the nature of disingenuous news personalities, lol, may be more helpful than the demonizing of a young American politician.

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FTAC: A Note on President Trump and the Prospect of a Feudal Modernity

11 Monday Jun 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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Trump’s support of Israel is about respect for tribal identification and the narcissism related to it. It matches Putin’s views of a renewed and sustained feudal world — a feudal modernity — featuring absolute authority, fated and unquestionable, placed in the future rather than left to history.

Accompanying that vision: a low-intensity war of re-conquest in Crimea, Ukraine and the tragic obscenity that has been made of Syria.

Most of us carry what we value of our pasts with us through life, but we try also to leave our futures open for good things to come.

These “malignarcs” (malignant narcissists), by comparison, wish to force the future forward into the past. Their personal visions — and behavior — have been dreadful, myopic, selfish as have been the habits, in lesser and greater measures, of caliphs, dictators, emperors, and feudal lords through time: for the mafia-type power and wealth, their methods, willful and thuggish, have been more known to history than those of democracy.  However, our Mr. Trump has a powerful employer and a job defining his position, and whether he personally likes it or not, he is duty-bound to promote democracy — the systems of checked and distributed power — against the political absolutism known to dictators.

As has been my habit with BackChannels, the titles promise greater and lengthier articles while format and inclination keep the verbiage down to a paragraph bloc.

Related on this blog —

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2018/04/04/ftac-reinforcement-reflexive-control-islamic-terrorism-and-perceived-threat-newest-nationalism-and-renewed-feudal-conflict/

With the public focused on the air assault of “9/11” (see the gems placed in reference) and numerous “Allahu Abkar” attacks worldwide across many years, the patriotic reaction has permanently altered the west’s political and security societies — and yet we wish to defend authentic democracies against the potential for the rise of the Orwellian police state and with it, indeed, a “new nobility”, an invisible, unimpeachable, unquestionable (“military-industrial”) aristocracy.

Reference: Related on the Web

http://www.businessinsider.com/exploring-al-qaedas-murky-connection-to-russian-intelligence-2014-6 – 6/10/2014

http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/02/security-brief-russia-providing-arms-to-taliban-chinas-global-kidnapping-campaign/ – 4/2/2018

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Changing Time for All Time: A Note on Antietam

22 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, United States of America

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Visitor's Center, Antietam National Battlefield Park, Sharpsburg

Visitor’s Center, Antietam National Battlefield Park, Sharpsburg, Maryland, June 1, 2017.

For visitors from other lands, the small patch of Maryland countryside on which the center has been planted represents the beginning of the end of slavery as an institution in the United States of America. In one horrific days of battle, General McClennan’s forces pushed General Lee’s Confederate army from the field but left it also to retreat west across the Potomac River and thence to fight a long war that would end about where it began but with the moral vision and structure of the country forever changed in favor of equality under the law and “liberty and justice for all”.

It takes a long time to change men — and to change their attitudes and beliefs about money and about one another. My America remains a work in progress, but as long as the work hews to the liberal view of man and the earnest distribution of political power through democracy accompanied by integrity, I think we Americans — and everyone else — will continue getting better in the building or forming of greater societies.

Where we have let people down, I’m sure we are going to be made to remember it. Where we have helped people up, one may hope we’ll be remembered for that too.

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Will the West Abandon Its Kurdish Allies in the Battle Against ISIS as Well as Their Efforts to Produce a Democratic Modern State?

12 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Kurdistan, North America, Politics, United States of America

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America: have you no dreams, faith, ideals, memories, values?

One cannot argue with the Soviet origins of the PKK — nor today it’s probable conflation with “TAK” terrorists operating occasionally in Turkey — and the long-term effects of the Kurdish-Russian relationship that is today being leveraged by a potentially genocidal (proven once — has the world to see it again proven?) Turkish and neo-Islamist authoritarian state.  However, modern Kurdistan and the “Rojava Experiment” with liberal democracy may be more “western” than commonly acknowledged.

Kurdish-PolitParties

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Kurdish_organisations

Credit Turkish President Erdogan with Soviet-style defamation when he frames all Kurds as action-producing PKK terrorists.

Credit American Revolutionary memory to with what had to be brought together to overcome an avaricious king and to mark its first steps on the road to becoming not only self-governing but uniquely so as the redoubt of freedom from all political and religious tyrannies.

The Kurdish Community may need to advance its own inter-tribal cooperation and perhaps temper the power of its own autocrats to achieve meaningful, responsible, and responsible authentic democratic governance; however, both Moscow-Damascus and “Moscow-Ankara” would seem to be working to squeeze the community back into political impotence and from there out of existence.

Followers and readers with timely information and insight into the Kurdish community’s political makeup, its arrangements with other powers — including Russia and related energy projects — and its desire for autonomy, dignity, and freedom are welcome to contact the editor through the contact page and form on this blog.

“Kurdish YPG Engages ISIS In / Near Raqqa, Syria”

Posted to YouTube Dec. 18, 2017.

Additional Reference

Adalian, Rouben Paul.  “Turkey, Republic of, and the Armenian Genocide.”  Armenian National Institute, n.d.

Dominique, Callimanopulos.  “Kurdish Represseion in Turkey.”  Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, June 1982:

During Turkey’s war for independence, Turkish leaders, promised Kurds a Turkish-Kurdish federated state in return for their assistance in the war. After independence was achieved, however, they ignored the bargain they had made.

Months after the declaration of a Turkish republic, Ankara, under the pretext of creating an “indivisible nation,” adopted an ideology aimed at eliminating, both physically and culturally, non-Turkish elements within the Republic. These “elements” were primarily Kurdish and Armenian.

Letsch, Constanze.  “In Turkey, Repression of the Kurdish Language Is Back, With No End in Sight.”  The Nation, December 21, 2017:

On the night of December 31, 2016, 94 associations, including the institute, were shut down on allegations of “connections to terrorist organizations.” A month later, the authorities confiscated all documents, course materials, and hardware—computers, two projectors, a TV—as well as the school’s furniture. The institute’s website was taken down. In theory, the institute has the right to appeal the shutdown through a state-appointed commission, but human-rights organizations such as Amnesty International have criticized it as insufficient, as more than 100,000 cases are pending review by just seven commissioners within a two-year deadline.

Ismael, Yousif.  “Once again, Turkey Refuses Solutions in the Syrian Civil War.”  Washington Kurdish Institute, September 21, 2017.

Mohamad, Sinam.  “Once We Beat ISIS, Don’t Abandon Us.”  Op-Ed.  The New York Times, May 11, 2017.

Rice, Bill.  “America Must Live Up to Its Own Values and Support Kurdistan’s Independence.”  Washington Kurdish Institute, September 21, 2017.

Weiss, Stanley.  “It’s Time to Kick Erdogan’s Turkey Out of NATO.”  HuffPost, n.d.

For nearly seven decades, this combination of factors has been the potential Achilles heel of NATO: that one day, its members would be called to defend the actions of a rogue member who no longer shares the values of the alliance but whose behavior puts its “allies” in danger while creating a nightmare scenario for the global order.

After 67 years, that day has arrived: Turkey, which for half a century was a stalwart ally in the Middle East while proving that a Muslim-majority nation could be both secular and democratic, has moved so far away from its NATO allies that it is widely acknowledged to be defiantly supporting the Islamic State in Syria in its war against the West.

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/09/syria-assad-isil-background/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/23/moscows-rules-a-module/

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