Tag Archives: dictatorship

FTAC – Muslims – “No to Hatred, No to Violence, No to Terrorism”

17 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Politics

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On Monday, The Independent had run a piece online by Matt Payton titled, “More than 30,000 Muslims from across the world meet in the UK to reject ISIS and Islamic extremism” (August 15, 2016).  Some in the Awesome Conversation were pleased by the sight of women in full abaya holding placards reading

NO TO HATRED
NO TO VIOLENCE
NO TO TERRORISM

The things the “Islamists” do go against the grain of humanity — that’s just how I feel about that criminality — and the appropriate response by Muslims is repudiation.

What next?

Cultural blending, differentiation, and separation — there’s wisdom in recognizing and maintaining boundaries and margins in a world supporting about 7,000 living languages and what each represents. (Note that Putin plays the ethnolinguistic cultural defense and evolution card _against_ political boundaries, effectively violating margins. Also: Back-Channels credits Assad with the incubation of ISIS through deselection for bombing and combat earlier in Syria and also notes that Russia continues to maintain Soviet Era relationships with at least Hamas, Hezbollah, and PFLP. Muslims have not only to repudiate the fascist ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood organizations — that’s in that “No” to hatred, violence, and terrorism — but also to grasp Moscow’s role in the grooming and manipulation of such organizations as weapons focused toward the modern democracies).

Posted to YouTube by the Daily Mail, Aug. 4, 2016.

BackChannels argument that Assad incubated ISIS rests on a Newsweek report and successive and validating news coverage coming out of the Syrian Conflict and Tragedy.

In the following video clip, President Putin notes, “That if you would like to stop the flow of migrants into Europe, if you want for them to live in their own countries, then you must return sovereignty to those countries where it has been taken away.”

Think about that.

Under whose sovereign command were Syrian children arrested and tortured in 2011?

Whose sovereign air force “barrel bombed” Syrian noncombatants?

Because of the incubating of ISIS as useful tool, BackChannels has long regarded the “Syrian Conflict and Tragedy” as a complete theater of politics and war managed off the post-Soviet Moscow hub, i.e., by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei, and by each to their own advantage but the common cause of sustaining medieval political absolutism in their respective states.

Different Talks?

Same Walk.

Perhaps this is where that “walk” always leads:

Posted to YouTube by RT, January 20, 2016.

Under whose sovereignty were the airplanes flown, the tanks driven?

At time mark 1:44 on President Putin’s April 2016 St. Petersburg address, the President says of western criticism and opprobrium associated with both the incursion in Crimea and the conduct of the Syrian Civil War, “They realised that such destructive behaviour against our country was never going to work but nevertheless they’d like to silence our success.”

With a small nod toward conciliation, one may note of the YouTube video of Homs and the link immediately following that leads to an L.A. Times piece about the city that it had indeed been occupied by rebel forces and would be subject to state assault.  Nonetheless, the intertwined battles for Syria and against the open democracies of the west have not gone so well for Moscow and its clients IF measured by areas of control, community wellbeing, and economic contribution or so many other benchmarks familiar where peace prevails and governments abet development.

Links

http://www.businessinsider.com/nearly-80-of-russias-syria-strikes-dont-target-isis-2015-10 – 10/22/2015

http://syriadirect.org/news/russian-jets-purportedly-target-relatives-of-fsa-affiliated-fighters-on-jordan-border/ – 7/13/2016:

“There were families members of Usud a-Sharqiya there,” said spokesman Younis Salama. “But does that justify them bombing the camp?”

Jaysh Usud a-Sharqiya primarily fights the Islamic State in Syria’s eastern desert region.

Last month, Russian aircraft reportedly targeted another FSA group, the New Syrian Army, in Deir e-Zor province. Moscow did not comment on either attack.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-schoolboys-began-the-syrian-revolution/ – 4/26/2011:

The local secret police soon arrested 15 boys between the ages of 10 and 15, detaining them under the control of Gen. Atef Najeeb, a cousin of President Bashar al-Assad.

In a gloomy interrogation room the children were beaten and bloodied, burned and had their fingernails pulled out by grown men working for a regime whose unchecked brutality appears increasingly to be sowing the seeds of its undoing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Syrian_Civil_War_barrel_bomb_attacks

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FTAC – A Note on Global Consciousness and Conscience

04 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, International Development, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics

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There is no justice.

There is money.

There SHOULD be conscience, principles, virtues, and values tempering HOW we earn / produce money and apportion its spending, but nature has no rules and languages within which we culturally define and suspend ourselves may offer or encourage awful options for channeling behavior.

Juxtapose the Glory of the Sochi Winter Olympics with the then Early Destruction of Syria.

For the tyrant and the civilization represented: what’s wrong? Where’s the problem?

The mass murdering of challengers and rivals confirms power.

That’s natural, isn’t it?

Of course, it’s not the only way to go, and the developed open societies and diversified economies of the west have proven that.

Perhaps our experience of the world only picks up the reflection of the character of its global business and political elites.

The talk-about inspiration for the post was a piece by Kevin Sieff on Luanda, Angola appearing in The Washington Post, August 2, 2016: “An oil boom made it the most expensive city in the world.  Now it’s in crisis.”  The poster had complained about petro-state corruption and celebrity perfidy in accepting gigs at private parties paying $2 million in fee.

(Perhaps BackChannels and its editor should take a break right about here — and both may but will forge on another moment).

Who is to say that states from Angola to Burma to Moscow to Tehran should not be feudal or medieval in character?

Should there not be dictators — or other singular powerful personalities — who build worlds around themselves and produce spectacles — in Syria, an entire theater of politics and war — for others?

The “responsive and responsible” governments of democratic open societies (of the west — but, really, anywhere similar ideals and related practices prevail), don’t just obtain money and spend it capriciously or selfishly, and while they certainly produce in their constituencies people who would do that, they may also demand greater virtue on the part of their own business and political elites.

In the modern atmosphere, economic development and urban and rural planning PLUS the integration of public and private interests in development becomes so common and transparent as to become invisible to most people most of the time.

The modern Everyman need not worry about roads and sewers, water pipes, electrical supply, and communications infrastructure  and all other such basic building blocks because all contribute some (and many do work in related industries) all of the time.

Boom-and-bust has always been the rule for mining towns and “petro states” but more responsible spending around them may also ease conditions when prices fall or the lode done run out.

The modern communities of Democratic open societies get a very different effect from that kind of broadened cooperation and inclusion.

Posted to YouTube October 20, 2014.

Result: no “ghost towns” — real ones or sets — that aren’t productive.

And fun!

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FTAC – On Putin & Associates’ Search for Medieval Absolute Power

25 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Russia

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Moscow – Putin | Putin, Assad, Khamenei | Putin, Orban | Putin, Erdogan (never mind the superficial enmity and differences in “talk”) — supports political absolutism in relation to the malignant narcissism evident in the personalities of related leaders (like Orban, like Erdogan). For this reason, Putin has encourage both Far Left and Far Right political organizations and personalities; it is why his government has hosted PFLP (2014) and continues to refuse to condemn Hezbollah and Hamas. The form of power wanted by dictators — different talks: same walk — is the power to visit suffering on others with impunity. On the cheerful side of that 🙂 — the acquisition of unlimited narcissistic supply. Whatever the west’s own issues may be with business, corruption, and crime, the power-distributing and power-checking political systems threaten the “malignant narcissist” — the autocrat, the absolutist — and that’s really what their battles are about. The power of the special sovereign / great leader has its place in Russian history but is by no means confined to Russia. In fact, I think feudal despotism more the way of the world, even if one hopes not its only future, than checked-and-distributed political power, and that at least two NATO states feature illiberal autocrats as heads of state — Hungary and Turkey — tells what the argument is really about: i.e., Medieval Absolute Power vs Modern Checked and Distributed Power.

The paragraphs may grow shorter as I retype and recast BackChannels’ main themes.

Why do dictators do what they do?

Ah, pride — but pride that compensates and covers psychic injury.  Terms of art may include the following:

Narcissistic mortification

Malignant and Reparative Narcissism — I would refer to this as “narcissistic pathing” or channeling.

Narcissistic Supply — that approving roar of the crowd.

Unlimited Narcissistic Supply — Ah, glorious, unless you have found yourself on the Great Leader’s wrong side, i.e., somewhere in the opposition.

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Breathtaking Doublespeak Out of Turkey’s Countercoup

20 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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The following appeared in The Washington Post yesterday (Turkey is expected to curb military power as purge expands”), but not so juxtaposed:

“The counter-coup is not over yet,” said Soner Cagaptay, a Turkey expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He said he believes that Erdogan is using the coup attempt as a “one-time window” to consolidate power and lead Turkey toward being a single-party state.

&

“But the president also made clear a couple of other things,” Earnest said. “The first is that the United States doesn’t support terrorists, the United States doesn’t support individuals who conspired to overthrow democratically elected governments. The United States follows the rule of law.”

The first paragraph has to do with a policy analyst’s prognosis for Turkey as an open democracy, the kind more familiar to Washington than to Moscow.

The second — the speaker is White House press secretary Josh Earnest — indicates Washington’s equivocal stance toward Turkish President Erdogan’s consolidation of power with Fethullah Gulen as a “chip” being played in the diplomacy.

So the United States “doesn’t support individuals who conspired to overthrow democratically elected governments”.

How “democratically” was Morsi elected in Egypt — and how democratic proved his administration?

Perhaps it was best the Egyptian people answered with their army, and the Muslim Brotherhood has been rightly purged from power in Egypt.

Similar dynamics apply to coup and countercoup in Turkey, which to BackChannels looks awfully manipulated in the state’s favor before it began, but that’s another story for exploration in a later post.

For the time being, Washington promotes “rule of law” — but look at how Turkey’s ruler has treated the same concept to effectively suppress the same throughout his nation and invest it all in . . . himself.

It appears that in Erdogan’s idea of the Turkish state, what democracy was designed to prevent it has instead enabled.

Addendum – Additional Reference

CBS/AP.  “More arrests as Turkish leader tightens the noose.”  July 21, 2016:

The detentions reported by Anadolu news agency come hours after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared a three-month state of emergency that is expected to expand the crackdown.

Already, nearly 10,000 people have been arrested while hundreds of schools have been closed. And nearly 60,000 civil service employees have been dismissed from their posts since the failed coup Friday.

Newton, Jennifer.  “Now Turkey suspects 15,000 TEACHERS over ties to Fethullah Gulen as Erdogan demands US hand the cleric over.”  Daily Mail, July 19, 2016.

RFE/RL.  “More Arrests In Turkey As State Of Emergency Takes Effect.”  July 21, 2016:

Nearly one-third of Turkey’s roughly 360 serving generals have been detained. The Defense Ministry is investigating all military judges and prosecutors and has suspended 262 of them, broadcaster NTV reported, while 900 police officers in Ankara were also suspended on July 20.

Turkey’s education system has been hit particularly hard during the ongoing crackdown. The Education Ministry on July 20 added more than 6,500 new names to the list of 15,200 school employees suspended, state media reported.

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Dictatorships – Putin’s, Erdogan’s – ‘Different Talks – Same Walk’

17 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Fast News Share, Political Psychology, Politics, Turkey

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Seldom nor so perfectly has the pot called the kettle black as at this moment.  “Failed Turkey Coup May Signal Beginning of the End for NATO” crows Sputnik News:

The failed coup attempt in Turkey led by a faction of the military seeking the overthrow of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan citing the leader’s abysmal record on free speech, democratic freedoms, and human rights may be the final death knell for both NATO and the European Union who are holding onto the increasingly undemocratic leader for dear life.

Mirror, please.

When it comes to freedom of the press, Moscow fairly owns the other category — “state-controlled press” — and one may suppose poor Erdogan will just have to catch up (even though he may not have far to go).

Human rights?

Again, Russia (okay: Moscow-Damascus-Tehran) kills it (if it’s moving) in the Syrian Tragedy, the world’s most magnificent display — from Assad’s barrel bombs to Baghdadi’s beheadings — of contemporary barbarism.

How About “Rule of Law”?

Chaika.

Of course, it’s complicated and funny in a very serious way.

Also online:

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/13489/putins-judicial-vertical-russian-rule-of-law-takes-a-step-backward – 1/14/2014.

As perhaps echoes the Egyptian experience with Islamism in force, factions of the Turkish military may have harbored more of the values of modern and democratic life than the democratically elected “malignant narcissist” brought into power and attempted a coup (if the situation was not manipulated by Erdogan himself to strain out of the military the last of his opposition in that estate).  Quite unlike the Egyptian experience, which appeared to have brought the very nation out into the streets in support of its military, the Turkish coup has failed, giving Russia finger-wagging power to point to NATO’s support of a dictatorship not unlike Russia’s own.

Putin’s Russian Nationalism : Erdogan’s Sunni Islamism: Different Talks – Same Walk.

Ak_Saray_-_Presidential_Palace_Ankara_2014_002.jpg

“White Palace” – “Presidential Palace”, Ankara, 2014 – by Ex13, Wikimedia Commons.

BBC Europe reports, “Turkey has arrested 6,000 people after a failed coup, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowing to purge state bodies of the “virus” that caused the revolt.”

Way back in March, journalist Dexter Filkins writing for The New Yorker had reported on “Erdogan’s March to Dictatorship in Turkey”.

“Not long after his initial election, Erdoğan’s agents embarked on a large and sinister campaign to destroy his political opponents, jailing hundreds—journalists, university rectors, military officers, aid workers—on trumped-up charges and fabricated evidence,” Filkins wrote — and wrote some more about the arrests of journalists, the taking over of opposition press, the delivery of arms to Jabhat al-Nusra (an al-Qaeda affiliate), the easy go with ISIS in favor of unleashing his military against Kurdish interests.

Other journalists have weighed in with similarly cogent observations.

Alon Ben-Meir, Consortium News, May 13, 2016:

Not surprisingly, once Erdogan assumed the Presidency, he continued to chair cabinet meetings and even established a shadow cabinet with a handful of trusted advisers. He pointedly sidelined Davutoglu, who quietly resented Erdogan’s usurpation of the role and responsibility of the prime minister as if nothing had changed.

The premiership became a ceremonial post and the ceremonial presidency became the all-powerful office without a formal constitutional amendment to legally grant him the absolute authority he is now exercising.

Reuters (with staff contributors listed at the bottom of the piece), January 20, 2016:

A Turkish court on Wednesday sentenced a female teacher to almost a year in prison for making a rude gesture at President Tayyip Erdogan at a political rally in 2014, local media reports said on Wednesday.

Insulting public officials is a crime in Turkey, and Erdogan, the country’s most popular but most divisive politician, is seen by his critics as intolerant of dissent and quick to take legal action over perceived slurs.

Today’s Telegraph UK has laid out the timeline of the attempted coup and listed the sorry statistics involving general arrests, the slaughter overnight (“265 killed”), soldiers imprisoned, and judges facing arrest.

Breaking in Fox News: “Detention orders were filed for 53 more judges and prosecutors while 52 military officers were rounded up for their alleged roles in the plot, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency reported.”

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FTAC – Clarity – An Observation About Russian Feudalism and the Middle East Conflict

30 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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The “single state” solution fails not for enmity but for comprehension of what is represented by the Hebrews living in the land of the Hebrews.

Language as a cultural technology evolves within a people in somewhat isolated social space sufficient to invent their way of getting along among themselves and with the surrounding earth. For each ethnolinguistic cultural cohort on the planet, there is a land, a someplace, from whence it came.

So the Hebrews are back in the Land of the Hebrews: Israel. There are also Baloch, Pashtun (“B’ni Israel”, self-defined), and Kurds who have a relationship with the land that made them, and they too have some political issues involving their autonomy and survival as a people.

The Jordanian Arabs and the migrant workers caught between armies in 1948 have been deeply manipulated by powerful forces within and outside of Arab culture. The Russian KGB’s invention of Arafat, an Egyptian, and the PLO either is or should be history well known to scholars who have devoted themselves to studying and solving the “middle east conflict” (never the others ongoing — and “hot” — at the moment). The contemporary and feudal Russian story, that which has had Mikhail Bogdanov entertaining PFLP in Moscow (Nov. 2014) while the state refuses to acknowledge either Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, should be taken into account.

It’s not the Israelis or Palestinian People (again: somewhat isolated in time and space — long enough to create new language 🙂 ) who sustain the middle east conflict: all along, it has been those who misinform, mis-educate, and maliciously “program” socially captive innocents in service to their own feudal-medieval aggrandizement (and financial enrichment).

This blog now has plenty of data for backing up its opinion about what has created and what sustains the “Middle East Conflict (MEC)”.  From the vicious narcissism that would hold refugees in camps (Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt) and separated from general state populations (a genuinely apartheid policy) to the Soviet distribution of anti-Semitic propaganda and, yes, the invention of Arafat, the MEC has come to represent medievalism at its greed-laden best.

Look into UNRWA spending and tunnel smuggling, and then take another look at who got the loot.

We know who didn’t get wealthy.

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Video

FTAC – ‘This is Moscow’s Game’

29 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

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This is Moscow’s game.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1*

Today, Putin plays “ends against the middle” by supporting Far Right and Far Left movements and personalities; he indulges in breathtaking political theater — Sochi or Syria, both have been about demonstration of political values; and he’s ruthless (poor Assad), enough so to have engineered through influence the incubating of ISIS (for the production “Assad vs The Terrorists”) and the creation of an EU / NATO stressing immigrant headache, to which the Brits have responded and played directly into his bid to keep restored feudal political absolute power.

Related in the news: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/06/29/post-brexit-the-u-k-is-in-its-worst-political-crisis-since-1940-and-the-e-u-may-be-about-to-unravel/ – 6/29/2016.

Most of the public will keep Putin’s feudal revanche in Russia separate from the issues attending the Great Britain – European Union split, but the general weakening of the European Union and NATO would seem fit to his own image of himself as the unassailable primary political force in a state suspended between a secret police organization (FSB) to whom he refers to as the “New Nobility”, himself, and the financial oligarchy that he controls.

*In the above cited and linked video, attend to Moscow’s creation of a conflict that it chooses to manage from both sides.

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FTAC – A Response to Advocacy for Putin’s Russia

27 Friday May 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Ukraine

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Re. democracies and monarchies: a dozen European states remain monarchies but tempered by their democratic complements in power (parliamentary systems).

Re. bigotry in the west — the point is the people fight it in concert with their governments. The real tension is between ethnolinguistic cultural majorities and their interest in preserving themselves and evolving as they themselves determine. As much has given rise to what I call the “New Nationalism” and, like Viktor Orban in Hungary, “New Nationalists”. Those on the Far Right in relation to those movements are often anti-Semitic, which goes with the defensiveness and, probably, patronage. Even in Hungary, however, such as Jobbik may become prominent but make the final climb into political leadership.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/a-note-on-hungarys…/

With Jobbik in Hungary, the revision is just weird, but explained some by the persistence of Soviet politics in the post-Soviet Era.

Regarding Ukraine, Alexander J. Motyl has been arguing for the ceding of Donbas, but it’s not about being Russian in any case. The truth is ordinary people resent state-enabled criminality and related criminal aggrandizement. Yanukovych worked to get himself shoved out of office, and some of Russian heritage with whom I’ve spoken — and some I have read about in Grigas’s book, resent being used by Moscow as “compatriots”. The claim of protection is seen as a pretext for aggression that either expands or strengthens Russia’s area of control and influence or that results in a “frozen conflict” lending itself to criminal enterprise (where there is no effective and functioning sovereign, there’s a lot of space available for mischief).

Even while posting about Nadiya Savchenko’s liberation, I have wondered about both inherent and legacy politics plus what the effect of fame and public interest may have on her political vision as she necessarily updates herself.

In the British sphere, I’ve unconditionally accepted Naz Shaw’s “turnaround” or present stance and, with either, her repudiation of the anti-Semitic facet of the Labour Party.

Finally, regarding criminality, we have all got some vanity, and our personal mixes of “reparative” and “malignant” narcissism generally fill out a moderate life. With the criminal class, immoderation becomes either desirable or habitual, partly because of what we think of as criminal has lost its brakes in conscience, busted through normative boundaries, and, here invoking the Islamic concept, “exceeded limits.” When these people are small and surrounded by a lawful society, the wind up in jail; when they’re large, they may go a long time in business before hitting any walls; and in politics, they can ruin states — and they do that in profound ways.

The want of the power to impose suffering on innocent others with impunity becomes, I believe, a facet of that political criminality we call “dictatorship”. It’s not just the firm hand that one may dislike to the point of loathing: it’s the dispensing of sadism that comes through those that the good find aberrant and abhorrent.

Welcome to Virtually New World.

Now that we’re all here and furiously chatyping, what are we (and leaders old and new) going to do with it?

We may try to recognize some things we don’t like about our Newest Age.

Also deeply related on this blog: “Why the Jews?”, a piece that is at bedrock about one human response to “absolute power” — within which concept BackChannels would include the power to make others suffer with impunity — that has worked its way around the world.

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