Tag Archives: dictatorship

Turkish Autocrat Erdogan – On Track

19 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Turkey

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Posted to YouTube April 14, 2016.

Posted to YouTube March 31, 2016.

From the early sacking of the generals accustomed to the state that Kemal Ataturk bequeathed to the Turks to the latest and disingenuous assaults on the Kurdish People under the cover of fighting terrorism accompanied by something like the resurrection of the Kurdish PKK, a Marxist-infused movement dating back to the 1970s and long stalled in its ideological tracks but naturally mixed back into Kurdish politics, Turkish President Tayyip Recep Erdogan has pursued a course in action, behavior, and language more familiar to Moscow than to Washington.

Add in that grandiose residence, the “White Palace”, a mixed development Versailles, but with its private residential part supporting some 250 rooms set on a landscape dotted with at least a few $10,000 trees imported from Italy.

On this post, the related and additional reference sections and fair-use excerpts should provide plenty for reflection on Turkey as a NATO state that while fulfilling its military contract has drifted as a democracy far into authoritarianism.  Although the Moscow-Tehran axis blocks any chance of an Erdogan-Putin political “bromance” like that between Putin and Hungary’s Orban, who despite his state’s NATO membership has displayed the same drift toward authoritarian rule, Erdogan’s path remains the one that leads to dictatorship.

Related Reference — Freedom of the Press

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2015/turkey – “Turkey: 5-Year Decline in Press Freedom”: “Conditions for media freedom in Turkey continued to deteriorate in 2014 after several years of decline. The government enacted new laws that expanded both the state’s power to block websites and the surveillance capability of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT). Journalists faced unprecedented legal obstacles as the courts restricted reporting on corruption and national security issues. The authorities also continued to aggressively use the penal code, criminal defamation laws, and the antiterrorism law to crack down on journalists and media outlets.”

http://www.dw.com/en/security-for-turkeys-erdogan-scuffles-with-journalists-in-washington/a-19157072 – “Security for Turkey’s Erdogan scuffles with journalists in Washington”: “The president’s security detail removed one opposition Turkish reporter from the speech room, kicked another and threw a third to the ground outside the Brookings Institution, in a melee that provided Washington’s foreign policy elite a firsthand glimpse at the state of the press in Turkey.”  Note: In the United States, Secret Service details protect foreign heads of state.  However, it appears that Brookings, Erdogan’s own security detail may have made moves against would-be Erdogan critics.

Related Reference — Human Rights

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2015/country-chapters/turkey – “World Report 2015: Turkey – Events of 2014”

https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/europe-and-central-asia/turkey/report-turkey/ — “Turkey 2015/2016”

Additional Reference

Ben-Meir, Alon.  “Turkey’s Path to Dictatorship.”  Consortium News, March 10, 2016:

. . . Erdogan has used his strong Islamic credentials to project himself as a pious leader, when in fact he consistently engaged in favoritism, granting huge government contracts to those who supported him and to his family members, irrespective of conflicts of interest and the corruption that ensued as a result.

Filkins, Dexter.  “Erdogan’s March to Dictatorship in Turkey.”  The New Yorker, March 31, 2016.

Google Search.  “Erdogan, dictatorship” (last seen on date of this post’s publication).

Gursil, Kadri.  “Why Erdogan can’t end PKK war.”  Al-Monitor, April 5, 2016.

Human Rights Watch. “UN Committee against Torture: Review of Turkey
57th Session of the Committee against Torture.”  April 22, 2016:

The breakdown in 2015 of the government-initiated peace process with Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has been accompanied by an increase in violent attacks, armed clashes, and serious human rights violations since summer 2015. The latter includes violations of the right to life and mass displacement of residents in eight southeastern towns where the security forces and PKK-affiliated youth groups have engaged in armed clashes, as well as denial of access to basic services including healthcare, food and education for residents placed under blanket curfew conditions for extended periods and in some cases months at a time. The past eight months have seen hundreds of security personnel, Kurdish armed fighters and civilians killed, with almost no government acknowledgement of the civilian death toll estimated at between 200 and 300 in this period. The renewed violence has provided the context too for numerous arrests of political activists and alleged armed youth on terrorism charges and ill-treatment of detainees.

See Richard Spencer’s piece, listed below, for an estimation of a changed PKK politics within the Kurdish effort to eject ISIS, where the Kurds of produced the most effective ground fighting force since the Syrian Tragedy took hold in 2011, and otherwise establish and sustain their autonomy despite their historic four-state division and subsequent treatment as an ethnic suzerainty.

Marcus, Aliza.  “The Kurds’ Evolving Strategy: The Struggle Goes Political in Turkey.”  World Affairs, November/December 2012:

“The PKK has become part of the people. You can’t separate them anymore,” said Zubeyde Zumrut (in Diyarbakir), co-chair of BDP, which won control of one hundred municipalities in the southeast of Turkey in the 2009 local elections and thirty-six parliamentary seats in the June 2011 national elections. “Which means if you want to solve this problem, you need to take the PKK into account.”

Mert, Nuray.  “Another banal expression of authoritarianism in Turkey.”  Hurriyet Daily News, January 18, 2016:

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s recent attack against academics – who signed a petition condemning military operations in Kurdish cities and calling for peace and negotiations – is yet another banal expression of the authoritarian politics that have long prevailed in Turkey under Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule. All authoritarian regimes are anti-intellectual and this tendency intensifies when they are in trouble. So it is not surprising that Turkey’s president and his party look for scapegoats to blame for their domestic and foreign policy failures. Indeed, authoritarianism is rarely a reflection of political power; rather, in most cases it is a result of weakness.

O’Sullivan, Kate and Laura Benitez.  “We Quit Working for Erdogan’s Propaganda Mouthpiece.”  Vice, April 8, 2014:

We joined the agency in January, hired to edit English-language news, but quickly found ourselves becoming English-language spin-doctors. The agency’s editorial line on its domestic politics – and Syria, in particular – was so intently pro-government that we might as well have been writing press releases. Two months into the job, we listened to Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç talking bollocks about press freedom from an event at London’s Chatham House, downplaying the number of imprisoned journalists in Turkey.

Popp, Maximilian.  “Kurdish Opposition Leader Demirtas: ‘Erdogan Wants a Caliphate'”. Interview.  Spiegel Online, April 19, 2016:

SPIEGEL: The government says it is exclusively pursuing terrorists.

Demirtas: The war is primarily focused on civilians that Erdogan suspects of supporting the PKK. Almost 400,000 people have had to leave their homes. The southeast of Turkey resembles Syria.

Serinci, Deniz.  “The PKK’s Evolution, 30 Years On.”  Rudaw, August 15, 2014.

Spencer, Richard.  “Who are the Kurds?  A user’s guide to Kurdish politics.”  The Telegraph, July 5, 2015:

What has happened is that Turkey has decided to allow Iraqi Kurdistan’s army, the Peshmerga, to join the YPG, the PKK’s Syrian affiliate, in defending Kobane.

The Kurds of south-east Turkey cheering the Peshmerga convoy as it passes are of course hoping they will save their fellow Kurds in Kobane. But they are also cheering the new-found unity of the Kurdish cause. For once, the faction-fighting of their leaders has been set aside in a common purpose, and the Kurd in the street feels anything is now possible.

The Young Turks.  “Crazy Muslim Theory From the Biggest Presidential Palace Ever. Video (satire). YouTube, November 22, 2014.

Tremblay, Pinar.  “Want to call Erdogan a dictator?  Get ready to hire some lawyers.”  Al-Monitor, January 27, 2016.

Wordsworth, Araminta.  “Turkish PM triumphs in the night of the generals.”  National Post, August 5, 2011:

The Turkish PM is on a roll: About 10% of the country’s top brass are in jail, awaiting trial for allegedly plotting against him. Voters have given him a mandate to rewrite the country’s constitution, produced under the shadow of a 1980 military coup and that allowed the military to interfere in the process of governance.

But there are suspicions the evidence against the officers was fabricated and the moves are intended to silence the opposition. Numerous journalists and academics are being held on similar charges.

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FTAC – Synopsis – On the Medieval Struggle

27 Sunday Dec 2015

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

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I think the Cold War, in essence, wraps around the “Islamic Small Wars” (my term), and on top of feudalism, a part of the framework involves the despotic attempting to “stage manage” the appearance of their wars. That may be called “political theater”, KGB style.

On Back-Channels, I’ve worked up to the incubation of ISIS as a political tool useful to Putin, Assad, and Khamenei — https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/syria-assad-vs-the…/ . Now that it’s not working out so well, the firestarter, perhaps, has to join the firemen in at least some aspects of common endeavor. Still: the stake for the anti-western axis, including Islamic terrorists, is the sustaining of the medieval worldview and their own “absolute power” within it.

The Soviet dissolved 24 years and one day ago (Dec. 26, 1991).

However, the spirit of aristocracy and privilege has come to live on in Putin’s “New Nobility” and beside it as well relationships formed around the idea of sustaining the worlds of absolute authority and the profiting of a few at the expense of the many through a familiar script: seduce, Subjugate, PLUNDER!

And so it has gone for Russians, Syrians, and Iranians — and in the rank-and-file beneath the loudmouths of Islamic Jihad it appears that some Islamic terrorists are finding that program no better than the programs it pretends to oppose.

Of most if not all dictatorships, one might say, “different talks — same walk”.

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FTAC – Approaching Anti-Semitism and the Medieval Revanch

22 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Syria

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1. Anti-Semitism serves feudal power. It is a tool for the manipulation and direction of mobs. Note: Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal are billionaires today, which begs the question: who has really occupied what? The PLO and PFLP have been Moscow projects from the beginning and the encouragement of an anti-Semitic middle east a major part of the Soviet program, which medieval / oligarchal phantoms we are fighting today.

2. Nationalism tends toward fascism (ask any of the more western-oriented opposition in Hungary about that). In Israel, the Hebrews, +5,000 years together, are back in the Land of the Hebrews, and they have been taught a long lesson by way of the leaders and fans of the “International Solidarity” and “Palestinian Solidarity” garbage (that’s the word for them): the complaint about Israel has never been about Israel — it has been always about Jewish existence itself, not only in Israel but anywhere on the planet.

3. Go back to Moses the Lawgiver and go forward to Hillel the Elder who to accommodate the restive of a decaying Rome made Judaism more about principle than ritual and more accessible to converts. Then: Jesus, Paul, Constantine; then: Muhammad. Those who really hate the Jews hate the law and humanity. The may hate themselves. Boco Haram, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah: call them the “God Mob” because intimidation, theft, and murder on one side and pandering and patronage on the other appears to be what each has best demonstrated in organizational lives short and long.

As much verbiage as BackChannels spools onto the threads of The Awesome Conversation, the social network chatyping fest, it wonders who compressed it may make a packet of thought.

Anti-Semitism : Feudal Mentality

Perhaps that should be enough.

It has been deeply disappointing watching some Syrians (for the most part, not friends, but others the “friends of friends”) refuse to struggle with the anti-Semitic expression that not only accompanies their suffering but plays directly into hands of the medieval troika, Putin – Assad – Khamenei, each of whom have pegged their survival on irrational mob behavior and, indeed, feudal wars that for being so intellectually bereft that they cannot resolve through violence.

Some prefer the engines of war to the machinery of peace.

A moderate Syrian opposition site had played a cartoon showing Putin, Khamenei, and Netanyahu in bed together while Assad lay on the floor.  Never mind the nonsense in which the leader of an open democracy shares the same mattress as the two despots, the intent to harm Israel absent of reason stands signal of the too familiar sickness and the fascism to which it connects.

Anti-Semitic hate contributes directly to the medieval worldview promoted by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei. Israel’s arrangements with Russia over Syria have been defensive and perfunctory. Before the Soviet Union dissolved (December 1991), this is how it manipulated latent Jew Hate in the middle east into the Baathist dictatorships — from one of which Assad has descended. In fact, Assad is counting on Syrian anti-Semitism to contribute to his stay in power. https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/ftac-tip-to-the…/

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FTAC – Tip to the KGB’s Amplification of Middle Eastern Anti-Semitism

12 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Political Psychology, Russia

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The attached cartoon was generated by Putin’s former KGB culture and inserted (with many like it, also many field agents, and thousands of Party trained Russian workers) into the middle east to promote Arab anti-Semitism. It’s something to keep in mind with regard to historic relations between Moscow and Tel Aviv. The directing of anger and hate toward a convenient target suits a certain kind of criminal power and its will to manipulate and poison “masses”.

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The promotion of the Great Leader, the destruction of the individual, and the development of controlled media, pervasive propaganda, and political theater seem to BackChannels themes familiar to all dictatorships.  Those operating in Syria today seem to BackChannels only the most recently hyperdestructive.

The cartoons were passed to BackChannels more than a year ago.

As always, “The Russian Section” of this blog’s library provides plenty of background as regards the political atmosphere and psychological mechanisms associated with the Soviet and the Soviet Era.

In context of The Awesome Conversation, encounters with anti-Semitic expression in the press of the post- or pseudo-communist “Solidarity” organizations and in numerous chat forums online seems unavoidable, but one may point out to the injured and angered the true source of their own indoctrination and manipulation in “helping” them bend to the will of a malign leadership.

While many observations may be made of anti-Semites — some criminally anti-authoritarian and anti-law of any kind but their own; some so obsessed as to suggest mental illness as a foundation for their rants — the idea that suggested content, like the above cartoons, has been conveniently packaged and made easy to swallow by the ugly among the powerful should tell the bigoted something about their own gullibility or intellectual vulnerability.

Related URLs on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/12/02/quote-manipulation-about-the-plo-leader-pacepa-and-rychlak-2013/  This provides a key example of Soviet meddling in middle eastern politics that resonates today with Mahmoud Abbas’s deeply anti-Semitic stance and the less remarked financial piracy that has made him wealthy ($100 million in estimated portfolio — of course, Hamas rivals Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires, all made on the backs of Palestinians and their suffering).

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/04/29/soviet-anti-semitism-an-example-from-andrew-and-mitrokhins-the-sword-and-the-shield/ BackChannels tries to reduce some message to essence, but as evident in this post and many others, brevity leads only to more reading, and of reading there is no end.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/09/01/ftac-soviet-to-syria-now/  As bloggers may, BackChannels daily surveying of the news across the web — and it’s human labor here, not machine — occassionally gets ahead of the story.  Mention was made of some Russian military incursion in Syria on this post (thanks to another source) and, lo and behold, it’s big news today.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/03/19/its-hard-helping-you-when-you-are-anti-semitic-among-other-things/ – 3/19/2014.  In agony, Syrians have reached out to the world for rescue, but some in the political arena have surfaced with a problem: they hate Jews and they hate the west — and that animosity and beliefs and attitudes related to it has isolated them.  As Assad, Putin, and Khamenei afford only the lengthening of their own medieval misdirection, subjugation, and enslavement — and too much of horror has been delivered by Assad for going back — Syrians chained and hobbled by anti-Semitism and related hatred of the west will have to remove those chains — habits of mind — themselves.  In North America — no problems: the diaspora Syrian community may be as modern and plural as suits life in the United States and Canada.  As regards life in the war zones of Syria, the matter of belief — about anything — would seem complicated by whatever force happens to be in town on any given day.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/ – 10/2/2015.  Only the superficial news reader perceives of ISIS as entirely an autonomous movement, a scourge independent of other powers, but other powers, as in those now olden 20th Century days, have meddled to produce a piece of political theater: “Assad vs The Terrorists” or, as presented to the open democracies of the west, “Assad OR The Terrorists”!

https://conflict-backchannels.com/syndicate-red-brown-green/ 😉

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/08/26/syria-assad-we-trust-the-russians/ – 8/26/2015.  The conflict from Assad’s perspective.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/09/15/bashar-barrel-bomb-assad/ – 9/15/2015 – the conflict from other than Assad’s perspective.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/06/02/assad-or-burn-it-assad-burns-it/ – 6/2/2015.  The quotation more common online goes, “Assad, Or We Burn the Country”.  It’s the same thing and goes back to the political blackmail “Assad OR The Terrorists.”  Either Assad (Putin and Khamenei) continue to control (and plunder) Syria or the west gets the Black Flag Hornet’s Nest (of implied evil puns there has been no end since 9/11).

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/05/24/syria-assad-belarus-red-brown-green/ – 3/24/2015 – Have we reached the end of the end of the Cold War, or will we now be saddled with War Without End by Russia, Syria, and Iran under the control of Putin, Assad, and Khamenei?

BackChannels may compile news and comment on it, but it has yet to acquire a crystal ball.

The links are probably not comprehensive but representative of the thought developed on this blog.  There’s always more to look up on this blog, and probably, despite the author’s desire for brevity and compression, more to say about many “conflict, culture, language, and psychology” related things.

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FTAC – America – The Presidency – Long Term

30 Wednesday Sep 2015

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

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I don’t think we’re destroyed, (name withheld): our bombers cover the earth daily; our satellite and other security systems are up 24/7/365; our armed forces have taken some hits in the area of “largeness”, but at the same time they have reinvented themselves in “force-multiplying” technology; our security industry, which includes at least 17 major active institutions is probably better knit together today than at any other time in their turf-divided histories; and we seem to have the capability of operating out of the spotlight.

Some programs run in the background.

I believe that this material — http://www.stripes.com/…/cia-special-ops-cooperate-to… — would not have been released to the public unless the CIA and military had agreed to “leak it” — i.e., to inform ISIS fighters as to just how closely they have been infiltrated and monitored. This has taken place, albeit off the Big Media radar, throughout the course of the Obama Administration. As such, the data argues against the conservative arguments involving appeasement.

I think what has happened is that the west has met and adjusted its tactics to the medievalism represented by, sigh, “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” and also distant rivals in Pakistan and elsewhere. We are the “Modern” at war with the “Medieval”. Time is the New Space, and we are fighting with these “emperors” and “new nobility” over the essential future models of governance. Colonel President Emperor Putin has found himself — and put himself — center stage in the defense of political “absolute power”. We, the west, remain and stand by “classical liberalism”: we believe in personhood for everyone: the despotic seem to believe that they — each — are the only persons who really matter.

I didn’t vote for Obama because of the Far (Out) Left connections and his experience with the Wright stuff . . . but I firmly believe that he is responsible to the major American institutions — DOD / NASA (that set the standards for the nation) and then the layers of bureaucracy that will survive him and other American Presidents to come. In that way, our democracy captures our elected leaders: they can talk all they want, and they can maneuver quite a bit, but once in the driver’s seat, the chief administrator’s chair, they’re cushioned or padded by all that has preceded them and constrained by other political forces. That despots don’t want that kind of position, and they’re fighting it all the way down.

Some Muslims — and Muslim to Judaism converts that I have encountered — believe that a “clash of civilizations” is taking form.  I take a broader view: the medieval past has inconveniences a great part of humanity, and the Moderns (and the Progressives) have a problem with that.  So do the clerics and dictators who counsel Obedience — or Else!  The autocratic or despotic — malignant narcissists, all of them — fear their own dawning irrelevance.

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Links – Russia in Syria – Medieval and Absolute Dictatorship

04 Friday Sep 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Syria

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Despite strong denials from Moscow, Russian airborne troops are preparing to land in Syria to fight Islamic State forces. The surprise attack on Monday, Aug. 31, by ISIS forces on the Qadam district of southern Damascus, in which they took over parts of the district – and brought ISIS forces the closest that any Syrian anti-Assad group has ever been to the center of the Syrian capital – is expected to accelerate the Russian military intervention.

http://www.jewsnews.co.il/2015/09/02/debkafile-russia-gearing-up-to-be-first-world-power-to-insert-ground-forces-into-syria/ – 9/2/2015.

Location: Syria’s Theater of the Real.

Producers: Putin, Assad, Khamenei.

Title of the Show: “Assad vs The Terrorists”.

Cast of extras, dead and alive: 250,000 dead; 9 million displaced or refugee.

Most Memorable Set Design: Homs, fashioned by barrel bombing to look like Hiroshima the day after.

Casting Dilemma: Getting Baghdadi’s fighters and other al-Qaeda-type elements to play their parts without knowing it.

Method: Bomb the al-Qaeda units less than ordinary Syrians.

Why: For Putin, post-Soviet Russia becomes neo-feudal Russia, and he’s the boss; for Assad, in the age of the “War on Terror” no spectacle could be more glorious than playing the lead in “Assad vs The Terrorists”; for Khamenei, a grand and sustained Shiite vs Sunni Battle perpetuates the medieval justification for his authority, however much he may care to abuse it.

CAUTION: From the Second Row Seat to History

Journalists in-country have an observation deck limited to their eyes and ears, but they may with accuracy report what they see and what they hear; journalists scouting the web for opinion and news in any area of interest necessarily receive all information one step removed from Being There and may be vulnerable to disinformation, in this instance information intended to change the character of the Syrian Tragedy — AKA either “Assad vs The Terrorists” or “Assad vs A Good Portion of the Syrian People” — and draw opposed powers into the field.

That noted, the world has seen also its share of barrel bombing videos and stills, read multiple reports involving at least one period of chemical warhead deployment — and seen Russia agree to neutralize and remove those munitions — and followed either the development of large Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon or Turkey, or, this week, witnessed the aftermath of drownings of ordinary people and their children, real people, Syrian refugees.

The world may also recall watching another production — the $52 billion Winter Olympics at Sochi during February 2014.  However, probably overlooked by the public at large that month (February 10, to be exact) was the headline and lede in The New York Times: “Russia and China Skip Security Council Meeting on Humanitarian Aid to Syria”:

UNITED NATIONS — The morning after an aid convoy came under fire when it tried to reach a besieged Syrian city, a meeting here on a draft resolution that would force all parties in the bloody conflict to allow access for humanitarian organizations fell apart when representatives from Russia and China failed to show up, United Nations Security Council diplomats said.

Perhaps Syrians would do well to borrow some mid-20th Century Jewish wisdom: Never Forget.

New evidence proves Russian military directly engaging in Syrian Civil War

The regime’s offensive in the Lattakia Governorate continues to reveal previously unknown details about Russia’s involvement in the Syrian Civil War. Apart from the sighting of recently delivered Russian BTR-82A infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs), new evidence now confirmes Russian military personnel has a key role in leading the offensive on the ground.

http://spioenkop.blogspot.com/2015/08/new-evidence-proves-russian-military.html – 8/29/2015.

“We are aware of reports that Russia may have deployed military personnel and aircraft to Syria, and we are monitoring those reports quite closely,” said spokesman Josh Earnest.

“Any military support to the Assad regime for any purpose, whether it’s in the form of military personnel, aircraft supplies, weapons, or funding, is both destabilizing and counterproductive.”

http://news.yahoo.com/white-house-monitoring-reports-russian-military-syria-213836626.html – 9/3/2015.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34131573 – “Syria conflict: How far is Russia prepared to bolster Assad?”  — 9/2/2015.

On August 22, the Bosphorus Naval News website showed the Alligator-class Russian ship Nikolai Filchenkov, part of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, two days earlier passing through Istanbul’s famed waterway en route to an unknown location in the Mediterranean (hint, hint).

But what was remarkable about the Filchenkov was that military equipment was visible on deck . . . .

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/01/russia-puts-boots-on-the-ground-in-syria.html – 9/1/2015.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4696268,00.html “Russian jets in Syrian skies” – 8/31/2015.

http://www.newsweek.com/why-putin-sending-troops-syria-368436 – 9/3/2015 – (by Elliott Abrams).

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c417e912-5479-11e5-b029-b9d50a74fd14.html#axzz3kz4QStb1 – “US voices concern to Russia over military moves in Syria” – 9/6/2015.

Sideways Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/12/02/quote-manipulation-about-the-plo-leader-pacepa-and-rychlak-2013/ – 12/2/2014.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/05/20/link-yarmouk-played/ – 5/20/2015.

Update: September 29, 2015 – From the Daily Beast, Aug. 23, 2015

Based on extensive fieldwork in one village in the North Caucasus, reporter Elena Milashina has concluded that the “Russian special services have controlled” the flow of jihadists into Syria, where they have lately joined up not only with ISIS but other radical Islamist factions. In other words, Russian officials are adding to the ranks of terrorists which the Russian government has deemed a collective threat to the security and longevity of its dictatorial ally on the Mediterranean, Bashar al-Assad.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/23/russia-s-playing-a-double-game-with-islamic-terror0.html – 8/23/2015.

Update: October 19, 2015: From The New York Review of books, July 11, 2012 – By Michael Ignatius

The Syrian conflict has triggered something more fundamental than a difference of opinion over intervention, something more than an argument about whether the Security Council should authorize the use of force. Syria is the moment in which the West should see that the world has truly broken into two. A loose alliance of struggling capitalist democracies now finds itself face to face with two authoritarian despotisms—Russia and China—something new in the annals of political science: kleptocracies that mix the market economy and the police state. These regimes will support tyrannies like Syria wherever it is in their interest to do so.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jul/11/syria-proxy-war-russia-china/

Update: October 20, 2015: From The Guardian, October 3, 2015

Another FSA officer, Colonel Abdulsalam Almerei, commander of Talbeissa operations in northern Homs, told me two days ago after his brigade was attacked by Russian aeroplanes: “We have no Isis here, we are fighting for our freedom and dignity. We want a united Syria for all Syrians. We do not want to oppress any sect or change one tyranny with another.”

Assad and his backers have jeopardised the national and territorial integrity of Syria. Many Syrians have lost faith in the UN; they feel that the international community has abandoned them to the barbaric killing machines of Assad and Isis. The international law states that the principle of responsibility to protect civilians overrides the principle of sovereignty of states when a government kills its own people.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/04/syria-russia-assad-isis-conflict

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FTAC – Soviet to Syria – Now

01 Tuesday Sep 2015

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

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Blame Berezovsky (the wealthy man who effectively upgraded Putin’s political clout — http://www.thedailybeast.com/…/how-boris-berezovsky…). The Russians, as a people, and Afghanistan as a financial black hole for military expansion, managed to derail the Soviet (dissolved December 26, 1991); however, hardline privileged had already produced a plan to outlive the Soviet (reference: Karen Dawisha – http://www.miamioh.edu/…/cultural…/putins-russia/ – and the results of that today plus the Islamist stance of the opposition (Assad needed “the terrorists” for his play, “Assad vs The Terrorists”) has led to today’s mass murder and destruction in Syria.

Compression and distillation matter.

The ability of the average victims of fascist and feudal sociopaths may depend on a quick pickup on critical information — accurate, clear, complete (delivered honesty and with the highest integrity) — and the independent discernment and both personal and public political decision making it enables.

A good telegraphy should open on to new worlds, truth revealing and trustworthy.

For those with the necessary time and resources (and intellectual freedom), the Russian Section of the Library of this blog provides ample reference for seeing the Putin machinery as it worked across the president’s years in power and across the arc of the impositions of the Soviet Era.

For those horrified by the destruction wrought by Assad in Syria and determined to address it, BackChannels suggests addressing first endemic Syrian anti-Semitism and anti-westernism, which may contribute to blocking greater western intercession — actually, at the moment, any intercession — in Syria.

For a look at the Russian contribution to man’s inhumanity to man as overseen by President Putin, Oryx, a blog oriented to military tactics, provides a look through such articles as “New evidence proves Russian military directly engaging in Syrian Civil War” (August 29, 2015) and “Captured Russian spy facility reveals the extent of Russian aid to the Assad regime” (October 6, 2014) — and there’s more between those dates.

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Bonding – Dissimilar States – Similar Political Personalities – Similar Ambitions

19 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Psychology

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Khamenei-Putin / Moscow-Tehran

Why?

Yesterday (1939), Hitler-Stalin may have seemed pragmatic on the part of both leaders, but cold enough for Hitler to break and aggress against Russia.

Today, Russo-Iranian cooperation preserves the privileges, relationships, and structures of the Soviet Era as transformed by Putin into a politically successful neo-feudal police state (state-controlled press; manipulated elections; political assassinations; kleptocracy to the extent that 110 “oligarchs” or “state capitalists” appear to control 35 percent of Russia’s wealth in total [while more Russians go begging, more or less, than have done so in many years, no thanks to the blowback from Moscow’s assertions of power and aggression in Ukraine]).

One may wonder about the sharing of “malignant narcissism” and piratical privilege across large ethnolinguistic, political, and religious divisions, but nonetheless, “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”, Putin-Orban, and Putin-Erdogan appear to represent “different talks — same walk”.

The walk is the walk of absolute political power.

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