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Tag Archives: dictatorship

Maduro “Wishes to Visit Ecuador”

25 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Ecuador, Political Psychology, Politics, Regions, South America, Venezuela

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dictatorship, neo-feudalism, post-Soviet politics, Red Brown Green

Waiting to pounce on me from my inbox this morning: “Please report that Nicolas Maduro wants to visit Ecuador to seek international support . . . .”

My correspondent alludes to a source within Ecuador’s government: ” . . . the visit will be in April or June . . . .”

Is this really such a good time — a good year even — for travel?

With a country, one cannot simply water the plants, check the faucets, lock the doors and leave, and this is not such a good time for Nicolas Maduro for doing even so little as that.

Reuters reported Tuesday, “A teenager was fatally shot at an anti-government protest in the western city of San Cristobal on Tuesday, state officials said, exacerbating tensions in Venezuela amid an economic crisis and crackdown on the political opposition.”

Kluiver Roa was 14 years old.  His father was reputed to be a member of opposition party Copei.  Although an arrest was made, Reuters reporters found cause to call the crime scene circumstances — what actually happened — “confusing”.

Currency devaluation, plunging oil revenues, shortages — no wonder violence has broken out on the streets.

Connection Red Brown Green

Camouflaged police smashed into the mayor’s office and carried him away . . . Mr Ledezma was on a list of people and foreign powers named by Mr Maduro last week as attempting to bring down his administration.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-31545963 – 2/19/2015.

Related:

Reuters.  “Russia’s Putin, Venezuela’s Madura discuss oil markets: Interfax.”  January 15, 2015; Pitts, Pietro. “Venezuela’s Asia Tour Backfires as Crude Extends Slump.”  Bloomberg Business, January 16, 2015; Lee, Hailey. “Beijing still funds struggling Venezuela, for now.” CNBC, January 21, 2015.

Reliant on mineral wealth for wealth, the “Red Brown Green” arc of power’s extension into developing South American economies may be suffering from the same malady: the west’s intent to finish off the Soviet Empire.

It has been about 25 years since the Soviet dissolved without also dissolving the “perks” of the Party privileged and all of its direct associates, including associate leadership in distant states.

Is the Party over?

It appears the power mad — political species “Narcissus communist proto-fascist”  — were dependent on climbing oil revenues — the miraculous abundance of “black gold”, and all of it theirs for the taking — for sustaining and growing both the functional and symbolic elements of power within their spheres of control, from state’s military equipage to the payouts in patronage that created the “nomenklatura”, which along today’s neo-feudal path appears to be a “Newest Nobility”, now rapidly deflating while being urged toward productive development investment — including investment in human development — and (gasp!) rule of law.

Financially strangling, the politically dying may be expected to put their people in their own place first, i.e., the privileged may be counted on to make themselves the last to give up privilege.

End Games, New Games

In the Awesome Conversation on Facebook, I often remind that Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe — another old Soviet tentacle — remains in power.  What he has done to Zimbabweans, including the reintroduction of cholera in relation to withholding from a rival funds for water sanitation chemicals, seems of no account: in the “one man, one vote, one time” democratic ways of much of Africa, Mugabe will celebrate turning 91 this Saturday.

Although no less than Vladimir Putin has called Mugabe a dictator (at least once and back in 2009), which is sayin’ somethin’, the point is the worst of national leaders, truly despots, have long demonstrated their possession of the means, wherewithal, and will for remaining in power to the natural end of their lives.

As our “malignant narcissists” appear to reject criticism, eliminate rivals, and cultivate a ceaseless “narcissistic supply“, one must expect politically geological aftershocks — or revanch birth pangs — basically kicking (whether leaving the world or coming into it) from the Fall of the Soviet Union and the latest squeeze on the oxygen supply that is cold hard cash at the wellhead.

Update – February 27, 2015

The regime’s favourite charge to level at hostile politicians is plotting to overthrow the government, often in conspiracy with the United States. But it is the president, Nicolás Maduro, who is staging a coup against the last vestiges of democracy. Venezuelans call it an autogolpe, or “self-coup”.

The Economist.  “Venezuela’s crackdown: A slow-motion coup: The authoritarian regime is becoming a naked dictatorship.  The region must react.”  February 28, 2015 (Print Edition).

Reference

BackChannels Library.  “Russian Section.”

BBC.  “Venezuela police raid arrests Caracas mayor Antonio Ledezma.”  February 19, 2015.

Dawisha, Karen.  Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?  New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Donkin, Tom.  “Venezuela’s financial crisis – in 90 seconds.”  BBC Latin America & Caribbean, February 12, 2015.

Newsday.  “Big bash for Mugabe’s 91st — A feast of wild animals, he’ll get a lion too.” February 23, 2015.

Newzimbabwe.com.  “Putin rebukes ‘dictator’ Mugabe.  December 11, 2009.

Onslow, Sue.  “Robert Mugabe and Todor Zhivkov”.  Cold War International History Project, e-Dossier No. 35.

Ramirez, Carlos Eduardo.  “Venezuelan teen dies after being shot at anti-Maduro protest.”  Reuters, February 24, 2015.

Romero, Simon and Girish Gupta.  “Amid a slump, a crackdown for Venezuela.”  The New York Times, CNBC reprint, February 23, 2015.

Wikipedia.  Antonio Ledezma.

Wikipedia.  María Corina Machado.

Reference – Red Brown Green

“He is alive, as long as nations are alive and struggle for consolidating independence, justice and kindness. I have no doubt that he will come back, and along with Christ the Saviour, the heir to all saintly and perfect men, and will bring peace, justice and perfection for all.”

Dehghan, Saeed Kamali.  “Ahmadinejad’s claim that Chavez will be resurrected with Jesus ‘went too far'”.  The Guardian, March 7, 2013.


Investigative Project on Terrorism.  “Israel: Iran-Venezuela Axis Traffics in Terror, Uranium.”  May 28, 2009.

Mahjar-Barducci, Anna.  “Bolivia, Venezuela, Supply Uranium to Iran.”  Gatestone Institute, October 6, 2010.

Sofer, Roni.  “Israel: Ties to South America aiding Iran’s nuclear program.”  YNet News, May 25, 2009.


Posted to YouTube 2/11/2015.


Posted to YouTube 5/8/2014.

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Syria – False Picture – Irrelevant Praise

19 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Russia, Syria

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dictatorship, political psychology

UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said on Jan. 15 that the continued violence in Syria is a “disgrace” and that the Syria conflict is “the largest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War.” Syrians have replaced Afghans as the world’s largest refugee population, with 7.6 million displaced and 3.3 million refugees, in addition to a death toll estimated at 200,000, and the return of typhoid, measles and polio to the country.

On Jan. 14, de Mistura got a boost from US Secretary of State John Kerry, who praised UN and Russian efforts to broker a settlement in Syria.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/01/hezbollah-syria-assad-kerry-russia-israel-turkey-yemen.html – 1/18/2015


This blog has supported the notion that yesterday’s communist elite are today’s state capitalists backed and defended by security fascists motivated by money and a new fascist nationalism.  That’s a complicated way of suggesting that “Old Red has met New Brown” — and the old Soviets are today’s New Nationalists.

Add the Old Red-Green Arrangement.

Along that line, and while scanning, collecting, posting, and commenting on news from journalism’s “second row seat to history”, one cannot help but note that certain relationships seem defined by common interest in “political absolutism”: Putin – Assad – Khamenei | Putin – Orban – Erdogan – (Khamenei).  The dry outer skin of the onion wants another story: secular vs religious power; Sunni vs Shiite teleology; Iran vs Iraq. However, lo and behold, as the Internet helps political wonks tear back the layers of the onion, Iran is in Iraq in a large evident way (and given the malignant psychology involved in men who would be as if gods — or just one — themselves, the Russo-Syrian-Iranian alliance may be what was in back of Daesh, for if one is to be as God, one would naturally manage the entire battle, not just one side of it.

As Putin was in the business of spending about $51 billion on the winter olympics in Sochi (the figure is disputed but still well into the tens of billions), he appears to have been thoroughly out of the business of tempering Assad’s response to a moderate, modern, and democratically updating revolutionary “Arab Spring” challenge or, Mr. Nice Guy, offering Russian aid to ameliorate the damage, displacement, and injury brought to millions of innocents.   After all, it really wasn’t his concern, was it, whatever happened to Syrians.

The suggestion that Assad chose to bomb the daylights out of noncombatant zones while holding off on the al-Qaeda-types who came into theater of war may be borne out in the casualty, IDP, and refugee figures created in the monstrosity that is today the deeply polarized and globally signal “Syrian Civil War”, for while NATO and the western world press for classical liberal values in governance, it appears Putin, Assad, and Khamenei together press for immense systems of abuse, coercion, enslavement, and exploitation on the mighty piers of fear and patronage.

Call Syria an “axle of power” 🙂 — if the three dictators get away with driving over the state’s constituents to an inherently fascist conclusion, they might well drive the same anywhere else — and the end of that kind of power: the power to make others suffer capriciously, with impunity, without heart, without justice, without limits.


Still, Secretary of State John Kerry declared on Wednesday that the United States welcomed both initiatives. He made no call for Mr. Assad’s resignation, a notable omission from Mr. Kerry, who has typically insisted on it in public remarks. Instead, he spoke of Mr. Assad as a leader who needed to change his policies.

“It is time for President Assad, the Assad regime, to put their people first and to think about the consequences of their actions, which are attracting more and more terrorists to Syria, basically because of their efforts to remove Assad,” Mr. Kerry said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/world/middleeast/us-support-for-syria-peace-plans-demonstrates-shift-in-priorities.html – 1/19/2015


Name the tyrants — communist, nationalist, Islamist (red-brown-green) — who have with grace backed away from or stepped down from power.


The Kremlin may be the main winner in the Lebanon war. Israel has been attacked with Soviet Kalashnikovs and Katyushas, Russian Fajr-1 and Fajr-3 rockets, Russian AT-5 Spandrel antitank missiles and Kornet antitank rockets. Russia’s outmoded weapons are now all the rage with terrorists everywhere in the world, and the bad guys know exactly where to get them. The weapons cases abandoned by Hezbollah were marked: “Customer: Ministry of Defense of Syria. Supplier: KBP, Tula, Russia.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/218533/russian-footprints/ion-mihai-pacepa – 8/24/2006

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Link – On Lampooning Kim Jong-Un

17 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by commart in Political Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

dictatorship, political psychology, staging

What is funny to us is the way in which the North Korean government works to create a mythology about itself and to protect itself from people finding out what’s really going on in there and the distortions that they propagate. All these things you hear about their leaders being born under a double rainbow or about them not defecating or urinating—these things are pretty obvious targets for comedy, to us anyway. We watched a lot of documentaries of journalists trying to get in there and see what’s really going on and it’s always the same damn thing: They are shown all of these fake shopping malls and fake cities with fake people walking around pretending that they live there and everything is fine when you can see, just out of frame, that everything is basically weird and haunting and crumbling.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/dan-sterling-the-interview-sony-hack – 12/17/2014.


The movie’s getting buzz!

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/17/exclusive-sony-emails-allege-u-s-govt-official-ok-d-controversial-ending-to-the-interview.html – 12/17/2014: “Emails between the Sony Entertainment CEO and a security consultant even appear to suggest the U.S. government may support the notion that The Interview would be useful propaganda against the North Korean regime.”


THIS is an act!

Not an act of war (except against the unprepared).

# # #

FTAC – Malignant Leaders – Anti-Semites – Fascists

08 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Politics

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Tags

anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, dictatorship, fascism, Putin, Russian Orthodox Church

Each malign leadership personality — Assad, Erdogan, Khamenei, Orban, Mobarak, Morsi, Putin, Yanukovych, etc. — makes himself also an independent actor in his own right as well as one bickering or cooperating with fellow dictators in the context of pursuing or sustaining “political absolutism”, i.e., themselves as the sole power of their feudal estates. In place of a decent politics, which cannot be had with any playing out this kind of script in personality (all are emperors), come only a limited practical politics — carrots, sticks, and horse swaps.

Internally, “patronage” fits in infantilization and dependency inducing behavior that is itself a part of a defeating spectrum of controls – blackmail, intimidation, incarceration, and murder on one hand, and kind approvals of the powerful, financial patronage, sweet and seductive lying — which in the dark mirrors of the evil includes the promotion of anti-Semitic libel and promise of violence against the Jews — on the other. All such leaders regardless of “nominal affiliation”: thieves. They mask what they really do — and what they are really all about (power over others without limit) — beneath their various banners, but they are also much the same person.


To be fair, Putin, who has been pro-Semitic in public, and whose state has some relations with Israel, should not be considered anti-Semitic despite the inherent anti-Semitic legacies of the old Soviet communism and the Russian Orthodox Church or portions of the same (untangling Russian history after what the Soviets did to it, lol, at least according to Pacepa and Rychlak, will take some time — in the meantime, I feel like I’ve just glimpsed a conciliatory Russian Orthodox Church by way of first encounter with a few voices associated with it).

As I type (and gather from the web as I do), this article may have some clues as to how modern new modern Russians may be as Putin continues on a revanchist neo-feudal path:

Benevitch, Gregory.  “The Jewish Question in the Russian Orthodox Church.”

Some wake up knowing we are all “in it” together.

🙂

Related:

According to Oleg Usenkov, press secretary of the Sophia association of Russian Orthodox Christians in the Holy Land, there are about 70,000-100,000 Russian Orthodox Israelis, and perhaps “the real figures are even higher.”1The number is significant, as the “Greek Orthodox Patriarchy of Jerusalem was informed by the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption that approximately 10 percent of the total Aliya from the former Soviet Union are of the Christian Orthodox faith.”2 This makes the Orthodox Church by far the largest among the past several decades of Israeli immigrants.3 It is also the largest among Palestinian Christians, of whom there are about 400,000 worldwide, and through whom it traces itself to the first Christian community.4

Smith, Hal.  “Is the Orthodox Church ‘Supersessionist'”? Orthodoxy Today, October 17, 2013.

Even while positioning Russia as anti-western, Putin nonetheless and recently laid out toward the end of his most recent Federation speech a familiar western cant:

Transcribed:

Dear colleagues, health care, education, social support, social security must become issues of true public good, true public value. They need to serve our entire society.

We cannot imitate education.

We cannot imitate health care or social security.

We cannot imitate caring for people.

We need to learn to respect ourselves.

We need to look at this important notion such as reputation and that reputation of a specific hospital, school, institution, or social office is a building stone in the overall reputation of our country . . . .”

If that ain’t modern and “western” — how about civilized? — what is?

The World Wide Web is the largest lens and mirror ever devised for having a look at other cultures and nations and for seeing how one’s own culture and nation looks in return.

The combines of old communist and fascist puppet masters should not fare well online, but as regards gravitational effects on “information space” and “intellectual resources” worldwide, some are trying like mad to get the world and have the world back as they would wish it to be.

As a guy with a library — and a “19th Century Modern” attitude — I’ve much enjoyed looking over the palaces of the obscenely enriched by politics, but one might look forward to an other than revolutionary reversion to rule of law and redistribution of wealth as capital driven back down to the floors of economies where cash is needed and a new engineering may come into view on a global stage.

The age of creating and sustaining breathtaking deceits?

Let it end.

# # #

FTAC – Comment on Brutality and Power

21 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by commart in Political Psychology

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Tags

conflict, dictatorship, personality

Complete indoctrination and organization beneath the auspices of dictatorship. This is universal. Similar evil is just a fact of life worldwide but also arranged in discrete geopolitical space even though what I call the “Islamic Small Wars” doubtless produce the lion’s share of conflict misery globally. Other movements: drug cartels, which have a narcoterrorism edge to them; resource-based conflicts in Africa (where “warlords” may fight with elements of Islamic Jihad); and dictatorships like Robert Mugabe’s or Paul Biya’s where a “heavy hand” accompanies in-state plundering. All have their ugly moments.

When it hits close to home, it’s different, but no less horror has been visited on Muslims worldwide, the Christian community (visit Congo), Baha’i (iran), Yezidis (Iraq), and so on. It’s never only about the Jews; it is, however, always about a form of want for power and control of others.


The question before the answer ran along the lines, “How can anyone do that to someone?”

Well . . . .

It’s done worldwide, and (as you are reading BackChannels), not for cause but for expression of damaged personality, perhaps, and the want of limitless compensation, perhaps.

The term “malignant narcissism” belies a story taking place within the imagination and rationalizing reason of the autocrat or thug.  That part, which lives in the privacy afforded individual mind, remains always hidden while the cultural and political effects become ever more obvious, disturbing, and horrific.

Things get bad.

All on the cyber war tour have been treated to a limitless pit of dismal still images and “rolling stock” (even though the “stock” today is digitally recorded — a child’s forearm and hand grasping a woman’s elbow, and that’s all that rests in the street, the bodies having been obliterated by the bomb that took them; children, truly, bloodied and hung by their necks from rafters in a Burmese shack, allegedly, a part of the tragedy of the Rohingya Muslims; executions by rifle of women kneeling in burqa before a stadium crowd; two young brothers, maybe twelve years old, set before a wall and being read a declaration by a so-called “adult” before being shot by firing squad; Pakistani Frontier Corps troops lined up on a hillside, shot by firing squad and finished by pistol, moaning, crying, and all . . . .

The peaceniks who want the brutality and carnage of conflict to stop tend to focus — or to be manipulated and focused — on facets of the political issues involved, but most may be most often deflected from attending to the character of the stagemaster driving — or attempting to drive — the entire theater.

Reading Recommended (for a Start)

Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013.

Post, Jerrold M.  Leaders and their followers in a dangerous world: the psychology of political behavior.  Forward by Alexander L. George.  Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004.

# # #

28 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by commart in Iran, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Ukraine

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Tags

dictatorship, Iran, Russia, Russo-Iranian, Ukraine

The number of political groups that are inclined to support Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is growing, both in the ruling parties of the European countries and in the opposition; from Hungary’s Victor Orban and his ruling Fidesz party to the far-right opposition parties that are performing spectacularly well in national elections, such as Marie Le Pen and her Front National of France. Sympathy and support also comes from Hungary’s Jobbik radical nationalists, the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn, Austria’s Freedom Party, and Italy’s Lega Nord, just to name a few.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/28/-sp-ukraine-russia-europe-andrei-sannikov – 10/28/2014.


I would expect Russo-Iranian methods in the development of power and wealth to expand until stopped cold.  The interior mythology in both units, to be clinical about it, have zero incentive to stall or stop aggression on the basis of the political accommodations and levers owned by others.  That implacable will may be buttressed by an equally sociopathic view of humanity.  For evidence of that in addition to Ukraine (and how Yanukovych milked it): Bashar al-Assad’s behavior in Syria.

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FTAC – Syria – A Note on Beyond the Burning

12 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Middle East, Syria

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Tags

Assad, conflict, dictatorship, political, politics, Syria

The foundations of the invisible wall surrounding Assad start about here:

“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.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/110423/syria-assad-protests-daraa

And then it builds to about here:

“But there is something legitimately scary about the weapon’s do-it-yourself ethos and its new systematic deployment against the neighborhoods of Aleppo. It speaks to the regime’s single-minded focus on finding new ways to kill, its narrow and obsessive pursuit of mayhem and destruction as seemingly official strategy in the conflict that has run for nearly three years now.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/12/24/what-makes-syrias-barrel-bombs-so-scary/

Being a merely “bloody dictator” in a conflict cauldron that has in it argument over despotism, democracy, egotism, goodness, God, morality, and narcissism (finally) is not merely a bad position.

The condemnation backed by astounding imagery and numbers to match may not be overcome with exigent maneuvering.


I know: faced with Hitler, one might be eager to bargain with Stalin.

Call that yesterday.

This day with Assad having produced a war that has brought al-Qaeda affiliates and such to his doorstep and that has incubated and loosed ISIS on the world, may be different.

How happy should one be to be led by Assad today?

That’s not my question to answer.  It’s a question for Syrians to answer for themselves in whatever condition and place the war now finds them.

If “Assad or Burn It” was the slogan, it has been working a long time, and once burned — in whatever portion — what then?

What now?

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Hungary Goes That-A-Fascist-Way – Washington “Canaries” Chirp Warnings

18 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, Hungary, Politics, Regions

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Tags

despotism, dictatorship, fascism, Human Blights, Hungary, Orban, political absolutism, Putin

Citing as models Singapore, China, India, Turkey and Russia, Mr. Orban added: “We have to abandon liberal methods and principles of organizing a society, as well as the liberal way to look at the world.”

The Hungarian leader traced his extraordinary conclusion to the global financial crisis, which he said had exposed the weakness of Western societies and mandated “a race to invent a state that is most capable of making a nation successful.” He was particularly scathing about the United States, claiming that “the strength of American soft power is deteriorating, because liberal values today incorporate corruption, sex and violence.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hungarys-illiberalism-should-not-go-unchallenged/2014/08/16/b2dc72d4-1e5c-11e4-82f9-2cd6fa8da5c4_story.html – 8/16/2014.


3. Call German Prime Minister Angela Merkel
to discuss a) Greek political and economic
conditions, as well as the need for Troika
policies to blunt the suffering caused by
austerity and to defuse the appeal of
extremism; and b) coordinating policies on
Hungary.

4. Instruct the Director of National Intelligence
to investigate allegations of Russian and
Iranian financial or other support of
European far-right parties and present a
classified assessment of whether the
Kremlin is attempting to use such parties to
undermine the European Union or thwart
further NATO expansion. Release an
unclassified version to Congress and the
public.

5. At the North Atlantic Council meeting at the
2014 NATO Summit, express concern
about the rise of neo-fascist parties in
Europe and its impact on security and good
governance in NATO member countries and
the strength of the Alliance. Instruct the U.S.
Ambassador to NATO and senior military
officials to raise these concerns—especially
with regard to Hungary and Greece—with
their European counterparts.

http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/sites/default/files/HRF-report-We-Are-Not-Nazis-But.pdf – August 2014.


Off-the-cuff and fast blogging brought “canaries in the cave’ to mind, but in actuality the editorial board of The Washington Post and the downtown think-tank Human Rights First have voices far greater than metaphorical canaries in coal mines.  However, as with the lesser birds, they are both sending a warning and should be heard loud and clear.

When referencing “the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei”, I had for a while to note the other axis of power that was Putin-Yanukovych.  Yanukovych’s now long gone from Ukraine (online, we are all living dog years [more animals, egads]) but the principle remains: the despots know how to gang up on the democratic among souls, and in league, they are force with which to be reckoned.

I wonder if in Syria, Bashar the Butcher al-Assad didn’t give al-Nusra and the young ISIS a break in order to clear the field of the moderate and ensure his war would leave one despot, preferably himself, or another standing, which would suit defending the indefensible principle that is “political absolutism”.

Regarding Iranian and Russian sabotage, potential or real, of NATO, a review of Turkey’s position in relation to fascist Islamism and the Islamic State, which is using for its headquarters Turkey’s embassy in Mosul, Iraq, would seem also in order.

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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