#Criminals and #Dictators for fear of being found out, humiliated, imprisoned, and shamed have to lie their way through their lives. Image matters. Privacy and some secrecy (as with personal matters in general — ain’t nobody’s business but our own!) — are generally understood and considered beneficial to persons, families, and communities.
We all have our private lives.
In politics, the politician who would be a dictator may only control his image through the control of the media.
Trump stepped off by demonizing the majors through his epithet, “Fake News!” Now he’s suing the same at every chance: he just doesn’t like the way he, in fact, makes himself look in the mirroring observations of most of the world’s journalists. So what does he do? He makes things up.
#TrumpLies – to himself first, then to #MAGA, and then to #Americans.
#VladimirPutin, the same kind of person as Trump, does the same thing and now has #Russia dying on the lost and twined causes of medieval conquest and tribute (most of all to himself). He’s a wealthy man with a dead soul, and in that regard, he’s completely worthless.
What I have been calling “The Islamic Small Wars” — the internecine competitions and interfaces within Muslim-majority political space running from Afghanistan to Yemen — have been wars about integrity — basic truth telling — requiring armies of poets and detectives for fighting and resolving.
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Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,
In this year, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Israel has chosen to make it a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people.
Moreover, they may be proven untrue, the Jews being the absolute worst genocidiers on the planet: before they kill you, they afford you basic services, emergency and sophisticated specialized health services (in which all patients are treated absent of politics), Internet access, freedom of speech sufficient to sustain adverse public relations and research organizations (like B’Tsalem).
What may be true is the greater the hate encountered in anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist cant (there is no difference between those two), the greater the opportunities for Israel’s expansion.
The Abbas speech may be investigated and laid out purple phrase by phrase (“Amidst a torrent of massacres and storms of massive destruction” — not one mention of the more than 10,000 rockets launched from Gaza since 2005 and every two to few years to launched at a tempo sufficient to call the same an assault against Israel’s children).
Sins of omission are not the only sins evident in Abbas’s speech before the UN.
Note the demonizing of Israel, the “reflections in a mirror” — a very dark and most primitive mirror in language — in such well-known canards as “However, and as usual, the Israeli government did not miss the opportunity to undermine the chance for peace” — never mind those tunnels illegally and surreptitiously built (with child labor, 160 accidentally killed or deliberately murdered in the process) to assault Israeli communities.
Add to that demonizing simple Arab refusal of just responsibility for the Arab refugees of 1948:
Israel refuses to end its occupation of the State of Palestine since 1967, but rather seeks its continuation and entrenchment, and rejects the Palestinian state and refuses to find a just solution to the plight of the Palestine refugees.
BackChannels no longer casually employs the term “Palestinian”.
As neither Egypt nor Jordan will absorb nor take responsibility for the constituents of (Judenfrei since 2005) Gaza, I refer to the same as “Gazans”).
Given the lying going on around Gazans — allegedly on their behalf but never beyond sacrificing them (individuals, family, finances, and property) as the pawns of Hamas’s supersessionary war against Judaism, one might expect them to become independent in their own right and to insist on the development for themselves of an independent, modern, responsible, responsive, and transparent democratic government.
Judea may be more complicated with its historic flow-down from the Soviet’s brand of poison (not only the Palestinian Liberation Organization, in spirit, remains present but a simple right-click of the mouse is all one needs to reach the airliner-hijacking Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the effects of the anti-Semitic New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left lingering long on the landscape, still leveraging the language of the refugees, which comes in the Abbas speech as, ” . . . against Israel’s policies of occupation, apartheid and colonial settlement . . . .’
The lie that is self-aggrandizing speech is there in that portion: one wonders just how large the combined International and Palestinian Solidarity Movements really are.
Investigating consultant and journalist Lee Kaplan has told me about the seeding of these groups on America’s college campuses and their access to student activity funds, which is fair under the precepts of freedom of speech in a truly open democracy, but we didn’t get to how really small these movements may be despite their broad distribution and the money pumped into them for priming.
The phrase comes from the 1940’s film Gaslight, in which an abusive husband deliberately dims the gaslights in the house, but when his wife comments on it he tells her she’s imagining it, that the lights never dimmed at all.
Gaslighting is one of the most insiduous, viscious, nasty and effective forms of emotional and psychological abuse.
Transporting psychology — the study of individual mind and mentality — into politics may have inherent issues in both psychology and politics: for example, are we now going to filter or judge politicians in relation to our concept of “malignant narcissism”, which in turn would seem to inform the psychology of dictatorship? At the same time, what choice has the world suffering war between brutal and sometimes immense despotic personalities?
(Of Bashar al-Assad and opponent (in general terms) al-Nusra, I have often remarked: “Different talk — same walk”.
The two together, Assad and al-Nusra — and the advent of BadDaddy and the Islamic Hate represent where the path of the malignantly narcissistic winds up — have burned out and left scorched the middle humanity of the historic Syrian state — factually speaking, about 9 million Syrians have been displaced in the fighting between the tyrant and the zealots [about 200,000 souls have been separated from life altogether]).
What I have been calling “The Islamic Small Wars” — the internecine competitions and interfaces within Muslim-majority political space running from Afghanistan to Yemen — have been wars about integrity — basic truth telling — requiring armies of poets and detectives for fighting and resolving.
Some people lie.
That’s a sad fact of life, and criminals and politicians both often draw the pointing fingers on the basis of their affiliations, ambitions, and reputations. Less acknowledged and less stated: observations about culture-wide denial, dissimulation, false assertion, and hapless vulnerability to the beguiling and patronizing sweetness of an evil tongue.
Often, in many quarters of the world, if not most, a loyal lie may be preferred to an uncomfortable truth, for shows of loyalty may draw immediate rewards, from praise to patronage, while relaying a critical or damaging truth may be met with punishment, including that of a swift death.
Without reporters and cameras there to document the carnage, the blood that Hamas compels Gazans to shed on its behalf would be wasted. Hamas thus needs reporters in Gaza. But the last thing it wants is a press corps reporting both sides of the conflict—documenting not just the result of Israeli airstrikes but also the Hamas rockets and missiles that drew Israeli fire in the first place.
Create (false flag) or take advantage of an incident that may be attributed to one’s chosen enemy.
Repeat.
Repeat.
As often as necessary until the air is filled with “you people” accompanied by the denouncing and demonizing of the same.
Form up and deploy additional gangs who have as their reason for being the mounting of “extremist” assaults.
When the The Enemy has responded with gangs of its own and produced sufficiently brutal atrocities in the process of addressing the provocations designed for it, then by way of the world’s more gentle hearts and the melange of motivations bouncing around inside the UN, cry, complain, and whine about the awful things being done to one’s own.
Finally, align one’s other assets — financial and political clout, defense purchasing power and related military — to draw the conflict (now created and burning well) toward one’s middle objectives.
With the world’s change of heart, it’s love and sympathy — its essential buy-in — expand and relax.
Job well done. Prepare the next front.
I don’t know if it’s true, but some things seem to work along these lines.
I do believe in the idea of expanding incitement in conflict, i.e., start with a fairly healthy society and do it some damage of a type associated with discrimination. Call that a dent and watch the dent become a hairline crack, a fissure, a fracture, a great rending of the social fabric, and continue to play the conflict — after all: you started it, it’s your game — until it comes to you for a moderated peace beneath the understanding aegis of your own capacious robes.