Because our Twittering may involve ordinary souls surrounded by the extraordinary and off-the-hook circumstances of war, I’ve declined to cite the Tweet’s address for months and years to come. Nonetheless, the reader gets the point: the “#Tyrant” refers to Putin who has in General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo a partner in crime equally ruthless and without conscience–and right now, and for Putin’s benefit, he’s ripping off the #SudanesePeople’s gold by the hour.
I’ve no idea whether General Burhan has the internal flexibility and fortitude x muscle x political power to shut down Hemedti’s off-the-books and Wagner-defended mining business, a revenue stream grossly circumventing western sanctions, but the step would seem one helpful to Sudan’s future as well as one certain to heighten his stature as a potential popular and eventually legitimate (elected) head of state.
“During our history, the armed forces have supported dictatorial governments, and we want to put an end to that,” al-Burhan, a career soldier during former President Omar al-Bashir’s three-decade rule, said in a speech to soldiers on Sunday.
Sudan’s General Dagalo Hemeti has had both long-standing family interests in Sudan’s gold trade, and he has had for some time arrangements with Russian President Vladimir Putin involving Wagner Group oversight of smuggled shipments to Russia that bypass western sanctions and help fund Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The west’s hunkering down, bleating about democracy, and pleading for some cessation in violence seems old news as well.
So it goes here for the Sudanese People and others watching the struggles of ordinary good people against thieves taking advantage of their innocence to rob them of their birthright, their dignity, and their humanity. In fact, having displaced the dictator and war criminal Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese have helped into power, in the course of their powerlessness, two dictators in return, both of them former subordinates to al-Bashir. Of the two, Hemeti may have the more powerful relationship with Putin as he flies off-the-books gold to Russia’s dictator and serves as an envoy — for Putin, a diplomatic channel — to Saudi power as well.
Neither Russians nor Sudanese appear to have today a champion whose interests as well as psychology and temperament reside with them. The present three “strongmen”– al-Burhan, Hemeti, and Putin– appear to represent the evil that enriches and aggrandizes itself while lying without conscience to the nation each purports to represent.
Russia’s meddling in Sudan’s gold began in earnest in 2014 after its invasion of Crimea prompted a slew of Western sanctions. Gold shipments proved an effective way of accumulating and transferring wealth, bolstering Russia’s state coffers while sidestepping international financial monitoring systems.
“The downside of gold is that it’s physical and a lot more cumbersome to use than international wire transfers but the flip side is that it’s much harder if not impossible to freeze or seize,” said Daniel McDowell, sanctions specialist and associate professor of Political Science at Syracuse University.
Deputy Chairman of Sudan’s Sovereignty Council and commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Gen Mohamed Hamdan ‘Hemeti’ Dagalo, called on the international community to support the dialogue between Russia and Ukraine. This is the official position of the Sovereignty Council, he said in a statement to the Russian news channel Sputnik yesterday.
Yesterday’s statement followed Hemeti’s statements last week during his Moscow visit, where he declared support for Russia’s invasion by saying that Russia had a right to defend itself and its people.
A July 2022 CNN investigation exposed deepening ties between Moscow and Sudan’s military leadership, who granted Russia access to the east African country’s gold riches in exchange for military and political support. The relationship began in earnest after Moscow’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, when Russia began to eye African gold riches as an avenue to circumvent a slew of Western sanctions.
The 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the wave of sanctions that followed accelerated Russia’s gold plunder in Sudan and further propped up military rule, increasing Wagner activity in the country.
On the day before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Dagalo headed a Sudanese delegation in Moscow to “advance relations” between the two countries.
#MedievalVModern At issue is only a proven #CriminalRevanchistRussia, probably an extension of injured- narcissistically mortified -little boys trying to repair themselves with wealthy aggrandizement by theft. That's the whole post-Soviet story, i.e., revenge #ForwardIntoThePast.
My tweets just ain’t whistlin’ up Dixie, but they could–the evil would be about the same, Mint Juleps, slaves, and all. Putin’s enemies, rather like Trump’s, come to think of it, are all the better souls opposed to the kind of excessive narcissism–messianic, grandiose, delusional–that obliterates boundaries and limits and excuses all crimes.
Related Online
Re. Russian Beheading Video
Note: the authenticating of media has become a major issue in OSINT. From Hollywood to Pallywood and all of the geopolitical and technology space between, it has become possible to tell the truth with integrity or produce a video with nearly seamless invention. At this time, Ukraine has not authenticated claims related to an alleged Russian beheading of a Ukrainian soldier.
Re. Vladimir Putin’s Personal and Political Character
Is Perception Reality?
In an older world, who could “fact check” the claims of an emperor or king? What word of battle could be found unreliable by a “commoner”, i.e., the most ordinary of citizens or, alas, subjects of the realm? I hope this day different from feudal-medieval times with political perceptions bound more directly to feudal power.
Here are three references I relay often and believe most telling about the true character of Moscow’s enfant terrible.
“Tsar Nobody” as Volodymer Zelensky may have called him (and I sometimes do) has proven before Russians a capable producer of his own political image, which is to him his most prized asset, but before the world beyond Russia, he has become “Putler”, a repeatedly and deeply destructive menace to world order and security universally, a man whose fear of his own unmasking has led to crimes on a scale as unfathomable as they have been unimaginable and unbearable.
How “it” looks, whatever the event and our role in it, matters as we each make our way through life, and we would all much rather be liked and loved than reviled and met with heart-sinking contempt. Nonetheless, and in the way of the world’s more ironic and wicked experiences, some who most need the roar of the crowd will do things to obtain that “Narcissistic Supply” that if ever–and whenever–found out will irrevocably and irrecoverably sink their own ships. At the end of their days, some who projected themselves as heroic and righteous prove only cowardly and criminal.
So it goes.
A Modern Psychology for Modern and Social People
If we progress as a species integrated with ubiquitous advanced technologies, some that we use directly, some always humming somewhere in the background, we may have to survive through peace founded in our own reasonable containment and freedom. In essence, we may become creatures more universally responsible for and thoughtful about the future and the needs of future generations. Becoming and being Modern may come to mean having considerations always present and beyond ourselves.
The search string, “Soviet Era Heroic Realism” yielded the second image–it helps to knowingly guess what one is after–which has the caption, “Post World War Two Russian Post–Young builders of Communism, go forth toward the new heights.”
We know how that worked out, and Stalin, at least in atrocious facsimile, appears to be with us yet.
Regarding Trump’s depiction, I have commented via Twitter (on Brigitte Gabriel’s feed) already this morning on Moscow’s Trojan Horse–he’s about that large too–in the Grand Old Party (of Greed), and here will relay the cannon fire in plain text and in a manner more easily accessed–>
“Trump is doing what he has always done. He walks to the line of openly calling for violence and stops just before making overt directives,” Kurt Braddock, an American University professor who studies far-right extremism and the ways in which communication and propaganda contribute to political violence, told Insider.
“In many ways, the implications are the same. His supporters who are looking for an excuse to turn to violence will see this as his implicit approval,” Braddock added.
Practically an Afterthought on Donal Trump’s Anti-Democratic Authoritarian Narcissistic Mentality
"“I get along well with Putin,” Trump said, adding that the Russian president discussed Ukraine regularly. “He wanted to get a piece,” Trump said. “Now it looks like he’ll probably end up getting the whole thing.” #DonaldTrump on #UkraineRussiaWarhttps://t.co/AHf5vVolJI#DTPutin
Reconsider the value of lying against the value of simple old fashioned #Honesty and #Integrity.
#ModernEuropeans and #ModernAmericans should wish to live in a #ModernWorld with all of the benefits of integrated complex sophisticated and sensitive systems and not in the world of chaos, fear of government, personal separation, political impotence, and #FeudalMedievalSlaughter.
Would that Russians had the courage to share so #Modern a desire and requisite for peace and prosperity–and what Russians choose to submit to and tolerate, including their own enslavement, would seem how Russians choose to live.
We humans support about 4,300 religions and 7,000 living language cultures around the world, and representatives of most are here in the United States beneath the magnificent umbrella of a working secular democratic republic as designed by the Founding Fathers.
Americans true to that spirit have the freedom to worship as each sees fit.
Some like Lauren Boebert flat out lie or live in their own delusions with insufficient confrontation or insight.
Two terms I have found helpful with relation to observing fascistic religious extremism: “Civilizational Narcissism”, Mobarak Haider’s term related to his view of the Taliban in Taliban: Tip of a Holy Iceberg, and “Malignant Narcissism“, which may be regarded as the political interpretation of “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” much characterized by “messianic delusions of grandeur” and represented by autocratic personalities worldwide.
Around the web (Twitter, lol, sometimes here on FB), I’ve been using #MaligNarcs and #PolitCrims to signal these archaic dimensions in leadership.
Christian Fanaticism, Christian Violence
The above mash-up, most appropriate for this day in the America (or #Jan6), has come off Alejandro Amenábar’s film Agora, as fine an exploration of the tension between faith and reason and between the lust for power and the imposing of a delusional, narcissistic, and sadist will on others possessed of more quiet, certain, and thoughtful virtues.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who faces a primary election Tuesday, says she is “tired” of the U.S. separation of church and state, a long-standing concept stemming from a “stinking letter” penned by one of the Founding Fathers.
Speaking at a religious service Sunday in Colorado, she told worshipers: “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. That is not how our Founding Fathers intended it.”
Integrity is derived from the Latin word “integer,” meaning whole. A person of integrity is complete, undivided. Sincerity, decency, trustworthy are synonyms of integrity. It’s on our shield because it is the quality that makes possible all the good that we do. Because everything we do requires that we be believed, whether that’s promising a source that we will protect her, telling a jury what we saw or heard, or telling a congressional oversight committee or the American people what we are doing with our power and our authorities. We must be believed.
Confidence in modern governance and its ability to sustain its political coherence, cohesion, and power, within and without, may be rooted in the credibility, integrity, and trustworthiness of the same.
For cause, I believe the Federal government of the United States of America better than supposed by a constituency often less educated, sophisticated, and specialized–or broadly elevated–for understanding its departments, duties, missions, and relationships. Few Americans have privilege and time, much less specific ambition and curiosity, for personally exploring the administrative machinery of the nation in the advancement and defense of the same.
NordStream II
What if Seymour Hersh’s report and analyses prove true?
The truth won’t change the barbaric, criminal, and untrustworthy character of Putin’s regime.
The truth won’t weaken the strength of America’s defenses nor the argument for inclusive, liberal, open democracies and related rule of law as the much better alternative to the ways of capricious tyrants and totalitarian systems.
The truth may force Germany and the German People to revisit the sordid and twisted political discourse of the 1930s and 1940s just to check the conclusions–and then measure the strides made by modern Germany against the feudal and primitive forces and ideas of a deeply defeated generation followed by an as astonishingly renewed and powerful German state.
The truth may be a fait accomplis, and here we are.
Whatever the truth may be, it’s too late with Russia in Ukraine–and positioned elsewhere for assault or heightened threat–for either the invention of or leveraging of a supposed casus belli. It has already in its surreal and psychopathic fashion picked its fight with NATO. However, Tsar #PutinFullTonto may be as ill in body as he appears to be sick in the head, and how far his madness takes his whole circle remains unknown.
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