Tag Archives: medieval v modern

FTAC: Why Putin Won’t Stop Until Stopped

20 Friday Jan 2023

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Russia, Ukraine

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What follows is a comment left beneath a CNN interview with Bill Browder.

Putin’s “Malignant Narcissism” with its “messianic delusions of grandeur” has his coconut set to defend his projection of heroic courage, a cover for early deep humiliation. He neither defends nor represents the interests of a modern Russia but rather the medieval psychosis he shares with similar criminal former KGB and sordid mafia. That’s it. Challenge the thesis, but I believe he won’t stop until stopped. Cancer, internal rivalry, uncooperative FSB and other security might suffice, but for now–for the west and for the world–“containment” will have to do. Putin has got a world in his head that no longer exists in either any shared nor viable fashion. He has only plundered Russia and led her into the void.

Malignant Narcissism: Links & Terms of Art for Exploration

This blog features earlier related musings on a page with a title a little bit ahead of its times–Anthropolitical Psychology, so named at the time for its alphabetical first place on the preceding drop-down menu list. 🙂 My fave for a while (if I do say so myself): Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation. Perhaps more to the point as regards Vladimir Putin, who has thrown Russia into a medieval war with modern weapons with the support of a host of lies, may be the process through which he became a monster: “Malignant Narcissistic Process Distilled”.

On the Psychology of Dictatorship and related matters (like destructiveness, fascism, sadism, more ordinary Narcissistic Personality Disorder) there is no end to either invention, observation, and reflection. I had embarked on this personal course in political science and psychology with comparatively light reading by the late Jerrold M. Post—Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior (Psychoanalysis and Social Theory), Jerrold M. Post and Alexander George, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York: 2004. My purchase had been made in 2012. Back then, “reading” for me still meant opening a book.

We’re not going to be stuck with “authoritarian” knuckleheads in office in the United States of American or anywhere else in the Atlantic Alliance or, for that matter, in the world, but the transition from the world of medieval belief, fear, and greed requires of both constituencies and governments a modern update related to comprehending retrograde politicians and political missions. In modern parlance, the holy (and secular) grail of characteristics desired may be “high-integrity, responsible, and responsive” governance with improving “Qualities of Living“–village x city x region–the worthy cause of power.

At the moment, the EU/NATO fold has within it disappointing reversions–examples: Recep Tayyip Erdogan; Viktor Orban; Donald John Trump–to feudal-medieval society in which the power of the leader becomes conflated with the existence of the state while related associates, family, and personally favored figures own and rule the businesses and industries hosted across the land–and the general population be damned. For such “leaders”, continuance in power and “unlimited narcissistic supply” are all that matter.

Related for Exploration: Narcissistic Mortification; Covering/Splitting; Gaslighting; Psychological Manipulation; Narcissistic Supply.

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KGB FSB ROC M-O-N-E-Y

18 Wednesday Jan 2023

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Russia

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After the fall of the Soviet Union, the church received official privileges including the right to import duty-free alcohol and tobacco. In 1995, the Nikolo-Ugreshky Monastery, which is directly subordinated to the patriarchate, earned $350 million from the sale of alcohol. The patriarchate’s department of foreign church relations, which Kirill ran, earned $75 million from the sale of tobacco. But the patriarchate reported an annual budget in 1995-1996 of only $2 million. Kirill’s personal wealth was estimated by the Moscow News in 2006 to be $4 billion.

During this period, the church has been silent about genuine moral issues, such as Russia’s pervasive corruption and the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants in Chechnya. As Kirill begins his reign as patriarch, there is little reason to expect this to change.

Satter, David. “Putin Runs The Russian State–And the Russian Church Too.” Forbes, February 20, 2009.

In the Feudal-Medieval Mode, there is no potion as toxic as that which couples belief and piety in the common spirit with financial, martial, and political power in an aristocracy of thugs: only in still medieval Russia has Kleptocracy an Emperor and a most loyal (and enriched) Patriarch, both formerly KGB and therefore today criminal FSB.

As has become too much my habit, reference follows, and while I read all that I cite–and have read or perused all that I have cited, and this for age or martinis–little stays with me but principles. For Putin-Kirill as an Infernal Dyad, the two appear to share the deepest relationship in corruption, crime, fascism, malign narcissistic covering, persecution of minorities, especially the LGBTQ set, profit from “sin taxes” on alcohol and tobacco, and God (whose existence each seems to be disproving), only knows what else fills their pockets out of the shadows in which the two actors more authentically reside.

Related Online

AFP. “‘God Put You in Power’: Russian Orthodox Leader Tells Putin on 70th Birthday.” The Moscow Times, October 7, 2022.

Chawrylo, Katarzyna. “The scandal over the Patriarch Kirill.” Center for Eastern Studies, April 4, 2012.

Cohen, Nick. “An evil collusion between a tyrant and a man of God.” The Guardian, August 18, 2012.

Coyer, Paul. “(Un)Holy Alliance: Vladimir Putin, The Russian Orthodox Church And Russian Exceptionalism.” Forbes, May 21, 2015.

Donovan, Jeffrey. “Metropolitan Kirill Elected New Patriarch of Russian Orthodox Church.” RFE/RL, January 27, 2009.

Giovanni, Janine di. “The Real Reason the Russian Orthodox Church’s Leader Supports Putin’s War: Homophobia is at the heart of Patriarch Kirill’s endorsement.” Foreign Policy, April 26, 2022.

Gedeon, Joseph and Nahal Toosi. “The pro-Putin preacher the U.S. won’t touch.” Politico, June 22, 2022.

Gordon, Michael R. “Russian Priests Accuse a Bishop, Plunging the Church Into Turmoil.” The New York Times, July 18, 1999.

Addendum to Reference

Schrader, Adam. “Russian Patriarch Kirill blasts Ukraine for ordering church to leave Kyiv monastery.” UPI, March 12, 2023.

Horowitz, Jason. “The Russian Orthodox Leader at the Core of Putin’s Ambitions.” The New York Times, May 22, 2022.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unfolded, Patriarch Kirill I, the leader of the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church, had an awkward Zoom meeting with Pope Francis.

The two religious leaders had previously worked together to bridge a 1,000-year-old schism between the Christian churches of the East and West. But the meeting, in March, found them on opposing sides of a chasm. Kirill spent 20 minutes reading prepared remarks, echoing the arguments of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that the war in Ukraine was necessary to purge Nazis and oppose NATO expansion.

Lord Dreadnought. “Russian Orthodox Church’s KGB patriarch got rich dabbling in tobacco, oil, and alcohol following ‘perestroika’.” Fitzpatrick Informer, December 30, 2020.

Luchenko, Ksenia. “Can the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Survive the War With Russia?” Carnegie Politika, January 17, 2023.

Satter, David. “Putin Runs The Russian State–And the Russian Church Too.” Forbes, February 20, 2009.

Satter, David. “Russia’s State Church.” Foreign Policy Research Institute, June 27, 2012.

Wikipedia. “Patriarch Kirill of Moscow”.

Wikipedia. “Russian Orthodox Church”.

Posted to YouTube April 16, 2022.

“…the Faculty of Special Propaganda . . . .”

In which Putin has “turned priests into Kremlin agents”–>

Posted to YouTube April 12, 2022.

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Russia’s Special Truth

12 Wednesday Oct 2022

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Russia, Ukraine

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Related Online

Nekrasov, Andrey (Director). Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File. Documentary film, 2007.

Thomas, Jake. “Russia’s Estimated Losses Entering Day 230 of War, Including 62K Personnel.” Newsweek, October 10, 2022.

Wikipedia. “List of Russian generals killed during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine”.

BackChannels’ Related Political Psychology

The blog’s starting to carry quite a package! 🙂

I think the “amateur psychologists” have been written off by the rough and tough get-it-done warfare analysts, but, sigh, Russia really does have a deranged narcissistic feudal-medieval “Vertical of Power” who has by his destructive and ruthless wiles and will made the powerful and wealthy of Russia dependent on his existence and his on them.

Who is Vladimir Putin to judge any of them?

Beneath heaven–and would they would ask themselves the same thing–I don’t know.

Whatever the answer (blackmail? intimidation? grandiose promises?), he has inveigled an entire class of associates, executives, and warriors in an archaic narrative of utterly barbaric cruelty, destruction, and ethnic cleansing. So far, not one of Putin’s oh-so-powerful associates appear capable of preparing any resistance to him or his crimes–or it’s they, at least a few, who have perhaps been pushing him. Either way, all have become themselves complicit in the leader’s ugly and cowardly fantasy about himself–and they are losing as mightily as they are clinging fast to this most backward, myopic, and villainous of daddies.

Are they brain dead?

Have they lost the last vestiges of conscience, humanity, and integrity?

Perhaps the worst thing–the most special truth, frankly–is they know what they have done and are doing and believing themselves bought in, doomed, and enslaved are walking themselves to their own ignominious end.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/anthropolitical-psychology/civilizational-narcissism/
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/19/detecting-post-soviet-russias-black-narrative-of-revenge-for-89-and-91/
https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/anthropolitical-psychology/malignant-narcissism/
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/10/malignant-narcissistic-process-distilled/
https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/anthropolitical-psychology/paranoid-delusional-narcissistic-reflection-of-motivation/
Reuters. Published to YouTube, August 30, 2022.

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Kerch Strait Bridge Fire Puts Russian Backs to the Wall

08 Saturday Oct 2022

Posted by in 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Russia, Ukraine

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CNN, October 8, 2022.

David Arakhamia, the head of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s party in parliament and a member of Kyiv’s negotiating team with Russia released a Telegram statement about the incident, saying: “Russian illegal construction is starting to collapse and catch fire. The reason is simple: if you build something explosive, sooner or later, it will explode. And this is just the beginning.”

Mykhailo Podoliak, who serves as an adviser to Zelensky echoed the sentiment. “Crimea, the bridge, the beginning. Everything illegal must be destroyed, everything stolen must be returned to Ukraine, everything occupied by Russia must be expelled,” Podoliak said.

Voitovych, Olga, Kostan Nechyporenko, Josh Pennington, and Hannah Ritchie. “‘Air defense of the Russian Federation, are you sleeping?’ Ukrainian officials respond to Kerch bridge explosion.” CNN, October 8, 2022.

Ukraine, perhaps, has announced its full intention to divorce Russia from its sovereign territory without exception. Today’s explosion and fire on Kerch Strait Bridge, the lengthy causeway linking Russia to Crimea by road and rail, will slow Russian resupply to Russian-speaking Ukrainians, Russians, and Russian soldiery recently delivered to Crimea for training.

Given Ukrainian President Zelensky’s determination to remove the last Russian armed presence from Ukraine’s sovereign territory, the contest is bound to lead to the elimination of Russian Naval Base in Sevastopol. The base had been started in 1772, finished eleven years later, fought over in the 19th Century, abandoned by Russia in 1855, occupied by the German Imperial Army in 1918, again lost to Nazi Germany in 1942, and leased by Russia for its Black Sea Fleet since the end of the Cold War.

As noted in a France24 video in 2019, a tour guide says to the reporter, “It’s a fleet that was armed two years ago. Everything we see in this bay is weaponry that appeared over the past five years” (1:55).

Related Online

Cragg, Gulliver and Elena Volochine. “The Crimean port of Sevastopol, a strategic link between Russia and Syria.” France24, March 20, 2019.

France24 English. “The Crimean port of Sevastopol, a strategic link between Russia and Syria.” Video. YouTube, March 20 2019.

Nechyporenko, Kostan. “Crimea authorities seek to reassure public on fuel and other supplies.” CNN, October 8, 2022.

Reuters. “Moscow says truck explosion destroys part of Russia-Crimea bridge.” October 8, 2022.

Reuters. “New Russian recruits train in Crimea and near Ukrainian border.” September 28, 2022.

Sky News. “Ukraine latest news: Explosion on key bridge linking Russia to Crimea; Putin sends ministers to scene.” October 8, 2022.

Wikipedia. “Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty”.

Wikipedia. “Sevastopol Naval Base”.

Yuhas, Alan and Raya Jalabi. “Ukraine crisis: why Russia sees Crimea as its naval stronghold.” The Guardian, March 7, 2014.

Times Radio analysis, posted to YouTube, October 8, 2022.

BackChannels concurs with perhaps less subtlety: Russia has clearly overplayed its position, and in the say of “soft power”, it has sacrificed any cultural or peaceful benefits it may have brought with its presence in exchange for bullying willful destruction and terror and nothing else. Russia has nothing to offer Europe or Ukraine at this time, and with Putin’s criminal enterprise–that’s all it has been since the early-mid 1990s–it has no place to go in history and has only sealed its fate in Ukraine.

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Putin’s ‘Kremlinals’ Find Disfavor Over War

02 Sunday Oct 2022

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine

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With regard to east-west rivalry, timing, perhaps has been everything as post-Cold War Russia “invited” western cooperation with and investment in Russia as part of post-Soviet reform. To our misfortune, some disaffected KGB, all products of the Bolshevik mentality, pried themselves back into power to become what one might call “Kremlinals”. Okay. Ouch. In any case, and based both on Litvinenko’s experience and Zawahiri’s “detention” in Russia (1996/7), the criminals were set for kleptocracy by the early-mid 1990s.

The west may have been played.

Vladimir Putin has never been a rational state actor but always a piratical “malignant narcissist” engaged in the cover of a projection of an heroic self with impression enforced by the many methods of perceptual control. As his fear of being “found out” becomes realized, he doubles-down in defense of image and becomes more surreal by the day. As he has never authentically served Russia but plundered her by developing his mafia-style monopoly on power, one may only hope that his own “tire” of him post-haste and with ambition to return to modernity, which some have quite enjoyed, will take the reins in the direction of reform.

This image may tell what is also at hand.

RFE/RL. “Pro-Ukrainian Protesters Rally in Belgrade.” YouTube, October 2, 2022. 0:43.

For the time being, the world surrounding Putin’s Imperial Russian Kleptocracy would seem stuck with containment, defense, and deterrence. For Russians who would be modern and well dressed with a Modern Political Mentality: despair, flight, lethargic cooperation, passive resistance; and for some close in with the little monster grown fat, one might hope for treachery.

The end-state desired would seem a modern responsible-responsive Russian state, not Putin’s criminal feudal-medieval monstrosity loaded up with 2,000 tactical nukes (advanced hypersonic missiles and stealthy submarines) x hate, ignorance, and fear to match, not to mention the leader’s criminal — and politically criminal — narcissism.

RFE/RL. “Pro-Ukrainian Protesters Rally in Belgrade.” YouTube, October 2, 2022.
UATV, October 2, 2022.
UATV, October 2, 2022.

Some of us are just waiting to see Robert Kraft’s Superbowl ring returned to him. And all of this over that? Could be as that ring is symbolic of the criminal, piratical, and unhinged nature of Putin’s increasingly naked regime.

Related Online

Anderson, Hans Christian. “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

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#DJT The Success! (At Failing): Two Tweets

27 Tuesday Sep 2022

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Spychology

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Ain’t he neat?/ See him working up a tweet/ Hasn’t had his breakfast yet/ That helps with workin’ up Donald’s debt/ ain’t he neat?

🙂

Humor helps.

And it’s evident (old bachelor, empty apartment), sigh, that I must say so myself (attaboy)!

Sad story, this guy “The Donald”.

Possibly, from Donald Trump’s perspective, he only loses or takes other people’s money (without return), and rather like the feudal-medieval king he’d like to be in the still revolutionary and evolving modern United States of America, he expects the ginormous junkyard of disappointments left to others to just go away.

How did we get here?

It appears to me that Moscow had a revenge story for the bankrupting of the Soviet Union: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/19/detecting-post-soviet-russias-black-narrative-of-revenge-for-89-and-91/ .

I has appeared to The Guardian that Moscow had also a “Manchurian Candidate” in Donald John Trump: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia-asset-claims-former-kgb-spy-new-book .

It has occurred to BackChannels (sometimes I growl and whine after saying “ChewbaccaChannels”) that KGB, FBI, TS/SCI boxes, folders, and whatnot may have a bridge with Registered Foreign Agent and Trump’s lawyer Christopher M. Kise via his relationship with the Russia friendly Maduro regime in Venezuela, happy host in the Western Hemisphere to Russian nuclear warhead ready TU-160 jets.

Addendum

I tweet this page from time to time to underscore Donald Trump’s character and personality issues in a way that proves helpful to authentic patriotic and traditional Americans as opposed to his generally easily manipulated or emotionally unhinged base of greedy and power hungry monsters or just plain innocent (generally white Christian) zealots. Sadly for America, neither the action, attention, and coverage linked to “#DJT” seems to diminish–I don’t think the base is growing but may be transforming into a vacuous American cult with legitimate gripes turned into off-the-wall explanations and conspiracies that never end.

In any case, and keeping with the above two tweeted packages of Trumpian disasters, here’s another on the way: Harwell, Drew. “He blew the whistle on Trump’s Truth Social. Now he works at Starbucks.” The Washington Post, April 29, 2023.

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Putin Embarrasses Russia Worldwide

26 Monday Sep 2022

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, Political Psychology, Russia, Ukraine

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Following the war — Russia v. Ukraine — news?

This is a day not to be missed as it features Russian allies (at least one–Serbia) refusing to recognize Russia’s bogus annexation referendums, shoot-’em-ups at recruitment centers (well, just one, so far), a magnificent show of confidence, love, and respect for Putin while fleeing for Russia’s borders and security elsewhere, presumably provided by some other state that knows what it’s doing, and the show most popular now across Russia, Putin and His Black Clad Oprichniki AKA Omon (formerly known as thugs and recently referred to as “Cosmonauts”) as depicted in action here:

Posted September 26, 2022.

Can’t get enough?

“This is cool that we have all gathered here today because we came here not on party or state orders, which is also sometimes necessary, but because we all wanted to be together, here and today,” Putin told the crowd, calling them “brothers”.

He ended by shouting “long live Russia, long live Ukraine” and “long live bike” in Ukrainian before heading off to a meeting with President Viktor Yanukovich.

Bryanski, Gleb. “Black-clad Putin roars into Ukraine biker fest.” Reuters, July 24, 2010.

Well, doesn’t that make plain what all the chaos, death, destruction, and suffering come down to?

Posted to YouTube, August 30, 2011.

Now the deluded, deranged, and tyrannical Vladimir Putin wants to restore his biker party no matter how many Ukrainians and Russians prove themselves willing to die for him without their cooperation or consent.

The clip appears to have come from the 2011 Sevastopol Bike Show, and it would appear to show how much Putin loves the Russians and Ukrainians that were his to plunder with impunity before Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity that had the corrupt Viktor Yanukovych skedaddling north to Mothering Russia (as Putin would have her) for reassurance, a kind of “That’s alright, my blubberous little buddy. We’ll get it all back the way it was. Or we’ll destroy it.”

Probably, Putin has been always a malignantly narcissistic, petulant, and posturing little boy.

Related Online

Maynes, Charles. “Russians protested in dozens of cities against Putin’s military draft.” NPR, September 24, 2022.

Murphy, Matt and Merlyn Thomas. “Ukraine war: Protests in Russia’s Dagestan region against new draft.” BBC, September 26, 2022.

Reuters. “More than 730 detained in anti-mobilisation protests across Russia, rights group says.” September 24, 2022.

Reuters. “Ukraine mocks Russia’s partial mobilisation on Twitter.” Deccan Herald, September 25, 2022.

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Russian Power (Back) to the Russian People for Russian Democracy, Development, Humanism, Progress, and Rule of Law

24 Saturday Sep 2022

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Europe, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, Great Britain and United Kingdom, North America, Northern Europe, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Psychology, Russia, Ukraine

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This story posted today on YouTube turns out as much about OSINT detective work from within Russia as about the internal brutality of the politically criminal and thoroughly kleptocratic regime of Tsar Vladimir the Small.

Posted by the BBC to YouTube September 24, 2022.

Tweeted earlier this morning —

While the United States has its own Russian infection with Trump’s own anti-democratic and demagogic and delusional fascist nationalist base, he has yet to turn American national and state military defense and police security services into his own personal goons, Americans on the way to mid-term elections are not waiting for him or his cult to amass that kind of power. Trump represents a diminishing base of corrupt or diminished or greedy Americans who crave his “power” — his appearance of it, in any case — in relation to their own damaged psyches and penchants for absolute and sadistic personal and political control — under cover of Christian zealotry, no less — of all that surrounds themselves.

Also on BackChannels

Page: “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation”.

By date published–

A Note on the Demise of the Medieval Rus, May 9, 2022.

FTAC: Russia’s One Big Step Backward-Why Ukraine Must Prevail to the Four Compass Points of Its Pre-Crimean Annexation, June 5, 2022.

Detecting Post-Soviet Russia’s Black Narrative of Revenge for ’89 and ’91,June 19, 2022.

Addendum

UATV #UATV_English #UkraineNews
Destroyed homes and tortured residents: Consequences of Russian occupation of Kupiansk, September 24, 2022.

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