15 Friday Jun 2018
Tags
21st Century Neo-Feudalism, Donald J. Trump, Kim Jong Un, medieval v modern, North Korea, political screenshot, Russia, United States
Is perception reality?
Should The People leave Big Business to Big Daddies?
Should we all just adore our Great Leaders?
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23 Wednesday May 2018
Tags
kleptocracy, malignant narcissism, medieval v modern, political absolutism v democracy, Political Perceptual Control, realpolitik, Russia, Vladimir Putin
Putin: leader of nationalist Russia, master of “realpolitik” — leverage, punishment, reward — the Boss of bosses, capricious and absolute.
Whatever the game, why play one side or the other when you can own the whole board?
KGB Colonel, President, Emperor Putin has taken Russia back the one giant step to an authoritarian system reinforced by secret police — today’s FSB supports more staff per capita than ever did the KGB — capable of presenting events for public political perceptual control as with the Moscow Apartment Bombings and the Russian Army’s after-hours (deeply unofficial) brutalizing of Chechen villages in such a way as to drive the men into the waiting camps of Chechen rebels. He has succeeded in abetting greater chaos and conflict in the world, especially in Syria, while balancing the tension between adversaries that may stall change but keep all of the businesses, licit and perhaps illicit, running.
BackChannels credits Putin with turning Erdogan’s pretty little head back toward the feudal glory of the sultanate — or something like it — with the help of Turkish Stream, encouraging the family business in Hungary, and aiding with the election of the formerly more autocratic President (“Fake News”!) Trump in the United States (the French, better knowing what they’re about, didn’t quite go for his Marine Le Pen; Trump, BC presumes, has been tempered by having gotten himself into a job involving personalities as large as himself and powers greater than known in his organization — America’s democracy has not been overwhelmingly wowed or easily walked over). The popular perception of Putin may respond opposite the viewer’s interests: for old lefties, he’s the world’s greatest reactionary and using revived militarism and the Russian Orthodox Church to assuage bad feelings attending the insult of expanding financial hardship associated with related ambitions in Syria and Ukraine and, ultimately, the way the guy at the top gets his hooks into the best performing businesses.
Why not?
In Russia, there’s protest and resistance to Putin, but there is no competition for the power he has amassed and his ability to . . . rearrange the world along feudal lines.
And for “righties”, he’s still the go-to for “socialist” dictatorships like Assad’s.
Never mind that Assad via the KGB-style political theatrical “Assad v The Terrorists” has been building Syria down, enough so, and so desperately so, for Putin to permanently expand Russia’s military footprint in Hafez’s old sandbox.
After the one step backward into 19th Century and earlier Russian paternal authoritarianism, aristocracy, imperialism, and resurgent nationalism, one may wonder what may be the “two steps forward” if any are ever taken as needs must be: whether Putin likes it or not, the Russian Federation is, alas, multicultural and perhaps yearning — as Navalny might have it — for the liberal devilishness that are “rule of law” and “responsive and responsible governance”.
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16 Wednesday May 2018
15 Tuesday May 2018
Tags
exploiting the masses, Hamas, medieval v modern, middle east conflict, Palestinian, Palestinian history, PLO, political blackmail, Soviet Era, totalitarianism
The Palestinian liberation movement descends directly from the Soviet Era and Moscow’s interest in leveraging grievance into the political power familiar to the world’s most piratical dictatorships. This is not to excuse western perfidy on parts of the global far right in the 20th Century, but to note where the phoniness in Palestinian politics originated.
At the end of WWII, what Adolph could not hold, Uncle Joe picked up and although representing a very different system from that of the German fascists, the feudal authoritarianism was there to encourage similar drift associated with absolute power — or “political absolutism” — in the middle east. (Note regarding Moscow: two major revolutions, three governments, one-hundred years — and The Bear remains absolutely authoritarian, criminal, and totalitarian).
We know today the KGB’s relationship with Arafat and the PLO (also the pride Yuri Andropov took in the airline hijackings of the 1970s) and we have learned within the past couple years of Mahmoud Abbas’s own KGB record.
Keep loving Moscow — and you will love even more Palestinian suffering by way of its designs.
Note well that ALL Palestinian top leaders have become multi-millionaires while Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh long ago developed reputations as billionaires.
The seduction, captivity, and suffering of the Palestinian main base has turned out a long-lived and powerful business for thieving elites and their systems of patronage.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftacantidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/
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09 Wednesday May 2018
Tags
Authentic Popular Democracy, feudalism v democracy, global financial elite, illusion of political control, medieval v modern, money and global political influence, Money for Money, Potemkin Democracy, Reflexive Control, Viktor Vekselberg
Brooke Seipel’s piece in The Hill, “Trump threatens to remove news networks’ press credentials over negative coverage” (May 9, 2018) provided the remark on the BackChannel’s reading page that inspired the following — and rather drifting — comment.
Trump should not have stepped off with denouncements of the Fourth Estate. However, BackChannels believes the location of tension in the world is that between the Modern and Medieval political worlds, and in the 21st Century, the medieval is a world of lies and manipulations. Motivation: money — for its own sake.
I need to update this piece —
The observation a year ago was that Islamic Terrorism had been prodded, channeled, and used _by Moscow_ to produce a reflexive “New Nationalism” in the EU / NATO states as part of Moscow’s efforts to degrade cohesion among the western democracies and within the military alliance defending them.
In an update, I would want to look over the potential integrating and related interference and shaping of Russo-American relations at highest levels. I’m a little tired as a volunteer poli-sci / poli-psy blogger, but were there encouragement plus a few $$$, that’s where intuition would send me.
There is obviously — and from the start with this Administration — a global class of immensely wealthy business personalities who appear to help one another along while also moving their hosting nations around in ways that address a number of issues.
BackChannels has to this point generally promoted “Authentic Popular Democracy” (APD) — not Potemkin Democracy operated by global elites. The guys (generally speaking) mixed up in these “Russian connection” investigations seem to believe otherwise, and that their money may purchase controlling influence.
Is that a world that is wanted from a democratic perspective?
President Trump’s “Russian Thing” becomes ever more complex and deep with the latest explorations into the working of financial clout by one of Russia’s wealthiest men, Viktor Vekselberg (the look-up may be left to the reader because the web has made that part of the blogger’s work almost superfluous).
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03 Thursday May 2018
Tags
cultural adaptation, ethnolinguistic culture, feudal mode, Jewish by choice, Jewish culture, Jewish election, Jewish identity, Jewish universalism, medieval v modern, modern culture, tribalism
Presented with choice between Christianity and Islam early in the 20th Century, the Abayudaya adopted Judaism. The Abayudaya are Jewish.
The Native American community is not a “nation” — it is an assembly and cohort made up of many nations with many formerly at war with one another.
While you are looking for bedrock authenticity, we Jews may enjoy both adoption and lineage in the construction of our identity.
In the feudal and medieval modes, lineage may be made to count for a great deal in the inheritance of power and privilege related to “purity” of some kind (as most kingdoms learn, genetic “purity” turns out badly pursued too well), but in the modern world, identity has much to do with what is in the heart and shared from it.
///
Now the sons of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, aside from children. 38 A mixed multitude also went up with them, along with flocks and herds, a very large number of livestock. 39 They baked the dough which they had brought out of Egypt into cakes of unleavened bread. For it had not become leavened, since they were driven out of Egypt and could not delay, nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves.…
/// (Exodus 12:38).
Who in that “mixed multitude” that shared the experience undertaken by the sons of Israel would not come to be themselves considered Hebrew and Jewish?
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23 Monday Apr 2018
Tags
confused battlespace, dictatorship, flag disorientation, Liwa al-Quds, medieval v modern, middle east conflict, Palestine Hospital Bombing, Phantoms of the Soviet, political chaos, Syria, Yarmouk Camp
The compressed link leads to this apparently unedited or particularly grim header:
BackChannels requested additional information, and this came in:
https://twitter.com/BloodyRain111/status/988320431722688512
Most important info missing, the Yarmouk camp is under ISIS. The offensive to liberate the Palestinian Yarmouk camp is led by Palestinian militias, most notably Liwa al-Quds.
4/23/2018
Liwa al-Quds is an Assad-aligned Sunni Palestinian fighting organization.
In the Soviet / post-Soviet medieval time bubble, the spectacle attending the bombing of a Palestinian hospital in the Palestinian enclave of Yarmouk in Syria appears that of a Palestinian Sunni force pitted against independent Sunni extremist forces to which, for enmity as viewed by Liwa al-Quds, the western-leaning Free Syrian Army appears appears to have been attached, although western alignment would seem also pitched against ISIS and other Sunni (and Shiite) extremists.
Among Liwa al-Quds allies, the Phantoms of the Soviet Era align: Ba’ath Brigades, Hezbollah, (Syrian) National Defence Forces, Russia, Syrian Armed Forces, Syrian Armed Forces, each defending “political absolutism”, the survival of dictatorship itself — and of dictatorships, BackChannels has long remarked, “Different talks — same walk!”
The walk seems to be that of a march toward the accumulating of wealth and power without end, without limit, and without purpose other than the experience of it (in the political psychology, the malign narcissistic process may begin with “narcissistic mortification” and end with “narcissistic supply”).
Among Liwa al-Quds opponents: minus the Free Syrian Army, defenders of the very same thing!
Missing from the picture: family, financial, and personal relationships. The interlocking details involving persons and personal interests would be another and more granular level down in public reporting, and such investigative work might be unwelcome where it would be gathered.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/12/29/syria-the-horror-2011/
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09 Monday Apr 2018
Tags
foreign affairs, liberalism, medieval v modern, Syrian conflict, Syrian Tragedy, totalitarian conflict, totalitarian control, western political enterprise
The prompts may be inferred — has Syria signaled the weakening and weakness of the west? And are we so beholden to “Big Money” — the personalities of the powerful and wealthy of the world — that we have abandoned our western political character? — for the following and linked pieces of the BackChannels Soapbox Opera.
Syria has been the demonstration project for a medieval absolutism that intentionally fails to differentiate between the value of property and that of persons. The indiscriminate killing by the Assad regime as flanked by Putin and Khamenei has reinforced that most feudal view of sovereignty — and it should be seen that way. The same “troika” has also extended the tenure of Russian totalitarianism in which centralized power has shown it may arrange all perception for everyone else. There should be no question that Assad incubated ISIS — i.e., allowed the al-Qaeda types to stream into the battlespace and form, and then encouraged their organization by choosing to battle the west first while also bombing neutral noncombatant targets. “Assad v The Terrorists” has been grand and bloody political theater from the start.
If all were so — even though much seems so — we would have disengaged from Syria and nascent “Kurdistan” completely, but I think the spirit of the west still evolving and strong. In Syria, the post-Soviet axis has been effectively destroying itself, especially as may be measured by Syria’s diminished population and controlled land space.
Russia and the “phantoms of the Soviet” in it may be fabulously wealthy, but the state has been deeply damaged financially — and not by sanctions completely but the accumulated effects of capital flight and mafia behavior for decades.
Where Iran has had its hand in driving conflict, it has poisoned land and politics both.
The west has been cautious beneath the now immovable cloud of potential nuclear exchange with its enemies, and it has perhaps (!) suffered from early post-Cold War cooperation that with “Putin’s Pivot” on Syria (2011) has become problematic.
As regards Powerful Big Money, the western investment in its own existence in ideals, principles, and values IS being tested. If the west fails to defend its hard won experience, then welcome to the New Feudalism and wars cooked up endlessly for illicit and licit trade in totalitarian fashion (black market arms –> miscreants; state arms sales –> states). Alternatively, if the west wants to exist as a liberal statement, it will have to stand to defend its integrity.
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