Tag Archives: medieval v modern

FTAC: Middle East Conflict: Misled

16 Friday Mar 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

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Prompt: ” . . . the Arabs . . . will become the majority in Israel, and things will  . . . change.”

The apartheid — the separation of Palestinians in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egyp — is Arab.

The exploiting of misery and leveraging of anti-Semitic perception is Russo-Arabian from the Soviet Era (and Russia’s 19th Century history as regards the libel of “The Protocols”).

Political suppression — suppression of criticism, of open speech, of election — may be credited to PLO/PA and Hamas.

Corruption and the skewing of financial distribution of UNRWA support has produced wealthy leaders — Arafat, Abbas, Haniyeh, Mashaal — and affluence among the patronized.

For those who feel diminished by not getting “one-up” on the Jews, the Jews in liberation theology got one-up on Pharaoh.

So many of the things you have heard have, perhaps, been intended to manipulate you, to make you angry, to exploit a bad situation.

Palestinian general good: never so loudly addressed.

The interest is there. The conscience, modernity, and will: absent.

Addendum – From the Same Day

The prompt had to do with Jews as outsiders, a trope coughed up frequently by the Palestinian holdovers from the era of Soviet cadre.  (URL added, of course).

The Point of No Return blog will tell a substantial part of the story of the Jews and their return to capital and land of the Hebrews.

A fast look-up of “KGB, Arafat” and “KGB, Abbas” will tell you a little bit about the origin, design, and handling of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, PFLP, and others.

A revisiting of the Gaza’s historic Jewish community, its more recent (2005) displacement by force, and the destruction of its synagogues, which were to remain accessible, will tell you also about where Israel’s Jews have come from and what they valued where they were settled.

We do not reconcile good with evil: we grow the good — and “the good”, if it is good, has integrity.

–33–

Also in Media: Speckhard on Torture

25 Sunday Feb 2018

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

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Just as the authors identify the factors that are predictive of those individuals and situations that are most likely to give rise to torture, they also identify the psychosocial sequelae of engaging in torture. These include dissociative personality splinters, social isolation, avoidance of reminders, self-condemnation with guilt and shame, intrusive thoughts and flashbacks, nightmares and sleep disturbances, high arousal states with the inability to concentrate or sleep well, and drug and alcohol abuse to forget and painful emotional states upon remembering. Lastly, the authors identify the practices that can be put in place to protect individuals from crossing the line into perpetrating abuse, atrocities, and torture upon those placed in their custody. Torture, as noted by Article 1 of the United Nations Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatments (United Nations, 1984; 1987):

Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Speckhard, Anne and Charles Figley and Ardian Shajkovci.  “Psychosocial Drivers, Prevention and Sequelae of Engaging in Torture.”  International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, April 17, 2017.

. . . the thoughtful individual needs to examine some core questions—the first being—does torture in any of it’s forms, including “torture lite” work? The answer appears to be a resounding no. Torture for the most part fails as a tactic because it does not leads to credible information, is problematic later for anyone we wish to prosecute, and may actually contribute far more to terrorism recruitment rather than to curbing terrorism. When dealing with al Qaeda for instance we must understand that most hardened terrorists who have blood on their hands have committed themselves to the idea of “martyrdom” and may be adept at misleading us when we believe they have cracked under torture. And when we resort to anything that is morally bankrupt they will later use it against us to show their constituents and potential recruits our “true colors”.

By contrast, interrogation that relies on rapport building has shown itself to yield positive results . . . .

Speckhard, Anne.  “Zero Dark Thirty — And the Real World of Torture, Enhanced Interrogation, Rendition and Prolonged Detention.”  Anne Speckhard, Ph.D, March 4, 2013.

Among other topics expertly engaged, Dr. Anne Speckhard has been working the issues on the subject of torture for many years.

If the repercussions are so bad and the results so thin, why do we persist with the same in practice?

BackChannels may suggest that engagement in torture represents the power of ownership of another experienced by the malign narcissist and is in the end, always, an expression of unbridled absolute power, i.e., the power to inflict suffering on others with impunity.

In his classic Russia Under the Old Regime, scholar Richard Pipes remarks on the meaning of sovereignty in the recession of Mongol power and subsequent princely Russian attitude toward property and persons as being alike — the power to destroy either the demonstration of sovereign ownership (approximate pages 70-80).

Note: between age, interests, and sedentary lifestyle at the desktop, your BackChannels editor is tiring and has two choice regarding loose scholarship: read less and slowly with pen, foolscap, and note cards at hand; continue remembering generally; or move off to a different kind of writing.  As regards Pipes, he’s masterful with analysis, complexity, and detail, and he will take the reader into the locking mechanisms between political exigency, political evolution in language, and the projection of political power.

For the purposes of this blog, the editor believe Moscow has deeply narcissistic issues supporting “absolute power” and all of the horror rightly associated with the demonstration of the complete absence of conscience in relation to the suffering of others.

On a more near historic note, author Anna Funder relays the testimony of a former Stasi prisoner arrested first for seditious leafleting and then again — having been motivated by the former imprisonment — for having attempted a crossing into then West Germany.  The form of torture during the second stay was sleep deprivation.  Here’s how that went down:

On the eleventh night, Miriam gave them what they wanted.  ‘I thought, “You people want an underground escape organisation?”  Well, I’ll give you one then.”

Fleischer had won.

‘There,’ he said, ‘that wasn’t so bad now, was it?  Why didn’t you tell us earlier and save yourself all this trouble?’  They let her sleep for a fortnight, and gave her one book each week.  She read it in a day, then started memorising the pages, walking up and down in the cell with the book to her chest.

‘In retrospect it’s funny,’ Miriam says, ‘but at the time it was pure, unalloyed frustration.  I cooked them up a story I would not have believed myself, even then.  It was utterly absurd.”

‘Miriam’ was on the far side of sixteen at the time she “cooked them up a story” in exchange for a little sleep.

Additional Reference

Funder, Anna.  Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall.  U.S. Edition, paperback.  New York: HarperCollins, 2002.

Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Old Regime: The History of Civilization. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974.

Additional Reading Online

Bukovsky, Vladimir.  “Torture’s Long Shadow.”  The Washington Post, December 18, 2005:

One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. “But, Comrade Stalin,” stammered Beria, “five suspects have already confessed to stealing it.”

This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad. Now that President Bush has made a public show of endorsing Sen. John McCain’s amendment, it would seem that the debate is ending. But that the debate occurred at all, and that prominent figures are willing to entertain the idea, is perplexing and alarming to me. I have seen what happens to a society that becomes enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse.

Fair for Look-Up

“Abu Ghraib”

“Evin Prison”

“Saydnaya Prison”

Through torture, it would seem the torturer learns most of all about himself, if he learns anything, and when it’s over, he may be treated to the sight of himself in media as ever deranged, infantile, sadistic, and tyrannical.

–33–

 

 

FTAC: East-West Conflict: Take the Longer Post-Cold War View

16 Friday Feb 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Russia

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Many conversations in the social networks rely on partisan politics for argument — Democrats this, Republicans that.  For the most part, the framing it time involves the period set by the run-up and aftermath of the Clinton v Trump election.  BackChannels suggests that the greater challenges associated with “Islamic Terrorism”, America’s political polarization, and the advent of vicious Far Left and Far Right fascism span Administrations all the way back to the last day of the Cold War (Dec. 25, 1991) and therefore beg Americans to broaden their scope accordingly.

Try to set aside partisan information and opinion and look at the present international relations in the greater frame of the post-Cold War period begun on the morning of December 26, 1991, the day after the Soviet Union dissolved. Rather than write long (e.g., “We know today through writers like David Satter and scholars like Karen Dawisha . . . .”), I’d rather share one link to what has been really taking place with “Islamic Terrorism” and the “New Nationalism” x Russia’s interest in sustaining dictatorships and much of the related political dynamics of the medieval world.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/reflexive-control…/

Putin | Assad | Khamenei comprise a package, as it were, from the Soviet Era: they are each in their way a part of what has been left of it.

Putin | Orban | Erdogan | add the leadership in some former satellites reengaging with anti-Semitism — should open the window wide on the medeival revanche.

I feel quite Quixote-like fighting this post-Soviet battle for liberal democracy because what Putin has done is brought back authoritarian and fascist (Turkey) or nationalist (elsewhere in EU / NATO) leaders in a way way that has damaged interstate democratic cohesion.

Russia from before the Bolshevik Revolution and to this day has had a long history as a promoter of anti-Semitic ideas and as a host, motivator, manipulator, and sponsor of terrorism. I hope the “Reflexive Control” piece will open a window for greater curiosity that may then lead to greater perception of an east-west conflict in which Israel very much represents a democratic and humanist future where other forces have kept installed medieval tyranny.

The Obama-Trump Punch and Judy gets and takes a lot of attention, but the struggle for western democracy against Moscow’s eastern sham spans American (“I looked into his eyes”) Administrations.

At the closing press conference, in response to a question about whether he could trust Putin, Bush said, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy – I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Bush’s top security aide Condoleezza Rice later wrote that Bush’s phrasing had been a serious mistake. “We were never able to escape the perception that the president had naïvely trusted Putin and then been betrayed.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovenia_Summit_2001

In her book, No Higher Honour, Condoleezza Rice would go on to say, “There was little room to convince critics that the circumstances of 2001 and the relationship with Vladimir Putin then were very different from what would come to pass.”

BackChannels submits that Putin was perceived differently in the White House by KGB design in those years and was not all different from the soul of the Soviet Union that had collapsed ten years earlier.  For reference to the Soviet transition plan developed in the 1980s for the event of dissolving, I would recommend reading Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy.

For an overview of Russian history and related authoritarian paternalism, BackChannels recommends from the Russian Section of its library the two volumes by Richard Pipes.

Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Old Regime: The History of Civilization. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974.

Pipes, Richard. The Russian Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knop, 1990.

Also in Media

Posen, Barry R.  “The Rise of Illiberal Hegemony.”  Foreign Affairs, March/April 2018.

America as led by President Trump appears to be winning its battles but altogether losing its war against a potential tyranny in the making that has come in the form of a “New Nationalism”, i.e., a populist president who is himself autocratic and seemingly enthrall to and reliant on feudal aggrandizement, cunning, and dumb strength in both personal and public realms.  As quoted from the Awesome Conversation and worth inserting here, the BackChannels piece on “Reflexive Control” and the rule of the manipulative and wealthy (like Medvedev) applies as regards the greater torque exerted by Russia, principally, and China as representing each their own politically unassailable business and leadership elites.

If Moscow believes it has taken the world forward by turning history’s clock backward, what has Washington done to freeze that totalitarian regress — and is it doing enough to keep from sliding into its own Orwellian (“Fake News!”) hell?

The American President — but not America’s governments in their totality — appears enmeshed in what ails most authoritarian regimes: questionable policies serving elites more than constituents, a host of political scandals, especially that “kompromat” thing that has come to associate the Trump brand with money laundering  (for more, web search, say, “Trump, Felix Sater”) and philandering.

11/14/2010

3/29/2016

4/21/2017

Ours is a competitive world but also one bound by our human awareness of self and related facets of conscience, empathy, ethics, and morality.  We’re aware of what we do and, perhaps, at the same time fearful of what we are capable of doing.

BackChannels believes that the Russian experience of the Mongol Invasion and related administration left their marks within Russian princes who would fear what any show of weakness might invite from the world around them while in the subjugated inspiring a festering crude anger and resentment.  The vaunted “realpolitik” would then seem to have evolved from doing what works, and if criminality and main force and leverage appear to have worked, then then those devices may remain installed but deeply redolent of despair and disaffection and far opposite the inspiriting benefits of higher-integrity and rule-of-law democracy.

–33–

Read and Weep: Signal of the Return of Endemic Russian Anti-Semitism: Bausman: Russia Insider: January 15, 2018

17 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Fast News Share, Political Psychology, Russia

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Bausman, Charles.  “It’s Time to Drop the Jew Taboo.”  Russia Insider, January 15, 2018.

Chosen link for a look-see: “Hostility to Putin’s Russia is largely a Jewish phenomenon”:

Russia Insider’s mission is to explain and describe Russia and her role in the world. As soon as you begin to drill into how other nations relate to Russia, and Russian history, it becomes obvious that the unreasonable hostility towards Putin’s Russia, particularly coming from the US and the UK, is very much a Jewish phenomenon, and has been for centuries.

And yes, ‘Jewish’ is the only term that accurately describes it, and not one of the many euphemisms we frequently see used.

The most vitriolic and obsessive Russia-bashing journalists in the media are mostly Jewish. The publications which push these writers most energetically are ALL Jewish-owned, and as a publisher, I know very well, that is where the buck stops.

BackChannels most respectfully suggests that Colonel President Emperor and Pharaoh Putler — if that is how he wishes to be known — may consider either disassociating his godliness from so cliche and puerile a revanche of the Imperial style in Jew Hate or now let the world know now he endorses it!  

Excerpt About the Forgery that Became Through the Agency of Russia’s 19th Century Okhrana — Tsar Nicholas II’s Secret Police — The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

A few months ago he bought a number of old books from a former officer of the “Okhrana” (Political Police) who had fled to Constantinople. Among these books was a small volume in French, lacking the title-page, with dimensions of 5½in. by 3¾in. It had been cheaply rebound. On the leather back is printed in Latin capitals the word Joli. The preface, entitled “Simple avertissement,” is dated Geneva, October 15, 1864. The book contains 324 pages, of which numbers 315-322 inclusive follow page 24 in the only copy known to Mr. X, perhaps owing to a mistake when the book was rebound. Both the paper and the type are characteristic of the “sixties and seventies” of the last century. These details are given in the hope that they may lead to the discovery of the title of the book [See Preface]. Mr. X. believes it must be rare, since, had it not been so, the “Protocols” would have speedily been recognized as a plagiarism by anyone who had read the original.

That the latter is a “fake” could not be maintained for an instant by anyone who had seen it. Its original possessor, the old Okhrana officer, did not remember where he obtained it, and attached no importance to it. Mr. X, glancing at it one day, was struck by a resemblance between a passage which had caught his eye and a phrase in the French edition of the “Protocols” (Edition de la Vieille France, 1920, 5, Rue du Préaux-Clercs, 5, Paris 7th Arrondissement). He followed up the clue, and soon realized that the “Protocols” were to a very large extent as much a paraphrase of the Geneva original as the published version of a War Office or Foreign Office telegram is a paraphrase of the ciphered original.

Before receiving the book from Mr. X, I was, as I have said, incredulous. I did not believe that Sergei Nilus’s “Protocols” were authentic; they explained too much by the theory of a vast Jewish conspiracy. Professor Nilus’s account of how they were obtained was too melodramatic to be credible, and it was hard to believe that real “Learned Elders of Sion” would not have produced a more intelligent political scheme than the crude and theatrical subtilties of the Protocols. But I could not have believed, had I not seen, that the writer who supplied Nilus with his originals was a careless and shameless plagiarist.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_truth_about_The_Protocols

Related on BackChannels in No Particular Order

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

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/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftac-antidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/12/29/ftac-middle-east-conflict-back-to-max-erwin-von-scheubner-richter-and-forward-to-the-plundering-of-palestinian-misery-by-palestinian-leadership-elites/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/12/16/excerpt-first-political-terrorist-organization-in-history/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/23/moscows-rules-a-module/

Related Reference

StopFake.  “Is Russia Insider sponsored by a Russian oligarch with the ties to the European far right?”  November 23, 2015.

Update: January 19, 2018: Lavrov Speaks Out Against Anti-Semitism

Source of First Encounter: Hanish, Seraphim.  “Russia’s top diplomat SLAMS anti-Semitism, calling it ‘the most horrible crime against humanity.”  The Duran, January 19, 2018.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov seems unable to separate the good intent shown in producing this overdue course correction from the seeking of advantage yet against Ukraine and the nationalist posture once taken against the Jews.  In fact, the Scheubner-Richter and Hitler relationship tells of a larger Russian history in the generation and dissemination of anti-Semitic libel and myth.  Nonetheless, Lavrov’s stern comments may pave the way for a long overdue pivot westward and away from the crimes against humanity of the Stalin years, the Soviet Era, and, most recently the same delivered with horrific brutality by Assad — as flanked by Putin and Khamenei –to noncombatant Syrians across the course of the civil war.

–33–

Dangerous History: Russia Slides Backward: A Note on Yuri Dmitriev and Moscow’s Return to Politically Directed “Punitive Psychiatry”

11 Thursday Jan 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Free Speech, Journalism, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology, Russia

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Dmitriev2007ByMediafond-522x

Yuri Dmitriev by Mediafond (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.

ManuPsy-1974-App-VI-524

Bukovsky, Vladimir and Semyon Gluzman.  A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissenters. (URL is to PDF). 1974.

The BackChannels editor has to wear “readers” too, but to spare some squinting here’s the most critical pull from the small print in the above image:

Dissenters, as a rule, have enough legal grounding so as not to make mistakes during their investigation and trial, but when confronted by a qualified psychiatrist with a directive from above to have them declared non-responsible, they have found themselves absolutely powerless.

Kafka comes to mind.

So does Milan Kundera’s famous statement: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

President Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship has chosen for Russians the erasure of their memory and gone after the culturally healing human rights organization Memorial.

While Yuri Dimitriev’s dark adventure into Putin’s Hell gains traction in the western human rights community, another Memorial notable has been apparently framed (here relayed in shortest form):

Oyub Titiev

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/01/russia-rights-defender-arbitrarily-arrested-in-chechnya/ – 1/11/2018
–
https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2018/01/276951.htm – 1/11/2018
–
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/10/chechnya-under-fire-after-human-rights-activist-held-for-drugs-possession – 1/10/2018

BackChannels wishes not to dilute the singular and stunning insult to the world that is the “Dmitriev Affair”, but it’s evident the Phantom of the Soviet has in mind the planting and rooting of Old Totalitarian Poison even with the world’s entire New Intelligentsia taking notice.

A Loose Note on Related Poli-Psy

Expressed as a personal trope: “Absolute Power” becomes inevitably the power to visit suffering on others with impunity.

Expressed as a personal trope: according to Richard Pipes (and now I shall have to relocate the reference), as the power of the Mongols receded, Russian princes had nonetheless internalized the idea that property and person could be (and should be) treated as the same thing, and proof of sovereignty was to be found in the permit to destroy either at will and without consequence.

For the malignant among narcissists, it would seem the suffering of another should have no consequence other than to affirm the power of the narcissist’s own blind will.  All the techniques of theater — for controlling family, if small; for controlling nations, if large — may apply to the artifice of presenting “reality” with the intention of framing and creating popular — and a neither too bright nor curious nor politically empowered — perception.

Reference Related to Yuri Dmitriev

ABC News.  “Fears Russian historian who exposed Stalin’s crimes may be falsely declared insane.”  January 10, 2018:

Some of Russia’s leading cultural figures say Mr Dmitriev was framed because his focus on Stalin’s crimes — he found a mass grave with up to 9,000 bodies dating from the Soviet dictator’s Great Terror in the 1930s — conflicts with the latter-day Kremlin narrative that Russia must not be ashamed of its past.

The narrative has taken on added importance ahead of a March presidential election, with polls showing incumbent Vladimir Putin, who uses his country’s World War II victory when Stalin was in charge to bolster national pride, is on track to win.

Mr Putin asserted last year that what he called an “excessive demonisation of Stalin” was being used to undermine Russia.

Activatica.  “The Arrest of Karelian ‘Memorial” Head Yuri Dmitriev: What is Known.”  March 22, 2017:

In general, the situation in Karelia is complex. On one hand, Karelia is a region where many exiles are left, the whole region was filled with camps and exiles, and the memory of this is alive at the personal level. And the authorities of Karelia have, for a rather long time, supported the activities of “Memorial” and various structures for perpetuating memory. When Dmitriev discovered the Sandarmokh burial site, the Karelian authorities cooperated and held a contest to landscape this place. But at the same time, there were efforts to conceal and obstruct the receipt of information on the side of the secret services. They also tried to pressure Dmitriev six years ago. On one side the authorities helped, but on the other side, some power structures interfered. And in the past couple years, pressure on Dmitriev has intensified, as an independent historian.

Ayres, Sabra.  “An outspoken research of Stalin’s crimes fights for his own fate and freedom in Russia.”  Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2017:

A small clearing in a dense northwestern Russian forest marks the site where, 20 years ago, Yuri Dmitriev discovered a group of mass graves containing victims of Josef Stalin’s Great Terror.

Using detailed documents uncovered in KGB archives, Dmitriev was able to piece together the location where Stalin’s execution squads killed and buried more than 9,500 people from 1937 to 1938. The documents contained the dates and names of those killed, as well as the executioners’ names. During the next two decades, Dmitriev worked meticulously to document every victim’s story.

Bukovsky, Vladimir.  “Punitive Psychiatry (1977).”  The Bukovsky Archives.  Vladimir Bukovsky’s foreward to Russia’s political hospitals (1977) by Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway.

Luhn, Alec.  “Gulag grave hunter unearths uncomfortable truths in Russia.”  The Guardian, August 3, 2017:

“For our government to become … accountable, we need to educate the people,” Dmitriyev said of his efforts to uncover details of Soviet repression.

But not everyone wants to remember this forgotten history, especially amid Russia’s current patriotic fervour. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said in June that “excessive demonisation” of Stalin has been a “means of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia”, and several branches of Memorial have been declared “foreign agents” in recent years.

U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Russia.  “U.S. Mission to Russia Concerned with Charges Against Yury Dmitriev.”  May 31, 2017:

The U.S. Mission to Russia is concerned by what appear to be politically-motivated criminal charges against prominent human rights activist and historian Yury Dmitriev. Mr. Dmitriev is a respected historian whose work has been instrumental in uncovering mass burial sites and founding the Sandarmokh Memorial Complex in Karelia. We call on Russia to transparently uphold the rule of law and respect human rights and fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We also call on Russia to respect its international human rights obligations, including those related to the prohibition on arbitrary arrest or detention and respect for fair trial guarantees.

Osborn, Andrew.  “Russian historian who exposed Stalin’s crimes faces enforced psychiatric testing.”  Reuters, January 9, 2018:

A previous psychiatric evaluation declared him to be of sound mind and a court-sanctioned expert group found no pornographic content in nine photographs of his daughter that are at the center of the case against him, overturning the earlier findings of other experts commissioned by prosecutors.

Yarovaya, Anna.  “The Yuri Dmitriev Affair”.  The Independent Barents Observer.  March 11, 2017:

What always struck me about Dmitriev was his enthusiasm, which materialized less in the help he gave me and more in his attitude to history, to events that had occurred many years ago. For example, in the same cemetery where I shot the film, he found the remains of a POW. None of the local authorities was in a hurry to bury the exhumed “youth,” as Dmitriev called him. So Dmitriev put the bones in his garage. A while later, he secured a spot in Peski Cemetery, found a sponsor to help him buy a gravestone, and asked the philologist Valentina Dvinskaya to translate the phrase “To the victims of war, disappeared but not forgotten” into German so that it could be engraved on the headstone. He did all this for an unknown man who had been killed over sixty years ago.

It was only later I realized that Yuri Dmitriev was the same Yuri Dmitriev who had founded the Sandarmokh Memorial Cemetery, who was involved in investigating the Krasny Bor Forest NKVD execution site in Karelia, who had catalogued over 13,000 names of victims of the Great Terror of 1937–1938 in Karelia and published them in The Book of Remembrance, which runs to thousands of pages.

Wikipedia.  “Memorial”.

The Dmitriev Affair (Website)

–33–

FTAC: FEMEN, Lady Liberty, Modesty, and Civil Disobedience

17 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, France, Free Speech, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Kurdistan, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Ukraine

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Inspiration: an image with FEMEN topless, of course, up top and below examples of accomplished female professionals and the charge was that FEMEN were not feminists but the workers were.

I like FEMEN.

The Atlantic ran a Pro-Con set on them in 2013:

Pro: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/05/topless-jihad-why-femen-is-right/275471/

Con: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/05/put-your-shirts-back-on-why-femen-is-wrong/275582/

Where women enjoy security beneath the umbrella of reasonable and sound laws, it should not make a difference how one or the other choose to bring attention to political or social issues that concern them.

Free to work; free to bare the breast (at times); free to choose: free.

***

The hidden principle and cultural value behind this discussion is “modesty”. In civil and day-to-day life, most may agree that modesty is a virtue.

Keep your clothes on.

🙂

However, in the liberal western democracies that adjust themselves with thought and thoughtfulness, there’s been ample room for peaceful civil disobedience and protest. It’s in that context that a passionate defense of persons against wrongdoing my be interpreted. Perhaps where attention is needed — perhaps we should discuss FEMEN’s causes more than its methods — attention is gotten.

The Eugene Delacroix painting is famous and here somewhat between camps because she is “Liberty” herself leading the charge against tyranny.

Le 28 Juillet. La Liberté guidant le peuple

Eugene Delacroix, “Le 28 Juillet. La Liberté guidant le peuple.” Source: Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives via artsy.net

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Excerpt: “. . . First Political Terrorist Organization in History . . .”

16 Saturday Dec 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Politics, Russia, United States of America

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Pipes, Richard.  The Russian Revolution.  P. 142. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1990.

Below: bold type added.

The author noted with dismay the effects of radical propaganda on the peasants:

How curiously our speeches, our concepts were interpreted by the peasant mind! . . . their conclusions and comparisons utterly astonished me.  “We have it better under the Tsar.”  Something struck me in the head, as if a nail had been driven into it . . . .  There, I said, are the fruits of propaganda!  We do not destroy illusions but reinforce them.  We reinforce the old faith of the people in the Tsar.”

The disillusionment with the people pushed the most determined radicals to terrorism.  While many of the disappointed Socialists-Revolutionaries abandoned the movement and a handful adopted the doctrines of German Social-Democracy, a dedicated minority formed a secret organization called the People’s Will (Narodnaia Volia).  The mission of its thirty full-time members, banded in an Executive Committee, was to fight the tsarist regime by means of systematic terror: on its founding, it passed a “sentence” of death on Alexander II.  It was the first political terrorist organization in history and the model for all subsequent organizations of this kind in Russia and elsewhere.  Resort to terror was an admission of isolation: as one of the leaders of the People’s Will would later concede, terror

requires neither the support nor the sympathy of the country.  It is enough to have one’s convictions, to feel one’s despair, to be determined to perish.  The less a country wants revolution, the more naturally will they turn to terror who want, no matter what, to remain revolutionaries, to cling to their cult of revolutionary destruction.

The stated mission of the People’s Will was to assassinate government officials, for the twin goal of demoralizing the government and breaking down the awe in which the masses held the Tsar.  In the words of the Executive Committee:

Terrorist activity . . . has as its objective undermining the fascination with the government’s might, providing an uninterrupted demonstration of the possibility of struggling against the government, in this manner lifting the revolutionary spirit of the people and its faith in the success of the cause, and finally, organizing the forces capable of combat.

The ultimate political goal of the People’s Will was the convocation of a National Assembly through which the nation would express its wishes.  The People’s Will was a highly centralized organization, the decisions of the Executive Committee being binding on all followers, known as “vassals.”  Members were expected to dedicate themselves totally to the revolutionary cause, and if called upon, to sacrifice to it their properties and even their lives.

I have for months spent a good deal of time each day passing along the “Hey, Martha’s” of breaking or recent news, primarily using the BackChannels reader page on Facebook to do it.

That ain’t writing, and even with highlighting and juxtaposing stories (“Related:” appears in the first one or two comments pointing to additional reading), it’s not really opining either.  At best, the method shares this blog’s editor’s interests and outlook of the day.  Much on the web becomes media passing along other media.  With that in mind, both internal reflection and weather — and aesthetic charm — seemed to point toward 19th Century time and the luxury of long reading.

Well, lookee up there — and into the pages wrought by the extraordinary historian Richard Pipes.

Fair use?

Fair advertising and advisement:

Having delved into other of Pipes’ work a short while ago with Russia Under the Old Regime, I felt the present volume its companion – and what a rich companion it is turning out (with 684 pages left to read).

To be fair, one cannot share the whole book, technically, at least, except by recommending it or joining others in classroom or colloquy to discuss it.

As much characterizes a process in democratic and responsible governance in which the general public may follow good advice — buy the book or take it out of the library — but what portion does becomes no longer the “general public” but an enlightened public cleaving away from former peers.

Putin’s game with election hacking favoring our President Trump?

While collusion would seem a possibility that the most determined of ongoing investigations may well dredge up and beat into reality, one might consider the alternative of interpreting Moscow as cynically narcissistic and malign in using methods still related to the “People’s Will” to disparage our noble democracy by seeing elected to head it a bullying businessman and entirely inexperienced politician.

With that interpretation for a base, Moscow (and Tehran) would seem to believe they have figured out how to divide us and undermine our confidence in our democratic integrity and the related institutions and processes that guaranty American justice (truly for all) and robust internal as well as external security.  However, now that that possibility may be seen — 🙂 — BackChannels is starting to like this latest in Presidents of the United States of America.

Go Trump!

And tackle Putin in his nasty dash back to Russia’s imperial glory and apparent future without the benefit of conscience.

Make America Great Again.

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FTAC: Being “Global Elite” and . . . Nothingness

05 Tuesday Dec 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics

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“For the global elite socialism is a tool to control the masses. Use government to provide enough stuff to keep passions in check. If a guy has an apartment, access to free porn and beer he likely won’t revolt. “

Almost “ouch”!

One becomes less interesting as well as pernicious with time and since when has the other been free? 

“Soma” and “The Feelies” are the drug and entertainment experience featured in _Brave New World_ (something else I should now re-read).

It’s true that as a nation, we have loaded up on material comforts, which trade produces our economy, so good, and “adult pacification systems”, which may include the downers, uppers, and mellowing agents prescribed by physicians (I want the roll-eyes emoticon for just such phrases) or naughtily accessed by the over- and under-enthused (and generally so for good reasons).

I would argue that business and political global elite are neither capitalist nor socialist nor much of anything apart from immense egos that tend toward authoritarianism in their own right!

Carnegie essentially quit — and then made sure to attach his name to a nation’s libraries . . . .

For touring in political science and with some focus on the Russian civilizational experience, I would suggest strongly that dogma, ideology, and religion serve power by leveraging the enthusiasms of “masses” and mobs.

Free radicals  🙂 are perhaps not so welcomed . . . . 　

Note: I was surprised recently to find the term “liberal conservative” in Pipes’ history of the Russian Revolution, and were I alive then, that is where I would place not only myself but possibly most good willed and responsible Americans.  There has been nothing wrong with making ourselves modestly comfortable and being apprised and attentive to the needs of others less well accommodated. Whether we should then lose our heads (a now interesting phrase) to serve a “global elite” at the expense of our “ethics, ideals, principles, and values” — and sentiments! — seems a fair question for asking.

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