“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.
Reference Abdullah Ocalan’s vision that misrepresents liberalism and true representative democratic process, which may in turn replicate what the Soviet axis always produced using “sweet words” combined with the rapacious temperament of the politically privileged in an autocratic system: kleptocratic strongmen in palaces and manipulated “masses” around them.
2. Phantoms of the Soviet – PKK
Related to the first point, the PKK set up in the Soviet Era with, apparently, related dogma for intellectual definition, and in that its presence in persons may persist beneath other banners, the same may serve to block western enthusiasm for an independent Kurdistan. In other words and in relation to the Phantoms of the Soviet (a category referenced frequently on BackChannels in relation to other conflicts), the persistence of PKK ideas and actions, whether vengeful or provocative, cloud western support. The only answer to that is to reconsider what is advanced in Kurdistan as regards practical ideals and political language (across languages) and adjusting for the distance in intellectual history between states of affairs in 1984 and those of this day.
3. Putin’s Feudal Revanche
Putin’s Russia represents another rapacious autocracy bent on producing conflict worldwide within a global system of feudal absolute power certain to drive wars of all against all.
The Federation represents Russia’s third flip — two revolutions, three governments — within 100 years of the days of the tsars, and appears now to leverage deals on that basis, e.g., in range of Putin’s sway (and leveraged by the Turkish Stream energy pipeline project, Erdogan has diminished the democracy that initially empowered him and all but returned Turkey to a feudal estate from which he cannot be politically (by mere elections) ejected.
4. Moscow / Moscow-Tehran’s Totalitarian Approach to the Creation and Presentation of Conflict
The intent was to produce a large piece of theater, truly, that would make Assad look good — he envisioned and helped into power the enemy wanted — while producing a major headache for the west. By remaining somewhat fixed in past arrangements and ideas, the Kurdish community has perhaps been maneuvered into aiding the devil that most seeks to control it (and everyone else).
5. State of Kurdish Administrative and Constitutional Development
It has been hard to see the coordinating and self-subordinating (“for the greater good”) character of Kurdish leaders to an overarching administrative and democratic (power checking, power displacing, power distributing, and culturally and politically evolving) system. The latent Kurdish state in fact that may be defined by the subordination of officials to greater institutional arrangements may be there, but the western / publishing-in-English journos haven’t laid out relationships, or I’ve missed that coverage, or the same is not wanted.
In deference to Ocalan’s “democratic communalist” vision, there may be little incentive (by way of example too) to bring western commercial elements and associated vulgarity into a culturally independent Kurdistan. There are many other ways to pursue and sustain both cultural and political evolution and distributed economic development across a new polity (reference authors Brown, McRobie, Schumacher, among others).
Addendum to the Above: Found Posted on YouTube – October 17, 2017
6. Modern Kurdish Defense Considerations Against Adverse Feudal Estates
Much in favor of the defense of Kurdish independence may be the reversion of the Turkish government to feudalism and its history of persecution of the Kurds and others. Clearly, the Kurdish community needs an effective defense against adverse egomaniac and ill-willed potentates.
7.Armed Proxies of Iranian Fascism
Washington needs to be pressed hard about the powering up and evident fielding of Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militia in the latest suppression of Kurdish independence. At this point, Moscow / Moscow-Tehran’s kleptocratic totalitarian ambition should be glaring, and the western public should join the Kurdish community in blocking greater Iranian fascism through armed proxies.
If there’s a secret to peace all around, it may be in the separation of the present western-backed governments from the external meddling of rogue dictatorships that wish to drag the region backward toward feudal barbarism using the most nefarious of political methods to do it. The leaders in that aggression have learned how to make money off the misery of others while they themselves remain remote from the nightmares they have created.
Inspiration: the common conservative American claim that the United Nations has proven consistently anti-Semitic and anti-Western: why fund it?
Think of the UN as having organized an institutionalized tug-of-war, i.e., a war between the medieval world and the modern one. It is the medieval world that culturally preserves and leverages anti-Semitism. It does so to deflect attention from power while it mightily exploits its deeply subjugated constituents. The situation is no different for the Arabs of the Kingdom who support the absolute power of the royals; the poor of Russia, a class once again growing by the day, whose wealth in the patrimony of the land has been swept into the hands of the patronized by the “Vertical of Power” (Putin) who are spending it elsewhere; the whites of South Africa, all of a sudden, but who have been the target of communist-aligned Jacob Zuma’s ire; and, though you may not believe me, the Palestinians whose KGB-trained Arafat and KGB-affiliated Mahmoud Abbas have kept most right where they are because for political leadership and powerful clans, the middle east conflict has turned out a spectacularly good business!
The modern world fights the medieval world at the UN.
It’s a long process, or one best approached a little bit at a time, for “the world left behind” may well swallow the one that has advanced with increments of violence from everywhere. It’s better to have one place where the truth can be dragged out into the light whether or not the representatives of so many nations wish to accept it.
Putin’s mission: sustain feudalism in service to political absolutism and reap the benefits of sustained conflicts and, eventually, subjugated and taxed populations.
KGB method: Reflexive Control via the indirect channeling of terrorism to promote the authoritarian nationalism certain to weaken EU / NATO cohesion and favor the development of political environments subject to the control by the wealthiest and most powerful of personalities.
Western Response Most Adverse to Democratic Modernity: in former Moscow-aligned organizations or personalities, adoption of “active measures” and forms of perceptual control, including the “false flag” painting of events, to channel popular perception in service to greater political power.
Western Response Most Favorable to Democratic Modernity: strongest possible emphasis on empiricism, integrity in investigation, and the promotion and retention of American and associated constitutional methods, principles, and values.
In the feudal mode, “the masses” — BackChannels finds the term itself degrading — may be controlled by disinformation, disingenuous information, framing, innuendo, rumor, and suspicion.
In the modern mode, the curious and the reasoning of the public may sift and evaluate for strong information — valid, reliable, significant, and straight.
North Americans and Europeans accustomed to political decency may wish to evaluate whether they really want to have the Feudal Mode installed in the future experience of their own presently democratic and modern rule-of-law states.
I would question the authenticity of each posture or pretense presented, and I should think a good detective would start with the accuser. Again, we have been made to enter an era marked by the potential for KGB-style “false flag” and other manipulation. Where some people dare the improbable — do the unthinkable — the numbers (what are the odds?) may not help them.
I find the Linda Sarsour side of the story deeply suspect given her relationship with Hamas.
What if Jews and Muslims accomplished the vandalism together, and then made a show of amity in the wake of tragedy?
In the feudal mode — where power is concentrated by a force in personality that generates immense wealth and patronage without regard for common law — and in the mind supporting the feudal worldview (blessed with imagination but cursed by limited access to applicable data, critical research and reasoning skill, and relevant knowledge), what, however improbable, is not possible?
In this imbroglio, to accuse either Jews or Muslims — or representatives of either — of engaging in a “false flag” operations draws immediate condemnation as either anti-Semitic or Islamophobic — and therein lies the beauty of medieval manipulation and political theater and the greater horror of it as well.
What happens when power play magus?
Syria — and the incubating of ISIL as useful tool for Moscow and the depopulating of the state to present the west with a major headache.
What will happen to the western public IF subjected to continued “reflexive control” and artifice in the presentation of political event?
Whatever the answer may be, it’s unknown to BackChannels.
However, BackChannels would attempt to armor the “American Mind” against so many feudal methods of perceptual control even though an obscure foreign policy / political science / political psychology blog cannot begin to do what perhaps the American Intelligence Community (IC) needs must do in defense of the Constitution and the related cohesion and integrity of the state itself: set the record straight.
How is it possible that an act of vandalism on the scale reported — in Philadelphia’s Mount Carmel Cemetery, some “75 to 100 headstones were topped” according to CNN — produced no claims (by person or organization), no witnesses — none that have been in any way publicized, at least — and to date no suspects.
What has been produced: innuendo, rumor, suspicion, each a part of the shifting — and at times easily manipulated — perceptions well known to feudal lords and their loyal subjects.
BackChannels 