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Tag Archives: oligarchy

FTAC: Absent of Boundaries; Absent of Conscience: Dictatorship

17 Friday Nov 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, China, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Active Measures, agitprop, aristocracy, authoritarianism, Chinese and Russian Totalitarianism, dictatorship, Global Information Space, information space, information warfare, malignant narcissism, oligarchy, propaganda

The prompt from my conversational partner: “. . . to solve these problems, we need cooperation, not war. And the main question is why does the government not understand this?”

The response:

Paper, scissors, stone,  and “paper” (money) covers and suffocates all beneath it while “liberating” those who have it and, perhaps (I don’t want to find out!), those who might believe themselves above it – or those of merely modest material ambitions.

My personal approach has been “Money Matters!” but is not everything; however, and this especially with our health care industry, there are forces producing polices I can’t field, and of course that inspires a yet impotent resentment.

Our government should be Christian, good-willed, and muscular (academic term “muscular Christianity” works in this regard), but it’s bending toward the criminals in the great mansions and penthouse suites, and I’ not talking about Bill Gates or most “plutocrats” but rather those who believe there are no boundaries between their perfect embodiment of the “isness” (I will find the word, literally) of their state and themselves. The businesses, the courts, the military and paramilitary elements, and legislatures are all theirs to exploit and manipulate on behalf of their preferred . . . associates. That’s dictatorship.

Let me see if I can find the word for existence as the authentic expression of spirit . . . .

“Esse” and “essence” were not what I was looking for but for an esoteric term having to do with the being of the thing within the thing. Believing in the singularity of person and state (as Ceausescu had; as Erdogan and Putin do) may comprise part of the messianic delusion suffered by dictators but unfortunately visited (with fist in the velvet glove, at best) on their subjected people.

I’m finding my reading of Russian history steeped in punitive control, and that doesn’t come with interest in “the masses” half so much as in the developing and sustaining of wealth beneficial to the image and power of the central figure in power.


Related, Recent, and Singular

On today’s Chinese and Russian totalitarian aggression in Global Information Space:

Walker, Christopher and Jessice Ludwig.  “The Meaning of Sharp Power”.  Foreign Affairs, November 16, 2017.

BackChannels maintains a brief bibliography of accessible and general volumes on Russia’s political history in the “Russian Section” of this blog.  For greater insight into the authoritarian-patrimonial experience of the political culture from the 9th Century forward, I would recommend Richard Pipes’ fine history, Russia Under the Old Regime.

Punitive control: in geopolitical space and in the various ages of the “rule of the strong”, including for Russia and surrounds domination by the Mongols, the power to control space produces arrangements with in to produce wealth.  Pipes’ — in the above cited volume — steps off with economic variance in the productivity of Russian land compared to soil fertility to the south to explain motivation for the social arrangements that would ensue in history and effect Russian political arrangements to this day.  What Pipes appears to find essential — and what most concerns this blog — is the prince’s (or equivalent or greater in power) considering the ownership of property and persons the same thing.  Worse — the test of sovereignty becomes the permit to engage in the wholesale destruction of both!

Now have another look at Assad’s destruction of Syria and incubation of ISIS as a useful foil and political tool (“Reflexive Control’s” little helper) as well as the very emblem of the worst of the worst of destructive forces.

Who has the control of it?

Moscow-Tehran.


Note: keyword tags are related this time but not directly addressed except beneath the category that is “Dictatorship” and its essential and unfailingly malign narcissism.

–33–

Navalny on Medvedev – How That Other Half Do Live!

09 Thursday Mar 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

corruption, Medvedev, Modern Russian Feudalism, Navalny, oligarchy, Russia

Alexie Navalny

Related in the news: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/24/russias-conviction-of-opposition-leader-alexei-navalny-arbitrary-european-court-says – 2/24/2016.

Dmitry Medvedev

Related in the news: “Kremlin Critic Says Russian Premier, Dmitri Medvedev, Built Property Empire on Graft” –  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/world/europe/russia-dmitri-medvedev-aleksei-navalny.html – 3/2/2017.


Posted to YouTube by Alexie Navalny, with subtitles (turn on captions) – March 3, 2017.

This is not the first time BackChannels has featured work by Alexie Navalny.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2013/09/22/navalny/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/12/31/navalny-and-putins-pivot/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/04/14/moscow-misrules-create-chaos-promise-order-collect/

Official Russia today has something greater today than a Navalny issue as regards whatever pretenses to moral clarity and virtue it may have sustained despite the barbarism displayed in Syria and poker-faced dishonesty exhibited throughout the ordeal it has imposed on Ukraine.  The Russian State has been hammered for years by capital flight, reduced oil revenues, and reliance on rule-of-law western banking for what it has left of its diminishing cash reserves (and for the “oligarchs” pricey western real estate for parking wealth).

As the truth comes out (and perhaps gets passed around at light speed), the centralized control of information also may be lost to the greater efforts of the less greed ridden and more tenacious and virtuous of the world.

If you’re reading this post . . . that could be you.

However — wait just a minute — what happens where the wealthy, and by whatever means, control the whole of the state far at the expense of those not in the club?

At this time — and as the above video has been viewed more than seven million times — BackChannels may suggest the official response might be a giant narcissistic shrug on the part of the Powers of the State — a big . . . so what?

Lines, Andy.  “Inside Vladimir Putin’s new Russia, where corrupt tycoons plunder billions while 19.2 million live in poverty.”  The Mirror, March 6, 2017.

–33–

FTAC – On Separating from the Medieval World

20 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Regions, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Syria

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

contemporary medievalism, despotism, feudalism, foreign affairs, oligarchy, Russia, Syria

Those deep into the polarization(s) don’t understand that what Putin, Khamenei, and Assad are trying to cement for the future and for themselves is the medieval worldview. The tough decision shouldn’t be where to stand up, i.e., against feudalism and fascism, but rather how to lead or navigate the medieval world into a more productive — helpful, peaceful, prosperous — and modern global reality.

Conflicts consume attention and destroy time, so the drivers and engines leading to political polarization have to be impeded or slowed down as well.


Some BackChannels posts function as markers — brief remarks; “scraped” reference to other publications that become teasers (made you click!); commentary that turns old the moment read but remains as a snapshot of response to a part of the news of the day — and that above serves as a marker.

Via BackChannels — perhaps especially in the section “21st Century Feudal” — one catches a glimpse of 19th Century Russia revisited in Putin’s Moscow, the same as alluded to or referenced in the volumes of “The Russian Section”.  The New Russian Security State is a medieval complex promoting spectacle (like the $51 billion Winter Olympics at Sochi) and political theater (like “Assad vs The Terrorists” AKA “Assad OR The Terrorists”) while failing to produce government responsive to Russians (some would add the term “outside of Moscow”) or responsible to humanity in general.  It has taken BackChannels, which is not edited by an hoary Cold Warrior or newly sprung political science major, some time to see the Great Picture aligning a malignant narcissism with an epic that has laid waste to a nation before a horrified and benumbed global audience.

Projected against the backdrop of this bizarre stage: an image of a Russian bishop (unidentified) blessing rockets intended to kill moderate and modern Syrians, not “The Terrorists” incubated into today’s “Daesh”.  The exact context of the image (in the linked Business Insider piece) has been contested but the message — there mere act of Christian religious authority blessing weapons intended for extremist Muslim targets — cannot but endorse the medieval script, would that history itself have kept its most bloody religious wars contained.

On stage, center and right: an endless, horrific, and obscene stream of the momento mori of war brought to the innocent, infant and adult: beheaded, burnt, crushed, mangled, poisoned, riddled, and sliced.

The post-Soviet, neo-feudal arc of power connecting Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran continues to blame the bloodletting on the west (even though last November — 2014 — it was Moscow entertaining the listed terrorist organization “PFLP”; even though it was then Assad’s, and today Russia’s, bombing priority to preference the mixed and moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA) as targets in bombing runs and spare Daesh as hornets to fill up Syria and lash against her neighbors should the Assad regime be plainly overrun).

Responsible oligarchy focused on internal development may survive Syria by way of the complexity of the numbers subject to authoritarian systems and the difficulty, for example, of offering the methods of democracy to such as the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization ever ready for elections followed by proving itself as demonic as advertised (in Egypt in 2013: so done), but the Moscow story now differs quite from that: Bloomberg Business has spotted the contraction of the Russian economy at 4.6 percent (8/10/2015).

Related and published about 30 minutes ago: Kolesnikov, Andrei.  “Russia Chooses Bombers Over Pensioners.”  The Moscow Times, October 20, 2015.

Related: Stadnik, Alexander.  “Russia’s startup migration could help repair relationship with US.”  Russia Direct, October 15, 2015; McKenzie, Malgorzata.  “Why start-ups are Really leaving Russia.”  Russia Direct, October 15, 2015; Murashova, Olesya and Elena Novoselova.  “Employment: Recruitment Shortly Before 2016.”  The Moscow Times, October 20, 2016; Whitman, Elizabeth.  “Russia Unemployment Soars Under Putin Amid Sanctions, Falling Oil Prices: 4.1 Million Out of Work.”  International Business Times, September 23, 2015.

However one may read or skim the above cited articles, business life (and employment) appears simply more tenable, perhaps even pleasant, in the west: more markets for high tech innovators, whether as labor or the heads of new businesses; the power to passively contribute to reduced global oil pricing — by way of North American Energy Independence for Canada and the United States — and, in relation to conflict, imposing sanctions that could only be imposed by the lawful (in banking, business, and trade) on the unlawful — and “unlawful” is what medieval “absolute power” — the rule of the despotic and piratical — has been always about.

# # #

Ukraine – Autonomy and Competence-Seeking Behavior – Plus Mobocrats

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, Political Psychology, Politics, Regions, Russia, Ukraine

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

democracy, dictatorship, mobocracy, oligarchy, political psychology, Putin, Russia, Ukraine

Russia denies controlling pro-Moscow force in Crimea – YouTube – 3/5/2014.

* * *

Ukraine: UN Envoy Threatened By Armed Mob – YouTube – 3/5/2014.

* * *

Ukraine crisis Russian troops ‘besieging navy headquarters’ – YouTube – 3/5/2014.

* * *

Ukraine No Agreements Reached In Crisis Talks – YouTube – 3/5/2014.

______

Give a new revolutionary state a break!

Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians know that the first day or so of establishment is huge as regards the potential defenses of a new state.  State leaders, provisional, interim, or old hands know they have got to get on their feet fast; at the same time on this one: where’s the war?

The Ukrainian revolution, what little I’ve seen of it, just hasn’t been about Ukrainian or Russian culture or nationalism — this goes way beyond “hardly” — as much as about kleptocratic and piratical Moscow — Putin’s Moscow –leaning on Ukraine, Russian and Ukrainian Ukraine, for favor and loot, and then promoting a dependency-creating energy-based trade policy to chain Ukraine back to The Bear.

Putin-Assad-Khamenei: okay.  It’s good to see them in the same arc, the three amigos of dictatorship (with just one capable of reversing his tracks).

Putin-Yanukovych?

It just wasn’t meant to last.

There are only two main themes for the whole wide world and for Ukraine as regards the recent boot given the government of Viktor Yanukovych: integrity in government; autonomy in self-governance.

It’s a big F-U alright, but not to Russia.  Or Russians.  Or people who speak Russian.

Putin isn’t Russia.

Putin is what he can command and control of Russia with the levers and methods he has at hand — start with his ability neutralize political rivals like Gary Kasparov and, perhaps, one day, Navalny — and to which he may have become accustomed (while we in the U.S. are counting on him to contain and destroy Assad’s chemical weapons, it’s, gosh, hard griping about his irresponsibility as regards the rest of the war . . . oh, that Arab-borne jihadi thing to close to Saudi ambitions gets in the way too.

Ukraine’s different.

Ukrainian Russians aligning with Russia and not on the take, as it were, may want to revisit what they may doing for Putin to keep themselves in Russian money.  I would suggest that if arrangements and contracts are commercial or industrial outside of defense or involve shipping and trade, the will be there no matter what.

The state relationships that seem to be at stake are off to the side of these other two central themes: again, integrity vs. kleptocracy; Ukrainian and Russian self-determination within Ukraine.

Ukraine may turn out a long-term neutral buffer between NATO and Russia, but that’s a peaceful position — pretty good one, actually — where the character of leadership on both sides wakes up in good health.

I cannot suggest that good health might also characterize, say, Bashar al-Assad’s mentality as regards his position in Syria.  That one left common sense (if children ask you a few questions, do you wipe them out?), prudent statecraft, and sanity behind years ago.

As regards the best possible Bond villain ever — and he doesn’t even have to live in fiction — Putin suffers as I do: we love the charms of 19th Century aristocracy, but mine is like an architect’s model of a life, a spec of an old apartment box lined with books; Putin has the whole estate, carriages with wings and palaces and all.

I can’t wait to see what he does with Marbella!

In the meantime, Ukraine seems to be breathing on its own again and getting on to its feet, nicely graced with Faberge eggs left behind by the former boss.

______

US official denies Russia’s claim that Moscow, West favor EU deal for Ukraine | Fox News – 3/5/2014.

Ukraine crisis: March 4 as it happened – Telegraph – 3/4/2014.

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Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner's own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.
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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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