Complete indoctrination and organization beneath the auspices of dictatorship. This is universal. Similar evil is just a fact of life worldwide but also arranged in discrete geopolitical space even though what I call the “Islamic Small Wars” doubtless produce the lion’s share of conflict misery globally. Other movements: drug cartels, which have a narcoterrorism edge to them; resource-based conflicts in Africa (where “warlords” may fight with elements of Islamic Jihad); and dictatorships like Robert Mugabe’s or Paul Biya’s where a “heavy hand” accompanies in-state plundering. All have their ugly moments.

When it hits close to home, it’s different, but no less horror has been visited on Muslims worldwide, the Christian community (visit Congo), Baha’i (iran), Yezidis (Iraq), and so on. It’s never only about the Jews; it is, however, always about a form of want for power and control of others.

The question before the answer ran along the lines, “How can anyone do that to someone?”

Well . . . .

It’s done worldwide, and (as you are reading BackChannels), not for cause but for expression of damaged personality, perhaps, and the want of limitless compensation, perhaps.

The term “malignant narcissism” belies a story taking place within the imagination and rationalizing reason of the autocrat or thug.  That part, which lives in the privacy afforded individual mind, remains always hidden while the cultural and political effects become ever more obvious, disturbing, and horrific.

Things get bad.

All on the cyber war tour have been treated to a limitless pit of dismal still images and “rolling stock” (even though the “stock” today is digitally recorded — a child’s forearm and hand grasping a woman’s elbow, and that’s all that rests in the street, the bodies having been obliterated by the bomb that took them; children, truly, bloodied and hung by their necks from rafters in a Burmese shack, allegedly, a part of the tragedy of the Rohingya Muslims; executions by rifle of women kneeling in burqa before a stadium crowd; two young brothers, maybe twelve years old, set before a wall and being read a declaration by a so-called “adult” before being shot by firing squad; Pakistani Frontier Corps troops lined up on a hillside, shot by firing squad and finished by pistol, moaning, crying, and all . . . .

The peaceniks who want the brutality and carnage of conflict to stop tend to focus — or to be manipulated and focused — on facets of the political issues involved, but most may be most often deflected from attending to the character of the stagemaster driving — or attempting to drive — the entire theater.

Reading Recommended (for a Start)

Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013.

Post, Jerrold M.  Leaders and their followers in a dangerous world: the psychology of political behavior.  Forward by Alexander L. George.  Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004.

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