Tag Archives: political manipulation

Putin’s Swipe at NATO Via Erdogan

30 Thursday Jun 2016

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

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From the Awesome Conversation:

Putin’s clawing into NATO, and he’s going to use Erdogan, a natural authoritarian (with his own White Palace) to further establish “absolutism” around a feudal Russian core.

In the today’s news:

The Kremlin accepted a letter from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as an apology this week.

Mr Putin spoke to Mr Erdogan by phone on Wednesday, telling him he planned to lift the travel sanctions.

The lifting of non-travel trade sanctions will depend on the outcome of the trade talks, the Russian leader said in his decree.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36676516 – 6/30/2016

In news analysis appearing in The Atlantic about three years ago:

The Turks suffer from a deep-rooted, historic reluctance to confront the Russians. The humming Turkish economy is woefully dependent on Russian energy exports: More than half of Turkey’s natural gas consumption comes from Russia. Consequently, Turkey is unlikely to confront Moscow even when Russia undermines Turkey’s interests, such as in Syria where Russia is supporting the Assad regime, even as Ankara tries to depose it.

Historically, the Turks have always feared the Russians . . . .

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/05/turkey-fears-russia-too-much-to-intervene-in-syria/275571/ – 5/6/2013

Moscow has so far been able to separate itself from such wondrous moves as the incubation of ISIS (through “deselection” for bombing and combat early in the Syrian Tragedy) and the related development of Syrian mass migration, and with Turkey and the latest airport bombing — and where the terrorists come from but Russia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan — the same channeling applies and to similar effect: Russia has been channeling its extremists to ISIS, and when they do what they do in the NATO community, it may lay claim to being tough on the same.

If terrorists should wreak havoc on a renewed Russian flight to Turkey, well then: Moscow and Washington may then mutually share sorrows and perhaps move toward rapprochement (on counterterrorism cooperation, say) while Assad the Tyrant and the familiar Soviet / post-Soviet (now neo-feudal) arrangements remain in place.

There’s a greater problem with such a rosey “what-if” or outcome, and that is the modern world’s ceding itself to the sustained “feudal absolute power” that today, as in medieval days, lends itself to despotism, kleptocracy, and the war of all against all without end.  Unfortunately, “Red Brown Green” applies: to have within NATO nationalist or Islamist authoritarians (Hungary’s Orban, Turkey’s Erdogan, for starters) lends itself to Russia’s feudal revanch and its imperial ends.

Fast Related Reference (URL + Date)

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/ – 10/2/2015.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/04/19/turkish-autocrat-erdogan-on-track/ – 4/19/2016.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/30/opinions/russia-soviet-fighters-istanbul-bombing-bergen/ – 7/1/2016

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FTAC – Sideways on Brexit and Putin’s Medieval Theater

27 Monday Jun 2016

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

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🙂

A fair part of the world is now The World x multinational business x communication x shipping x transportation, and while sovereign states must control their borders, few are able to ignore their neighbors, their neighbors’ ambitions, or bad habits and bad sectors. Probably the way to think about criminality, as determined by familiar western and modern precepts is to attach it to “filtration” — catch the “bad apples” — and osmosis from ungoverned conditions and space to governed.

At the moment, there’s a feudal-criminal world (psst: Moscow and its assortment of Far Right and Far Left helpers) continuing to drive chaos into the more civil, more “rule-of-law” west. While the west should (must!) push back, it should do so with other than reversion to its own feudal tendencies.

What Moscow / Putin promotes has been on full display between Sochi and Syria — immense accumulations of wealth and power beside the most inhuman of practices and the most thoughtless and provocative real behavior in foreign policy. I know I can’t keep going over how Damascus incubated ISIS, or, in Russia, (or Iran), how criminality / kleptocracy leak down through the justice systems and corrode their entire societies, but all of that is what is actually represented by ISIS and so many Syrian refugees.

I know as an editor (of possibly the world’s most obscure political blog) that similar specialists or academics “get” the post-Cold War “big picture” but for most with more parochial interests, it’s “ISIS” and what Putin’s sayin’ sounds about right — lower the portcullis!

BackChannels has developed a whole image of the “Post-Cold War – Cold Struggle” environment anchored yet in Moscow and Washington.  In getting to this point, it has learned that “research analyst” (self-assigned, autodidact) knowledge and public impression and perception diverge often and quite, which fact of life may suit the treatment of the public as “the masses”, for as much fits with Moscow’s philosophy regarding information, “information space”, and political manipulation via, as with the handling of Syria, political theater writ large.

Related and Highly Recommended Summer Reading

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev, 2014.

Vovochka: The True Confessions of Vladimir Putin’s Best Friend and Confidant by Alexander J. Motyl, 2015.

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FTAC – On Moscow and Tehran’s Interest in the Manipulation of Terrorist Organizations

13 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars

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Moscow and Tehran have two interests served by facilitating and manipulating terrorists organizations: 1) sustaining the feudal worldview — including in the writing of political theater that is history itself — that in turn sustains each their own medieval leadership and systems of patronage; 2) weakening their enemies by infiltrating them with divisive political subcultures.

Notably, Moscow has refused to designate Hamas and Hezbollah and others as terrorist organizations. The probably reason for that is that the same are subject to “handling” in the interests of the now neo-feudal, neo-imperial Russian state.

Moscow has so far refused to designate Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.

Tehran, of course, has a complicated but nonetheless a sponsoring relationship with Hamas and Hezbollah (the URL links to a 2014 U.S. State Department report: BackChannels believes the underlying politics have not changed radically in the two years that have passed).

BackChannels persists in believing that the Moscow-Damascus-Tehran axis of power deliberately incubated ISIS by preferentially bombing less eventually useful targets.

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FTAC – On the Meaning of Al Aqsa

04 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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I can’t endorse the sentiment, ______, having taken a moderate course, but I hope that more and more Arabs will take note of the abuse of the refugees at the hands of their leaders and the medieval disinformation and manipulation campaigns that have led to The Preoccupation not only with the Jews but their own self-concept and status in the world. Too many fathers like al-Husseini have put them on the worst imaginable track, i.e., the emulation of Hitler and the Nazis. Some who have embraced that most may be due to wake up from the nightmare within them that has long masqueraded as their dream.

BackChannels now has plenty of information as to how the Israelis, the west, the refugees of 1948 and their generations, got to this unpretty pass.  The themes erupting in WWII — that Stalin-Hitler thing — have been sustained in the middle east conflict; the Soviet promotion of anti-Semitism in the middle east and the concomitant terrorism of the PLO and PFLP have been similarly and perhaps exhaustively covered; the formation and presence of what has been referred to here as “Syndicate Red Brown Green”; the self-dissolve of the Soviet on December 26, 1991 also has been remarked in these virtual pages, as have the feudal kleptocracies kept floating along in its place and around it; less has been remarked as regards the post-Cold War Era around the world, but BackChannels believes we’re in that realm as this is being posted.

All in all, and with Khamenei pressing for Israel’s destruction while a smattering of Sunni-majority states brand Hezbollah as a terrorist organization (that move took a while plus some “war by proxy” on Iran’s part), the world, even in one of its most medieval appearances, appears to want to move forward, not backward — and forward would seem toward the classical liberalism of the west.

The comment to which the excerpt responds called for the realization al-Husseini’s manipulative lie: the Jews haven’t any desire to “take over” Al Aqsa Mosque — never did and never will — because while being Jewish involves attending to self defense, it also involves being about and for others, and that includes the Arab brother and sister.

Two of Hillel the Elder’s most famous statements ring down through the ages: “That which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another.”  That is an idea predicated on the concept of human self-restraint.  Israel may produce harm when harmed itself, but it does not have to prove its power through making others suffer with impunity.  If met with the force that would do that to people, including its own people, then it may answer in kind.

The second of Hillel’s language-based corrals:  “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  If I am not for others, what am I?  If not now, when?”

Some Palestinians may be surprised to find Israelis for them in peace, but peace is needed as part of a sea change in the character of our humanity.

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FTAC – Egypt – Russian Airliner Crash

14 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Egypt, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

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The Kremlin’s cry that “the terrorists done it” has been challenged recently by Egyptian claims that no evidence of a bomb or bombing had been found in the related forensic investigation.  Says Egyptian Streets (Dec. 14, 2015), “Preliminary investigations into the Russian airplane that crashed in Egypt’s North Sinai killing all 224 passengers on board have revealed no signs of terrorism, said the Ministry of Civil Aviation.”

Oh what evil webs some may weave — one hedges where empiricism falters on ambiguous evidence or too little evidence: BackChannels would place Egyptian doubts regarding the Russian assertion of the plane’s having been sabotaged (by having a bomb put on board) before takeoff in Egypt within the following framework.

Post-Soviet, post-KGB neo-feudal now FSB Russia has developed its own “War On Terror” designed to destabilize and fracture NATO and allied or cooperative states.

Muslims may know the epigram, “All of the evil is in one room and lying is the key.”

Through the KGB, the Soviet established a reputation for deceitful and disingenuous action and speech, and in the post-Soviet environment, that nefarious spirit may be expressed, this with reference to the Moscow Apartment Bombings, through possible “false flag” operations designed to manipulate “the masses”. https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/ Karen Dawisha’s book may be especially helpful in untangling some of the real life detective mysteries produced by the post-Soviet regime.

On rare occasion, but it happens, the fireman is the arsonist, the hero the creator the monster to be subdued. So it may go with Putin’s feudal revanche in which “Putin vs The Terrorists” — the political display of power proven effective in producing the nationalist fervor that wins elections — is an important fixture and image in Russian politics.

So the motive may be there.

Still, I and most modern observers (as opposed to medieval ones who feel their loyalties constantly tested) would rather have an empirical analysis of the crash than any useless collection of bold political assertions.

Given that all politics involves presentation, i.e., some show-and-tell business, one might ask whether any, most, or some political organizations possess more integrity than others.

The question’s fair today, for the theme most central to a spectacle in which the modern world — and the modern soul — struggles with the medieval involves the relative weight of a “loyal lie” to the possession of a possibly lonely integrity as regards an authentic and solid cognizance of the truth.

In the old biblical story in which “God proves” Abraham, the test is never defined but potentially involves either a test of absolute obedience to God or, much more interesting, a test of Abraham’s conscience and courage to speak back to God in defense of the life of the son he and Sarah had waited so long to have.  God sees to it that Isaac lives (while a ram is made to die in his place) and never again speaks directly to Abraham.

BackChannels’ preferred argument: the test of conscience, courage, and, perhaps, Abrahams integrity as a father.

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Link – Iraqi Theater – Iranian Disinformation

20 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green, United States of America

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The idea that the United States is effectively arming the Islamic State is a popular rumor, particularly on Iranian State-run media, but the extent of individuals who believe that mistruth reaches to the highest echelons of Iranian society, according to Crytzer.

“The Iranian Quds Force commander absolutely believes we’re supplying Daesh,” Crytzer told Defense One. “He’s not trying to play on it. He actively believes it.”.

Tucker, Patrick.  “US Helicopter Shot at By Anti-ISIS Forces; Commander Blames Iran.”  Defense One, May 19, 2015.

Disinformation suits the feudal/medieval mode and its concentration of power and wealth in a very few “malignars” (malignant narcissists) devoted primarily to their own absolute power and breathtaking aggrandizement.

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