Tag Archives: political psychology

Islamic Small Wars – Distillations

17 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology

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General Conditions

  • Global communications and sub-state mafia and media;
  • Corruption and political criminality at state level and downward;
  • Within-state cultural and social fractiousness, incoherence and insecurity.

Whether Goodluck Jonathan’s Nigeria where Boko Haram runs riot or clannish Somalia where warlords reign and al-Shabaab roams wild, the above-stated conditions apply: the God mob and its criminal associates communicate and recruit at will while the reliability of official power seems questionable and other social variables attenuate the response to the presence of the problem.

General Population Divides

  • Criminal vs Just
  • Despotic vs Democratic
  • Loyalty to Local Power vs Integrity Before God
  • Medieval vs Modern
  • Shiite vs Sunni
  • Sub-National Culture vs National Identity

Choosing up sides is no game in war zones.

For many, the telling of a loyal lie would appear to feel both more comfortable and survivable than telling the truth (if this were not so, anti-Semitic libel would not exist); for as many more, political discomfort or greed — one, the other, or both — serve to influence immediate alliance: In fact, criminal actors all along the cutting edges of these conflicts leverage choice their way through direct confrontation, false praise, intimidation, and patronage, speaking of which . . . .

Methods

  • Assassination and Theft
  • Leverage and Intimidation
  • Manipulation and Patronage

Mafia is the way of both the “God Mob” and the “Anti-God Mob” — i.e., the communist drive to obtain control over the productive assets and capacities of others.

Tools

  • Banners, Scripts, and Programs
  • Committees, Gangs, Organizations, Patrols
  • Hardware and Software

Banners, scripts, and programs serve manipulation by piratical personalities.

Whether or not the same buy their own ranting, all despots amass immense power over others — and wealth thereby — on the basis of whom may be intimidated and who seduced to their designs.  The banner is their cover; the script is that which plays in their heads on the stage of which each is the star of their own show; and the program is what is to be sold to or imposed on others for control by themselves.

The rest is about social violence, much produced by way of the mouth, and in the theaters of war, much more effect produced by violence.

Call it “big picture” or merely “bloviating prose”, the world would seem to wade in blood beneath the elements noted.

To form up societies capable of expelling the criminal would seem to require first and foremost idealism and integrity — behavior and performance bound to the more magnanimous of time-honored principles — in whatever area-wide or regional security system exists, and then that element has to prove effective in securing a whole constituency to the effect that any may offer up intelligence or call in a crime with confidence in the institutional forces serving their own defense.

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FTAC – Offhand – Sociopathy and Narcissism

11 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology

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Sociopathy — lack of compassion, connection, empathy, feelings integrated with others — may feature in “narcissistic personality disorder” and what I consider its political relative, ‘malignant narcissism”, which are both interwoven with personality. Grandiose messianic delusion, manipulation (gaslighting is symptomatic of that), willful control of others (why it’s so important to own the press, put on a show, destroy rivals, and inhibit critics, educators, and journalists) become features of population- or state-exploiting dictators. The banners above them matter a lot less, lol, than how they’re wired on the inside. Overlooked feature in this area: “narcissistic mortification”. Whatever the injury was, the memory of it is private.

Oh, really?

Yes, really, but, sigh, also for this writer, intuitively.

I’ve no idea what the latest news may be from the psychology and social science sector, and, sans funding for research, I don’t care to look (but will take a glance in a few moments)

Empathy, imagination, and intuition serve this writer as well they may.

I have noticed online that articles showcased of deal with narcissistic personality within the context of intimate relationships, e.g., from the “Grace, Power, Strength” blog, “Is He a Sociopath? – 20 Signs”.

Surprising to me, and I meant nothing malicious by this, the Google search “Putin, narcissist” indeed yields results.  I had cringed with the thought that this blog might come up tops on that — having some ideas Out There is different from having some statement Way Up There 🙂 — but Joseph Burgo’s piece in The Atlantic took the top spot: “Vladimir Putin, Narcissist?”(April 15, 2014).

In second place: Ablow, Keith.  “Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin — Russian president no simple thug.”  Fox News, March 11, 2014.

Sam Vak’s page comes up third.

And BackChannels, the blog you’re reading: it doesn’t exist.

😉

Putin may do okay.  Transference . . . reparative narcissism . . . maturation — even the leaders of powerful states will grow older and may grow wiser (would that Obama would catch up with the Other Great Leaders in this regard).  Given the descriptions of the possible sources of Putin’s possible “narcissistic mortification”, self-preservation cathected to ethnolinguistic cultural security seems to me a clear good path.

Reparative.

And “reparative narcissism” is also a term of art in this arena.

“Reparative” or “destructive” narcissistic leaders:

“Narcissism,” of course, is not a “bad word” and is as normal in human psychology as are sexual or aggressive desires and natural anxiety about internal conflicts. Indeed, healthy narcissism is necessary for anyone to survive, work, and maintain a solid identity. But narcissism is also subject to frustrations, which may lead to unhealthy weakened or inflated self-love (Weigert, 1967.) It is when people have exaggerated love of self that they exhibit the repeated thought, behavior, and feeling patterns that in combination are called narcissistic personality. Such individuals think that they are unique and grand, which causes them to feel omnipotent and to act as though they are better than anyone else. But people with narcissistic personalities live in a paradox: while they love themselves too much and feel grandiose and omnipotent, they also, in the shadows so to speak, possess an aspect that is devalued and “hungry” for love. Periodically, this hunger asserts itself into awareness and creates anxiety, shame or humiliation in the person. Accordingly, such individuals’ personality organization splits between a grandiose self and a hungry self. The splitting in the personality organization reflects a lack of cohesive identity. The personality characteristics reflecting the grandiose self are overt, while those characteristics reflecting the hungry self are covert (Akhtar, 1992; Kernberg, 1975, and Volkan and Ast, 1994.)

Volkan, Vamik D.  “Some Psychoanalytic Views on Narcissistic Leaders and Their Roles in Large-Group Processes,” January 12, 2007.

That’s what happens when one noses into academese online.

Blocky text.

The style is much friendlier paper-based and supported by sofas, tables, highlighters, and coffee.

Nonetheless, and to access a Jewish trope, one has always the choice of making things a little bit better — not a great revolution, great war, great “grandiose delusional messianic” (an NPD term of art) image, but a little more fair and just, a little more comfortable and strong.

Much will be written about the Putin’s leadership psychology across the arc of his tenure, but I would suggest today that as rough as his childhood may have been, it had a little bit of magic and warmth somewhere in it, and while Moscow once again chats with terrorists (PFLP), the leader nonetheless promotes before his public education, health care, social security . . . integrity.

Additional Reference

Vamik D. Volkan (website)

Volkan has been practicing political psychoanalysis for over two decades. His first “patients” were high-level delegations from Israel and Palestine, with whom he engaged in “unofficial diplomacy” for six years. He credits the late Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, with opening the field with his 1977 declaration that 70 percent of the problems between Arabs and Israelis are psychological. Ten years later, Volkan established the Center for the Study of the Mind and Human Interaction, the world’s only conflict resolution organization housed in a medical center. Because Volkan’s brand of therapy depends on individual breakthroughs to affect mass behavior, it is difficult to quantify “progress.” The clinical effects of his work, by nature, may never be proven. Such is the persistence of man-made trauma.

Kiem, Elizabeth.  “Putting the War on Terror on the couch: Vamik Volkan’s Blind Trust.”  Review of Blind Trust: Large Groups and Their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror by Vamik Volkan.  Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone Publishing, 2004, pp. 367.  Review published in Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2004.

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Link & Comment – On Islamist Violence and Mentality

27 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Religion

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I find it interesting that Muslims in the West who kill Christians, Jews, and soldiers in the name of their religion are referred to as “lone wolves” suffering from a mental illness. Are all those millions of people who belong to Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, al-Nusra al Qaeda and ISIS-are they mentally ill, too? Or poor? Or uneducated and disadvantaged?

When we go down a road of justification, root causes, we deny the fact that these people choose an ideology that promotes hate.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/67041 “We Will Remain Undaunted” by Diane Weber Bederman – 10/27/2014.

My note to the author:

Our conflict solution is to address a political psychology that does indeed derive from ideas in psychology proper. The malignant narcissism surrounding the political existence of Putin, Assad, and Khamenei as well as other dictators in the middle east and around the world cannot be avoided, nor with that recognition their arch-criminal, manipulative, and piratical skills that foster animus with the west, stage conflicts that then leverage them additional political power, and then underwrite their oligarch / billionaire handlers.

My most recent book read, _The Zhivago Affair_ on the trials of Pasternak and the CIA’s effort to get his book into Russia, and the one I’m reading now, _Putin’s Kleptocracy_, are frightening books about criminal political power radiating through state authority. It’s frightening reading, but it opens the eyes to the manner in which — perhaps as demonstrated by Muhammad — ideological and religious thought may be leveraged into boundless absolute power and wealth.

To back that comment on Islam, one may direct attention to the now contested presentations of the Banu Qurayza legend, a story so ethically and morally lost that Tarek Fatah has denied its authenticity and others, so I have read recently in the Facebook aquarium, have separated Muhammad from the beheading of 800 Jewish males who had surrendered unconditionally rather than lose additional life through fighting.  Also read: “the Jews were just as bad”.  I don’t believe that: I believe wealth obtained through earnest trade was simply obtained by a barbaric pushiness abetted by provocations that ended in capricious judgment, mass murder, rape, and plunder.

There may be more pleasant descriptions of the crushing of the Jewish Banu Qurayza, but none have any legitimacy in a caring, gracious, and merciful world.  It has appeared to me that those who want that world, as may Tarek Fatah, decry the legend while those who want the merciless and sadistic powers of that world for themselves extol and pursue it for themselves.

The Prophet had the husband of the Jewess Raihana Bint Amr hacked to pieces before her very eyes, hours after he had murdered her father. No doubt this was the Prophet’s perverted version of a wedding present, because after these atrocities he raped the mortified girl and tried to force her to convert to Islam.
Muslim historians still describe the savage rape of Raihana Bint Amr as her “willing submission to Islam and wifehood to the Prophet”

http://www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t=115614

One thing leads to another on the web.  This in The Huffington Post surfaced along a moderate-look at the challenge (here’s an excerpt):

We are a wounded nation, not a terrorized one.

Canada may have a benevolent exterior, but we all understand the steel at our core. We know that freedom exacts a steep price, because we’ve paid it before. And we know, as we enter military hostilities to confront ISIS in Iraq, that it won’t hesitate to exploit the stupid, the gullible and the deranged as a means of attacking its enemies in their own lands.

If we weren’t prepared for that on Monday, we should be now. And even without spurs from ISIS there’s no telling what these same people will do (or have done) on their own to bootstrap themselves into Canada’s history books.

Let’s not be their victim.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/sandy-garossino/nathan-cirillo-terrorists-patrice-vincent_b_6045168.html – 10/26/2014, updated 10/27/2014.

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FTAC – A Note on Approaching Fascist Movements Across Four Dimensions

21 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, Philology, Political Psychology

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Let me suggest four parts or elements that get the machinery working:

1. “Malignant Narcissism” / “Civilizational Narcissism” / relatives of “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” / “Bipolar Disorders” (“grandiose, messianic delusion”) –> each of the labels may represent a straying of innate human energy plus some craziness. The application to conflicts within the “Islamic Small Wars” context should be apparent with some meditation but outside of that, the same applies to variants of “National Socialist” presence, e.g., Putin in Russia, Jobbik in Hungary.

2. “Cultural Poetics and Social Grammar” — words do have a power and poison put in the ears or set before the eyes gets into children very early in the development of language plus self-concept. Good adults are careful with what they impart to their children, and, perhaps, good politicians must be careful with their words, but bad parents and bad politicians — there are lots of “BadDaddy’s” — may have cause to hide something shameful in themselves, to deflect attention away from themselves, to keep on stage a glorious image of themselves in the eyes of others, starting with their children.

3. Ideological Political Programming — the conservative’s abhorrence of dhimmi status, poll taxes, state discrimination speaks to that and may make something of a match between old Stalinist Soviet practices and some notes in Islam that seek the transformation of whole populations using central absolute authority and political torque to do it.

4. Cultural linguistics or language behavior –and as behavior, this may differ from “poetics” (the arrangements of symbols that make language possible). When we listen, when we read: how much do we memorize, parrot, ingest and sustain as stable? How much do we create, invent, question?

When Jews greet “The Binding of Isaac” (“The Akedah”, and bear with me on Isaac), a minority opinion notes that perhaps Abraham should have talked back to God (!) instead of setting off to carry out His instructions without hesitation.

Listen and obey? Listen and question?

Narcissism, cultural programming, political programming, and language behavior as behavior (we’re part of as wild a species as any) would be the four anchors of any approach or analysis of ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hezbollah.

Notably, both Putin and Khamenei operate deeply piratical regimes beneath the cloaks of nationalism and religiosity. They have different trajectories as persons and as representatives of very different states, but they are similar in the pursuit and maintenance of absolute power — absolute control, as if from God — and they apply the same sets of tools for doing that.

I fear overdoing the knowledge part of this kind of view for the fascism it might inspire, if as much has not happened already in the intellectual warrens of governments invested in part in social control.  However, considering the Loud Fascism evident in the wild and the necessity of reducing the same in number and force, the above suggests four useful ways of approaching rogue leaders, their psychology, and their movements.

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FTAC – ME – Comment – Political Absolutism

13 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics

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The alternative axis of power — “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”, which may be more accurately expressed as “Khamenei-Putin-Assad” — is predicated entirely on the destruction of Jewish ethics, morality, and thought that has contributed mightily to the intellectual construction of the Judeo-Christian / Greco-Roman west. The west did not start out where it has arrived, but where it has arrived — equal rights, human rights, rule of law (rather than of men), democracy rather than despotism, etc. — stands as an affront to piratical dictatorships worldwide. Catch on and hang on or let go and get lost (so ISIS — bank robbers, plunderers extraordinaire — can pick you up) that sense of dignity in self and dignity in others might well be, ultimately, the “gift of the Jews”, from Moses to Muhammad in those parts speaking to the “better angels of our nature”. Putin, Assad, Khamenei are each believers in political absolutism. So is Baghdaddi. They may not know that they are really fighting together on the same side.

The tropes are going to take over, e.g., “Putin-Assad-Khamenei: together they are defending political absolutism.”

There’s some truth in them.

Perhaps they – so many repeated kernels, ideas, and puns – just need a page of their own.

Be that as it may, conflict involving “the west” may ultimately devolve to democracy vs despotism.

The details may be complicated, God knows, but the theme may be also just that simple.

Either have a voice in the governance of one’s geopolitical space — or not; either be free among those free to say yes and no to life’s challenges and opportunities — or be enslaved and have a host of decisions already made for you.  Such choosing between good and evil should be stark, but for some torn between a lonely idealism and the seductions set out by tyrants — or promoted by their agents, manipulations, and money — such choosing becomes deeply confused.

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Gaza Script Rewrite

13 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Gaza, Israel, Middle East

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For some 20 years now Israeli governments, left and right, operated within the paradigm of the two-states solution, “land for peace” formula and the belief that only the establishment of a Palestinian country in the very heart of our own will solve all our problems. This, however, was tried and failed numerously. If there’s indeed any science in “political science”, then these “experiments” and “observations” must be taken into the most serious of consideration.

http://levzhivaev.blogspot.co.il/2014/10/yom-kippur-and-false-conceptions.html – 10/9/2014.

I should publish the  above excerpt as a link and leave it be.

Instead, and this a true “back channel” in “People’s Diplomacy” (online), I will suggest only that poetry needs once again to be taken seriously.

🙂

The kind of Gazan leadership that uses children — 160 of them now dead — to build assault tunnels has a problem in the head sustained by language internalized and maintained (or else!) in the head.

That language can be changed.

Gazans may be quiet, considering the kind of ears the walls may have, but they need no longer be kept blind and deaf as well.

Where Hamas has exploited children, Gazans may know it.

Where Hamas has forced, manipulated, or positioned noncombatants and their immediate surrounds as human shields, Gazans well know it.

Where Khaled Mashaal appears to have gone missing through the action while producing a reputation as a now powerful and wealthy man worth more than $2.5 billion, Gazans may know it.

Where Israelis mean well and Arab Israelis, Christian or Muslim, do good by themselves and others, Gazans now know it.

Those are nice homilies for reading by the side of the road, but let’s really get on the on ramp: the language traps formed by Islamist and Soviet post-Soviet anti-Semitic cant and rant and the congruent manipulations in language to produce anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist passion are the kind of traps that hold the mind in tangled webs.  They’re woven of evil pairings — simple metonymy — into dismal and self-defeating worldviews.  Taken up and strewn around campuses and streets by the “solidarity movements”, they sustain the plundering of Gazans by powerful, deeply exploiting, and sociopathic personalities.

The Revolution on the Inside will not be televised.

Related Reference

http://levzhivaev.blogspot.co.il/2014/07/israeli-military-operations-in-gaza.html – 7/17/2014.

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FTAC – Comment on Anti-Semitism and Fear

12 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

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The motivation of anti-Semitic thought relies deeply on lies, not only libels and slanders against the Jews (and others) but also obfuscations and omissions involving speakers and, plainly, invention involving familiar malignantly narcissistic self-aggrandizement. As people like to hide something or to get something — and sometimes what is to be hidden or gotten is small, but sometimes the shame or the theft is large — the related experience of fear, instilling it or suffering it, plays into the language and related behavior as well.

I’ve no need to repeat the lie that prompted the response.  It was dismal, juvenile, scatological.

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Rayhaneh Jabbari – Uncertainty and State Sadism

07 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Middle East

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Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime had granted Reyhaneh Jabbari a stay on execution to October 8, 2014.

As I type, it is about 9 p.m. in Tehran.

The known facts of her case are clear and simple: a male boss plied her with a date rape drug, took her to a deserted space, and attempted to rape her.  Rayhaneh Jabbari fought back.  Whether she only injured him (with a small knife) or killed him has not been discerned: given the ethical and procedural issues attending the case, the pack of human rights groups who tally the most egregious miscarriages of justice have been following the Jabbari’s story for years.

Facebook pages, petitions, blog posts (like this one), attention across the global press have been to little avail other than to have delayed Jabbari’s execution to about this hour.

With more than 700 executions during his tenure, Rouhani has even surpassed Ahmadinejad’s statistics, and has virtually doubled the rate of executions. Dozens of public executions, mass hangings in prison courtyards, and clandestine and undocumented murders of prisoners are what define Rouhani’s notion of human rights improvement.

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/06/19/Over-700-Executions-in-Rouhani-s-First-Year-As-Human-Rights-in-Decline-in-Iran – 6/19/2014.

The combined Khamenei-Rouhani “charm offensive” should by now have now transformed into an “offensive charm”, i.e., a charm offending a greater world, including a greater Persian world within the state, a world still in possession of conscience and heart and still sensitive to and outraged by theft.

Fox News journalist Lisa Daftari has maintained a page on Rayhaneh Jabbari.

Reuters has had online great coverage of the (often stolen) “Assets of the Ayatollah”.

After a while, one must ask: where does this ayatollah-thing live where it cannot see its own true image?

From the “Chain Murders of Iran” to the horrors of Evin Prison, the regime would appear to sweat evil:

“To many Iranians, the concept of Evin prison is synonymous with political repression and torture,”Gissou Nia, executive director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, told FoxNews.com. “Today, anyone who is perceived to be a threat to the Iranian regime, including human rights defenders … is kept within the confines of Evin and other notorious prisons in Iran.”

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/01/28/inside-evin-look-at-world-most-notorious-political-prison/ – 1/23/2013.

From a recent Daftari interview with Rayhaneh’s mother:

“The countdown has begun. It’s hell. It’s the worst feeling. I can’t be awake facing this reality and I can’t go to sleep,” she said. “When people see that someone (is) drowning, some rush to rescue and some who are indifferent stay away and say that ‘let’s not get involved because if we do we will get our pants or feet soaked in water.’ I can shout and shout that my daughter is in danger, but everybody knows what the right thing is to do for my daughter in this situation.”

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/10/02/execution-iranian-woman-accused-killing-attacker-back-on-says-mom/ – 10/2/1013.

A note of hope has appeared today in the L.A. Times:

Authorities were seeking consent from the family of the victim to vacate the capital judgment against Reyhaneh Jabbari, according to an Iranian judiciary spokesman, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, who made the comments at his weekly news conference.

Meanwhile, the semiofficial Iranian Students News Agency quoted Justice Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi as saying that the hanging of Jabbari would be put off for at least a month.

http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-iranian-woman-death-penalty-20141006-story.html – 10/7/2014.

Is there really hope in that story?

Why were things discussed today not undertaken months or years ago?

To hold over someone’s head the power of life and death — to hold over the world’s head the power of life and death — one might wonder how that feels?

For an answer, ask the sociopath and sadist — the one or the two — best positioned to know the answer to that question but don’t hope for a conversation: next to killing innocents, lying, smiling, and thieving (from those who trust them most) would seem their next best and most proven talents.

Update: Wednesday, October 8, 2014

In order to save her daughter’s life, Pakravan published the contents of this call on social media and asked the public for help. In fact, the execution was postponed, in Pakravan’s opinion, because of the public pressure, she told DW.
Now only one thing can save her daughter: if the slain man’s family pardons Jabbari. But Sarbandi’s family of refuses to do this on the grounds that Jabbari dragged his good name through the mud with allegations of rape.

http://www.dw.de/the-last-word-in-iranian-justice-revenge/a-17982603 – 8/3/2014.

IF Sarbandi is but an alleged rapist, how can Rayaneh Jabbari be other than an alleged murderess?

There is no justice Ayatollah Khamenei’s Iran, only darkness and capricious and sadistic raw power.

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