It’s just that kind of Facebook morning, the argument at the dinner table resuming at the breakfast table . . . .
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“Let there be no compulsion in religion. Truth has been made clear from error. Whoever rejects false worship and believes in God has grasped the most trustworthy handhold that never breaks. And God hears and knows all things.” (Quran 2:256) / “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29).
And God (and nature and the universe) did not make others?
The MEMRI clip involves play with symbols with the veiled Dr. Noha expressing the modern ethical-humanist-skeptic-religious perception and the modern news interviewer espousing a terrifying retreat into the medieval atmosphere.
Textual ambiguity in scripture enables the narcissistic and venal to adapt injunction and prophecy from on high to murder and plunder. Much of the world has been victimized by these robed (more often) mafia methods, and one hope it might develop the wherewithal to fight back: however, what it may want to engage (fight) is a kind of personality, and the available text is less important than that.
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The PROBLEM is a mightily complex machine — what more could one want to look at than “conflict, culture, language, and psychology” in the interests of peace? — but a problem in the head may be language-driven, and the invention of that language may fall to mouths that in serving themselves poison the perceptions of others whom they use.
Narcissistic supply.
Self-aggrandizement.
Grandiose ambition and delusion.
When it starts to be seen, it may start to be solved.
Institutional competition and the want of supremacy inducing wealth by subscription has brought to the world an immense grief. A system devised and parlayed as perfect for one both expresses and guarantees “all against all” where what we all need and must have is “all for all”.
Hillel around 0-CE may have inspired early Christianity — just my thought but his outlook fits that new religion — but while striving to explore the law — Torah — to produce a more embracing and inclusive Judaism, he could not have foreseen the development of General Constantine (272-306-CE) or General Muhammad (570-632-CE). The resulting supersessionary warfare, broad at times as with the Crusades, narrow as on the Iberian Peninsula, sometimes on the surface (perhaps Turkey and the Armenian population suit that description), sometimes burning underground and erupting like volcano (about where we are today) has been ugly in every century. This is where to stop it.
One cannot blame scripture — Jewish, Christian, or Muslim (or other) — for this state of affairs but rather perhaps the ascent to power of men whose ambitions combine venality with grandiose aspirations.
The Colossus of Constantine lays on the ground in Rome, a ruin, and the Brotherhood affiliates (is their another umbrella?) purport to be building new civilizations wherever they have their adventure, hold themselves together, and get away with their crimes. The secular dictators are no better — in fact, I suggest they are mirror images in personality and that whether language promotes a secular ideology or a religion, in the hands of such men, the results are the same. WE need to get them off the stage.
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I will distill all of that down to 140 characters.
It’s all about axis in power – dictators, dictatorships, and despotism vs listeners, open conversations, mutual constituent-leadership risk.
As dictatorships inspire or motivate conflicts worldwide, it may be worth taking a moment to delve into the psychology involved. Getting a handle on “malignant narcissism”, “narcissistic supply”, “narcissistic mortification” and similar other terms may help open some windows and let in some insight into how cycles of despotism and subjugation come about, how they work, and why they are so difficult to diminish.
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In political psychology, one might find the principles simple enough but the machinery complex and difficult to take apart and rebuild.
As much may characterize the experiences of the states now collected under the rubric “Arab Spring” and those continuing to suffer along within systems of corruption, despotism, and patronage.
To readers even loosely in the field, whether in academe or, as I seem to be, in pseudo-academe, a model like, oh let’s just make one up, “dictatorship –> narcissism –> political and social control of others –> sadism” may beg a “so what else you got?” but what informs that apprehension may not be universal: do the subjugated know that those they have entrusted with their destiny are actually using them to abet their own aggrandizement and glorification?
Have those in the path of a Bashar al-Assad (there are many like him today) understand what echo in themselves facilitates his progress while compromising their own in their efforts to defend their people.
In the olden days, one could flee a troubled space, wander around lost for a while, perhaps create a more congenial environment for one’s own, but in a world compressed intellectually by the system on which you are reading this and physically by jets and supertankers and superhighways, where is the someplace else?
Well, there is a someplace else: the language of the mind, i.e., that which informs political concepts, including self-concept and ideas about others plus ideas about the world.
The Internet has brought about the appearance of a new global intelligentsia — with Facebook buddies from Riyadh to Islamabad, I think I can support that suggestion — and if we can take a firm step where the dynamics of dictatorship are concerned, we might allay, diminish, or eliminate much sorrow otherwise guaranteed by our ignorance with regard to a basic political and social psychology concept.
I call that other force “the humanity of humanity” but while hoping the same aggregates toward the middle, mild, and moderate one also confronts immense cowardice and lethargy in the face of violent ambition. At one point, for example, an estimated 10,000 al-Shabaab fighters making a mess in Somalia had displaced, in effect, some 1.25 million Somalis to camps in Kenya and to make-do camps around Mogadishu. How is it the same were not organized — governed, self-governing — to stop “The Youth” in their tracks at first appearance? Of course, political anarchy and the individual interests of competing warlords and such then maintained conditions for an AQ-type landing or development.
Each of the societies hosting what I call the “Islamic Small Wars” exists with an incoherence sufficient to keep its destructive miscreants in business — and in business with money supply drawn from combinations of criminal activities (“narcoterrorism”) and rogue but princely largesse.
Ambivalent or difficult injunctive text may be neutral in the manner of a Rorschach — it maintains many things corresponding to the innate character of the reader, and it’s the reader that drives the character of the text into some kind of social reality.
I’m loath to reflect here on commands, demands, and judgments in scripture but may suggest for improved relations and peace that open and far ranging discussion — whatever it is, drag it out into the sun and let’s have a look at it together — may be the best aid in navigating OUR way toward something better.
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My old rabbi, a conservative with a lefty past, said he liked Reform Judaism because it “forces you to think”.
Perhaps some of us who read the Torah fresh find that it neither directs nor instructs but more often puzzles and thereby asks that we bring as much as we may to understanding something that we have just experienced through it. In effect, and running on very little familiarity with the five books, my close reading of the Adam and Eve story would suggest it is not about the “loss of innocence” and very far from “original sin”: instead, it’s about the gift and onset of human consciousness, self-consciousness, and conscience. God says to Eve that if she eats of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she will die, and the snake tells her she won’t die — and they have both told the truth!
What Eve does with that bite of the apple is transform.
Not to go on with that exegesis here, the point is the story refuses to dictate its message.
Moreover, if one chooses to do a close-reading crawl through the two well-known sections (Genesis 2 and 3), one may discover many puzzles in the way of comprehension: why, for example, does the snake mention just one tree to Eve when there are two — the other is the Tree of Life — planted in same place? The Church, for another example, may connect the fig leaves with shame, but why not mutual regard, for, when it comes to dressing for success, God sews for his two daring children — whom He is about to dispatch into human life — their first useful and protective clothing?
And so it goes.
The effect on the mind: deep aggravation and perturbation.
Should not God have told us about how we’re supposed to live?
Oh no — that would have been too easy and perhaps too cruel: we are forced instead to think through our way and the way ahead.
“It is ridiculous that Israel opens Jerusalem for foreign tourists, while millions of Palestinian Christians and Muslims are being banned from entering their occupied capital,” said Nabil Shaath, a confidant of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.” — We humans do ourselves in with our mouths, and our mouths do in others through their ears. When hate is the cause, the cause is poison, the body politic, should it care to care for itself, takes appropriate measures.
Shalom. Moderation may be for the most religious among mankind.
One might ask, “what contributes to and defines the better humanity of humanity.”
I am an optimist who believes there is a “humanity of humanity” better served by a natural “moderate middle” that looks toward improved “qualities in living” — including psychological and spiritual qualities as well as those attending economics, justice, and health — than by deeply narcissistic extremists blinded by their own glory to the needs, privileges, and rights of others.
One hopes the world may be tiring of its tyrants and the followers who would most like to be tyrants themselves.
Is it all about word play?
Who gets to make the call?
Whose eye looks down the microscope?
Whose body wriggles on the viewing platform?
Is our condition one, the other, or both?
This kind of Facebook-inspired thought goes on throughout the course of an average day:
It’s not the “worldly gains”, Lakhkar, that are evil in and of themselves: it is how they’re gotten.
Regarding the dictator-kleptocrats that I also call “malignant narcissists” — they exceed limits and trap themselves in criminality and shame. and it is for those reasons they resent freedom of the press and strive to reject and suppress scrutiny and criticism.
As a class, dictators are weak, not strong, but, in fact, they are creative and the manipulation of belief, loyalty, and perception comprise a first set of intellectual tools for manipulation. At first, they will tell you what you want to hear; then they will tell you to agree with what you have heard. Or else. As a class, dictators come to power through various means but they all sustained eventually by a 1) treasury funded by resources over which they may assert control, 2) paid military and thugs down to street level, and 3) our old familiar, privacy attended by the deflection of scrutiny motivated by integrity.
Dictators subjugate humanity in service to their own aggrandizement associated with, in technical terms, “narcissistic supply”. They own their states and all of its resources, human or natural, and if you are unlucky enough to reside in such a place as Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, they own you too. Their worlds exist only to serve their own greatness, and that which doesn’t serve that end may be destroyed without a second thought.
It’s opinion.
It has some eloquence.
Perhaps there’s even some truth to it.
However, it may be getting a little old for the writer.
Men and women dream.
Some dream huge.
Some think so much of themselves and the God-given or godless and natural favoring of their will that throwing boiling water over a nanny’s head doesn’t give them pause for a moment’s empathy or reflection.
Or guilt.
Depending on the context and thrust of that dreaming, a dream or two might come true, myriad political and social barriers and boundaries (start with family) protecting the young on their journey to Hollywood, the old on their way to retirement aboard yachts.
And for a few, the material achievements accompanied by good enough products and services may want for the greater thrill of power among others, over others, or otherwise manipulated around themselves.
When as much develops in show business, the world goes around, and whether one likes the executive or entertainer, the two cannot grow moneyed and powerful but by charging a fee for an artifact or performance; when the same develops in the political sphere, the burden of the will of the little shit would seem today certain to become either deadly or soul deadening.
Take note: for all the devastation brought to Zimbabwe in the course of his tenure, Robert Mugabe has long achieved the dream of dying an old man: it is certain that he will do that; if he then dies peacefully in his sleep, well then, all the better testament to the validity of the venerable African political post that has been fashioned beneath the unspoken title that is “President for Life”.
In the wake of last week’s Eastern Ukrainian flyer imbroglio — briefly: a flyer bearing the “symbols of both Russia and the People’s Republic of Donetsk”and distributed outside a synagogue by men wearing balaclavas had asked the region’s Jews to register with the government and declare their property — I was tempted to compose a piece titled “Is Putin Playing for Jerusalem?”, as the Russian President may be accused of many things but never anti-Semitism.
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Above: posted to YouTube by JewishLife, June 26, 2012.
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“As you know, Judaism is one of the four traditional religions in our nation . . . .” (0:25).
So, hate the haters, political anti- anti-Semitism has become the symbol of virtue, and the other: that’s the tar with which to spatter one’s enemies.
However, in our convoluted topsy-turvy atmosphere complicated by facsimile bipolar political sociopathy and the license taken to exploit deceit in the cause of an immense but fragile “egotism”, it’s hard saying who, actually, is the anti-Semite and whom the anti- anti-Semite.
Or the call might be easy: neither – no one (normal) at heart.
The truth is as regards all but an emotionally arrested and purple political fringe — one that should stop holding its collective breath for validation of (choose any combination) white / black / Muslim / Aryan / Internationalist / (simpleton) / etc. supremacy — the Jews are off the examining table for any majority of concern and have been since Auschwitz reopened as a museum.
Nonetheless, the higher one climbs on the ladder of power, the more valuable the “anti- anti-Semite” and “anti-Semite” chips become.
The two political rhetorical objects — one claiming (“I am an anti- anti-Semite”), the other accusing (“You are an anti-Semite”) — may have nothing to do with modern Jewry, Judaism, Jewish culture and life, Jews, or Jewish anything else — but these two objects in social currency have power in service to the will to control others, and for a certain kind of political personality and temperament, that’s all that matters.
1. Donetsk could have published the flyer earnestly and backpedaled, possibly with a rebuke from Moscow. That would be the simplest explanation.
2. Ukrainian nationalists masquerading as Russians distributed the flyer to make break-away Russian nationalists look bad.
Now it gets interesting.
3. Putin may have suggested creating and distributing the flyer in Russian incognito to suggest just how low Ukrainian nationals would go in overturning the Moscow-aligned Yanukovych government.
Notably, and much to the credit of the Jewish community in Ukraine, Jews receiving the flyers asked the men distributing them to take off their face masks.
Guess who ran away?
The possession of integrity should not be so difficult.
However, comfort, defense, and refuge may be taken in lying given a certain kind of leader and leadership plus follower and following.
Update!
As JewishPress.com pointed out, it’s not going to stop at threatening letters. At 2 AM, Saturday morning, the Nikolayev synagogue in Ukraine was firebombed multiple times, as the anti-Semitism escalates.
Unfortunately, it appears the flyer and the emphasis on political rhetoric has not sufficed for either amusement or manipulation.
Posted to YouTube April 20, 2014.
However, I have a problem with the video: the weather in south Ukraine appears to have been above freezing last night: where has the snow come from? The looks of another synagogue firebombed in February look quite different from the building of interest, and the building of interest appears on the web elsewhere as a single story unit, not the two required for camera placement as the video would suggest.
Should anyone with a smart phone care to report in on the story, which has made the rounds on the Jewish press, please do.
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“It is part Soviet theme park, part wacky anti-western wonderland.”
“I’m asking those behind this not to make us tools in this game,” he said. Anti-Semitic incidents in the Russian-speaking east were “rare, unlike in Kiev and western Ukraine,” he said.
I used to call the “Islamic Small Wars” wars for detectives and poets — everything that happens has been planned in private and the motivation is all in the head suspended there by language. It’s disturbing seeing the same mode become ascendant in eastern Europe. Without claim for the crime, there’s no known criminal, and the finger-pointing goes in every direction.
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The traditional political cultivation of an anti-Jewish animus in services to institutional development and greed has been at least socially explicable. One understand the poison and its applications. The application of “anti- anti-Semitism” and “anti-Semitism” in Ukraine may signal a brand of cynicism and manipulation that has less to do with hating Jews than with tarring one’s political enemies.
However . . . Russian desk expert Luke Harding published this gem yesterday: http://www.theguardian.com/…/ukraine-donetsk-pro-russia… It could be the “kiddies” after all, and, God help them, if they’re demonstrably anti-Semitic, Putin will jettison them.
Answer “why” first — and the answer may have to do with the roles played in language by loyalty and what might be called “secure feeling”. When people lie, which concept includes false accusations and omissions, it is to hide something or to get something.
Always.
Around the world, what competes with loyalty? Principle.
However, if dissimulation accedes to bullying (by the local god mob), if fibbing means being fed, if deflection of responsibility forestalls opprobrium and shame, if vicious slander summons murder and plunder to one’s greater glory, thuggish though it be, well, heck, lying works!
All of that is part of “social grammar”, which you are trying to change where it’s needed. Perhaps, unfortunately, social reality — with which language behaviors are integrated — trumps principle by maintaining and reinforcing the behaviors cited for scolding. To get to a better place, the reward system has to change in a pervasive way.
From the above, one may sense how and where propaganda fits in and why it’s so important for autocrats to manage their state’s media to whatever extent may be possible: the systems they create in their own piratical interests are made to depend on their patronage and protection without exception, and for that, their subjects, the subjugated, must be made and maintained as the most loyal of believers: our “malignant narcissists” cannot afford the freedom of free minds when it comes to maintaining their “vertical of power” and their vision of expanding and limitless “narcissistic supply”.
Are “grandiose and messianic delusions” actually delusions if the person possessed of them makes them even somewhat real?
Be that as it may, the challenge and puzzle posed by Tezyapar’s jihad of the pen nonetheless involves the unraveling of complex and long-lived systems of pandering and patronage on the part of the powerful — who for their own aggrandizement lie to their people to keep them manipulated — and systems of subjugation within which the weak may grovel or play — and pray — as required and reap the benefits of an imperious acknowledgment, one by whom that if defied would be just as pleased to “barrel bomb” the children of the loyal every bit as much as the disloyal.
That last behavior, the throwing of an ungodly tantrum, I would not call indicative of “social grammar” but rather “criminal infallibility”, a state of being and regard most appreciated by dictators.
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