Tag Archives: political psychology

FTAC – Yemen – A Note to Sunni Militia

06 Monday Feb 2017

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

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Clarifying the battlefields of the Islamic Small Wars (my term) has been an issue since I began reading the news and blogging.

With perhaps the ascent of the Far Right, the “crusader west” analogy may have a little more substance, but it really isn’t true.

What AQ-types do, especially in the way of cruelty, sadism, and subjugation, goes against the grain of a normal and healthy humanity, and, frankly, Muslims seem themselves ever first in the path of the “jisadists”.

A western organization would first secure their children away from the fighting and work not to confuse noncombatants with warriors. That’s not going to make life fair to warriors who draw western attention, but if the same focus instead on fending off Iranian aggression and the alignments with Hezbollah and such, that may change the perception of who is fighting and why.

As regards Syria, Moscow today continues to represent feudal political absolutism — dictatorship, police state, mafia state, all of that — but this time (and this 25 years after the dissolving of the Soviet Union) as an ultra-nationalist imperial project counting on barbarism and its nuclear threat to get its way in the world. As such, it has managed to abet the destruction of Syria, produce some arms sales out of the horror put on display, and otherwise run its economy and cash reserves down to where it can do little more than loom large and hold its positions.

Syria is an immense tragedy, and the historic credit for it will most certainly go to Assad as flanked by Putin and Khamenei.

Charges against the west are often more assumptive and rhetorical than observed and reasoned. In the political psychology involved, there’s often a measure of the “paranoid delusional narcissistic reflection of motivation” — the target may be accused of harboring the motivations actually intended by the one pointing the finger.

In politics, narcissism often serves to cover an injury to the psyche (terms of art: “narcissistic mortification”; “splitting”) and over time, the cover abetted by anger and resentment can become quite malign and in such a way as to come to serve none but the afflicted himself. Go down the lists of the world’s dictators, and one may see the process repeating itself beneath different banners across time (with regard to dictators: “Different Talks — Same Walk!”).

And the walk turns out for most reliably miserable.

Revisit Mugabe’s history.

The post was written in response to a plea for western attention to drone strikes in Yemen that allegedly were killing any number of noncombatants, including children.  Such “news” gets mixed up with post-operation battlefield assessments — but for a few hours to days, the propaganda is the thing.

Here’s what had happened.

Washington (CNN)Nawar Anwar Al-Awlaki, the 8-year-old daughter of former al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed in a joint American-UAE raid against the terror group Sunday, according to the girl’s family.

Anwar Al-Awlaki, a US-born cleric who directed attacks against the US, was killed in a targeted drone strike in 2011.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/31/politics/yemen-raid-daughter-al-qaeda-leader/ – 2/1/2017.

Search term for following graphic: “American, UAE, raid, Yemen”.

gsearch-yemen-raid-170206-1009

The Seal Team met resistance, fought back, called in reinforcements, and got out with the computers that had been the objective of the raid.

“The raid resulted in the seizure of materials and information that is yielding valuable intelligence to help partner nations deter and prevent future terror attacks in Yemen and across the world,” the statement continued.

The Pentagon said 14 al Qaeda fighters were killed in the battle. Central Command said an internal review team “concluded regrettably that civilian non-combatants were likely killed in the midst of a firefight” during the raid, adding that “casualties may include children.”

The statement said than an assessment was ongoing to determine the exact number of civilian casualties.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/politics/us-raid-yemen/ – 1/1/2017.

Thomas said the footage was part of the large amount of data taken in the raid. He said the team collected more intelligence and data “than we’ve gotten at any one time on AQAP up to now.” It included videos, computer and communications equipment and data.

http://nypost.com/2017/02/03/pentagon-botches-release-of-video-seized-in-yemen-raid/ – 1/3/2017.

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Also in Media: “New Book Fails to Convict ISIS of Islamic Heresy” – Philos Project – January 23, 2017

25 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology

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Speckhard herself provided insight into the Islamic doctrine that motivates individual jihadists to sacrifice their lives on behalf of groups like the Islamic State. “The vision of hell in Islam is fiery and horrific, and there is no way – aside from relying on Allah’s compassion – to guarantee on the final day of judgment that one’s good deeds will outweigh the bad – except by dying as a ‘martyr,’” she said. Thus, “desiring to martyr oneself is a story I’ve heard many times from Islamic extremists who fear the everlasting repercussions of their sins.“

For Muslims growing up in Western culture, a strong tension exists between conservative Islam and Western freedoms,” Speckhard added, pointing out that this mindset makes jihad martyrdom particularly attractive.

Read more: New Book Fails to Convict ISIS of Islamic Heresy – Philos Project – 1/23/2017.

Jihadi Talk – The Dictionary by Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin

17 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Religion

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Jihadi Dictionary cvr.jpg

Kobrin, Nancy Hartevelt.  The Jihadi Dictionary: The Essential Intel Tool for Military, Law Enforcement, Government and the Concerned Public.  Mamaroneck, New York: MultiEducator Press, 2016 (Amazon – Paperback).

Kobrin, Nancy Hartevelt.  The Jihadi Dictionary: The Essential Intel Tool for Military, Law Enforcement, Government and the Concerned Public.  Mamaroneck, New York: MultiEducator Press, 2016 (Amazon – Kindle).

From the introduction:

The purpose of this dictionary is to explain the confusing and terrifying behavior of the jihadis by bringing to light their unconscious motivation. What is missing in their mental development that makes an entire group enact such vicious crimes not only against humanity but even their own people? The reservoir of their rage arises from problems nested in early maternal attachment in shame–honor cultures ― the early mother/infant bonding attachment, the first relationship in life. This is the real driver of the terrorism. While there has been a voluminous amount of material written about terrorism, little hinges on how to decode the meaning of the terrorists’ aberrant behavior from the perspective of early childhood development and trauma.

One has to be cautious not to “diagnosis” an entire group of people, but given the amount of destruction, cruelty, sadism, and revenge leading to heinous crimes against humanity, in this case I make an exception. Daesh, The Islamic State, helped me uncover a borderline psychotic diagnosis for jihadis because their behavior is so out of bounds in terms of morality and ethics that it has revealed its own psychosis. Others in the Arab world are aware of this and realize that they have created a tiger whose tail they are now bound to ride. Hezbollah and Iranian extremism has also been blatant in its wanton destruction and, in fact, has been a major funder of Sunni violence even though they are Shia. Almost worse than the terrorist attacks themselves is the jihadis’ lack of empathy and concern for the pain they cause. Jihadis are incapable of walking in the shoes of others. They may appear to be empathic, but it is only what I refer to as pseudo-empathy.

Kobrin’s writing is as entertaining as its interpretations of language are educating and loaded with insight.

Here’s a portion from the first “A” — for “Acting Out”:

Acting out is a process frequently seen in play therapy, where children have the opportunity to play out their most violent behavior and repressed fantasies.  Often these acts are attacks against the mother, who is seen as the source of painful dependency needs and nurturing.  The breast that is needed is also the breast that needs to be destroyed — e.g., beheadings, rage against their mothers, the need to get rid of her, to violently separate from her.  Jihadis manifest extreme attention-seeking behavior . . . .  “watching somebody else doing an action is just like doing the action yourself.”

On a late page (271-272) — and all between appears just as well grounded and rich in perspective — comes this gem associated with “Neoteny”:

The Islamic suicide terrorists and all their accessories to the crime — the engineer bomb maker, the recruiter, the sender, the escort, the charismatic leader, their mothers and fathers, their uncles, the clan, the tribe, the umma — are terrified because they, too, have been “neotenized”.  They are developmentally arrested and have never been allowed to separate, individuate, mature, or be free, independent, self-sufficient, confident, and competent human beings.  They live their early lives in the throes of terrorizing and shaming child-rearing practices.  If one never separates psychologically, they are left with group think, a kind of herd mentality.  The family, the community, and the culture embody and accept bad behavior as normative . . . .

For all curious as how it is that Islam, the Religion of Peace seems to be somewhere always wading in blood and unimaginable cruelty, The Jihadi Dictionary delivers answers and explanations aplenty — and they would seem to work.

BackChannels Aside

BackChannels has long maintained that Moscow today “plays” the Jihadists by using their own motivations, proclivities, tendencies, and weaknesses to incite, manipulate, and position the same in service to Moscow’s own medieval ends.  As much fits with Soviet Russia’s long history of involvement with terrorism and certainly this blog’s observation of Assad’s engineering the incubation of ISIL.

If the jihadist were not so predictable, the same would not be so useful to the politicians, like Assad, who have figured out how to get some use out of them.

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FTAC – Deranged Power

02 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Psychology

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The chat began with comment on the infamous Dr. Mengele and his demonic practices, but then it slipped a little sideways to talk about an inherent evil in procedures unrelated to the Nazi’s bent.

Again (again, again): the kind of power embraced by the despotic is the power to visit suffering on others with impunity and without conscience.

It may not be the procedure — e.g., abortion, sex change — that is evil but rather the removal of choice in its imposition.

Where abortion arguments are batted back and forth, the concern is not with procedure but the precedence of the “right” to choice on the mother’s part or advocacy for the fetus in its earliest phase.

Mengele and other famous sadists given the power to maim, torture, and murder with impunity do as the disturbed people they either were before their empowerment or have become as a consequence of it.

Much of this blog — perhaps all of it — has been concerned with the nature of political power in its most basic regions — “conflict, culture, language, and psychology” — and here it addresses the kind of extremist and vacuous force that gives way to wholesale theft and murder all the up the imaginable scale and beyond.

How could an ophthalmologist have created so much horror absent of conscience and shame?

Posted to YouTube by Muhammad Al Mousa on September 4, 2016.

How could the privileged and wealthy of Moscow — or Russia — have escaped the opprobrium associated with the most heinous irredeemable of war crimes?

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/18/syria-russias-barbarism-the-hospitals/
11/18/2016

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Also in Media: “Why Vladimir Putin Hates Us” | Observer | November 22, 2016

29 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Russia

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Predictably, the Kremlin maintains that moving state-of-the art missiles into Kaliningrad is a response to American ballistic missile defenses which have been deployed in Eastern Europe. As usual, Moscow depicts all its military moves, even ones which are destabilizing to regional security, as cosmically defensive, so great is the Western threat to Russia.

Source: Why Vladimir Putin Hates Us | Observer

Relevant on BackChannels: “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation”.

FTAC – Keith Ellison – Division and Information

22 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, United States of America

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Ellison stories speak to his relationships with CAIR, ISNA, Farrakhan, and others who have either articulated anti-Semitic and racist positions, especially Farakhan, or have been associated with questionable organizations, as for example CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood.

However . . . let the man speak.

In our online lives in the information ocean, all have been subject to surrounding currents and related choices in content selection. As I have had some time and understand that few have that luxury — and I don’t really have it (although I’m available for less public research tasking) — it may help at times to overview information about a subject and its tributaries. With that in mind, here also is an article about a 2016 Muslim Student Association (MSA, and in Minnesota) decision to REJECT BDS and anti-Semitic cant in its campus work.

http://www.mnrepublic.com/msa-avoids-divestment-and-anti-semitism-arguments/ – 3/8/2016.

Of course, there’s a slew of articles that analyze Keith Ellison’s leanings quite differently.

I may suggest that in the way of “reparative narcissists”, that their joining or including movements, organizations, or personalities with histories of discomfiting views — look up Farrakhan’s assistant Dr. Khalid Abdul Muhammad, and listen to his rant for a few minutes — intends drawing the same away from hate and violence because that is the character of a repairing personality.

Let the politician work — or even work his magic.

Here are a few “fast links” to opinions about politician and how he’s been seen in several ranks, especially the conservative and Jewish political communities.

BackChannels feels that if you listen to Keith Ellison in action and directly — and you have been informed of the role of the Soviet Union in forming up the PLO — then you understand something new about the generation of rhetoric in the politics of the middle east conflict and perhaps the promotion of internecine Jewish-Muslim conflict in the United States.

Additional Reference

Simon Wiesenthal Center.  “SWC: Congressman Ellison as DNC Chair is Wrong Signal at Wrong Time.” n.d.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/11/muslim_nationalist_keith_ellison_bad_news_for_women_children_gays_golden_retrievers.html – 11/21/2016.

http://www.meforum.org/2756/keith-ellison-stealth-jihad – September 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Ellison

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/218385/keith-ellison-supports-bds-and-admires-louis-farrakhan-so-why-are-jewish-democrats-supporting-him-for-chairman-of-the-dnc – 11/21/2016.

Dr. Khalid Abdul Muhammad’s 1993 Kean College Speech – 1:45:05 – Posted to YouTube August 29, 2014.  Khalid Abdul Muhammad had been an assistant to Louis Farrakhan, and, apparently, an angry one to the end.

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Also in Media: “Playboy Interview: Donald Trump (1990)” | Playboy

16 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, American Domestic Affairs, Political Psychology, United States of America

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But if the grass ever did look greener, which political party do you think you’d be more comfortable with?  Well, if I ever ran for office, I’d do better as a Democrat than as a Republican–and that’s not because I’d be more liberal, because I’m conservative. But the working guy would elect me. He likes me. When I walk down the street, those cabbies start yelling out their windows.

Source: Playboy Interview: Donald Trump (1990) | Playboy

It was too good a quotation not to share on this blog.

There are others nuggets as regards the Trump show, the promotion of extraordinary egotism (on this blog, the same may be interpreted and developed as a malign or reparative narcissism), admiration for the Chinese government’s show of strength at Tienanmen Square, and obsession with nuclear war:

I’ve always thought about the issue of nuclear war; it’s a very important element in my thought process. It’s the ultimate, the ultimate catastrophe, the biggest problem this world has, and nobody’s focusing on the nuts and bolts of it. It’s a little like sickness. People don’t believe they’re going to get sick until they do. Nobody wants to talk about it. I believe the greatest of all stupidities is people’s believing it will never happen, because everybody knows how destructive it will be, so nobody uses weapons. What bullshit.

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FTAC – ‘The Masses’, Putin, and News Awareness

13 Sunday Nov 2016

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

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I generally don’t use the term “the masses”, and when I do, it’s to note how dehumanizing a term it really is.

Regarding Putin’s methods in ascent: one might credit Berezovsky and perhaps the Moscow Apartment Bombings.

On the chess pieces:

http://rbth.com/business/2016/03/09/where-does-the-russian-orthodox-church-get-its-money-from_574079

http://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-resurrects-the-kgb-moscow-security/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/110-oligarchs-own-a-third-of-russias-wealth-8869725.html

Of course, the citizens of every state needs must care about their own lives first — biological, familial and otherwise social, financial, emotional, spiritual. Security and stability in those aspects of life are generally part of everyone’s quality of living.

That Putin has been able to sustain and transform many aspects of the defunct Soviet Union tells a story about the kind of political power exercised in relation to malignant narcissism. In effect, he has got Russia revolving around himself, and for the discomforts he has caused, the Russians have channels today for faith and patriotism. The “Communists” are gone but the essence of the old nomenklatura has been transformed into an ultra-nationalist and neo-imperial enterprise.

The public that has wished to take an interest in foreign affairs has plenty of information — responsible, valid, and reliable — for working, but large constituencies may only attend to so much in aggregate. I would not think of such as “ignorant masses” but rather people with families and jobs and struggles and worries of their own. They may find what they need to know WHEN it matters to them, when the dots circle back to their own interests, and they perceive that.

The stimulus for the response made note of the people voting Putin into power.

Mention had already been made of Berezovsky and the Moscow Apartment Bombings.

Perhaps “Russia’s state-controlled press” should have been added to the “chess pieces” –Russian Orthodox Church, KGB Revival, Oligarch Aristocracy — section of the above response: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/vladimir-putin-russia-news-media_us_56215944e4b0bce34700b1df .  I sometimes indulge in minor revision, but not this time.

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