Tag Archives: political science

FTAC – On Putin & Associates’ Search for Medieval Absolute Power

25 Monday Jul 2016

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Moscow – Putin | Putin, Assad, Khamenei | Putin, Orban | Putin, Erdogan (never mind the superficial enmity and differences in “talk”) — supports political absolutism in relation to the malignant narcissism evident in the personalities of related leaders (like Orban, like Erdogan). For this reason, Putin has encourage both Far Left and Far Right political organizations and personalities; it is why his government has hosted PFLP (2014) and continues to refuse to condemn Hezbollah and Hamas. The form of power wanted by dictators — different talks: same walk — is the power to visit suffering on others with impunity. On the cheerful side of that 🙂 — the acquisition of unlimited narcissistic supply. Whatever the west’s own issues may be with business, corruption, and crime, the power-distributing and power-checking political systems threaten the “malignant narcissist” — the autocrat, the absolutist — and that’s really what their battles are about. The power of the special sovereign / great leader has its place in Russian history but is by no means confined to Russia. In fact, I think feudal despotism more the way of the world, even if one hopes not its only future, than checked-and-distributed political power, and that at least two NATO states feature illiberal autocrats as heads of state — Hungary and Turkey — tells what the argument is really about: i.e., Medieval Absolute Power vs Modern Checked and Distributed Power.

The paragraphs may grow shorter as I retype and recast BackChannels’ main themes.

Why do dictators do what they do?

Ah, pride — but pride that compensates and covers psychic injury.  Terms of art may include the following:

Narcissistic mortification

Malignant and Reparative Narcissism — I would refer to this as “narcissistic pathing” or channeling.

Narcissistic Supply — that approving roar of the crowd.

Unlimited Narcissistic Supply — Ah, glorious, unless you have found yourself on the Great Leader’s wrong side, i.e., somewhere in the opposition.

-33-

FTAC – MEC – Thin Wall

18 Wednesday May 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza Suzerain, International Development, Political Psychology, Syndicate Red Brown Green

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

One has not to choose sides at all: one may choose integrity.

This is about where the modern Palestinian alternative narrative began: https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/quote-manipulation…/

The world’s community of “Kremlin watchers” well know the history of domestic political policing and the manipulation and stage managing of foreign conflicts, and that not much more different than what we’re witnessing today in Syria.

While Putin has been charming in Israel and inclined to accuse Ukrainians of anti-Semitic drift, one of the ploys involved in “information warfare” in the Crimean Stall, Russia has unfortunately had a long history with that brand of hate, and it surfaced in the Soviet’s approach to middle east politics.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/ftac-tip-to-the…/

International and Palestinian Solidarity continue to preach and promote “Sovietese” — the tired language of the Far Left and what I’ve called the “New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left” — and that’s coming from a modern liberal’s voice.

This a listing of the Board of Directors of a wealthy real estate development corporation anchored in Gaza:

http://www.padico.com/Public/English.aspx?Page_ID=631…

They are each real persons, profit minded, some educated in the United States. The public generally doesn’t hear much about the extent and nearness of private wealth in Gaza. There are embarrassing financial reasons for that — there are no ethical or moral arguments for not increasing investment levels throughout Gaza in the cause of peaceful trade.

Final note regarding the true economics of the privileged in socialism: both Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires. “Arafat’s millions” remains a popular look-up on the web, and “Abu Mazen” may be following in similar steps.

What would be wrong with having “Two Narratives for Two People”?

🙂

One of them would remain forever hateful and wrong — and manipulated by the most heartless bastards on the planet, the kind that produce child soldiers, that force noncombatants into harm’s way, that skim up their wealth from legitimate businesses, that run smuggling operations not in their people’s interests, and that create and spread lies guaranteed to keep their people muzzled and truly occupied (by themselves) and preoccupied (with “the Jews”).

In the title of this piece, “thin wall” refers to a boundary in information warfare.  It is the boundary between the creation, promulgation, reach and protection of Soviet-style propaganda under the cover of socialism and human rights and the potential intrusions of political observation and analysis naturally generated by the democratic and open societies.

# # #

FTAC – A Comment on Attitudes and Beliefs and Religion

08 Monday Feb 2016

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

I believe in Judaism, but I don’t want to see a religious court developed in place of a secular one.

As an American, I appreciate the symbolism of the Jordan River as depicted or used in the Torah, but my river is the Potomac and my soul altogether American.

_God is Red_ by (Native American) Vine Deloria, Jr. makes an interesting case in regard to the relationship between a land and its people.

Also of basic interest may be Daniel Everett’s _Language: The Cultural Tool_ and _Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes_, both of which tell about our use of language as a tool of survival.

Those “internal variables and functions” operate with and through language over a base of emotional turmoil and valence.

In “Attitude-Behavior Correspondence” studies (at least back in the 1980s), for some, “Attitude = Belief x (Affect x Intensity) / Primacy”. What needs looking at are the arrangements of multiple beliefs. In survey form with the Likert scale, “Do you believe in God?” (1 = Not At All, 5 = As Strongly as Possible” becomes one question and “Do you believe that Muslims can never be friends with Christians and Jews” (1 = Completely Disagree, 5 = Completely Agree).

Add 38 more questions, distribute to 150 students on one campus somewhere, apply regression analysis to the response set, and see how “beliefs” — or statements about beliefs — correlate with one another.

Recapitulate on another campus.

Recapitulate with another age group.

Such studies can go on a while, but I would suggest that through social science and other methods, one will find certain beliefs, like the belief in God, primary, and other beliefs, like that having to do with not being friends, either dismissible (“completely disagree”) or minimized in the mind of the surveyed subject, and, when aggregated (through survey method), also minimized.

“Attitude = Belief x (Affect x Intensity) / Primacy” may be the BackChannel’s author’s own addition to the more customary configuration, “Attitude = Belief x Affect”.  It simply adds in the intensity of good or bad feeling (“affect”) about a belief and it recognizes that some of what we believe about our existence — start with one’s own name, which is fairly “low level” or basic in the programming of our own personalities — may be more dear to us than other aspects of an object, including ourselves as our own possession.

As regards an “American religion” — might there be such a thing? — BackChannels may turn some attention to revisiting early American literature and the classic visitor commentaries.

# # #

FTAC – America – The Presidency – Long Term

30 Wednesday Sep 2015

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

I don’t think we’re destroyed, (name withheld): our bombers cover the earth daily; our satellite and other security systems are up 24/7/365; our armed forces have taken some hits in the area of “largeness”, but at the same time they have reinvented themselves in “force-multiplying” technology; our security industry, which includes at least 17 major active institutions is probably better knit together today than at any other time in their turf-divided histories; and we seem to have the capability of operating out of the spotlight.

Some programs run in the background.

I believe that this material — http://www.stripes.com/…/cia-special-ops-cooperate-to… — would not have been released to the public unless the CIA and military had agreed to “leak it” — i.e., to inform ISIS fighters as to just how closely they have been infiltrated and monitored. This has taken place, albeit off the Big Media radar, throughout the course of the Obama Administration. As such, the data argues against the conservative arguments involving appeasement.

I think what has happened is that the west has met and adjusted its tactics to the medievalism represented by, sigh, “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” and also distant rivals in Pakistan and elsewhere. We are the “Modern” at war with the “Medieval”. Time is the New Space, and we are fighting with these “emperors” and “new nobility” over the essential future models of governance. Colonel President Emperor Putin has found himself — and put himself — center stage in the defense of political “absolute power”. We, the west, remain and stand by “classical liberalism”: we believe in personhood for everyone: the despotic seem to believe that they — each — are the only persons who really matter.

I didn’t vote for Obama because of the Far (Out) Left connections and his experience with the Wright stuff . . . but I firmly believe that he is responsible to the major American institutions — DOD / NASA (that set the standards for the nation) and then the layers of bureaucracy that will survive him and other American Presidents to come. In that way, our democracy captures our elected leaders: they can talk all they want, and they can maneuver quite a bit, but once in the driver’s seat, the chief administrator’s chair, they’re cushioned or padded by all that has preceded them and constrained by other political forces. That despots don’t want that kind of position, and they’re fighting it all the way down.

Some Muslims — and Muslim to Judaism converts that I have encountered — believe that a “clash of civilizations” is taking form.  I take a broader view: the medieval past has inconveniences a great part of humanity, and the Moderns (and the Progressives) have a problem with that.  So do the clerics and dictators who counsel Obedience — or Else!  The autocratic or despotic — malignant narcissists, all of them — fear their own dawning irrelevance.

# # #

Gülen and the Gulls (the American Public)

05 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, North America, Political Psychology, Psychology, Religion, Turkey, United States of America

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

In a normal public school district, you’d be able to tell who the vendors are, but in charter world, it’s purposely opaque. It must amount to millions of dollars of business that aren’t going out to bid, or that in all likelihood, aren’t even going out to Americans.

http://www.tbfurman.us/2014/07/a-patronage-empire-concept-and-its.html – 7/31/2014.

Related:

http://gulencharterschools.weebly.com/concept-schools-favored-vendors.html – September 2013.

Also from TB Furman:

Basic research, basic due diligence, basic critical thinking skills— these are the only things required to figure out that there are multiple connections between this transnational social/political/religious movement and the three charter schools in Chicago, that these connections are purposely blurred to keep people uninformed, and that this phenomenon is consistent with the established patterns of behavior of the Gulen Movement worldwide.

http://www.tbfurman.us/2014/04/taking-good-long-look-at-concept.html – 4/9/2014. Page contains audio recording and slide show, “Gulen 101”.

Related: Herkul – This Week: The Broken Jug: Droplets of Wisdom from the Heart: “Genius Minds and Flourishing of Talents.”  12/21/2014.  The main web appears in Turkish while the English version appears to begin on the page cited.  After practically and classically describing a narcissistic personality, Gulen goes on to say:

“By even developing a certain code of rebellion of their own, they might begin to refuse even very plausible thoughts developed as a result of serious pondering and forget the fact that doing things for the sake of God is exalted above all.

Actually, what lies at the root of such wrongs is a lack of learning manners. In the past, people who were responsible for education were very good teachers of manners as well.”

Behave!

🙂

And obey Gülen — as regards aspects of the autocratic, authoritarian, unreasoning, and cult-of-personality dimensions evident in the Fathullah Gülen story, Rachel Sharon-Krespin’s Middle East Forum piece (Winter 2009) contains plenty for related reflection.

TB Furman’s latest: “The Million (Billion?) Dollar Question Charter School Oversight.”  January 3, 2015.

Related: Sharon Higgins’ Charter School Scandals blog.

Today, despite the rhetoric of European Union accession, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has turned Turkey away from Europe and toward Russia and Iran and reoriented Turkish policy in the Middle East away from sympathy toward Israel and much more toward friendship with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria. Anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-Semitic sentiments have increased. Behind Turkey’s transformation has been not only the impressive AKP political machine but also a shadowy Islamist sect led by the mysterious hocaefendi (master lord) Fethullah Gülen; the sect often bills itself as a proponent of tolerance and dialogue but works toward purposes quite the opposite. Today, Gülen and his backers (Fethullahcılar, Fethullahists) not only seek to influence government but also to become the government.

“Fethullah Gülen’s Grand Ambition” – Turkey’s Islamist Danger – by Rachel Sharon-Krespin – Middle East Quarterly – Winter 2009, pp. 55-66.

Gulen, once respected by Erdogan, is now vilified and branded an “assassin” — a reference to Hassan Sabbah’s violent medieval cult. Thousands of public servants allegedly close to the Gulen community have been removed from their jobs. Some have been arrested.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/12/turkey-erdogan-gulen-war-benefit-lesser-known-islamic-groups.html#ixzz3NxZdUY00 – 12/30/2014.

“A Gülen organization controls the real estate companies that own their schools. They charge rent to their own schools and taxpayers foot the bill. They refuse to answer public records requests, falsify attendance records, and cheat on standardized tests. Yet, Ohio continues to grant them charters to operate.”

Scott Beauchamp quoting Matthew Blair in in article in The Atlantic, “120 American Charter Schools and One Secretive Turkish Cleric,” August 12, 2014.

No more tender a national achilles heel offers itself to America’s enemies quite like public education.

That Fethullah Gülen’s organization has run itself into trouble against Turkish autocrat Erdogan fits with the same emerging neo-feudalism that has surfaced in Russia, i.e., cabal of shady nouveau riche rise to operate organization out of the public’s view, exploit the same, any which way (and they produce sufficient tell-tale propaganda to prove it), and live lavishly promoting their favored or more convenient ideological or religious program – but then they must contend with one another.

There is a “Gulen Movement 101, Session One”.

This, however, is what I have listened to while working on this piece:

Sharon Higgins’ closing questions:

  • Have these charter schools been built on a foundation of exaggerations, half-truths, and lies?
  • Why won’t public officials publicly address this situation?
  • Americans are still in the dark because no national reporting has been done that portrays the extent of the GM’s (Gülen Movement’s) presence here?
  • Why are taxpayers — who don’t know about this group — being forced to fund these schools?

 # # #

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

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.

# # #

FTAC – Guest Note – Elena Elena – On Crimean Identity and Self-Determination

24 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, Politics, Regions, Russia, Ukraine

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

I’ve been trying to locate a really good article I read about the subject without much luck… Putin is done with the Ukraine. I do not think Russia is going to do anything beyond annexation of the Crimea. The reason: Because the Crimea is a special case legally. (1) The Crimea was given illegally by Nakita Khruschev to the Ukraine in 1954, without any authorization by the Russians in Crimea or from the Duma. It’s worth noting that only 13 members of the Secretariat voted to this, the other 14 were simply absent. (2) As a compromise, the Crimea became an autonomous Russian Region within Ukraine and its constitution stated as such. The means the Crimea could, at any time, vote and rejoin Russia, which is what happened. (3) The propaganda from the EU and the USA and NATO trying to characterize Russian behavior as illegal is a lie. There are treaties between Russia and Ukraine in 1991, 1994, 2004, and 2007 which make everything that has happened perfectly legal within the law – and in 1999 the World Court in the Hague, responding to a question, stated that any people, exercizing self-determination, can quit one state and join another legally.

“FTAC” — “From the Awesome Conversation” (on Facebook).

“Elena Elena” — A Facebook friend and writer of the above quoted passage.

______

With the arrival of common broadband, access to the English-language editions for foreign newspapers, blogging software, and social networks — basic ingredients — any English reading and writing Everyman lucky enough to have the lifestyle, technology, and time could travel by armchair around the world and through its war zones with unprecedented freedom.

So I, you, and we have done as much.

We have seen it all!

But, perhaps, we haven’t seen it at all at all.

As elsewhere, the devils in history are in the details of events, and while hopscotching from revolution to terror, from the diplomacy of the hour to the heart wrenching atrocity of the day, one may discover missing the clear, accurate, and complete intimacy with story that comes with specialization.

How difficult might such specialization be here in mid-flight?

Here’s the step-off for recent events by way of the Modern Broadbanded Everyman’s Wikipedia entry:

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Crimea became part of the newly independent Ukraine. Independence was supported by a referendum in all regions of Ukrainian SSR, including Crimea.[17] 54% of the Crimean voters supported independence with a 60% turnout (in Sevastopol 57% supported independence).[18] The percentage of the total Crimean electorate that had voted for Ukrainian independence in the referendum was 37%.[19] In 1994, the legal status of Crimea as part of Ukraine was backed up by Russia, who pledged to uphold the territorial integrity of Ukraine in a memorandum signed in 1994, also signed by the US and UK.[20][21]

This new situation led to tensions between Russia and Ukraine. With the Black Sea Fleet based on the peninsula, worries of armed skirmishes were occasionally raised. In August 1991, Yuriy Meshkov established the Republican Movement of Crimea which was registered on 19 November.[20]

On 2 September 1991, the National Movement of Crimean Tatars appealed to the V Extraordinary Congress of People’s Deputies in Russia demanding the program how to return the deported Tatar population back to Crimea. Based on the resolution of the Verkhovna Rada (the Crimean parliament) on 26 February 1992, the Crimean ASSR was renamed the Republic of Crimea.[22] The Crimean parliament proclaimed self-government on 5 May 1992.[23][22] (which was yet to be approved by a referendum to be held 2 August 1992[clarification needed Did the referendum happen, or was it cancelled?][24]) and passed the first Crimean constitution the same day.[24] On 6 May 1992 the same parliament inserted a new sentence into this constitution that declared that Crimea was part of Ukraine.[24]

Huh?

As a Wikipedia section note tells, the above passage might be too detailed.

Be that as it may, what it also tells is how time may be needed to read, sift, and reflect on descriptions of events, of the evidence of events, until they make sense, the rhetoric and actions of so many conflicted parties tumbling finally into place in an historian’s mind in a way less ambiguous than may be perceived in a hurry.

Add this commonplace too: nothing beats being there.

The armchair bobbing on the foam of the information deluge and short form Wikitype “learnin'” might not suffice for accurate and reliable comprehension.

# # #

Revived Arcs of Dictatorship – Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela

24 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by in Asia, China, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, Politics, Regions, Russia, South America, Ukraine, Venezuela

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

To Russian and Syrian officials and their supporters, the Syrian war and the standoff over the Crimean Peninsula are essentially part of a single, larger battle, against post-Cold War American unilateralism.

Unity Coalition for Israel.  “Russian Defiance Is Seen as a Confidence Builder for Syria’s Government.”  March 24, 2014.

When Putin’s Russia pledged $10 million to Syrian relief while spending $52 billion to host the winter games in Sochi, it told the world unmistakably what it was going to be about: the greatness of the Great Leader.

Why shouldn’t Bashar al-Assad continue what he’s doing while “encouraging” votes to reelect him as their Great Leader?

Why should Vladimir Putin halt the expansion of either mafia enterprise or Russian hegemony in Crimea?

* * *

Six documents stamped with the seal of the Venezuelan army show that as far back as December 2001, agents of then president Hugo Chavez — Maduro’s mentor — sought to build a paramilitary. What is more, the recruitment efforts targeted military bases in order to incorporate army personnel into this non-uniformed militia. In other words, the Chavez government was looking for trained professionals who could handle weapons.

O’Grady, Mary Anastasia.  “Sanctioned killers make a mockery of ‘democracy’ claims.”  The Wall Street Journal, March 24/25, 2014.

I read the above in hard copy at the coffee shop an hour ago, so it has been out today, Monday, March 24.

Venezuela’s axis may be counterpoised to Russia, as I recall the note of a South American friend: “You can see the oil rigs of the Chinese from Miami.” [1]

The business would seem to come along with the way of doing business – or perhaps dictatorships simply understand one another in the way of crooked and sociopath elites:

The challenges facing most of the Caribbean nations are neither unique nor entirely isolated. They include high unemployment and migration levels, unsustainable levels of government debt and increasingly high costs of energy. In fact, the high costs of energy have led some small Caribbean island nations to join Hugo Chavez’s radical ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) in exchange for cheap Venezuelan petroleum. When a powerful nation such as China comes on the scene and offers loans, credits and investment, local actors take substantial notice, especially when the traditional hegemon, the United States, seems preoccupied elsewhere.

Menéndez, Fernando.  “China Comes to the Caribbean.”  China – U.S. Focus, January 25, 2014.

To spell in schematic, “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” and “Putin-Yanukovych” (so sorry it didn’t last) seems to me perfectly sensible, and then to suggest a similar but Chinese-oriented path for Chavez seems not unreasonable.

The line may be missing a dot or two, but the dots are there and whether intentionally among the Bond-villain set — in the post-00s of the 21st Century, these already have their nukes — or unconsciously by way of the anomic lust for money that produces the policy that pipes out Sudanese oil while ignoring the Darfur Genocide, for example — hardly matters: free Europeans say “hello” to the new old bosses, the old familiars, the kind that talk kindly while select suspect associates are thrown off the roofs above their heads and the children of their constituents are barrel bombed into dead certain compliance with their will.

______

Related on BackChannels: “Draw Near, the Next World Order — China and Russia Hang Together.”  March 3, 2014.

# # #