The discovery of oil would transform the geopolitical role of Saudi Arabia. It was an American firm, later called Aramco — not a British firm — that succeeded in getting the rights for prospection in 1938. Aramco sought assistance from the U.S. government to exploit the fields.
One consequence of Aramco’s interest combined with President Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of the geopolitical future of the United States was a now famous, then little noticed, meeting of Roosevelt and the ruler of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud, on Feb. 14, 1945 aboard a U.S. destroyer in the Red Sea.
Empathy with an emphasis on compassion, and here with that as related to casualties and displaced from Syria’s agonizing civil war, signals something good in the general humanity, but it’s not going to be enough to promote band-aids when the war is sustained on the absence of an armed force of a middle and perhaps now modern temperament.
It’s notable also that Russia pledged $10 million to refugee relief in Syria while spending $52 billion, the largest amount ever, for the winter Olympics at Sochi.
___
My partner in the short conversation then said, “Humanity in the true sense has lost all its values.”
___
Not really although it sometimes seems to. We’re a wild species suspended in about, oh, 6,900 living languages, each of which represents a cultural invention and technology and conveys from one generation to the next a behavioral program fit to the character of the language community in a given circumstance in place and time.
I believe the variance in that language-driven and language-derived behavior shapes consciousness and conscience and with regard to empathy, may emphasize the cultivation of that ability to meld emotion and imagination on behalf of someone else, or it may harden the heart against the same.
Other qualities may obtain similar support and the tapestry of whole cultures, whether that of, say, a living sun king or that of a god remote and separate from the mortal, becomes made of such threads. With the aforementioned 6,900 differences in cultural cognitive style wrapped in language, it’s amazing we don’t have more conflict on our plates than we do, but, ever optimistic here, if we drift toward a moderate middle together, we can clean up and forestall a lot of this kind of mess.
The modern dictator’s values — any side (one chessboard – same player on both sides, lol) — build on heroic myth to develop power over others for the purpose of obtaining continuous and inexhaustible “narcissistic supply” — the adoration and adulation of the realm: and they often sail themselves and their own to disaster on the wings of a grandiose messianic delusion.
______
The inspiration for the above portion of threaded conversation appears to be a contrivance but quite pointed:
The best way to save the children is, alas, to save the adults, get enough on to about the same page in their attitudes, ethics, ideals, and values with regard to others, and then get them to challenge, eject, or evolve the kind of deeply narcissistic and lost personalities who have attempted to paint reality for others through what they do in the pursuit of war.
Of the Assad regime and the al-Nusra et al. counterpoints, I’ve remarked “different talk: same walk”: each will use the lives of noncombatants for political chips. Perhaps nowhere in the whole sorry tragedy has that been made more clear than in the approach of each side to the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp, where one side laid siege as part became a rebel base, and the rebels, true to form, used the helpless and unarmed residents as their own human shields.
Is there anyone reading this post that might want to see that obscenity again?
Attitudes and beliefs, including beliefs about Jews, about loyalty, about the west, about the Baath Party and the Soviet Union (or its ghost from 22 years ago) play a role in impeding the development of an effective and true Syrian people’s army. Moreover, but along similar lines, the three sides — Assad; more secular revolutionary forces; and, of course, the al-Qaeda types — have found themselves trapped in the immense shadows cast by the glorious wars of yesteryear, which for each is different: Bashar al-Assad has been trying to fight his father’s war, an armed insurrection against the state; the battles in mind, perhaps literally, for the al-Qaeda affiliates need little introduction and would seem to be expressed in battlefield and political behavior; and the moderates who seem to be carrying around the load of combined internationalist and Islamist hate for Israel, Jews, and “The West” just haven’t found their way to daylight.
I don’t know where to change that “Jew hate” that signals so much else about the three parties sewing Syria with destruction, and I’m not sure it’s my job alone to locate those cognitive switches in the languages alive on the fields of battle, but finding that would be a good place to start.
Syrians needs Syria — I know of no culture free of a relationship with its land and landscape — and they need to own it for themselves in peace.
To obtain that ownership and peace, the defense Syrians may need most of all, the defense most absent in the three years of continuous and brutal fighting, is not defense from Israel, which is treating Syrian wounded today, but defense from those among themselves who would seek their own excessive aggrandizement at the costs now well displayed in death, displacement, and suffering.
Related (updated 3/18/2014) from The Torah, Exodus 31-32:
31The LORD did as Moses asked, and removed the swarms of insects from Pharaoh, from his servants and from his people; not one remained. 32But Pharaoh hardened his heart this time also, and he did not let the people go.
FATA has been in the eye of the storm for the past 10 years and other than drones, bombs and shells, what pacification measures have the government taken, other than to be scared witless of the terror merchants and their cronies?
On that horrific and too familiar a kind of story, one of my friends in Islamabad, Asad Khan, who states on his Facebook page, “every human has the right to communicate with the creator, in the manner s/he thinks best . . . “, provided me permission to relay his thoughts here.
As an editor in this process, I’ve added paragraph breaks to help ease the reading, question marks to the interrogative statements, and applied rote grammatical corrections (“has” to “have” for example) where needed.
“MPAs” refers to members of the Provincial Assembly; “MNAs” to members of the National Assembly. There are a few other acronyms sprinkled about (“FC” refers to “Frontier Corps”), but the reader is online too and look-up works fast.
Guest Post by Asad Khan
The Police Service is the most vilified, most underfunded, most politically manipulated, probably most demoralized, and most undertrained of all government services.
With this background of our own home grown “keystone cops”, should we be surprised that the terrorists came calling to the courts and turned it into a shooting gallery, shooting innocent people as if they were sitting ducks.
I think what has happened in Islamabad should not come as a surprise to anyone, least of all to the current political leadership. I have always expounded the view that we should have job descriptions and selection criteria for ministers and other leaders and policy makers. For example what are the qualifications of the interior minister, other than the fact that a whole bunch of nincompoops have voted him to the national assembly on false promises?
The same holds true for the rest of that galaxy of greats and near greats that adorn the corridors of power in Islamabad.
First of all I would like to ask the interior minister to define the roles of the police departments/service, the FC and various other “law enforcement” agencies that he lords over?
Probably he will not know the answers to this/these question(s).
Next what is the internal security policy for the nation as whole, not just Raiwind, Lahore, and Punjab in that order, and not just security for the star spangled generals, judges, ministers and MPAS or MNAS?
Does the interior minister know the shelf life of a cartridge in the bandolier of a Police Constable, or when it was purchased, and to how many rain falls and sun shines that cartridge has been exposed to?
Probably it is beneath the dignity of that snotty, arrogant minister to know such trivia.
Why must the Police Constable die in the line of duty protecting a judge who does not value his (police constable’s) life?
What has the government done for Malakand, post 2009 conflict other than some nicely written fraudulent reports?
FATA has been in the eye of the storm for the past 10 years and other than drones, bombs and shells, what pacification measures have the government taken, other than to be scared witless of the terror merchants and their cronies?
We are adopting the line of appeasement not because of our love for the Taliban, but because we are scared blue of them.
Has the Interior Minister, or the PM or the CM ever been to the funeral of a police constable or an FC jawan killed in the line of duty in KPK?
I don’t think so.
Has a survey ever been conducted to know the views of the police or the FC?
I don’t think so.
If I were a Police constable or an FC jawan I would not throw my life away for the protection of some judge or politician.
Have the powers that be ever stood in the shoes of a police constable and thought of these things?
The post-event inquiries ordered by the Head Judge, the PM, CM and what not make me laugh.
It is a joke on the nation.
Pakistan can only get out of the morass it is in if we have honest, decent men and women at the helm of affairs, but unfortunately this will never be. The West is rooting for parliamentary democracy because they know that this sham “democracy” is our nemesis and will be the cause of our eventual downfall. Robber barons will keep on replacing one another and this game of musical chairs will keep on going, and we will keep on sinking deeper and deeper until the sands of time will cover us and there will be no trace left, and the freebooters will take their loot and head West, to out their miserable lives there.
For the present, this country is being run by mafias and unless their hold is broken, and they are made accountable for their actions, we can bid sayonara to any hope for the better.
Their story is more evidence that Christian children are being taken from West Papua and converted to Islam – a practice officially denied after being revealed in Fairfax Media’s Good Weekend magazine last year. It also makes clear for the first time that knowledge of the practice reaches high into the upper echelons of Indonesia’s political elite.
The religious conversion of any young child is illegal in Indonesia, and the United Nations deems any transfer of a minor, even for education, as trafficking.
Posted on Facebook by the Free West Papua Campaign, March 3, 2014: “Indonesian police and plainclothes police can be seen taking sickening “trophy photos” of the corpses of West Papuan people they have just stripped and murdered and thrown into a drainage ditch used as a makeshift mass grave in the middle of a highlands village. According to sources, this is in the Central Highlands of West Papua, possibly the Puncak Jaya region and was taken relatively recently. What appears to be the National flag of West Papua, the Morning Star can be seen raised behind the horror. The raising of this flag has been made illegal by Indonesia and carries a 15 year jail sentence. As this photo has just emerged, we are currently finding out as much as possible about the details and cannot yet verify the exact date and location but what is for sure is that this photo, taken in the highlands of West Papua is 100% real and genuine, hard evidence of Indonesia’s 21st century apartheid and genocide in West Papua.”
I have yet to download a conflict photo loaded with EXIF/IPTC verbal data identifying the camera used, the photographer, and photographer’s title and caption. Most often too, these incendiary images come out of the special interest press representing religious denominations and organizations that repeat their use or transpose images taken in one place to captions representing another event. The Free West Papua Campaign, however, insists itself on locating the specific photographer who took it, when, and where. It believes in the veracity of the image enough to question its exact provenance, and therefore I believe in its accuracy too.
UPDATE, OCTOBER 16, 2017:for those coming off third-party sites using the above photograph — one has actually disinformed its public by putting “Rohingya Muslims” in place of West Papuans in its headline — I’m no longer certain of the forensic quality of the photograph: the bodies look related in hands-behind-head security postures; the police could just be checking ID in a most humiliating manner; or there could be some mix of dead and living. One had to be there, of course, and the one who was there to take the picture has not apparently distributed the same with captioning data intact.
______
How BackChannels views the West Papua Conflict: on the border between the Muslim and Christian worlds, the indigenous of West Papua struggle to keep their culture and land intact, refusing forced conversion and assimilation to the Muslim-majority state whose international boundary has overrun their property.
As is common and familiar to Muslim-majority states worldwide, the tack pursued with regard to West Papuans has been than of cultural annihilation and political suppression.
Coming from an American of European descent, this layout of the story would seem hypocritical, for as West Papuans may be to Indonesia, so Native Americans would seem to have been to European colonizing forces. However, these days, the Native Americans of the United States have title to reservation as well private properties, the freedom to arrange themselves and worship as they see fit, and in all other aspects to own businesses and enjoy or hate the American tapestry as they see fit within the bounds of the common law, which codes revolve most around the freedom and security of all persons.
America’s Native Americans are not getting their continent back, of course, but they are supported in their endeavors related to the defense of culture, family, property, and religion, the same as any, and every, American.
Coming from a Jewish background that includes lending attention to Israel as the unique cultural, political, and religious homeland of the Jews, the bond between the true indigenous of a land and indigenous elsewhere might apply, albeit in the progressive Jewish manner with adaptation toward modernity — some things will stay with the people forever in freedom, and some (like cannibalism) may recede into history.
In the larger scheme, our planet supports 6,900+ living languages, and it loses a few each month: it should be sustaining those few and perhaps working to encourage separable language evolution or new language development although natural language behavior is not like biology: we’re just not going to ship a healthy population of humans to an island, cut them off from social commerce, and visit them again in a thousand years (if they have survived their own company).
______
JONAH WENDA (voiceover): They were picked from different places like school, gardens, on the road and even taken from their home and kill them and throw them in the bush.
In May, Indonesia’s human rights record was assessed under the UN Universal Periodic Review. The government rejected key recommendations to review specific laws and decrees which restrict the rights to freedom of expression and thought, conscience and religion. In July, Indonesia reported to the CEDAW Committee. In November, Indonesia adopted the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration, despite serious concerns that it fell short of international standards.
PM – More details emerge on West Papua massacre allegation 28/05/2013: “The Indonesian Embassy in Canberra has issued a blanket denial, describing the reported violence as rumours and lies. / But the ABC has been provided further information that tells a different story, as Peter Lloyd reports.”
Knife-wielding attackers, dressed in black clothes, stormed the railway station of provincial capital Kunming shortly after 9 p.m. on March 1, slaughtering those who could not flee fast enough.
Related: Chinese Communist System Rules! – Video – TIME.com — Narrator in regard to China’s political system: ” . . . notoriously opaque and mired, so far as we can tell, by corruption and a whole vast untold story of political intrigues . . . .”
As an editor and writer, one might say of my own node on the web that it is itself a vast territory devoted to information control.
That would be true.
However, I don’t gate what others may have to say and, in fact, invite a fairly broad (but must be civil by my own mysterious standards) conversation.
*
The “Islamists” are ruining Islam as may be Muslim apologists and others who bend and twist to make it come out okey dokey no matter what murders and persecution may take place in its name, but we have also intimations of “false flag” operations and thoroughly evil impression-making pacts, such as appears to exist between Assad and ISIS in Syria, that also are destroying those who have bought into them: they think they are getting away with something — they are not: all comes out in the sun when finally the sun again comes out.
China is dark.
Beijing glitters some today, and magnificent-dangerous projects like the Three Rivers Dam astonish those with more modest ambitions (I’ve no ambition myself to make the earth wobble on its axis), but at the top sit another national elite — another cloaked dictatorship defended by The Party and beyond the influence and reach of the common worker and starving child entrusted to the care of the monster that runs North Korea.
China will be dark — and so will Islam — if it cannot turn up all of its cards, leaving to the truly aberrant within its districts a much reduced channel for criminal pursuits, for in the information dark, one cannot separate sophisticated thieves from perhaps even the most compassionate and earnest of politicians.
One more thing in loose regard to some tribal societies and precepts: 90 percent charitable and 10 percent murderous and piratical does not work where the surrounding world desires, promotes, and demands from itself a good ethics and morality.
Note: undated references are current within 24 hours.
______
PEREVALNE, Ukraine (AP) — Warning that it was “on the brink of disaster,” Ukraine put its military on high alert Sunday and appealed for international help to avoid what it feared was the possibility of a wider invasion by Russia.
Outrage over Russia’s military moves mounted in world capitals, with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry calling on President Vladimir Putin to pull back from “an incredible act of aggression.”
“This is not a threat: this is actually the declaration of war to my country,” Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said in English. Yatsenuik heads a pro-Western government that took power when the country’s Russia-backed president, Viktor Yanukovich, was ousted last week.
Of potentially even greater concern are eastern swathes of the country, where most of the ethnic Ukrainians speak Russian as a native language. Those areas saw violent protests on Saturday, with pro-Moscow demonstrators hoisting flags at government buildings and calling for Russia to defend them.
Meanwhile, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said at a press conference that Russia should pull back its forces and refrain from interfering elsewhere in Ukraine, according to Reuters. NATO is urging the two countries to seek a peaceful resolution through dialogue.
Secretary of State John Kerry — who is heading to Kiev on March 4 to meet with representatives of Ukraine’s new government — has called Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine “an incredible act of aggression” and said Putin has made “a stunning, willful” choice to invade another country.
The Bear regards the old system of buffers as its own, but it has a remarkable failure going in Syria. That President Vladimir Putin pumped $52 billion into the Winter Olympics at Sochi while pledging $10 million for humanitarian relief in Syria has not gone unnoticed — nor have election shenanigans, the Night Wolves, allegations about “mafia state” and “fragile empire” — and all will reflect poorly on his sense of responsibility to Russians and to others.
However, Ukraine is also a borderland naturally spanning a cultural divide between Europe and Eurasia, between the politics of the now open democracies and their common currency and shared values and a stalwart attempting to build some kind of new Slavic society out of the 19th Century manners of aristocracy, now an energy-fueled oligarchy committed not only to its survival but the survival of Bashar al-Assad and Ayatollah Khamenei, a veritable arc of despotic displays of power.
While Syria has become a battleground squeezing out Syrians as casualties and refugees between despots, Ukraine’s democratic revolutionary opposition to despotism has its feet and spirit planted against the “vertical of power” in Moscow.
* * *
As Russian forces seize key objects in Crimea, their objective is not just to create chaos in Ukraine but also to protect kleptocratic rule in Russia itself.
Russia and Ukraine under Yanukovych shared a single form of government – rule by a criminal oligarchy. This is why the anti-criminal revolution that overthrew Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych is a precedent that is perfectly applicable to Putin’s Russia. It is also the reason why, from the Russian regime’s point of view, the Ukrainian revolution must be stopped at all costs.
Perhaps the last time the Russian intelligentsia watched the internal struggle in another country this intently was in 1968 during the Prague Spring, when they hoped the Czechs would succeed in building what they called “socialism with a human face”. They also believed it would hold out the promise of something better for life in the Soviet Union. In August 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, quashing the Prague Spring. In Moscow, seven people came out to protest against the invasion; they were arrested and the modern dissident movement was born.
“Yes, I could see this one from Alaska. I’m usually not one to Told-Ya-So, but I did, despite my accurate prediction being derided as ‘an extremely far-fetched scenario’ by the ‘high-brow’ Foreign Policy magazine,” Palin wrote in a Facebook post on Friday. Palin was resoundingly mocked by comedians like Tina Fey and eggheads for saying in 2008 that Alaska’s proximity to Russia forced her to deal with foreign policy issues just like George W. Bush said thatTexas’s proximity to Mexico compelled him to deal with Mexico when he was governor of Texas.
In my last note, I’ve mentioned one of the “hate-peace peace groups” that might serve as a gateway to so many others. If you want chit-chat with Greta Berlin, one of the organizers of the Gaza Flotilla, she’s around; if with my generally conservative buddies. they’re in the mix too; if a whole other set, we might get it. “Humanism” — shall I refer to Felix Adler and “Ethical Culture” — provides a common thread across religious and state boundaries; however, it would support, if we’re really going to be good about this, cultural polyphony. The Roma should not be so abused! Nor the Jews. Nor the Rohingya of Burma. Wahhabi imperialism, Islamic expansionism — especially as the “Islamists” would have it, resurgent nationalisms (which has Hungarian Jobbik relating to Iranian roots, for pete’s sake), ensure we’re going to be in trouble for a while. Even so, we may pay more attention to autonomy, degrees of freedom, human dignity, human rights, and qualities of living — physical, psychological, and spiritual, across our 6,900 or so language cultures and adjust for co-evolution.
______
I’m not the only one who tires of addressing, confronting, and arguing the issues (and the facts) of the “middle east conflict” (i.e., that would be the one involving The Jews, as the others, I suppose, want for less attention).
I caught my second wind 🙂 in the 1980s with my “discovery” of Abraham Maslow while working on a Masters in “Outdoor Recreation Resources Management”. Perhaps for this venue, Maslow’s suggestion that if one is to pursue greater health (with actualization), one ought to study healthy people as much as those beset by pathology.
The radical Jews — whoever gathered in the desert more than 5,000 years ago — produced a religion in which one God had dominion over all and no man — not even Moses, not even Abraham — was like Him.
God, from the Jewish beginning, was “Master of the Universe”.
Many, by comparison, could barely master his own emotions.
Anti-deification and conflation with God characterizes a Jewish approach to scripture, every passage of which enjoys close reading and vigorous ethical and moral argument. Even “The Akedah” splits between the (option one) promotion of obedience and (option two) the call to speak back to God, which we today we refer to as “speaking truth to power.”
Jewish, Christian, Islamic humanism, social humanism, atheist humanism, secular humanism, etc. all suggest that while God has plans, we are none of us God, and if we wish to live in peace, a common peace, a peace for the democratic (small “D”) man, a peace for the Pacific Islander as well as the Iraqi, we’re going to have to help one another and, perhaps, quiet some of the egotism and noise, most ambitious and inventive, coursing through our minds, the gift of languages invented to cope with survival in bounded systems.
We’re a wild species, but our war technologies have exceeded many natural limitations, and they really can destroy humankind, while our advanced technologies have become comparatively fragile, “glass” plates beneath a blazing sun converting light to electricity.
We have a way to go, but, whatever we do, we’re going to go there together — and we’re not going to outwit God, nature, or the universe along the way.
In addition to believe that cooperation with the Assad regime is the best way to struggle against jihadists and Islamists [1] extremists groups is to ignore the history of this regime in instrumentalizing and cooperating with them such as with jihadist groups after the Iraqi invasion by the USA in 2003 or Fateh el Islam in Lebanon in 2007, and to forget that the regime is the one to have freed most of the jihadists and Islamists extremists in the various amnesty calls since the beginning of the revolutionary process while democrat activists were kept in prison, assassinated and targeted by the security services.
BackChannels 