The torture process starts once a demonstrator who opposes President Mohammed Morsi is arrested in the clashes or is suspected after the clashes end, and the CSF separate Morsi’s supporters from his opponents. Then, the group members trade off punching, kicking and beating him with a stick on the face and all over his body. They tear off his clothes and take him to the nearest secondary torture chamber, from which CSF personnel, members of the Interior Ministry and the State Security Investigations Services (SSIS) are absent.
At least one protester was incinerated in his tent. Many others were shot in the head or chest, including some who appeared to be in their early teens, including the 17-year-old daughter of a prominent Islamist leader, Mohamed el-Beltagy. At a makeshift morgue in one field hospital on Wednesday morning, the number of bodies grew to 12 from 3 in the space of 15 minutes.
It appears Egypt’s polarized politics knows no language for accommodation, compassion, or compromise, and it may also lack the wherewithal needed to control the amplitude of state violence against constituents on those occasions when riot suppression or the conclusion of a reasonable period of mass protest may be warranted.
* * *
Bishop Anba Suriel, the bishop for the Coptic Orthodox Church in Melbourne, wrote on his Twitter micro blog, “over 20 separate attacks on churches and Christian institutions all over Egypt.”
One correspondent suggested to me this morning that Egypt would follow Syria in its self-destruction, but I’m not so sure considering that Mubarak with his plans to install a dynasty are today long gone (seems like it) and even with the excessive force displayed by Egypt’s military in the latest fighting, the qualities of a Maher al-Assad and his wanton aerial bombing sprees are not in it.
The fascist theocratic ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood have been made plain at every passage since Mubarak’s overthrowing, from lies told to win elections to publicizing the possession and use of the old regime’s torture chambers — a flagrant act of intimidation unsuited completely to the values inherent in the concept of a democratically self-governed and modern state — to, finally, acts of war, of seeming allowance of crime with impunity, against Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, not to mention some bold anti-Semitic ranting on the side.
* * *
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Mere mention of “the center will not hold” would summon to the English mind the above poem (in Yeats’s vision, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”), but it seems in Egypt at the moment that there is a political center, a broad class of more moderate constituents, i.e., those who turned out by the millions to demand, in essence, Morsi’s resignation or that the army remove him, that seems itself helpless to defend itself against the nefarious methods of the Muslim Brotherhood through other than martial power.
That much is not — indeed, has not been — the fault of the moderate.
However, Karman’s recent comparison of deposed Egyptian leader Mohammed Morsi to Nelson Mandela, one of the most influential and inspirational figures of the latter half of the 20th century and whose name is synonymous with courage, struggle and wisdom, is astoundingly wrongheaded. Mandela remains a global moral authority. Morsi is not worthy of such praise — not even close.
I list it here because it conveys what is represented in the pro-Morsi part of Egypt’s turmoil.
Morsi’s infamous November 2012 presidential decree, which established him as above the law and forcefully installed a political ally as prosecutor-general, was ultimately used to ram through a divisive constitution. The bloody clashes that followed and the sequence of events that ensued left Egypt dangerously polarized and the January 2011 revolution in tatters.
Russian President Vladimir Putin may yet turn out the bad boy who knows more about good than so many goody two shoes arching up on their hind legs over the seemingly endless tragedy in Syria.
What Putin knows, I am sure, is from where has come from, the ingredients of his own frame, from poverty to KGB, from Soviet Russia to the post-Soviet FSB of his own making, from Russian heroic sports culture to the more measured testing of waters to, perhaps, restore Russian pride in empire.
Take the Tale of the Pocketed Superbowl Ringand a fast denial plus offer of complete restitution as signal of a different kind of explorer, albeit a shrewd autocrat on the make for a good deal, cash to swell out a country, a new energy industry with clout, and a little respect even from his critics.
This month’s imbroglio over anti-Gay legislation hasn’t helped Putin with either western or progressive audiences — I am certain of that — but it too may symbolize the difficulty of parting with yesterday’s story.
And Syria is all about the entire host of interests parting with yesterday’s story.
Putin first.
* * *
Throughout the Cold War, third world actors could and did manipulate Eastern and Western patrons to further their own parochial objectives or regional ambitions, and Baathist Iraq was no different in this respect.
Currently, the Syrian Communist Party officially supports the Baathist regime, although it follows the Soviet line on certain key political issues. The party, for example, recently urged Arab terrorists to be “more responsible” in their political activities, and its delegation to the recent international Communist conference went along in supporting the Security Council resolution of 1967 for a political solution to the Arab-Israeli crisis. The party’s 3,000 members make it the third largest Communist Party in the Arab world, and a Communist now holds a cabinet post as minister of communications and foreign trade.
Call it a reunion: “You haven’t changed a bit” one always says, but with these –Russia and Syria, Great Britain and Saudi Arabia, Israel and God (maybe) — time has changed them some or altered their surrounds, and the bulwarks in power and sustained relationships have been eroded, and no more so than in long neglected Syria where forty-four years of competition, cultural evolution, and diplomacy on its flanks have turned a family’s military dictatorship into a merely and deeply selfish anachronism.
I’ve no friends for whom the end of a marriage or other long-lived relationship has been not only traumatic but life changing.
Such events are not about the one thing.
Everything comes under review, and while most don’t beat themselves up with “should have done this” and “should have done that” — and they shouldn’t — they may change some principles in what I’ve come to call “social grammar”, i.e., inevitably frozen in language, the most deeply ingrained ideas and rules by which they have maintained their own program.
Even so civil a split — cloaked in mystery and, beneath the Al Jazeera clip on YouTube, accompanied by a relatively gentle public humor — would seem to support this view.
Something has changed and done so in some unalterable way.
One floats free of the past after a while, but perhaps it takes a while to do that.
* * *
Syria’s civil war, already irreversible in its effects — more than 106,000 Syrians dead because of it; more than 1.7 million refugee in surrounding states; add some more millions for displaced and homeless; cities like Aleppo and Homs ravaged or razed — should close a chapter that in retrospect may be seen as having been about several forms of intellectual poison, an aspect of conflict I suspect Putin recognizes, being himself so public, so accustomed to the development of information and the projection of image.
“Moscow has never had much political influence in Syria, a xenophobic country that has known little other than periodic power struggles over the past 20 years. Moscow’s virtual inability to moderate Damascus’ hard-line posture has been, in fact, the only constant factor in the shifting Soviet-Syrian relationship” (page 7).
Fourty-four years of that same old same old.
Time for a change?
* * *
No longer completely opposite the Russian course and sensibility, Cameron and Obama may have to tell Qatar that it may not always get what it wants. That too would depart from yesterday, but as much Qatar may already know, having rushed an heir to the throne.
That too may depart from yesterday’s story, one of several that have been run to ground and drowned in blood and suffering for years to come.
The World Wide Web has changed how the world experiences its one separable experiences: now we can see what we are doing in light of what we have done, and we cannot but help see all of that laid out in the sun together.
A correspondent in Germany wrote to tell me about the bombing of his apartment by parties unhappy with his work in the peace making field.
I couldn’t find a corroborating abundance of small town fire stories in relation to the claim, but the correspondent sent along one online clipping, noting that state security services had sought to squelch coverage of the event while they themselves looked into it.
Another in the United States wrote recently, “At the mosque yesterday when a man ran in and shoved a rolled up wad of bills into the zakat box I wondered about how many of these people run their lives based on an underground economy.”
Hmmm.
I would have to say “I don’t know” to that last correspondent.
This is the tale of another Egyptian coup, an account in fiction of the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. Strong in atmosphere and romance, engaging some in the daring of its hero, Dirk Celliers, and in the depiction of angry crowds, wild slaughter in the streets, and the burning of Cairo (“Black Saturday” today in the history books), it is itself more an impression than a parallel history in its own right — in fact, it’s light on the hinges — but it resonates with the latest rounds in Egypt’s political turmoil.
The reader will recognized the Egyptians of 1952 in many facets: the royal state (that Farouk ran and Mubarak would have established had he gotten away with it), the secular nationalist army, the Muslim Brotherhood, the conservative culture, especially constraining for women and also defensive and dangerous with regard to their keeping, and then the roving crowds — out to tear apart the “Englesi” of the earlier age and boot the same out of the state’s affairs — and riots, bullets, fires, and the rending of hapless victims limb from limb, which today one might liken to throwing youth, aligned with one side or the other, off the roofs of buildings.
On a personal note: having inherited this work from a father who had degrees in economics, political science, and law and spent the bulk of his career in civil service, I found the pages uncut, which means the old man had acquired it, kept it on his shelf, smoked his pipe (back then) beneath it, but never read it.
“Post-Soviet Russia” may have morphed the “Evil Empire” out of a few captive states but by no means did the collapse of the Soviet Union spell the end of its most durable internal business, political, and social relationships, much less the external ones that today sustain the Russo-Iranian-Syrian (Assad) arrangements that should have ended yesterday and been in the way to doing so in 1991.
Oh no on all of that.
This excerpt hails from Nick Fielding’s forward:
President Boris Yeltsin’s appointment of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, to head upt the FSB in 1998 marks the beginnings of a new era. By 2000, as soon as he became president, Putin began to rebuild the intelligence services and to concentrate power in their hands. While the FSB’s predecessor had been a “state within a state,” subservient to the Community Party, the FSB has in many ways become the state itself–its officers now directly responsible to the president, and its former members owning and controlling the commanding heights of the economy.” (ix).
I’ve commented elsewhere myself on President Putin but not quite like this (chapter title: “The Interests of the State Demand It: Spymania”):
In May 1999, Putin was the director of the FSB and also head of the Kremlin’s security council, a group of high-ranking officials who set national security strategy. It was a time of instability in Russia, just months after the country had suffered a major economic crash. President Boris Yeltsin seemed to be drifting. One day Putin went to the offices of Komsomolskaya Pravda, a mass-circulation broadsheet daily. At the newspaper, he gave an interview in which he was asked, “There is a concern that you and your friends might organize a military coup d’etat?” Putin replied, “And why do we need to organize a coup d’etat? We are in power now. And whom would we topple?” Then the newspaper interviewers suggested: perhaps the president?
“The president appointed us,” Putin said, with a half-chuckle.
Instead of an internal threat, Putin pointed to foreign espionage as Russia’s gravest enemy . . . .”
One might imagine what would come of that observation, but with The New Nobility one does not have to imagine anything, the research being well reported, from the refusal to grant visas to Peace Corp volunteers accused of “gathering information of social-political and economical character” and far on to the handling of affairs in the North Caucasus.
As I remain ever a man on a mission without a mission, my easy recall of details from the book seems absent, everything being interesting and nothing being immediately or practically relevant except for one thing: the idea that Russia is again in the hands of autocrats who may be expected to commandeer their media, squelch political criticism and resistance, and generally discourage the development of a more open, robust, and vibrant democracy (for the record: I think Masha Gessen is a gift to mankind, Pussy Riotshould have had the good sense to keep its act out of the church, Khodorkovsky fits the profile of a kind of Putin victim — either too rich to complain [I’m thinking of the “Putin stole my Superbowl ring” thing to which Putin has responded, recently, vociferously, and convincingly] or too remote in plutocratic station to inspire massive (proletarian to middle class) anger over the misdeed, and, at that, an anger strong enough to overcome the fear of the state’s ruling class).
If you think RT has been bending and twisting it some in Syria — and the war of images and words on the World Wide Web over that tragedy seems as real as it was in the paper-based days of NATO-Soviet discord — there’s no need to think “KGB”: Федеральная служба безопасности Российской Федерации (ФСБ)” (Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii) or, in plain English, “Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation” will do.
“FSB”, however old its story — about two decades in the making at the moment — is the buzz for what may be the clouded image of a still new and rapidly evolving Russian intelligence and security state.
It is raining today in western Maryland, and the apartment is dark and cool. The air conditioning’s white shushing noise seems pleasant enough. The dog in the apartment next to mine lets out a lonely howl while at my right elbow there’s a cool drink, Diet Coke and Cruzan white rum on ice with a slice of lime, and at my left elbow David Cornwell’s latest, which for pace fairly requires just the day I have got.
Of course, it picks up, by which I mean the book, if not my day.
And it resonates.
Le Carré’s latest tells the tale of war bureaucratized, privatized, loaned out by governments — here, Her Majesty’s Own — and in the hands of corporate robber barons with numerous hands, rivals among them, gripping the wheels and as many and more dipping into the cookie jar hidden from public view and debate.
Unlike the deckle-edged Schiemer book mentioned above (also “A Novel of Modern Egypt” — the modern one of 1952), my father read Le Carré’s books, so suited to those intellectuals maintained or trapped or both in the great bureaucracies of state and defense. Possibly no other author creates the image of the political office, from bottom to top in relation to power, and its auditoriums, corridors, labyrinths, meeting rooms, hallways, residences, sidewalks, car parks, cafes, bars, and restaurants and the talk and signals of its tête-à-têtes and small groups better — and then tops it by making his heroes above average bunglers but ones with the finest and greatest of patriotic British spirits!
This one is like the Torah: the more close reading the reader and the longer the engagement, the more shutters fly off the windows, the roof disappears, the heavens open, and one sees a little bit of everything more clearly.
Unlike with the Torah, I was not enamored of either the extremity of spymaster Gabriel Alkon’s sadism at time nor the author’s indulgence in practicing random acts of violence through an anomic sidekick as well as the engineering of assorted shoot-em-ups: on the other hand, perhaps all of that will make it easier for a Hollywood writer with highlighters to find the good parts and yank them into something worthy of competing with the Broccoli franchise (more on that in a moment).
Opposite all that: Silva knows his politics and semi-wonks like myself may find ourselves on similar ground as regards with Big Picture Analysis in International Affairs. Here on BackChannels, I hedge with the “may be’s” and the “seems to’s” but in this sprawling jet setter spy epic fiction, Silva pulls no punches. From mafia to oligarch, prized fine art to torture, subtle spy craft to ugly explosion . . . it’s not only pretty good reading, it’s a great mirror in its underlying analysis of a global state of affairs.
Let it surprise you, says I, and damnation to any spoilers out there who may have said too much already.
* * *
I don’t spend all of my time on my bed reading.
Sometimes I get up, go into the living room, and watch a movie.
🙂
It has been a while since I’ve watched a Bond film, but I thought Skyfall was terrific but Quantum of Solace remarkably less so. The difference for me: the sophistication of the plot and its cultural interests.
Skyfall tackles the “malignant narcissist” head on, the punch from the shadows — sub-state warfare — also, and updates the mirror on the modern post-modern world, one in which “M” is “Mom”, Ms. Moneypenny’s just about as good an operator in the field as Bond, Bond himself has an almost (maybe not almost) gay moment, and the desire of the dictator to surround himself with himself and control the world rings true to what we know about the real ones.
By comparison, Quantum of Solace seemed to me an extended shoot-em-up over greed with water supply involved.
That method got old and certainly does not work for me five years after the release of the film.
A little conflict of interest here: I own a Barbour too, Mr. Bond. I may not be able to fight like you but I’ll be as dry in a November rainstorm as any hero or villain on the planet.
Finally, in e-books: Hemingway and Gellhorn (for $2.99 how can you go wrong) and Spies for Hire ($10.38 for the Kindle, so perhaps interest should be sincere). I’m enjoying the former; have not started the latter; but it might go down well with the Le Carré book. Indeed, our states are in trouble if and when they compromise their monopoly on the development of military and political intelligence and, worse, when private enterprise comes to “run operations”.
It seems to me that nongovernmental interests may have other interests, including their own survival aided by their own extended relationships, at heart.
Compassion because concern with the well being of another creates always a more pleasing environment between the two.
Humility because while hurtling through space on our “pale blue dot”, we may not know everything, and God forbid we ever do.
Inclusion because the more taken in with compassion, humility, and integrity, the stronger and more surviving the entire species that is Homo sapiens sapiens.
Integrity because when the lying stops, many conflicts will also, and some will be able to do more for many than is possible in decaying societies dependent on “pandering and slandering” for their existence.
As a species, we may not know what we’re going to need by way of new concepts and insights drawing on our inventory in languages across distance and tunneling back through time, so we may wish to be careful about what we would dispose of or, for various reasons, may be losing.
The overarching, broad, and recurrent themes may be — should be — assurance or restoration as regards supporting an inherent dignity and integrity for mankind worldwide, a common enemy being discovered in those who have set out to humiliate others and rise to power or steal it on seas of lies.
Here I have been idealistic, perhaps Jewish with that “inherent dignity and integrity” business, but what other path in human affairs — and international affairs — would serve all across the great arc of Homo sapiens sapiens time yet to come on this planet?
This “assurance and restoration” for ourselves and others is what we need to do, and the key to doing it may lay in the development of a new cross-cultural and integrating poetry.
It draws on an anti-human egotism and irrationality to divide its national community and set each at the other’s throat, and not only those quick to fight but families too.
As it is, Syria remains unsolvable as one would wish to promote neither a brutal dictatorship, which if Assad’s wasn’t, it has certainly become, nor the fascist vision of a humanity subjugated to men who would portray themselves as the appointees of God and would become themselves absolute powers.
Although I’ve collected below a few leads and quotes from recent news, each seeming to balance out the other, one might fault Putin a little more than Obama over Syria for having taken a deeply anomic stance that set aside the conflict’s developing human toll in death, suffering, and, not to be overlooked, social disorganization and anarchy in favor of reducing overt policy to revenues tied to military contracts.
Is that a stance worthy of an empire?
An emperor?
* * *
I suppose if I were somehow working under contract with, say, RAND, I’d feel better about not knowing the answers with regard to Syria.
In that way, of course, it’s okay if idling over a blog one fails to outfox two of the world’s most powerful politicians, their advisers, and their nation’s think-tanks.
One might also consider such a “cop out” at any level of intellectual endeavor.
Clearly, Syria is a collapsing house on fire, and sooner or later, the neighborhood will have to account for the homeless and the maimed, the destruction of economic assets, including trade relationships, the diminishment of the efficacy of state, regional, and local powers, and the dangers posed by continuing and related political anarchy and its spillovers.
Obama’s bid to approach Iran’s looming nuclear threat by way of Qatar and through Syria would seem of equal positive interest to post-Soviet Russia, and it may be and may be working out that way (remember: Russia has largely ferried away its civilian and military presence in Syria), but it has no interest in the promotion of Sunni Islam over Shiite (nor should the world at large, Sunnis and Shiites included, have that interest — perhaps that’s to be saved for another post), and it knows — and Obama should know — that attempting to develop and validate an Islamic democracy today affords a look at the span from the chartering of Pakistan to the ousting of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
It does not work.
Or it does not work sensibly or well without direct challenge.
And it does not do so because the language of Islam in its totality has not been updated (not with “invention” on lock-out) or reformed, so that good sentiment borrowed from a Jew, say, Hillel’s “whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world” (source: Wikipedia) cannot offset the grandiose, pandering, and placating slips that disservice mankind in the name of human aggrandizement: “Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, and forbid not that which Allah hath forbidden by His messenger, and follow not the Religion of Truth, until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low” (Quraan 9:29 — I chose to lift from a skeptic’s web page).
Eventually, resettling Syria, not alone in this predicament, will mean introducing and strengthening other thought in the environment and that extensively and potently enough to bring Syria’s displaced back to their homes or known lands or landscapes with their heads held high but in them a different outlook on their humanity and their evaluation of political leadership.
I don’t see that happening today.
In fact, what one sees may be opposite: further exposure and subjection to criminality and humiliation for those in camps or lost on the new landscape and otherwise squeezed between these other and most evil forces come to fight within the state to sustain war without end and with an intellectual basis that proves altogether and repeatedly incoherent as regards decency in purpose.
What follows is what I’ve snagged off the web while constructing these thoughts.
* * *
BEIRUT — Human Rights Watch says the Syrian military is firing ballistic missiles into populated areas where it is battling rebels, killing hundreds of civilians.
The U.S.-based group said in a report released Monday that it has investigated nine apparent missile attacks that killed at least 215 people, half of them children, between February and July.
“The devastation is evident everywhere. According to the government telecoms chiefMtanios al-Shaer, “The terrorists destroyed everything 24 hours before the town was liberated, and caused damage of a billion Syrian pounds ($57 million).”
Activists and local opposition groups in Syria accused regime forces for using poisonous form of gas in the city of Douma and Adra, outskirts of Damascus.
According to the local media offices, Syrian army has launched a series of attacks on these two big cities on Monday. More than 400 people have been hospitalised showing symptoms of convulsion, shortness of breath, profuse sweating and frothy sputum, activists said.
“No solution can be reached with terror except by striking it with an iron fist,” Assad said.
. . . .
He accused the Syrian National Coalition of “being on the payroll of more than one Gulf country,” and of “blaming the (Syrian) state for terrorism rather than blaming the armed men,” or rebels.
Charles Lister, an analyst at IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center, has said that “There is no doubt that as a distinct single entity, Syria has ceased to exist… Considering the sheer scale of its territorial losses in some areas of the country, Syria no longer functions as a single all-encompassing unitarily-governed state.”
President Bashir Assad will be winning until he loses; alternatively, he may hold out and win on that level, but his Syria won’t be that which he inherited.
“The sand is running out of the hour glass,” said Hillary Clinton on Sunday. So, as the fighting in Syria intensifies, and Russian warships set sail for Tartus, it’s high time to take a closer look at those who are speaking out on behalf of the Syrian people.”
WASHINGTON — Twelve Republican and Democratic senators are calling on the Pentagon to cancel all contracts to buy helicopters for Afghan security forces from a state-run Russian arms exporter that is a top weapons supplier to the Syrian government.
General Salim Idris, the head of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) accused Russia of using its ships in the Mediterranean to transfer Hezbollah fighters from Beirut , Lebanon directly to the mostly Alawite province of Tartus in western Syria.
In an interview with the Turkish Anadolu News Agency he also accused Russia and Iran of supplying the Syrian army with 400 tons of ammunition every ten days.
Hours before his arrest, Abdelke had signed a petition that averred (here’s where Chrome’s translate option comes in handy) “support to the forces of the revolution who advocate the establishment of a pluralistic democracy” and “desire for a peaceful solution to stop the bloodshed and to preserve national unity and territorial integrity, which involves the departure of Bashar al-Assad and pillars of his regime.
Youssef Abdelke — never hard of him before two minutes ago — but as one who has learned the ways of the World Wide Web, the third minute opens on eternity.
(Reuters) – Syrian government forces have detained a dissident left-wing painter in a new wave of arrests of non-violent critics of President Bashar al-Assad, opposition groups said on Friday.
“A place to share art, uninhibited without a bunch of stupid ass rules. A place to help your fellow page owners grow and succeed. A group to have fun with no dictator shoving shit down your throat and bowing down. A group to be FREE to help as you see fit. A group to rock the fuck on!”
It’s a closed Facebook group, one to which I would apply if I were shooting the local downtrodden as opposed, say, to the leisured, business, and community development classes.
Nonetheless, “Art and FREEDOM”, my soul is with you and your author, Youssef Abdelke.
* * *
I really don’t know why Putin darkens his role in history by keeping in his hand with the Ayatollah’s Iran and the Assad’s Syria.
* * *
Novelist Daniel Silva has a great deal of fun with the “Russian President” — in fiction, merely a character, never named, nothing more than coincidental with anything or anyone in reality, in his latest best seller The English Girl.
As a fiction writer, Silva’s actually, probably, one of the very best political analysts on the international stage, and while playing that role through his characters and plots, the Russian President looms large and rightly so for the behind-the-curtain strategy pursued by the post-Soviet oligarchs of the Latest and Greatest in Russian States.
As we know about narcissists and narcissistic hunger and supply, they are ultimately about themselves, and whatever their charms, political and social, may be. Not that Bashir Assad has enjoyed abundance in dimension, but it’s the Russian President who has been most quiet on the obscenity of a state that deploys jets to suppress, at first, a small challenge to its authority.
While the Syria of 2010 has been destroyed, culturally, socially, structurally, one might note that Russia, in her defense, has ferried both the larger part of its civilian and military presence out of the country — not exactly a show of confidence, that, but not exactly either a show of humanist resolve.
The world wonders at the conundrum that has pit a brutal dictatorship against partially but deeply virulent Islamist forces. There is in that aspect of Syria’s agony the “no good dog in the fight” and the “black hole” of the Islamic Small Wars constructed of a contempt, hatred, and self-contempt in the inhumanity that draws in military energy and burns without end.
Nearly one hundred thousand dead and four million displaced in Syria’s furnace and neither of two of the most powerful statesmen of our era either cares to or knows how to shut it down.
Instead of the kumbaya “reset” between the states and the federation (how young is Obama?), Putin appears to be draining the former plus NATO by keeping the oven hot while avoiding, rightly, the imposition of another Chechnya in its sphere of influence. And yet . . . the Assad regime was the Soviet’s monster, and one would think that after 1991 the state would have been concerned with other than filling its pockets in collusion with it for another 22 years.
But that perhaps would have been too caring, too ethical.
Too English.
* * *
While the superpowers dick around with trivial issues like Snowden, Syria, in part, draws to it the “worst of the worst” — or just the most spirited — of fighters representing Shiite and Sunni Islam, those two angry wasps someone left in a bell jar separating their concerns from the much, much greater world surrounding.
On a portion of that, I would blame the west.
We’ve done business, haven’t we, for how many years?
And barely a word, most certainly few, if any, of outrage in regard to humanity and human rights in the contained but also dark medieval quarters of the globe.
So why not leave them — today in Syria, tomorrow perhaps in Egypt or somewhere else — in their own mess?
Whether the President of the Free World or that of the Russian Empire, is it incumbent on either to reorganize a middle east state as a pet humanitarian project?
There are, of course, other ambitions in the mix, much including Iran’s and Qatar’s, but one may one wonder between them whether either will wake up from their dream or with history pass away into it.
* * *
Prestige matters.
As a Jew, I may wonder how global memory will treat of today’s powerful in the days beyond their reclamation by the earth.
Abu al-Khair said that the judge sentenced Badawi to five years in prison for insulting Islam and violating provisions of Saudi Arabia’s 2007 anti-cybercrime law through his liberal website, affirming that liberalism is akin to unbelief.
I have to wonder what Raif Badawi wrote or otherwise said that may have been so egregious in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as to have the kingdom throw him in jail and the court sentence him to seven years in prison plus 600 lashes.
While the kingdom modernizes — “Related Stories” dredged up on the New York Daily News page include such titles as “Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah grants women seats on the nation’s top advisory council” and “King Abdullah: Saudi Arabia women can vote, hold elected office” — the persistent throttling of expression, the disproportionate sentencing, and the medieval cruelty of lashing to boot (imagine having that to look forward to each week for, say, 30 weeks) tell of a willful egomania thundering atop a fragile surface of faith.
Every tyrants first concern in power has to do with making a convincing case for authority and maintaining it.
Perhaps with that in mind, we say in the United States with regard to the famous Freedom of Speech principle, “Without the First Amendment, all of the others are worthless.”
The Mellow Jihadi reports, “Raif’s site discussed the role of religion in Saudi Arabia, and he has been held since June 2012 on charges of cyber crime and disobeying his father – a crime in the conservative kingdom.“
About eight months ago, Reuters reporting on the Raif Badawi case noted, “Judges base their decisions on their own interpretation of religious law rather than on a written legal code or on precedent.” That is, if I may interpret, responsibility for this ethical and moral confusion may not rest so much with King Abdullah as with an archaic clerical class, but also, alas, that which doubtlessly supports his authority.
Following Reuter’s latest on the case (published two hours ago) back to Human Rights Watch, this wrap may sum the Saudi state of mind:
Abu al-Khair said that the judge sentenced Badawi to five years in prison for insulting Islam and violating provisions of Saudi Arabia’s 2007 anti-cybercrime law through his liberal website, affirming that liberalism is akin to unbelief. The judge ordered the closure of the website and added two years to Badawi’s sentence for insulting both Islam and Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, or religious police, in comments during television interviews.
Even while King Abdullah presses for reforms and aspects of modernity course through or make their way into the cultures of the Arabian Peninsula, the Anachronisms cling to a power today deeply mocked and reviled among the educated worldwide, and whether by way of “listening posts” or the perhaps guilty indulgence of going solo online, one by one, logged on and searching the world’s largest information mirror, that is how they will see themselves.
By way of the design in human nature, for which one might credit God, God being God, what Saudi Arabia’s most dogmatic clerics and judges had wished to avoid for want of pride has become precisely that which they must encounter in the feedback supplied by the World Wide Web.
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