10 Saturday Jan 2015
The French have not yet grasped the reality that radical Islamic terror rooted in the Middle East, but nurtured by misguided politics on their own soil, may begin by targeting free speech, authority as personified by the fallen policemen and women, and Jews but, as with all totalitarian ideologies, it eventually targets everyone who do not bend to their will.
http://israeltheviewfromhere.blogspot.co.il/2015/01/january-9-2015-was-kristallnacht-for.html – 1/10/2015.
09 Friday Jan 2015
Posted 11/30/2014.
On YouTube, it is an i24 video.
On BackChannels — if this post works — it has a context an adventure in political psychology and the interplay between personality — “malignant narcissism” — and controlled information space (language, linguistics, propaganda, gaslighting, political theater, manipulation, etc.) and political power that drives despotism, fascism, sadism.
Our global Internet with English as lingua franca has become the largest “mirror, mirror on the wall” in political history, and it reflects through and back to a political elite, from pundits worldwide to leaders worldwide. Its reach is limited, of course, by language barriers and Internet filtering. That leaves the despotic putting on a show for still captive constituents, but they know the barriers remain nonetheless permeable. Bilingual national speakers, extended diaspora — including Palestinian diaspora — encounter these pages and videos as much and as well as anyone else.
There is always a “next new world”, and we’re heading for it even while some turn back and revel in a long ago darkness; for others, the dawn spreads out before them and everyone.
# # #
05 Monday Jan 2015
Tags
Post 9/15/2014.
NO
Freedom of the Press
Open Courts
Self-Determination
Indonesian State Impunity Promotes
Cultural Genocide
Murder
Rape
Theft
Torture
Until the hour someone sends me the “who, what, where, when, how, and why” on a breaking event, I, perhaps others as well, may not be able to do much more than add to the advocacy and compile whatever’s on the web in news and organizational support for this buffer that has been politically birthed between west and east, between democracy and narcissistic authoritarianism.
This Anzac Day weekend, we opened the first ever Free West Papua campaign office in Australia.
For more than 50 years, my people have suffered what I considered to be a slow-moving genocide under the repressive military occupation of Indonesia. During the second world war, the “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels” of West Papua came to the aid of Australian soldiers. Now it is the West Papuans that need Australia’s help in order to end human rights abuses so that my people can be free to live in peace.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/28/west-papua-my-people-need-australias-help-before-it-is-too-late – 4/27/2014.
Five West Papuans were killed when Indonesian military and police personnel shot into a protesting crowd on Monday, local media reported. Reports say the protesters were not separatist rebels, but community members angered by the alleged assault on a group of adolescents who had clashed with soldiers the previous night.
http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2014/12/10/West-Papuan-killings-cast-doubt-on-Jokowis-promises.aspx?COLLCC=2682691678& – 12/10/2014.
The protesters, some carrying ceremonial Papuan hunting bows that have a purely ritual function, expressed their grievance through a traditional Papuan waita dance, which involves shouting, running in circles and mimicking birdsong.
The police ordered the protesters to disperse and then struck them with batons and sticks when they refused to comply. Police and military personnel then fired live ammunition into the crowd.
http://www.ucanews.com/news/sydney-papua-incidents-offer-stark-contrast-in-media-access/72686 – 12/23/2014.
For years I worked as a tour guide, sharing my knowledge of the region with those few individuals who desired a glimpse of what the National Geographic calls “one of the wildest, most isolated frontiers on earth.” But on this visit I wanted to verify a village burning in the Lanny Jaya area and continue filming the West Papuan refugees living in Papua New Guinea.
http://www.independent.com/news/2015/jan/01/spoiling-paradise/ – 1/1/2015.
Jakarta: Two French journalists have been sentenced to two months and 15 days imprisonment in an Indonesian jail for reporting in the West Papua province while on a tourist visa.
http://www.humanrightspapua.org/
http://paper.li/Black_WPapuan/1371945233
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/9/22/west-papua-mediablackout.html – 9/22/2014.
http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/west-papua-forgotten-war-unwanted-people – n.d.
http://thediplomat.com/2014/01/the-human-tragedy-of-west-papua/ – 1/15/2015.
http://etan.org/issues/wpapua/2014/1409wpap.htm – September 2014.
http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/9173 – 4/22/2013: “The military presence in West Papua is almost always accompanied by human rights violations such as killings, arbitrary arrests, rape and torture.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_Star_flag
The Indians’ decision to make contact was not driven by a desire for material goods, however, but by fear. With the help of translators who spoke a closely related indigenous Panoan language, the Acre Indians explained that “violent attacks” by outsiders had driven them from the forest. Later, details emerged that their elder relatives were massacred, and their houses set on fire. Illegal loggers and cocaine traffickers in Peru, where the Indians are thought to come from, are likely to blame, according to the Brazilian government. Indeed, Funai’s own nearby monitoring post was shut down in 2011 due to increasing escalations with drug traffickers.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140804-sad-truth-of-uncontacted-tribes – 8/4/2014.
So what do anthropologists who specialize in first contact say? Are there ‘uncontacted tribes’? The short answer is ‘no’, and while I appreciate SI’s work on behalf of ‘tribal’ people, I find it disappointing to find that they still use this sort of language. Any one who reads the material on their web page will see that by ‘uncontacted’ they actually man ‘frequently in contact with, and victimized by, outsiders’. Let’s take a look at the evidence from SI’s website.
http://savageminds.org/2008/07/01/are-there-uncontacted-tribes-the-short-answer-no/ – 7/1/2008
Posted 1/8/2014.
Caption statement by the Free West Papua Campaign: “West Papua, Melanesia. Rally organised by the KNPB. These are the images the Indonesian government is trying to stop the world seeing. The Indonesian government always lies to the world and says that West Papuans who want freedom are just small groups in the jungle. In fact the vast majority of peaceful civil society want freedom.
This is why Indonesia dosen’t want foreign journalists in West Papua. Because every West Papuan who they meet tells them they want freedom.
This is the truth in West Papua. That almost everyone wants to be free. This is the truth that Indonesia is trying to hide. West Papuans want to be free and Indonesia believes it has the right to torture and murder those who want to be free.”
# # #
05 Monday Jan 2015
Tags
autocracy, conspiracy, Gulen, Islam, malignant narcissism, narcissism, neo-feudalism, neo-medievalism, political psychology, political science, politics
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.
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.
“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:
# # #
31 Wednesday Dec 2014
Tags
. . . Alexei Navalny was found guilty of what activists said were trumped-up charges and given a suspended sentence of 3½ years. His younger brother was sent to prison, a move that drew comparisons to the Stalin-era practice of punishing family members of enemies of the state.
“Putler” has become a popular term.
There’s even a snarky Facebook group built around it.
For two or three reasons, I would not go so far as to permanently and seriously conflate Russia’s president with the little guy with the mustache in Germany.
For one thing, Russia’s own internal saboteur works from a very different space in political time, and he’s both engaged and surrounded by the world free of dictatorship, which at the moment is shunning his best buddies and diminishing revenues from his state’s easiest money.
Moreover, the colonel president emperor may be operating also with internal controls and desires quite different from Adolph’s, the piratical motive combined with domestic aggrandizement being already well established and far out ahead of the want of the headaches attending imperial designs.
He knows too that while the plundering of Russia by its “Vertical of Power” and the approximately 110 multi-billionaire “oligarchs” who control about 35 percent of the state’s productive capacity may be stalled by a flooded oil market responding to the misadventure in Ukraine, responsibility today for the the essential criminality of the state — in Luke Harding’s words, the “Mafia State” — reverse engineers to himself, the only man at the top, and he’s the only figure capable of reversing its course.
*
We need to learn to respect ourselves.
We need to look at this important notion such as reputation and that reputation of a specific hospital, school, institution, or social office is a building stone in the overall reputation of our country . . . .
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/12/10/goodbye-potemkin-quotation-vladimir-vladimirovich-putin/ – 12/10/2014.
*
“We all understand that the sources of assets are different, that they were earned or acquired in various ways. However, I am confident that we should finally close, turn the ‘offshore page’ in the history of our economy and our country. It is very important and necessary to do this.”
The sentiments expressed in the speech follow action taken earlier in the year:
On the 18th of March the Russian Ministry of Finance published a draft law on anti-offshore measures. Following wide public discussion, a revised draft was published on the 27th of May.
The draft introduces four key concepts, namely, controlled foreign companies (CFC) rules; Russian tax residence for foreign companies, based on tests of management and control; concepts of ‘factual right to income’ and ‘beneficial owner’ in the context of applying international tax treaties; and new rules on taxation of the indirect disposal of Russian real estate.
https://www.accountancylive.com/russian-taxman-sets-sights-offshore-wealth – 6/19/2014.
Apply: “For my friends, everything! For my enemies, the law!”
Putin may be making some new “frenemies” about now as he at one turn coaxes the return of capital to Moscow and determines, perhaps, to build from it a new modern domestic economy — and at the other, in days to come, woe to the holdouts who may be made to face the latest in law promulgated by the Ministry of Finance.
The haunt of old Joe may spook the careers of both Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny: he’s the ghost representing a past to which no one should wish to return. In fact, Kruschev trashed it; Gorbachov nearly buried it; but the KGB and associates have revived it just enough to suit themselves grandly.
The present neo-feudal Russian security dictatorship may have a problem in just not really wanting to be what it is, i.e., politically criminal, a Russian domestic disaster, a financial Chernobyl, a billboard for the expression of malignant, unbridled, and ruthless narcissism.
While Navalny appears to threaten the power that is, he may also stand as the one first most reliable channel marker out of the kind of hell that attends the psychology in personality of the same.
Perhaps for Russians as a whole the journey contained in the homily “you can’t go home again” has of necessity involved a deep revisitation through Putin with the near histories of feudalism and communism, a two steps back toward the revival of 19th Century aristocracy and 20th Century socialist fascism that has reliably, inevitably, recalled to mind the excesses and miseries attending both.
In that light, the regime may know that Navalny needs to be a part of the Russia to come, that he’s part of the self respect to come — a sentiment mouthed into necessity by the president — and that playing with him with the familiar tools of dictatorship might be just the simplest way of telling him to wait his turn: his better day will come.
http://blogs.ft.com/the-world/2014/12/putin-treats-russias-oligarchs-to-a-free-supper/ – 12/19/2014.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_people_by_net_worth
Credit Suisse said that there were hopes with the demise of the Soviet Union that Russia would turn into a high skilled economy with fair wealth distribution but “this is almost a parody of what happened in practice.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/09/russia-wealth-inequality_n_4070455.html – 10/9/2013.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/12/10/goodbye-potemkin-quotation-vladimir-vladimirovich-putin/ – 12/10/2014.
# # #
17 Wednesday Dec 2014
Posted in Political Psychology, Politics
Millions of dollars stashed in shoe boxes, bribes delivered to their recipients in chocolate packages, a gigantic gold smuggling scheme conducted through an Iranian “businessman,” the arrest of ministers’ sons, the resignation and dismissal of ministers and shameful corruption conversations wiretapped legally and illegally are some of the episodes of the probes now engraved in public memory.
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/12/turkey-gulen-akp-anniversary-corruption-probes.html – 12/16/2014: “Gulenists defeated on first anniversary of corruption probes.”
Take note of the other headlines on the Al Monitor page: “Erdogan Defense Brotherhood’s Qaradawi After Arrest Warrant”; “Energy Deals May Make Turkey Irreversibly Reliant on Moscow”; “Shadow Government Set up in Erdogan’s White Palace”.
Don’t say BackChannels didn’t warn you about this politically malignant backbone: Putin-Assad-Khamenei / Putin-(Yanukovych) / Putin-Orban / Putin-Erdogan.
Bent on glory, the Club of Bad Little Boys appears to have formed a confederacy of different interests bonded in state-based kleptomania.
Considering what had to have taken place to build the Great Pyramids of Egypt, plus what we my know and what they Jews have to say about it, the public may scratch its collective international head today over the building of the Great Palaces of the Politically Criminal, which I hope have been built already well enough for move-in, for I would not want to see the compounds or palatial estates of these wealthy left unfinished for the public to absorb when they’re gone.
Leaving completed works — that’s just being polite, as such “gentlemen” should be, well affording the same on the apparent misappropriation of national wealth.
Nonetheless, local, state, and global intelligentsia and empowered or struggling policy makers may indeed weigh the benefits of despotic rogue self-aggrandizement in creating magnificence from gain miserably obtained against the implied costs in freedom, human rights, and general rule of law.
“The Pyramid Conundrum”?
The pyramid does not get built without Pharaoh’s absolute power and related sociopathy.
A government may build some sturdy buildings — or a national Interstate highway system, which in the United States may be considered another wonder of the world — but they’re generally not monstrous residences.
Or mausoleums.
Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013.
Not to be too hypocritical and uppity here, a reminder of how it was in the west (with family and friends of a highly privileged sort) may be found here: http://www.anglotopia.net/anglophilia/top-11-stately-homes-in-england-best-english-manor-houses/ (11/9/2010).
# # #
08 Monday Dec 2014
Posted in Islamic Small Wars
The hijacking doesn’t just take place through protest marches and conferences. A Wisconsin Ojibwa Indian told me of her fear of the inroads Muslims have made in the local native communities, marrying Indian women and then using their new status to gain influence in native affairs and policies. An expert in Southwest Indian art claims that Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian Arabs have been buying Aboriginal American art businesses in Arizona and New Mexico, then selling “Navajo” art made in the Philippines. When I asked him to write about this for our publication he refused, not even wanting his name mentioned. “People have been killed,” he explained.
http://www.quantumcannibals.com/aboriginal-american/ – 11/22/2014.
01 Monday Dec 2014
Tags
Quite slowly but with method, the library takes shape within the mansion within the cottage inside an apartment out in the countryside about one mountain beyond the Washington area.
Probably, the shelves should be alphabetized rather than categorized, but that would be a registry, not a library: a library has sections and themes, visual appeal and both mysterious and promising atmospheres — there are whole shelves here filled with Le Carre (all of his books) and Peter Mayle — but as regards this blog, certain aspects of the collection emerge in relation to “conflict, culture, language, and psychology”.
“Dicks and Spooks”?
Detectives and spies, intelligence organizations and operations, their marks: mafia and political criminals.
The section is small. Even so, two of the list have not been read, one for boredom (“MI6” risks becoming a doorstop), the other — it’s not its time yet.
Titles as readable as they may be intriguing: The Good Spy, The Zhivago Affair, and Mafioso.
There’s relevant library on the Kindle as well — e.g., Tim Shorrock’s Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing — but I don’t even want to light up that screen or find out what Amazon has to say about me: The Book remains the Friend in the Library, spine out, ever present, ever ready to be read and to be read again on bed or sofa, or, God forbid it (which uttered objection is certain to bring about the same), at the table with coffee, note cards, and pens at the ready.
Inventory in “Dicks and Spooks” just noted:
Bird, Kai. The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames. New York: Crown Publishers, 2014.
Finn, Peter and Petra Couvee. The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book. New York: Pantheon Books, 2014.
Jeffery, Keith. The Secret History of MI6. New York: The Penguin Press, 2010.
Servadio, Gaia. Mafioso. New York: Stein and Day, 1976.
Trento, Joseph J. The Secret History of the CIA. Roseville, California: Prima, 2001
All of the above solopsistic discussion for five books (of more than two thousand) . . . . Still, one of five of two thousand just might appeal to the reader.
# # #
BackChannels 