Tag Archives: post-Cold War

FTAC – Turkey (and Hungary) – Medieval Absolute Power vs Modern Distributions

18 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eastern Europe, Politics, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Turkey, United States of America

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Let me suggest this: we see opposed medieval forces in “Russia vs Turkey” but we don’t so easily discern “Medieval vs Modern” in Russia and Turkey vs NATO (I know Turkey is a NATO member but it may no longer be what a NATO member should be — distributed power, secular, reasoning).

Peacocks vs The People

While NATO focuses on the military defense of the democratic open societies of the west, its opposition, including NATO members Hungary and Turkey, appear to focus on authoritarianism, corruption (encouraged), cults of personality, and the greater encouragement of medieval conflicts involving modern weapon systems.

Troika Putin-Assad-Khamenei-(Baghdadi) have produced a whole theater of politics and combat (BackChannels titles the production “Assad vs The Terrorists”, also “The Syrian Tragedy”), and while the analyst’s perception may be that of a wickedly callous totalitarian and tyrannical bid to control the public perception of events, the public appears to be buying it: those who have incubated ISIS have now to enjoy the glory of destroying it over as long a period of time as may please them.

With Putin having extracted an apology from Erdogan over the Turkish response to aggressive Russian piloting (akin to Netanyahu’s apologizing for the defense of Israel against the Gaza Flotilla and weapons stored aboard the Mavi Marmara), Erdogan has appeared to stiffen his resolve to destroy democracy in Turkey and replace it with himself.

Having alluded to Hungary’s Orban as being of similar “malignant narcissistic” type, two to a few recent titles might suffice for support: “Vladimir Putin’s Little Helper: Hungary’s Viktor Orban is abetting Moscow’s push to sow chaos in the European Union.  But at what cost?”  (by Paul Hockenos, The New Republic, April 19, 2016); “Putin’s Messenger Boy: Viktor Orban in Moscow” (Hungarian Spectrum, February 17, 2016). For good measure: Orban and Press Freedom; Orban and Corruption; Orban and Fascist Nationalism.

Posted to YouTube by “Russia Insider” June 24, 2016.

Listen / read what Putin has to say.

Also note the related YouTube feed.

By way of comparisons, what has the penultimate classically liberal democracy — my very own United States of America — to show for its values?

Hillary Clinton and Corruption

Donald Trump and Nationalism

This ain’t no Yankee Doodle election coming up.

However, it will still be free and fair with an entire electorate free to publish and speak as it may, demonstrate where it may wish (with equal and fair permitting and wondrous order, for the most part, considering the emotions involved), and talk itself through its own national issues and sense of purpose, which is not to “rule the world” but perhaps produce a world less given to self-aggrandizing tyrants.

I’ve reserved “Fascist” from “Nationalism” with Trump because . . . he’s an American: BackChannels expects him to reject his role in the development of his own idolatrous cult of personality and to put Americans first in the representation of the many cultures, manners, and personalities that have co-produced America’s magnificent tapestry and its related wealth.

Immediately Related on BackChannels

“Cold War? –> Cold Struggle”, March 15, 2016.

Countercoup – On the Immediate Aftermath

Morris, Loveday, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Souad Mekhennet.  “Turkey is expected to curb military power as purge expands.”  The Washington Post, July 19, 2016.

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Political Myopia – Chilcot in the Post-Soviet Context

07 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, Fast News Share, Great Britain and United Kingdom, Iraq, Middle East, North America, Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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BackChannels places conflicts involving Iraq in the post-Cold War framework and suggests that military engagements were part of “containment” and the “building down” of Soviet alliances that remained in character authoritarian and openly supportive of terrorism.

Note too that Russia today refuses to designate either Hezbollah or Hamas as terrorist organizations; that is has met in recent years with PFLP (easily looked up online), well recognized for the hijacking of airliners in the 1970s; and, sigh, that it is most responsible for allowing / enabling / encouraging Assad to incubate ISIS — by deselection for bombing and combat — in Syria as that conflict got under way.

Basically, Russia then and Russia today criminally manipulates foreign political constituencies to suit its own kleptocratic appetites. Hussein (and Gaddafi) were part of that enterprise, and perhaps as God willed it, both are gone (and thank God).

Yesterday’s BBC report on the Chilcot report  keeps itself narrowed on the image of Iraq as an oasis of stability, however miserable, under the rule of a strongman, and the report itself reasserts at face value the idea that “regime change” in Iraq linked to direct threats posed by WMDs, which imbroglio BackChannels would shove into a bin labeled “Potential Convenient Pretexts” (sorry the same don’t really work out) and the more general “Global War on Terror,” which period of observation appears to start on September 11, 2001:

10. After the attacks on the US on 11 September 2001 and the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in November, the US Administration urned its attention to regime change in Iraq as part of the second phase of what it called the Global War on Terror.

Source: “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry: Executive Summary: Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors: Ordered by the House of the Commons to be printed on 6 July 2016”, PDF, page 5, Item 10).

It is unfortunate that governments most devoted to “classical liberalism” and democracy should feel the need to resort to manipulating their “masses” (instead of free constituencies) because they have failed to publically educate the same in the longer-lived themes of geopolitics and history — or worse, lost that battle to the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left that relies on short memories to promote their own ultimately authoritarian, fascist, and totalitarian outlooks.

I don’t know what BackChannels is going to do when the 25th Year Anniversary of the Dissolving of The Soviet passes on December 26, 2016, but as that day is still coming up, it’s going to harp on it with the hope that other “English” and Europeans and others less free or more so catch a glimpse of Putin’s Excellent World (PEW), the world from which it has emerged, and the malignantly narcissistic worldview it continues to promote or install wherever it may.

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FTAC -‘Palestinian Slavery Organization (PSO)’

04 Monday Jul 2016

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

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The “PLO” became the “PA” — but I’m going to call it the “PSO” — “Palestinian Slavery Organization” from here on out. The Fatah Party, a secular-nationalist political machine, continues to dominate the PLO / PA. The chain of association between it, the old Soviet, the Baath Parties, and pan-Arab nationalism should be clear.

I don’t know the early history of Hamas, but two characteristics certainly stand out today: we know (we know, I know you know, and everyone knows) it”s a Muslim Brotherhood organization. However, it is also an organization approved and manipulated by Moscow and Tehran, neither of whom — from Tehran, we would expect this but not from Putin’s Moscow — will join the west in designating the same as a terrorist organization. In fact, and despite Putin’s “anti- anti-Semitism” stance, Moscow hasn’t altered its relationship much since Soviet days, and the neo-feudal / neo-imperial revanche has sought to sustain old “friendships”.

Although Hussein and Gaddafi have been shoved off the world’s stage, Putin appears to regard the Russian client Syria as essential to his state’s ambitions and defense — and mafia ways of doing business. It appears to me that Washington and NATO have chosen to contain the Russo-Syrian-Iranian arrangement rather than challenge it while at the same time seeking to accept the fallout in jihadism (ISIS was incubated by Assad’s counterrevolutionary strategy, and I have plenty of evidence for that) and refugees, leaving the blame for Syria on Moscow’s doorstep.

Back to the “Palestinians” — the refugees: they remain representative of Cold War / Soviet politics. As Putin plays extremes against the middle, i.e., supporting Far Right and Far Left organizations and personalities worldwide, the PA and Hamas suit his ends, which includes promoting and sustaining absolute and frequently criminal political power at state level in his world and in others.

Into this comes Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi who for his good nature slipped through the fence, figuratively in his reading, literally with the visit to Auschwitz with his students, and now I think the has a larger problem: what does one say to a whole population that has been duped by political machinations they could not see? How does one approach decades of disinformation, miseducation, and deep political manipulation?

On Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi

Epstein, Nadine.  “Mohammed Dajani Daoudi: Evolution of a Moderate — Once a radical Fatah leader, the Palestinian professor has come under fire for taking his students to Auschwitz to teach reconciliation.”  Moment, July/August 2014.

Daoudi’s moderateness, expressed by his taking a passel of Palestinian Arab students to Auschwitz, got him expelled from the al-Quds Teacher’s Union and not much later saw his car torched in front of his home.  No stranger to America (Ph.D, Government, University of South Carolina; Ph.D, Political Economy, University of Texas, Austin), he has had an association with the Washington Institute since 2012, at least, and moving back and forth between the Middle East and The States these days.

On Moscow and Hamas

Reports online of Moscow courting Hamas date back at least as far as 2007.  Today’s Moscow refuses to designate either Hamas or Hamas as terrorist organizations, and it has met too with PFLP, those of 1970s airline hijacking fame, in November 2014 (but I will leave the reader to look that up).  BackChannels regulars know too that the blog considers ISIS as an element incubated by Assad — by “deselection” for bombing and combat in the early years of the Syrian Tragedy — and that it routine groups “Putin, Assad, Khamenei, AND Baghdadi” as being the principles in a political theater posing the medieval worldview to the modern democratic open societies (of the “west”).

As suggested in the excerpt From the Awesome Conversation, the Obama Administration and NATO have adjusted to perhaps containing the apparent (!) energies of a revanchist Russia while choosing to let that most dispassionate of political scripting that has been “Assad vs The Terrorists” play itself out into the horror that it has become.

From Cold War to Cold Struggle and from the installation of the Middle East Conflict to this day seems not that long a span by the measurements of history — 68 years of statehood for Israel and the same period for the Arab world’s separation of the Refugees of 1948 from the mainstream of Arab history; 71 years since the collapse of Nazi Germany and the near concurrent initiation of competition and hostility (and fear) between Moscow and Washington — and 24 years and six months since the dissolving of the Soviet (December 26, 1991).

Where are we now?

I doubt the 25th anniversary of the dissolving of the Soviet will go unremarked in major media, and perhaps it is about now, this summer, and not to mention this American Independence Day, that analysis, lowly bloggers, and major media pundits will be asking the same question: as regards Moscow and Moscow-Tehran and the many “worlds” spun up around central absolute or authoritarian power, indeed, where are we now?

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FTAC – Sideways on Brexit and Putin’s Medieval Theater

27 Monday Jun 2016

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

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🙂

A fair part of the world is now The World x multinational business x communication x shipping x transportation, and while sovereign states must control their borders, few are able to ignore their neighbors, their neighbors’ ambitions, or bad habits and bad sectors. Probably the way to think about criminality, as determined by familiar western and modern precepts is to attach it to “filtration” — catch the “bad apples” — and osmosis from ungoverned conditions and space to governed.

At the moment, there’s a feudal-criminal world (psst: Moscow and its assortment of Far Right and Far Left helpers) continuing to drive chaos into the more civil, more “rule-of-law” west. While the west should (must!) push back, it should do so with other than reversion to its own feudal tendencies.

What Moscow / Putin promotes has been on full display between Sochi and Syria — immense accumulations of wealth and power beside the most inhuman of practices and the most thoughtless and provocative real behavior in foreign policy. I know I can’t keep going over how Damascus incubated ISIS, or, in Russia, (or Iran), how criminality / kleptocracy leak down through the justice systems and corrode their entire societies, but all of that is what is actually represented by ISIS and so many Syrian refugees.

I know as an editor (of possibly the world’s most obscure political blog) that similar specialists or academics “get” the post-Cold War “big picture” but for most with more parochial interests, it’s “ISIS” and what Putin’s sayin’ sounds about right — lower the portcullis!

BackChannels has developed a whole image of the “Post-Cold War – Cold Struggle” environment anchored yet in Moscow and Washington.  In getting to this point, it has learned that “research analyst” (self-assigned, autodidact) knowledge and public impression and perception diverge often and quite, which fact of life may suit the treatment of the public as “the masses”, for as much fits with Moscow’s philosophy regarding information, “information space”, and political manipulation via, as with the handling of Syria, political theater writ large.

Related and Highly Recommended Summer Reading

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev, 2014.

Vovochka: The True Confessions of Vladimir Putin’s Best Friend and Confidant by Alexander J. Motyl, 2015.

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FTAC – Moscow-Tehran – Far Left Connection – Distilled

15 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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One might agree with the sentiment in “BDS is mainly the invention of self-hating Israelis and Jews” but the truth is it’s mainly the invention of historic Russian anti-Semitism ported through the Soviet Union to the “comrade networks” that today have morphed into the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left.

Here’s one of their portals, and I think a glance at the names still on the marquis, as it were, tells of the “longer game” being played on the world stage.

http://www.blackforpalestine.com/

In the wings, imho, but not without cause: the Russo-Syrian effort to sustain their systems of feudal absolute power far into the 21st Century. As KSA realigns westward, or follows its massive investments in the west, Moscow and Tehran may remain committed to installing in the west greater chaos, dissension, and threat.

It’s a big picture view, but the connections between so-called “liberation movements” (add the Far Right New Nationalists like Viktor Orban to the mix) seem to me unmistakable. Possibly, Obama and his subaltern Shapiro are giving signal, whether lip service or sincere, back to Moscow, as the Palestinians remain incapable of challenging the PLO / PA (set up by the KGB way back when) and Hamas (whom Moscow today refuses to designate a terrorist organization).

Does the suggested political architecture work?

Test it.

Directly related on BackChannels, which is now well woven: Syndicate Red Brown Green.

Addendum – 7/6/2016

Golding, Shenequa.  “Ray Lewis Blasts Black Lives Matter Over Silence On Black-On-Black Crime.”  Vibe, April 7, 2016.

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FTAC – On the Post-Soviet Quadratic Conflict

20 Sunday Dec 2015

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

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To be flip, Obama appears to be maintaining the middle east’s new imbalance of power. smile emoticon

As regards sectarian favoring of any kind, he has referred to involvement in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere by characterizing such conflicts in a catch-all: “another dumb war in the middle east” — and “dumb” because war cannot and will not decide anything having to do with the nature of God.

Those who have visited or followed BackChannels, e.g., https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/ftac-on-separation…/ know that the present Moscow-Damascus-Tehran axis of power promotes and sustains by example of the Syrian Tragedy medieval absolute power. Different talks — same walks: what Putin, Assad, and Khamenei share is the will to completely control their constituencies to serve themselves. One possible Obama Administration underlying strategy: avoid the hot war with Russia over the character of 21st Century Feudalism vs 21st Century Modernity and quietly (!) drawn down the mess-making capacities of the feudal axis. As much has nothing to do with identification as a Shiite Muslim per se — only identification with the medieval worldview that (in the mind) makes the distinction so important.

As regards the Sunni side of this most complex quadratic puzzle, U.S. aid and trade are inseparable from Sunni-led state defense capacities, and as much has been so for Jordan and Saudi Arabia for some time.

The ocular, as it were, through which one views these conflicts — I sometimes call the same the “Islamic Small Wars” — is through an etching of the behaviors plus zones of influence set through the Soviet Era — the Cold War — and transitioned through time in Putin’s neo-feudal Russian revanche.

The 24th anniversary of the dissolving of the Soviet will take place the day after Christmas, i.e., December 26.  The occasion must have then seemed quite the gift to the pro-democratic and foreign policy oriented of the United States.  However, influencing the transition turned rocky with the ebullient activity of unbridled Russian mafia and the machinations of the once “Party privileged” to remain privileged.  Blame Berezovsky if you must (you must) — at least he’s a safe bet for criticism — and otherwise welcome to the “Vertical of Power” and the New Nobility.

The “quadratic conflict”?

(Medieval vs Modern) x (Sectarian vs Plural / Shiite vs Sunni / Post-Soviet Arc vs NATO + Alliance ME)

As regards standard American and western cultural values, the politics become convoluted as western defenses include some cooperation from Sunni-associated powers, e.g., the Kingdom and Turkey (whether or not Erdogan likes it — and, of course, he can’t like it, but he’s out of the Shiite-associated loop that wobbles around the beleaguered regime in Damascus).

None but close family pay attention to 24th anniversaries but when a state reaches such a milestone and the dysfunctional family of nations has been yoked to its internal politics and foreign affairs, some notice might be in order, for a year plus six days from this one, there will be a 25th Anniversary of that most singular and wondrous of near historical events.

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FTAC – Post-Cold War Post-Soviet Syria Challenges Putin

15 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, Europe, Middle East, Regions, Russia, Syria

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Through the Cold War / Soviet Era, the boundaries and mischief provided by Soviet –> Syrian –> Iranian bonds and similar arrangements produced both enmity with the west and a bulwark against it even though the basis for, say, Soviet and Iranian existence would be wildly different (but not so different with the Soviet : Baathist relationship elsewhere). The ghosts of the Soviet Era have play in Syria’s disaster today: in essence, post-Soviet, post-KGB Russia seems to have maintained its business and military relationships with Syria without influencing or updating the political and social arrangements of the earlier state of affairs, except to better enable the capital interests of a ruling class. Enter Colonel President King and Stakeholder Putin today: how would you have him now address the Assad family (keep in mind he has his own “kleptocratic” track record within key Russian industries), Maher Al-Assad (who has launched jets against the innocents of whole communities and rather only haphazardly found the armed elements arrayed against the family), and fend off the de facto acquisition of another Chechnya?

I happen to think, perhaps alone in this, that Obama has been trying to goad Putin into intervening in Russia’s client state, but neither Obama or the U.S. have “true interest” in Syria: the focus of activity in Syria is (Shiite) Iran, and into that space KSA, with ample investment in U.S. capitalism (with Big Defense contracts, it’s we who are working for them), has handily played its rivalry with Iran for regional influence.

From both humanist and political perspectives, no one knows how to “sort” the collection of civil and religious interests engaged in conflict within Syria, and no one from outside, including bordering state armies like Suleiman’s wishes to step into the furnace (not the best analogy coming from a Jew, but it seems to work). Instead, we would rather have UNHCR beg for $1 billion through the end of the year to address the civilian tragedy attending Syria’s civil war and unresolved hatreds and threats attending western identity and interests.

Syria is Putin’s problem, and while he can and has, I think, embarrassed Obama with it, he hasn’t rolled out a good strategy yet for his modern, post-Soviet state.

One more thing: Putin may have himself for a problem as regards his own narcissistic universe and the at least partial detachment of that from human suffering within his reach. Syria is a hard problem for him, and it’s important the unfolding story of the state’s themes do not serve to dishonor or embarrass him in history.

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Some interests are known: Obama’s mom-and-apple-pie bid for a new Syrian secular democracy; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s interest in establishing greater autocratic Sunni-based influence in the region; Israeli reduction in Iranian-backed capability and hostility in general.

What we do not know are post-Soviet Russian interests in Syria today beyond continuing the archaic economic system chaining funding from Iran –> Syria –> Russia.

That system is up and running.

The old motivations are down and the current set are plainly absurd.

Russia, wary of its experience with Chechnya, has zero interest in otherwise supporting or strengthening Ayatollah Khamenei.  In essence, President Putin and the Russians have come to a crossroads in Syria, and they can’t go back, unless perhaps to the age of the czars minus the validation of religion for doing so (but mountains of cold hard cash may suffice for validation these days), and going forward, they’re a bit uncomfortable with us Yanks and perhaps lots of others on the Continent.

The longer Putin peers down the new routes available to him without stepping forward, the more he may contribute to the New World Disorder so signaled by the failure of the Assad family’s Syria to secure their citizens lives (casualties so far: 82,000; combined IDP and refugee figures: 3.4 million homeless).

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