— The whole legitimation of Kadyrov is the ‘victory’ in the Chechen war.
Do you remember how he appeared from nowhere in 1999? The terrorists blew up our houses (in the reality Russian secret services did that) and all of a sudden a heroic military officer appeared and stopped the terrorists, calmed down Caucasus, proclaimed the war. Putin cannot declare Kadyrov as an enemy and liquidate him as some military bosses would like – that would mean that Putin deceived us all of these 15 years and that all of his politics failed. Closing the ‘Kadyrov’ project is a solution required by the security forces. They use the murder of Nemtsov (organized by themselves) as a pretext for the closure of the ‘Kadyrov’ project. It is obvious that the direct executors of the murder were captured- and they are Kadyrov’s people. Investigators want to question people close to Kadyrov, and Kadyrov himself. And it is a sharp political conflict, which unfolds now between military bosses and Putin. This conflict is a lot sharper then the conflict between Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko.
“Is there literally nothing that can shame you?” Power said. “Is there no act of barbarism against civilians, no execution of a child, that gets under your skin? That just creeps you out a little bit? Is there nothing you will not lie about or justify?”
Unfortunately for Russians, what Putin is doing puts them and their culture under threat. “For Russia, the fate of their language is a question of life or death” because the language is in many ways a metaphor for Russia itself. “The Russian language, Russian culture and Russian literature are … what Russia is.”
Indeed, Shchetkina argues, Russia doesn’t exist anywhere beyond these things; and that explains why Putin has said that Russia has no borders because Russia is a “virtual” reality rather than a geographic one. And in this is a problem: “this culture and language does not belong undividedly to a country which is now called the Russian Federation.”
“As I have repeatedly said, it is not our fault that Russian – American relations are in that poor condition.”
If you’re a BackChannels regular or an enthusiast in political psychology, you know that the “malignant narcissist” — autocrat, bully, or dictator — is never wrong.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
Lest any forget, there’s plenty of reading at hand (these days: Amazon One-Click shopping may be the next best thing) for guarding against forgetting.
Posted by The Guardian, November 9, 2016.
BackChannels has framed contemporary conflict in terms of time, i.e., whether confronting Assad or, for a domestic example, the Ku Klux Klan, the modern person is actually rejecting the reappearance of the past in his own path.
For the most part, whether involving the aggressive Muslim Brotherhood aspect in contemporary Islam, the barbarism on display in Syria — and do “thank” Assad, Putin, and Khamenei for choosing that evil path — or the Russian invasion of Crimea, one is actually aiming the finger back at the world of Medieval Political Absolute Power, i.e., AKA the divine right of rule, rule by a presumptuously superior nature, rule by thuggery, and, most certainly, unquestionable authority, or authority beyond criticism and beyond law.
Putin : Medieval Political Absolutism
vs
Trump: Modern Democratic and Checked Distribution of Political Power
Choose.
Posted by VICE News, March 3, 2014.
While “western” political success and related productivity and affluence provide for western humanism and other aspects of idealism, “eastern” barbarism and suffering have left behind a world in which fear and insecurity appear to threaten those who should be in the most confident and secure of internal psychological states. Leadership in tribal cultures and states tend toward a winner-take-all — and loser-lose-all — position in their politics, and it may be that we mistake for a better politics and ennoble with the term “realpolitik”.
Our world pays a high price in general suffering — suffering associated horrors beyond imagining — for the emotional care and feeding of its “malignant narcissists” — its most damaged bad boys, the same that make themselves known as political and war criminals.
So:
Bashar al-Assad: war criminal?
Vladimir Putin: war criminal?
Ali Khamenei: political criminal?
As a class, dictators “exceed limits” — just as Muhammad warned 🙂 — and in doing so free themselves from other normative restraints while at the same time condemning themselves to remaining in political power at any cost (always to others).
In effect, the worlds of despots become worlds of political absolutes, and if for no other reason than the near impossibility of the retreat of their authors.
If over the past five years you had been a Syrian noncombatant, would you wish to see Bashar al-Assad a) remain in power, b) exiled, or c) hung in public?
If you had been swept off the streets of Tehran and dumped in Evin Prison (say for wearing that hijab a little to far to the back — or for being Baha’i or gay or western in outlook) , or if you had had family murdered by the Iranian regime, would you care to see Ali Khamenei’s term in power a) modified, b) truncated, c) “terminated with extreme prejudice”?
Has Putin a graceful retreat today — Syria was al-Assad’s war and armies, flyers especially, make mistakes; and Ukrainian autonomy was Khrushchev’s mistake, which was made with the confidence that Kiev would remain forever bent to Moscow?
Putin may have that.
And Trump may be wise to see that Putin, the Russian State, and the Russian People (of Russia proper) have that “out” — but to horse trade Ukraine, the European Union, the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization?
“Nyet” to all that!
(Liberal politics have come to mire judgment, unfortunately. Biography.com maintains a page titled “Political Criminals” but begs credulity by placing side-by-side J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, both of whom may have exceeded some boundaries in power, with Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Fidel Castro, and Idi Amin all of whom plainly represent the most reckless of minds and murderous of despots).
Historian John Bew suggests that much of what stands for modern realpolitik today deviates from the original meaning of the term. Realpolitik emerged in mid-19th century Europe from the collision of the enlightenment with state formation and power politics. The concept, Bew argues, was an early attempt at answering the conundrum of how to achieve liberal enlightened goals in a world that does not follow liberal enlightened rules.
If, as the poet says, America is not the world, then the world is surely owed an apology for the lack of attention paid to what ought to have been, and are, a series of alarming developments throughout Europe and the Middle East. Perhaps appropriately, all have involved or implicated a revanchist authoritarian power for which the incoming commander in chief has repeatedly professed his admiration and which, after having done all it could to facilitate an upset American electoral outcome—“maybe we helped a bit with WikiLeaks,” as pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov put it Wednesday morning—offers its hearty congratulations on his victory. Meanwhile, Russia’s alleged “wet work” and maneuvering outside the United States in the last two weeks has been even more impressive.
“Jews who deny Muslim and Christian attachment to Jerusalem pave the way for Muslims and Christians to deny Jewish attachment to Jerusalem.”
—
Hmm.
“Muslims who deny Jewish and Christian attachments to Jerusalem pave the way for Jews and Christians to deny Muslim attachment to Jerusalem.”
“Christians who deny Jewish and Muslim attachments to Jerusalem pave the way for Jews and Muslims to deny Christian attachment to Jerusalem.”
It’s funny how the assignment of culpability works within such a statement.
Truth to tell: in 12th Century Christian Hungary, laws devised to discriminate against Jews were upon activation applied equally to Muslims (source: Raphael Patai, _The Jews of Hungary_).
The bogey: jealousy and resentment (perhaps) and supersessionary ambition (no question).
What is it about the medieval world and worldview — apart from concentrating ill-gotten wealth in thuggish elites — that keeps so many of the Soviet / post-Soviet arc trapped within it?
Perhaps post-Holocaust, the arguments are shifting from hidden and shameful supersessionary wishes (I thought that was done with in 1964) and “recognition of ‘the other'” (who isn’t “other” for somebody?) to the differences between medieval perception and rhetoric (and absolute power) toward the modern comprehension of political conditions, greater recognition of mutual obligations, and interest in the peaceful interweaving of complex and varied cultural and economic systems.
What may the medieval world have looked like?
Crimea.
Syria.
And thank the same system of thought so slyly — ah, but obviously — singles out the Hebrews as the source of all troubles.
Leadership, cultural mentality, and political power have a relationship in which the medieval of mind invests energy in the command and control of mobs. Frame-ups, innuendos, lies, rumors: snookering the marks is what political dishonesty has been all about.
In and around the Middle East Conflict, the Palestinians — who having suffered Arab apartheid and gross isolation and misguidance for decades — have paid the highest price for their once unwitting subordination to a mixture of Nazi- and Soviet-promoted images of the surrounding world, and that starting with the demonizing and scapegoating of the Jews.
Soviet cartoons distributed in the Middle East to leverage “the masses” into the Soviet camp.
Soviet cartoons distributed in the Middle East to leverage “the masses” into the Soviet camp.
The Soviet Era cartoons from the late 1960s and early 1970s suggest what Moscow used to inveigle the Arab World in its unholy designs, for back then, Russia was avowedly and godlessly communist as well as deeply anti-Semitic.
Palestinians and others — and this plainly demonstrated in Syria, and nowhere more so than with Yarmouk, the once Palestinian camp and refuge — will never know authentic freedom and self-determination while bent to the will of a still medieval and excessively controlling — and kleptocratic (and today “ultra-nationalist”) — Moscow.
The truth of the matter is Moscow-Tehran with baby Damascus chose to sustain a barbaric “medieval political absolutism” in Syria intent on fighting western ideas, actually, while incubating and using as tools the al-Qaeda types, including ISIL.
Moscow’s conversational tone may be firm, but the site of what the “troika” — Putin, Assad, Khamenei — has done to Syria — and the most innocent of the Syrian constituency — awareness of Moscow’s continuing relations with Hamas and PFLP, and its planting of those “Little Green Men” in Crimea speak brazenly for a Moscow more interested in thuggery and empire than in freedom, peace, and prosperity, and that whether at home or abroad.
Putin & Co., appear to be making an effort to stand on familiar old evils, which includes the encouragement of greater Far Left and Far Right extremism in the world and consequent chaos and violence. I suspect western diplomats apprehend what has been “reset” before them and are taking measures to respond appropriately.
Inspiration for the note: an assertion that Puton, Lavrov, and Churkin have been always firm in their speech, never belligerent.
Fair enough.
However, set the tone of the talk against the results of Moscow’s policies over many years and the juxtaposition looks ugly — bipolar; black and white; glittering Sochi against atrocities — including the sniping of pregnant women — taking place in Syria; the patriotic and rousing concert at Palmyra placed in time less than a day before the Russian bombing of a Syrian refugee camp; and so on.
Found on Twitter this morning from Ukraine Ministry of Foreign Affairs —
While Russia’s hand in Ukraine has hardly been a secret, the emails, if genuine, provide fine-grained detail of Mr. Surkov’s office in setting up separatist enclaves in Ukraine’s east.
They also shed light on the workaday activity of a propaganda shop, including a rare example of a draft text apparently edited in Mr. Surkov’s office that can be compared with a final version.
The Ukrainian group, calling itself CyberHunta — a mocking reference to the Russian assessment that the Kiev government is a fascist junta — released 2,337 emails from the address prm_surkova@gov.ru, many from 2014 as the eastern Ukrainian separatists established their mini-states.
Perhaps most frightening is how Pussy Riot sees Moral America, which is actually pretty good as regards the creation of the civil society that the deeply anti-authoritarian Pussy Riot needs as audience and consumers of its entertainment. Nonetheless, it too appears to have perceived in Presidential Candidate Donald Trump’s demagoguery similarities with Putin’s now rapidly developing ultra-nationalist politics.