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Tag Archives: Putinism

Surrealpolitik: Orban & Putin & ‘Illiberal Democracy’

07 Saturday Jan 2023

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Hungary, Psychology, Russia

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authoritarianism, autocracy, EU & Hungary, Hungary, Hungary & Russia, Illiberal Democracy is Tyranny, kleptocracy, malignant narcissism, Medieval v. Modern, New Nobility, Orban & Putin, Orban and Putin, political absolutism, Putinism, Russia, Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin

BUDAPEST, Hungary—When Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban unleashed a racist tirade during an annual address to ethnic Hungarians in Romania on July 23, in which he argued that his supporters do “not want to become peoples of mixed race,” the international community recoiled in horror at the vitriol being espoused by the leader of a NATO and European Union member state. One of Orban’s longtime advisors, Zsuzsa Hegedus, resigned after the speech, calling it a “pure Nazi text … worthy of [former Nazi leader Joseph] Goebbels.”

Coakley, Amanda. “Putin’s Trojan Horse Inside the European Union: No matter what Moscow does, Hungary’s prime minister consistently carries water for the Kremlin.” Foreign Policy, August 3, 2022.

Amanda Coakley’s article also covers Orban’s deliberate development of dependence on Russia for Hungary’s energy supply. His disingenuous position within the European Union suggests he has had but one outcome in mind, i.e., to become premier in Europe’s “New Nobility” as encouraged by Vladimir Putin. At the base of the autocratic feudal-medieval bond–the same “Malignant Narcissism” that has so characterized former American President Donald Trump’s careers and politics that have turned out disasters for banks, contractors, and citizens.


In late November 2022, Ukrainian special forces arrested a suspected Russian agent at the Ukraine–Hungary border. The man had been attempting to smuggle secret information into EU member state Hungary on a flash drive that he had allegedly concealed in his anus.

The flash drive contained stolen personal information about senior figures and staff at the Ukrainian domestic secret service SBU and the Ukrainian military intelligence service GUR, as well as sensitive data on Ukrainian army bases, weapons and logistics.

Bogar, Zsolt. “Is Hungary becoming Russia’s spy hub within the EU?” DW, September 12, 2022.

Orban, contrary to the European Union’s posture, appears not to mind either the presence nor success of Russia’s spies in Budapest and elsewhere in Hungary. The penetration surpasses presence in numbers as allies believe Hungary’s “IT networks and internal communications” compromised. For a four-year period, 2013-2017, Orbán’s Hungary had even eased the access of Russian spies into the rest of the EU via a “Golden Visa” program (related and recent: Szabolcs, Panyi. “Russian spy chief’s son has a Budapest address–in a property owned by an old friend of Orbán’s chief of staff.” Telex, November 14, 2022).


In the now “surrealpolitik” constructed between Hungary and Russia, business includes the following:

  • Building two nuclear plant blocks in Paks financed by borrowing $10 billion from Russia;
  • Building railroad cars;
  • Hosting Russia’s dark International Investment Bank;
  • Supporting a 15-year gas delivery contract with Gazprom that bypasses Ukraine.

For further details, see the source–Rácz, András. “Authoritarian Ties: The Case of Russia and Hungary.” The Russia File, Kennan Institute, Wilson Center, October 22, 2021. Rácz also notes where Orbán’s spine has stiffened in relation to Russian performance not up to EU standards (and some “intelligence operatives” have indeed been ejected from Hungary).

Global Security‘s remarks fit the brotherly love model of modern despotism in Hungary: “Orban played tough, which might not turn out well for him in the long run. His games were turning into a high wire act, threatening to keep Brussels off balance. At times Orban made half-hearted promises to uphold the EU’s policy toward Russia; at other times, he allowed himself to be flattered by Putin, his self-declared political role model. Or, when it came to economic interests, he allowed himself to be put under pressure (Global Security, “Hungary-Russia Relations” as quoted January 7, 2022).

Putin’s realpolitik, plain old mafia leverage, came through for Russia this past year. From The Guardian—

Hungarians voted in general elections just weeks after the invasion, in April, and it seems reasonable to assume that the war next door had an influence on the result. Given the climate of fear that the devastating “special military operation” created, Hungarians voted to keep Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in power rather than risk an untested six-party coalition. This assumption also underlies Orbán’s response, which is to stay out of the conflict to the point of being “exempted”, a position that has been condemned as a betrayal by Hungary’s western allies. Hungary refuses to allow arms shipments destined for Kyiv to transit Hungarian territory and blocks the extension of EU sanctions against Russia to the energy sector. This latter stance is intended to enable an already controversial Russian-Hungarian project to build a nuclear power plant on the Danube (Paks II) to go ahead unaltered.

Dalos, György.  “Orban says Hungary is ‘exempt’ from the conflict: tell that to his friend in Moscow.”  The Guardian, October 29, 2022.

György also notes the “similarities between the two leaders: authoritarian posturing and illiberalism underlying their respective concepts of the state.”


Since then, Orbán has been accused of fostering resentment. Tensions flared in 2018 over a video that apparently showed diplomats illegally issuing Hungarian passports to people in Transcarpathia. Later, in 2019, Hungary was accused of trying to influence the outcome of elections in the region, and blocked Ukraine’s NATO membership negotiations over the row. |

Today, from the Donbas to Kosovo, events are again proving the potency of nationalist narratives over lost territory and peoples separated by the claimed injustices of history. Yet, in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the simple fact that many Hungarians have negative views of both Russians and Ukrainians is pertinent.

Nattrass, William. “Hungary’s ‘pro-Russia’ stance was inevitable.” Politico, September 15, 2022.

The wholly reactionary New Nobility (a member of which Orban might wish to be counted) rather like the old, appears fascinated by its own super-duper bloodline and culture, enough so to demonize hosts beyond their own boundaries, engage in passportization, and when possibility arises, redraw maps by way of wars driven by the conviction of racially-based cultural supremacy.


Comparing Orban to Putin might once have been hyperbole. But when Fidesz seems determined to expel a high-quality educational institution from the country on the grounds of political views of its funder, it is hyperbole no longer.

The attack on CEU, furthermore, is not happening in isolation. It is part of a broader effort to squeeze out “Soros and the powers that symbolize him,” to use Orban’s own words.

Rohac, Dalibor. “Hungary Is Turning Into Russia: On the CEU, Orban Mimics Putin.” Foreign Affairs, April 12, 2017.

America’s Anti-Defamation League has classified the demonizing of George Soros as expressive of anti-Semitism, a return to the rhetoric of Jew as Globalist. In fact and far back in the day, George and his father, Tivador, used social camouflage to survive the Holocaust while providing other Jews with forged papers for escape. Their resistance would continue against Stalin and Communist Russia, and so through George Soros it has been sustained through the Cold War and throughout Russia journey into kleptocracy and, on this day, politically absolute tyranny.


ADL. “The Antisemitism Lurking Behind George Soros Conspiracy Theories.” October 11, 2018.

Bogar, Zsolt. “Is Hungary becoming Russia’s spy hub within the EU?” DW, September 12, 2022.

Coakley, Amanda. “Putin’s Trojan Horse Inside the European Union: No matter what Moscow does, Hungary’s prime minister consistently carries water for the Kremlin.” Foreign Policy, August 3, 2022.

Dalos, György.  “Orban says Hungary is ‘exempt’ from the conflict: tell that to his friend in Moscow.”  The Guardian, October 29, 2022.

Global Security. “Hungary-Russia Relations”.

Nattrass, William. “Hungary’s ‘pro-Russia’ stance was inevitable.” Politico, September 15, 2022.

Oppenheim, James S. “FTAC: A Short Note on the Demonizing of George Soros.” BackChannels, August 8, 2020.

Rácz, András. “Authoritarian Ties: The Case of Russia and Hungary.” The Russia File, Kennan Institute, Wilson Center, October 22, 2021.

Rohac, Dalibor. “Hungary Is Turning Into Russia: On the CEU, Orban Mimics Putin.” Foreign Affairs, April 12, 2017.

Szabolcs, Panyi. “Russian spy chief’s son has a Budapest address–in a property owned by an old friend of Orbán’s chief of staff.” Telex, November 14, 2022.


While #PutinFullTonto strives to return Russia to some version of the KGB revisits the Russian Imperial mode, few believe the Phantom of the Soviet will restore a monstrous near past; however, he has well succeeded in leveraging cooperation from malign and piratical personalities similar to his own–in power Viktor Orban and Recep Tayyip Erdogan most notably–and thereby weakening the political cohesion and coherence of the Atlantic Alliance and the European Union.

–33–

FTAC: Briefest Comment: Corbyn, Anti-Semitism, and the Soviet Era

31 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics

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anti-Semitism, Putinism, 21st Century Neo-Feudalism, medieval vs modern, transnational crime, Soviet/Post-Soviet Totalitarianism

Inspiration: Corbyn’s intellectual connection with the Soviet Era as mentioned by Ben Cohen in a notice and review (The Tower, October 2016) of David Rich’s The Left’s Jewish Problem. My conversational partner had asked about the origins of British anti-Semitism, and while I had a sense of where the answer might be, I hadn’t much validation for it. Now that little patch of curiosity and intuition may be on the cusp of becoming known.


From the Awesome Conversation on Facebook


Of course. I’ve been right about the “Phantoms of the Soviet”. I just purchased the earlier Kindle edition of David Rich’s The Left’s Jewish Problem and hope that will fill in some gaps.

The west has made broad strides in mopping up after the Cold War; however it has succumbed to the new “syndicate”, a melange of authoritarian governments bent on the renewal of feudalism above a darker background of global crime and corruption driven by trade in narcotics and abetted by money laundering.

For Russian power, today’s “anti- anti-Semitism” and anti-Semitism are just political tools for the defense of the terminal or singular representation of the power of the state in one person. What it long ago promoted beyond its borders has been pure intellectual poison.


Updated edition published September 18, 2018.

Related Online

Bloodworth, James. “Labour’s New Anti-Semitism Has Disturbingly Old Roots.” Foreign Policy, August 21, 2018.

# # #

FTAC: East-West Conflict: Take the Longer Post-Cold War View

16 Friday Feb 2018

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

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democracy, medieval v modern, New Medievalism, New Nationalism, Political Longitude, post-Cold War, post-Soviet Era, Putinism, Reflexive Control, Rule by Political Elites, Rule of the Rich, Russia

Many conversations in the social networks rely on partisan politics for argument — Democrats this, Republicans that.  For the most part, the framing it time involves the period set by the run-up and aftermath of the Clinton v Trump election.  BackChannels suggests that the greater challenges associated with “Islamic Terrorism”, America’s political polarization, and the advent of vicious Far Left and Far Right fascism span Administrations all the way back to the last day of the Cold War (Dec. 25, 1991) and therefore beg Americans to broaden their scope accordingly.


Try to set aside partisan information and opinion and look at the present international relations in the greater frame of the post-Cold War period begun on the morning of December 26, 1991, the day after the Soviet Union dissolved. Rather than write long (e.g., “We know today through writers like David Satter and scholars like Karen Dawisha . . . .”), I’d rather share one link to what has been really taking place with “Islamic Terrorism” and the “New Nationalism” x Russia’s interest in sustaining dictatorships and much of the related political dynamics of the medieval world.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/reflexive-control…/

Putin | Assad | Khamenei comprise a package, as it were, from the Soviet Era: they are each in their way a part of what has been left of it.

Putin | Orban | Erdogan | add the leadership in some former satellites reengaging with anti-Semitism — should open the window wide on the medeival revanche.

I feel quite Quixote-like fighting this post-Soviet battle for liberal democracy because what Putin has done is brought back authoritarian and fascist (Turkey) or nationalist (elsewhere in EU / NATO) leaders in a way way that has damaged interstate democratic cohesion.

Russia from before the Bolshevik Revolution and to this day has had a long history as a promoter of anti-Semitic ideas and as a host, motivator, manipulator, and sponsor of terrorism. I hope the “Reflexive Control” piece will open a window for greater curiosity that may then lead to greater perception of an east-west conflict in which Israel very much represents a democratic and humanist future where other forces have kept installed medieval tyranny.

The Obama-Trump Punch and Judy gets and takes a lot of attention, but the struggle for western democracy against Moscow’s eastern sham spans American (“I looked into his eyes”) Administrations.


At the closing press conference, in response to a question about whether he could trust Putin, Bush said, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy – I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Bush’s top security aide Condoleezza Rice later wrote that Bush’s phrasing had been a serious mistake. “We were never able to escape the perception that the president had naïvely trusted Putin and then been betrayed.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovenia_Summit_2001

In her book, No Higher Honour, Condoleezza Rice would go on to say, “There was little room to convince critics that the circumstances of 2001 and the relationship with Vladimir Putin then were very different from what would come to pass.”

BackChannels submits that Putin was perceived differently in the White House by KGB design in those years and was not all different from the soul of the Soviet Union that had collapsed ten years earlier.  For reference to the Soviet transition plan developed in the 1980s for the event of dissolving, I would recommend reading Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy.

For an overview of Russian history and related authoritarian paternalism, BackChannels recommends from the Russian Section of its library the two volumes by Richard Pipes.

Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Old Regime: The History of Civilization. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974.

Pipes, Richard. The Russian Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knop, 1990.


Also in Media

Posen, Barry R.  “The Rise of Illiberal Hegemony.”  Foreign Affairs, March/April 2018.

America as led by President Trump appears to be winning its battles but altogether losing its war against a potential tyranny in the making that has come in the form of a “New Nationalism”, i.e., a populist president who is himself autocratic and seemingly enthrall to and reliant on feudal aggrandizement, cunning, and dumb strength in both personal and public realms.  As quoted from the Awesome Conversation and worth inserting here, the BackChannels piece on “Reflexive Control” and the rule of the manipulative and wealthy (like Medvedev) applies as regards the greater torque exerted by Russia, principally, and China as representing each their own politically unassailable business and leadership elites.

If Moscow believes it has taken the world forward by turning history’s clock backward, what has Washington done to freeze that totalitarian regress — and is it doing enough to keep from sliding into its own Orwellian (“Fake News!”) hell?

The American President — but not America’s governments in their totality — appears enmeshed in what ails most authoritarian regimes: questionable policies serving elites more than constituents, a host of political scandals, especially that “kompromat” thing that has come to associate the Trump brand with money laundering  (for more, web search, say, “Trump, Felix Sater”) and philandering.


11/14/2010


3/29/2016


4/21/2017

Ours is a competitive world but also one bound by our human awareness of self and related facets of conscience, empathy, ethics, and morality.  We’re aware of what we do and, perhaps, at the same time fearful of what we are capable of doing.

BackChannels believes that the Russian experience of the Mongol Invasion and related administration left their marks within Russian princes who would fear what any show of weakness might invite from the world around them while in the subjugated inspiring a festering crude anger and resentment.  The vaunted “realpolitik” would then seem to have evolved from doing what works, and if criminality and main force and leverage appear to have worked, then then those devices may remain installed but deeply redolent of despair and disaffection and far opposite the inspiriting benefits of higher-integrity and rule-of-law democracy.

–33–

Also in Media: Excerpt: “Mikhail Khodorkovsky Lantos Rule of Law Speech”, October 10, 2017

11 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by commart in Russia, Political Psychology, 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media

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democracy, feudal political absolutism, Lantos, mafia state, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, political criminality, Putinism, rule of law, speech

It is a great honour for me to give the first Tom Lantos Rule of Law Lecture. I would like to thank Annette Lantos, Katrina Lantos, and their whole large family for all their support over these 10 long years.

Today, the outside world is seeing Russia more and more as an aggressive country with an outmoded economy…

Against the background of the latest scandals about interference in elections, military adventurism in Syria and the Donbass, and the seizure of territories in Crimea, my country is more and more often being mentioned in the same breath as places like Iran and North Korea.

Of course, I don’t agree with this, but I cannot help but notice that we are regularly starting out from the position of an aggressor. Of a country that disrupts the world order, an exporter of tension and corruption. And the fact that we are not the only country like this gives me no comfort whatsoever.

I can’t help but notice that my country’s ambition to be a world leader is not supported by the viability of its economic system and the results it produces.These are becoming ever more dismal as the country has stalled its way into stagnation.

Source: Mikhail Khodorkovsky Lantos Rule of Law Speech

 

Also in Media: “The shadowy Russian émigré touting Trump” – Financial Times, November 1, 2016

01 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Russia

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Putinism, Trump, Russo-American relationship, Russo-American business

. . . questions are mounting over whether Mr Millian was one of a number of people who could have acted as intermediaries to build ties between Moscow and Mr Trump. This comes after Paul Manafort resigned earlier this year as Mr Trump’s campaign chief after controversy over his years of consulting work for Viktor Yanukovich, the pro-Moscow former president of Ukraine.

Source: The shadowy Russian émigré touting Trump – 11/1/2016

Catherine Belton’s article goes on to explore other aspects of the Soviet / post-Soviet Russo-American relationship.

If the reader has been “paywalled” by the Financial Times piece, the Daily Beast has a related article at this address:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/08/meet-the-man-who-is-spinning-for-donald-trump-in-russia.html

–33–

FTAC – About that Image of Israeli Girls Signing Rockets

27 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics, Russia

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Tags

Active Measures, captioning, interpretation of photographs, Israeli girls signing rockets, journalism, Palestinian propaganda, photo history, photography, Putinism, Russia, Russian propaganda, Soviet Era

About that picture of Israeli girls signing rockets —

The photograph was taken on July 17, 2006 by AFP photographer Pedro Ugarte or AP photographer Sebastian Scheiner*, who was then covering Israel’s defensive war with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

It appears to have been taken up by the Far Left (New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left, has been my trope for a while) in 2012, in which year it was exploited by The Electronic Intifada and others —

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/i-picture-dead-arab-disturbing-video-israeli-childrens-words-echo-indoctrination

http://americantribune.org/?p=14646

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/may082012/israeli-missiles.php (note the anti-Semitic caption — a bald lie — invented for the presentation of the image).

Israel Images may provide the most accurate and blunt caption for the true when-where-and-what: http://www.israelimages.com/see_image_details.php?idi=8814


The image was put to use by “Stop The Wall” on July 20, 2006 and on the next day used in a cynically demonizing “message received” way — with pictures to prove it — by “22dollars” — “Dear Lebanese, Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Christians Kids – Die with love. Yours Truely, (STET) Israeli Kids.”

When The Electronic Intifada had recycled the same image on its site in 2012, the caption had shifted to crediting Pedro Ugarte, possibly a ploy to keep AP and Scheider from noting the later use of the image.

The issue — who took that picture?  — has come up because writer Gal Beckerman, today Editor of The New York Times Book Review, had posted a similarly titled piece about the picture in the Columbia Journalism Review (July 20, 2006): “About Those Photos of Little Girls and Artillery Shells …: Photographs of Israeli children doodling on artillery rockets have inspired strong reactions across the world. But what’s the story behind the photos?”

Gal’s piece says Scheider took the picture.  I believe it.  Those are the captions that appear in 2006.

Related Reference

On Soviet Era “Active Measures”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures;

https://www.spymuseum.org/education-programs/news-books-briefings/background-briefings/active-measures/;

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/26/putin-s-wicked-leaks-didn-t-start-with-the-dnc.html;

http://fas.org/irp/world/russia/kgb/su0523.htm;

http://www.statecraft.org.uk/research/russian-active-measures-modernised-tradition

On the Soviet KGB and the Palestinian Cause

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/


 

FTAC – Muslims – “No to Hatred, No to Violence, No to Terrorism”

17 Wednesday Aug 2016

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

≈ Leave a comment

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21st Century Neo-Feudalism, absolute power, dictatorship, Islam, Islamic reform, Islamism, medievalism, political absolutism, Putin, Putinism

On Monday, The Independent had run a piece online by Matt Payton titled, “More than 30,000 Muslims from across the world meet in the UK to reject ISIS and Islamic extremism” (August 15, 2016).  Some in the Awesome Conversation were pleased by the sight of women in full abaya holding placards reading

NO TO HATRED
NO TO VIOLENCE
NO TO TERRORISM


The things the “Islamists” do go against the grain of humanity — that’s just how I feel about that criminality — and the appropriate response by Muslims is repudiation.

What next?

Cultural blending, differentiation, and separation — there’s wisdom in recognizing and maintaining boundaries and margins in a world supporting about 7,000 living languages and what each represents. (Note that Putin plays the ethnolinguistic cultural defense and evolution card _against_ political boundaries, effectively violating margins. Also: Back-Channels credits Assad with the incubation of ISIS through deselection for bombing and combat earlier in Syria and also notes that Russia continues to maintain Soviet Era relationships with at least Hamas, Hezbollah, and PFLP. Muslims have not only to repudiate the fascist ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood organizations — that’s in that “No” to hatred, violence, and terrorism — but also to grasp Moscow’s role in the grooming and manipulation of such organizations as weapons focused toward the modern democracies).


Posted to YouTube by the Daily Mail, Aug. 4, 2016.

BackChannels argument that Assad incubated ISIS rests on a Newsweek report and successive and validating news coverage coming out of the Syrian Conflict and Tragedy.

In the following video clip, President Putin notes, “That if you would like to stop the flow of migrants into Europe, if you want for them to live in their own countries, then you must return sovereignty to those countries where it has been taken away.”

Think about that.

Under whose sovereign command were Syrian children arrested and tortured in 2011?

Whose sovereign air force “barrel bombed” Syrian noncombatants?

Because of the incubating of ISIS as useful tool, BackChannels has long regarded the “Syrian Conflict and Tragedy” as a complete theater of politics and war managed off the post-Soviet Moscow hub, i.e., by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei, and by each to their own advantage but the common cause of sustaining medieval political absolutism in their respective states.

Different Talks?

Same Walk.

Perhaps this is where that “walk” always leads:

Posted to YouTube by RT, January 20, 2016.

Under whose sovereignty were the airplanes flown, the tanks driven?

At time mark 1:44 on President Putin’s April 2016 St. Petersburg address, the President says of western criticism and opprobrium associated with both the incursion in Crimea and the conduct of the Syrian Civil War, “They realised that such destructive behaviour against our country was never going to work but nevertheless they’d like to silence our success.”

With a small nod toward conciliation, one may note of the YouTube video of Homs and the link immediately following that leads to an L.A. Times piece about the city that it had indeed been occupied by rebel forces and would be subject to state assault.  Nonetheless, the intertwined battles for Syria and against the open democracies of the west have not gone so well for Moscow and its clients IF measured by areas of control, community wellbeing, and economic contribution or so many other benchmarks familiar where peace prevails and governments abet development.

Links

http://www.businessinsider.com/nearly-80-of-russias-syria-strikes-dont-target-isis-2015-10 – 10/22/2015


http://syriadirect.org/news/russian-jets-purportedly-target-relatives-of-fsa-affiliated-fighters-on-jordan-border/ – 7/13/2016:

“There were families members of Usud a-Sharqiya there,” said spokesman Younis Salama. “But does that justify them bombing the camp?”

Jaysh Usud a-Sharqiya primarily fights the Islamic State in Syria’s eastern desert region.

Last month, Russian aircraft reportedly targeted another FSA group, the New Syrian Army, in Deir e-Zor province. Moscow did not comment on either attack.


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-schoolboys-began-the-syrian-revolution/ – 4/26/2011:

The local secret police soon arrested 15 boys between the ages of 10 and 15, detaining them under the control of Gen. Atef Najeeb, a cousin of President Bashar al-Assad.

In a gloomy interrogation room the children were beaten and bloodied, burned and had their fingernails pulled out by grown men working for a regime whose unchecked brutality appears increasingly to be sowing the seeds of its undoing.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Syrian_Civil_War_barrel_bomb_attacks

–33–

 

Video

FTAC – ‘This is Moscow’s Game’

29 Wednesday Jun 2016

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

dictatorship, feudal absolute power, neo-feudalism, neo-imperialism, Putinism, Russia, Russian feudalism, Russian politics

This is Moscow’s game.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1*

Today, Putin plays “ends against the middle” by supporting Far Right and Far Left movements and personalities; he indulges in breathtaking political theater — Sochi or Syria, both have been about demonstration of political values; and he’s ruthless (poor Assad), enough so to have engineered through influence the incubating of ISIS (for the production “Assad vs The Terrorists”) and the creation of an EU / NATO stressing immigrant headache, to which the Brits have responded and played directly into his bid to keep restored feudal political absolute power.


Related in the news: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/06/29/post-brexit-the-u-k-is-in-its-worst-political-crisis-since-1940-and-the-e-u-may-be-about-to-unravel/ – 6/29/2016.

Most of the public will keep Putin’s feudal revanche in Russia separate from the issues attending the Great Britain – European Union split, but the general weakening of the European Union and NATO would seem fit to his own image of himself as the unassailable primary political force in a state suspended between a secret police organization (FSB) to whom he refers to as the “New Nobility”, himself, and the financial oligarchy that he controls.

*In the above cited and linked video, attend to Moscow’s creation of a conflict that it chooses to manage from both sides.

-33-

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"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."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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