The world has been dealt a terrible puzzle: Syndicate Red Brown Green (Shiite) has through “Red” (post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia) a nuclear armed block to its ability to impose its better nature; “Brown Green” — national socialist, Islamist (Sunni side) promotes a program unpalatable most to those whose humanity, sense of justice, and sentiment could motivate intercession despite a nuclear armed Russia and an Iran positioned to acquire a similar capability if given about a year’s lead surreptitiously. Change those politics. I think Putin-Assad-Khamenei cannot get off their track by way of their investment in a medieval world view intended to keep themselves in power to the end of time. Baghdadi is about in the same place, but others might not be.
The God (concept) intended by the Jews was thrown out beyond the universe, made greater than even the universe, and with finality separated from humans, even Moses — and not even Moses parts the waters — and this is why. Somewhere between Assad and ISIS, the middle must pioneer its way, cast off the medieval, reach for something more human, more kind, more modern, more present, more survivable, more evolving, more progressing.
Perhaps when Syrians involved in fighting perceive their jihad as one involving the middle against the extremes, they will be on their way to peace.
For this day, dependence on the medieval concentration of power in one dictator, dynasty, junta, or nobility masks off the potential for a greater future. “Syndicate Red Brown Green” appears to be playing — by having other people die for its privileges –for the feudal mode and the perpetual war needed to keep the criminally powerful and wealthy in business for generations.
By contrast, Cockburn takes a generous view of the regime’s belated and brief confrontation with ISIS. He has pronounced Assad’s army its “main military opponent,” deserving of Western support. But facts tell a different story. According to a Carter Center study, the regime has spared ISIS in 90 percent of its attacks; and an IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center (JTIC) study finds that in 2014, the regime targeted ISIS in only 6 percent of its attacks. (ISIS in turn directed its fire on the regime in only 13 percent its operations.)
Since Aboud Dandachi laid out the shaping of the battle by Assad forces in his refreshingly honest and entertaining history and polemic, The Doctor, The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between the World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict (2014), the feudal perversion of a modest pro-democracy protest in 2011 into a brutal epic one might title “Assad vs The Terrorists” has been apparent but the statistics on how it was done never so well relayed.
BackChannels (oh the bias!) commonly invokes the term “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” in place of Bashar al-Assad alone to play up the axis, its Russo-Iranian core, and define the conflict in Syria as other and greater than “civil war”, a mere internal dispute, the greater dispute being that between medieval absolute power and modern democratic distributed or popular power.
Obama may be misguided or misled or in cahoots with what I guess I’ll call the “Newest Global Nobility” — very wealthy people who cooperate with one another in various ways while maintaining a popular screen of differences in their ideological or political rhetoric.
Khamenei — and his brother — appear themselves to be without boundaries, and perhaps unwittingly, the U.S. / NATO have opened the gates to Iranian power in Iraq — and, bear with the writer, Iran-manipulated ISIS (that’s the story I feel I’ve seen) provides both key and lever for that condition. Khamenei with ISIS has the leverage to convince Iraq’s Shiite community that it needs him in their defense, when, probably, he helped open the way for ISIS into Iraq and influenced the stall of the ISIS summer 2014 campaign north of Baghdad.
Complicated?
Putting on a show in “political theater” has been the Soviet way / post-Soviet neo-feudal KGB / FSB way, and Iran has been part of that all the way. The sanitizing and prettying up of the Camp Liberty crowd may signal Obama’s own complicity in this developing arrangement between emerging 21st Century neo-feudal politicians.
While “Red Brown Green” may be defined by the revanch skeleton of the Soviet Union in the form of a “Newest Nobility” — Putin-Khamenei as anchors, Assad, Orban, and Erdogan as lesser lords — the American and NATO roles in making adjustments on behalf of Really Big Money seems much less visible.
Is The Money Democratic or Republican?
Or is The Money just concerned with itself and include to manipulate whatever suits its accumulation best?
Are we watching the invention of a true-to-life (and politics) Global Monopoly Board?
BackChannels doesn’t know the answer to that question yet, but it’s coming to know how ruthless Soviet / post-Soviet and KGB-derived politics may be, and that to the extent that “false flag operations” and manipulated horrors like ISIL are possible in the cause of the acquisition of human but inhuman and psychologically disturbed (and disturbing) power.
Whether that “Moscow Apartment Bombing” kind of behavior (KGB false flag, according to Karen Dawisha) has found a place in the west remains to be verified (by some preponderance of evidence), but that Obama has been giving Khamenei a hand — Yemen ceded to the Houthis, apparently; the western coalition response to Daesh slowed before being made to response to atrocity (e.g., the enslavement and slaughter of the Yezidis; the intervention on behalf of the Kurdish community in Kobani) with some plans seemingly leaked — seems plain. In Obama’s world, inaction appears to have become as good as action as regards enabling and encouraging the development of increasingly bad news.
Unverified video uploaded to social networking sites purports to show fighting near Syria’s Yarmouk refugee camp, where Palestinians.
In this report, posted on the Internet on November 22, 2014 by the Palestinian Diaspora Media Center, refugees at the Yarmouk camp in Syria show how they pro.
Opposition activists say Syrian warplanes launched rockets at the Palestinian refugee camp known as Yarmouk.
At least 25 people have been killed in the Yarmouk refugee camp in southern Damascus. Syrian fighter-bombers fired at least one miss.
Red Brown . . . a little less Green, perhaps.
Published on Oct 9, 2014
In this moving video, NATO Review looks inside the KGB prison where Latvians were locked up, tortured or killed. We hear how today’s leading Latvians were affected by Soviet occupation. And we ask if they see echoes in today’s Russian aggression.
The Kremlin doesn’t invent anti-European or anti-establishment ideas, it simply supports them in whatever form they exist, customising their tactics to suit each country. They’ll support the far left or the far right — in Greece they support both. Despite its economic plight, the new Greek government’s first act was not a protest against European economic policy but a protest against sanctions on Russia. Only then did it tell its European creditors that it might not pay them back.
The following section has appeared already once on BackChannels but it bears repeating and may be seen in several locations as the fray between the neo-feudal dictatorships and the democratic open societies becomes more obvious and pressing.
Red Brown Green
Red = Soviet, post-Soviet, Putinesque neo-feudal Russia.
Brown = New Nationalist Movements — an allusion to the drifts of Orban’s Hungary and a part of the mix involved in Erdogan’s Turkey.
Green = Islamofascism generally with Ayatollah Khamenei possibly the most central element in driving the form worldwide, fromDaesh in IraqtoHezbollah in Argentina.
*If ever a head of state has experienced an “Oh F***” moment, it has to be Cristina Kirchner who has found herself and her government in the glare of intense global scrutiny in the wake of the death of of Alberto Nisman. The world has gotten the sense of what would inform her motivation to have Nisman out of the way, and now — as I read the news — it appears the global “Red Brown Green” aspect of a revanch post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia (revanch for those who enjoy privilege at any cost to others, including their own greater constituencies) has become clear as well.
News from Yemen (from back in the USSR/RF) —
During the meeting, the Houthi delegation promised an array of lucrative contracts in exchange for Moscow’s recognition of the Ansarullah’s authority.
The delegation assured that the Houthis will soon take control of oil-rich Marib Province, which they say will yield billions of dollars per day.
Let’s not forget Mikhail Bogdanov’s meeting with the PFLP back in the first week of November 2014.
The abandonment of principle characterizes the geopolitical space operated by The New Gang of Bad Little Boys (and Perhaps One Girl). No doubt, however, these play hard among themselves as well, but before the press approaches internecine differences, it’s just as well to note the cooperation between “political absolutists” disregarding the ideological and state interests that would be otherwise ascribed to them. As malignant narcissists — every one of them — what they have in common is the possession and want of immense power and wealth in service to their securing boundless “narcissistic supply” — they would be in their own halls of mirrors eternally glorious — and some day to be remembered as such (or else!).
Waiting to pounce on me from my inbox this morning: “Please report that Nicolas Maduro wants to visit Ecuador to seek international support . . . .”
My correspondent alludes to a source within Ecuador’s government: ” . . . the visit will be in April or June . . . .”
Is this really such a good time — a good year even — for travel?
With a country, one cannot simply water the plants, check the faucets, lock the doors and leave, and this is not such a good time for Nicolas Maduro for doing even so little as that.
Reuters reported Tuesday, “A teenager was fatally shot at an anti-government protest in the western city of San Cristobal on Tuesday, state officials said, exacerbating tensions in Venezuela amid an economic crisis and crackdown on the political opposition.”
Kluiver Roa was 14 years old. His father was reputed to be a member of opposition party Copei. Although an arrest was made, Reuters reporters found cause to call the crime scene circumstances — what actually happened — “confusing”.
Camouflaged police smashed into the mayor’s office and carried him away . . . Mr Ledezma was on a list of people and foreign powers named by Mr Maduro last week as attempting to bring down his administration.
Reliant on mineral wealth for wealth, the “Red Brown Green” arc of power’s extension into developing South American economies may be suffering from the same malady: the west’s intent to finish off the Soviet Empire.
It has been about 25 years since the Soviet dissolved without also dissolving the “perks” of the Party privileged and all of its direct associates, including associate leadership in distant states.
Is the Party over?
It appears the power mad — political species “Narcissus communist proto-fascist” — were dependent on climbing oil revenues — the miraculous abundance of “black gold”, and all of it theirs for the taking — for sustaining and growing both the functional and symbolic elements of power within their spheres of control, from state’s military equipage to the payouts in patronage that created the “nomenklatura”, which along today’s neo-feudal path appears to be a “Newest Nobility”, now rapidly deflating while being urged toward productive development investment — including investment in human development — and (gasp!) rule of law.
Financially strangling, the politically dying may be expected to put their people in their own place first, i.e., the privileged may be counted on to make themselves the last to give up privilege.
End Games, New Games
In the Awesome Conversation on Facebook, I often remind that Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe — another old Soviet tentacle — remains in power. What he has done to Zimbabweans, including the reintroduction of cholera in relation to withholding from a rival funds for water sanitation chemicals, seems of no account: in the “one man, one vote, one time” democratic ways of much of Africa, Mugabe will celebrate turning 91 this Saturday.
As our “malignant narcissists” appear to reject criticism, eliminate rivals, and cultivate a ceaseless “narcissistic supply“, one must expect politically geological aftershocks — or revanch birth pangs — basically kicking (whether leaving the world or coming into it) from the Fall of the Soviet Union and the latest squeeze on the oxygen supply that is cold hard cash at the wellhead.
Update – February 27, 2015
The regime’s favourite charge to level at hostile politicians is plotting to overthrow the government, often in conspiracy with the United States. But it is the president, Nicolás Maduro, who is staging a coup against the last vestiges of democracy. Venezuelans call it an autogolpe, or “self-coup”.
“He is alive, as long as nations are alive and struggle for consolidating independence, justice and kindness. I have no doubt that he will come back, and along with Christ the Saviour, the heir to all saintly and perfect men, and will bring peace, justice and perfection for all.”
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