No more clear an example of #MedievalVModern may appear than the war that has broken out between #Hamas and #Israel. For Hamas, only the weapons are modern. The motivations have been deeply medieval, well rooted in directed misperception, i.e., disinformation, fabrications, lies promoted and sustained by edict and enforced by unquestionable and vicious authority. In essence-this on the Gaza Strip-the #Palestinians have been perceptually controlled by their own “leaders”, and they are now bound to be driven to destruction by them too.

For possibly most of the public, the story may be that Israeli settlers went wilding in Gaza and Gazans fought back, e.g., https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/6/palestinian-killed-as-israeli-settlers-attack-west-bank-town-of-huwara, but what has rolled out in the past day appears a full-scale Hamas battle plan, one with infiltrated shock troops and rockets (more than 2000 of them so far). In first fast response, BackChannels has forwarded through X background on #Russian antisemitism-https://conflict-backchannels.com/2021/02/01/ftac-endemic-russian-anti-semitism-a-note/-and #Russia’s related handling of the #Palestinians: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2023/04/22/ftac-moscow-suffocates-the-palestinians/; https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/12/29/ftac-middle-east-conflict-back-to-max-erwin-von-scheubner-richter-and-forward-to-the-plundering-of-palestinian-misery-by-palestinian-leadership-elites/. The behavior of those who would call themselves #Rus (and bridle at the hash term #RusNazis) appears just as barbaric and vicious as it must have in the 10th Century when the same displaced the last Khazar outpost.

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Sviatoslav finally succeeded in destroying Khazar imperial power in the 960s. The Khazar fortresses of Sarkel and Tamatarkha fell to the Rus in 965, with the capital city of Atil following circa 967 or 969. A visitor to Atil wrote soon after the sacking of the city: “The Rus attacked, and no grape or raisin remained, not a leaf on a branch.”

http://mirror2.polsri.ac.id/wiki/wp/k/Khazars.htm (see “Addendum, June 19, 2023” on BackChannels for related data).

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Today’s Khazarian and Rus descendants and others who have come to define Ukraine’s cultural, ethnic, and tribal endowments in total have become #ModernPeople, overwhelmingly lawful, fair and just, and peaceful in business and in general comportment while the most corrupt of persistent medieval thugs, Viktor Yanukovych, had been booted back to Moscow by general popular revolution, e.g., https://world.time.com/2014/02/22/ukraines-president-flees-protestors-capture-kiev/ and with the moral support of Ukraine’s army.

Hamas X Russian Political Absolutism, Barbarism, and Mafia

While Russia professes good will daily through its X-platformed embassy sites, its claims inevitably belie its own horrendous evil in the realms of chaos and mass destruction. The at-hand BackChannels references: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2023/06/28/a-dark-mirror-in-language/. For those most evil, language may be perverted to cover crime in the present and humiliation in the past as the rogue malign narcissistic psychology fashions strategies in language to match.

For the adverse personal and political psychology in play: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/10/malignant-narcissistic-process-distilled/; https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/anthropolitical-psychology/paranoid-delusional-narcissistic-reflection-of-motivation/.

Whatever Russia and the entities within its sphere of Soviet/post-Soviet Era influence may say of their enemies, it’s certain that they are describing themselves and their own ethical, moral, and spiritual bankruptcy. Their leaderships prove predictably corrupt and (out of necessity) dishonest and repressive. As a collection of #MaligNarcs, none–from #Assad in Syria to the #Taliban in Afghanistan–can bear critics or rivals anywhere close to home, and all have made their bones on atrocity, brutality, and mass murder. In yet another BackChannels package-https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/19/detecting-post-soviet-russias-black-narrative-of-revenge-for-89-and-91/-waits this gem: https://www.businessinsider.com/exploring-al-qaedas-murky-connection-to-russian-intelligence-2014-6.

#Putin, #TsarNobody in my #Zelensky-inspired desktop world, has with his KGB/FSB cohort proven immune to inconveniences posed by conscience (note: I’ve made a trope of “delusional, grandiose, and messianic ideation with an absence of normal boundaries, conscience, and limits” as shorthand for Narcissistic Personality Disorder and the political expression of the same beneath the label of “Malignant Narcissism”). For perhaps the most horrifying example of Putinesque stage management and perceptual control: #OperationStormInMoscow AKA #MoscowApartmentBombings, and here-https://conflict-backchannels.com/2023/05/03/reference-journalist-alexander-zhilin-operation-storm-in-moscow-aka-moscow-apartment-bombings/.

When it comes to bombing apartment buildings in the dead of night, none have done it better than #MadVlad who today threatens nuclear annihilation using the same methods in language inversion and psychological project to blackmail the west into the abandonment of Ukraine. And that’s “above the table”, i.e., in plain sight.

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The speech came after hardline political scientists and commentators in Russia said a return to nuclear testing could send a powerful message to Moscow’s enemies in the west. “I hear calls to start testing nuclear weapons, to return to testing,” Putin said.

Some in Russia have called for Putin to detonate a nuclear bomb to show the west that Moscow’s patience over its support for Ukraine and apparent unwillingness to negotiate is wearing thin.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/05/vladimir-putin-escalates-nuclear-rhetoric-with-threat-to-resume-testing

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Hamas has long found a sympathetic (or sympathetic-acting) presence in Mikhail Bogdanov, Moscow’s envoy to the Middle East. While it has been an independent actor, it appears to have also long-ingested the former communist state’s anti-Semitic rants and emphatic absolutism while holding itself n place with methods familiar to all dictatorships (for overview: https://freedomhouse.org/country/gaza-strip/freedom-world/2023).

Much has been written about the #RussianMafiaState. For quick reference->

Mustaffa, Munira. “Russia: The mafia as the state.” The Interpreter, August 31, 2023.

Rachman, Gideon. “Putin, Trump and the meaning of a mafia state.” Financial Times, August 28, 2023.

Wikipedia. “Mafia State”.

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Israel has been hampered in its assistance to Ukraine by a deconfliction arrangement with Russia over Syrian airspace (e.g., https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/russia-sees-military-coordination-with-israel-syria-continuing-2022-02-26/). Nonetheless, The Jewish State has arrived today with biblical, global, and modern histories. In Israel it has a homeland; around the world, it contains communities of all races and cultural strands bound together by Judaism, its Torah, and Jewish experience and lore across thousands of years; and it has so contributed to the ideas of the west that the entire political culture may refer to itself as “Judeo-Christian” as well as “Greco-Roman”. The barbarians from European North and Asian East have in Russia chosen to remain defined by whatever fear they may install in others and then tribute exact or steal in wealth. That’s what they did in the Byzantine and Medieval Eras, and that is what they are doing now.

In the Middle East, the Palestinians have served Russia as a block and goad to the west and the burgeoning and vibrant cultures associated with the democratic open societies of the world whose freedoms may be well symbolized by Israel’s vitality.

In Eastern Europe, Ukraine by revolution, election, and today war has in every possible way become part of the west, leaving Russia to attempt its capture and subjection or destruction even while “Muscovy” dies or destroys itself for its own archaic and deeply displaced, misguided, and perverse ambitions.

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Also related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2021/07/26/ftac-palestinian-kgb-the-palestinians-abused-and-plundered-by-their-own/.

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Related Reading

Kellogg, Michael. The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Emigres and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Politkovskaya, Anna. A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Nekrasov, Andrey. Director. Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File AKA The Murder of Litvinenko.

Wikipedia. “Russian Imperial Movement”.

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