Dictators may have just two options when challenged: accept safe harbor, if available, step down, and try to appreciate (and survive) the “golden years”. (In BackChannels memory, Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf is the only General and President to have done that, and he today lives in exile — and declining health — in London; Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe has been recently removed from power by his former bodyguard, Emmerson Manangagwa — of course there’s more to that story — who may protect the old man while getting hands and head around the disaster left him by the former dictator).
The other is to suppress the revolution.
Beatings. Secret detention centers. Held without charges. Torture.
“Ghost Houses”.
“Disappeared”.
“The Fridge”.
The gangs conveyed by white Toyota pick-up trucks as depicted in the above video may be known as “Shadow Battalions”.
The ISS article suggested for any protest to bring about change in Sudan, it would have to dislodge the government’s power base in the army and security apparatus, as well as the ruling coalition and the Islamic movement.
As former vice president Ali Osman Taha has said, “the authorities have full shadow battalions ready to sacrifice their lives to defend the regime”.
Omar al-Bashir must make clear the depths of the sadism he will indulge in his quest to remain in power by intimidating all who oppose his stay.
Aside: one BackChannels source has reported the use of shotgun bird shot aimed at faces to take out eyes.
The same sadism that once served Moscow (and may again serve it) at Lubyanka Prison appears repeated in the Soviet / Post-Soviet sphere of influence. Also infamous for murder and torture: Evin Prison, Iran; Sednaya Prison, Syria.
Now we have the “Ghost Houses” of Sudan.
KHARTOUM (Reuters) – Security forces arrested 14 professors who were gathering to protest outside Khartoum University on Tuesday, witnesses said, as anti-government demonstrations neared the end of their eighth week.
The chat began with comment on the infamous Dr. Mengele and his demonic practices, but then it slipped a little sideways to talk about an inherent evil in procedures unrelated to the Nazi’s bent.
Again (again, again): the kind of power embraced by the despotic is the power to visit suffering on others with impunity and without conscience.
It may not be the procedure — e.g., abortion, sex change — that is evil but rather the removal of choice in its imposition.
Where abortion arguments are batted back and forth, the concern is not with procedure but the precedence of the “right” to choice on the mother’s part or advocacy for the fetus in its earliest phase.
Mengele and other famous sadists given the power to maim, torture, and murder with impunity do as the disturbed people they either were before their empowerment or have become as a consequence of it.
Much of this blog — perhaps all of it — has been concerned with the nature of political power in its most basic regions — “conflict, culture, language, and psychology” — and here it addresses the kind of extremist and vacuous force that gives way to wholesale theft and murder all the up the imaginable scale and beyond.
How could an ophthalmologist have created so much horror absent of conscience and shame?
Posted to YouTube by Muhammad Al Mousa on September 4, 2016.
How could the privileged and wealthy of Moscow — or Russia — have escaped the opprobrium associated with the most heinous irredeemable of war crimes?
All of a sudden, “20/20 hindsight” has become more significant than Monday morning coaching: where evil has bloomed, the good of the world may need to recover the memory of its beginning.
Assad should have “leaned west”, accommodated some political challenge from his people, and come into the modern fold. Instead, he responded to an actually mild civil challenge with the barbarous arrest and torture of young students (Darra, 2011).
Shall we simply forget how it started?
The American position appears to leave Syria a Russian client without challenge, but perhaps Washington had hoped for a more modern approach to a) accommodating political challenge and b) hunting out the al-Qaeda types that got going on the troubled landscape.
Instead, effort seems to have been put into incubating and producing ISIS, and the indiscriminate bombing that has destroyed much of Aleppo and Homs has proven similarly help to energizing the very forces Assad claims to be fighting! However, the same are the weaker forces and may be chased or surrounded and destroyed IF Damascus chooses to concentrate on just that.
Ashkar, who has been posting videos of the carnage, said Syrian troops were executing civilians on the streets, including women and children. Similar allegations have been reported by other residents to the United Nations and activists in Aleppo.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian military helicopters dropped barrels packed with explosives in the government’s latest air raids on rebel-held areas of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Saturday, killing at least 23 people, including a family trapped in a burning car, activists said.
In neighboring Lebanon, a car bomb blew up near a gas station in a Shiite town, killing at least three people, in the latest attack linked to the war in Syria.
Ahmad al-Hamoud, Vice Commander of Ahfad Hamza Battalion for Special Missions, al-Sultan al-Fatih Brigade, told VDC that many kinds of the barrel bombs used by the regime forces had been recognizable. These included:
1- Regular Russian-made Barrels. These are believed to have been used by the Russian Army in the middle of the previous century. They were brought from Russia ‘ready to use’. The regime has owned them for decades. Their weight ranges between 300 to 500 kg and they’re filled with TNT and metallic scraps. There’re extremely destructive, yet their range is more limited than that of the other kinds.
2- Medium Destruction Barrels. These are believed to be made by the regime in ‘Defense Factories’ in al-Safira, in the Valley of al-Waha. Most of the helicopters taking off from this valley dropped these barrels on the districts of Aleppo. The weight of these barrels ranges from 400 to 500 kg.
3- Highly Destructive Barrels. These are the most dangerous and destructive of all. Weighing more than 600 kg, they take many shapes like containers, cisterns and, in some cases, green rubbish containers.
Barrel bombs are improvised weapons: oil drums or similar canisters filled with explosives and metal fragments. They are dropped without guidance from helicopters hovering just above antiaircraft range, typically hitting the ground with huge explosions and the widespread diffusion of deadly shrapnel. They pulverize neighborhoods, destroy entire buildings and leave broad strips of death and destruction.
Footage has emerged showing the Syrian regime using explosive “barrel bombs” on civilian neighbourhoods, killing hundreds, while its representatives attended peace talks at Geneva.
Filmed by activists in the southern Damascus suburb of Daraya, the ten minute video is a compilation of footage showing barrels, loaded with TNT, being dropped on the neighbourhood during the week the Geneva II conference was convened.
Nongovernmental organizations researching and working in Syria, including Human Rights Watch and the Syrian Civil Defense, testified during the meeting. Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy on Syria, said in a video message that the Syrian government is responsible for the use of barrel bombs and that at the rate the weapons are being used, there won’t be any civilians left in Syria.
Government forces and pro-government militia continue to conduct widespread attacks on civilians, systematically committing murder, torture, rape and enforced disappearance as crimes against humanity. Government forces have committed gross violations of human rights and the war crimes of murder, hostage-taking, torture, rape and sexual violence, recruiting and using children in hostilities and targeting civilians in sniper attacks. Government forces disregarded the special protection accorded to hospitals, medical and humanitarian personnel and cultural property. Aleppo was subjected to a campaign of barrel bombing that targeted entire areas and spread terror among civilians. Government forces used incendiary weapons, causing superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering, in violation of international humanitarian law. Indiscriminate and disproportionate aerial bombardment and shelling caused large-scale arbitrary displacement. Government forces and pro-government militia perpetrated massacres.
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Report of the independent international commission of inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic.” Human Rights Council, 25th Session, Agenda Item 4, February 12, 2014.
While the Assad opposition masks off its own excesses, and, as always in the Islamic Small Wars, it’s hard “seeing” who is fighting exactly for what and how they’re doing it, warrior band by band, and sometimes person by person, there are no doubts as regards the smashing of large business, education, religious, and residential areas packed with noncombatant Syrians.
As Syrian Muslim and Jewish relationships develop — a perhaps “unheard of” now heard of — and Syrian anti-Semitism and anti-westernism comes more into focus as one impediment among several to western intercession, the scales may tip in the direction of the cosmopolitan and modern and therefore away from the medieval worldview that forms the basis for the despotism displayed by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei on the Shiite axis and al-Nusra and ISIS and others on the Sunni complement that serves the former as foils for the cooked up theatrical “Assad vs The Terrorists”.
In Syria, the center could not hold and the rough beast rose to savage the land.
I spoke last Wednesday night at Brooklyn College, if you can still call it that. Every seat was filled – 80 percent by Muslim students. If this is the future, it is murder. The sneers, the jeers, the laughter – my discussion of the most savage jihad acts was met with huge peals of laughter. It wasn’t a talk; it was a vicious circus: lawless and shameful.
From the moment I began to speak, the Muslim students were cackling and catcalling with Jew-hating remarks and jeers.
Last fall, The New York Times referred to ISIS as a “cult of sadism” (October 2, 2014), noting of the center of ISIS power in Iraq and Syria, “In this confused and complex landscape, the Islamic State seems a model of remorseless clarity. We have not seen the last of its horrors.”
Recommended for insightful reading in the psychology involved: any of the works of Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin.
BackChannels got its start elsewhere with comments on the 2006-7 assault by al-Shabaab on Somali, and its author then noted its caprice in dealing death to Muslims. The al-Qaeda-type group appeared then to have the conscience of an earthquake or typhoon, both mindless forces of nature, which is to say it appeared to have no conscience at all. After seven years, the only change marked by Daesh appears to be the amplified scale of the firepower, the general warfare, and the vacuous horror visited on those whose bodies, minds, and souls it destroys.
While al-Qaeda was once the most barbaric terror group in the world, that dubious label now goes to ISIS.
I know this piece is all over the map . . . but what fresh observation from media is wanted?
From the documentary filmmaker mentioned in the above article, Itai Anghel:
Posted to YouTube 1/18/2015.
Addendum
From the Awesome Conversation, one friend asked in reference to this piece, “Where are America’s most prominent feminists? The Naomi Wolf, Rachel Maddow, Amy Goodman? sadly many are Jewish.”
BackChannels would suggest that some mouths have been trained in a certain political aesthetics: what is “cool”. Some people will stick with “what was cool” even while time wraps layers of change around them, and they become like amber, old, shiny, and fixed.
The developed empathy that drove a humanist liberalism would do well to confront new challenges. The Jewish community, conservative and liberal, will always address abuse, disconcern, neglect in the promotion of human dignity and human rights, but it may need to update now and then its assessments of the ambitions of its fellow travelers.
. . . Shole Pakravan, said Wednesday morning that her daughter has heard nothing about the execution and is being pressured to sign a document that denies there was any attempt at rape and that there was no third party present at the time of the alleged murder.
As if more proof were needed of Ayatollah Khamenei’s ______ (you fill it it in — the writer’s tired), the entire world has now the spectacle of this smiley old white haired fella torturing a young woman not only by denying her an inherent right to an authoritative, honest, fair, just, and open — and openly audited — trial before the Iranian public but by degrading and humiliating her all the way to the gallows — or freedom, God willing.
Reyhaneh Jabbari’s first lawyer, Mohammad Mostafaei, had apparently made it clear that Jabbari’s death sentence was signed by the courts even after the evidence had been destroyed or went “missing.” Possibly those who signed her death sentence in the Islamic Republic of Iran are not even sure of Jabbari’s guilt themselves, or could be just trying to blame her for the murder, regardless.
The government announced that the execution will be postponed but did not give any indication the sentence had been overturned. It also did not disclose if any future execution date had been set.
Jabbari, who has already served seven years in prison, claims Sarbandi drugged her and attempted to have physical contact with her.
Modafe website 31 Aug 2010 News Report- (Human right Lawyer Mr Mostafaei’s Official site)
Reyhaneh Jabbari is a girl from Iran. She is now 22 years old and has been in Tehran’s Evin prison where the last Wednesday of every month a number of prisoners are hanging. She has spent the best years of her life in the prison and she will. Maybe some other days of her life have left.
Proposed film title: “Iranimania II: Death Cult Hanging Orgy!”
Each of the above reports, published in 2009, 2011, and 2014, comments on the acceleration of the rate of hangings by the Iranian regime: more arrests, more “trials”, more hangings, never fewer, often if not predominantly similarly unjust — and when a hanging is “unjust” it is only a common act of murder.
It is not that they accuse us of lying, they now say, or failing in our duty; it is that describing their experiences only seems to make things worse.
Gradually, I have come to realise there may be some truth in that. In 1940, during the London Blitz, the poet Louis MacNeice noticed the same curiosity, that awareness of others’ fate seemed to make people less rather than more empathetic: “…with doom tumbling from the sky/ Each of us has an alibi/ For doing nothing – Let him die.” The plethora of news distances us from the disaster unfolding: “Let him die, his death will be/ A drop of water in the sea/ A journalist’s commodity.”
The crossing itself, one of the few between Syria and Turkey that are still functional, remained in the hands of the more moderate Free Syrian Army on Wednesday night, despite reports that Islamic State was mounting an offensive to take it.
Abeheaded little girl, a part of the reference here also earlier this afternoon, a victim denoted Christian, a perpetrator denoted “ISIL” — “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”.
Israeli scholar Phillippe Assouline, among my acquaintance on the social networks, asked in relation to this latest image of decapitation making the rounds, “Can we sit by and watch our enemies murder non enemies for their religion?? Is that not what happened to us? There is a budding genocide of Christians going on…”
War-related events in Syria have gone way beyond “blast and battle” and “NATO rounds” and the known suite of “insurgent methods”, as ugly as all those things may be: the “war” has slipped over into unadulterated and numbing barbarity.
One could list quite a few historic moments of complete cultural degradation, but that would be too easy.
Instead, I think I will close this post with an obituary from yesterday’s Boston Herald: Holocaust survivor, top German lit critic dies | Boston Herald. It seems to me as relevant a remark to make about the latest in barbarism associated with the too familiar clowns parading today, perhaps, in Azaz, Syria.
BBC News – ISIS seizure of Syria’s Azaz exposes rebel rifts 9/19/2013: “As a measure of the grip the jihadis have in Azaz, one eyewitness inside the town said no-one was smoking on the streets – tobacco is forbidden according to strict Islamist doctrine.”
BackChannels 