Tag Archives: Soviet / post-Soviet politics

Excerpt: _Stasiland_: How That Life Goes On

11 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics

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Guardian first book award 2003 – online: MacDonogh, Giles.  “The spy’s the limit.”  The Guardian, June 7, 2003.

He tells me he worked from 1961 to 1990 at the ministry of Potsdam, exclusively in counter-espionage.  He picks up the thesis and reads its title:

The Work of the Ministry for State Security on the Defence Against Intelligence Infiltration by the Secret Services of the NATO States against the GDR.  Presented from the Viewpoint of a Member of the Division for Counter-Espionage, Regional Administration, Potsdam.

‘This is a discussion paper I wrote based on my work at the ministry.  If you read this, you will learn a lot of what you want to know.’

I flick to the front page, and see that the paper was written in 1994 for the ‘Potsdam Working Group of the Insiderkomitee for the Reexamination of the History of the Ministry for State Security, Inc.’

— In BackChannels experience of the eternal present online (and in the library), herewith a gush —

Author Anna Funder has put together a delightfully cringey-queasy how-it-was  — Stasiland, Harper Perennial; Reprint edition, 2011(German Edition, 2006; first published in 2002 as suggested above)  — on the German Democratic Republic (GDR, 1949-1990), and along with remembrance of assorted adventures and certain manners and methods in suffering comes this eyebrow-raiser.

Insiderkomitee?

1994?

“‘ . . . we have changed our name to the ‘Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and the Dignity of Man’.”

Okay, then.

Here’s a chill —

Funder-commentary

Moore, Nicole and Christina Spittel.  Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic: Reading through the Iron Curtain.  Pp. 224-225.  London & New York: Anthem Press, 2016

Link to the above on Google Books.

For corroboration here in the open source, another writer, Gary Bruce, has made mention of the same ghost:

The organization of former Stasi officers known as the Insider-Komitee, whose self-styled objective is to restore “balance” to the current literature on the Stasi by writing “objective” history of the Ministry for State Security, assisted me in locating an important Stasi officer for interview.

Bruce, Gary.  The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi. P. 33.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.  Link: Google Books.

As resources appear fairly wide open to the curious on the web, BackChannels will wrap up the gawking now that it has stumbled across the tracks of at least a few others, and including those of the author her brave self, for she acknowledges, “My great mistake was to imagine that the stories of resistance, courage and decency would be well received by Germans” — for who would show up at the launching of Stasiland in the ballroom “of the former Stasi Offices in Leipzig”?

The first two rows of seats were filled with ex-Stasi (or perhaps ex-Party) men. I know this because they were in the ex-Stasi (or ex-Party) uniform, which consists of polyester trousers with a nice firm crease, a bomber jacket and a significant amount of Brylcreem. They were sitting in their former ballroom, legs splayed, arms crossed, looking daggers at us.

Funder, Anna.  “Sound of silence.”  TLS, October 12, 2016.

The same crew would later make a show of walking out on the event.

An observation higher up in the above cited piece precedes the willies and seems more worth remembering:

When I encountered Miriam, Julia, Frau Paul and Klaus Renft, what they told me was deeply thrilling. Not only in the sense of the bravery it took to climb the Berlin Wall or dig an underground tunnel or defy a governmental declaration that you “no longer exist”. The thrill was more fundamental. I felt I was witnessing, alive and breathing and drinking coffee opposite me, heroic human decency.

Referenced and Related on the Web

Betts, Paul.  “Socialism, Social Rights, and Human Rights: The Case of East Germany.”  Humanity Journal, June 11, 2014.

MacDonogh, Giles.  “The spy’s the limit.”  The Guardian, June 7, 2003.

The GDR was a furtive and insidious tyranny. Through the Stasi it pried into every aspect of your life. It possessed armies of spies, paid and unpaid. Some estimates run as high as one for every six and a half members of the population. Any attempt to achieve success in East Germany involved a pact with the devil – you paid with your soul if you wanted to attend a university, enter a sports-club, become a lawyer or a clergyman or marry a foreigner – like Funder’s friend Julia. You could only avoid contact with the regime if you opted out, and went into “inner emigration” – not an option for the ambitious.

This was a regime ruled by dour old men – Marxisten-Senilisten.

Wikipedia.  “Stasiland” (bold added to excerpt):

Stasiland has been published in sixty nine countries and translated into a dozen languages. It was shortlisted for many awards in the UK and Australia, among them the Age Book of the Year Awards, the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, the Guardian First Book Award 2003, the South Australian Festival Awards for Literature (Innovation in Writing) 2004, the Index Freedom of Expression Awards 2004, and the W.H. Heinemann Award 2004. In June 2004 it was awarded the world’s biggest prize for non-fiction, the Samuel Johnson Prize.

–33–

Statement Regarding a “Military Parade”

08 Thursday Feb 2018

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

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 American holidays and strong community interaction with the military honor the military. Related concerts and parades are today legend for binding the nation into a coherent and cohesive entity worth defense and worthy of respect all around.

There are ancillaries in air shows and show components, e.g., Blue Angels, in other events.

The parading of missiles and tanks has been for most who produce that spectacle a boast and a threat associated with lesser power, not greater.

The Vietnam generation of military cannot be compensated nor, perhaps, repaired adequately, but all have been permanently honored, memorialized, remembered on the Mall and beyond that in America’s communities. If and where long-term disservice has been done, perhaps that conversation is the one that should be led by an American President.

“A Needle in the Rain”


(c)1996 J. S. Oppenheim & DRB Productions

Brief History Lesson Regarding the Vietnam Era and the Present

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

Hey, old college kids, remember the fatigue jackets, the grass, the Mobilization on the Mall, and the whole trippy deep ecology and far out peace thing?

Know that the Soviet Union invested $1 billion in the environmental and peace movements of the day (perhaps labor was already under way), and it got its money’s worth in the sabotaging of domestic will for that war.  It would also come to lose influence with the hip when it demonstrated its true methods in “realpolitik” as it drove tanks into the Soviet satellite states that it had completely demoralized with its own narcissistic claptrap and thuggery.

I was young at the time — the last of the babies of the baby boomers — and on the draft rolls only briefly before our troops were brought home.

The “Active Measures” part of the Vietnam War is active today on Moscow’s part: disinformation, election meddling, war by proxy in support of kleptocratic dictatorships.  If you approve of such methods and ends — much including the ownership of other humans as mere property and as well demonstrated by Moscow-aligned Bashar al-Assad and Iranian Grand Ayatollah Ali (“Hang ‘Em High”) Khamenei — do nothing, say nothing.  If that’s not the world in which you wish the next generations to live, look back, get caught up on Orwell — or Hitchens on Orwell — for a start — and look forward to engaging in this now really different kind of war.

BackChannels reminds: Putin appears to have bombed Moscow apartments with interest in blaming Chechen rebels for the deeds (“false-flag operations”) and then gone on to brutalize Chechen villages into pushing their men into the ranks of experienced and ready Chechen rebels.

Big Deal

https://youtu.be/4MeV0E6Ibyk

The Soviet Union dissolved in bankruptcy with official finality on December 25, 1991.

The moment had a backstory, one well worth the reading.

The west may have been too quick to believe Russia would then evolve into a capitalist democracy, free and vibrant.  Instead, and much as scholar Karen Dawisha has unearthed, it became by design an elitist’s kleptocracy and one that now apparently revolves around its own “Vertical of Power”.

BackChannels believes the strong have cause to celebrate through national holidays and shared American events, but it is the weak that needs must put their muscle on display in parades.

The strong?

End Note

When one works a few ideas around to a compressed or distilled state, one hates to lose them in cascades of commentary published through the social networks.  Blogging helps preserve such thoughts and keep them available via keyword searches.  This passage comes from an earlier take on the same theme:

With President Trump, the American public faces three deep challenges:

1) how do deal with disinformation in the long term — “Active Measures” from Russia’s machinery, deflection and related strategies involving information and (“Fake News!”) rhetoric;

2) how to resist our own deepening divisions to return to quintessential American ideals, principles, and values, starting with the valuing of integrity in business and government and consequent distaste for corruption; 

3) how to address enemies that have found ways to blend and practice war indirectly, not only by proxy but with “frozen conflicts” aiding the movement of arms and narcotics worldwide and ability to deeply manipulate terrorism (e.g., see “Moscow Apartment Bombings”; read Anna Politkovskaya’s observations on the brutalizing of Chechen villages).

We may be in a little bit of trouble because the Cold War didn’t end quite where we thought it had and not much has prepared EU / NATO constituencies for its apparent phantoms and their still medieval political ambitions and views.

–33–

FTAC: +70 Years of Palestinian and Israeli Coexistence: A Comment

25 Thursday Jan 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia

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It has happened: the refugees of 1948; the KGB-designed Arafat and PLO and associated Abbas; and Hamas, held to account for rocket fire from Gaza: all — whatever has been the mix — have coexisted with Israel for 70 years.

If not happily, there’s a story there that goes back to the WWII and the character of the Soviet Union then and comes forward to that of the Russian Federation today. Absolute power, corruption on the part of the powerful, the deceptive and disingenuous use of language — such have been the variables that have sustained Palestinian hardship and an angry coexistence with the Jewish neighbor from near the ruins of Ottoman power and Nazi adventure in the middle east. When the phantoms of the Soviet wake up and then decide to go back to sleep forever, then the coexistence will become peaceful, pleasant, productive, rewarding.

I don’t know if there’s a fairy tail ending with “peace and prosperity” for all, but I feel the burden and weight of the “Nakba” should be rightly assigned to the post-WWII role taken up by an historically autocratic, authoritarian, elitist Russia having difficulty shaking off its attachments to “political absolutism” and related egotism, narcissism, and hypersensitivity to civilizational self-concept and image.

Of course Moscow means to look noble and powerful before the world.

Well, here it has its chance to stop covering its yesterdays, which may include immediately two major revolutions and the weathering of three governments within the past 100 years, and shrug away the chaos and dishonesty that have brought a mess to Syria, hardship to Ukraine, and continuous meaningless and needless suffering to the Palestinian main base.  BackChannels may well see in its crystal ball — why else publish such a blog?  🙂 — the difficulty of transitioning patronage and power away from corrupt elites in the effort to better and honestly serve the interests of an abused and disenfranchised once refugee population, but where else to go?  Let the political criminals and gamblers settle up, reinvest, and move on to the challenges posed by genuinely noble causes and enterprises.

–33–

Dangerous History: Russia Slides Backward: A Note on Yuri Dmitriev and Moscow’s Return to Politically Directed “Punitive Psychiatry”

11 Thursday Jan 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Free Speech, Journalism, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology, Russia

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Dmitriev2007ByMediafond-522x

Yuri Dmitriev by Mediafond (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.

ManuPsy-1974-App-VI-524

Bukovsky, Vladimir and Semyon Gluzman.  A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissenters. (URL is to PDF). 1974.

The BackChannels editor has to wear “readers” too, but to spare some squinting here’s the most critical pull from the small print in the above image:

Dissenters, as a rule, have enough legal grounding so as not to make mistakes during their investigation and trial, but when confronted by a qualified psychiatrist with a directive from above to have them declared non-responsible, they have found themselves absolutely powerless.

Kafka comes to mind.

So does Milan Kundera’s famous statement: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

President Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship has chosen for Russians the erasure of their memory and gone after the culturally healing human rights organization Memorial.

While Yuri Dimitriev’s dark adventure into Putin’s Hell gains traction in the western human rights community, another Memorial notable has been apparently framed (here relayed in shortest form):

Oyub Titiev

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/01/russia-rights-defender-arbitrarily-arrested-in-chechnya/ – 1/11/2018
–
https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2018/01/276951.htm – 1/11/2018
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/10/chechnya-under-fire-after-human-rights-activist-held-for-drugs-possession – 1/10/2018

BackChannels wishes not to dilute the singular and stunning insult to the world that is the “Dmitriev Affair”, but it’s evident the Phantom of the Soviet has in mind the planting and rooting of Old Totalitarian Poison even with the world’s entire New Intelligentsia taking notice.

A Loose Note on Related Poli-Psy

Expressed as a personal trope: “Absolute Power” becomes inevitably the power to visit suffering on others with impunity.

Expressed as a personal trope: according to Richard Pipes (and now I shall have to relocate the reference), as the power of the Mongols receded, Russian princes had nonetheless internalized the idea that property and person could be (and should be) treated as the same thing, and proof of sovereignty was to be found in the permit to destroy either at will and without consequence.

For the malignant among narcissists, it would seem the suffering of another should have no consequence other than to affirm the power of the narcissist’s own blind will.  All the techniques of theater — for controlling family, if small; for controlling nations, if large — may apply to the artifice of presenting “reality” with the intention of framing and creating popular — and a neither too bright nor curious nor politically empowered — perception.

Reference Related to Yuri Dmitriev

ABC News.  “Fears Russian historian who exposed Stalin’s crimes may be falsely declared insane.”  January 10, 2018:

Some of Russia’s leading cultural figures say Mr Dmitriev was framed because his focus on Stalin’s crimes — he found a mass grave with up to 9,000 bodies dating from the Soviet dictator’s Great Terror in the 1930s — conflicts with the latter-day Kremlin narrative that Russia must not be ashamed of its past.

The narrative has taken on added importance ahead of a March presidential election, with polls showing incumbent Vladimir Putin, who uses his country’s World War II victory when Stalin was in charge to bolster national pride, is on track to win.

Mr Putin asserted last year that what he called an “excessive demonisation of Stalin” was being used to undermine Russia.

Activatica.  “The Arrest of Karelian ‘Memorial” Head Yuri Dmitriev: What is Known.”  March 22, 2017:

In general, the situation in Karelia is complex. On one hand, Karelia is a region where many exiles are left, the whole region was filled with camps and exiles, and the memory of this is alive at the personal level. And the authorities of Karelia have, for a rather long time, supported the activities of “Memorial” and various structures for perpetuating memory. When Dmitriev discovered the Sandarmokh burial site, the Karelian authorities cooperated and held a contest to landscape this place. But at the same time, there were efforts to conceal and obstruct the receipt of information on the side of the secret services. They also tried to pressure Dmitriev six years ago. On one side the authorities helped, but on the other side, some power structures interfered. And in the past couple years, pressure on Dmitriev has intensified, as an independent historian.

Ayres, Sabra.  “An outspoken research of Stalin’s crimes fights for his own fate and freedom in Russia.”  Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2017:

A small clearing in a dense northwestern Russian forest marks the site where, 20 years ago, Yuri Dmitriev discovered a group of mass graves containing victims of Josef Stalin’s Great Terror.

Using detailed documents uncovered in KGB archives, Dmitriev was able to piece together the location where Stalin’s execution squads killed and buried more than 9,500 people from 1937 to 1938. The documents contained the dates and names of those killed, as well as the executioners’ names. During the next two decades, Dmitriev worked meticulously to document every victim’s story.

Bukovsky, Vladimir.  “Punitive Psychiatry (1977).”  The Bukovsky Archives.  Vladimir Bukovsky’s foreward to Russia’s political hospitals (1977) by Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway.

Luhn, Alec.  “Gulag grave hunter unearths uncomfortable truths in Russia.”  The Guardian, August 3, 2017:

“For our government to become … accountable, we need to educate the people,” Dmitriyev said of his efforts to uncover details of Soviet repression.

But not everyone wants to remember this forgotten history, especially amid Russia’s current patriotic fervour. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said in June that “excessive demonisation” of Stalin has been a “means of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia”, and several branches of Memorial have been declared “foreign agents” in recent years.

U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Russia.  “U.S. Mission to Russia Concerned with Charges Against Yury Dmitriev.”  May 31, 2017:

The U.S. Mission to Russia is concerned by what appear to be politically-motivated criminal charges against prominent human rights activist and historian Yury Dmitriev. Mr. Dmitriev is a respected historian whose work has been instrumental in uncovering mass burial sites and founding the Sandarmokh Memorial Complex in Karelia. We call on Russia to transparently uphold the rule of law and respect human rights and fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We also call on Russia to respect its international human rights obligations, including those related to the prohibition on arbitrary arrest or detention and respect for fair trial guarantees.

Osborn, Andrew.  “Russian historian who exposed Stalin’s crimes faces enforced psychiatric testing.”  Reuters, January 9, 2018:

A previous psychiatric evaluation declared him to be of sound mind and a court-sanctioned expert group found no pornographic content in nine photographs of his daughter that are at the center of the case against him, overturning the earlier findings of other experts commissioned by prosecutors.

Yarovaya, Anna.  “The Yuri Dmitriev Affair”.  The Independent Barents Observer.  March 11, 2017:

What always struck me about Dmitriev was his enthusiasm, which materialized less in the help he gave me and more in his attitude to history, to events that had occurred many years ago. For example, in the same cemetery where I shot the film, he found the remains of a POW. None of the local authorities was in a hurry to bury the exhumed “youth,” as Dmitriev called him. So Dmitriev put the bones in his garage. A while later, he secured a spot in Peski Cemetery, found a sponsor to help him buy a gravestone, and asked the philologist Valentina Dvinskaya to translate the phrase “To the victims of war, disappeared but not forgotten” into German so that it could be engraved on the headstone. He did all this for an unknown man who had been killed over sixty years ago.

It was only later I realized that Yuri Dmitriev was the same Yuri Dmitriev who had founded the Sandarmokh Memorial Cemetery, who was involved in investigating the Krasny Bor Forest NKVD execution site in Karelia, who had catalogued over 13,000 names of victims of the Great Terror of 1937–1938 in Karelia and published them in The Book of Remembrance, which runs to thousands of pages.

Wikipedia.  “Memorial”.

The Dmitriev Affair (Website)

–33–

FTAC: “Oh, Jerusalem” and Islam’s New Divide

07 Thursday Dec 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Psychology, Politics

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The prompt was the familiar — too familiar — and now cliche threat: the whole Muslims world will now unify against the “Little” and “Great” Satan that would be Israel and the United States were it not that Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran have consistently and with enthusiasm proven themselves cruel and evil to the Believers fervent or moderate:

Unless directed by Moscow — the PLO was once its projects; Hezbollah and Hamas remain its clients; Assad and Khamenei remain its fellows in dictatorship — the “Jerusalem Move” may well divide Islam.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/islam-supports-israels-right-of-existence/

The “Palestinian Cause” isn’t what it was when cobbled together by the Soviet Union and pressed into the minds of the unknowing or leaders venal enough to inspire jealousy and leverage it into greater power for themselves — and what sadistic and tyrannical selves they proved to be.

The Palestinian popular charges of corruption leveled at Mahmoud Abbas and the Hamas leadership as well — and their reputations for growing wealthy off funding intended for Palestinian development — may also turn support away from old Soviet Moscow’s pernicious designs. (Note: the Soviet Union will have been dissolved 26 years this coming December 25).

Referenced

Dahri, Noor.  “Islam Supports Israel’s Right of Existence.”  Times of Israel, October 16, 2016.

For Noor Dahri and other devout Muslims knowledgeable in the interpretation of the Qur’an, the “Jerusalem Decision” may call for choosing between Moscow’s tired incitements and manipulations of the Muslim community and a renewed message in scripture.

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/ 

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

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/28/a-short-page-referencing-works-by-or-associated-with-ion-mihai-pacepa/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

 

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftac-antidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/

On Palestinian Corruption

Eldar, Shlomi.  “Palestinian journalists frustrated with inability to cover PA corruption.”  Al-Monitor, January 12, 2017:

No journalists in Gaza — no matter how senior — would even think of criticizing the leaders of Hamas, and in the Palestinian Authority (PA), criticism of any kind against President Mahmoud Abbas, or exposure of corruption in the PA, could result in the journalist’s arrest.

“We all known there’s terrible corruption in the PA,” a senior veteran journalist from Ramallah, the seat of the PA in the West Bank, told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “We know hundreds of stories about senior PA officials and about Abbas’ sons, but we can’t publish them or even talk openly about them.”

 

Laub, Karin and Mohammed Daraghmeh.  “In tough times, most Palestinians view government as corrupt.”  AP, May 24, 2016:

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — A gated community of villas with well-tended flower gardens near the West Bank town of Ramallah may help explain why Palestinians almost universally believe there is corruption in the government of President Mahmoud Abbas.

The secluded “Diplomatic Compound,” built for senior Palestinian Authority officials on subsidized land, is one of the symbols of what many Palestinians think is wrong with their leaders — that they are cut off from the people and award themselves special privileges.

Menenberg, Aaron.  “Terrorists & Kleptocrats: How Corruption is Eating the Palestinians Alive.”  The Tower, June 2014.

The Tower.  “New Survey: 96% of Palestinians Believe Palestinian Authority is Corrupt.”  May 24, 2016.

Toameh, Khaled Abu.  “Palestinians: ‘The Mafia of Destruction’.”  Gatestone Institute, September 21, 2016.

FTAC Addendum

I think there’s more to the story as Moscow and Tehran crowd Israel with military presence beyond Hezbollah alone.   In essence, te Cold War’s tension is back in place, and this time — and at this time — it appears the United States has chosen to assert western power with a move certain to be opposed but with uncertain cohesion in the Russo-Arab and Russo-Iranian spheres of control and influence. What Washington may have just done with Jerusalem stands counter to Moscow’s assertions of power in Syria and Ukraine. We have more or less planted a flag forward and now will see some return from the Russo-Iranian axis.

–33–

Also in Media: “Western Worries About Russian Disinformation ‘Just Fits of Hysterics'” | Hungarian Spectrum | November 15, 2017

16 Thursday Nov 2017

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

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Of course the title of the Hungarian Spectrum article is ironic, not dismissive.

Moscow’s manipulation of “Information Space” beyond its boundaries is serious stuff, and the American public and other western democratic constituencies need to know it down to and through their grassroots.

Good examples of Russian manipulation can be seen in the Catalonian independence referendum and Brexit. Spanish Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis announced that his government had confirmed that a propaganda campaign intended to destabilize Spain came from Russia and Venezuela. They used Twitter, Facebook, and other internet sites to publicize the separatist cause and swing public opinion to support it.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh identified 419 accounts operating from the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) that attempted to influence British politics. Russian hackers also spread anti-Islamic sentiments in Great Britain after the recent terrorist attacks. According to The Guardian, hundreds of paid bloggers work around the clock at IRA “to flood Russian internet forums, social networks and the comments sections of western publications—sowing disinformation, praising the country’s president, Vladimir Putin, and raging at the west.” On Monday Theresa May addressed the issue in a speech, saying that Russia’s actions were “threatening the international order on which we all depend.”

http://hungarianspectrum.org/2017/11/15/western-worries-about-russian-disinformation-just-fits-of-hysterics/

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/10/01/the-active-measures-links-page/ – a short and goofy primer that probably should have a more formal twin.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/10/23/fake-news-genuine-fake-news-the-real-fake-news-get-your-fake-news-here/ – American mainstream journalism is “high-integrity professional” by design and training.  BackChannels believes it has been an authoritarian ruse with some P. T. Barnum thrown in to sell alienated or struggling white Americans (for the most part) on the distrust of the mainstream (NOT “lamestream”) media.

Reliable, verifiable, and trusted news — “clear, accurate, and complete” — forms the very foundation of public impression and related decisionmaking, and to smear the entire industry bids only for absolute and tyrannical power.  Around the world, however, what governments may withhold as secret from the press may not be known, or easily known, and from that comes a contest in democracies between governments and Real Press for general constituent and voter confidence in their elected government.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/ — Moscow’s Game.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/23/moscows-rules-a-module/ – a good natured primer on the world’s most cynical political regime.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/ – a backgrounder in the form of a bibliography listing the most accessible and enjoyable volumes on Cold War history and related political mafia and disinformation (and much else).  Highly recommended: Disinformation by Pacepa and Rychlak and the Agnia Grigas work on Crimea.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/28/a-short-page-referencing-works-by-or-associated-with-ion-mihai-pacepa/

Call BackChannels the work of an obsessive curiosity by the most accidental tourist in political science and political psychology.  I’d say the editor would be a senior in high school, perhaps a junior in college, at this point . . . perhaps a little more sophisticated for breadth of awareness of related elements across regions (“culture, conflict, language, and psychology”) and ability to get the connections just about right.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/anthropolitical-psychology/paranoid-delusional-narcissistic-reflection-of-motivation/ – if ever there was a psychological phenomenon or method accompanying the aggression of the murderous and tyrannical, the title gets it.

Related in Wikipedia

For the once-Soviet inspired, manipulated (and paid) Hard Political Left whose most privileged of the Party would regard the same with contempt for being pliable and useful idiots:

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

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

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

–33–

Also in Media: Mark Galeotti on “How Russia Manages Its Political War in Europe”

02 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Notes On Reading BackChannels, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics

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ECFR218-Graphic-PSA

Source and Recommended Reading

http://www.ecfr.eu/page/-/ECFR228_-_CONTROLLING_CHAOS1.pdf

“Listen: we engage in foreign policy the way we engage in war, with every means, every weapon, every drop of blood. But like in war, we depend on both the strategy of the general in the High Command, and the bravery and initiative of the soldier in the trench.”

Russian former diplomat, 2017

Russia sees ‘active measures’ (aktivnye meropriyatiya) – from supporting populist parties through disinformation and espionage campaigns, all the way to incidents such as the attempted coup in Montenegro – as an essential part of its efforts to influence Europe.  Along with the usual instruments of foreign influence, such as diplomacy and economic levers, Russia is especially active in using covert and non-traditional means, from intelligence operations to military pressure and even organised crime, all of which have been the foci of recent policy briefs for ECFR.3 This final publication in an informal series seeks instead to consider the extent to which these campaigns are carefully planned and coordinated – and, if so, by whom.

Approximate date of publication: September 2017.

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Module: Moscow and the Middle East Conflict

18 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Philology, Political Psychology

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The story begins in the feudal mode with medieval anti-Semitism.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

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

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

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

The story may end with the Palestinian’s own recovery of integrity. 

Path

19th Century Russian Anti-Semitic Obsession –> Developing Nazi Germany –> Middle East –> Development of Yasser Arafat | Development of an Orwellian Political Method | Encouragement of Left / Far Left Peace and Sunshine Organizations | Masking off the Violence (Political Repression) Applied to the Defense of Privileged Elites (from Czar to Party to Putin).

Organizations representing the Cultural Left appear to have split the scene with Moscow (man) each time Soviet tanks appeared in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere.

If what the Soviet was selling was so good . . . why the intimidation and force?

The Soviet Union dissolved itself in history more than 25-1/2 years ago (Dec. 25, 1991).  However, in the course of Putin’s tenure, Moscow has continued to meet with Hamas and PFLP leadership and through war — direct, hybrid, or by proxy — continued to battle western integrity and liberal democracy in Syria and Ukraine — and if connected through cooperation with Tehran, than Yemen also.

How are things going for the Phantoms of the Soviet?

Have a look at Syria (start with Homs).

Have a look at Moscow’s financials.

Orwellian Politics and Palestinian Suffering

George Orwell’s Animal Farm turns out the template for how corrupt power manages (with totalitarian methods) “the masses” (AKA “the street”, “The People”) for its own aggrandizement and enrichment.

In politics, disinformation poisons cultures, and here it may be suggested that what the Soviets, the PLO, and Hamas have accomplished is neither the creation nor preservation of Palestinian anything but rather the destruction and impoverishment of Gaza City and Ramallah while growing their respective systems of patronage on skimmed funding and a host of shady enterprises.

Of course, after 70 years of cultural and political separation from the Arab world by way of the camps, which are now small cities, and by way of apartheid Arab social policy — that which set up the Yarmouk Camp in Syria for devastation by the Arab and Muslim forces of Syria and ISIS — the refugees of 1948, much abused by the Arab world itself, may now be truly a “Palestinian People” in need of detoxification from Soviet Era disinformation and manipulation and an Arab people nonetheless apart from the Arab politics that has so abused their existence.

Today, “The Occupation” may be better stated as “The Preoccupation with the Jews”.

The principle misnomer — and misguidance — needs a complete and permanent deconstruction.

BackChannels has previously commented on the Boycott Divestitures and Sanctions (BDS) Movement — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/ — and what it senses to be the Palestinian main base:  https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/ .

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