This post continues my practice of trying to make accessible and somewhat permanent useful observation composed in passing elsewhere online or in correspondence. In short Twitterese, I’ve diagrammed the argument as, approximately (NA=North America; LA=Latin America), “NA cash->LA narcotics->NA; NA arms->LA cartel & gang violence->migrants->NA.” Close enough. “NA”=”North America”, of course, and “LA”=”Latin America”.
Here follows an online comment already made plus short associated and supporting reference.
Our narcotics habits and black market enthusiasms fuel the cartels and gangs of Latin America, and those are not known for healthy governing practices. The abused, impoverished, terrified, and threatened migrate to El Norte where they believe there will be at least better security, order, and rule-of-law.
We Americans (and Canadians) are not only a powerful market for everything that may be obtained only through smuggling, we’ve had a business going in running arms into Latin America (along with all the outlaws of the world). Term for exploration on the web: “America, arms, iron river”. I have collected articles on the subject dating back to 2007.
The sad truth about my Fellow Americans is that we’re greedy as sin, –or desperate and both–and we pay a high price for it x addictions x homelessness x social failures x social pathologies. Neither our Far Out Left nor Rabid Reactionary Right seems to have a clue as regards the full ecology of corruption, crime, narcotics, trafficked labor (2nd largest abuse of all), and above all our most prized possession: money–would that our ethics, principles, values, and general American spirit modify the national appetite for good times and loot.
Berkin Elvan, then 14, got caught up in street battles in Istanbul between police and protesters on June 16 while going to buy bread for his family. He slipped into a coma and became a rallying point for government opponents, who held regular vigils at the hospital where he lay in intensive care.
. . . Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the main target of last year’s demonstrations, has so far declined to apologise for any of the protesters’ deaths. He has riled opponents, however, by praising the police response to what he and his allies depict as a foreign-backed coup attempt as “heroic”.
Between the Islamic Small Wars and its pack of malignant narcissists and renewed Russian imperialism driven by the vertical of the hour Putin and his coterie, I think we’re going to see a lot of breathtakingly callous violence perpetrated by the same and lied about in similar ways.
The recent revolution in Ukraine cannot be Yanukovych’s fault, except perhaps for being weak in the face of western-backed nationalist fascist aggression, or so he might say; ditto for whatever Russians may be thinking about Putin tonight while he most certainly intends to annex Crimea, regardless of the true fealty, or lack thereof, on the part of Crimean Ukrainians: and so it goes for Assad and Khamenei and too many others around the world.
Put it in common punk talk: “They wasn’t doin’ nothin’.”
Footage of violence in the Ukrainian capital was beamed almost non-stop into Russian homes by state television on Wednesday, accompanied by apocalyptic warnings of civil war next door and accusations of meddling by foreign states.
Russians well know this form in lying through accusation.
They have been through it right to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, about 24 years ago, and here they have again arrived captive (fewer than 7 percent of Russians speak English) to state media and “covered” by a state security apparatus employing more than 400,000 of their neighbors.
I cannot yet vet videos, much less receive them independently. Nonetheless, one may see through them to the contact point between worlds of deception reliant on narcissistic manipulation for wealth and the self-aggrandizement it affords and the other of integrity that insists on speaking truth to power and on political conversation in the open.
Note, February 19, 223: I’ve tried to repair link-rot on two videos (so done) on this post, but the condition (when objects and references disappear down the memory hole) is impossible to address in all cases. Thought assembled and published in this way decays in mechanics as well as relevance. –jso
This copy posted to YouTube on February 20, 2014. 0:25:
We want to be free from dictatorship. We want to be free from the politicians who work only for themselves, who are ready to shoot, to beat, to injure people just for saving their money, just for saving their houses, just for saving their power.
I want these people who are here, who have dignity, who are brave: I want them to lead a normal life. We are civilized people but our government are barbarians.
* * *
Deadly clashes between protesters and police in Kiev on Tuesday led to a fire-lit nighttime assault by Interior Ministry troops on the main protest encampment at Independence Square, in what may be a dramatic and irreversible turn in Ukraine’s months-long political crisis.
EU foreign ministers have called an emergency meeting on Ukraine for Thursday.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said: “We have … made it clear that the EU will respond to any deterioration on the ground. We therefore expect that targeted measures against those responsible for violence and use of excessive force can be agreed by our member states as a matter of urgency.”
Posted to YouTube, February 25, 2014.
* * *
In the middle east: Putin-Assad-Khamenei.
In eastern Europe: hard to say.
As the late Barry Rubin has pointed out in regard to the middle east, the revolution goes with the military. Mubarak had a good run, but come time to set up dynasty, Egypt’s military countenanced the revolution (and a year later rescued the latent democracy from a fascist Islamic organization that maintained the Mubarak-era torture chambers, jailed progressive journalists, altered the constitution to consolidate power in what may well have been another “president for life”.
No dice.
With Assad’s unforgivable assaults on Syrian noncombatant constituents in mind, this news unfolding from Ukraine may well signal the end of an age of dictatorship. It may turn out a second fall of the Soviet Union, a post-Soviet challenge to the continuance of state oligarchies forged in the shadows of the Cold War.
One hopes that it is not also the start of a new era of autocratic repression, but with armed state organizations brought to the barricades, one never knows. Who is in those military and paramilitary forces? Are their senior and junior officers dissenting from the projection of state power and the arrangement of regional power?
The people have themselves: what else do they have? Who else do they have on board with them?
As Nero fiddled, so I’ve heard, Putin as host of the most expensive winter games in history, has been in his glory in Sochi.
Echoing Ukraine’s interim prime minister, Peskov told reporters that Russia saw the protests, during which deadly clashes erupted on Tuesday, as an attempted coup.
We shall soon find out, I am sure, what Ukraine’s armed forces think about that, for protest in the streets is by itself a strong signal — ask Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan about that — but it is not a coup; it is, however, revolutionary.
(CNN) — Gunmen burst into the home of a local leader Thursday in Iraq, killing him and five of his family members as they slept. The attackers then planted explosives and blew up the home, police said.
The attack took place in Tikrit.
The female MP recalled when Sheikh Ali was member of her political party, saying he used to live in a house owned by Iraq’s chief of staff and that he had 30 bodyguards who were all on the payroll of the government.
She further claimed that he used to praise and glorify the government day and night. But when it was no longer in his interest, he turned against the government and considered it his enemy.
And Sheik Ali Hatem al-Suleiman, a leader in the Sunni Awakening movement, storms out of the conference after the opening speeches and threatens to leave the conference altogether. “People want answers from us,” he says. “We’re not going to sit here only to listen to speeches.” The Awakening opposes the Sunni-led insurgency within Iraq. Shi’ite leader Sheik Muhammed Fahman al-Rikahis wonders how any reconciliation can take place if key groups are not invited or fail to take part in the dialog.
It’s not all the Sheik al-Suleiman’s fault, if it all.
The shadows creep across the landscape, sewing discord or renewing it, etching their program in blood to bear forth inconsolable sorrows to soak in endless cycles of revenge.
______
Six high ranked Democrats and Republican senators claimed sectarian violence was rife also because of Maliki’s failure to give Iraq’s Sunnis, Kurds and other minorities a greater role in the country’s administration.
“This failure of governance is driving many Sunni Iraqis into the arms of al-Qaida in Iraq and fuelling the rise of violence,” a letter signed by both high ranked Democrats and Republican senators read.
Perhaps Putin knows something about Al Qaeda – Wahhabi – Sunni Islam and the extremist fronts to which two, albeit from the darker shadows, contribute cash or favors for “field operations” to their perceived advanced guard.
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Al Qaeda’s main branch in Syria, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), will be disbanded but the jihadist al-Nusra Front will continue to operate in the country under al Qaeda’s command, al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri said in an audio message broadcast by Al Jazeera on Friday . . . Zawahiri said in the message that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of al Qaeda operations in Iraq, had “made a mistake by establishing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant without asking for our permission, or even informing us”. It was not clear when his statement was recorded.”
The legitimacy of a theocat’s power rests on several competitive dimensions — lineage, mentors, scholarship — approximated similarly among uncommon or exceptional personalities.
Of course, in lieu of other and more peaceful social methods and skills, they’re going to fight for position Alpha.
One may suggest that the invention of a religion synthesis the immediate concerns as well as habits of mind of the adapting and adopting culture, i.e., we invent our programs – sun worship or virgin sacrifice, holy emperor or more reasonably humble elected public servant — and then we live in them and call what we do “our culture” and our way and our calendar and our rites and our language.
Iraqis caught up in promoting and facilitating sectarian violence may be likened to dictators or mafia bosses: while we’re quick to notice the methods involved in making “offers that can’t be refused”, we’re slow to notice how dismally trapped — painted into their own corners, suffocated surrounded by their own mirrors — these personalities make themselves.
Having hitched their identity and honor to corruption, murder, and sadism, they’re “in it” but good with their associates behind them to keep them from backing up.
If that is the premise — and we could argue it some and it would probably hold up — what drives Iraq’s violence, what’s in the heart, i.e., combatant self-concept, has access to no program other than continued accelerated and escalated “gaming violence” and retribution.
Those who keep themselves out of it needs must passively, cautiously perhaps, weather it.
It’s a miserable condition in which to live with more moderate and productive passions and ends.
There are never enough dead for forestall the launch of one more attack.
This inexplicable savage violence is typically attributed to psychological warfare, military tactics or individual acts of brutality but for Jihadists they are justifiable sacred acts against the enemies of Islam. They are ritual murders that are consistent with a growing global Jihadist method of operation [MO]. Similar acts of torture, rape, beheading and mutilation regularly occur in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Syria and other countries.
In the larger view, engagement and indulgence in violence are not the province of one criminal or religious motivation but a part of the complex cultural psychology of our species and the cultures and subcultures it generates. Brought into empirical view, the behavior of interest — outrageous and unbridled gang violence — becomes less significant in history and much, much less romantic by way of related desires and dreams.
We may not have a religious issue per se with Islam or Islamists bur rather the challenge of addressing an anthropological phenomenon analog across diverse gangs and tribes.
So who is looking through the microscope and who has been laid out for dissection on a slide?
Dawn Perlmutter’s piece today in FrontPage provides for reflection on the motivation and psychology exhibited in Islamist attacks.
Maspero Youth Union’s Facebook page reports 38 churches burned and looted, 23 attacked and partially damaged, six school burned and looted, seven Coptic buildings burned and looted, six Christians dead, and seven kidnapped.
CAIRO — More violence is expected in Egypt after chaos swept through the country last week, leaving nearly 900 dead in four days of unrest and threatening to stall a political transition.
Some 38 Muslim Brotherhood supporters died in disputed circumstances at a prison yesterday, as the leader of Egypt’s powerful army warned he would not tolerate violence, urging Islamists to change course.
My eyes have read 890 dead in the recent fighting.
My ears have heard 3,500 Muslim Brotherhood supporters arrested.
There’s potential for drawing down the violence in Egypt’s polarized society by dint of one side not having to prove God’s favor on the way to producing a more broad and meaningful round of elections, which I hope will neither be forgotten nor put off more than a year.
The other side has demonstrated its values in the burning and pillaging of properties of the Coptic Church and in general rioting.
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