Narcissistic Mortification: diminishment or humiliation –>
Narcissistic Covering/Splitting: covering the diminished, humiliated, or shamed damaged self / splitting off a courageous and heroic persona to be presented and sustained before the world –>
Narcissistic Manipulation: manipulation of the behavior and perceptions of others with behaviors ranging from gaslighting and lying to framing others and leveraging their behavior through various strategies –>
Experience of Unlimited Narcissistic Supply: experience of the sustained adoration, adulation, admiration and love of others en masse and without limit.
Related Online
Regarding the ideas represented by terms such as “Malignant Narcissism”, “Reparative Narcissism”, “Narcissistic Personality Disorder”, I’ve chosen to select reference both according to convenience and in response to my own experiences, ideas, and thinking (especially as regards the cited “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” that is my own). Whether bullies on the streets, dictators in families, and imperious personalities in politics, the idea that the display of power, whether obviously malign or disingenuously protective (as our Lt. Colonel President Emperor and Tyrant Vladimir Putin so well presents), the relationship between the display awesome destructive capability coupled with unparalleled wealth belies the heavy armoring and compensation needed to cover a much challenged and derided personality at an earlier stage. “I’ll show you!” and “I’ll show them” and “I will make them pay” suit the outlook of a tyrant whose damaged psyche may never be sufficiently appeased, placated, or repaired. History may come to regard the present Russian president as a man who could master associates, investors, mafia, and military but not himself.
Kraft’s ring now appears on display in the Kremlin’s library, quite a trophy brought home to Moscow by Russia’s Boss of Bosses.
From CNN:
The 4.94-carat ring is in the Kremlin’s library, where all official state gifts are kept, he said. It is worth more than $25,000, according to multiple reports from 2005.
A Kraft spokesman said Sunday the story is a humorous anecdote that Kraft “retells for laughs.”
“He loves that the ring is at the Kremlin and, as he stated back in 2005, he continues to have great respect for Russia and the leadership of President Putin,” said Stacey James, a spokesman for The Kraft Group.
Putin the Pirate has done a few things under the table upside-down and sideways over decades to weaken western political coherence, cohesion, and resolve. Start with the KGB’s handling of Zawahiri over the winter of 1996/7. In connect-the-dots fashion, I believe that stay led to the attack by jet hijacking Islamists on 9/11 that in turn goosed the pride of western states in their Christian and independent political cultures and led to what has been referred to as the “New Nationalism”.
When bees sting and flesh swells, the response has not been called “proud flesh” for nothing.
The popular western response in enmity and fear regarding Islam has not been misplaced in relation to Islamic Extremism and related Islamist Terror, but the same has given rise to blood-and-soil nationalism, authoritarianism, and actual autocracy in some EU/NATO states. Hungary, Italy, Poland, Turkey, and the United States (one nation under Trump for a while) have each seen their open democracies challenged by demagoguery or political perversion.
We may also take note of the “01s” in dates: 1991-dissolve of the Soviet Union in bankruptcy following American intercession opposite the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (from which Russia was forced to retreat in 1989); 2001-the September 11 attacks took place on Felix Dzerzhinsky’s birthday, quite a gift for a Moscow bent on revenge for its losses in Afghanistan-and, no, Putin didn’t do it–it was obviously radical Muslims assembled and deployed by Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama Bin Laden; 2011-The Horror taking off in Syria that would send millions of refugees into NATO (Turkey, which today hosts about 3.68 million Syrian refugees), the European Union (0.7 million-Germany), and Scandinavia (0.3 million), another goad for the defense of the rightly ethnolinguistic state cultures settled and enjoying the benefits of, well, being themselves, the only problem being a concomitant drift toward the same feudal-medieval worldviews and fascination with authority held by Bashar al-Assad, Ali Khamenei, and Vladimir Putin; 2021-Russia’s repeated threats by military feint against Ukraine, a young democratic state seeking NATO accession, and, by extension, NATO itself, but not quite as Ukraine remains without accession.
So hey, Bob (Kraft), George and George, Jr. (Bush), where are you today with Putin (the thief)?
***
Where and when are dictatorships to be stopped?
Is it when one or another has engaged in political repression and breathtaking plunder at home?
Should it be when the security service agents and agent provocateur show up within the borders of one’s democratic state?
Should it be when the tanks roll into a neighboring state struggling for its own sovereignty against barbaric force and the possibility of a return to corrupt, kleptocratic, and tyrannical governance?
Putin
was once a brave KGB man in service to the Soviet while in East
Germany. He stood off a maddened crowd with a bluff and bought time for
the further destruction of KGB records in that Soviet satellite. He
may be admired for his extraordinary bravado, courage, and wiles.
When
he moved Russia off the pro-democracy track, he inherited an
effectively lawless state, one that had transferred the wealth of the
Soviet to the Soviet nomenklatura in a fire sale of state assets.
Opposition like Khoderkovsky came out of that transfer that had been
planned in the mid-1980s (reference: Karen Dawisha, RIP). In effect,
Putin inherited the challenges posed by the Vory and assorted
gangsterism on a scale unknown to the west (and western naivette about
that helped waste billions (I think) in capital that would never be
recovered. The mafia state was born.
The Capo de
capos, the Boss of bosses, has now to look inward and consider the
future of the now old Viking state that he has looted. He could retire
to Spain, where he has a house, and watch the cocaine traffic moving up
from Africa — just look out his window and know the ships and smile —
or he could turn around — this would be a good time — and address
Russia’s under-development outside of the Agricultural, Defense, and
Energy sectors. He could revert to rule-of-law in Ukraine and
apologize, at least, for the bombing of so many hospitals –he’s leveled
him — in Syria.
Judging from his behavior, he
appears to believe his mission has been to revive the glories of the
medieval world and the idolatry associated with political absolutism,
i.e., unquestionable authority.
I, not alone, believe he should reconsider that mission.
He has produce what he has promised the world: a “New Nobility”.
But
he should look around at what now lies at the feet of that circle:
atrocity, mayhem, murder, and the self-inflicted wounding of the image
and global acceptance of Mother Russia.
A change of course would be more helpful to him than his staying with old habits past their expiry.
Has one party or personality or other to always play the “bag guy”? The Bond villain? The head of the worst of the worst?
Vladimir Putin has children who will one day and in the natural course of living will look back on their father with an accuracy and perception beyond the public’s ken and the best of the world’s intelligence agencies. When he’s gone, whatever he was, they will know in ways beyond knowing.
For a glimpse at what his state has done at his behest: Idlib today. Here is some recent background involving Russian participation — missile strikes (got to about 7:15 on that)– in Assad’s scorched earth pursuits.
Published to YouTube by The Docterr, July 28, 2019.
Al Jazeera English, July 28, 2019.
Aside: what the Assad Regime did to the Yarmouk Palestinian Camp —
Contrary to the beliefs of nice people who believe The West, the United States, and Israel the chief repositories of evil in the world, dictatorship do not provide their people with stability: they provide themselves with the power to accumulate and indulge in excess and that especially of cruelty, power itself as the malignant embrace it becoming the power to visit suffering on others with impunity.
Note: the editor has added the URL to a BackChannels piece on ISIS as Assad’s preferred enemy or foil.
I used to say the same thing, especially in relation to the invasion of Iraq: ” . . . at least Saddam Hussein kept the lid on the pot.”
In retrospect, Hussein did not keep things under control. He leapt into a ruinous war with Iran when presented with weakness in the shadow of the Islamic Revolution, and produced infamous sport like this:
As regards Syria, I and my blog 🙂 have tried to float a too accurate message about barbarism, feudal and totalitarian politics, and their blending in KGB-style Political Theater. Assad had really to produce conditions favorable to the assembling of the “AQ-types”, the “jihadists”, and their sorting out into the most vicious of fighting elements, and then with ISIL / ISIS make certain that he would have the foil best suited to driving off (to Europe) his most troublesome noncombatant population.
Mission accomplished.
Where westerners believe themselves culpable for such a disaster — “if we hadn’t done this or done that” — the truth slips away without pursuit _except_ by a seemingly small cadre of academics and journalists (and retirees) who drill down beneath the convenient cant to drown themselves in the details of history.
Russian political culture has long displayed itself as medieval, ruthless, and ever paternally authoritarian.
In the near span of 100 years, 1917 to 2017, the experience of two upheavals by revolution and the appearance of three forms in government has not changed its historic character. Russians less connected to Moscow and St. Petersburg are missing out on all the fun with cash while the oligarchy could care less — and thus as it has ever been.
While Moscow often admires Europe and the west and adopts related aesthetic and cultural practices, it seems to resist deep political change, not to beg the point. The Obama Administration had indeed hoped to encourage a little bit of western liberal values in what remained of the Soviet axis of power in the middle east, and at that junction in 2011 defined by Bashar al-Assad’s response to a mild challenge to his absolute power, he would go on to say that Putin had reverted to “the KGB playbook” — and that’s the truth long forgotten at this point in the Syrian Tragedy, so I call it, and the more general and frightening “east-west rivalry”, so others call it.
BackChannels has adopted the term “paternally authoritarian” from the work of the recently late Richard Pipes. There are two volumes listed in “The Russian Section” of this blog’s library:
Blog editors may not have the collegial and financial defenses plus resources known to tenured scholars, so there may be other of Pipes’ works here, even bookmarked — there’s a box full of set-asides that has not been opened in ages — but the two mentioned by do for a start. Note also: flood by web-info, the editor has developed a short memory for which countermeasures are being installed, specifically, limited time on the web to much less “Facebooking” and blog posting in order to return to that world in which the companionship of a book — any long read — might be appreciated for a day or two without deflection or distraction.
all I can do is ask the question my people came to me dan coates came to me and some others they said they think it’s Russia I have president putin he just said it’s not russia i will say this i don’t see any reason why it would be I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today and what he did is an incredible offer he offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators with respect to the people I think that’s an incredible offer
BackChannels has lived long enough to see “Active Measures” become a movie, “alternative facts” obtain traction in the arguments of some lost souls, and the “Fake News!” rise up en masse to denounce the source of the accusation. Now the whole ugly stain attending the deeply foreign influenced election of America’s president has begun to seep and spread from the infernal nucleus of the Russian marriage between State and Mob and now a hint of the presence of the same in the United States of America.
How soon will the journalists be asking of the Russian mafia — and mafia generally — in America, “How broad, how deep, how high, how powerful?”
“Dear friends, respected colleagues!” Nikonov said. “Three minutes ago Hillary Clinton admitted her defeat in US presidential elections and a second ago Trump started his speech as an elected president of the United States of America and I congratulate you on this.”
Even though Nikonov did not add what many in the Kremlin already knew, his brief statement was greeted by enthusiastic applause. Donald J. Trump had just become Vladimir Putin’s man in the White House.
While readers may not find evidence quite so “hard” as a memo or recording between “Don” and “Vlad”, the darkly glittering atmosphere brewed by dirty or shady businesses, related events, FBI and other investigations, and innumerable lawsuits in all directions (with Trump Administration scandals, even the lawyers have needed lawyers) the preponderance of the evidence — in the worlds of investigators and journalists alike, the character of personal associations and relationship — becomes inescapable.
***
The art of reading has been changed by “broadband Internet”: these days, one may snooze between the hardcovers but also depart from any event or noun mentioned to find source and related materials online — or to chat with the “journo” should the same be so nice and unhurried as regards giving up a piece of his time o’ day. With a book as rich in coverage as Craig Unger’s, there are mentions aplenty for mining. Page 147, for example, a simple flip-open (it could have been any other page or chapter), makes mention of somebody “Nogueira” and a Reuters investigation — and a minute later, now listed in reference, Brad Brooks’ piece comes up (and may be read separately). Of the man noted, here’s one more excerpt from Unger’s new book:
According to conversations secretly recorded by a former business partner, in 2013 Nogueira said he had laundered tens of millions of dollars through real estate. “More important than the money from real estate was being able to launder the drug money — there were much larger amounts involved,” he said in the recording. “When I was in Panama I was regularly laundering money for more than a dozen companies.”
Nogueira told Reuters that he became the leading broker for the project thanks in part to the support of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who appeared in a promotional video with him.
What did Donald Trump do?
Trump licensed his name — attractive and synonymous with glamour, power, and wealth — to the project of interest and many others worldwide. What crime could there have been in that? His organization also held management contracts on real estate projects, but here BackChannels will leave the details to the curious among readers; however, the same litmus applies: he nailed a service contract: so what?
On the other hand, perhaps the “so what?” is in the “with whom” and the true “for what”.
At the end of his book, Unger notes, “Donald Trump has repeatedly said he has nothing to do with Russia. Below are fifty-nine Trump connections to Russia” (p. 265). “Below” begins with Roman Abramovich and ends with Viktor Yanukovych.
Given Judaism’s natural promotion for ethical and moral arguing and the “speaking of truth to power”, why would an Israeli president court the favor of the world’s most emergent autocratic leaders?
Here’s one approach to an answer.
I would not blame Netanyahu for Putin’s development of centrality in the adjacent conflict zones. Neither Israel, the more general “west” nor the Palestinians (and now the Syrians) will ever escape the effects of Soviet meddling in the middle east on the heels of the cessation of WWII. While it may be to Putin’s credit (and Lavrov’s) that the Kremlin has shifted some policies concerning the Jews, it is certainly to the west’s discredit that so little interference (to none) has forestalled the depths of the agony experienced in Syria by Syrians of all backgrounds.
The above noted, I liked the article. For my purposes, it underscores the powerful drift backward in the world toward feudal absolute power. Modern liberal Israel may not itself have the power to express pique or impose sanctions with effect: it is the smallest of states as regards that kind of financial or military power. The best it may do — and appears to be doing — is to walk the MaligNarcs (“malignant narcissists”) through a little bit of history from the Jewish perspective and to encourage the autocratic to reconsider what each budding or established dictator appears to be missing in conscience.
American-based, humanist, and classically liberal and democratic BackChannels here adds just one more biker video:
BackChannels Frame
Feudal-Medieval Political Absolutism
v
Modern Democratic Checked and Distributed Power
Between “Active Measures” and America’s inherent internal tensions, citizens may feel channeled toward a fascistic Far Right new nationalism or a dippy Far Left socialist revival, but BackChannels reminds that there may be — there should be — a more grounded and spacious Middle American Way and some wish to rediscover and renew that more coherent nation.
BackChannels credits Putin with turning Erdogan’s pretty little head back toward the feudal glory of the sultanate — or something like it — with the help of Turkish Stream, encouraging the family business in Hungary, and aiding with the election of the formerly more autocratic President (“Fake News”!) Trump in the United States (the French, better knowing what they’re about, didn’t quite go for his Marine Le Pen; Trump, BC presumes, has been tempered by having gotten himself into a job involving personalities as large as himself and powers greater than known in his organization — America’s democracy has not been overwhelmingly wowed or easily walked over). The popular perception of Putin may respond opposite the viewer’s interests: for old lefties, he’s the world’s greatest reactionary and using revived militarism and the Russian Orthodox Church to assuage bad feelings attending the insult of expanding financial hardship associated with related ambitions in Syria and Ukraine and, ultimately, the way the guy at the top gets his hooks into the best performing businesses.
Why not?
In Russia, there’s protest and resistance to Putin, but there is no competition for the power he has amassed and his ability to . . . rearrange the world along feudal lines.
And for “righties”, he’s still the go-to for “socialist” dictatorships like Assad’s.
Never mind that Assad via the KGB-style political theatrical “Assad v The Terrorists” has been building Syria down, enough so, and so desperately so, for Putin to permanently expand Russia’s military footprint in Hafez’s old sandbox.
After the one step backward into 19th Century and earlier Russian paternal authoritarianism, aristocracy, imperialism, and resurgent nationalism, one may wonder what may be the “two steps forward” if any are ever taken as needs must be: whether Putin likes it or not, the Russian Federation is, alas, multicultural and perhaps yearning — as Navalny might have it — for the liberal devilishness that are “rule of law” and “responsive and responsible governance”.
BackChannels 