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Tag Archives: western ethics

FTAC – On the Syrian Tragedy

29 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Syria

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21st Century Neo-Feudalism, American values, modern values, modernity, political corruption, Putin, Russian Federation, western ethics

Oil has nothing to do with the Syrian Tragedy. The primary “driver” is the medieval political absolutism exploited and sustained by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei, each of whom relies on feudalism to keep themselves in business.

Note that Putin put $52 billion into the Winter Olympics at Sochi. What Putin has put into Syrian humanitarian aid: $0.00.

Obvious pacifism in the Obama Administration has been balanced some by weakening Putin’s own ability to prosecute his chosen enemies across time and in intensity. The in-and-out demonstration of power in Syria may reflect that reality, although the show worked well in Moscow.  The stalling of the incursion into Ukraine through Crimea also attests to the Russian Federation’s underlying fragility. However, Russia remains a nuclear power, a newly militarized (revived in that aspect) and nationalist state, and a little unpredictable. It may be for that reason that “diplomacy” rather than “confrontation” has so far defined the western limits of engagement in Syria.

No one knows today how it will end, but I believe the west may look back on this period with immense shame for not having done more to block “Moscow, Damascus, Tehran” while pulling Syria — and Syrians — out of the medieval mode and into a modern politics. Results of related efforts on the battlefield appear to me to have been mixed, although one may credit Assad with the incubation of ISIS through the election to bomb other targets and leave Baghdadi’s enterprise to develop.


The themes are now tangled but still coalesce around “medieval vs modern”.

What is “medieval” now?

And what is modern?

Although BackChannels has frequently paired “medieval” with “absolute power” — and as much seems so — it may be more worthwhile at this point to travel into the 21st Century image of deeply medieval political worlds.

BackChannels readers will get to Riyadh, but let’s start with Moscow.

I have used the term in my own work, as well, and I define sistema as a style of exercising power that turns the country’s people into temporary operating resources, against their wills and in breach of their rights.  Sistema is a deep-seated facet of Russian culture that goes beyond politics and ideology, and it will persist long after Putin’s rule has ended.  Sistema combines the idea that the state should enjoy unlimited access to all national resources, public or private, with a kind of permanent state of emergency in which every level of society — businesses, social and ethnic groups, powerful clans, and even criminal gangs — is drafted into solving what the Kremlin labels “urgent state problems.”  Under Putin, sistema has become a method for making deals among businesses, powerful players, and the people.  Business has not taken over the state, nor vice versa; the two have merged in a union of total and seamless corruption.

Pavlovsky, Gleb.  “Russian Politics Under Putin: The System Will Outlast the Master.” Foreign Affairs, May / June 2016 (10-17).

Q: What are the roots of Putin’s ideological worldview?

A: By the beginning of the 1990s Putin had developed almost all the ideas he espouses today. He’d only just started working in St Petersburg, but if we look at documentary recordings of the time, we see that he already had a whole series of attitudes concerning, for example, the idea that Russia’s system of administration should be a unitarian, centralized state, and also his condoning the chinovniki [bureaucrats] taking bribes. That surprised many people, but it’s undeniable that he took a positive view of this. He even shared—and repeated—the scandalous thesis of the then mayor of Moscow, Gavril Popov, that bureaucrats had the right to a commission on contracts.

Pavlovksy, Gleb (Interviewee) and Tom Parfitt (Interviewer).  “Putin’s World Outlook.”  New Left Review, 88, July-August 2014.

And here’s an image from the modern world according to Andy of Mayberry:

Posted to YouTube May 22, 2012.


The “Syrian Tragedy” — I don’t know what else to call it, for it represents in its various facets a bitter revolution, a (medieval) tyrant’s assertions about a family’s outright control and ownership of a state, a civil war but one complicated by multiple sides and the political “flavors” preferred — conveniently, earnestly, momentarily — by the roving bands of the hours — but it is most certainly the result of a consecrated villainy fit to the absence of conscience and the bloody caprice of the worst of kings and emperors of history.

Once tweeted: “Putin, Assad, Khamenei — together they are defending absolute power.”

Pavlosky, in the Foreign Affairs article cited, notes of Putin’s inner circle, “Transformed from a campaign committee into a presidential entourage, the team has changed only marginally in its composition.  These are people who have never once told Putin, “You can’t do that” (p. 12).

In light of that observation, it might be worth taking another look at Andy and Opie and the difference between a quarter earned and three “just because”.

Cited and Related Reference

Pavlovksy, Gleb (Interviewee) and Tom Parfitt (Interviewer).  “Putin’s World Outlook.”  New Left Review, 88, July-August 2014.

Pavlovsky, Gleb.  “Russian Politics Under Putin: The System Will Outlast the Master.” Foreign Affairs, May / June 2016 (10-17).

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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