Oppenheim Arts & Letters

Facebook Excerpt -- On Putin's Role in Syria

Russia is Syria's Great Power; Putin is Bashir's Big Brother.

Putin, while enjoying influence in Syria and having the power to curb the Assad regime, has also proven himself a dictator and in line with that behavior -- complex in its own way -- hasn't the capacity and will not respond to an end-game on the basis of either compassion or justice. He may, however, pursue the course that either best reflects on himself or otherwise engineer the image that does the same.

In rhetoric only has Putin distanced himself from the Assad disaster.

Russia's geopolitical status and military dependence on Syria as a client state has not changed from the Soviet era.

Probably, I should not quote myself, revise myself, nor reprint myself.

I grew up wanting to write fiction (and may go ahead with that), but commenting on politics seems to draw from the same wells.

How should we want things to be?

How are things really?

Reference Not Cited

AFP.  "China and Russia reaffirm support for Syria."  The Telegraph, May 30, 2012.

Berman, Ilan.  "The Russian-Syrian Connection: Thwarting Democracy in The Middle East and the Greater OSCE Region."  Pundicity, March 9, 2005.

Besemeres, John.  "Which Putin will stand up?"  Inside Story, March 28, 2012.

Gessen, Masha.  "The Dictator."  International Herald Tribune, May 21, 2012.

"Since May 6 — the day before Putin was inaugurated for his third term as president — police in Moscow have made more than 1,000 arrests. They have carried out no fewer than 100 beatings. They have also confiscated, destroyed or damaged several thousand dollars’ worth of private property, including a generator, several café tables, a cash box with money collected by street activists and copious amounts of food — including sandwiches taken out of people’s hands as they were eating."

Green, S. A.  "Kremlin Targets Jewish Tycoons in War on Critics."  The Jewish Daily Forward, October 31, 2003.

With Green's article in mind, I've suggested on Facebook that it seems natural enough that the Jewish mind, soul, and spirit would find a contemporary Pharoah in Putin, another self-aggrandizing and overbearing narcissist for defeating with help by way of the hand of God or absent that energy, the people, so grossly preyed upon.

Loiko, Servei L.  "In Russia, some seek justice in European Court of Human Rights."  Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2012.

Petrov, Nikolai.  "Putin Won't Liberalize Anything."  The Moscow Times, March 20, 2012.

Sapa-AFP.  "Putin declines to back Syria's Assad."  Times Live, March 2, 2012.

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Note: I haven't yet mastered how to use the online, probably spied on, doubtlessly robotically scanned source compilation site that has from the web's earliest appearance been "Delicious", but . . . for any who may be interested, my list resides at http://www.delicious.com/commart/.  I've more tabbed on "Putin" and "Russia" and much less on on the political psychology involved in the Syrian debacle but may suggest that exactly that personal and transactional area in human behavior holds many keys to the creation and maintenance of genuinely civil and peaceful societies.

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The Middle East Conflict in Twelve Minutes

This is a pass-along from the lively conversation (several of them) continuing in peace (and hate-peace groups) in which I participate on Facebook.

My sense from the aforementioned groups is that my co-religionists and the west may well be short on the Arab story in the middle east.  We generally don't pore over those histories (unless specializing, I suppose, in Middle East Studies), and perhaps we should become familiar with them.

On the Middle East Conflict itself, we have plenty to access from historians, Jewish and gentile, so any who may wish to damn or refute the above synopsis may move on to Benny Morris, Efraim Karsh, and others who have devoted large swaths of their scholarly careers to this corner of modern history.

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Excerpt - One Quotation from Leslie Noyes Mass's 'Back to Pakistan"

"Our philosophy is very simple," says the deeply committed Muslim pragmatist.  "Our philosophy is that, God forbid, if one day a war erupts between India and Pakistan and it is perceived as a Hindu-versus-Muslim war, I want the child who has studied in a TCF school to protect his Hindu neighbor from anybody who may want to harm him."  Ateed Riaz as quoted by Leslie Noyes Mass. [1]

Our world does not change by itself.

I, you, and we change it, one thought, note, statement, and action at a time.

However, some may have a greater impact than others as regards the realms of positive change, and there should be no question that Pakistan's Citizens Foundation [2] and such as Ateed Riaz and author and professor Leslie Noyes Mass have made use of their own lives to create that greater impact.

"In 2000, inspired by her father, Leslie Mass decided she would turn a lifelong fantasy into reality. At the age of 59 she began to train for a grueling journey -- a thru-hike of the 2,000-mile Appalachian Trail." [3]

My literary encounter with what one may call contemporary "fearless women" -- more accurately, I'm sure, heroic women -- started with photographer Deborah Copaken Kogan [4], who hooked up with the Mujahideen dressed like a boy and covered the insurgency against the Soviet army in Afghanistan.

One day I'll look over my library for more of the same right stuff and let you know here what I've found.

In the meantime, those online and blessed with what I might call a "normative human temperament" have a New Earth bounded firmly by intelligent rapid global communications (in English, no less) and perhaps as signaled by Ateed Riaz's statement, an ethic as common and recognizable in Rome or Tel Aviv as it may be or may become in Karachi.

Cited Reference

1. Mass, Leslie Noyes.  Back to Pakistan: A Fifty-Year Journey.  P. 60.  New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011.

2. The Citizens Foundation.

3. Mass, Leslie Noyes.  In Beauty May She Walk: Hiking the Appalachian Trail at 60.

4. Deborah Copaken Kogan. 

Other Reference

Linden, Caroline.  "The Citizens Foundation: Education Leads to Success."  Global Management Summit.

The Citizens Foundation, USA.

Zehra, Batool.  "Generation Next."  The Express Tribune, May 16, 2010.

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Irshad Manji's Interview with Imran Siddiqui -- Changing the World Two Mouths at a Time

The wise know the power of language in conversation and its relation to the development of culture.  This brilliant interview between Irshad Manji and Imran Siddiqui speaks to the great human mystery that is the arrival and possession of good conscience and the development of related great ethics.

YouTube's "globalcrossover" posted the video about a year ago and there's much in it, especially as regards online publishing of suppressed work in multiple languages, that tells how language and spirituality may work through personalities at their best.  One might reference the positive side of the psychology of narcissism -- call it "reparative narcissism" (if I'm following that thinking correctly) -- and still arrive at the same conclusions.

God's good name?

Nature?

The better angels of our nature?

What works in the best of human nature -- inherent kindness and love, thoughtfulness, consideration, conscience and guilt, containment and self-control . . . so many characteristcs and virtues -- simply works.

How we box it up, package it, label it, what we call it . . . perhaps we'll find our way together and get our global heads around that.

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A Glimpse of Pakistan's War Theater

"What's going on?" I asked the warlord. "Why aren't they coming for you?"

"I cannot lie to you," Namdar said, smiling at last. "The army comes in, and they fire at empty buildings. It is a drama – it is just to entertain." [1]

In the way of the webcentric blogger's second row seat to history, that above comes via Sherry Ricchiardi quoting for the American Journalism Review (August-September issue of 2009) veteran war reporter Dexter Filkins quoting a Taliban warlord .

"What is striking, say analysts, is how little has changed in Pakistan a year after U.S. special forces burst into a large house in Abbottabad in the early hours of May 2, 2011, and shot bin Laden dead.

"Pakistan's security establishment remains addicted to using, or at least tolerating, Islamic extremist groups as its proxy warriors, despite the deaths of thousands of Pakistani civilians and soldiers and the humiliation of bin Laden being found just steps from the country's premier military academy." [2]

A friend of mine in Lahore has called Pakistan's cultural and political makeup "a salad." 

It is sure that, and while I wouldn't worry about the hot peppers taking over, one well may question the officially tolerated predilection for leaving the same growing wild and always more influencing on the character of the landscape.

My guess: the Taliban have turned out out the best military aid packaging stimulus ever.

Reference

1. Ricchiardi, Sherry.  "Assignment AfPak."  American Journalism Review, August/September 2009.

2. Shah, Saeed.  "A year after bin Laden raid, Pakistan still harbors US' biggest enemies."  Jewish World Review, May 1, 2012.

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