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Do you really think our entirely corrupt and ineffective central government can properly screen Muslims entering the USA? I do not. As such, stopping all Muslim immigration until such time as we can properly screen or radical Islam is terminated, makes sense. Yes or no? Would we import known Nazis into our nation today?You misunderstand.Why is it always the same old nonsense of 'its not ALL Muslims so....?"
The same tired refrain...and yet, NO ONE SAID IT IS ALL MUSLIMS.
Only people are saying ban all Muslims. Why? If it's not all Muslims, don't ban all Muslims.
Many on the Left, whenever radical Muslims murder innocents, scream don't blame ALL Muslims for the acts of a radical few. Mrs BJ did it yesterday.
Problem is...no one is blaming all Muslims. Strawman...it is a propaganda ploy to dupe the ignorant.
...and discontinuing all Muslim immigration into the US, until this violence is stopped, makes sense to intelligent people...the unintelligent are easily duped into thinking this policy bigoted.
No, i don't misunderstand.
The point is that people say "ban all Muslims" and then the left say "don't blame all Muslims".
If you ban all Muslims, then you're implying that they're all guilty.
Isn't this a similar argument used for when people say that all guns should be taken away from people because of a crime they did not commit?
You're fighting against an argument that, possibly you and, many on the right use all the time. It's a contradiction.
An ironic point...the Left today demands gun control or in some cases, out right confiscation. This at a time when our borders are open, the lying corrupt fool of a president is bringing in thousands of undocumented Muslims, and after several terror attacks in the country; which surely indicate radical Muslims are here.
Can't fix stupid!!!
Do you really think our entirely corrupt and ineffective central government can properly screen American citizens who want to own guns? I do not. As such, stopping all American citizens from owning guns until such time as we can properly screen makes sense. Yes or no?
Back to the point, would the US import known Nazis today? Simple answer is FUCK YES.
List of German aerospace engineers in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fraud.
You spend 90% of your Troll time on this forum apologising for your Islamic pets at every opportunity, so here get some testicles, a thread for you to focus your obsessive propaganda in to your black hearts content....make comments in this thread, or are you afraid to?
CDZ - Are Leftists as dangerous as the Terrorists?
They're actually a strange mix of Islamofascist and Stalinist. Sick assholes!!!
Greg
How interesting, what do you mean, saying "Stalinist"?
It's a typical Stalinist strategy. Get rid of any moderates; then the useful idiots and then you have totalitarian control. Saddam was similar as was Qaddafi as were ....quite a few ME Dictators.
Nocookies
They use useful Religious Zealots but discard them when they are no longer able to be controlled. Just more useful idiots.
Stalin is the godfather of Islamic State. The Soviet leader died 60 years before the brutal fundamentalist caliphate began to take shape in Syria and neighbouring Iraq. But just as Stalin created a spy-state founded on fear, so the architects of Islamic State set out to forge a new caliphate using precisely the same methods.
Stalin’s USSR and the self-proclaimed theocracy ruled by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi both laid claim to ideological purity; but both, in reality, were predicated on the acquisition of power by means of a fearsome internal espionage network.
The KGB, the East German Stasi and Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat intelligence agency are the direct progenitors of the Islamic State security apparatus. The proof lies in a cache of documents uncovered after a shootout last year between Syrian rebels and an Iraqi intelligence officer now believed to be the strategic mastermind behind the Islamic State takeover of northern Syria.
Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, who usually went by the nom de guerre Haji Bakr, was a colonel in Saddam’s military intelligence services who found himself jobless when the Baathist regime was dismantled and dismissed after the US invasion.
“Bitter and unemployed”, Bakr and other disgruntled Baathists began plotting a seizure of power: the roiling chaos in the rebel-held territories of northern Syria offered the perfect opportunity.
Bakr was shot dead by Syrian rebels in January 2014. Inside his house in the town of Tal Rifaat his killers discovered a bundle of documents describing how to build and enforce a police state. The documents, revealed by the German magazine Der Spiegel this week, amounted to nothing less than a “blueprint for a takeover ... not a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an ‘Islamic Intelligence State’.”
Spies, not religious converts, were the foundation on which Islamic State was built. Bakr’s plans called for missionary offices to be opened in towns across rebel-held Syria, as cover for the recruitment of informants, usually young men in need of money, regime opponents at odds with the rebels, and former intelligence officers. These spies were deployed to amass information that might be useful to divide and control the local populations: power structures, armed groups, potential opponents and the religious complexion of individual imams.
The agents were also instructed to gather evidence on criminal or homosexual activity which might be used to blackmail individuals, and to infiltrate powerful clans by marrying into them.
A local commander would be appointed for each province to oversee kidnapping, murder and espionage. But at the same time, the security structure would itself be subject to surveillance by parallel departments. Everyone would spy on everyone else — a recipe for the systemic paranoia that is the hallmark of totalitarianism.
The underground spy network established by Bakr enabled Islamic State to rise to power with a speed and efficiency that stunned Western intelligence agencies. But his methods were hardly new.
Bakr was a product of the terror state created by Saddam, whose system of internal surveillance in turn owed a great deal to the Soviet model of repression and manipulation. Saddam’s Baathist regime was a Stalinist dictatorship in all but name, controlling every element of society through fear, uncertainty and an all-seeing security apparatus.
As a young man Saddam bragged that he would turn Iraq into a “Stalin state”. He collected numerous biographies of the Soviet leader.
His seizure of power came with a staged scene of terror, when about 60 “traitors” were exposed at a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council in 1979 and then led away to be shot, while Saddam wept for the cameras. Saddam urged his intelligence officers to recruit “a shadow in every house”; the shadows themselves were spied upon.
Men such as Bakr learnt their trade among the shadows, and have now successfully applied these techniques to build Islamic State, a caliphate ostensibly dedicated to jihad but built on old-fashioned Stalinist fear. Its nearest parallel may be that of the Stasi, the security force of East Germany. Using thousands of citizen-informants to root out dissent, it was perhaps the most effective secret police agency in history.
The spy regimes of the USSR and East Germany were created to bolster communism; Saddam claimed to be defending Baathism; the army of spies deployed by Islamic State are in the service of the self-styled caliphate. But what all spy-based regimes have in common is a hunger for power.
Islamic State portrays itself as a pure religious revolution. It is seen in the West as a terrorist state, dedicated to wholesale destruction and looting. But the discovery that the world’s newest state is the work of Saddam’s former spooks suggests that what appears to be a new phenomenon may really be the application of tried and tested techniques of autocratic rule.
According to Der Spiegel, Baghdadi was selected by Bakr and his cabal of former Iraqi intelligence officers to give the organisation “a religious face”.
Islamic State, it seems, has two faces: one fanatical and fundamentalist, imposing religious conformity; the other secular and strategic, pursuing raw power. When they searched Bakr’s house, the rebels found ample evidence of a super-spy at work, but not a single copy of the Koran.
THE TIMES
Greg
How deep are you, western people, really propagandizing in this question... I understand it - I remember all this propagand, which came to Russia after USSR falling and added to internal propaganda. We needed about twenty years of learning historical archive documents to get a point of view, closer to truth.... So, thanks for your information!
Do you really think our entirely corrupt and ineffective central government can properly screen Muslims entering the USA? I do not. As such, stopping all Muslim immigration until such time as we can properly screen or radical Islam is terminated, makes sense. Yes or no? Would we import known Nazis into our nation today?You misunderstand.Only people are saying ban all Muslims. Why? If it's not all Muslims, don't ban all Muslims.
Many on the Left, whenever radical Muslims murder innocents, scream don't blame ALL Muslims for the acts of a radical few. Mrs BJ did it yesterday.
Problem is...no one is blaming all Muslims. Strawman...it is a propaganda ploy to dupe the ignorant.
...and discontinuing all Muslim immigration into the US, until this violence is stopped, makes sense to intelligent people...the unintelligent are easily duped into thinking this policy bigoted.
No, i don't misunderstand.
The point is that people say "ban all Muslims" and then the left say "don't blame all Muslims".
If you ban all Muslims, then you're implying that they're all guilty.
Isn't this a similar argument used for when people say that all guns should be taken away from people because of a crime they did not commit?
You're fighting against an argument that, possibly you and, many on the right use all the time. It's a contradiction.
An ironic point...the Left today demands gun control or in some cases, out right confiscation. This at a time when our borders are open, the lying corrupt fool of a president is bringing in thousands of undocumented Muslims, and after several terror attacks in the country; which surely indicate radical Muslims are here.
Can't fix stupid!!!
Do you really think our entirely corrupt and ineffective central government can properly screen American citizens who want to own guns? I do not. As such, stopping all American citizens from owning guns until such time as we can properly screen makes sense. Yes or no?
Back to the point, would the US import known Nazis today? Simple answer is FUCK YES.
List of German aerospace engineers in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
German or Nazis?
In 30th nazism was progressive ideology, supporting and creating a lot of qualified specialists.
Now nazism is retrograde, because mass education level is higher. It cannot grow and produce specialists anymore, only a stupid bigots with guns
Just checked: Russian Orthodox Easter isn't until May. I'll be out of chocolates by then!!!
Greg
You spend 90% of your Troll time on this forum apologising for your Islamic pets at every opportunity, so here get some testicles, a thread for you to focus your obsessive propaganda in to your black hearts content....make comments in this thread, or are you afraid to?
CDZ - Are Leftists as dangerous as the Terrorists?
They're actually a strange mix of Islamofascist and Stalinist. Sick assholes!!!
Greg
How interesting, what do you mean, saying "Stalinist"?
It's a typical Stalinist strategy. Get rid of any moderates; then the useful idiots and then you have totalitarian control. Saddam was similar as was Qaddafi as were ....quite a few ME Dictators.
Nocookies
They use useful Religious Zealots but discard them when they are no longer able to be controlled. Just more useful idiots.
Stalin is the godfather of Islamic State. The Soviet leader died 60 years before the brutal fundamentalist caliphate began to take shape in Syria and neighbouring Iraq. But just as Stalin created a spy-state founded on fear, so the architects of Islamic State set out to forge a new caliphate using precisely the same methods.
Stalin’s USSR and the self-proclaimed theocracy ruled by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi both laid claim to ideological purity; but both, in reality, were predicated on the acquisition of power by means of a fearsome internal espionage network.
The KGB, the East German Stasi and Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat intelligence agency are the direct progenitors of the Islamic State security apparatus. The proof lies in a cache of documents uncovered after a shootout last year between Syrian rebels and an Iraqi intelligence officer now believed to be the strategic mastermind behind the Islamic State takeover of northern Syria.
Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, who usually went by the nom de guerre Haji Bakr, was a colonel in Saddam’s military intelligence services who found himself jobless when the Baathist regime was dismantled and dismissed after the US invasion.
“Bitter and unemployed”, Bakr and other disgruntled Baathists began plotting a seizure of power: the roiling chaos in the rebel-held territories of northern Syria offered the perfect opportunity.
Bakr was shot dead by Syrian rebels in January 2014. Inside his house in the town of Tal Rifaat his killers discovered a bundle of documents describing how to build and enforce a police state. The documents, revealed by the German magazine Der Spiegel this week, amounted to nothing less than a “blueprint for a takeover ... not a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an ‘Islamic Intelligence State’.”
Spies, not religious converts, were the foundation on which Islamic State was built. Bakr’s plans called for missionary offices to be opened in towns across rebel-held Syria, as cover for the recruitment of informants, usually young men in need of money, regime opponents at odds with the rebels, and former intelligence officers. These spies were deployed to amass information that might be useful to divide and control the local populations: power structures, armed groups, potential opponents and the religious complexion of individual imams.
The agents were also instructed to gather evidence on criminal or homosexual activity which might be used to blackmail individuals, and to infiltrate powerful clans by marrying into them.
A local commander would be appointed for each province to oversee kidnapping, murder and espionage. But at the same time, the security structure would itself be subject to surveillance by parallel departments. Everyone would spy on everyone else — a recipe for the systemic paranoia that is the hallmark of totalitarianism.
The underground spy network established by Bakr enabled Islamic State to rise to power with a speed and efficiency that stunned Western intelligence agencies. But his methods were hardly new.
Bakr was a product of the terror state created by Saddam, whose system of internal surveillance in turn owed a great deal to the Soviet model of repression and manipulation. Saddam’s Baathist regime was a Stalinist dictatorship in all but name, controlling every element of society through fear, uncertainty and an all-seeing security apparatus.
As a young man Saddam bragged that he would turn Iraq into a “Stalin state”. He collected numerous biographies of the Soviet leader.
His seizure of power came with a staged scene of terror, when about 60 “traitors” were exposed at a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council in 1979 and then led away to be shot, while Saddam wept for the cameras. Saddam urged his intelligence officers to recruit “a shadow in every house”; the shadows themselves were spied upon.
Men such as Bakr learnt their trade among the shadows, and have now successfully applied these techniques to build Islamic State, a caliphate ostensibly dedicated to jihad but built on old-fashioned Stalinist fear. Its nearest parallel may be that of the Stasi, the security force of East Germany. Using thousands of citizen-informants to root out dissent, it was perhaps the most effective secret police agency in history.
The spy regimes of the USSR and East Germany were created to bolster communism; Saddam claimed to be defending Baathism; the army of spies deployed by Islamic State are in the service of the self-styled caliphate. But what all spy-based regimes have in common is a hunger for power.
Islamic State portrays itself as a pure religious revolution. It is seen in the West as a terrorist state, dedicated to wholesale destruction and looting. But the discovery that the world’s newest state is the work of Saddam’s former spooks suggests that what appears to be a new phenomenon may really be the application of tried and tested techniques of autocratic rule.
According to Der Spiegel, Baghdadi was selected by Bakr and his cabal of former Iraqi intelligence officers to give the organisation “a religious face”.
Islamic State, it seems, has two faces: one fanatical and fundamentalist, imposing religious conformity; the other secular and strategic, pursuing raw power. When they searched Bakr’s house, the rebels found ample evidence of a super-spy at work, but not a single copy of the Koran.
THE TIMES
Greg
How deep are you, western people, really propagandizing in this question... I understand it - I remember all this propagand, which came to Russia after USSR falling and added to internal propaganda. We needed about twenty years of learning historical archive documents to get a point of view, closer to truth.... So, thanks for your information!
Since the fall of the wall?? lol. No my friend. Many in my family were massacred by Stalin. My Father's family was pro-Constitutional Monarchist as I am. They were mercilessly attacked, jailed and murdered by Stalin's useful idiots. My Grandfather left his homeland in the late 40s. It is not propaganda, my friend. It is family history. But FREEDOM now is part of the East. It will be lost unless you diligently defend her; to not do so is a to go back to being controlled by the Old Style again. I would not wish that on my worst enemy. Embrace your freedom, Sb; never let it go. But the past is dead; it matters not what was before 1990; that is gone. That it still has some ghosts is sad but the world has turned. I am very optimistic about the future; just some mopping up of some old ways to be done never to be tolerated again.
Greg
They're actually a strange mix of Islamofascist and Stalinist. Sick assholes!!!
Greg
How interesting, what do you mean, saying "Stalinist"?
It's a typical Stalinist strategy. Get rid of any moderates; then the useful idiots and then you have totalitarian control. Saddam was similar as was Qaddafi as were ....quite a few ME Dictators.
Nocookies
They use useful Religious Zealots but discard them when they are no longer able to be controlled. Just more useful idiots.
Stalin is the godfather of Islamic State. The Soviet leader died 60 years before the brutal fundamentalist caliphate began to take shape in Syria and neighbouring Iraq. But just as Stalin created a spy-state founded on fear, so the architects of Islamic State set out to forge a new caliphate using precisely the same methods.
Stalin’s USSR and the self-proclaimed theocracy ruled by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi both laid claim to ideological purity; but both, in reality, were predicated on the acquisition of power by means of a fearsome internal espionage network.
The KGB, the East German Stasi and Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat intelligence agency are the direct progenitors of the Islamic State security apparatus. The proof lies in a cache of documents uncovered after a shootout last year between Syrian rebels and an Iraqi intelligence officer now believed to be the strategic mastermind behind the Islamic State takeover of northern Syria.
Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, who usually went by the nom de guerre Haji Bakr, was a colonel in Saddam’s military intelligence services who found himself jobless when the Baathist regime was dismantled and dismissed after the US invasion.
“Bitter and unemployed”, Bakr and other disgruntled Baathists began plotting a seizure of power: the roiling chaos in the rebel-held territories of northern Syria offered the perfect opportunity.
Bakr was shot dead by Syrian rebels in January 2014. Inside his house in the town of Tal Rifaat his killers discovered a bundle of documents describing how to build and enforce a police state. The documents, revealed by the German magazine Der Spiegel this week, amounted to nothing less than a “blueprint for a takeover ... not a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an ‘Islamic Intelligence State’.”
Spies, not religious converts, were the foundation on which Islamic State was built. Bakr’s plans called for missionary offices to be opened in towns across rebel-held Syria, as cover for the recruitment of informants, usually young men in need of money, regime opponents at odds with the rebels, and former intelligence officers. These spies were deployed to amass information that might be useful to divide and control the local populations: power structures, armed groups, potential opponents and the religious complexion of individual imams.
The agents were also instructed to gather evidence on criminal or homosexual activity which might be used to blackmail individuals, and to infiltrate powerful clans by marrying into them.
A local commander would be appointed for each province to oversee kidnapping, murder and espionage. But at the same time, the security structure would itself be subject to surveillance by parallel departments. Everyone would spy on everyone else — a recipe for the systemic paranoia that is the hallmark of totalitarianism.
The underground spy network established by Bakr enabled Islamic State to rise to power with a speed and efficiency that stunned Western intelligence agencies. But his methods were hardly new.
Bakr was a product of the terror state created by Saddam, whose system of internal surveillance in turn owed a great deal to the Soviet model of repression and manipulation. Saddam’s Baathist regime was a Stalinist dictatorship in all but name, controlling every element of society through fear, uncertainty and an all-seeing security apparatus.
As a young man Saddam bragged that he would turn Iraq into a “Stalin state”. He collected numerous biographies of the Soviet leader.
His seizure of power came with a staged scene of terror, when about 60 “traitors” were exposed at a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council in 1979 and then led away to be shot, while Saddam wept for the cameras. Saddam urged his intelligence officers to recruit “a shadow in every house”; the shadows themselves were spied upon.
Men such as Bakr learnt their trade among the shadows, and have now successfully applied these techniques to build Islamic State, a caliphate ostensibly dedicated to jihad but built on old-fashioned Stalinist fear. Its nearest parallel may be that of the Stasi, the security force of East Germany. Using thousands of citizen-informants to root out dissent, it was perhaps the most effective secret police agency in history.
The spy regimes of the USSR and East Germany were created to bolster communism; Saddam claimed to be defending Baathism; the army of spies deployed by Islamic State are in the service of the self-styled caliphate. But what all spy-based regimes have in common is a hunger for power.
Islamic State portrays itself as a pure religious revolution. It is seen in the West as a terrorist state, dedicated to wholesale destruction and looting. But the discovery that the world’s newest state is the work of Saddam’s former spooks suggests that what appears to be a new phenomenon may really be the application of tried and tested techniques of autocratic rule.
According to Der Spiegel, Baghdadi was selected by Bakr and his cabal of former Iraqi intelligence officers to give the organisation “a religious face”.
Islamic State, it seems, has two faces: one fanatical and fundamentalist, imposing religious conformity; the other secular and strategic, pursuing raw power. When they searched Bakr’s house, the rebels found ample evidence of a super-spy at work, but not a single copy of the Koran.
THE TIMES
Greg
How deep are you, western people, really propagandizing in this question... I understand it - I remember all this propagand, which came to Russia after USSR falling and added to internal propaganda. We needed about twenty years of learning historical archive documents to get a point of view, closer to truth.... So, thanks for your information!
Since the fall of the wall?? lol. No my friend. Many in my family were massacred by Stalin. My Father's family was pro-Constitutional Monarchist as I am. They were mercilessly attacked, jailed and murdered by Stalin's useful idiots. My Grandfather left his homeland in the late 40s. It is not propaganda, my friend. It is family history. But FREEDOM now is part of the East. It will be lost unless you diligently defend her; to not do so is a to go back to being controlled by the Old Style again. I would not wish that on my worst enemy. Embrace your freedom, Sb; never let it go. But the past is dead; it matters not what was before 1990; that is gone. That it still has some ghosts is sad but the world has turned. I am very optimistic about the future; just some mopping up of some old ways to be done never to be tolerated again.
Greg
I understand, because I have also history of my family, and it's really ambigious. For example, my grandpa in a late 40th had a large problems with NKVD, but... But who wrote denunciation for him? A COUSIN! He just hope to free the house! Does Stalin guilty in this? Or Stalin's useful idiots? NKVD freed my grandpa after checking it.
And I've started to learn history in details after another episode. My father liked to tell story, how it was be bad and poor to live during Stalin's rule, how the local authorities forbid to have a cow and his younger sister stayed without milk and how they made very hard tax for the garden trees, and parents have been compelled to cut apple garden (it's known moment of Soviet history, when people became much more poor...)
And one moment I've understand something... "Stop" - I said - how can YOU remember "Stalin's crimes" like this, if you was born a year, before the Stalin dead? It was a choke, but many economical and political crimes, usually known as Stalin's were commited BY KHRUSHEV!!!!
So, now I'm trying to find as much as possible details, when I learn the Stalin's times... And it's really very, VERY interesting. I don't want to say, Stalin was angel, it was a hard epoch, WWII... But without him Russia with almost all population would be just another big Khirosima (Operation Dropshot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). It's another fact to remember.
They're actually a strange mix of Islamofascist and Stalinist. Sick assholes!!!
Greg
How interesting, what do you mean, saying "Stalinist"?
It's a typical Stalinist strategy. Get rid of any moderates; then the useful idiots and then you have totalitarian control. Saddam was similar as was Qaddafi as were ....quite a few ME Dictators.
Nocookies
They use useful Religious Zealots but discard them when they are no longer able to be controlled. Just more useful idiots.
Stalin is the godfather of Islamic State. The Soviet leader died 60 years before the brutal fundamentalist caliphate began to take shape in Syria and neighbouring Iraq. But just as Stalin created a spy-state founded on fear, so the architects of Islamic State set out to forge a new caliphate using precisely the same methods.
Stalin’s USSR and the self-proclaimed theocracy ruled by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi both laid claim to ideological purity; but both, in reality, were predicated on the acquisition of power by means of a fearsome internal espionage network.
The KGB, the East German Stasi and Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat intelligence agency are the direct progenitors of the Islamic State security apparatus. The proof lies in a cache of documents uncovered after a shootout last year between Syrian rebels and an Iraqi intelligence officer now believed to be the strategic mastermind behind the Islamic State takeover of northern Syria.
Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, who usually went by the nom de guerre Haji Bakr, was a colonel in Saddam’s military intelligence services who found himself jobless when the Baathist regime was dismantled and dismissed after the US invasion.
“Bitter and unemployed”, Bakr and other disgruntled Baathists began plotting a seizure of power: the roiling chaos in the rebel-held territories of northern Syria offered the perfect opportunity.
Bakr was shot dead by Syrian rebels in January 2014. Inside his house in the town of Tal Rifaat his killers discovered a bundle of documents describing how to build and enforce a police state. The documents, revealed by the German magazine Der Spiegel this week, amounted to nothing less than a “blueprint for a takeover ... not a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an ‘Islamic Intelligence State’.”
Spies, not religious converts, were the foundation on which Islamic State was built. Bakr’s plans called for missionary offices to be opened in towns across rebel-held Syria, as cover for the recruitment of informants, usually young men in need of money, regime opponents at odds with the rebels, and former intelligence officers. These spies were deployed to amass information that might be useful to divide and control the local populations: power structures, armed groups, potential opponents and the religious complexion of individual imams.
The agents were also instructed to gather evidence on criminal or homosexual activity which might be used to blackmail individuals, and to infiltrate powerful clans by marrying into them.
A local commander would be appointed for each province to oversee kidnapping, murder and espionage. But at the same time, the security structure would itself be subject to surveillance by parallel departments. Everyone would spy on everyone else — a recipe for the systemic paranoia that is the hallmark of totalitarianism.
The underground spy network established by Bakr enabled Islamic State to rise to power with a speed and efficiency that stunned Western intelligence agencies. But his methods were hardly new.
Bakr was a product of the terror state created by Saddam, whose system of internal surveillance in turn owed a great deal to the Soviet model of repression and manipulation. Saddam’s Baathist regime was a Stalinist dictatorship in all but name, controlling every element of society through fear, uncertainty and an all-seeing security apparatus.
As a young man Saddam bragged that he would turn Iraq into a “Stalin state”. He collected numerous biographies of the Soviet leader.
His seizure of power came with a staged scene of terror, when about 60 “traitors” were exposed at a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council in 1979 and then led away to be shot, while Saddam wept for the cameras. Saddam urged his intelligence officers to recruit “a shadow in every house”; the shadows themselves were spied upon.
Men such as Bakr learnt their trade among the shadows, and have now successfully applied these techniques to build Islamic State, a caliphate ostensibly dedicated to jihad but built on old-fashioned Stalinist fear. Its nearest parallel may be that of the Stasi, the security force of East Germany. Using thousands of citizen-informants to root out dissent, it was perhaps the most effective secret police agency in history.
The spy regimes of the USSR and East Germany were created to bolster communism; Saddam claimed to be defending Baathism; the army of spies deployed by Islamic State are in the service of the self-styled caliphate. But what all spy-based regimes have in common is a hunger for power.
Islamic State portrays itself as a pure religious revolution. It is seen in the West as a terrorist state, dedicated to wholesale destruction and looting. But the discovery that the world’s newest state is the work of Saddam’s former spooks suggests that what appears to be a new phenomenon may really be the application of tried and tested techniques of autocratic rule.
According to Der Spiegel, Baghdadi was selected by Bakr and his cabal of former Iraqi intelligence officers to give the organisation “a religious face”.
Islamic State, it seems, has two faces: one fanatical and fundamentalist, imposing religious conformity; the other secular and strategic, pursuing raw power. When they searched Bakr’s house, the rebels found ample evidence of a super-spy at work, but not a single copy of the Koran.
THE TIMES
Greg
How deep are you, western people, really propagandizing in this question... I understand it - I remember all this propagand, which came to Russia after USSR falling and added to internal propaganda. We needed about twenty years of learning historical archive documents to get a point of view, closer to truth.... So, thanks for your information!
Since the fall of the wall?? lol. No my friend. Many in my family were massacred by Stalin. My Father's family was pro-Constitutional Monarchist as I am. They were mercilessly attacked, jailed and murdered by Stalin's useful idiots. My Grandfather left his homeland in the late 40s. It is not propaganda, my friend. It is family history. But FREEDOM now is part of the East. It will be lost unless you diligently defend her; to not do so is a to go back to being controlled by the Old Style again. I would not wish that on my worst enemy. Embrace your freedom, Sb; never let it go. But the past is dead; it matters not what was before 1990; that is gone. That it still has some ghosts is sad but the world has turned. I am very optimistic about the future; just some mopping up of some old ways to be done never to be tolerated again.
Greg
I understand, because I have also history of my family, and it's really ambigious. For example, my grandpa in a late 40th had a large problems with NKVD, but... But who wrote denunciation for him? A COUSIN! He just hope to free the house! Does Stalin guilty in this? Or Stalin's useful idiots? NKVD freed my grandpa after checking it.
And I've started to learn history in details after another episode. My father liked to tell story, how it was be bad and poor to live during Stalin's rule, how the local authorities forbid to have a cow and his younger sister stayed without milk and how they made very hard tax for the garden trees, and parents have been compelled to cut apple garden (it's known moment of Soviet history, when people became much more poor...)
And one moment I've understand something... "Stop" - I said - how can YOU remember "Stalin's crimes" like this, if you was born a year, before the Stalin dead? It was a choke, but many economical and political crimes, usually known as Stalin's were commited BY KHRUSHEV!!!!
So, now I'm trying to find as much as possible details, when I learn the Stalin's times... And it's really very, VERY interesting. I don't want to say, Stalin was angel, it was a hard epoch, WWII... But without him Russia with almost all population would be just another big Khirosima (Operation Dropshot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). It's another fact to remember.
How interesting, what do you mean, saying "Stalinist"?
It's a typical Stalinist strategy. Get rid of any moderates; then the useful idiots and then you have totalitarian control. Saddam was similar as was Qaddafi as were ....quite a few ME Dictators.
Nocookies
They use useful Religious Zealots but discard them when they are no longer able to be controlled. Just more useful idiots.
Stalin is the godfather of Islamic State. The Soviet leader died 60 years before the brutal fundamentalist caliphate began to take shape in Syria and neighbouring Iraq. But just as Stalin created a spy-state founded on fear, so the architects of Islamic State set out to forge a new caliphate using precisely the same methods.
Stalin’s USSR and the self-proclaimed theocracy ruled by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi both laid claim to ideological purity; but both, in reality, were predicated on the acquisition of power by means of a fearsome internal espionage network.
The KGB, the East German Stasi and Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat intelligence agency are the direct progenitors of the Islamic State security apparatus. The proof lies in a cache of documents uncovered after a shootout last year between Syrian rebels and an Iraqi intelligence officer now believed to be the strategic mastermind behind the Islamic State takeover of northern Syria.
Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, who usually went by the nom de guerre Haji Bakr, was a colonel in Saddam’s military intelligence services who found himself jobless when the Baathist regime was dismantled and dismissed after the US invasion.
“Bitter and unemployed”, Bakr and other disgruntled Baathists began plotting a seizure of power: the roiling chaos in the rebel-held territories of northern Syria offered the perfect opportunity.
Bakr was shot dead by Syrian rebels in January 2014. Inside his house in the town of Tal Rifaat his killers discovered a bundle of documents describing how to build and enforce a police state. The documents, revealed by the German magazine Der Spiegel this week, amounted to nothing less than a “blueprint for a takeover ... not a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an ‘Islamic Intelligence State’.”
Spies, not religious converts, were the foundation on which Islamic State was built. Bakr’s plans called for missionary offices to be opened in towns across rebel-held Syria, as cover for the recruitment of informants, usually young men in need of money, regime opponents at odds with the rebels, and former intelligence officers. These spies were deployed to amass information that might be useful to divide and control the local populations: power structures, armed groups, potential opponents and the religious complexion of individual imams.
The agents were also instructed to gather evidence on criminal or homosexual activity which might be used to blackmail individuals, and to infiltrate powerful clans by marrying into them.
A local commander would be appointed for each province to oversee kidnapping, murder and espionage. But at the same time, the security structure would itself be subject to surveillance by parallel departments. Everyone would spy on everyone else — a recipe for the systemic paranoia that is the hallmark of totalitarianism.
The underground spy network established by Bakr enabled Islamic State to rise to power with a speed and efficiency that stunned Western intelligence agencies. But his methods were hardly new.
Bakr was a product of the terror state created by Saddam, whose system of internal surveillance in turn owed a great deal to the Soviet model of repression and manipulation. Saddam’s Baathist regime was a Stalinist dictatorship in all but name, controlling every element of society through fear, uncertainty and an all-seeing security apparatus.
As a young man Saddam bragged that he would turn Iraq into a “Stalin state”. He collected numerous biographies of the Soviet leader.
His seizure of power came with a staged scene of terror, when about 60 “traitors” were exposed at a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council in 1979 and then led away to be shot, while Saddam wept for the cameras. Saddam urged his intelligence officers to recruit “a shadow in every house”; the shadows themselves were spied upon.
Men such as Bakr learnt their trade among the shadows, and have now successfully applied these techniques to build Islamic State, a caliphate ostensibly dedicated to jihad but built on old-fashioned Stalinist fear. Its nearest parallel may be that of the Stasi, the security force of East Germany. Using thousands of citizen-informants to root out dissent, it was perhaps the most effective secret police agency in history.
The spy regimes of the USSR and East Germany were created to bolster communism; Saddam claimed to be defending Baathism; the army of spies deployed by Islamic State are in the service of the self-styled caliphate. But what all spy-based regimes have in common is a hunger for power.
Islamic State portrays itself as a pure religious revolution. It is seen in the West as a terrorist state, dedicated to wholesale destruction and looting. But the discovery that the world’s newest state is the work of Saddam’s former spooks suggests that what appears to be a new phenomenon may really be the application of tried and tested techniques of autocratic rule.
According to Der Spiegel, Baghdadi was selected by Bakr and his cabal of former Iraqi intelligence officers to give the organisation “a religious face”.
Islamic State, it seems, has two faces: one fanatical and fundamentalist, imposing religious conformity; the other secular and strategic, pursuing raw power. When they searched Bakr’s house, the rebels found ample evidence of a super-spy at work, but not a single copy of the Koran.
THE TIMES
Greg
How deep are you, western people, really propagandizing in this question... I understand it - I remember all this propagand, which came to Russia after USSR falling and added to internal propaganda. We needed about twenty years of learning historical archive documents to get a point of view, closer to truth.... So, thanks for your information!
Since the fall of the wall?? lol. No my friend. Many in my family were massacred by Stalin. My Father's family was pro-Constitutional Monarchist as I am. They were mercilessly attacked, jailed and murdered by Stalin's useful idiots. My Grandfather left his homeland in the late 40s. It is not propaganda, my friend. It is family history. But FREEDOM now is part of the East. It will be lost unless you diligently defend her; to not do so is a to go back to being controlled by the Old Style again. I would not wish that on my worst enemy. Embrace your freedom, Sb; never let it go. But the past is dead; it matters not what was before 1990; that is gone. That it still has some ghosts is sad but the world has turned. I am very optimistic about the future; just some mopping up of some old ways to be done never to be tolerated again.
Greg
I understand, because I have also history of my family, and it's really ambigious. For example, my grandpa in a late 40th had a large problems with NKVD, but... But who wrote denunciation for him? A COUSIN! He just hope to free the house! Does Stalin guilty in this? Or Stalin's useful idiots? NKVD freed my grandpa after checking it.
And I've started to learn history in details after another episode. My father liked to tell story, how it was be bad and poor to live during Stalin's rule, how the local authorities forbid to have a cow and his younger sister stayed without milk and how they made very hard tax for the garden trees, and parents have been compelled to cut apple garden (it's known moment of Soviet history, when people became much more poor...)
And one moment I've understand something... "Stop" - I said - how can YOU remember "Stalin's crimes" like this, if you was born a year, before the Stalin dead? It was a choke, but many economical and political crimes, usually known as Stalin's were commited BY KHRUSHEV!!!!
So, now I'm trying to find as much as possible details, when I learn the Stalin's times... And it's really very, VERY interesting. I don't want to say, Stalin was angel, it was a hard epoch, WWII... But without him Russia with almost all population would be just another big Khirosima (Operation Dropshot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). It's another fact to remember.
I wish you well on your journey to knowledge; try not to get too emotionally involved. You must review the history from reliable sources and you may not find much on the Period that is without bias. What I do is try and work out the bias BEFORE reading from a particular source. All the best.
Greg
How interesting, what do you mean, saying "Stalinist"?
It's a typical Stalinist strategy. Get rid of any moderates; then the useful idiots and then you have totalitarian control. Saddam was similar as was Qaddafi as were ....quite a few ME Dictators.
Nocookies
They use useful Religious Zealots but discard them when they are no longer able to be controlled. Just more useful idiots.
Stalin is the godfather of Islamic State. The Soviet leader died 60 years before the brutal fundamentalist caliphate began to take shape in Syria and neighbouring Iraq. But just as Stalin created a spy-state founded on fear, so the architects of Islamic State set out to forge a new caliphate using precisely the same methods.
Stalin’s USSR and the self-proclaimed theocracy ruled by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi both laid claim to ideological purity; but both, in reality, were predicated on the acquisition of power by means of a fearsome internal espionage network.
The KGB, the East German Stasi and Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat intelligence agency are the direct progenitors of the Islamic State security apparatus. The proof lies in a cache of documents uncovered after a shootout last year between Syrian rebels and an Iraqi intelligence officer now believed to be the strategic mastermind behind the Islamic State takeover of northern Syria.
Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, who usually went by the nom de guerre Haji Bakr, was a colonel in Saddam’s military intelligence services who found himself jobless when the Baathist regime was dismantled and dismissed after the US invasion.
“Bitter and unemployed”, Bakr and other disgruntled Baathists began plotting a seizure of power: the roiling chaos in the rebel-held territories of northern Syria offered the perfect opportunity.
Bakr was shot dead by Syrian rebels in January 2014. Inside his house in the town of Tal Rifaat his killers discovered a bundle of documents describing how to build and enforce a police state. The documents, revealed by the German magazine Der Spiegel this week, amounted to nothing less than a “blueprint for a takeover ... not a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an ‘Islamic Intelligence State’.”
Spies, not religious converts, were the foundation on which Islamic State was built. Bakr’s plans called for missionary offices to be opened in towns across rebel-held Syria, as cover for the recruitment of informants, usually young men in need of money, regime opponents at odds with the rebels, and former intelligence officers. These spies were deployed to amass information that might be useful to divide and control the local populations: power structures, armed groups, potential opponents and the religious complexion of individual imams.
The agents were also instructed to gather evidence on criminal or homosexual activity which might be used to blackmail individuals, and to infiltrate powerful clans by marrying into them.
A local commander would be appointed for each province to oversee kidnapping, murder and espionage. But at the same time, the security structure would itself be subject to surveillance by parallel departments. Everyone would spy on everyone else — a recipe for the systemic paranoia that is the hallmark of totalitarianism.
The underground spy network established by Bakr enabled Islamic State to rise to power with a speed and efficiency that stunned Western intelligence agencies. But his methods were hardly new.
Bakr was a product of the terror state created by Saddam, whose system of internal surveillance in turn owed a great deal to the Soviet model of repression and manipulation. Saddam’s Baathist regime was a Stalinist dictatorship in all but name, controlling every element of society through fear, uncertainty and an all-seeing security apparatus.
As a young man Saddam bragged that he would turn Iraq into a “Stalin state”. He collected numerous biographies of the Soviet leader.
His seizure of power came with a staged scene of terror, when about 60 “traitors” were exposed at a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council in 1979 and then led away to be shot, while Saddam wept for the cameras. Saddam urged his intelligence officers to recruit “a shadow in every house”; the shadows themselves were spied upon.
Men such as Bakr learnt their trade among the shadows, and have now successfully applied these techniques to build Islamic State, a caliphate ostensibly dedicated to jihad but built on old-fashioned Stalinist fear. Its nearest parallel may be that of the Stasi, the security force of East Germany. Using thousands of citizen-informants to root out dissent, it was perhaps the most effective secret police agency in history.
The spy regimes of the USSR and East Germany were created to bolster communism; Saddam claimed to be defending Baathism; the army of spies deployed by Islamic State are in the service of the self-styled caliphate. But what all spy-based regimes have in common is a hunger for power.
Islamic State portrays itself as a pure religious revolution. It is seen in the West as a terrorist state, dedicated to wholesale destruction and looting. But the discovery that the world’s newest state is the work of Saddam’s former spooks suggests that what appears to be a new phenomenon may really be the application of tried and tested techniques of autocratic rule.
According to Der Spiegel, Baghdadi was selected by Bakr and his cabal of former Iraqi intelligence officers to give the organisation “a religious face”.
Islamic State, it seems, has two faces: one fanatical and fundamentalist, imposing religious conformity; the other secular and strategic, pursuing raw power. When they searched Bakr’s house, the rebels found ample evidence of a super-spy at work, but not a single copy of the Koran.
THE TIMES
Greg
How deep are you, western people, really propagandizing in this question... I understand it - I remember all this propagand, which came to Russia after USSR falling and added to internal propaganda. We needed about twenty years of learning historical archive documents to get a point of view, closer to truth.... So, thanks for your information!
Since the fall of the wall?? lol. No my friend. Many in my family were massacred by Stalin. My Father's family was pro-Constitutional Monarchist as I am. They were mercilessly attacked, jailed and murdered by Stalin's useful idiots. My Grandfather left his homeland in the late 40s. It is not propaganda, my friend. It is family history. But FREEDOM now is part of the East. It will be lost unless you diligently defend her; to not do so is a to go back to being controlled by the Old Style again. I would not wish that on my worst enemy. Embrace your freedom, Sb; never let it go. But the past is dead; it matters not what was before 1990; that is gone. That it still has some ghosts is sad but the world has turned. I am very optimistic about the future; just some mopping up of some old ways to be done never to be tolerated again.
Greg
I understand, because I have also history of my family, and it's really ambigious. For example, my grandpa in a late 40th had a large problems with NKVD, but... But who wrote denunciation for him? A COUSIN! He just hope to free the house! Does Stalin guilty in this? Or Stalin's useful idiots? NKVD freed my grandpa after checking it.
And I've started to learn history in details after another episode. My father liked to tell story, how it was be bad and poor to live during Stalin's rule, how the local authorities forbid to have a cow and his younger sister stayed without milk and how they made very hard tax for the garden trees, and parents have been compelled to cut apple garden (it's known moment of Soviet history, when people became much more poor...)
And one moment I've understand something... "Stop" - I said - how can YOU remember "Stalin's crimes" like this, if you was born a year, before the Stalin dead? It was a choke, but many economical and political crimes, usually known as Stalin's were commited BY KHRUSHEV!!!!
So, now I'm trying to find as much as possible details, when I learn the Stalin's times... And it's really very, VERY interesting. I don't want to say, Stalin was angel, it was a hard epoch, WWII... But without him Russia with almost all population would be just another big Khirosima (Operation Dropshot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). It's another fact to remember.
My own family's history is less ambiguous. Grandad fell out with the useful idiots in the late 40s. My own father was a student in Prague doing Medicine. When in his second year he was sent back along with all the other foreign students. The family was in the thick of the oppression and were informed to get out as they were on a "death list"....so they left. Many in the extended family were unable to leave and some were murdered. Nearly all were "enemies" of the state and under the eye of the Secret Police. You know the set-up. Grandad got drunk for three days when Stalin died; most of it spent dancing and singing. I am told it was quite a sight. But they were there. You are right though; Krushev was as bad.
Greg
It's a typical Stalinist strategy. Get rid of any moderates; then the useful idiots and then you have totalitarian control. Saddam was similar as was Qaddafi as were ....quite a few ME Dictators.
Nocookies
They use useful Religious Zealots but discard them when they are no longer able to be controlled. Just more useful idiots.
Greg
How deep are you, western people, really propagandizing in this question... I understand it - I remember all this propagand, which came to Russia after USSR falling and added to internal propaganda. We needed about twenty years of learning historical archive documents to get a point of view, closer to truth.... So, thanks for your information!
Since the fall of the wall?? lol. No my friend. Many in my family were massacred by Stalin. My Father's family was pro-Constitutional Monarchist as I am. They were mercilessly attacked, jailed and murdered by Stalin's useful idiots. My Grandfather left his homeland in the late 40s. It is not propaganda, my friend. It is family history. But FREEDOM now is part of the East. It will be lost unless you diligently defend her; to not do so is a to go back to being controlled by the Old Style again. I would not wish that on my worst enemy. Embrace your freedom, Sb; never let it go. But the past is dead; it matters not what was before 1990; that is gone. That it still has some ghosts is sad but the world has turned. I am very optimistic about the future; just some mopping up of some old ways to be done never to be tolerated again.
Greg
I understand, because I have also history of my family, and it's really ambigious. For example, my grandpa in a late 40th had a large problems with NKVD, but... But who wrote denunciation for him? A COUSIN! He just hope to free the house! Does Stalin guilty in this? Or Stalin's useful idiots? NKVD freed my grandpa after checking it.
And I've started to learn history in details after another episode. My father liked to tell story, how it was be bad and poor to live during Stalin's rule, how the local authorities forbid to have a cow and his younger sister stayed without milk and how they made very hard tax for the garden trees, and parents have been compelled to cut apple garden (it's known moment of Soviet history, when people became much more poor...)
And one moment I've understand something... "Stop" - I said - how can YOU remember "Stalin's crimes" like this, if you was born a year, before the Stalin dead? It was a choke, but many economical and political crimes, usually known as Stalin's were commited BY KHRUSHEV!!!!
So, now I'm trying to find as much as possible details, when I learn the Stalin's times... And it's really very, VERY interesting. I don't want to say, Stalin was angel, it was a hard epoch, WWII... But without him Russia with almost all population would be just another big Khirosima (Operation Dropshot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). It's another fact to remember.
I wish you well on your journey to knowledge; try not to get too emotionally involved. You must review the history from reliable sources and you may not find much on the Period that is without bias. What I do is try and work out the bias BEFORE reading from a particular source. All the best.
Greg
Offcourse. I respect British approach to history - for example, they remember Wilhelm Bastard as one of the others kings...
How deep are you, western people, really propagandizing in this question... I understand it - I remember all this propagand, which came to Russia after USSR falling and added to internal propaganda. We needed about twenty years of learning historical archive documents to get a point of view, closer to truth.... So, thanks for your information!
Since the fall of the wall?? lol. No my friend. Many in my family were massacred by Stalin. My Father's family was pro-Constitutional Monarchist as I am. They were mercilessly attacked, jailed and murdered by Stalin's useful idiots. My Grandfather left his homeland in the late 40s. It is not propaganda, my friend. It is family history. But FREEDOM now is part of the East. It will be lost unless you diligently defend her; to not do so is a to go back to being controlled by the Old Style again. I would not wish that on my worst enemy. Embrace your freedom, Sb; never let it go. But the past is dead; it matters not what was before 1990; that is gone. That it still has some ghosts is sad but the world has turned. I am very optimistic about the future; just some mopping up of some old ways to be done never to be tolerated again.
Greg
I understand, because I have also history of my family, and it's really ambigious. For example, my grandpa in a late 40th had a large problems with NKVD, but... But who wrote denunciation for him? A COUSIN! He just hope to free the house! Does Stalin guilty in this? Or Stalin's useful idiots? NKVD freed my grandpa after checking it.
And I've started to learn history in details after another episode. My father liked to tell story, how it was be bad and poor to live during Stalin's rule, how the local authorities forbid to have a cow and his younger sister stayed without milk and how they made very hard tax for the garden trees, and parents have been compelled to cut apple garden (it's known moment of Soviet history, when people became much more poor...)
And one moment I've understand something... "Stop" - I said - how can YOU remember "Stalin's crimes" like this, if you was born a year, before the Stalin dead? It was a choke, but many economical and political crimes, usually known as Stalin's were commited BY KHRUSHEV!!!!
So, now I'm trying to find as much as possible details, when I learn the Stalin's times... And it's really very, VERY interesting. I don't want to say, Stalin was angel, it was a hard epoch, WWII... But without him Russia with almost all population would be just another big Khirosima (Operation Dropshot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). It's another fact to remember.
I wish you well on your journey to knowledge; try not to get too emotionally involved. You must review the history from reliable sources and you may not find much on the Period that is without bias. What I do is try and work out the bias BEFORE reading from a particular source. All the best.
Greg
Offcourse. I respect British approach to history - for example, they remember Wilhelm Bastard as one of the others kings...
I'm not British; I'm from Australia. It was as far from the USSR as Grandad could get. lol
But Stalin had his own crimes; striking a deal with Hitler, the Kulaks..a strategy repeated by Mao in 58/59 with similar results ...so having his own little purges was only a part of the problem. His policies resulted in mass deaths and atrocities based on his Totalitarian system. He even used induced famine as a means of suppressing and eliminating those he considered his class enemies. Do not lose sight of the fact that these events happened.
The History Place - Genocide in the 20th Century: Stalin's Forced Famine 1932-33
Greg
Maybe, go to another thread, because here main topic is about Brussel? I heared, terrorists in Brussel had a primary target - nuclear station, Belgian nuclear research centre security guard murdered
