Human dignity has had a tough couple of weeks in the Middle East. Turkey’s President Recip Tayyip Erdogan is out to cleanse Kurds from borderlands in Northeastern Syria. His bombers have killed children. His Arab mercenaries executed an exemplary Kurdish woman diplomat. Hundreds of “ISIS families”—who had been in Kurdish custody—are now on the loose. Over one hundred thousand civilians have been displaced. Kurdish officials and military officers based in the autonomous democratic region known as Rojava have had to cut a deal with fascist Assad (and Putin) to protect their people from an invasion that Erdogan (who “loves Orwellian double-speak”) calls “peace spring.”[1]
Meanwhile Trump has locked on his own See-ya, Hate-to-be-ya cynicism. He’s gone from slap to slurs since he signed off on Erdogan’s campaign of ethnic cleansing. He abused “Mr. Kurd” for failing to help out on Normandy’s beaches. Then turned around to vow he’d “crush” Turkey’s economy, before going back to trashing Syrian Kurds who’ve been stalwart allies of America: “They’re no angels.” No doubt coming days will bring more “strategically brilliant” C.Y.A. from our taunter-in-chief.
I’m just now realizing we didn’t talk back to Trump enough at last weekend’s rally for Rojava in NYC. The focus was on…“Turkey out of Rojava!” “Turkey is ISIS!” “Terrorist Erdogan!” We tried to chant from the heart with help from a big bass drum. Turn-out for the demonstration wasn’t big enough to make Union Square roar but the sounds of solidarity still seemed like the inverse of indignity.
The fellow who led our chants picked up on a song being hummed by a couple of counter-protesters on the edge of the rally—a martial air favored by Erdogan’s troops. Our leader didn’t bother to rail at these Kurd-teasers. Advising us to laugh at them, he kept things cool yet fervent. This representative man modeled what’s made Rojava’s cause humanity’s.
Anyone who surfed the crowd at Union Square would’ve dived into the world’s gene-pool, though I guess East Asia was missing. (They get a pass—Hong Kong’s resistance must concentrate attention over there.) The rally’s age range was as rangey as the racial/global mix. Both kids and elders were present, though the crowd got most of its juice from twenty-somethings. And, among that cohort, variousness ruled too. Grad school drab rubbed up against minis and nose-rings and box braids. Style was truly optional. There was a dresser in some kind of antifa outfit—leather jacket, fatigues, combat boots. And the nearness of him reminds me I thought I saw a cadre in a Lenin cap on our side of the Square, but Vanguard partiers slept on the demo…
That’s because Rojava’s democracy—notwithstanding last Monday’s dispiriting deals with devils—is tuned into an anarchist tradition that’s antithetical to Bolshie wannabes. Think Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War or all those anarchists in Russia who knew by the early 20s Lenin et al. were Murder Inc. with a Marxist veneer. (See Emma Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) or My Further Disillusionment in Russia (1924) and don’t blame her, btw, for those titles.)[2] The daughter of the late anarchist theorist, Murray Bookchin, spoke at the rally.
Debbie Bookchin [pictured above] has been all in with Rojava ever since the eminence grise of Kurdish resistance in Turkey and Syria, the imprisoned Abdul Ocalan, began talking up her father’s anarcho-eco-localism. I’m leery of Ocalan. (He remains the focus of a cult of personality in Kurdistan, though leader-mongering is at odds with Syrian Kurds’ commitment to direct democracy.) Unlike Ms. Bookchin, I doubt I’d come back from a trip to Rojava believing I’d seen the future. Yet I don’t want to diminish what’s been done there by a younger generation under the influence of her father’s (and Ocalan’s) small-is-beautiful legacy. A British feminist has summed up Rojava’s achievements:
[Rojava’s] organizing principle is democratic confederalism: a system of direct democracy, ecological sustainability and ethnic inclusivity, where women have veto powers on new legislation and share all institutional positions with men. Within the short time since forming Rojava’s democratic experiment, child marriage, forced marriage, dowry and polygamy were banned; honour killings, violence and discrimination against women were criminalized. It is the only part of Syria where sharia councils have been abolished and religion has been consigned to the private sphere. This is a blueprint for the kind of society that many of us have been campaigning for all our lives…[3]
Syrian Kurds’ experiments in direct democracy should have an international resonance even if this aspect of Rojava’s governance turns out to be more of a bug than a blueprint. Representative democracy and high Constitutionalism are probably not as anti-democratic as Bookchins or that Brit assume. (A glance back at the state of Massachusetts in 1775 may be on point as one thinks through where Rojava was at before Turks invaded:
The condition of Massachusetts was anomalous; three hundred thousand people continued their usual avocations, and enjoyed life and property in undisturbed tranquility without a legislature or executive officers, without sheriffs, judge, or justices of the peace. As the supervisors of government disappeared, each man seemed more and more a law to himself; and as if to show that the world had been governed too much, order prevailed in a province where in fact there existed no regular government; no administration but by committees; no military officers but those chosen by the militia…[4])
Transitions from direct to representative democracy don’t necessarily entail Decline and Fall. (Though trouble will come if your union/Constitution is founded on an alliance with slaveholders.) In a panel a few months ago, anarchist scholar David Graeber acknowledged realpolitik informed certain stances taken by Rojava’s more public figures. They’ve played down aspects of their region’s challenge to patriarchy, for example, when they’ve made alliances with tribal leaders who’ve tended to be actual patriarchs. And given new realities on the ground, Syrian Kurds are probably headed toward more compromises with nasty strong men.
Not that Rojava’s feminist imperatives aren’t perfectly apposite in a part of the world where modern patriarchy was founded (as Graeber has pointed out). Meredith Tax affirmed those imperatives in A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State (2016)—her essential book on Rojava’s rise. Yet Tax allowed Kurdish feminism might seem a little out of time to Western women. Rojava’s version of women’s liberation doesn’t really take in sexual freedom. Many Kurds in Rojava are practicing Muslims and their attitudes toward sex are conservative.
OTOH, there really are no speed limits in Rojava! And you don’t need a license to drive or plates on your car. Traffic cops exist but their job has been limited to pulling 12 years olds out from behind the wheel. I’m guessing the live-and-let-live quality of dailiness in Rojava, which has so much charm for someone like David Graeber, is a sign of a society in extremis rather than a Dream Realized. (Perhaps if life ever gets stable enough to allow folks in Rojava to worry more about traffic accidents than car bombers, they might try on bottom-up rules for the road.) Please don’t understand me too quickly. I’m not saying Rojava’s anti-authoritarian ways have always been fated to go away. Just that it’s possible anarchists who idealize Syrian Kurds underestimate how life during—or on the verge of—wartime has shaped our heroes’ excellent politics.[5]
Extreme circumstances have surely helped give feminism a push in Rojava. Syrian Kurds have needed everyone in their communities to become war fighters. And once Roza the Soldier has picked up the gun, she’s not going to be lorded over (much less beaten) by hard guys. It seems likely too that women and men of Rojava have been improved by their enemies—uplifted by their fight against faith-based totalitarians. When you’re in a death-match with brutes stuck on the Middle Ages, Enlightenment is winning.
But I don’t mean to over-explain Syrian Kurds’ heroic humanism. What really matters is that the world’s party of hope has been reinforced by Rojava’s universal soldiers. We owe these people. They have done more than anyone else in our time to stand up for values of open societies against agents of the new Dark Ages. Their resistance during the siege of Kobane broke ISIS. Before Kurds won the battle for the city, ISIS was attracting thousands of recruits from all over the globe every day. Once ISIS lost, the numbers began dropping fast until there weren’t nearly enough newbies to replace “martyrs” whose lives were being thrown away in mad (and strategically pointless) suicide attacks.
Never forget Erdogan’s government facilitated ISIS attacks on Kurds in Kobane:
On November 29 [2015], Daesh sent four cars of suicide bombers into Kobane from the Turkish side of the border, where they had been using government-owned grain silos as their base. Turkey assisted them with an unannounced power cut that plunged the border area into darkness so the attack took the Kobane forces by surprise…[4]
I’m reminded just now that lights stronger than death shine in Kobane during Kurdish New Year celebrations. Fires are lit all over the city the night before Nowruz. Black smoke covers the sky and candles are placed on all the toombstones of the more than 1700 Kurds who died in defense of Kobane. (A few months ago Debbie Bookchin showed slides of this moving ceremony, which you can view here if you click on around 27:40 into the video of her talk.)
Last weekend in Union Square, a speaker read a message from professors at Kobane University. They invoked Adorno’s credo “No poetry after Auschwitz.” There seems to be a kind of Jewish/Kurdish nexus. Both peoples have been through plenty of genocidal events, though that common excruciation hasn’t made Rojava an ally of Israel. A defender of Palestine spoke at Union Square and she belonged there. But I wish she’d passed on pointing out Syrian Kurds shouldn’t have trusted America. I’ll allow she wasn’t out to rub that in. And her caveat seems more than warranted at this instant. Still, anti-American told-you-so’s may not be the way to go if you’re out to lobby Congress on behalf of Rojava in the wake of Trump’s betrayal. It’s true too that Trump’s greenlight to Erdogan isn’t likely to wipe out memories in the Levant of George H.W. Bush’s 1991 intervention to protect Iraqi Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s depredations. (A decade after, Christopher Hitchens wrote up his own shock at learning how much Iraqi Kurds venerated Poppy Bush.) All Americans should feel shame now, but pre-Trump, this country had earned its decent rep in Kurdistan.
It would be wise for Americans acting in solidarity with Rojava to deploy patriotic tropes. After all the America First impulse that drove Trump’s sell-out of Kurds is (and always has been) pro-fascist and…anti-American. American anarchists—most of whom have no use for Democratic pols—might prefer direct action to pumping up Anti-Trump internationalism among Republicans. OTOH, the tone of that Union Square rally gives me confidence defenders of Rojava over here won’t be constrained by purity tests. (And it’s surely a boon that purists on Rojava’s side are, ah, anarchists.)
The Union Square protest had a coda that brought home its openness. Two young black Christian women who’d been drawn in to the demonstration by the chants and speakers, asked if they might say a prayer for Rojava. The demo’s organizers were down. And those young Christians got their grace on, sending us home with a final hit of inspiration…
My high lasted. As I found out that night when I had one of my few recurring dreams. In it, the map of NYC gets reconfigured. I head around the corner to Old Broadway in search of my favorite pastry shop (where I’ve never actually been). Chinatown—and that cheap joint with delicious soup (which I’ve never actually tasted)—is, suddenly, accessible by a side street off of 110th St. Barack Obama has come home, not to Chicago but to Grant Houses—projects in my neighborhood. And there’s another Northwest Passage to a dance hall that’s a meld of Village clubs like SOB’s and (the late) Kilimanjaro—which is now down by the river on 125th St where I’m about to hear the next great Black Atlantic sound…
I’m pretty sure this dream is a Wilde thing—a testament to my desire for a map of the world with utopia on it. No doubt Rojava’s “blueprint” informed my seasonal infusion of hope after dark, but I bet its arrival last Saturday night owed as much to felt human connections at that Union Square demo.
My dream never repeats itself exactly. This time around there were turns that seemed to nod to The Joker, which I saw last week. That flic has generated plaints by critics who fear it might spur shootings by incels or other twisted types. But I don’t think it will motivate movie-goers to act out because it’s a deeply enervating spectacle. And that must be why The Joker made it into my dream. An unWilde counterpoint to my utopian instinct, it’s a contrarian exercise in the audacity of despair. Hollywood tends not to have a clue about cultivating a humane sense of possibility—how long will it before we see a movie about the Battle of Kobane?—but they do do dystopia. The Joker is one of numberless movies that have helped quash America’s faith in underdogs. The movie’s anti-hero, played by Joaquin Phoenix, manages to be charismatic and repellent. Before he’s done, he’s done in the idea of solidarity among everyday people. The plot has him go out of his way to wreck any prospect of interracial intimacy or amity in the commons. Yet The Joker doesn’t even have the courage of its anti-populist compulsions. Those who look down on “deplorables” get blown away but they are meant to go unmourned by massified viewers. The auteur who made The Joker is a talented con artist who’s specializes in…trumpery. He’s cleverer than our doofus pres but his facility isn’t that far removed from Trump’s “great and unmatched wisdom.” Trump’s obscene joke of a presidency is unravelling but we won’t be saved until the culture of The Joker is over too.
Bless Rojava and dis dystopians in D.C., Hollywood and Turkey.
Notes
1 Per Meredith Tax in her piece last week in Dissent.
2 See Paul Berman https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/culture-news/286009/anarchism-jewish-working-class-left-1
3 Quote taken from Tax.
4 George Bancroft’s History of the United States of America.
5 My lower expectations about prospects for anarchy in Syria stem in part from memories of Eritrea. In the 70s and 80s a national resistance movement there became known for its moral grandeur. Eritrean fighters (and doctors) had a history of making selfless sacrifices even as they treated their prisoners well. Their collective culture hinted Eritreans had leapt out of history into a new realm of human freedom and sociality. But they couldn’t sustain their exemplary struggle or those images of a New Man and New Woman that Thomas Keneally once brought to life in the pages of his novel, To Asmara.