An Ambiguous Paradise Built in Hell

January 7, 2023

By Dan Fischer
Retrieved 5 April 2023 from https://newpol.org/an-
ambiguous-paradise-built-in-hell

Dilar Dirik, The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice (London: Pluto Press, 2022)

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On November 20 , Turkey launched Operation Claw-Sword, a large-scale campaign of drone attacks
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killing civilians and militants in the predominantly Kurdish regions of Syria and Iraq. Then, in Paris
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on December 23 , a shooter murdered three Kurds in a disturbing echo of the city’s 2013 shooting
that killed the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)’s co-founder Sakine Cansız and two other women.

While the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) suspended military cooperation with
Washington, not for the first time, in protest of the assaults that the United States has allowed fellow
NATO member Turkey to carry out, Parisian Kurds have also protested en masse against Western
complicity in their people’s extermination. Some youths have set cars and garbage bins aflame,
echoing the city’s yellow vests insurrections of recent years as well as the ongoing feminist uprisings
in Iran where protesters, including non-Kurds, have adopted the Kurdish slogan of “Woman, Life,
Freedom.”

Just as world leaders abandoned Jews during the Holocaust, and have kept Bashar al-Assad’s
genocidal regime in power (as my co-author Javier Sethness and I previously argued in News and
Letters, and as Omar Sabbour argued in these pages), they’ve also systematically approached the
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Kurds, the world’s largest stateless nation, from a deeply realpolitik position. For example, after
infamously green-lighting Saddam Hussein’s massacre of Iraq’s Kurds and Shiites in 1991,
Washington sent weaponry to Turkey throughout the 1990s enabling the deaths of tens of
thousands. Although Washington has militarily supported the SDF since 2015 and has provided air
cover in their attacks on ISIS strongholds, committing and covering up war crimes in the process,
the United States’ leadership has no intention of permanently supporting Kurdish groups’ direct-
democratic experiment of Rojava.

Moscow, meanwhile, has boosted its energy ties with Ankara and has entertained talks about
Turkish use of Syrian airspace to bomb Kurdish towns, and, even more ominously, orchestrated a
Erdoğan-Assad rapprochement that will likely spell catastrophe for Syrian Kurdish autonomy.
Communities of various ethnicities have protested across Northern Syria in late December and early
January. One of their concerns has been that Turkey will return Syrian refugees into the hands of the
Assad regime.

Sadly, some loud and well-funded elements of the global left have for several years aided (what Leila
al-Shami and Noam Chomsky among other signatories have criticized as) an “‘anti-imperialism’ of
fools” which joins in the multipolar abandonment of the Kurds, Arabs and other Southwest Asian
ethnicities and peoples. Such propagandists, along with right-wing allies, have tragically joined in
the imperialist powers’ divide-and-conquer techniques, facilitating ethnic war, and have been
complicit in the destruction of perhaps the brightest revolutionary hope since 1994’s Zapatista
uprising. In this context, I write a bit hastily and imperfectly—but enthusiastically—to recommend
Dilar Dirik’s study of Kurdish women’s resistance movements. It does not tell the whole story by any
means, but it tells enough of the story to invite readers to take the nuanced and messy stance that
Kurdish anarchist Zaher Baher has summarized: “Our attitude towards Rojava must be critical
solidarity.”

Born in Turkey and raised in Germany, Dirik is a Kurdish scholar and anti-authoritarian, and she
makes fine use of her field research in the (Turkish) northern, (Iraqi) southern, and (Syrian) western
parts of Kurdistan, respectively, called Bakur, Başûr, and Rojava. Dirik takes pains to highlight
voices of grassroots Kurdish women, crafting and even going beyond a “women’s resistance history
from below” (xx). She acknowledges a number of professors, “some of whom requested anonymity”
(xvi) and includes Radha D’Souza and the late David Graeber.

To non-academic readers unfamiliar with Kurdish struggles, Dirik’s 300-page study won’t always be
a quick read. Sure, a glossary might have helped, but readers can make their own easily enough.
Some of the Kurdish struggle’s key concepts include friendship (hevalti), freedom (azadi), love for
the homeland (welatparetzi), and self-critique (tekmîl). Jin means woman and jiyan means life; both
are at the root of jineolojî, an emerging “science of woman and life.” Jineolojî seems to largely
describe Dirik’s own approach, which goes beyond narrower academic disciplines such as the
sociology in which she was trained.

Dirik rightly opposes Western imperialism (earning her a supportive blurb from steadfast anti-
imperialist Harsha Walia) and acknowledges that “the US strategy towards the Kurdish question is
marked by a carrot-and-stick approach” (308). She also finds this acknowledgment at the local level,
when for example grassroots fighters in Kobane “categorically refused to express gratefulness to the
Obama administration” (278-9). This may not satisfy condescending tankies who will point to official
SDF leaders making statements like “America is a superpower that fosters democracy globally” or
an anarchist account attributing to Kurdish fighters the highly muddled view that “while the US and
Israel are bad, they aren’t nearly as bad as the Arab Regimes.”

If there’s really anything I want to say critically in public at this moment about Dirik’s book, it’s only
that at times I felt that it could have acknowledged a tad more of the ambiguities, particularly
around Kurds’ relations with Arab, Turkish, and other neighbors. I may be utopian enough to believe
that the inter-ethnic problems could be resolved, but a first step has to be to dwell on these
contradictions which are present in any society.

My favorite eco-utopian novel, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (New
York: Eos, 1974) was so believable precisely because it vividly portrayed its anarchist society of
Annares with gut-sinking flaws of peer pressure and informal hierarchies. Characters talked about
the need to be “permanent revolutionaries,” a concept that’s also influenced me via Raya
Dunayevskaya, Karl Marx and, to a lesser extent, Leon Trotsky. After reading The Dispossessed, I
could really close my eyes and picture what an egalitarian society would actually “look like.” And
this is the sense that I’ve gotten from some accounts that don’t seek to mythologize the region’s
Kurdish and Arab uprisings or gloss over their contradictions.

When I read The Kurdish Women’s Movement, could I close my eyes and picture Kurdistan’s
endangered revolution? A historic fight against fascism and patriarchy that, for all its faults, needs
concrete support and solidarity from below right now? Well, I could picture it closely enough to get
excited about writing something with the message of “Read this book, and also others that
paradoxically contradict it at certain points, but more importantly go to the streets NOW to stop the
Erdoğan-Assad counter-revolution that is crushing the ambiguous and permanent revolutions of
Kurdistan!”

History

Appropriately for a struggle located in the Fertile Crescent, feminist Kurds celebrate the region’s
Neolithic period beginning around 12,000 years ago. If in 1973, Erich Fromm, based on admittedly
“suggestive” data, assessed the Neolithic to be “relatively egalitarian, without hierarchy,
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exploitation, or marked aggression,” this case has been further strengthened (in part, outside the
academy) with subsequent research by Marija Gimbutas, Ian Hodder, and David Wengrow. Although
several historical figures and mythical symbols from post-Neolithic eras remain symbolic to Kurdish
struggles—among them, the goddesses Sahmaran and Sitar (Ishtar) and the world’s first known poet
and author Enheduanna—Jineolojî generally sees human history’s largest rupture as the rise of
patriarchy and statism around 5,000 years ago (69). Unlike the anti-civilization elements of some
eco-anarchist activism, the Kurdish movement espouses what might be called an alter-civilization
worldview, seeking an anarchic and sustainable form of social organization at a global level for the
first time in millennia.

Dirik’s historical narrative, however, emphasizes more recent decades starting with the PKK’s 1978
founding in Turkey’s Diyarbakır Province. Dirik appropriately highlights the above-mentioned Sakine
Cansız who, along with other Kurdish radicals, was incarcerated in Diyarbakir’s prison notorious for
cruelty and torture at the hands of misogynist guards. Involved in 1982’s prison uprising, Cansız
famously spat in the face of her interrogator Esat Oktay Yıldıran (31).

From the PKK’s early days, guerrillas and commanders included women such as Elif Ronah who
explained to Dirik in an interview: “Women flooded to the PKK’s ranks, leaving the realm of their
families behind for the first time. This meant a radical break with our socializations as someone’s
daughter, sister, or wife and signified a rejection not only of the state but also of oppressive
traditions and dominant conceptions of life” (35).

Dirik mentions the cruel contradiction of Hafez al-Assad’s regime in Syria, on one hand, persecuting
Syrian Kurds, and on the other, tolerating PKK militants’ operations in his country as a
counterweight to his geopolitical rivals in Turkey. Given this dynamic, it’s understandable that some
Syrian Kurds, and non-Kurdish victims of the Assad dynasty, might have come to resent the PKK as
well as Rojava’s philosophically aligned Democratic Union Party (PYD) established in 2003.

In contrast to accounts that solely credit the party’s lead theorist Abdullah Öcalan with developing
the PKK’s philosophy, Dirik traces the party’s “Democratic Confederalism” to a context of ongoing
processes of feminization (feminism in action) and decentralization at the grassroots levels. Already
by 1995, the party formed historic women’s caucuses, committed to stop attacking civilians, and
removed from its platform the aspiration for an exclusionary nation-state (45). In Dirik’s account of
the PKK’s internal contests from 2002 to 2004, women’s caucuses insisted that the party remain
committed to socialist, feminist, and revolutionary ideals (54).

Both in the quotes from Kurdish women and, to some degree the authorial voice, there’s a sense of
adulation for the PKK and its leader that I can’t always share, especially given, for example, the
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PKK’s past tactics of “burn[ing] down schools and health clinics” and executing party members.
Still, the late anarchist author Paul Z. Simons was right to emphasize that, whatever our feelings
about this captive spokesperson that some Kurds love and other Kurds despise, Öcalan in any case is
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“buried so deep in a Turkish prison that they probably won’t let him out after he dies.”

Theory

The book’s second, theoretical, section discusses Kurdistan’s Democratic Confederalism which,
combining feminism and horizontalism, attempts to advance a non-nationalist and non-statist version
of national self-determination. In contrast to some earlier accounts, the role of Murray Bookchin is
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decentered and is considered as just one of numerous philosophical influences. Although
Democratic Confederalism has been likened to the Austro-Marxists’ concept of “national-cultural
autonomy,” certain currents have an anarchistic flavor that seeks to fully exit from state control.

In highlighting the Kurdish movement’s “feminization,” Dirik adopts a term earlier and separately
invoked by Northern California’s Wobbly and Earth First!er Judi Bari in her 1992 essay “The
Feminization of Earth First!” Just as Bari had challenged the Earth First! movement’s machismo and
xenophobia (including that of Dave Foreman who passed away in September), Kurdish women have
demanded that men in their lives adopt more feminist forms of masculinity partly modeled on
Öcalan’s example.

The idea of Öcalan becoming a major feminist theorist will raise eyebrows for those familiar with
Öcalan’s cartoonish levels of self-absorption as captured in this description by Aliza Marcus:

“When he spoke, everyone clapped. When he entered a room, everyone stood up. When
he made a decision, nobody contradicted or questioned him. All his speeches were taped,
transcribed, and distributed for study. Even his phone calls to PKK commanders, calls
that could last over an hour, were taped and then transcribed for later use.

His narcissism spilled over into every activity. When he played soccer with men in the
PKK, as he often did at the group’s Damascus-based compounds, players took care to
pass the ball to him and equal care not to block his goals. But he insisted that someone
keep track of each goal he scored. Once, the PKK militant tasked with keeping track of
Ocalan’s goals forgot to count four of them. Ocalan blew up at the man—an experienced
fighter from the very-tough Botan province. Neval, who was watching the game,
explained that Ocalan just couldn’t stop screaming.” 8

Whether or not Abdullah Öcalan actually had a sort of Damascene conversion, or more accurately an
İmralı prison conversion, it’s understandable that the story carries immense symbolic power for
those committed to a transformative justice approach (although I imagine there are a number of
“ordinary” Kurdish women, men, and nonbinary folks who might be better role models, but who have
practical reasons for keeping a low profile and maintaining anonymity).

I personally suspect there’s much truth to accounts of Öcalan’s adoption of a feminist psycho-
political transformation since, as John Clark writes, “It is certainly implausible that the sweeping
critique of civilization and the state developed by Öcalan is a mere rationalization, as is
demonstrated by his extensive and eloquent defense of his position in diverse pamphlets and several
major multivolume works.”9 Although Democratic Confederalism in general, and Öcalan’s work in
particular, is far from perfect, it may be worth studying from a psychoanalytic perspective how
someone with an authoritarian character structure could go through such a transformation and
overcome what Erich Fromm called the “fear of freedom.”

I’m reminded of C.L.R. James’s hopeful suggestion in Notes on Dialectic that even ideologically
Stalinist workers (and presumably peasants) could organically move toward a more horizontal
politics, since, whatever the views of the party leadership, the rank-and-file have already
“repudiated vast areas of bourgeois ideology” such as support for private property, electorally-
centered strategy, and national defense.10 This is essentially the trajectory, after all, of the Zapatista
movement which transformed its vision from a Marxist-Leninist Democratic Centralism into an
ambiguous though inspiring direct-democracy. It’s also the path taken by a number of Black Panther
Party members whose politics morphed closer to anarchism, such as Lorenzo Kombo’a Ervin, Russell
Maroon Shoatz, Ashanti Alston, and Kuwasi Balagoon. Such figures are celebrated in the important
work of Zoé Samudzi and William Anderson, and Mississippi’s Cooperation Jackson named their
coordinating base after Balagoon. Paralleling Judi Bari’s deep-green ecological observation that
“humans must learn to live in balance with the needs of nature,” the Zapatistas, Cooperation
Jackson, and many Black anarchists have adopted ecological foci corresponding with Fromm’s ideal
of biophilia, or love of life.

Similarly, the Kurdish women’s movement has highlighted ecological themes. During a hike with
Dirik, a guerrilla named Dorsin proclaimed: “Look around you. Look at these mountains, these trees,
this sky. Do you think we as guerrillas needed much theory to appreciate and respect nature?” (149)
Dirik takes the important and courageous steps of supporting an animist approach that suggests
“you view yourself as part of a nature that is alive” (152). This is a philosophy that’s gotten some
Kurdish women to go vegetarian and that parallels the interest in veganism and total liberation
among Western anarchists. We are speaking here of a philosophical realm that is truly cosmopolitan
since it includes the multitudes of nonhuman members of the cosmos.

On the other hand, there remain areas for further communal discussion and grassroots change.
Although Dirik doesn’t say if she interviewed transgender and queer Kurds, closeted or otherwise, I
get the sense that some of the movement’s views on gender and sexuality aren’t quite as on-target
as the sort of anti-oppression policies that I recommend organizations adopt in more sheltered social
contexts. I also wonder about the thoughts of Kurdistan’s Jews, given some antisemitic passages in
Öcalan’s writing.

Moreover, in an absence of consistent solidarity from the international grassroots and from the
region’s Arab populations, Kurdish leaders have had tragically few choices regarding who to ally
with against imminent war crimes from Turkey, the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (tFSA), and
ISIS. At times, it has appeared from the outside that the PYD has benefited from a “tacit
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agreement” with Bashar al-Assad’s regime with all its “fascistic trends” including torturing
hundreds of Palestinians to death in prison since 2011. It is unlikely that Kurds will find any lasting
freedom under the rule of this brutal regime which may as well adopt the Francoist commander José
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Millán-Astray’s non-ironically ghastly motto “¡Viva la Muerte!” (“Long live death!”)

Practice

The book’s last section discusses how the Kurdish women’s movement has, in practice, built an
extensive network of committees, councils, and cooperatives following the philosophy of Democratic
Confederalism. Most impressively, women’s gains parallel transformations among the Zapatistas
whose women now control fifty percent of influence in many self-governing institutions. On Kurdish
governance, Anna Rebrii and Ariella Patchen reported last March in The Nation:
 “Alongside women’s autonomous organizing, all mixed-gender organizations and
institutions have a minimum 40 percent gender quota (soon to be changed to 50 percent)
and implement a cochair system—one male and one female cochair for every position of
authority. There are also parallel women’s structures within every institution which can
veto any decision of the mixed-gender body if it negatively affects women.”

This is a remarkable accomplishment which was achieved through many years of coordination and
building grassroots institutions, a process that was carried out more haphazardly in the Arab Spring
uprisings.

Dirik brings to life the Mexmûr refugee camp located in Iraq on territory that’s disputed between the
Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). This camp, with 12,000 Kurdish
residents, has “established its own civil society structures, education and health care system, and
economy” (159). In contrast to the KRG’s much more authoritarian politics, the Mexmûris “present
their camp as an autonomous alternative to the nation-state system” (160). District councils send
delegates to the People’s Assembly which coordinates the camp as a whole (162). Each district has a
nursery and primary school. There are no prisons in the Mexmûr camp, and due to the cohesive
communal ties, “murder and theft are rare.” When punishment is deemed necessary, it takes forms
such as “writing a self-critical report, reading up on topics, or taking up specific duties in the
organized structures” (168). Elsewhere in Başûr (Iraqi Kurdistan), Yedizi women have taken a
leading role in establishing the direct-democratic governance structures such as the Şengal
Democratic Autonomy Assembly (270).

In her chapter on Bakur (Turkish Kurdistan), Dirik discusses women’s historic involvement in
electoral politics, while acknowledging that “much of the women’s movement’s work takes place
outside of this realm and includes grassroots politics in the streets, urban neighborhoods and rural
villages through political education in popular academies, radical democratic assemblies and
consciousness-raising initiatives” (170-1). A fuller account of these grassroots initiatives, which I
think are ultimately more consequential, can be found in the book Democratic Autonomy in North
Kurdistan (TAROT Kurdistan, 2013), translated by Janet Biehl who was Bookchin’s collaborator and
partner.

Finally, of course, there’s Rojava, meaning “west” in Kurdish, but officially known as the
Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) and comprising 7 regions with 4 to 5
million residents (222). Surpassing even revolutionary Spain’s important accomplishment in the
1930s of eliminating more than 60 percent of private land ownership, Rojava has reached a situation
where “‘three-quarters of private property is being used as commons’ while only ‘one quarter is still
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being owned by use of individuals.’” Rojavans have established a multitude of workers’
cooperatives and communes comprising Tev-Dem, a “counter-power” to the AANES’s quasi-state
(223). Of course, it’s important to raise a bit of “literary realism” and point out that “much of the
economy is not cooperative but is rather based on wage labor, trade in smuggled goods, and the sale
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of petroleum, and that this material basis will exact its due.”

Dirik argues that “Coordination, not spontaneity, made Rojava’s revolution” (219). This emphasis on
coordination is indeed important, and it offers lessons from Syria for other parts of the world which
have struggled to go beyond mere resistance. Indeed, many aspects of Rojava’s social organization
showcase the possibilities that anarchist author Peter Gelderloos calls “cybernetic or rhizomatic
planning processes.” Nonetheless, I wouldn’t want to rule out the amazing power of spontaneity
either, of the sort that inspired youths in the Kurdish Future Movement and Yekiti Party (unlike the
PYD) to participate in the Syrian revolution from the beginning. I hope readers of Dirik’s book don’t
overlook the power of everyday resistance that autonomist Marxists and anarchists argue is an
important factor of revolution.

Dirik reports that many Syriacs see a role for themselves in the AANES’s Democratic Confederalist
project (233), and Syriac women in particular are taking charge of reviving the endangered Aramaic
language which is believed to have been spoken by Jesus Christ (232).
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Given that the majority of AANES residents are most likely Arab, I do wish Dirik had more to say on
the fact that “Arabs I spoke to were not shy to admit their scepticism towards that what many see as
a Kurdish political project” (225). There’s virtually no discussion of AANES authorities’ repressive
crackdowns on anti-Assad protesters. In Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (London:
Pluto Press, 2016), Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami go so far as to call the PYD a “highly
centralised and authoritarian party.” I do think there’s unfortunately much truth to this critique, as
I’ve elsewhere elaborated.

Of course, including Arab voices would necessarily include the voices of Arabs who strongly support
Democratic Confederalism. For instance, as Khawla Diad told Haaretz, using Öcalan’s nickname
“Apo” which means “uncle” in Kurdish: “At first we thought it was a nationalist revolution for the
Kurds, not a revolution for peoples’ brotherhood and democracy. But Apo’s ideology was far-
reaching. Slowly we saw that this ideology was not only for Kurds, but also for Arabs and Assyrians,
and especially for women.” Moreover, the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP)
profiles a number of Arabs who joined the SDF because, apart from the practical reasons of needing
salaries and wanting to fight ISIS and Turkey, they “support at least some, if not all, of the basic
political principles upon which the SDF and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria
(AANES) are based.”

Given Dirik’s frequent citations of freedom struggles around the world, it feels like a missed
opportunity when she (like a number of other pro-Rojava sources) doesn’t mention Syria’s anarchist
theorist Omar Aziz whose writings influenced the incomplete though exciting development of
hundreds of self-governing councils across the Arab-majority parts of Syria. Although Dirik cites al-
Haj Saleh’s fine book The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2017) in order to point readers to a contrary perspective, she doesn’t share al-Haj
Saleh’s characterization of the uprising’s early years: “The general spirit of the Syrian revolution
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[was] open to the world and oriented toward liberation and dignity.” Indeed, Dirik puts “Syrian
revolution” and “Arab Spring” in scare quotes (215) and suggests that “what happened in the other
parts of Syria was rebellion rather than revolution” (209).

Dirik’s chapter on Rojava’s city of Manbij also struck me as one-sided. Governed by a local council
before ISIS took over in 2014, the city was liberated in 2016 by the SDF. Rather than re-install the
old council, or suggest that the old council be secularized and democratized, the SDF implemented a
Democratic-Confederalist council in a pretty top-down manner according to most sources I’ve read.
Moreover, the SDF was criticized for handing over control of Manbij to the Assad regime in 2018.
Nonetheless, Dirik’s account is worth reading since you’ll find things that aren’t mentioned in some
of the critiques from opposition-leaning sources: “there is plenty of footage of women vibrantly
participating in women-organized or mixed protests and rallies led by structures loosely or directly
affiliated with the AANES system (e.g. against gendered violence and occupation, etc.), but women
are notably absent in the protests that resist it” (289).

On the topic of security in Rojava, Dirik writes that “Prisons and security measures are seen as
necessary in a region plagued by suicide bombings and assassinations carried out by Daesh sleeper
cells” (237). There is also an internal security force, called the Asayish, that might be considered a
police force, although the intention is to make sure they are completely accountable to the
community (237-8). Although the AANES has by no means accomplished prison abolition or police
abolition, there is a focus on community-based alternatives that would eventually make (at least
long-term) incarceration obsolete as it has been in the Mexmûr camp.

Readers looking for more information on the AANES’s important reforestation, agroforestry, and
urban agriculture projects might consult the book Make Rojava Green Again: Building an ecological
society (London: Dog Section Press and Internationalist Commune, 2018). Yet again, there are of
course deep political-economic contradictions about trying to build ecologically-oriented
communities in an economy so dependent on oil extraction. Although Biehl reported in 2014 that
“The local oil industry, if such it can be called, produces only enough for local needs, nothing more,”
the SDF was selling oil and gas to the Assad regime by 2019 and was making a business deal in 2020
with the U.S. oil company Delta Crescent Energy. This is all the more reason for Western
internationalists to advocate for ecological reparations and ecotechnology transfers as demanded for
example by the 2010 People’s Agreement of Cochabamba (which, however important and radical a
document, contains its own limits and contradictions due to the participation of Bolivia’s extractivist
government in the drafting).

Despite the messiness of the Kurdish women’s movement and various states’ coordinated attempts
at co-option and repression, the drastic moves toward gender egalitarianism must be seen as deeply
hopeful in a region that’s long been treated as nothing but a sea of victims (temporarily deemed
“worthy” or “unworthy” by one geopolitical bloc or another), whose lives and democratic aspirations
lie in the way of securing global oil flows. If Kurdish women can make such gains, even in the hellish
Middle Eastern context, then this is hopeful for those of us trying to build a sustainable world in
somewhat more comfortable conditions. Perhaps if we leftists outside the region stopped spending
so much time courting the favor of states and politicians, then we might actually be able to build
transnational coalitions to craft alternatives from below and allow us to dismantle oil imperialism
and racial-capitalism for good, allowing the Middle East a chance of genuine democracy that the
Global North’s states have for so long united against. Here’s hoping that one day the workers and
peasants of Arab, Kurdish, Jewish, Syriac, Assyrian, Armenian, Yedizi, Turkic and other communities
of the region unite and overthrow tyrannical regimes and kick out imperialist powers so that
genuinely peaceful, sustainable, and democratic coexistence might at last be achievable.

1There’s an open letter titled “Stop Turkish Aggression Against North and East Syria.”

2As a total liberationist, I have to put in an obnoxious footnote saying I’m speaking only about
human nations, as opposed to, say, the Hoof Nation or Fish Nation that the indigenous Nishnaabeg,
on whose land I reside, traditionally dealt with to maintain long-term sustainability. Leanne
Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

3 Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1973), 183.

4Meredith Tax, A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State (New York: Bellevue Literary
Press, 2016), ch. 3. Tax, a Rojava solidarity campaigner who passed away this year, quoted an
estimate that the PKK executed 50 party members between 1985 and 2004.
5Paul Z. Simons, “Dispatches from Rojava,” in Dilar Dirik, David Levi Strauss, Michael Taussig, and
Peter Lamborn Wilson, eds., To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution (Autonomedia, 2016), 86.

6 It’s therefore incidental that Dirik misstates the central idea of Bookchin’s social ecology. Dirik
writes, “Social ecology, a philosophy and praxis first developed by Murray Bookchin, defends the
perspective that power and domination within human societies is based on the domination of
humans over nature” (150). Actually, Bookchin argued that the idea of humans dominating nature
results from domination in human societies. In my view, Bookchin’s account and Dirik’s
representation each express an overly unidirectional view, and that actually the domination of
humans and domination of nature reinforce each other. I’m not sure that Dirik, or Öcalan for that
matter, would disagree with me here, but I don’t know for sure.

7Then again, Öcalan’s writings (like Marx’s) are ambiguous enough that you can also extract statist
lessons, such as “It is possible for the state civilization and democratic civilization to coexist through
compromise and without destroying each other.” John Clark, Between Earth and Empire: From the
Necrocene to the Beloved Community (Oakland: PM Press, 2019), 129.

8Aliza Marcus, Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence (New York: New
York University Press, 2009), 266.

9Clark, Between Earth and Empire, 135.

10C.L.R. James, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (Westport: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1948), 42.

11Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London: Verso, 2017), 155.

12Joseph Daher, Syria After the Uprisings: The Political Economy of State Resilience (Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2019), 161.

13Fromm, Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 368.

14Clark, Between Earth and Empire, 136.

15Clark, Between Earth and Empire, 135.

16Rojava Information Center “Beyond Rojava: North and East Syria’s Arab Regions,” June 2021, 3.

17Yassin al-Haj Saleh, The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (Chicago:
Haymarket, 2017), 132.