“We can establish universally an education that recognizes in every child a tongue-tied prophet, and in the school the voice of the future, and that equips the mind to think beyond and against the established context of thought and of life as well as to move within it. We can develop a democratic politics that renders the structure of society open in fact to challenge and reconstruction, weakening the dependence of change on crisis and the power of the dead over the living. We can make the radical democratization of access to the resources and opportunities of production the touchstone of the institutional reorganization of the market economy, and prevent the market from remaining fastened to a single version of itself. We can create policies and arrangements favorable to the gradual supersession of economically dependent wage work as the predominant form of free labor, in favor of the combination of cooperation and self-employment. We can so arrange the relation between workers and machines that machines are used to save our time for the activities that we have not yet learned how to repeat and consequently to express in formulas. We can reshape the world political and economic order so that it ceases to make the global public goods of political security and economic openness depend upon submission to an enforced convergence to institutions and practices hostile to the experiments required to move, by many different paths, in such a direction”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a Brazilian philosopher and politician. He has developed his views and positions across many fields including legal theory, philosophy and religion, social and political theory, progressive alternatives, and economics.

Unger’s social theory is premised on the idea of classical social theory that society is an artifact and can be created and recreated. Whereas previous thinkers such as Hegel or Marx backslid at some point and held onto the notion that there was a necessary institutional or historical social development, Unger, in the words of one critic, seeks to “take the idea to the hilt and produce a theory of emancipation that will escape the limitations of liberal and Marxist theories.” That limitation is the search for an ideal structure of society that can be foreseen and centrally planned; whereas the emancipation leads to societies with greater institutional flexibility and variation.

For Unger, society emerges not through compromise or the winnowing down of best options, but rather through conflict and struggle for control of political and material resources. The victors of this struggle come to set the terms of social interaction and transaction, which is then institutionalized through law. This emergent order Unger calls formative context. Under a particular formative context, routines are established and people come to believe and act as if their social words were coherent wholes that are perfectly intelligible and defensible. They come to see the existing arrangements as necessary. Unger calls this false necessity. In reality, these arrangements are arbitrary and hold together rather tenuously, which leaves them open to resistance and change. This opposition Unger calls negative capability.

This leads Unger to the conclusion that change happens piecemeal through struggle and vision, rather than suddenly in revolutionary upheaval with the replacement of one set of institutional arrangements with another. Unger theorizes that cumulative change can alter formative contexts, and he goes on to propose a number of such changes as institutional alternatives to be implemented, which he calls Empowered democracy.

Empowered democracy is Unger’s vision of a more open and more plastic set of social institutions through which individuals and groups can interact, propose change, and effectively empower themselves to transform social, economic, and political structures. Unger’s strategy in its realization is to combine freedom of commerce and governance at the local level with the ability of political parties at the central government level to promote radical social experiments that would bring about decisive change in social and political institutions.

In practice, the theory would involve radical developments in politics at the center, as well as social innovation in localities. At the center, by bestowing wide ranging revising powers to those in office, it would give political parties the ability to try out concrete yet profound solutions and proposals. It would turn partisan conflicts over control and uses of governmental power into an opportunity to question and revise the basic arrangements of social life through a rapid resolution of political impasse. In local communities, empowered democracy would make capital and technology available through rotating capital funds, which would encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. Citizens’ rights include individual entitlements to economic and civic security, conditional and temporary group claims to portions of social capital, and destabilization rights, which would empower individuals or groups to disrupt organizations and practices marred by routines of subjugation that normal politics have failed to disrupt.

Unger’s ideas developed in a context where young intellectuals and radicals attempted to reconcile the conventional theories of society and law being taught in university classrooms with the reality of social protest and revolution of the 1960s and 70s. Disillusioned with Marxism, they turned to thinkers like Levi-Strauss, Gramsci, Habermas, and Foucault in attempt to situate understandings of law and society as a benign science of technocratic policy within a broader system of beliefs that legitimized the prevailing social order. Unlike Habermas, however, who formulates procedures for attaining rational consensus, Unger locates resolution in institutions and their arrangements that remain perpetually open to revision and reconstruction. And, unlike Foucault, who also emphasizes the constructed character of social life, Unger takes this as an opportunity to reimagine institutions and social conditions that will unleash human creativity and enable liberation.

False necessity, or anti-necessitarian social theory, is a contemporary social theory that argues for the plasticity of social organizations and their potential to be shaped in new ways. The theory rejects the assumption that laws of change govern the history of human societies and limit human freedom. It is a critique of “necessitarian” thought in conventional social theories (like liberalism or Marxism) which hold that parts of the social order are necessary or the result of the natural flow of history. The theory rejects the idea that human societies must be organized in a certain way (for example, liberal democracy) and that human activity will adhere to certain forms (for example if people were only motivated by rational self-interest).

False necessity uses structural analysis to understand socio-political arrangements, but discards the tendency to assemble indivisible categories and to create law-like explanations. It aims to liberate human activity from necessary arrangements and limitations, and to open up a world without constraints where the possible becomes actual.

The theory of false necessity develops the idea that the organization of society is made and can be remade—we can rebel against the worlds we have built; we can interrupt our rebellions and establish ourselves in any of those worlds. By emphasizing the disembodiment of institutional and social structures, the theory provides a basis to explain ourselves and our world without using necessitarian thought or predetermined institutional arrangements.

At the extreme, the theory of false necessity criticizes and thus unifies strands of the radical tradition. It frees leftist and liberal ideals from institutional fetishism, and emancipates modernist ideals from structural fetishism. The theory further detaches the radical commitment from utopian claims and provides a theoretical basis for transformative action. That transformative action, Unger believes, does not have to be a complete overhaul or total revolution, but rather is “a piecemeal but cumulative change in the organization of society”. The key to the project, in the words of one critic, “is to complete the rebellion against the naturalistic fallacy (that is, the confusion of accident with essence and contingency with necessity) and to effect an irrevocable emancipation from false necessity”.

The problem of false necessity arises due to the failure of transformative practice to realize its stated aim. This can take form in three different scenarios:

1. the ideals fought for (democracy, decentralization, technical coordination, etc.) result in the development of rigid institutions
2. an oligarchy effect in which groups and rulers clash at the summit of power and drum up popular support
3. the survival effect in which there is a fear of disturbance of contemporary arrangements.

Unger points to mass politics as a means to counter oligarchy and group identity. However, if these forms are only disturbed and not destroyed, democracy is limited and becomes a quarrel about forms of power and seizing advantage. Likewise, enlarged economic rationality provides another source of emancipation by shifting economic and social relations in the ability to constantly innovate and renew.

The radical project

The theory of false necessity develops the idea that the organization of society is made and can be remade—we can rebel against the worlds we have built; we can interrupt our rebellions and establish ourselves in any of those worlds. By emphasizing the disembodiment of institutional and social structures, the theory provides a basis to explain ourselves and our world without using necessitarian thought or predetermined institutional arrangements.

Fundamental Principles of False Necessitarian Theory:

1. All superstructure, i.e. culture, religion, politics, economic modes are human created “artifacts”. 
2. All existing human practical and visionary conflict which is then frozen or contained incorrectly informs us that only a liberal, conservative or socialist program exists.
3. There is no “closed list of structures and systems”, there has never been one homogenous pure system.
4. An “illusion of indivisibility” which states one whole system has to be fully replaced as a whole, has been historically disproven.
5. There are no proven “historical rules” for transition between systems, but it has been bloody and disastrous when this occurs.
6. Radical projects can be visionary and piecemeal without being “reformist or trivial”. System hybrids can and should exist.
7. Humanization via “compensatory redistrabation via tax and transfer” is the liberal project, the Socialist project is to revise and humanize the disasters of Socialism as it existed in the 20th and 21st century. The Conservative project is to preserve the current order.
8. This leaves no role for “programmatic imagination”. All solutions are thus derided as “utopian, or trivial.”
9. A Radical Project for “Empowered Democracy” would seek legislative capture to initiate piecemeal radical projects thus proving them without major loss of life or state expense.
10.  The most dangerous of the conservative impulses are facism, a total freeze or theocracy, a religiously imposed order.

Chapter (1) One

A flaming, low lying wreckage spreads out before us in every direction. The ruins of an all ready desolate land. Sprawling two story compounds along a mighty river. Pock marked with rifle rounds. Misery absolutely everywhere. Syria is now a bi-word for total warfare, over 600,000 have so far died. A Revolution in a Civil War. A Third World War using several dozen proxy armies is underway. Russia, Iran, China, America and Europe all have their boots on the ground. In Northern Syria, an unrecognized administration in three cantons protects 4 million civilians and internal refugees. A Kurdish lead project for democracy, ethnic pluralism, women’s empowerment and something called ‘social ecology’. The sun bakes you and the dust gets into, onto everything.

In Deir Ez-Zor Province, a wasteland along the North bank of the Euphrates, in a few hundred hamlets, from their ‘capitals’ in Raqqa and Mosul, Iraq the most hateful and radical of Islamic fascists rules over 10 million persons. Some happily embrace its Caliph Baghdadi as the fulfillment of prophecy. Over 50,000 Muslim Jihadists from around the world arrived to reinforce this effort. At its maximum the Islamic State occupied massive swaths of Eastern Syria and North western Iraq, it threatened to capture Baghdad and Damascus.

Deir Ez-Zor was one of the very first Syrian cities in 2011 to stage large scale demonstrations against the Assad Regime. In 2014 ISIS took over the city with little resistance leaving only a small pocket of pro-Assad military and perhaps over 100,000 civilian supporters cut off in an airbase and small section of the city. Supplied by helicopters and high altitude drop services the besieged garrison deep inside the ISIS control zone resisted capture for over 3 years and 2 months.  

The siege of Deir Ez-Zor Airbase garrison lasted a very long time. ‘Daesh’ controlled everything except a small military airport which the Russians and Regime supplied by air for all of the war, but could not re-take, along with the city until just a month ago when it was “liberated” on 3^rd November, 2017 by the SAA and the Russians. 

At some point the Regime soldiers made the local women trade sex for basic rations of food. There were rarely sympathetic forces in the war, besides ours. But even the Y.P.G. conscripts children, forces Arabs off their land and dabbles in war crimes from time to time, to time. Now, on the South bank, Assad Regime forces, Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary guards and Russian special forces push south east down the southern bank of the River while Syrian Democratic Forces and United States lead coalition forces pushed rapidly south to the Euphrates North bank, both sides maneuvering to secure the majority of the Syrian oil fields. The S.D.F. capturing most of them. Now we slowly begin the final offensive to capture Isis’s last strongholds, moving down the river toward Hajin. Trying not to kick off World War Three.

“Perhaps I am not where I am supposed to be,” muses Heval Ciya, “Perhaps here, I will die for nothing at all. We can be killed so easily by anything, then they will dance about with my corpse making speeches in Kurmanji for a day, until my death takes on significance that it probably never had.” 

Heval Ciya Zinar is the name they gave me. “Comrade Friend Mountain Rock”. I am a separatism minded Scottish Soldier. Although still a member of the British army, I voted for independence in our latest failed referendum. I am a gentleman by most accounts and a Y.P.G. International Volunteer. I have absolutely no political sympathies with the Kurdish lead formations, though I possess formal military training, making me more valuable than most of these preachy, useless ideologically motivated volunteers. 

“There’s dust in my beard and men dying all around me!”

As we grew closer to the Euphrates we can see fire in the sky and the night is lit up with heavy coalition airstrikes somewhere far away to the south. The convoy of nine trucks had left Al Hasakah the largest rebel held city in the morning and drove about five hours south toward some forward operating base. The eight of us internationals had not been issued weapons until halfway to the front. We stopped of course several times for obligatory tea and some volleyball. The sport of ‘Apoist’ revolution. Sometimes we’d stop at what seemed like the same identical storefront kiosk, next to well stocked pharmacies. The road bodega of Kurdistan stocked with energy drinks, smokes and Turkish day to day items, never toilet paper. All the toilet paper in Syria was now gone. There we bought energy drinks and cigarettes of a more potent type, as the party issued Ardens were lights or ultra lights at best. There was Pepsi, but no Coca-Cola throughout the liberated zones. Real freedom was not won yet.

In the first battle that I participated in during the Syrian Civil War five Arab soldiers in our S.D.F./ Y.P.G. Unit were blown to bits by mines and mortars as we stormed the river basin a little after midnight. Evidently, there were far more Daesh entrenched than we had thought. From a dirt sand trench I fired my AK-47 shiftlessly over the wall, peaking out I saw an Arab comrade ripped apart by gun fire and collapse in the sand.

    The fire fight resumed immediately after a short re-calibration of the battle plan, after Heval Commander Dalil’s men were buried. A larger number of Kasadeh were trucked in, barely trained. Half or more might have fought for Daesh or the Regime at some point. Child soldiers all over the place. A major conscription drive happened, even some cadro tabors were moved in. This was a race to secure as much turf north of the Euphrates as we could as quickly as we could, creating a defensible buffer against the regime, Russians and Iranians to secure the oil fields. Of course, implicit in all that was to finish Daesh for good. Smash their final positions along 60 to 100 hamlets and miserable dust cake boney towns leading to Hajin, for the very last stand of the caliphate. 
    Very bad intelligence friends! The bandits were still very well dug in, refugee were swarming out and among them suicide bombers. Five so far. it was impossible to know anymore who was Daesh or not among the refugees flooding out. Some two dozen Arab Hevals were martyred the first night of operation. We were down the hardcore of the elite, the foreign fighter zealots, their families. Motorcycles with snipers affixed to reposition.  Sleeper cell deployment, suicide bombers, booby traps, tunnel mines, the usual. Now they would in four battalions capture about fifty tiny key destitute towns working south in several prongs toward the river. 
    “If you see a helicopter, don’t shoot at it!” Dalal had said, it was our new resupply drop copters. We allegedly had a very, very small air force now. “Do not shoot at the helicopters in general,” was repeated several times in Arabic and Kurdish.
    “Also, also! If the regime forces fire, return fire, but do not engage them. Unless they actually cross the river.” Declared Commander Heval Brusk, which means ‘commander lightning’. Commander lightning then personally presided over a few hours on conscript drills. None of these bearded partisans were trusted with grenades.
    So the very next day, at early dawn, ten of the destitution ridden little seemingly strategic ISIS hamlets were again stormed. 
    There was chaotic gun fire erupting everywhere. There were utterly ransacked two story brown buildings all unfinished, all about the same shattered look. From several positions Takim commandos were firing endlessly from roof tops and sniper holes out toward where it was believed the enemy was hiding. A mosque about half a kilometer away. Well of course every Daesh position was in a mosque, hospital or granary since nothing else was defensible. 
    This was a mostly one sided AK-47 and mortar barrage. Much of the war had proceeded like this, pickup trucks dripping light infantry to storm abandoned Arab homes and light up anything that moved. Loot absolutely anything that wasn’t made of sand and carry it back north. One pipe, one water basin one carpet at a time.
    A small child ran out into the road and was blown away. Briefly a pause, until he was clearly limp and dead. A day or two more of endless AK fire, sometimes at night too. Eventually the Americans were told to bomb the mosque. Spotters transmit grid coordinates. Soon, about 5 minutes later an airstrike rips apart the mosque. Battle won! 

Many people have written at length about “how boring” it can be to be at war, but it is more terrifying than boring, actually Heval. You do your best to not think about how men and women far more prepared than yourself took a wrong turn and then just exploded. Or how a sniper cut them down. Or how they died in a Turkish airstrike. Or contracted hepatitis because of poor local appreciation of pooping with toilet paper and hand washing, then eating.
    The boredom of war Heval is perhaps a cover for a sneaking debilitating fear, so that is what people write about. Being bored, instead of being afraid. And in a war such as this certainly you sit around quite a lot drinking tea, smoking weak Party issued cigarettes and standing guard. Or looking for strategic places to jerk off or poop without setting off a mine. But nothing for us was the same for very long and thus all the time you spend sitting around was better spend ‘conversating’ on the Revolution’s bleak future, or studying some Kurdish, or horsing around with the Arabs. Who loved to try and communicate actually. And also show you pornography and awkwardly try and steal, trade for or buy your hand grenades. Or ask you to bring them to America or Europe hidden in a bag. Jokes abound, but really it is only you who will be brought back to Europe or America in a bag.
    While very few of us actually spoke any real Kurmanji Kurdish or Arabic, it seemed that the Arabs were far more interested in us than the Kurds though. I would call the Kurdish commanders attitude, begrudging appreciation and that of the rank and file borderline insulting. I would go so far as to say that at this stage in the war, being fought in majority Arab zones now by the Euphrates river that an increasing number of the front line fighters were Kasadeh, non Kurdish Arab S.D.F. fighters. The Assyrians too had a small group, less than a few hundred men, many little kids and old men. Many poorly trained and poorly paid semi conscripts. Many were not even very against the Islamic State more eager to shoot at the Russians and regime forces on the other side of the river. With the Kadros being withheld in clear preparation for the impending defense of Afrin Canton. 

    In retrospect I assume that Heval Fermander Dalil probably saved our lives by abandoning us in a rear fox hole in the dead of night. The ten internationalists that I was aware of were placed further back in the rear, but Heval Shervan ‘the crazed Irish gypsy’ commandeered a Humvee and caught us up, without any invitation to the troops of “Fermander Dalil”.

    I remember freezing out in the dunes all night long while the Arab fighters shared neither bedding nor blanket. It was so bitterly god damn cold! 

Sometimes Heval Kawa the idealistic New Yorker and I talk about the girls back home. I talk about my Ms. Ashley. He talks about his Daria. Some escort Russian he has some arty muse thing with. Pretty much this is what men at war do. Although in my case, I motorboated my female best friend. In his case it seems a bit more fucking dark and tragic.

“Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your lips. Late into the long trip back to Brighton to your so-called home. I have no home, only ugly little flats around Brooklyn soviet which I rent out of poverty, artless and shared. Decorated with trinkets. I’ll never go back! To you or to Russia, or Haiti, nor to Mehanata the tavern or even dear Cuba! All these things are a form of slavery now. Your lingering Daria, it takes the form of ruminations on WhatsApp messages telling me to “come home”. But to what? To nothing. Life here is hard, but it is free life as they say.” Kawa, the American,  is more a poet than a medic in his heart of hearts. Me? I am simply a Scottish warrior. I long for the fight and I got some.

I was deployed into the Deir Ez-Zor Province wastelands about ten days ago to the front near Omar, Daesh is nearly completely defeated they say, but everyday we are taking martyr bodies back to Al-Hasake. Assigned briefly to the Tabor Shahid Lawrence; we lost fifty men in the first few battles to advance south on the mighty Euphrates river. After all that initial death it seems they aim to break up our group of internationalists into different places. They do not want us all to die at once. They do not really seem to have achieved consensus or a plan on where we should be or when and if we should die, or what we are actually even good for. Or what to do when ISIS is finished, and America abandons them and the Turkish Army rolls over the border to kill us all. A heated internal debate is constantly held in both Turkish and Kurdish. Sometimes also in Arabic. Which always ends inconclusively. Well its a complex matter anyway. So many ways to die out here for the greatest cause of our time.

On this matter Kawa and I agree, that whatever motives brought us all to this wasteland, this place of dying and suffering over made up Gods and ideologies, invented ethnicities and world war three style great power politics; this was the resistance of the age. This was a battle good men, bad men and crazy men could not sit out. Because when the smoke clears there will be a different Middle East, a different world. I am no ideologue. I am no dreamer or religious fanatic. I am a professional soldier. While it is not unreasonable to say the Assad Regime backed by Russia and Iran, the Turks, Al Qaeda and of course the Daesh, are unequivocal forces of religious fanatical reaction, of fascism, or totalitarianism and death, well they are. While the Kurds and Arabs of Y.P.G./Y.P.J./S.D.F. are not saints of course. We are not angels here to help do some God’s work. We are fighting for democracy, feminism, ecology and tolerance in the heart of the Middle East. As opposed to all the other groups that are fighting for radical Islam, chauvinism, fascism and the right to impose the will of the minority on the majority. 

Did you know that when you take off a person’s uniform to bury them, you cannot tell a fascist corpse, from a democratic corpse, from a Daesh corpse not even from the length of the beard? Those three and letter affiliations, they don’t matter anyway. It matters more, the stuff inside a person’s heart. Their moral compass. Not the length of the beard or who they pray to. Not the historic struggle of their people or their claim to the rivers. When true warriors die, they might not end up anywhere glorious. They might just be dead. The “immortality” we are achieving in our death here is thus rooted in the way the story is framed. Which is to say, who ever wins the war. But can you really win a revolution inside a civil war, inside a World War?  I see absolutely no good end in sight. Most likely, we will all get killed ingloriously. But there is of course a timeless epic glory for young men of all cultures to join a seemingly impossible battle, risk their lives and join a pantheon of immortal heroes. Of course, the Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds, Turks, Checehens, Turkmen, Persians and all the other micro-ethnic tribes gathered here to make war, well they sadly all have no choices. These are the oil rich, strategic holy lands and mountains they were cursed perhaps by their gods to be born in. 

Part I: 

BAKUR

Prelude

“A Special Period

In Times of Peace” 

SET IN: 

HAVANA, CUBA

 1989

Comrade Norma Sanchez has jet black hair and is petite. She’s vaguely malnourished for a Cuban, but still attractive and dynamico. Of course. She is and always will be a member of the Committees for Defense of the Revolution. The vigilant internal defense mechanism against Yankee imperialist aggression and unrestrained, insatiable sex tourism. Her mother was a fairly high ranking person in the Party, and told her of the struggles to defend socialism during the cold war years. Told her of the deprivations and economic siege beginning in 1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed and virtually all proto-communist regimes along with it.

“The U.S.S.R. was the sun and we were just a proud and tiny fortress; that when the sun went out, when we lost our greatest, sturdiest ally; we would be in the dark and there were many things in the dark that could ruin us.”

    There would be no more petrol for the cars and tractors, buses and power plants. There would not be fertilizer for growing food. There would be shortages of absolutely everything on every level of consumption. There would be long lines and no electricity. There would be no fans or air conditioners, there would be zip-zero-nada. And in this proverbial darkness of our times ahead, our enemy which had sought to ruin us from the very day of our independence would move in, emboldened by the so-called end of history.

I have some understanding that were it not for decisions made during the revolution, if not for our Russian friends and of course the own solid base of our people in the historical context; we could be living in an illiterate and deeply unhealthy place; with a brothel and gambling embankment running from Miramar to Varadero. 500 kilometers long where foreigners could just cheaply, scenically fuck our women, drink our rum and smoke our cigars in the sun.

I knew, the minute I was called to the office that we would not surrender, our great leaders, well the two brothers still alive; would not for one human second consider that the fight was lost.

I was there the day they called us all together. The top nine, the big two; the Ministers and the deputies of industry, defense, finance, agriculture, espionage later. We had known it was coming the fall of our protector and benefactor. In embassy cables and diplomatic whispers; we also knew, it was our job to know that when the big bear fell down, died, and became reborn as god only knows what under American guidance! And its brightest, newest oldest and also highly questionable satellites began dropping from the sky; that nothing, not one thing would stop the aggressors to the north from moving in upon us.

    We knew this was the beginning of the end of the revolution as we understood it, but what could we do? We suspected the Syrians and the Libyans would not give in easily to them at all. And we watched one after another as communist regimes collapsed in Eastern Europe and Africa. It was really our estimation, that by the time the dust settled; it would be only us, the Vietnamese, the People’s Republic of China (both which had embraced capitalism in most regards five years ago, Laos, and whatever the backwards hell they were doing in North Korea!

    We assumed Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Namibia and Angola would remember what we did for them but be in no position to reciprocate. And between 1989 and 1994, it would all come tumbling down. The failed architecture of a dystopian dream.

We sat together at a time when even the leaders were hungry and when anyone looked in a mirror they would not always recognize their own faces, for a look of despair had set in, inside oneself. All that we had willed as a people could be undone in just one year. We were all the same outside, for the siege had not begun yet, it would begin tomorrow and the next day and for the next ten or twenty years. And the Yankee enemy in the North, the pale colder place just a few days out by raft or one hour by plane; it would either soon invade, or try and starve us out. The ten million that had refused to defect. And the accomplishments of the last fifty years could go up in smoke, or simply in a long whimper, as the Dominoes began to fall.

    But I understood, it was my training from Moscow to understand and my own Cuban sense of putting it together and taking it apart and refashioning. I knew that there was only one thing that could hold the country together, and so did Fidel and Raul. We needed to buy the time it required us to shore up. I am not sure that we prepared adequately for this day, actually. I’m not sure really we believed this day would come.

They drove us out to, well of course they didn’t tell us and we didn’t ask. And we were told in a meeting this was going to be a special period in times of peace, which was to say all the conditions of a siege and a war were to be upon us and really the only question was how long could we last until the U.S. gets bored, not tired for they have never been in a rush. More until the empire is bored with us, less obsessed with us. Long enough for the opposition to imperialism to recoup.

    I remember in the car to the ranch which disguised the room for these situations. I remember wondering if this was the end of our experiment and life as we understood it.

“This comes right from Fidel; you’re all going abroad in a week. Some of you will join embassy staff or medical missions, some as private people with foreign passports. You will be going to allied countries and Western countries, you will be going to make some hasty business.”

    Well really the whole speech was so much longer. But this was the short of it. We were not told in any specific terms how long supplies and foreign currency reserves could hold out on the island. We were told in no uncertain terms that things were going to run out, and that our job was to generate hard currency through the operation of a variety of legal and illegal businesses to shore up the essential purchase; food, fuel and probably armaments.

    “They’re rioting in Moscow and Warsaw and Budapest. It’s all coming down. Even the Chinese are talking about calling it something else.”

    I tell you it wasn’t all cigar smoke and mirrors and fake foreign names, Cubans look like everyone and we had trained long ago to act like anyone, and we’d been assimilating for years into the second world and there was a contingency planned for a cut off over time from USSR foreign aid, not overnight.

    “What brought it all down?” Norma asks.

    “This wasn’t a polite or immediate question,” she was told. But the answer was several things. First, the West was economically more exploitative and comparatively more ruthless. Second, the Russian Communist Party lost its popular imperative, and third, the endless wars in proxy had sapped its will. But there was something else no one said, which was being said in the West; that Capitalism was simply a better system, no-no no one would say that. But everyone was always hoping blue jeans and popular gringo music would fall off a favela cart or plane hatch back from Miami. And it often did. Luxury carrots for all or for none says the evil murderous and often sloppy C.I.A.! But ours was a hard won thing that had the support of the people and would not be defeated by American imperialism and temptation.

    We will do what we have to do to survive this! Too much is historically on the line, if we fall like the others this idea and all our sacrifices and gains will have been for nothing. We would plot and organize, mobilize and do anything we had to do to secure the revolution. We would survive this coming Special Period in Times of Peace. We will break the grim Yankee blockade and ensure the relevancy of Cuban style Marxist Leninism for ten thousand years to come! And I will wear blue jeans when I have to.

Four people with exotic features enter the room, two men and two women, clad in loose army green tunics.

“I would like to introduce the delegation from the Kurdistan Workers Party,” declares my chief, “They are quite expert in smuggling, establishing European business fronts and of course they are committed revolutionaries.”

Pro-logue

When you open your paper, turn on your TV, or boot up your smartphone and attempt to understand what is happening; you are already tuned into people paid well to validate a view you already had. One such view is that there is a war going on between Islam and the mainly Christian Eastern & Western Bloc that affects China too. Both Russia and the United States have been poorly managing Wahhabi-Salafist terror in their countries since long before the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991. The United States by funding it and Russia by committing war crimes against whoever deploys it against them or their interests. China has been battling Islamic separatists that wish to section off 1/5 of its country to the Northwest in Xinjiang province. Perhaps what you tune into tells you it’s all some massive clash of civilizations. This ridiculous idea was popularized by Samuel Huntington in 1992. Other writers and pundits declare the events all part of a long running proxy war extending past when Francis Fukuyama ended history after the Cold War. If you’re deeply religious, and much of the human race is, you might periodically wonder if this is the end of times. As humans have wondered many, many times before. Neither the media nor the thought leaders nor your religious intuitions are paid by telling the truth. They are paid because you like how they interpret horrifying, unpredictable events for you. You subscribe to their interpretations because they assist you in rationalizing, wholly irrational human behavior, predatory government malfeasance and social policies that enable an endless war. 

From your house of worship or via your TV screen you might try to rationalize what’s happening here in the killing fields of the Middle East through the prism of your respective prophet’s scriptures or favorite pundit’s words. The news is a nasty circular addiction. A part of religion is a repetitive act of denial. You almost have to always deny that vast portions of the rest of your species are even loved or protected by God. Which allows a dynamic whereby you systematically begin to not care as much about whole blocks of other humans, based on something you must have faith is real, but cannot be proved by science or reason. So in many regards, any group of religious practitioners that equate a Godly protection to a set of scriptures always probably re-written and re-translated by fallible man. It is implicit to accept the belief that your hands are washed of much of humanities manifest suffering. But the wretched of the earth are statistically Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and Hindu in relatively equal proportions. But let’s look at the flood of violence from this phase of this longest war today. Let’s try and be dispassionate, objective and ration without losing our solidarity or our souls.   

I could only assure you on the political science and international development level it is wholly rational what is happening in the world today. Outside of wars for diminishing resources, prophetic revelations and clashing civilizations. It is the product of high-level planning and an absence of low-level care. We might extend that to the human tragedy generally and the Middle East Highly specifically.   

The steak is just as tender in New York, London, Berlin, Beijing, Shanghai, St. Petersburg and Moscow. The politicians in these places and those who manage them live in the similar style of homes. People that own energy companies, big financial firms, manage banks, own the arms or information tech companies; their mansions and yachts have similar styles and elite luxury amenities. The suits that their businessmen wear are of similar styles and fine materials. The sports cars their kid’s drive are all around the same speeds, and costs since luxury items are all price fixed. The women for sale in all three power blocks have the same price tags and services for sale. 

Thank God the “Cold War” is supposedly over because, for a cold war, a kind of hot series of medium scale wars, civil wars, and highly bloody armed events occurred in almost every single country on earth between 1945 and 1991. Although most respective national histories are total propaganda by omission, it has been agreed in the West that Communism was soundly disproven and defeated and of course the West “won.”

We are supposedly all very democratic in the West. We have Republican or Parliamentary governments with generally only two major opposing parties and free-market economies. The Russians supposedly are that thing called Democracy as well. After all the looting that happened in the gangland 90’s under the Shock Doctrines. Nigeria will tell you it’s a democracy and so will a lot of other people. It’s hard to find a Kurdish political party without the word Democracy in it. The absolute most war town, brutal, depraved place on earth is called the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

In reality, we all have highly Managed-Democracies. Scripted even. They are managed differently in Russia than in the West. Also generally with two parties of angry, loud ambitious lawyers, technocrats and oligarchs trying their hands in populism. In European social democracies, after looting the entire earth, they raised taxes and funded social services. Well certainly in Russia with only one relevant Party Yedinaya Rossiya (United Russia), democracy is slightly easier to implement. In Russia, the Communist Party is still the second biggest party. Anyone effectively opposing United Russia or even writing about in a negative way is promptly killed. Its corruption is referred to as the “party of crooks and thieves.” But most Russians agree that Vladimir Putin has restored security and dignity to Russia. So America is a two party state and Russia is also two party state. Designer consumer goods are readily available in both places. Russians as the losers of the Cold War are demographically poorer than Americans, but Russians have higher rates of university graduation and literacy. Both have pretty enormous domestic reserves of fossil fuels. Which is why their ferocious Middle Eastern proxy war can’t be just about oil at all.

China has a one party state, and it is run by the Communist Party. Its impressive economic growth since embracing State Capitalism in 1986 has propelled it to be a clear contender to the Western Hegemony. China is disinterested in both military interventions and experiments in the Middle East. All three powers have increasing energy needs which American and Russia can meet in their borders and China cannot, who therefore has elected to colonize every country in Africa. However, energy resources; oil and natural gas are the engines of both war and development.

America in 2017 has willing proxies in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. Its base for all Central Command, Military operations is in Qatar. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, as some may recall. It mostly withdrew in 2011 but has returned to contain ISIS in 2014. Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf States are Western oil clients, but all of them have intrinsic ties to the propagation of radical Islam.

Russia has a long term client relationship with Syria and it’s only Mediterranean Naval base there. Along with Crimea which it annexed in 2014 on the black sea, this is one of only two warm water ports. The key Russian regional ally is Iran. Iran as a result of the American invasion of Iraq controls everything in Iraq that is not Iraqi Kurdistan, the Sunni Triangle and the remains of the ISIS held areas (Ar Raqqah, Anbar, Al-Hawijja, Deir-Ez-Zor). Most people here call them Daesh, the perjortive using the acronym.

For over 2/3rds of the human race the very events critical to their respective, overlapping and at times contradictory faiths took place in Egypt, the Levant and Mesopotamia. For followers of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha’i, and numerous sub-sects of each this is where their very prophets were all born, raised and communicated with the source.

From the very moment, according to their own religious texts, that the Israelites arrived out of Egypt there has never, except for several long authoritarian periods of Islamic Caliphate rule been one even year of continuous peace. The Crusades were a several hundred year attempt to establish a genocidal, white supremacist Catholic foot hold in an area only slightly larger than modern Israel. When not seeking to expand Islam into ¼ of the earth or repulsing Christian incursions; the Abbasids, the Umayyads and the Ottomans were fighting constant wars with Mongol hordes, each other or the long running Sunni v. Shi’a wars.     

There is nothing that can be written academically or rhetorically, presented on any medium to give the West or the East a new conscience. It is now a simple matter of public record that the developed world has accepted that the only obligations it has to the maldeveloped world is periodic mitigation. Famines, wars, floods and disease epidemics are to be poorly managed by direct aid. Multilateral efforts though the United Nations are to be the extent of collaboration. NGOs will proliferate as donor trends determine. Regular military intervention will remove or shore up state systems intrinsically hostile to any of the three centers of global power; named Washington, Moscow and Beijing.

The World Wars and Cold Wars brought humanity closer than it ever has come to total self-destruction. But, there was nothing particularly stable about the Pax-American from 1991 to 2001. The Russian and Chinese embrace of free market capitalism has not altered in the slightest way how they maneuver as states toward their citizens and world. Albeit with fewer disasters periods of social engineering. There is nothing particularly comforting about the Chinese hegemony when it fully arrives. 

Consistent for nearly 100 years has been the Middle Eastern theater of a war which changes locations, ideologies, factions and names; but is in fact a singular ongoing war. 

If we accept the validity of real politics being intrinsically hostile and equity in the international order; if we excuse every type of growing human rights violation as explained in national interest; the center cannot hold. The earth has only so much capacity for economic pillage. The weapons of war are exponentially more destructive. The exodus towards the West is overwhelming. We cannot prove broad conspiracy nor do we have to. We cannot confirm or deny that something in the human nature is self-interested, violent and cruel. 

But, we can truly verify a coherent, consistent willingness for wealthy nations to prey on the developing ones and keep them deliberately dependent and maldeveloped.  

The Middle East has been in flames since 1919 and it is irresponsible to pretend that has something to do with civilization, religion, or cultural clashes. It fundamentally has to do with two forces pushing from the East and the West toward an energy resource. But that is in itself simplistic since both the United States and Russia have some of the largest proven reserves under their own territory. A Middle Eastern market for the weapons needed for constant warfare is a vital aspect. Both the Western and Eastern Blocs are seeking to control the oil in the ground and sell the dozens of Middle Eastern players’ advanced and simple tools for defense but mostly more killing. The various holy sites for the innumerous religious believers who convolutes the basic thesis, but is the third pillar to the equation. Were there no oil, there would be no willingness to arm so many opposing players. Observe Somalia where Muslims in a desert and absolutely no Western powers really care until high profile piracy occurs. 

Were there no arms racing there could only be small wars. Without political actors in Moscow as well as Washington, London and Berlin there couldn’t be such a cauldron of bloodshed. There have been countless stated rationales for intervention, proxy arming and invasion. It is nearly impossible to convince the democracies they ever did anything to escalate this. The war with the Islamic State has become a focal point, almost an obsession for everyone, but it is the latest manifestation of a long running problem. 

Before there was ever such a thing as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; the usual pundits and politicians screamed Cold War. Then East and West heavily armed everyone. Israel then tripled its land mass, Syria became the Russian proxy, and Egypt changed opportunistically sides. Next, they screamed contain the Iranian Revolution than the West armed Saddam Hussain. A gruesome eight-year war later Iraq genocided the Kurds. During this period to give the USSR their own Vietnam, the Saudis, Pakistanis, and American created Al-Qaeda and turned then Communist Afghanistan into the ungovernable Islamist warzone it is today. Then Saddam annexed Kuwait, and the West invaded. Several atrocities against Shi’a and Kurds later he remained in power. The pundits screamed loudest after September 11th, 2001 and the Global War on Terror began. Russian atrocities in Chechnya in 1990’s where 1 in 7 Chechens was killed were replied to with the 2002 Beslan and 2004 Ord Nost Hostage crisis. Hundreds of innocent Russian hostages died in both events. An estimated 240,000 people had died in Chechnya in two wars which leveled the separatist state. Most regimes including Israel saw waves of protest in 2011 over domestic grievances and inequality during the Arab Spring. Virtually all regimes besides Tunisia quelled the uprisings. Civil War broke out in Libya and Syria. By 2014 Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria were all in total unrest, ashes, and anarchy. The corrupt military dictatorship of Egypt had been overthrown, then restored with U.S. intervention. Saudi Arabia and Iran were fighting proxy wars all over the region. 

Turkey has clearly logistically enabled the creation of a Sunni oriented, Wahhabi Salafist ultra-fundamentalist Jihadist entity which took the world by complete surprise. Saudi Arabia has long provided it with a hateful Sunni version of Islam. Qatari actors gave its sophisticated propaganda and branding. Pakistani intelligence coordinated it as they had in Yemen and Afghanistan.

Then Islamic State took dozens of Syrian and Iraqi cities including Mosul, had come dangerously close to taking Baghdad, before turned back by Iranian coordinated militias and Kurdish Democratic Confederalists. The Peshmerga and the Iraqi military had fled in varying ways exposing civilians to atrocity.    

But allegedly quite a lot of these Sunni tribes people liked living under the Islamic State non-state governance. It validated their identity, it gave them something big and powerful to believe in. But, now they are near the brink of annihilation.

It is actually not important to indict who thought up the Islamic State, who planned it. Some say Gulf States, some say Iran, Israel and the West. The evidence though is clear that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar all fueled its development and Pakistan has the only intelligence service capable of working out the variables. It is pretty fucking child like to believe it was created by Islamists and Ba’athist officers in U.S. custody.

I take a little break to watch the last lights of the sun dip below the low range to the West of the city. The whole roof is lit up in white neon lights. I continue the broadcast.

It can be difficult to figure out what’s happening out here in the Middle East. It can become an abstraction of alien cultures, conflicts and ethnic configurations that are easily blurred to an uncaring or untrained eye. It is hard to get your head around how the alleged cradle of human civilization became such an everlasting intractable bloodbath. Perhaps it is only the responsibility of the Western audience to know what is happening because the collateral of the carnage is spilling over into their European and American cities. No one will perhaps admit that, but yes. And it is also important to render the Middle East more human because the weapons distributed here are from the West or Russia. The oil being pumped is being bought and sold by Western or Russian firms.  Most people living in the West don’t actually know what Kurdistan is, but that doesn’t say so much as most people in the West don’t know where a lot of things are. I would go so far as to say the majority don’t care. 

Most probably won’t admit that they didn’t know that the Kurdish ethnic group existed until 2014. It was not until various pundits made it clear “the Kurds” were actively fighting the Islamic State did anyone ever hear about things like the Peshmerga, the People’s Protection Units (YPG) or about Kurds in general. The perversity and violence of ISIS kept it in the headlines for the past three years and the Kurdish issue has increasingly been at the forefront of understating geopolitics in the region. Particularly because Iraqi Kurdistan, administered by the Kurdish Regional Government as an autonomous area since 2003 is set to hold its next referendum vote for independence on September 27th, 2017. And it is sitting on top of the fifth largest proven crude oil reserve on earth. No one should totally wash their hands of what happens in the Middle East because its conflicts are fought with Western and Russian weapons, paid for by American and Russian tax dollars. The companies pumping out the oil are largely Western or Russian based firms. 

There are in fact a lot of players, but all of them fall into four big tents; Western Allies led by the United States Military and Coalition forces. Russian Allies most prominently Syria and Iran. Gulf Sunni Client States that claim they are Western Allies but can be linked to the Islamic State through one or two acts of deductive reasoning. And the 40 million Kurds spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. The Kurds, who are the world’s largest stateless people are seeking some viable means to safeguard their long abused community and of course, get rich off the oil under their Iraqi territory.

     I plan to be very repetitive with names and places that matter. 

Or places that have more than one name so the reader can try and learn them. There are a lot of overlapping players, a lot of acronyms, national interests, international interests and underlying religious and ethnic antagonisms that go back thousands of years. There is a very long history of desert prophecy. This is certainly the land of Zoroaster, Abraham, Bab & Bahaullah (Iran); Moses (Egypt), Jesus (Israel/Palestine) and Muhammed (Saudi Arabia). Well documented and repetitive ethnic killing is reality of life here for over 4,000 years punctuated by foreign occupations, colonies and Islamic empires. Devastating foreign invasions on behalf of Mongolia and Europe altered the entire composition of the region; culturally, politically and genetically. There is deep rooted tribalism which has to be understood as a means of both loyalty and social organization. There are monarchies created by Europeans to crown their favored Bedouins as oil clients. There was the re-birth of the Jewish State for the third time in three thousand years. There was the re-birth of the revolutionary Shi’a State in Iran which carries a similar sense of Messianic optimism and zealous indoctrination to preserve for Shi’a what the Jewish one does for Jews. There is absolutely a more recent history since 1947 of several large and also small wars and protracted atrocities. Such as those experienced by the Palestinians at the hands of almost everyone in the region. You could rightfully say with a straight face that since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919; there has been a constant war playing out inside every single country of the region. 

The Western Media’s linguistic and cultural detachment from these antagonistic protagonists’ borders on being a crude Orientalism. An anti-Islamism mixed with a thirst for covering and sensationalizing bloodshed. The fact that suicide bombs are regularly going off in Western cities has made everything more immediate, more visceral. But it is undeniable now that some of the biggest beneficiaries of being Western petro-colony clients (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman) can be linked to funding and supporting Wahhabi Salafist doctrines when not being caught outright funding the Islamic State. 

And frankly the enduring miserable heat doesn’t help anything. While obsessing, that is the word I would use; obsessing about the regions 5 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians of Greater Israel, West Bank and Gaza takes up a lot of printed word on the subject. The enduring issue, the issue that everyone needs to become more fluent in is the question of Kurdistan. 

Beyond the wars, the ceaseless violence and the conservative, mostly intolerant, male dominated nature of Middle Eastern society in general; and Arab, Kurdish and Persian society in particular. All anthropological and political variants are made worse by what I would call a claustrophobia. A feeling of being trapped in small spaces disguised as holy lands with nowhere to really go. Or fear of impending genocide, which affects all the players out here, and there are many. As I did not write this article for academics, let me paint with broad brushstrokes a paragraph on demographics. 

There are 35-40 million Kurds mostly spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They are mostly Sunni Muslims., There are two primary types of Muslims; Sunni and Shi’a which differ on a range of practices and beliefs, but are mostly divided over who was the rightful successor of the Prophet Muhamad. Shi’a declare it was Muhammad’s cousin and son in law Ali and have been historically persecuted by the Sunni caliphates and rulers. Sunni Islam, which is the majority sectarian faction of global Islam (say 70-90%) Shi’ism is the smaller (say 10-20%) faction of the Ummah, or Global Muslim community which is about 1/3 of the human race. 

Kurds are also the world’s largest stateless people. Linguistically, culturally, spiritually and often militarily Kurds are a great deal like Persians.  

     The nation of Iran which is a Revolutionary Shiite Islamic State since 1979, is about 65% Persian or say 50 of its 80 million people. There are also 9-10 million Kurds living there. While they are certainly not free from Iranian Sharia law; they are generally better treated than everywhere else in their historic lands of settlement. In Iraq a genocide called Anfal happened in 1988 which brutally killed 180,000 Kurds. In Turkey Kurds and Turks have been in an open civil war since 1984. In Syria, Arabization campaigns and forced resettlement made them third class citizens. Iran had an anti-Western, anti-Shah revolution in 1979. The United States promptly armed U.S. client Saddam Hussain to the teeth. Then sold guns secretly to Iran in the Iran-Contra Affair. While North Korea, Libya and Israel all sold arms and also secretly advised the Iranians. An 8 year war occurred fought in the style of World War I with trenches and poison gas where over a million people were killed. In the last days of the war Saddam Hussain ordered Al-Anfal or the systematic killing of 180,000 Kurdish Iraqis.

The nation that used to be Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussain and the Ba’ath Party until 2003 when the US successfully “liberated” the nation. Only the Kurds would call it liberation as both the Shi’a and Sunni Iraqi Arabs both for the most part hate the United States. The Ba’ath party which was nominally Arab-Socialism but really a one man dictatorship is also found in Syria. It is the political party of President Bashar al-Assad, who is an Alawite, but we will come back to that.

It is certainly neither irrational nor poorly documented that historically everyone out here has at one point tried to annihilate each other. As most of the groups out here have at one point, or are actively today trying to obliterate each other. None of this is helped by the obvious fact that the biggest Western powers & Russia cannot and will not allow control of natural resources under Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States to go unspoken for. Or be nationalized. Or be made inaccessible by virtually endless conflict.

Hewler, which again is Erbil in Kurdish, is a city of 2-3 million, the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. It has a tall mound fortification in the very center. The Citadel which has been the fortress defending Erbil, Hewler s all Kurds call it, for nearly 5,000 years. Like Moscow, Hewler is a series of ring roads; the 30 meter, the 60 meter, the 100 meter and the 120 meter which are punctuated nearly every other block by a 5 Star Hotel. In 2011-2014 a building boom erupted and everyone was making money. 

By the time I arrived in Iraq, or Kurdistan (as it is called by most of the Kurds living in this KRG zone); ISIS was fully driven back into Iraq proper by Peshmerga forces. Mosul was completely besieged by the Iraqi Military with nightly airstrikes hitting the positions in the Old City and Medical City.

The city of Hewler was once dubbed “the next Dubai”, but that’s a very dubious claim. For one thing, Hewler or Erbil isn’t any fun. For another, however you define that word fun, Erbil is not either pretty or architecturally impressive. That is because it is estimated that under the region of North Iraq; called the Kurdish Regional Government, autonomous since 2003 and home to 5 million Kurds and various minorities such as Turkmen (former Turkish administrative class of the Ottoman empire), Assyrian Christians (Syriacs & Chaldeans), Yazidis (recently genocided by ISIS), whatever is left of Iraq’s Baha’i community and a growing community of Western expats; the KRG sits on top of what might the fifth largest proven oil reserve.

But, in 2014 ISIS got about half an hour west of Erbil and was stopped by Coalition airstrikes in Makhmar. Everyone panicked and had begun evacuating their family’s hours before. ISIS had taken Mosul, then a city of over 2 million and Iraq’s second biggest with under 400 fighters. ISIS had invaded Sinjar (Shengal), the historic home of the Yazidis, murdered over 5,000 men; carried an unknown number of women into sexual slavery and trapped most of the remaining Yazidis up in the mountains. The Peshmerga, the military forces of KRG’s two main parties; KDP (Democratic Party of Kurdistan which controls Erbil) and PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan which controls Sulymanyia, which is also called Slemani) had basically retreated from both Sinjar and their positions in Makhmar and were incapable of repulsing the 2014 ISIS offensive. What is now a matter of historical records; the US air force hammered ISIS positions in Makhmar and stopped the advance there and the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) proxies; YPG Militia (People’s Protection Units) and the PKK armed wing People’s Defense Forces invaded Sinjar, cracked open a corridor for safety and by all accounts saved the majority of the remaining trapped civilians there.

Speaking on the subject of claustrophobia. There are an estimated 35-40 million Kurds; 14.3-20 million in south east Turkey, 8.2-12 million in Iran, 5.6-8.5 million in the Kurdistan autonomous region in North Iraq and 2-3.6 million in Northern Syria (Rojava). Armenia, Azerbaijan & Georgia all have populations which total under 50,000. 2 million Kurds live in the diaspora; particularly concentrated in Germany, France, Sweden and Netherlands. As well as in Russian Federation, Belgium, United Kingdom, Kazakhstan, Switzerland, Denmark, Jordan, Austria, Greece, USA, Kyrgyzstan, Canada, Finland and Australia (highest to lowest concentrations).  

As you can see from the spreads of these numbers; no one actually knows how many Kurds there are. Politically speaking these numbers are very problematic, since Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran in their own various ways and strategies would all prefer the Kurds not to even exist. 

That then said the Mossad thinks there are 30-40 million.

As stated in 1988, towards the end brutal eight year of the Iraq-Iran War, in Chumchumal Iraq, the Baath Party under Saddam Hussein began a genocide against the Iraqi Kurds. 180,000 Iraqi Kurds were loaded onto trucks, placed in concentration camps, driven to the south of the country, ordered to dig a ditch then shot and buried. Poison gas was used in the city of Halabja. Tens of thousands of villages around Chumchumal were emptied. The majority of the Kurdish population in that region fled to Iran. Only the US invasion of 1991 slowed the genocide. The invasion in 2003 basically allowed the PUK and KDP to seize northern Iraq and make it autonomous. In 2014 the KRG was fiscally cut off from Baghdad and began selling oil directly to Turkish, Russian, American and Israeli companies.

There are only Iraqi flags in Erbil inside the various 5 Star Hotels and most government buildings. But the red, white, green emblazoned with a yellow multi pronged star is virtually everywhere else.

The Kurds have an often repeated saying, “Our only friend in the mountains,” which related their historic persecution at the hands of an unending series of foreign occupiers’ particularly but limited to Arabs and Turks. Whenever invaded, without fail in thousands of recorded engagements Kurds fall back to the mountains which make up the majority of their imagined, and historic territory; and promptly begin guerrilla wars.  

In Turkey, the Turkish government has long banned Kurdish language and culture for years. It has been described as “highly effective cultural genocide” For decades the Kurds were assimilated, repressed and told they were “Mountain Turks”. In 1914 the Ottoman Empire conscripted the Kurds to help carry out the Armenian genocide. Because of official apology, long running dialogues for reconciliation and a common enemy; Turkey, Armenia is one of the biggest supporters of the PKK’s (Kurdish Workers Party) war against the Turkish state. In 1984 the PKK began it’s insurgency against the Turkish state. More than 50,000 Turkish citizens, mostly of Kurdish descent were killed in this still running war. In 1999 PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was arrested, tortured and placed in solitary confinement in an island prison near Istanbul. Reading the works of Murray Bookchin; Ocalan renounced Marxist-Leninism in favor of his own non-state, pro-democratic, gender co-equal, ecologist vision called “Democratic Confederalism” which is now the official PKK ideology. After several failed rounds of ceasefire and peace talks, after the arrest of all Kurdish parliamentarians after the 2017 Coup in Turkey and after repeated bombardment of PKK positions in Iraq, Turkey and Syria as well as great complacency if not active support of the Turkish state to allow ISIS fighters to come and go over its territory; the PKK has been physically pushed back to mountain bunkers in the Qandil Mountains of Northern Iraq and positions in Sinjar, but enjoys enduring popular support amongst Turkish and Syrian Kurds. Its political parties repeatedly are elected to Turkish Parliament, subsequently banned and their leaders jailed. 

In 2004 the PKK Syrian affiliate PYD (Democratic Union Party) began rapidly organizing a militia and administrative structures which later protected, then effectively occupied Kurdish areas in Syria during the atrocities of the Syrian Civil War (which has led to the deaths of over 550,000 people largely civilians and displaced over 13 million internally or into neighboring countries in vast miserable series of camps.  

In 2014 the PYD (Democratic Union Party) and its militia force the YPG/YPJ (YPG is People’s Protection Units [male] and YPJ is Women’s Protection Units [female]; now numbering around 45,000 light infantry fighters) defeated ISIS in the Siege of Kobani with Peshmerga, PKK and coalition air support. In the past three years the PYD, through its civil society organ the Tev Dem (Movement for Democratic Society); is for the most part governing a 4 million person non-recognized parallel state; three cantons in Northern Syria called the Democratic Federation of Rojava- Northern Syria. 

Afrin Canton (to the West of Rojava, but still landlocked) is isolated by a Turkish supported incursion toward Aleppo, Syria. Kobani the central canton is connected by land to Jazira Canton which borders the Kurdish Regional Governorate (KRG). Because the KDP (Democratic Party of Kurdistan), majority KRG party based in Hewler/Erbil is incredibly dependent on Turkey for exporting oil and development assistance, actually most of the 5 Star Hotels, apartment towers, and consumer goods in Iraqi Kurdistan are a product of that economic relationship; Rojava is quarantined on all sides. The only people getting in are well resources journalists, NGO workers and people getting smuggled mostly over the Iraq-Syria border through a combination of bribes or Kurdish family loyalties.

The Turkish border to the north is completely sealed. The Free Syrian Army/ Turkish forces occupy a land strip from the Turkish border to the city of al-Bab, which cuts Rojava’s Afrin canton from the Kobani & Jazira Cantons. Jazira borders Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Sinjar Mountains are partly under YPG/PKK/PYD control and partly under Peshmerga/KDP control.  All flights to Qamishli go through Damascus. Most of the Syrian territory south of Raqqa is in the hands of ISIS or the Nusra Front (another Al-Qaeda rebrand). The Assad government and its military control of the Qamishli airport make it possible to have supplies airlifted in and about 20 registered NGOs, can go over the Syrian/Iraqi border. 

The YPG/YPJ making up the majority of the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) has pushed ISIS back to Raqqa (which is now completely surrounded by Syrian Democratic Forces). The YPG/YPJ has been politically dressed up as the SDF incorporating varying smaller militia forced from ethnic minorities and various rebranded Syrian Free Army groups. This pluralism for US Government and military intelligence foreign donors has occurred because of three reasons: 

1) Virtually every Western nation has declared the PKK a terrorist group, so overtly supporting the PYD militia YPG/YPJ is outrageous and offensive to Turkey, a critical regional ally. Who spends way more time bombing the Kurds in PKK and YPG rather than do anything constructive to oppose ISIS. So SDF is a thinly veiled way for the United States to say it isn’t directly funding a group it called a terrorist group to fight another terrorist group, but that is exactly what is happening. Turkey has bombed Iraq and invaded Syria by proxy forces cutting off the Western most Rojava canton Afrin from its two eastern cantons Kobani & Jazira.

 2) The YPG/YPJ is along with the Iran controlled Iraqi Shiite PMU (Popular Mobilization Forces, also called Al-Hassid Al-Sha’abi the only credible ground forces in consistently rolling back ISIS. Without the PMU, ISIS might have taken Baghdad in 2014. Without YPG, Rojava would have been overrun. The PMU is regularly accused of atrocities and is controlled via Shi’a clerics loyal to Iran. The YPG/YPJ should be viewed as a military asset of the PKK militarily expedient to the U.S. led Coalition “Enduring Resolve” Operational needs.

3) When ISIS is defeated, the PMU will be used against Peshmerga in Kirkuk. Turkey, the Baathist Military and NUSRA front will be attacking Rojava in different configurations. SDF is an effort on the PYD part to make the militia forces more multiethnic, and thus remain eligible for American war money. 

Mosul fell to the Iraqi military around July 9th, 2017 after nine months of fierce urban warfare. Raqqa is expected to fall by the end of the summer. I.S.I.S. Redoubts in Tel Afar, Iraq (a historic Turkman city) were predicted to fall by September, but mysteriously the city was found to be empty after just eight days of fighting by the end of August. Hawijja, Iraq historically a Kurdish city long emptied and Arabized by the genocide is widely believed to be one of the most pro-Wahhabi Salafist centers as far as the population’s sympathies. Its population supported Al Qaeda, currently supports ISIS and regularly launches terror attacks in neighboring Kirkuk. There is a desolate barren zone in the Anbar province (outside Kurdish zone) which also needs to be pacified.

All of this leads analysts to conclude I.S.I.S. will be militarily defeated in all major remaining Iraqi and Syrian cities by January 2019. Importantly Raqqa, it’s only remaining official headquarters could be over by November. The mop up operations in and around Deir Ez-Zor will pale in comparison to the possibility of war between the Peshmerga against the Hashid al Shabi and Iraqi Army in Kirkuk. 

To whom it may concern,

Good day, here are some short answers to the basic, but crucial questions posed to accompany the more extensive briefings we are sending.

1. How many students can be trained at a time?

With a ground a staff of a paramedic, an EMT, a teacher and two local nationals not necessarily but preferably with some teaching/ medical experience; we can train 40 students at a time over 246 hours, approximately 3 months. This presumes the students have no prior medical training and do not necessarily speak English. A larger number of indigenous national support staff, i.e. your organization providing more adjunct instructors (nurses, doctors or combat medics); the non-indigenous (extra-national) staff could train 80 students in the same period of time if a night/ day class was organized. The ideal ratio of students to instructors is 5 to 40.

2. What group will be the recipient of the training?

The EMT course is designed for both civilian and military use. Therefore given the context of the ongoing Syrian civil war and the complexities of Rojava; we recommend a mixture of front line combat medical personnel, ambulance workers, hospital staff as well as civilians be selected to participate, but we place those policy preferences on your local leadership. We will be throughout the course identifying the top students and working with them to make the programs replicable past the departure of the GCC unit. If it is in the interest of the sponsoring organization we can tailor additional sessions of the course to the personnel likely to engage in military defense operations with an emphasis on the practical skills over the strictly medical curriculum.     

3. Would the students require any prior medical or educational background?

No, none is required or encouraged. This course is designed to rapidly make civilians professionally proficient in basic life support, prehospital care.

4. What is the age range and gender demographics?

Students should be 18 years old and be approximately half male, half female.

5. How big does the class room space need to be?

The classroom should allow 40 students to be seated in front of a power point projector with the ability for them to take active notes in note books. It should be shielded from the elements as best as possible and should be able to have the desks quickly cleared for drills where the 40 students are broken into units of 5-10. The power point projector requires the room to be relatively dim when lectures are being given. Electricity is required for 4-6 hours each day. A white sheet can be used as a projector screen, we can acquire and move a projector device into the country if none is available. There should be mats or drop rugs to allow students to be supine on the floor for drills and assessment training. There needs to be an open space near the class room, indoors or outdoors where the students can drill in the practical skills; a space double or triple the size of the classroom. There should be a ready source of hydration available to the students.

6. For how many hours a day/ days a month will the training class run?

A standard class of 40, morning, afternoon or evening will be between 4-6 hours per day, 4-5 days a week for approximately 3 months (246 hours of training). About half of this time will be spent in a medical/ trauma lecture and half as practical skill drills and hospital rotations. 

7. What materials/ equipment will be needed?

1 classroom for 40

1 medical facility for observational rotations

1 open space/ field for drills

40 Stools/chairs/desk table space

1 generator/ fuel to operate it 4-6 hours a day/ 4-5 days a week/ 3 months

2 large tarps

2 extension cord cables

2 external hard drives

2 power strips

2 power point projectors

2 lap top/ desk top to connect the projector to the slides

5 large drop mats/ rugs for drills on the ground

4 equipment boxes/ gear bags

Printing capability

• Printing black and white exams (1 a week) (12 weeks) (4 pages) = 

Approx. 1,920 pages.

• Printing skill sheets (8 skills) (40 students) = approximately 320 pages
• Printing final exams (20 pages) (40 students): 800 pages. 

Printer ink to accommodate printing of exams and skill sheets on a weekly basis

Reams of paper needed to accommodate above need.

For each of the 40 students over 12 weeks an estimated 3,200 pages of exams and materials will need to print which serve as their primary review and preparation tool. The only way to reduce this kind of print volume to take exams off the screen which is time consuming, or institute a different testing system involving rote memorization fill in exams. We are flexible and accommodating to the pedagogic variations best suited to our students.   

Medical Equipment

Some of this equipment can be produced or procured in country, please consult with us further about what will be completely unavailable. 

Essential Moving and Assessment Equipment

10 stethoscopes

10 blood pressure cuffs

10 penlights/ small flashlights of any kind

5 boxes of examination gloves

5 carrying stretchers 

2 long boards (rigid body sized boards w. handles)

2 stair chair devices

5 cervical collars

10 CPR pocket face masks

10 Bag valve masks

5 CPR mannequins/ could be substituted with a large bag of rice.

5 OB-Delivery kits (sterile sheets, 2 clamps, sterile cutting tool, suction bulb)

4 portable oxygen tanks/ could be substituted with liter sized plastic bottles.

4 oxygen regulators/ impossible to substitute

4 non-rebreather masks

4 nasal cannula oxygen lines

4 sets of oropharyngeal airways/ bend metal spoons

4 sets of nasopharyngeal airways/ impossible to substitute

Dressings & Splints

10 short splints (size of forearm)

10 long splints (size of leg)

5 boxes of triangle cravats

5 boxes of 4×4 dressings

4 boxes 5×9 ABD pads

2 boxes of 2 inch tape

2 boxes of 1 inch tape

1 box multi-trauma dressings

1 box of duct tape

8. What must be provided for the foreign instructor staff?

GCC instructors require the following things from the hosting organization.

• A mutual aid contract specifying the stakeholders, their roles and obligations to each other.
• Contacts or support to assist the team in transport from Irbil to the Rojava border.
• Pick up at the border and facilitation of transportation to the site of training
• Basic and secure location to sleep, wash and rest.
• 3 basic meals a day.
• A regular provided source of hydration.
• Periodic access to internet
• Extraction to the border and assistance in crossing back to Irbil.   

9. What translation activities must be provided?

There are approximately 43 power point slide presentations that must be translated before or during the course into Kurdish or Arabic. There are 12 exams that must be translated and 8 skill sheets. As none of the GCC instructors speak Kurdish or Arabic there must be at least 2 full time bi-lingual instructors on site, at all hours of instruction to render short spurt translation (burst per sentence) of what the EMT and Paramedic are saying. The course should be taught off the slides by these same 2 local national bilingual instructors. When a more detailed question emerges the foreign national EMT or Paramedic will assist in expanding on the topic. The third member of the foreign team an educator will be constantly working with staff and students to improve and modify teaching methods. The work load on the local national teaching staff is immense. They must teach a course in a second or third language while working to translate slides and materials. This translation process is essential to indigenous control of replication, ideally more than 2 instructors should be employed by the sponsoring organizations, agencies, governmental, non-governmental and social movements enrolled in the mutual aid agreement. The actual calculated GCC cost to implement a year of courses, four rounds of EMT training for 160 EMTs is approximately 500,000 USD. Due to the unique and exceptional circumstances of the civil war, the Rojava governate as well as GCCs broad sympathies with your people we are waiving all normative salaries. To carry out a three month course where your organization will then possess ability for replication will require a sturdy coalition of actors in mutual support and the rapid ability for you to translate the materials. This is by default going to be an operation and implementation based heavily on confidence building and trust.

10. Who will ultimately certify, credential and take responsibility for the newly trained EMT personnel?

Following a procedural modal established in the Republic of Haiti; the ultimate authority over the newly trained EMTs is a nationally licensed physician in the countries ministry of health and other doctors who employ and deploy these EMTs.

The majority of the EMTs in the Rojava context will be likely deployed as combat medics and rearguard ambulance operators as well as technicians in hospitals to support existing nurses and emergency room physicians.

Whatever medical body funds and operates your healthcare system will ideally over time replicate this course using the materials we provide modified for the local contexts and epidemiology.

Certification has to occur through the primary implementing body, the group hosting the training and facilitating the class. In the Haitian context this was a major NGO Project Medishare controlling one of the biggest hospitals in the capital and Haitian American Caucus a Haitian civil society organization. The ministry of health is still evaluating the EMT title to this day, and allows EMT employment but due to the Haitian context is not overseeing the EMT training process.

Credentialing has to occur through government so once certified a political representative must push to recognize this title in country.

In practical terms these 40 new EMTs should be absorbed as needed into existing groups in the coalition with one particular group assuming ongoing training operations.

In the Haitian context and in the context of most developing nations the EMTs will either seek employment at hospitals, NGOs and ambulance groups. In the Rojava context most of these students will assume positions of prehospital care as needed in the ongoing defense of the country.

 Defining a Social Movement for Emancipatory Development

I would like to take this brief opportunity to summarize tactical and philosophical lessons drawn from our seven week study of social movement organizations (SMO)s. It is vital to me as a Development Practitioner who views Universal Human Rights as a mere baseline and holds the desire for real change coupled with full emancipation in my heart; that I help dispel some mythologies and embrace a program fully in line with “emancipatory development”.  

Emancipatory Development is the collective tactical blueprint by which the masses render the sources of their dependency obsolete, the violence of their oppressors is neutralized and they emerge with full human capacity and agency to uplift their fellow humans.

The most nefarious victory of the global elites over the human masses was to remove the legitimacy of our vocabulary to speak of change. To keep billions on the precipice of survival requires a vast campaign of de-legitimization and historical revisionism as well as vile and periodic atrocity. Neo-liberalism and globalization itself are an exploitative construct to force an intellectual and tactical break between those fighting for freedom and those attending to the immediate Maslowian needs of billions of our poor. As if to disconnect acceptable from unacceptable change and sanitize the strategic action field of actors with a means to provide as they engage to resist. The poor are poor because of overt political decisions made to pre-determine their non-development. Hiding behind the veil of Human Rights is their open and acknowledged widespread violation. And behind the wool; the smoke screen of development is but a complex, vaguely sanitized version of colonialism.

The world’s 3 billion poor are victims of an organized structural violence perpetrated by the economic elites of the traditional hegemon powers. As we prepare to wage peacefare; as we prepare to organize and train for our total liberation we must attempt to articulate a Social Movement ideology that incorporates the best of the historic freedom struggle with the most cutting edge arsenal of anti-poverty development capabilities. 

“Emancipatory Development” is both an ideology and a tactical framework in the service and liberation of the poor. Those of us who are fighting for baseline Universal Human Rights and speak of real socio-political freedom must now embrace the tools of development cautiously as a supplemental mechanism to the tactics of non-violent resistance. 

Development means nothing unless it is emancipatory, egalitarian, and led by the people it serves. It must also rely on and invest in the capacity of the masses to be their own agents of delivery, progress, and victory over oppression. We must fully break from neo-colonialist controls, “poverty entrepreneurship”, and measure all our work by its value in national struggles for human liberation. The poor are so poor because they are victims of a global economic system. A system which breeds technocratic dependency on “aid”, who’s structural adjustments gut social systems and place control of national resources in the hands of multinational corporations. It is easy to identify our primary targets. There is not a government on earth without some culpability. “Development” means absolutely nothing unless it is completely rooted in tangible victories of the poor over the sources of their poverty. We stake our legitimacy as a social movement on our ability to wed resistance fully with development. 

In the seven week overview of social movements we began with theory. Why they form and theories on their success or failure. Drawing from this I bring attention to the “Resource Mobilization Theory” which states that movements take preexisting organizations able to marshal resources of various types and their synergy yields movement success. Charles Tilly said that Social Movements are “sustained campaigns that make collective claims aimed at authorities” Sidney Tarrow called them: “collective challenges based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities.” What is clear from the recent mobilizations of Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Brazil, Bulgaria, Thailand, and the Ukraine is that mass mobilizations are most successful at resisting government repression when they can a) clearly articulate demands and b) mobilize the resources of pre-organized associations to sustain the movements operations. That failure of all of these movements so far, even ones that have brought down repressive governments in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt is to have incorporated any development component that makes their confederation of SMOs, viable alternatives to the states they dismantle or assail.

In Theory of Fields we read that “defection of economic elites is one of the most critical aspects to the success or failure of a social movement to seize power” They cite the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 1986 and the Somoza Regime in Nicaragua in 1979. There is a co-relation between expanded social movement activity and expansion of state strategic action fields. Modern states are stronger by separating from economic and social bases, then forming alliances with the vital players of the major non-state fields. “Development” via the third (NGO) Sector and government aid is itself a strategic field to conquer. Social Movement’s for Emancipatory Development must in fact make mastery of development and delivery of services more of priority than resistance to regimes they oppose.

In our case studies we learn the obvious strength of non-violent resistance, economic boycott, and mobilization out of intuitions of cultural relevance. In both the cases of the American Civil Rights Movement and the Indian Independence Movement we see the moral superiority and tactical relevance of non-violence. We read in these cases the necessity of harnessing economic buying power away from assets owned by your oppressors. We see that militarily it would have been disastrous for the Indian people to take up arms against England or the American Negro to fight the Federal government with arms (as the Black Panthers learned in 1968). Instead both movements achieved considerable constitutional victory without arms. In modern day Syria we can see just how quickly a non-violent pro-democracy movement can devolve into a protracted war with over 100,000 dead.

In our studies of Liberation Theology we examined the power of subverting traditional mechanism of reaction and repression into new social gospels for change. We identify the power seen in Latin American via the Church and in Political Islam in the recent 2011 uprisings across the Middle East. Clearly Zionism is profound example of utilizing a religious framework for geo-political ends. As is the Islamic Revolution in Tehran in 1979. It was used to topple the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. I fully advocate that the Movement continue to embrace the universal messages of justice found in the world’s religions as long as no aspect of the movement will seek to impose a singular religious norm over communities not of that religion.  Liberation Theology is so subversive because it conquers one of the elites’ traditional pillars of control.

In our Paulo Freire readings we examined humanization/ dehumanization; internalization of oppression; and understanding of the elite as divided, uncompleted human beings. Isolation of the mind, disempowerment, and mental slavery was his diagnosis of the oppressed. He spoke of the “false generosity” of philanthropy. And of how the poor live in an “ahistorical world”; a completely deterministic world that they cannot escape of total resignation about their plight. He states that “liberation is painful like childbirth” and that only via the direct empowerment of the people can we achieve political rights or social freedom. In agreement with this philosophy and that of Amartya Sen in “Development as Freedom” Mass Capacity is different from “State Capacity”. The most vital tool of a movement for Emancipatory Development is direct investment in the education and technical training of the masses to develop their own communities as they collectively determine. The concept of mass capacity is vital to the success of our movement because only by achieving self-determination can a people enjoy rights, development or freedom.

In our readings on the ant-caste movement we see the emancipatory power of abandoning imposed identity. We read about mass conversion for Hinduism to Buddhism.  Forced to “act out ones oppression” via the caste rituals millions are enslaved. Stopping the belief that you are inherently a slave goes back to Paulo Freire. Breaking ones “psychological isolation in an ahistorical world.” It would not be a strategic social movement position to oppose Hinduism, which is the foundation of the Indian State. The conversion of millions to Buddhism is profound example to the rejection of outsider imposed identities that allow class and ethnic exploitations. There is no cultural relativism to be respect to universal human rights, simply cultural paradigms that either can be understood and adopted (liberation theology) or rejected out of hand as the invention of an oppressor (Hutu/Tutsi). 

 In our cases on land reform of course we go back to the most fundamental question of movement; what is your turf? What is your territory? What is yours as people? To what extent do 206 governments built nearly all by historic rapes and expropriations have legitimacy to declare some land yours? I would argue that not one nation state on earth has a legitimacy the masses should respect. This movement cannot be defeated if it is universal in demands and universal in expectations. It cannot regard one last repressive regime standing to be acceptable. It cannot abide one single person living in starvation as an acceptable norm. It cannot have national aims. The reality of nation state experiment is that in the guise of security it usurped control and it build a global system where most of the species would be subjugated to the minority.  

In our cases on resistance to apartheid we see that just because a social movement can take state power does not in any way make it able to wield political power to the end of economic empowerment for its poor. I think it should be clear to us that violent revolutions and non-violent revolutions do not improve the economic situation of countries poorest citizens, in fact wide spread violence almost certainly comes after every violent revolution. The aim is not to improve the existing state system. I would argue that the primary aim of emancipatory development is to completely circumvent the state system and place tools directly in the hands of the people. It is historically clear that taking control of an instrument of mass coercion, i.e. the state; is not a successful means to use its power on the behalf of its citizens. It has historically only fostered a new predatory elite.

We are often confronted with the apolitical generation raised post-Cold War that do not have an “ideological” paradigm to view world events. It is quite likely that due to historical revisionism and the previously discussed sanitization of political vocabulary for change many young people in the West may actually believe that globalization is the face of progress. I would say frankly that little has changed since the days of colonialism except that direct rule has been replaced with proxy rule. I would go so far as to say that 3 billion poor and extreme poor, also means 3 or 4 million more pliable workers that can be utilized in the global supply chain. Except right now it is not necessary to mobilize 6 or 7 billion workers, half will suffice and the other may hover on the brink or ruin as a reserve. This is not about economics as much as it is about control because even in the hegemon and metropol nations there are percentages starving, percentages working nearly cradle to grave, and a tiny controlling elite. The fallacy of our entire “Development Enterprise” thus so far is to pretend, to trick ourselves in that the governments were acting in good faith. If Development is not an instrument of political power then it is simple charity. The poor do not need our manipulative carrots and their governments’ sticks. They are not empowered via your charity. We reject that dichotomy that aid is either politics or charity. It’s always politics. It’s got to stop being charity. We have to divest our development from states and put it squarely into people. 

The slogan of our entire movement is simply to “teach a person to fish.” With one arm of the movement we strike back at the violators of human rights and with the other we build up the global capacity, the mass capacity of the people to secure their universal rights and more. This will not come from mobs in streets, from civil disobedience or rifles.  We will bring our oppressors to their knees by illustrating their irrelevance. A free people can teach their children to read, tend to their people’s health, and operate the means of development needed by a community. Let it be clear. The liberation of a people comes not from the barrel of a gun but in via control of the means of development; the schools, the hospitals, the civil service, sanitation, and all other trades that by their nature promote self-determination and the public good. And any development practitioner that is not working to build that mass capacity; they are poverty profiteer, a bright eyed idiot, or worse a dirty collaborator perpetuating the system that keeps so many destitute.

I did not come here to plant trees or play with kids in orphanages though these are important tasks. I came here join a movement. And if one does not exist in true coordination then it is my goal to open the lines of communication. 

PAMPHLET (2)

“WHAT WE WANT/ WHAT WE BELIEVE IN 2021”

The Immediate Goals of the Clandestine Movement

What We Want

1. We want Real Freedom. We want the power to determine the destiny of our Communities through actual Democratic Autonomy.

2. We want our Full Human Rights. Guaranteed and legally protected for our people in the constitutions of every single nation.

3. We want an End to the Robbery by the Oligarchy in every nation of the working class, of marginalized minority groups and our long oppressed communities of color. We want control on the community and municipal levels of both the means of economic production and social development.

4. We want decent infrastructure, housing, schools and hospitals fit for human beings. We want fully protected Economic Social and Cultural Rights, as codified and defined by the United Nations Treaties.

5. We want Fully Subsidized and Equal Opportunity Educational systems for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent World System. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society. One unified Educational system kindergarten through college, not segregated by class favoring the wealthy with better services.

6. We want Fully Subsidized and Equal Universal Health Care provided in all communities, one system on equal basis. One single payer health system, not segregated by class favoring the wealthy with better services.

7. We want True Equality before the Law, the right to participate in the judiciary, the local and national governance mechanisms along with a full dismantlement of the racist criminal justice system that regularly exonerates the upper class, and over incarcerates people of color. We want fully protected Civil Political Rights, as defined by the United Nations Treaties.

8. We want an immediate end to the Mass Incarceration and State Sanctioned Police Murder of our people. All existing penal systems are brutal, cruel and unusual; they must be disbanded and replaced with a more just alternative.

9. We want Freedom for all non-violent offenders held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails. We want the de-funding of state intelligence organizations, secret prisons and facilities for torture. We want community control and oversight of police forces.

10. We want to Defund and Withdraw the Imperialist Military forces of all nations from every nation on earth, massively reduce funding for the military industrial complex and a global facilitate mass disarmament.

11. We want massive policy level action directed to protect our planetary environment before it collapses. Massive reduction in Carbon Emissions, reduction in Bovine consummation, fossil fuels use and the widespread harmful industrial practices which devastate the environment. We need a massive investment in Green Energy, alternative sources for meeting our energy needs and globally coordinated sustainable effort toward a Global New Green Deal.  

12. We want to dismantle the existing backwards, predatory Westphalian State System. Exploitative, corrupt and inefficient predation on all peoples to be replaced by smaller, community-centrist, largely self-reliant Federations and Confederations within the Democratic Confederalist framework.

What We Believe

1. We believe that no People can ever be “free” until we are able to determine our own destiny, Control our own Developmental Structures and participate in our own democratic governance.

2. We believe that all governments are responsible and obligated to give every human not just employment or a guaranteed income, but fully Secure all Human Rights on a constitutional basis. We believe that if Euro-American Oligarchs and business men will not grant full employment at living wages, alongside actual social mobility, then the means of production should be taken from the Oligarchy and businessmen and placed back in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living. Livelihoods with dignity leading to life of security and possible happiness.

3. We believe that all governments have robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt in the form of Adequate, Acceptable, Accessible and high Quality social services funded by the tax base. Europe and America owe an enormous debt to the world that Europeans looted for over 500 years; reparations for slave labor and mass murder of colonized peoples must be paid in full. We will accept the payment in a transfer of currency, expertise and services over time back from the Global North to the long victimized Global South. Specifically predatory nations such as the Netherlands, France, England and America will be expected to repay the massive human rights violations previous governments inflicted. We demand reparations be paid from Europe and America to all exploited colonies throughout the developing world. 

4. We believe that landlords will not give decent housing to our Working class and Minority communities, then the housing and the land should be organized into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make a decent housing for our people.

5. We believe in an educational system that will give our people a knowledge of collective and self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We believe that without a Single Payer National Health Service the working class and people of color will never have adequate equal access to good Health care.

7. We believe that people should not be compelled to fight in the military service to defend governments that do not protect us, or grant us human rights. We will not fight and kill other people in the world who, like all Working people, and people of color are being victimized by the Core Powers; namely those in Europe, America, Russia and China. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of aggressive violent police, military, and intelligence services by whatever means necessary.

8. We believe we can end both police brutality and criminal banditry in our community by organizing self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our community from racist police oppression and state supported brutality. As well as vile gangs and mafias. We therefore believe that all people experiencing state sponsored violence should arm themselves for self-defense and form People’s Defense Forces/ People’s Protection Units and Womens’ Protection Units to defend their community from violence.

9. We believe that all non-violent offenders should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial. Such facilities are also cruel and unusual and a violation of human rights.

10. We believe that the courts of all nations should adopt normative human rights entitlements into the national charters. These rights need to be enforced and ensure full equality for every citizen in obtaining them. People must receive fair trials, tried by their peers. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical, and racial background. To do this the court must select a jury from the actual community from which the defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by biased juries that have no understanding of “the average reasoning man” of the working class and communities of color. The rich get better lawyers and “better justice” in all nations.

11. The existing State System, the Globalization Epoch and the Capitalist dominated World System have fully exhausted the bounds of their legitimacy. War is rampant, poverty is pervasive and widespread and the earth is literally dying. As wrote the founding fathers of the American Empire;

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s god entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, and that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such a form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accused. But when a long train of abuses and usurpation, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, and their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards of their future security.”

We seek to replace a convoluted, paternalistic notion of “good governance” with a more revolutionary, conscious passage;

“The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.”   

12. Human activity must be regulated by social and economic policy to ensure sustainable environmental practices on the earth. We have one planet and it is in decay from over use, exploitation and neglect. The most harmful practices are associated with personal vehicles, the burning fossil fuels, bovine livestock herding and slaughter, globalized shipping on container ships and airlines as well as industrialization and the lack of regulation of big firms on their practices.