It’s the 20th of December in the year 2009. Jeremy Mccgaffey has been dead for about one year. Most of the mourning aloud was long over. But his ghost remained.
Those fucking pagans from Gerritsen Beach tried to kill me and Maria, Nick and also Angelica on the damn Q train. This hate crime was defeated with fists and knives and the press machine. The FDNY EMS hired him immediately, he cut a whole long civil service list somehow. Then came FDNY in the Bronx at night, then losing his Maria slowly for almost two years. Then recently Maria left him. About two months ago. After a little episode on Block Island that scared her too bad. Vodka, a dive into the stormy sea he followed Jeremey’s ghost way out into the Atlnatic and left her alone in the night on a beach.
It hasn’t been a very good year. Sebastian’s a Jew at heart. At heart, he starts counting the year from September. A real shit year all things considered, it isn’t rounding out to be the decade he’d hoped for either. He’d believed in so many things once. Had so much sense of possibility for life. The hope, the feeling of possible change, the want for greater justice. For an imagined freedom fighting life via a “militant nonviolence”. Making bombs that didn’t kill. Things he learned in the Middle East applied to America. Now, it seemed maybe he’d just pass the firefighter promotional exam. Maybe become an FDNY Lt and lead a noble but simple working class life. He’s gone and joined the FDNY boxing team. Maria left him over the many ghosts of his dead friend and comrade Jeremy. Who blew his brains out a year ago or so.
Sebastian Adon has been technically working for the F.D.N.Y. Bureau of EMS since January of 2008. But, just a month into the Academy his best friend, his comrade and old partner Jeremy took a pistol to his foolish head. He got off two rounds. Now that was some zealous work. Two shots to the head and from this world departed the best partner Sebastian ever had. Jeremy and Sebastian used to organize people back in college. They tried to make a little change in the community. They’d together built a revolutionary club of several hundred in nine chapters dedicated to human rights and “real change”. They were a good team. But now Jeremy was dead and Sebastian didn’t believe human beings were all that good anymore after about two years in the South Bronx and Bedford Stuyvesant. And the other places where the sidewalk ended and the schools were too crowded and the American dream was a nightmare. All right alongside such incredible wealth.
Before the F.D.N.Y., Adon used to work on a Tran-scare Transport Unit. About a month after Jeremy died on January 31st of 2008 Adon worked his very last Transcare shift with a Haitian Paramedic named Victor Emile Cange. After dropping out of the FDNY Academy he picked up overtime where he could get it waiting for the next Academy class..
He’ll retell it to you in a flashback:
“Its late at night, in the old city, sometime around 4 in the morning, no calls, the transport bus was seated somewhere out deep in Canarsie, waiting of orders on the Nextel for work. As Transcare tended to assign per Diem employees random partners, Cange and Adon were total strangers, met that night. It was a Sunday, Victor Cange tried to never work on Saturday ‘cause it was the Lord’s Day. He was a practicing Adventist now and had recently been educated how the Lord’s Day was actually Saturday, not Sunday. Sebastian always tried to work on Sunday because everyone else had been fooled into thinking it was the lord’s day, and that drove the call volume down.”
“Why’d you go and become an EMT anyways?” Victor Cange asks him with a faux Southern twang that he turns on and off.
“To do the Lord’s work,” Sebastian claims.
“Brother Amen!”
The conversation then turned to God and the Jews, and it was a conversation that had gotten old to Sebastian, as he’d had by now with what seemed like every other black person he’d ever rode with, a talk about God, late at night, on an ambulance, a talk about Jews. Blacks were obsessed with Jews it seemed to Sebastian, couldn’t decide just how anti-Semitic they were as a people, the answer was that blacks were pretty anti-Semitic as a people. Victor wasn’t though. They talk for a while, their palaver leaves an impression on Victor, but to Sebastian it’s the same old song he’s been singing to blacks for years. But he likes them as much as he likes the Soviets, which is to say more than anyone else via projedice.
“The lord’s work is often done by an unwittingly righteous person I’ll have you know,” Sebastian interjects.
“Amen to that. God has a plan, and man is filled with all sorts of arrogance that he can generate one, better to let the lord work through you.”
Black people are just fuckin’ loaded with their stammering opinionated biblical insight, thinks Sebastian. But Sebastian’s lungs are black and his heart too, so some of that knowledge he can relate too. But, Sebastian doesn’t believe in God any more, and has no use for her.
It has seemed increasingly that he is to walk his life Alone. In the past year, tragedy in the form of questionable suicide struck. Everything had gotten a little surreal since then. He’d retreated into his work, bringing out the sick and dying. By the time he met Victor Cange, there wasn’t too much going on for him, days he slept, nights he worked, and on free days he was drunk, bad, bad-evil drunk.
“Jesus still has a plan for you brother,” Victor Cange had told him more than a couple times.
He doubted it. He deeply missed his dead friend Jeremy. He often wondered what kind of guy lets his best friend off himself without seeing it coming. He’d seen him a week before he did it at Woodhull hospital psychiatric. He wonders what kind of piece of shit he is when that’s the best friend he respectively takes on. He wonders if he’ll ever get the true nerve to kill himself.
Sometimes Sebastian sits on the Brooklyn Bridge, all horror show and wonders if he has the nerve to jump. He imagines his body hitting the cold blue black brine and moving on to the sweet hereafter. He doesn’t mind the late night ambulance work. Seeing all these sick and dying people. He’s already dead. His body just has to catch up with his mostly long lost mind.
Her name is Paramedic Barbara Danton. She works on a Tran-scare 911 unit out of Brooklyn Hospital. That is to say a commercial ambulance provider, the biggest on the east coast staffing a voluntary hospital unit in the city controlled 911 system. Ah the date, well it is 15 December now in the year 2009. The weather is poor and the streets are not well plowed in Downtown Brooklyn.
In her own words:
“Only reason I’m out here this gorgeous Friday evening is that I don’t make a living wage and thus do an insane amount of overtime to keep myself in the lifestyle to which I am accustomed. I want to be a fire-woman. I made the list, I passed the physical, and then the recession bullshit happened. Come the fuck on, I said to myself; I’ve paid my dues. It’s time for them to let me the hell out of this chicken shit outfit, this EMS bullshit. It’s 19:05, and I’m gonna bang out at midnight. The rain is beating down on the windshield, and I’m praying to black baby returning King Seventh Day Adventist Jesus that we don’t get any more damn jobs.”
Now don’t get me all wrong. I have no romantic ideas about fire suppression. A woman, a black woman, I know the deck isn’t stacked in my favor over there in the goomba-squad. But you know what? I have been asking myself a lot lately. What exactly those fire people do for 90,000 plus a year that makes them so much more valuable to the department than me. My unit is in the shit. We could do ten jobs a day on a summer shift in da ‘Stuy. I don’t wanna say some shit like those firefighters don’t work, they work a bit. And a real blaze, albeit hard to come by these days happens and yeah they heroically run in.
But number wise; come the fuckery on.
In my five years in 911 EMS I’ve gotten fifteen confirmed saves. That’s eleven returns of spontaneous circulation in the field post cardiac arrest and four ‘hauled my ass at the speed of light to King’s county after some young brother got blasted away.’ They only gave me nine little sheets of accommodation because I think one of the arrests bottomed out in the ER 40 hours in. And they don’t give out anything for shots and stabs. For ass hauling, lifesaving spectaculars.
I carried three tight asthmatic pediatrics out of projects and got them intubated up in my bus and on the treatment. Nothing for that! I’m saying I don’t want a bonus or anything but the sum total of my work, of my personal life saving five year total is high as hell. And yeah I buff, but you gotta buff to keep it all interesting.
I’m a fast Haitian motherfucker. My hands move so damn fast at that wheel I can clock under four minutes on any notification anywhere in the borough of Brooklyn. I am a demon behind the wheel. And if not for the recession I’d be getting’ mine. I’d make it through their academy and be up on a ladder by now. Savin’ property not life is where the green is. The fame too. Just last week the Daily News ran a two page spread about a fire engine crew that delivered a baby on the Belt. Not to be a complete hater, but I have delivered six babies now, they even named one after my unit; Sonja “B” Carter. ‘Cause I hold it down in the Stuy, the Heights, the Ville and the Wild East.
It’s aggravating that the press loves the fire fighters so much. Not that they don’t deserve it, it’s just we need a little love too. It gets to a tech when year after year they are out in the trenches and they feel more like a cab driver than a medical professional. We always post the firefighter saves in the lounge whenever we see them, as if to say we do that shit too you know. We save lives too. It’s been near a decade since the merger and still they shit on us. They still think we’re the red headed step children of the emergency services.
But the cops know. They see us out there more doing our thing with the shots, and stabs, and EDPs. I heard just a week ago some EDP put a gun up in some crew’s face and demanded that his girlfriend be given Narcs. EMTs don’t carry narcs. We got Aspirin (the ASA), Albuterol, Oral Glucose (a fancy word for a sugar tube) and Oxygen. That’s it. TV has everyone thinking we’re paramedics. Anyhow, I got upwards of thirty recognized and mostly unrecognized saves and I want out. I want my goddamn promotion because I’m closing in on 29 and then they cut ya.
I heard that an EDP motherfucker nearly shot two of our boys last week on 44I in Brownsville. He shot his girlfriend, hit an MOS close range in the leg, then shot himself. The crew member saved the cop by hitting that EDP with his asp thirty times in the face. Bleeding out his damn leg he called a 10-13 and held direct pressure on the wounded cop. Don’t see that in the Daily News. Don’t get any thanks when we have to act like enforcement. But a Fireman who delivers a baby is a god among men. Or a firefighter who does just about anything in front of a camera.
I want out. I want to get into that Fire Department hustle. I need the stimulus money to stop getting ‘lost’ in paperwork before it trickles down to EMS. I need to stay in shape, not burn out, and not let the resentment over take me. They say it’s for the good of the service, but I’d like the service to do a little good for me.
“31Sam for the Multi Trauma on Livonia,” the dispatcher cuts into my thoughts.
“I hate East New York,” mutters my partner Melvin Clarke. And he’s a 6 foot 6 Jamaican.
“31Sam, I got trauma and I ain’t got any other units available,” the dispatcher Shirley states, too always too camp casual on the air.
She tones us up, the loud extended beep to wake up sleeping crews.
“31Sam pick up your radio!”
“31Sam; send it over central!” I hoot into the radio. It comes over flashing on the KDT.
“That looks really, really bad,” Melvin mutters. I glance at it without reading anything.
“Yup. Let’s ride on that,” I say without looking. “Central show us extended!”
Clarke taps me on the shoulder, points me to the screen; he never mentions the job enroute unless it might matter. Apparently a dog is eating a little girl’s face, says the KDT screen.
I have to move far faster now. Faster than the speed of public safety, or life. Not because the outcome can be affected, or even the merit of the intervention. Only because it is the only variable that I can control.
On the 10th of December in the year 2009 the snow dropped open and the sky fell out and then we all had a 7 foot ice coat. To keep warm I invited pugnacious and highly sassy Yelizaveta Kotlyarova to join me at the Wall Street Baths, called Spa 88 in the cavern tombs below the District Financial. The date is the 10th of December in 2009 of the Common Era. The snow still falls heavy on the Isle of Man.
Below ground, in the underground you can hear the rumble of the trains through the walls; three flights down below street level; is the wood ceilinged restaurant of a Russian Bathhouse Spa 88. It stinks of sweat and also vaguely of after-hours fornication, buried below the streets of the Financial District a long conversation is coming to a close. An emergency medical technician named Sebastian Adon is finishing up a supposedly good yarn to a slightly younger Russian-Ukrainian-Jewish medical student named Yelizaveta Alexandrenova Kotlyarova who has recently become his platonic confidant.
The aim of such storytelling is that she might let him pour cold water upon her when she gets too hot, let him gaze at her nearly naked body, captivate him with her bright eyes and take in all his ambulance war stories. Of which he has plenty. He’s been writing to her for months. She has full and wavy real blond hair and she smiles with such mischievous knowing that her beauty and bright smile stays with him long after she is gone. But, it’s not romantic, never has been, she simply likes to hear him tell his various yarns. Thus so far he has made no motion to even try to kiss her. They are of course platonic friends. This has been a great success for the last four hours. Everything is fully dilated. They know each from a student group many years ago, when all in this country talked more openly about equality. Sebastian Adon is an avid fan of former and post Soviets. She is the loveliest Ivory he has ever known. Ivory is the clever rendition of the ethnic group Hebrew which is “EE-vree” when said by Israelis, and Yeli and he debate sometimes at length about the linguistic origins of the less flattering word “Jew:.
They remind him of something that is tough and also fearless; loyal to a red line and of course exceedingly beautiful and open minded in the bedroom to just about anything, he inherited his father Avraam’s gift for, curse for? Erotic undertones to everything. Adon has been writing Yelizaveta letters for over two years. He’s not sure why. Attention? It isn’t simply to sleep with her, well of course it is because he’s a man. Although as a man of course he would not turn that prospect down for she is surely very beautiful. He’s a man always highly in need of a confidant, for he’s nearly always in some form of emergency mode.
It has been a rocky road of activism, repeated arrest, trial and tribulation since he first came back from the State of Israel nearly ten years ago in 2001 shortly after the 9-11 martyr operation. He should have stayed, how he’s Babylonian, and locked in at FDNY. To her, he’s a fiery train wreck of comedy and tragic idealism. She observed him younger early in his student movement days, then briefly at Hunter University, once at yoga and on the Book Face for some time intermittently making snarky chatter. He cannot possibly be cut of normal Amerikanski cloth, he’s weird. He is a curiosity to which she can devote sporadic time. A minor deviation from her studies at Stony Brook.They are now on a winter break and she needs a distraction from her bickering parents. Her Jewish father, a former Soviet dentist, now descending into light madness and her Ukrainian mother; a maid at the Benjamin hotel. A cattle driver toward her being a doctor.
The story this time has been about his moral descent post deportation from the State of Israel, which just occurred a couple weeks before. He had recently attempted to return there to visit a long lost associate by the name of Maya Solomon.
He was immediately arrested at the airport.
His two days in Lod Prison were recounted and about Israelis not taking kindly to him working on a Palestinian ambulance for a week; four years prior was much of today’s yarn. The Israelis kind of hold a “whose suicide are you on” type grudge. About them beating him, waterboarding him emotionally, hitting him with strange lights, moral electricity and kicking him repeatedly in the groin bellowing in Russian.
Sebastian Adon ethnically speaking is one quarter Irish; one quarter Russian; one quarter German; and some part Polish Jew; therefore he makes a good little Brooklyn mutt. Or perhaps at best an exceedingly good liberal New Yorker. He drives ambulances for FDNY going on two years in the South Bronx; he sometimes drinks too much liquor and brutalizes a girlfriend sexually; but nothing rapey or ultra-violent. Cuffs, anal, threesomes with whores, foursomes with couples, loads on tits and faces. Family oriented fun like that. The product of a generation raised on porn. He’s got loose and transient morals that he justifies with his ambiguous vocation. He likes the idea of human rights, but isn’t sure if humans know they have any, or sometimes if they deserve them. He likes the idea of communism, but isn’t clear why the communist revolutions were mostly violent autocracies. He has basic values that are in essence good, Yelizaveta agrees, though she is vaguely appalled to hear him speak of his sexacapades’ and depravities, they cheapen him profoundly in her eyes.
She heard that Maria, his longest running ex left him because he got drunk and swam into the Atlantic last September after a fight. The Russian rumor mill was faster than Book Face. Sebastian has led a small revolutionist club since his return from Israel in 2001 that has caused him considerable trouble; but alas capitalism still rules in the USA, despite his and others best efforts to defeat it.
“There’s a half black president promising to end the wars, forgive student debt and provide universal free healthcare,” Yelizaveta says, “we weren’t all totally defeated.”
She had at one time organized a chapter of the movement at her all girl school Chapin, but that was in almost another life.
“Why are you still just an ambulance man again?” she asks him”
He replies to her:
“An ambulance is a vehicle for transporting sick or injured people, to, from or between places of treatment for an illness or injury, or to heaven or hell. The term ambulance is used to describe a vehicle used to bring medical care to patients outside of the hospital or to transport the patient to hospital for follow-up care and further testing, or bring their souls to other vessels should they be fit enough to live again. The word is most commonly associated with the land-based, emergency motor vehicles that administer emergency care to those with acute illnesses or injuries, hereafter known as emergency ambulances, but in numerous developing and socialist nations community health workers have performed this work on foot and commandeered vehicles when needed. These are usually fitted with flashing warning lights and sirens to facilitate their movement through traffic. It is these emergency ambulances that are most likely to display the Star of Life, which represents the six stages of pre-hospital medical care. Other vehicles used as ambulances include trucks, vans, station wagons, buses, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, boats, and even hospital ships.”
“So says my Wikipedia,” smirks Emergency Medical Technician Sebastian Adon reading off his half smartphone, a little black android.
“Why do you have to quote your little Wikipedia, like every six conversations”, mutters Yelizaveta Kotlyarova, perhaps the object of his desire, a perky, tough as nails golden blue eyed, blond haired, shut up he thinks, making words rhyme doesn’t make you any kind of poet.
While completing a degree in Political Science at City University Sebastian took a job as an Emergency Medical Technician and this seems to have tempered some of his previous radical fervor, but not by much.
“I like helping my people,” comes his scripted response.
“Your people?” she replies.
“Everybody or anybody who needs some help.”
Sebastian is just under six feet tall. After they get dressed and meet in the banya lobby where she tries to pay and makes sure not to let her. He’s wearing a blue FDNY job shirt he’s gotten personally emblazoned with the Israeli flag, an irony under the circumstances of recent events. The Irish had been putting on such patches for years, however the window for other ethnicities was about to be cut short once the West Indians began wearing their flags into battle so to speak. He has bags under his eyes because he works life’s night shift. He wants her in every way a man can desire a woman but has never told her thus so far in the two years he’s known her. After Maria left he intensified the courtship. That is largely because he at first was fooled into loving another, lesser woman, second because he’s a coward when it comes to his actual emotions and did little to pursue the more likely reaction to his affections; which was surely bewilderment and rejection. So he just kept the letters about big ideas, not passions.
“I like collectively written documents. And you’re just being a snob because your Oberlin teachers always tell you never to use it. It’s a fucking great definition of an ambulance if you ask me.”
Yeli likes things with scientific references. She likes looking up anything that seems suspect, which when it comes to Adon, is a lot.
“I like some of your collectively written documents. But you go on and on sometimes and need to get to the point,” she says.
“Sometimes your art is overdone, overdrawn, you make the boobs big and gross and subtract from your bold uniqueness, in my opinion,” she smiles.
Yelizaveta likes things with references. But she is fully an artist at her core, in her heart and soul. She likes looking up almost anything that seems suspect, which when it comes to Adon, is a lot. She knows he keeps things from her to preserve a somewhat sanctimonious appearance of some kind of bohemian revolutionary ambulance hero.
Just fifteen minutes before they’d both been lying near naked in a Russian Banya called Spa 88. He was putting the story on her about something crazy that had just gone down on what was supposed to be his first vacation in three years. After some other story about a threesome with Maria, his ex. Which didn’t ever really happen, it was just something that turned him on to say in front of her. In reality, he had gotten into a fight with her in September on Block Island and followed Jeremy McCaffey’s ghost out to sea for several hours. The local police found him several hours later walking naked down the road with and carrying an enormous rock.
He has a very subjective reality compared to the rest of us, she thinks.She knows he keeps things from her to preserve a sanctimonious appearance of a bohemian revolutionary ambulance hero.
“I think you need to go back to school and get more real medical training,” she says, “you’re a glorified cab driver with an oxygen tank. You’re not living up to your expectations of yourself.”
“I’ll forgive your lack of appreciation. We’re god’s avenging angels with sirens I’ll have you know.” When Adon feels cornered he typically drops into even more grandiose rhetoric.
“Sebastian. You are a terrific story teller, but let’s not forget where we stand in life’s chain of command shall we. I am a student and you are a truck driver with a stethoscope, if we wish to be more than that there is such a long road ahead. ”
He wishes she was less coy; less belittling of his profession and what was left of his idealism. He guesses it isn’t truly love, not when sentiments of rough degrading sex run across the conscience. But if it was simply her in the back of an ambulance type love, she’d have seen right through it, likely been appalled. He believes in impossible, supposedly un-doable things. Kids himself into thinking he’s the man for the job. But she’s not impressed by all or any of that.
Sebastian Adon, is of course in the twilight of his young adult life. He has been driving an ambulance for three years thinking someone would call him a hero at some point, hoping, believing that there was gonna be a chance to save some lives.
“I’ve saved eight lives,” he informs her as he sometimes has before. It’s a justification for why he hasn’t quit the job yet.
“Well don’t let anybody take that from you,” she retorts.
“I want to reiterate that the reason we civil servants feel so entitled is that the rest of you are unwilling to work the conditions we are and face the raw unadulterated bullshit the people of this city are quite willing to put us through. We guard you while you sleep and you pay us like pizza men. I think this job has taken more from us than we were able to give to our city. And when the city is gone I assure you it is because we have abandoned hope in it.”
“You’re so preachy and poetic, I kinda hate, sort of love it,” she utters as she rubs her fingers together, “That, Tovarish is the world’s very smallest violin playing just for you.”
Adon is the kind of man who at this very juncture can still be motivated by even the world’s smallest violin. At least to him life then has a theme song.
I ask you now friend, in whose reality do you live? We all dedicate our actions to the future. But, what is it that we claim to do with our little lives as that future narrows? Have we all lost our faith in outer generations or a glorious world to come? Of course, all lives are both great and also quite little, but it was a matter of sure and soulful pretension; crossed of course a bit with the “sollidaritous” desire to teach a nation of certain newly freed slaves to fish. Allegorically speaking. The fishing and the slaves. More to the sharp of the point, we were training quietly amidst the dust and rubble of the fourth detachment of a growing underground medical battalion, to aid a coming “Great Revolt”. A guerrilla army of young rescue workers and student teachers preparing to accomplish the basic yet audacious task of combating meaningless death and diseases of poverty pandemic on the island of Hispaniola.
The effects of 210 plus years of chattel servitude, rancorous massacre, ceaseless uprisings and put-drownings; varying quarantines, Blan occupations, re-occupations by proxy and an induced poverty inflicted upon these people, mostly from the outside. In short, we are the latest reinforcements penetrating a long besieged slave revolt. These long abused stalwarts, there are believed to be eight million poor unfortunate souls on the Haitian side of the line, but the number is truly anyone’s guess; no realistic census has been taken since the last coup against President Aristede in 2004. Which was ten years ago. The date now is presently 4 June, 2014. Thus 210 years and six months since the declared success of the initial bloody rising.
I will tell you now where power comes from. It comes from any grouping of people that can devise a just means to secure ones Maslow hierarchy of needs and elevate then a given population toward their droits de moun, human rights. The power is not in any violence or coercion and fear but in the bravery of provisioning hope. Ah, yes indomitable hope. Hope for the rights of man are an issue of freedom and freedom is well and good but what is freedom to misery and deprivation. What say I on due process when I must mix dirt with my flour to watch my family starve at a decreased pace! Or, watch my fallow fields yield nothing as my children die not long after birth of .Or, when my parents perish in a brown and vivacious filth of their own vomit shit and piss from contaminated water. What are our rights when we cannot read and we cannot flee and we cannot work and there are no schools and we die by the age of mid fifty.
Thankless faceless and unknown niggers. Statistics the UN tallies on we slaves. Power comes from control of the means of development! To those who run the schools the clinics or the farms the means to secure basic things so that hope is alive again and then once fed clothed housed secure I can wonder on about my so-called “rights”.
The trouble with the utilization of stranger volunteers in any operation of stress and seriousness is tri-part for vast complication. Since there is no material compensation it is hard to prevent adventurism and privateering. Since they are all mostly strangers it is hard to enforce the chain of command flat as it may be. And since they are often multidisciplinary; a linguist, a paramedic, a marine, a fire commissioner, a spook and an inner city transport e.m.t. they are all mostly unfamiliar with the dynamic of free association based two tiered consensus utilized by the People’s Army. The third part of the problem beyond privateering and command control is “loyalnost”. Sebastian and Adelina are lovers, but the love is mostly gone. They have been living together for the last nine months in the exile of Massachusetts so despite it, or her total lack of interest not one shit given not a shit of a shit on the subject of politics or dialectics, she does truly love him and he loves her as well and therefore she controls him. Abstaining from the politics of the coming operation she can dispassionately suggest the common sense approach.
This approach is hardly common for here if you wonder about the chicken and the egg you are working often with a sea of self-proclaimed experts that expertise on shells or eggs or how they crack. Or chickens and how to raise them. Or which comes first. But all the local people the Haitians on the street are not concerned with theories like this. They are concerned with survival for themselves and their families. Once everyone has survived peaceably for some time then maybe there would be time for speaking of the perfect egg, the just economy or the chicken the functional state. If that’s what chickens and eggs are really about. And all these experts these NGO technocrats speaking English or Portuguese, Spanish or French they don’t trust governments and see nothing in the economy to so easily carry them off. For there is nothing; they devise ways to raise chickens from broken eggs from sick diseased chickens. Then they blame the Haitians in languages they don’t speak. But they are still just fighting to survive.
The Quarantine, as we call it, is 210 years old. It began the day the revolution was declared victorious with the separation of the tricolor into the red and blue bi-color ripped by JJ Dessalines. The revolution which had begun by the Jacobins in France whose ideas spread to the blood soaked paradise of St. Domingue purged the entire island of foreign rulers, resulted in a loss of life of an estimated 500, 400 inhabitants and 60,000 soldiers from France, Spain and Greater Britain. It began in 1791 and culminated in the only victorious slave uprising in 1804. Shortly after the quarantine and civil war between blacks and mulattos began; JJ Dessalines signed a purge order of all whites of the island which remained. And by 1805 there were less than 300 alive in greater Hispaniola, mostly female, Polish or medically trained. White physicians and Polish conscripts had also fought for newly freed Haiti. The quarantine was not about race or racial antagonism. Whites Negs and Mulats fought on both sides of the great revolt. The issue for Napoleon and other leaders of European powers was that of newly freed slaves. With weapons and armies, cannons and turf proclaiming rights of man that had been defeated in the cradle of the uprising, France. The issue was still that in the Americas in Europe, Africa, Asia and most of humanity remained a type of slave and this revolt might spread rapidly.
To the other islands of the Wild West Indies; to all of Latin America; to the USA and reverberating out back to Europe and the serfs of Russia and China. In fact the defeat of the Haitian revolution was one of the greatest foreign policy objectives shared by nearly every power. And since the armies of Spain, France and England had not been able to re-impose the hated regime of chattel servitude the new policy was containment.
They had by 1802 captured, tortured and killed the only man Toussaint L’Ouverture who had the moral authority and military genius to secure a multiracial Hispaniola as a rebel base. He was the father of the revolution. The great powers stirred racial tensions inside and locked Haiti off from the world. And by 1806 JJ Dessalines had been assassinated and rebel Generals Petion a Mulatto in the south was at war with Christophe in the north and these exhausted former slaves were freed to a country mostly burned to the ground in 13 years of violence. Most of the people functionally illiterate content to retreat to tiny plots allotted to them and world their own land staying away from the intrigues and civil conflict between Cap Haitian and Emperor Christophe and President Alexander Petion in Port-au-Prince. And the outside world whispered sedition and tightened the quarantine. The revolt which could not be suppressed had to be buried. Economically this was a success. Haiti no longer had her sugar infrastructure or the means to export anything. So Alexander Petion in a historic meeting with Simon de Bolivar in Jamel, the southern port city, agreed to export the revolution. In exchange for Haitian guns and fighters Bolivar agreed to liberate Latin America and free all the slaves there. By 1820 both colonialism and slavery in Latin America were finished. But newly freed slaves and revolutions do not always quickly make chickens eggs or democrats and by the time Bolivar was dead there were new oligarchies laying claim to all of the newly freed turf. By 1822 Haiti was unified under Haitian President Boyer who, surrounded by French war ships, signed the indemnity. These freed slaves would pay back France. 21 billion USD between then and 1947. To end the quarantine the economic blockade Haiti would impoverish herself further. And there would be coups. 22 coups until 1915 when the US occupied Haiti with troops until 1934. Imposing a new slavery. Building roads and new plantation infrastructure. And an army which a man named Francois Duvalier would use to come to total power in 1957. And he and his son Jean Claude would rule until 1986 with vile secret police, the Maccoutes supported by US money and of course the CIA support for the killing of communists. And a revolt from the peasants and church brought to power a priest. The liberation theologian Aristede. Toppled in 1991 after serving 9 months. And then more bloodshed and coup and more us occupation. And then came a quake which killed 300,000 perhaps. Or 220,000 or 100,000; no one actually knows. As rounded numbers suggest. But, it leveled the capital and the technocrats descended and missionaries. And now four years since the quake a pop singer and Duvalierist is president. A UN occupation is in its tenth year and there are still over 10,800 small, medium and international ONG talking about chickens and eggs and such. The quarantine never really ended. And now 98 percent of the trees are gone. Life expectancy is 56. Half the population cannot read. And a cholera epidemic introduced by the UN troops has killed 9,000 and crippled over 600,000. And yet still people speak of building back better with the Sai Ah Industrial park mega sweat shop or the tourist build up in Ile-a-Vache or new plans to link Haiti into the globalized economy, via a mighty chain of sweatshops.
But the typical Haitian wonders about the power which goes on for two hours a day for the world cup. Or the water supply. Or how to afford two meals a day. It is not so much that one must believe in this narrative but one must listen for a narrative. Or the quarantine succeeds. It succeeds by painting these newly freed slaves as savage primates unable to have a country. Haiti instead of being a triumph of will for human rights and freedom is used then as a cautionary tale. For the long suffering Haitian people do not always get their news, except by radio. And since most cannot read French there are only irregular reports in Haitian Creole about the success or failure of this revolt they began. That it spread to Russia, China, and Cuba and then to Algeria, Congo, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Iran and dozens of others plantations. For those with the ability to read history and current events it seems to be spreading like fire into the Middle East.
This revolt is an apolitical desire to enjoy the human rights codified by the UN in 1945. It isn’t about government or economic organization. After the abolitionist battles and legal end of slavery there are still 37 million slaves worldwide. The great powers and their oligarchies propagated race hatred and then utilized the quarantine of the Soviet Union as blackest proof this socialist modal was unsound. But there remain bastions. And again it is not about politics or the economy but about justice. About not spending a half-life fighting only to survive like an animal.
We have broken the physical quarantine with ease because our passports are blue and we have 15 USD and a base of operations in this dusty old fort. But perhaps we will have to spend the rest of our lives breaking the secondary quarantine. The false consciousness. The separation of fakeness and real imposed by the oligarchy telling us who is white and who is black. Man and woman. Haitian and foreigner. Capitalist and communist. It is a matter of knowing that all of these divisions are lies. Separating us from our human rights. Rights such as healthcare, education, food, water, living wages, unions, the right to speak or write our opinion without being put in a bag by masked men. Raped. Cut into pieces. And dumped by the roadside at night.
Sebastian and Adelina, shortly joined by the Marine Peter Saint Reed newly re-trained as an EMT, but of course always a marine. And Barbara Louis a Haitian American EMT and Eric Addman a firefighter-paramedic from the Seattle area. None shared a simple identity or view. If such labels were too imposed about nationality all were card carrying Americans. And it was this exploitation of privilege that we hoped to use to win. The oligarchy of any country relies on division. And therefore our greatest strength is not our nationality or privilege but that we are forcing an opening. Haitian leadership in Haiti. A simple objective; teach more forty Haitians to save lives. But we have a narrative though not agreed to by all of this ad hoc unit; it forms the underpinning. If there is to be change here and abroad we must control our own means to human development. As a means to human rights.
Covered in dust and baked by heat and surrounded by endless miles of corrugated shanty dwellings and walled compounds no will pay much attention to us. The revolution began by murdering the oppressor. For 210 plus years that fight has been fought to a stalemate. And the resulting rights have been transient and largely un-won.
So we are switching the tactic in accordance with orders from rebel leadership here and abroad. We are internationalists. We are willing to travel country to country to go where needed to the most remote jungle or mountain. The oppression is real. The violence is real. The slavery is still real. Our oppressor will still stick a gun in our face and drag us away in a sac and torture us over rights. The way we win is to make our oppressors irrelevant. For they wish to read us some Machiavelli or Hobbes and tell us as we are but violent little monkeys. That without them we’d eat each other. I will say that when men and women can fish; can educate, heal and keep roads open and trash free then we will not need them. We will not pay them taxes. We will not let them use our money or hard earned money to buy guns and kill people just like us over their ideas on chickens and eggs.
We are not alone on this island with this idea. My place in the chain of command is that of a staff sergeant. The day we got here we were but five more reinforcements. We have broken the first level of the quarantine by penetrating the siege. And now with but a few devices carried in supported by the local arm of the resistance we train 40 more souls how to save a life. The insurgency began with weapons and ideas. I will not survive this war to see Zion. But that is not my role. Nor Adelina or Pete Reed or Eric Admen or Jean Louis. You give a slave a gun and say freedom and you will wash the blood of an entire generation onto the sea and streets. You give a slave training to heal and save and the blow to the oppressors on the mountain is fully sustained. We are but an army of newly freed slaves who have chosen to build the world we wish to see, rather than again set on fire a world already burning.
Within the confines of a dusty but patriotic fort barely held together by cinder blocks rebar pillions and chipped paint; partially overrun by cats a small internationalist unit composed of but five volunteers who will garrison the outpost beginning 3 June, Gregorian Year 2014. Behind a mammoth red iron door is the concrete skeleton of a school called “Ecole Shalom des Frères”, which means a ‘school of the brothers of peace’ being intermittently erected, year by year and brick by brick. And in the adjacent courtyard is a two story maze of chalk board dimly lit classrooms, a small mess hall and some ten second floor rooms worth bunks to accommodate the inbound reinforcements.
There is a water tower that supplies clean chlorinated water to the locals at 5 goudes a liter. There is a parade ground field covered now completely in debris an impassible dumping ground occupying half the forts enclosure. There is a field kitchen and a wrangle of mangy creatures that when bled or squeezed make what passes as food. Or, eggs. There is a small partially compensated staff of locals. There are two former restaveks, one 12 and one 22. They accomplish various tasks of carpentry banditry plumbing an electric work. Three female cooks live in town. One is old women is young and the third of medium age. There is a transporter named Colbert; a former tap tap driver on staff along with several other useful quasi useful or only vaguely advantageous adjunct personnel with vague if not wholly nepotistic function. And the ground commander gong on his business card as a “country director” is one Mr. Avinadav DeBuitléirs educated at the University of Stony Brook in Long Island. He affiliates himself with the diaspora aspirations of various movements in Brooklyn. But, he directs little outside the walls of this miserable fort; and even here he often prefers delegation.
Avinadav was directly supported by a Petit Blan named Laura Levi. But since she was on some business in Ethiopia she had been replaced by a temperamental wench, a Quebecois from Montreal named ‘miss lady Catherine’. Her last name was completely unpronounceable except by the haughtiest of Francophone so we said Lady or ‘Madam Catherine’, or ‘Catherine Q’ because there was universal contempt for her amongst the volunteers. She has too well assimilated into the habit of barking orders at the Brown people. And that is, as we say “what it was”.
On 3rd June two members of our unit crossed the rocky road called a National Highway from Santo Domingo to the City of Port-Au-Prince on the Capital Cruiser armored bus service which showed the movie Fast and the Furious part 5, at least five times. At first, it was quite loud but by the third run it was silent as no one on the bus spoke anything besides Spanish, French or Haitian Creole, and the initial plot points of the rock and Vin Diesel the most famous of Mulat action heroes had been grasped. And now it was all tits jiggling and exploding cars. And the road fell apart right after the Jimani checkpoint crossing. They served us a ham sandwich and a bottle of cold water. Sebastian Adon could see the color slowly leave Adelina Blazhennaya’s pretty and petite face as the border was crossed. He could see and via the omnibus rattling feel the road become not road. The structures of the countryside become not structures. The lush foliage becomes ugly barrens. And as the color of his partner’s face fades Sebastian also wonders how she will react to what is to come. Jostling jolts hit the bus and traffic slows to a trickle pace as the driver forms a one lane convoy behind mack trucks built in East Asia to shuttle merchanting goods from Dominican Republic into Haiti. Sneakers and such. Also cocaine or even people sealed a large valise.
In the mind of Sebastian Adon whose hair was brown and heart was neg. He imagines this infiltration as a patriotic duty for there was some Haitian blood in him for once we took an oath.
The trappings of normal human development crumble each kilometer the bus rumbles into Haiti and the endless dust. A cloud of whirling particulates swallowing the charmless and desolate environs. At the border, there was nothing to buy except Pringles. In addition, soda of every kind. The customs agent asked Adon in Creole what his business in Haiti was; “tourism”.
Adelina Blazhennaya and Sebastian both crossed the border in black boots and blue uniform pants and black shirts and therefore the customs agent knew that tourism wasn’t really what they were doing in Haiti. But, no one cared. The Brazilians, Chileans, Argentinians, and a poperee of other lesser nations were running the functions of the disbanded military. The Americans were subsidizing the state. The Cubans were running the hospitals and several thousand NGOS perhaps as many as 10800 were the only economy besides transshipment, allegedly of bulk packaged cocaine. No real cares are given in a meaningful way. Much less an under compensated customs agent. They both had blue American passports. Crisp and newly issued. Who cared what their intention was if they had such blue passports and fifteen USD a piece. The two enormous satchel valise roller bags went completely unexamined. As did their two green voodoo tactical rucksacks. Who cared?
The omnibus continued two hours west down the national highway. There was corrugated tin shack after shack. Contrasting anything to D.R. is an exercise in futility. One can simply see that this is the same island and anthropologically speaking that is where it ends. Without a lengthy discourse on history colonialism and superficialities of cultural antagonism well honestly it’s night and day except they both like cock fighting. Three months ago the president of the Dominican Republic signed an executive order denationalizing over 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent.
They have the tenor of slightly overfed happy slaves, notes Blazhennaya. Not the Haitians. Neither happy nor well fed. At each juncture she slowed down as she grew more pale seeing the descent into some land before time some utter desolation. Naked children drooling covered in flies. Tents and shanties. Everywhere unfinished construction sites and partially erected edifices. And the cloud of dust hovered over the endless misery.
When they finally reached Port-Au-Prince it was just before tusk and Avinadav DeBuitléir accompanied by Marco Balan the light skinned apparatchik and Colbert the driver loaded them in and shuttled them both away to Croix des Bouquets down the unlit impasses to 808 Rue Double Barrel They were given a choice of three rooms all very dusty and Spartan. Settled a little before midnight. Adelina Blazhennaya sat on their twin bed in a room with no window coverings, just a window space with sheet nailed to cover it. And then she cried heavily but silently voer what a hell she has followed her partner into. Not at the overwhelming poverty; the blight scorched earth of the quarantine. Not for fallen friends and those surely to fall. The quiet tears of Adelina Blazhennaya were for herself. To protect the man she loves and is so devoted she will lose everything and everyone she has ever known. This was a dying place. A ruined pocked and parched Island at or near the bottom of the mountain. Horror has exhausted tears, thinks she. She cries because what hope do they have for humanity in general to win. Their enemies are hunting them. She is so far from Chelyabinsk Tank City. She cries and Sebastian holds her. Darkness seeps in. They take their place in the trenches joining the reality, the tragic ranks of newly freed slaves.
It was one thing to follow a man into hell, it was another thing altogether to fight your way from that hell to the heights of Mt. Olympus if not higher! No part of the stated American dream included any of this.
But before there was a “Haitian Emergency Group”. Before there was a resistance movement winning ground in both Haiti, Syria and the United American States; there was a mighty quake which took the lives of somewhere between 100,000 to 316,000 men, women and children, which struck the county on the morning of 12 January, 2010.
Round large disparate numbers which revealed a great unknowing and uncaring. For when the oligarchy cannot crush, kill or discredit a thing they quarantine it.
It was a spirit of solidarity that brought us out from Brooklyn to stand beside our Haitian brothers and sisters in their darkest hour; it was the Haitian defiance of empires and the world system itself that made us stay in Hispaniola and continue the battle for freedom beside them.
Outlined here are several major Policy Strategies being developed to address the four core inequities of the Nation. Taken in total this framework is called THE SOLUTION PROCESS.
Addressing Economic Inequality andSocial Service Apartheid
There is an uprising happening in the United States of America. It is the response to a brutish President and the irresponsible management of a pandemic, catalyzed by the televised lynching of a black man. To succeed in achieving real change, real justice this uprising will require conscience and a soul. It must address on a structural level, as well as on a policy level ugly injustices of racist apartheid. It must at the same address glaring inequalities of wealth. Both between the American worker and the American Oligarch, but also the way American wealth and privilege has been built on the backs of black, brown, white, and yellow labor exploited abroad.
So many terrible things happen in the world that the natural human reaction is to un-see, perhaps also to un-know and thus un-feel. But as the latest body count rises, as long-ignored ugly truths play on repeat that position is irresponsible.
Did you know that just two months before the death of George Floyd an Emergency Medical Technician in Kentucky named Breonna Taylor was gunned down in her sleep in a botched no-knock Police raid? You might know that now, but at the time the Covid-19 Pandemic drowned it out. Unconsciously on your phone and television, you are fed happy, individualistic disinformation. Consciously, you make choices about what to spend your time on. Sports not history, porn not philosophy. Shopping not researching. Movies on a fantasy life you cannot probably lead and of course religion, promises of eternal paradise, but only when you die.
What you can know and what you can feel is on a highly manipulated spectrum in America. A product of a deliberate set of policies, multiple variations based on your class and skin tone, and an elite consensus on how and who should run this country, and by default an empire. What is perhaps still more shocking than the televised lynching of an African American is the strange quiet that accompanies the deaths of over 120,000 highly vulnerable Americans from Covid-19. The majority will be proven to be people of color ill-served by long de-funded health systems, living in the various ghettos of America, as well as the elderly abandoned to places that deliver neither nursing nor a home.
Despite rage and rhetoric, this was not the first and will not be the last series of lynchings of a person of color in America. It will hopefully last time hundreds of thousands will die because of their race and their class deemed the second, third, fourth, and fifth class citizens by public policy.
Not to mince words, all the many material comforts, relative security, and general prosperity this nation enjoys is built on four highly uncomfortable truths that exist outside the written law. Assailing an individual pillar of the Ziggurat will not result in real system change. Each pillar is holding up a vast multidimensional injustice that capitalizes on the apathy and inaction of the American people.
The first pillar is an ongoing Violent Hegemony imposed on most other nations abroad that we all subsidize with our taxes. The result is a trade-in working-class American military lives abroad for an above-average European quality of life and our own imperial ambitions. 800 bases in 70 foreign nations are there to enforce the economic prosperity of the United States.
The second pillar is an extra-legal system of Racial Apartheid that is fairly obvious terms places a tiny group of ultra-wealthy Euro-American oligarchs on the very top. Supporting the architecture of that system is a skilled professional and technical class mostly of Whites, Asians (6%), and Jews (1.7%). A majoritarian mass of White European settler descents as an imagined “Middle Class” (59.1% of the population), a Latino/Hispanic labor class below it (18.3%), a largely subjugated the African descent reserve menial labor population (13.4%) and the remnant of the Native Indian population (1.5%). The lack of legal segregation and legislation to support Apartheid by no means prevents it from operating as such a system.
The third pillar is the popular rejection of “Class Consciousness”, where strangely most of the nation works almost their entire life believing they are a part of the “Middle Class“.
The Fourth Pillar is a legalized, institutionalized Political Bribery. This political system is not a “democracy” and your vote really does not matter. The two-party system is a large expensive game of special interests making enormous campaign contributions that allow access to create new laws advantageous to corporations. But America, like Russia and China, like all nations in existence, is a Corporate Oligarchy.
Americans have been systematically directed through low levels of education (under 30% have a college education) and inoculated by our mass media and hyper-materialistic consumer culture to basically reject a class analysis of modern political events. Most Americans do not have the interest or formal education to even be aware of the full extent of violent interventions the nation is currently engaged indirectly or by proxy.
The majority of our people are just too busy, kept constantly working our entire lives at places that do not really sustain or profit us.
Through Mass Incarceration and Racialized Aggressive Policing generations of people of color were disenfranchised, households are broken up and large swaths of the population reduced to a below minimum wage captive labor pool.
Through Grossly Inadequate Public Social Services entire neighborhoods were Ghettoized and reduced to cheap domestic labor reserves that we call “the Ghettos and Barrios”.
Through the Relative High Level of Material Comfort available to virtually all classes of Americans, most people tolerate the system as it stands. No one starves in the streets of America by choice. We have Regressive Welfare for the poor and Amazon Prime for the Middle Class or anyone that can afford it. But like everywhere else the best things go to the elites.
If you set the bar very low and others reinforce your low objective for validation, then it may actually seem like progress. Daily demonstrations increased the charges on the officers who killed George Floyd, led to the tearing down of Confederate statues, the Cos-play of the Seattle C.H.A.P./C.H.A.Z., so-called “Autonomous Zone” and a mainstream debate on “de-funding the police.
That optimism is wholly unfounded. This is not a real set of emerging victories. These are token expressions of first amendment rights inside a well-contained system, a pressurized cage for acceptable dissent. But when you have no real historical context for your valid righteous anger and when you have no way to achieve a true majority (African Americans, their actual allies, and White progressive liberals if and when combined do not constitute even 50% of this country’s electorate), you will just march in a very large circle within the confines of your glass ceiling and soft cage.
Paired nicely with over 120,000 and rising Covid-19 deaths, two months of varying lockdowns the now daily marches of mostly peaceful protesters is exactly the kind of acceptable dissent this nation will tolerate. Endless marches that are in fact a theater. A game for the unemployed, under-employed, and college students. But the game has pre-rigged rules. Dissidents will be data-based with facial recognition software, no physical space will be allowed to be occupied for long, and no matter what rhetorical games liberal Democrats and progressives play with Police Budgets. The economic order will not change. The Two-Party Plutocracy will not yield. The legalized bribery of campaign finance will not be reformed.
But nowhere we can look closely at Modern American history lessons:
More people drown in bathtubs than die in Islamist terror attacks in the United States, but somehow and multi-billion dollar 20-year blank check for war has been allowed by the American Taxpayer.
There is no Credible American left, there is a large and well-armed Libertarian Right.
Organized Labor is thuggish, conservative, largely discredited, and is less than 10.3% of the total American workforce.
If organized labor is radicalized it will be forcibly disbanded.
There is not a unified African American or Latino/Hispanic voting or buying block. Demographically neither ethnic group is large enough to force a policy shift.
If a public space or building is occupied or any property is threatened then the iron heel of the state will come down hard and fast.
If a Black Messiah arises he or she will be killed.
If a collective rebel leadership emerges, they will be imprisoned, murdered or discredited by the 17 Agencies of State Repression that we know exist.
If you talk about “class” and talk about “robust publicly funded social programs” they will discredit you as “Communist“.
If a movement ever effectively combines demands for racial and economic justice it will be made public enemy number one.
Pre-2020 Uprising there was already the highest prisoner to population ratio on earth, 1 in 147 citizens and 1 in 8 black men.
If the following elements of a Resistance and Solution process are not put in place immediately all the demonstrations and countless deaths will be for nothing. They will not enact the change we need. This uprising will fail like all the ones before it. This is not tactical advocacy. It is one of strategy, alignment of vision and of an “Anti-Necessitarian ideology”— i.e. it is also Democratic, and Confederalist.
It is actually mobilizing the citizens to participate and vote and partake in community Governance, its administrative units actually evaluate and regulate their own independence-interdependence. It has fusion elements of both the left and the right. It is not ideologically dogmatic of individual social policies. It is not historically determinant/ millenarian forcing its thinking into supposed historic rules and determinations.
In America Today
We have to End all Special Interest Campaign Financing, lower the wages of politicians, and publicly fund all campaigns ending the mockery of American legalized, formalized bribery.
We have to legislatively challenge Class and Ethnic Discrimination in all public and social services.
We have to lower the funding for the Police, Prisons, Corrections, Intelligence Services, and the Military.
We have to massively raise funding massively on Health, Education, Housing, and Infrastructure.
We must Form new political Parties that actually represent American workers and the American Working Class.
We must acknowledge an American Apartheid and see it fully defeated. We must acknowledge race-class discrimination where certain citizens gain better opportunities, jobs, schools, hospitals, and lives based on their identity. We must acknowledge that oppression or discrimination against any identity constitutes a crime against us all as a society, but there is a hierarchy of oppression and protecting the most vulnerable communities is a responsibility for all.
There must be a Compulsory National Service System created mandatory for all citizens age 18 to 21, through such service we will create national unity, rebuild the nation, staff the civil services/military, and reward our young people with free college educations and free health care.
We must Naturalize every person currently residing in our country and create a more just system for immigration.
We must ensure a Democratic Meritocracy based on real ability, not wealth and private connections to prevail in this country. To that end, we should nationalize all schools, universities, health faculties and not allow private privilege to reign. The national service will be all citizens road to equality of health and education placing all groups on even footing to begin their careers.
We must end all overseas imperialism and interventionist activities. We must shut down the majority of our overseas military bases, abolish all treaties committing us to the defense of foreign nations including Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and Israel. We must embrace a multilateral world and focus our spending on domestic self-reliance.
We must end the degrading and regressive welfare machine that perpetuates backwardness, dependency, and multi-generational poverty. We must replace it with a safety net that protects the vulnerable and reintegrates the poor back into livelihoods with dignity.
We must align our economic production to environmentally sustainable practices and make large-scale policy-level adjustments to prevent further environmental degradation.
We must amend our constitution to reflect the norms of international Human Rights Law.
We must be sincere and committed internationalists and understand that the arbitrary borders of invisible lines on a map should not break our collective human solidarity and the realization we have far more in common with each other than those who run our countries in our names, without tax dollars with zero accountability to their communities.
The Way Forward is not found in the history books and comes not from the left or right, these are antiquated and dis-proven political positions. The Liberals and Conservatives of the Democratic and Republican Parties have already discredited themselves with this two-party charade which is in reality a Corporate Oligarchy of two flavors. Certainly, we have no use for radical extremism, mass violence, theocratic backwardness, and no use at all for grand social experiments. Such things only unleash misery, atrocity, endless repression, and expansionist war.
We should be able to fully recognize the violence humans have the capability to unleash and cruelty we are capable of. The History of humanity is a blood bath, especially during state collapse, civil warfare or unaccountable “Utopian” experimentation.
We require one or many Working Class Parties to be fully committed to dismantling a racist white supremacy.
We require Democratic Autonomy to be the foundation of all social organizations.
We require so-called Human Rights to be made binding on this nation at home and its actions abroad.
What is to be done in the United States of America? A fast fading empire, a powder keg of racial and political conflict ready to blow? Will we turn inward and isolationist? Will we once again put a facade of paint on the colonial manor and call it by a new name? The sea is rising. The virus is a taste of things to come. The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were the latest on a very long list of casualties. One Party offers you a billionaire real estate tycoon, a friend of a pedophile and a rapist, a thief and thug. Another Party offers you a crappy, senile old man, a hangover from the last presidency. There is no viable third option. It doesn’t matter if they put on a populist “democratic socialist” face, a “gay”, female, a Latina, or a “progressive” face. It doesn’t matter at all. This is a White Supremacist Settler slave state. This is an Oligarchy. The quality of life here is based on exploiting fully people all over the world.
What is to be done is to connect the dots, unite the factions and develop the resolve to fight. Begin drawing the connection between exploited labor, racial apartheid, and Oligarchy masquerading as “Democracy.”
Only the renunciation of a systematic privilege for European descendants will result in Emancipation for all people and an actual Equality before the law.
Only the realization that we are “workers” and our labor makes other people rich, that we will work until we die; only when we see fellow humans and not racist paradigms of division and hate; only then will we realize that somewhere between bullets and ballots there is a middle road to our freedom. Only then the restoration of a Republic whose liberty has been based on others long term suffering, on pretty words alone, can ever be really free.
Then collective action will begin, the veil of hypocrisy must be torn off, our privileges relinquished, and “American Exceptional-ism” will then be a reflection of actual multi-ethnic democracy, that actually upholds the high minded values it espouses and is in the world a force for a greater good, not a predator, not a violator not a thief.
We do not attempt to appeal to your guilt, hope, shame, ego, self-interest, ideals, or patriotism. We ask you to draw your motivation from what you see before your eyes. Atrophy, injustice, and apathetic glut existing right alongside pandemic death and state-sponsored murder.
What is to be done in America? Unite the working class and defeat white supremacy. Just another socialist scheme to fight for human rights? Or something this country was founded to inevitably be strong enough to achieve.
An Introduction to Democratic Confederalist Thinking
Understanding Bookchin & Apo; what is ‘FREE LIFE’, and ‘PURSUIT OF A ‘COMMUNAL EXISTENCE’
Slavery, Colonization and Globalization have resulted in a nearly 500 year period of sustained Maldevelopment. Over the last three hundred years many brilliant and powerful people have made revolutions or undertaken vast societal change and development in highly difficult conditions.
But, virtually all attempts to produce an alternative political and economic order, a replacement and improvement to Capitalism have been bloody, authoritarian regressive failures.
In short progress has been unequal, change has been tempered with vast bloodshed, and some of the best minds and devout leaders have been unable to bring about the changes deemed necessary to redeem the human condition.
Most of the 19th century revolts imperfectly implemented enlightenment values. Women were excluded from power, slavery was only partially abolished. The colonies were placed under localized management.
In the 20th century the Socialist and Communist revolutions all took place largely in nations that were too poorly economically developed to meet Marx’s general criteria. The attempts all resulted in major top down industrialization programs; most of which resulted in major loss of human life. None of the Retrograde Socialist regimes were democratic, though some set up better systems for internal one party governance.
Most of the 19th century revolts transferred power from Kings, Aristocracy and Clergy to the Bourgeoisie, the most substantial ones were Colonial revolts in the New World.
Most of the 20th century revolts toppled flailing corrupt regimes during war time; Russian and China, or were also post-Colonial revolts in the developing world; Cuba, Vietnam and Angola. All of them had to invent existentialist criteria on Socialism without Marxist criteria. In many ways holding state power made a large swath of the world wary of socialism. Between 1917 and 1989 a wide range of actors on all continents sought to implement a Communist idea in a wide range of places incapable of manifesting it.
At the World Social Forum, the international forum for leftist and third world populist liberation coordination and discourse; all sorts of apologies and explanations have occurred for the so-called Socialism of the 20th century and many factions turned to Political Islam and Anarchism as paths ahead. In many ways Democratic Confederalism is a Syncretic Ideology. It incorporates a variety of revolutionary ideas about change and power; it attempts to place the wide range of failures of the 20th century into a solution oriented methodology.
Explicitly “Democratic Confederalism” critiques and condemns the Nation State. It critiques and condemns the retrograde socialist experiments for their violence and totalitarian tendencies. Of course it also overtly brings attention to the vile inequality and wanton planetary destruction occurring in Capitalist Modernity.
Is an ideology for Non-state Governance that emerged as a theoretical fusion between Murray Bookchin’s Municipal Confederalism, Social Ecology and libertarian socialist thinking and the practical application of such ideology by Abdullah Ocalan and the Kurdistan Workers Party in Rojava, beginning in 2004.
The specific ideological elements of this program include non-state democratic autonomy, confederations using levels of council democracy, gender equality, protection of minority populations, environmental sustainability and robust development of non state infrastructure.
Rojava is a region of Northern Syria that has had semi-autonomy from Syria since 2014. It was deeply reliant on US military aid until 2019. After defeating the Islamic State it was abandoned and is now under the protection of Russian Federation. It always had ties with the Assad Regime throughout the war.
In conclusion, most people are not politically conscious and the media in every country seeks to polarize the population further. Most ideologies are then best judged on the substance of policy, not rhetoric. Many parties are adopting ideological terms without backing them up with social policy. Many institutions are simply corrupted by money and power.
Without a logical Dialectic, an evolution in development and consciousness a group of people or nation cannot arbitrarily progress to one stage of economic development without engaging in the previous one.
The Marxist theory of Dialectical Materialism emphasizes the importance of real world conditions, in terms of class, labor and socioeconomic interactions.
Material conditions in each society present Contradictions that seek resolution in new forms of social organization. Marx and Engels claimed that Alienation from economic and political autonomy, coupled with exploitation and poverty was the culprit that over history pushed humans into confrontation with governing authorities, seeking to establish more egalitarian means to engage in labor and life.
Thus ideology establishes “the Paradigm” that takes the chaos of history and seeks to present a scientific basis for social, political and economic development.
Brazilian Social Theorist Oberto Ungar advanced the “False Necessitarian” approach to social policy and theory. According to this theory it is not necessary to whole scale adopt an entire ideological paradigm to governance. You can be flexible, you do not have to set up wholly capitalist or socialist social policies. You can have a Socialist Health Service alongside Small and Medium Enterprises where workers are compensated adequately. You do not need to be liberal or conservative in all areas of governance. A state can pick between ideologies when implementing goals. However, some of these ideological frameworks offer very mutually exclusive paradigms.
Many theoristshave made lengthy critiques of both capitalist and socialist states, as well as the Westphalian State System. Many of those specific critiques will be analyzed in the upcoming lessons. Ideology is meant to be liberating, not dogmatic.
It is meant to help form the social policies best suited to the stage of development a given nation is actually in.
The reason we make a revolution, the reason we engage in human development is to win personal rights and collective entitlements.
All other reasons are purely selfish or reactionary.
A personal right is “right to”, “or a right from”. A positive or negative right is established in a constitution; codifying a legal basis for rights. The specific obligation society has to uphold of the individual and things society must grant us have to evaluated as substantiate. Are the rights “Adequate, Accessible, Available and of good Quality? Are the rights distributed without discrimination to a group? Does the populace know their rights?
Personal Rights, such as those in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and 39 various Human Rights instruments; have to be codified into Constitutions and enforced with Courts. A personal right can only be guaranteed by securing a Collective Entitlement; I.e. no one has rights in a vacuum, no one can have rights respected if they have no structures in place to address violations or have their entitlements enforced. Thus when the state which is the historic guarantor of such civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, is most often the leading violator; then to actually secure our rights we need a fundamental shift to a new mechanism.
The overall social policy goals of global Resistance are articulated within in two broad classifications:
Pursuit of a Free life
Pursuit of a Communal Existence
What then is a Free Life?
“Free Life” is a concept that involves actualization of the human rights entitlements enshrined in the United Nations. Extrapolating individual rights to and rights from, so-called negative and positive rights, all human rights can also be divided into Civil Political Rights and Economic, Social Cultural Rights. These rights are not legally binding in any nation on earth currently. These are not rights granted by deities or governments. They are intrinsic rights by virtue of being born human, to be enshrined and attained by good governance.
A Free Life is a life where a human being can live out their existence actualizing all these rights entitlements, which are not an end in themselves. They are a framework to set all humans up for the most equitable existence possible, where their needs are fully met and wants are possible because of enhanced capability. The presumption is that if full rights are enshrined in local governance, a life of security, dignity and emancipation are the result. Not all people are genetically, socially and culturally the same, nor can the free will to compete and strive be suppressed, nor should it. Free life then is built on a foundation of equal rights and opportunity, a social support infrastructure cultivating an equal starting place among people and the ability of all women and men to achieve their needs, wants and aspirations. Living lives of material and social security with the possible attainment of happiness and fulfillment. Though emotions and feelings cannot be legislated.
This Free Life is not a political or ideological ideal. It is the way humans live when not acted upon by poverty, war, crime, malice and terrible social policy.
What then is a Communal Existence?
A “Communal Existence” is founded in that we are actually by genetics (nature) and upbringing (nurture) empathetic social creatures that generally seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, but are still generally good. That we are divided by arbitrary false identities, state nationalism and imposed creeds. But, that we are more good than, evil. We are more social than individualistic. That the ultimate norm of human evolution, not acted upon by hateful ideology, false consciousnesses, poverty and violence; is a tendency to be collective and coexist.
Thus, pursuit of communal existence is an alignment of social policy which firsts grants an full and total upholdment of human rights, assuring an equality before the law. After this is period where economic modals are brought in service of these rights, the economy beholden to the social and environmental sphere as opposed to today where social and environmental policy is in service of Capitalist economic needs. In this order the rights and equality secured humanity moves to place of equilibrium where individual want, individual wealth, individual need is a secondary thought to collective want, collective rights and communistic responsibility.
Human nature is not individualistically oriented and wholly greedy, selfish and self interested. These are values that arise in an environment of competition, exploitative policy and scarcity.
WHO IS SEROK APO?
Abdullah Öcalan, also known as Apo (short for both Abdullah and “uncle” in Kurdish), is a Kurdish leftist political theoretician, political prisoner and one of the founding members of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.).
Öcalan helped found the P.K.K. in 1978, and led it into the Kurdish-Turkish conflict in 1984. His leadership style was often ruthless, and many of his opponents in the PKK were killed on his orders. For most of his leadership, he was based in Syria, which provided sanctuary to the P.K.K. until the late 1990s.
After being forced to leave Syria, Öcalan was abducted in Nairobi in 1999 by the Turkish National Intelligence Agency (M.I.T.)(with the support of the CIA) and taken to Turkey, where he was sentenced to death under Article 125 of the Turkish Penal Code, which concerns the formation of armed organizations.
Öcalan now argues that the period of armed warfare is past and a political solution to the Kurdish question should be developed. Öcalan’s prison regime has oscillated between long periods of isolation during which he is allowed no contact with the outside world, and periods when he is permitted visits.
From prison, Öcalan has published several books. Jineology, also known as the “Science of Women”, is a form of feminism advocated by Öcalan and subsequently a fundamental tenet of the Kurdistan Communities Union.
Öcalan’s philosophy ofDemocratic Confederalism is a strong influence on the political structures of Rojava, an autonomous polity formed in Syria in 2011.
“A system of popularly elected administrative councils, allowing local communities to exercise autonomous control over their assets, while linking to other communities via a network of Confederal councils.Decisions are made by communes in each neighborhood, village, or city. All are welcome to partake in the communal councils, but political participation is not mandated. There is no private property, but rather “ownership by use, which grants individuals usage rights to the buildings, land, and infrastructure, but not the right to sell and buy on the market or convert them to private enterprises.” The economy is in the hands of the communal councils, and is thus (in the words of Bookchin) ‘neither collectivized nor privatized – it is common.”
Feminism, Ecology, Protection and Empowerment of Minority Groups and Direct Democracy are essential elements in Democratic Confederalism. The substitution of monolithic identity based nation states with a Confederation of autonomous communities is the political objective.
With his 2005 “Declaration of Democratic Confederalism in Kurdistan”, Öcalan advocated for a Kurdish implementation of Bookchin’sThe Ecology of Freedom via municipal assemblies as a democratic confederation of Kurdish communities beyond the state borders of Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. Öcalan promoted a platform of shared values: environmentalism, self-defense, gender equality, and a pluralistic tolerance for religion, politics, and culture. While some of his followers questioned Öcalan’s conversion from Marxism-Leninism, the P.K.K. adopted Öcalan’s proposal and began to form assemblies.
In early 2004, Öcalan attempted to arrange a meeting with Murray Bookchin through Öcalan’s lawyers, describing himself as Bookchin’s “student” eager to adapt Bookchin’s thought to Middle Eastern society. Bookchin was too ill to meet with Öcalan.
In May 2004 Bookchin conveyed this message “My hope is that the Kurdish people will one day be able to establish a free, rational society that will allow their brilliance once again to flourish. They are fortunate indeed to have a leader of Mr. Öcalan’s talents to guide them”. When Bookchin died in 2006, the P.K.K. hailed the American thinker as “one of the greatest social scientists of the 20th century” and vowed to put his theories into practice.
On Libertarian Municipalism
Starting in the 1970s, Bookchin argued that the arena for libertarian social change should be the municipal level. In a 2001 interview he summarized his views this way:
“The overriding problem is to change the structure of society so that people gain power. The best arena to do that is the municipality — the city, town, and village — where we have an opportunity to create a face-to-face democracy.”
In 1980, Bookchin used the term “Libertarian Municipalism“, to describe a system in which libertarian institutions of directly democratic assemblies would oppose and replace the state with a confederation of free municipalities. Libertarian Municipalism intends to create a situation in which the two powers, i.e. the municipal confederations and the nation-state, cannot coexist. Communalists hold that this is a method to achieve a liberated society.
Libertarian Municipalism is not seen merely as an effort to “take over” city and municipal councils to construct a more “environmentally friendly” government, but also an effort to transform and democratize these structures, to root them in popular assemblies, and to knit them together along Confederal lines to appropriate a regional economy. Bookchin summarized this process in the saying “democratize the republic, then radicalize the democracy“.
It is a dual power that contests the legitimacy of the existing state power. Communalists hold that such a movement should be expected to begin slowly, perhaps sporadically, in communities here and there that initially may demand only the ability to alter the structuring of society before enough interlinked confederations exist to demand the outright institutional power to replace the centralized state. The growing tension created by the emergence of municipal confederations would represent a confrontation between the state and the political realms. It is believed this confrontation can be resolved only after Communalism forms the new politics of a popular movement and ultimately captures the imagination of society at large.
Communalists see as equally important the need for Confederation – the interlining of communities with one another through recallable delegates mandated by municipal citizens’ assemblies and whose sole functions are coordinative and administrative. This is similar to the system of “nested councils” found in participatory politics.
According to Bookchin, “Confederation has a long history of its own that dates back to antiquity and that surfaced as a major alternative to the nation-state. From the American Revolution through the French Revolution and the Spanish Revolution of 1936, confederalism constituted a major challenge to state centralism”. Communalism is seen to add a radically democratic dimension to the contemporary discussions of confederation (e.g. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia) by calling for confederations not of nation-states but of municipalities and of the neighborhoods of large cities as well as towns and villages.
On Policy and Administration
Communalists make a clear distinction between the concepts of Policy and Administration. This distinction is seen as fundamental to Communalist principles.
Policy is defined by being made by a community or neighborhood assembly of free citizens; administration on the other hand, is performed by Confederal Councils a level up from the local assemblies which are composed of mandated, recallable delegates of wards, towns, and villages. If particular communities or neighborhoods –or a minority grouping of them– choose to go their own way to a point where human rights are violated or where ecological destruction is permitted, the majority in a local or regional confederation would have the right to prevent such practices through its Confederal council. This is explained not as a denial of democracy but the assertion of a shared agreement by all to recognize civil rights and maintain the ecological integrity of a region.
Policy-making remains local, but its administration is vested in the Confederal network as a whole. The confederation is intended to be a community of communities based on distinct human rights and ecological imperatives. These ideas have inspired indigenous leaders such as Tomas Cruz Lorenzo, who was assassinated in 1989 in Oaxaca, Mexico.
On Participation in Existing Political Systems
One of the core distinctions between ”Anarchism” and “Communalism” is that Communalists are not opposed in principle to taking part in currently existing political institutions until such a time as it is deemed unnecessary.
For Anarchists this is ideologically incompatible, for Anarchists in general cannot abide by any form of bureaucratic government or hierarchy.
Communalists on the other hand see no issues with supporting candidates or political parties in local electoral politics—especially municipal elections—as long as prospective candidates are libertarian socialist and anti-statist in general policy. The particular goal of this process is to elevate Communalists (or those sympathetic to Communalism) to a position of power so as to construct face-to-face municipal assemblies to maximize direct democracy and make existing forms of representative democracy increasingly irrelevant.
There are obvious contradictions to this model where anti-statists participate in elected office, or transitional or provisional government. Democratic Confederalism, a political administration faces these Contradictions in Rojava today; where they are:
Democratic Pluralism vs. Leninist Style Vanguard? An autonomous non-state governance confederation of three Cantons and several large territories providing for nearly 4 million people, is managed by a coalition of political parties through TEV DEM, though in reality dominated by only one Party the Party of Democratic Unity, the Syrian Branch of the P.K.K. and no dissent has been tolerated in the ongoing war time environment.
Agents of Imperialism vs. Realism Under Fire? Throughout the Civil War the Party fought ISIS and other Islamist rebels armed and supported by the air power of the United States. It rarely ever fought Assad’s regime, and when the US abandoned Rojava in 2019 the Party quickly secured itself against Turkey by allying overtly with Assad, Russian and Hezbollah.
Agents of Assad or Ocalan? The Party is also the implementing arm of services funded by the Assad lead Syrian government, who has throughout the war paid the civil servants in the Autonomous Zone in Northern and Eastern Syria. It has sold oil to the Assad government throughout the war.
Real Change or Propaganda? Rojava has explicit policies to elevate Women and protect minorities; Rojava has large Kurdish and Arab demographics, as wells as Christian Assyrian, Turkmen, Yazidis, Chechens and Circassians. However, it is a political project completely dominated by Kurds. The role of women in most of the territory it governs is heavily Sunni Muslim, traditional and deeply patriarchal. Environmentally, the territory is complete disaster. There is trash everywhere. There are large constantly burning fields of oil, producing Masood, a deeply polluting alternative to diesel. There is not one actually sustainable element to the entire project in place.
These are some of the major contradictions you will find in the world of the real; Democratic Confederalism is very different from Marxism/Leninism in its view of economic or historical determinism. It breaks from it in several crucial ways, while at the same time remaining anti-state, anti-capitalist. Let us look at these contradictions.
Background
Rojava was born out of total state collapse, in a world war zone. A war zone that to date has claimed over 700,000 lives. It is quite literally surrounded by enemies.
In 2011, a civil uprising erupted in Syria, prompting hasty government reforms. One of the issues addressed during this time was the status of Syria’s stateless Kurds, as President Bashar al-Assad granted about 220,000 Kurds citizenship. In course of the next months, the crisis in Syria escalated into a civil war. The armed Syrian opposition seized control of several regions, while security forces were overstretched. In mid-2012 the government responded to this development by withdrawing its military from three mainly Kurdish areas and leaving control to local militias. This has been described as an attempt by the Assad regime to keep the Kurdish population out of the initial civil uprising and civil war.
Existing underground Kurdish political parties, namely the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Kurdish National Council (KNC), joined to form the Kurdish Supreme Committee (KSC) and the People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia was reestablished to defend Kurdish-inhabited areas in northern Syria. In July 2012, the YPG established control in the towns of Kobanî, Amuda and Afrin, and the Kurdish Supreme Committee established a joint leadership council to administer the towns. Soon YPG also gained control of the cities of Al-Malikiyah, Ras al-Ayn, al-Darbasiyah, and al-Muabbada and parts of Hasakah and Qamishli. Doing so, the YPG and its female wing, the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), mostly battled factions of theFree Syrian Army, and Islamist militias like the al-Nusra Frontand Jabhat Ghuraba al-Sham. It also eclipsed rival Kurdish militias, and absorbed some government loyalist groups. The government’s withdrawal and concurrent rise of the PYD “raised many eyebrows”, as the relationship between the two entities was “highly contentious” at the time. The PYD was known to oppose certain government policies, but had also strongly criticized the Syrian opposition.
On 19 July 2013, the PYD announced that it had written a constitution for an “autonomous Syrian Kurdish region”, and planned to hold referendum to approve the constitution in October 2013. Qamishli served as first de facto capital of the PYD-led governing body, which was official called the “Interim Transitional Administration“.
The announcement was widely denounced by both moderate as well as Islamist factions of the Syrian opposition.
In January 2014, three areas under TEV-DEM rule declared their autonomy as cantons (now Afrin Region, Jazira Region and Euphrates Region) and an interim constitution was approved. The Syrian opposition and even the Kurdish parties belonging to the KNC condemned this move, regarding the canton system as illegal, authoritarian, and supportive of the Syrian government.
The PYD countered that the constitution was open to review and amendment, and that the KNC had been consulted on its drafting beforehand. From September 2014 to spring 2015, the YPG forces in Kobanî Canton, supported by some Free Syrian Army militias and leftist international and Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) volunteers, fought and finally repelled an assault by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) during the Siege of Kobanî, and in the YPG’s Tell Abyad offensive of summer of 2015, the regions of Jazira and Kobanî were connected.
After the YPG victory over ISIL in Kobanî in March 2015, an alliance between YPG and the United States was formed, which greatly worried Turkey, because Turkey stated the YPG was a clone of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which Turkey (and the U.S. and the E.U.) designate as terrorists.
In December 2015, the Syrian Democratic Council was created. On 17 March 2016, at a TEV-DEM-organized conference in Rmelan the establishment the Democratic Federation of Rojava – Northern Syria was declared in the areas they controlled in Northern Syria. The declaration was quickly denounced by both the Syrian government and the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces.
In March 2016, Hediya Yousef and Mansur Selum were elected co-chairpersons for the executive committee to organize a constitution for the region, to replace the 2014 constitution.
Yousef said the decision to set up a federal government was in large part driven by the expansion of territories captured from Islamic State:
“Now, after the liberation of many areas, it requires us to go to a wider and more comprehensive system that can embrace all the developments in the area, that will also give rights to all the groups to represent themselves and to form their own administrations.”
In July 2016, a draft for the new constitution was presented, based on the principles of the 2014 constitution, mentioning all ethnic groups living in Northern Syria and addressing their cultural, political and linguistic rights. The main political opposition to the constitution have been Kurdish nationalists, in particular the KNC, who have different ideological aspirations than the TEV-DEM coalition.
On 28 December 2016, after a meeting of the 151-member Syrian Democratic Council in Rmelan, a new constitution was resolved; despite objections by 12 Kurdish parties, the region was renamed the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, removing the name “Rojava“.
Turkey, the second largest NATO army to the north, is nothing short of devoted to destroying the P.K.K./P.Y.D. led project in Rojava. A conglomeration of Al-Qaeda and Islamist affiliates to the South west in Idlib. The neutral, leaning toward hostile Syrian Army south of the Euphrates, a Turkish backed Kurdish Regional Government (K.R.G.) in North Iraq and of course from 2014-2019, an existential threat from the Jihadists of the Islamic State in the Levant and Syria. Which has been largely neutralized. By 2014, Y.P.G./Y.P.J. forces had been surrounded in Kobane, where most expected them to be massacred. Following massive Coalition air strikes, the Y.P.G./Y.P.J./P.K.K. an their allies drove ISIS back city by city, town by town. In 2017 Raqqah, the capital of ISIS was surrounded and after a protracted siege liberated. Just shortly before the Iraqi Army and Shiite Hashidashabi, Popular Mobilization Militias liberated Mosul.
For a wide range of reasons the United States and NATO coalition forces were not willing to commit ground troops after the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq, so they heavily utilized the militia forces available. Which ideologically in both Iraq; the Hashidashabi and Syria; the YPG/YPJ were both ideologically hostile to the U.S., but for several years defeating ISIS was a unifying priority for everyone.
The Hashidashabi militias (over 120,000 light infantry fighters) were the direct proteges of the Iranian revolutionary Guard Corps, the Pasdaran. As is Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite Militia defended the Assad regime.
The largely Kurdish People’s Protection Units/ Womens’ Protection Units (over 65,000 light infantry fighters), the military arm of the Democratic Union Party are the direct proteges, if not the direct military asset of the Kurdistan Workers Party (P.K.K.)
When the Syrian Civil War began, the Syrian army evacuated the historically Kurdish, re-settled heavily by Arabs region. The armed defense forces of the Y.P.G./Y.P.J.; People’s Protection Units/ Womens’ Protection units secured the major villages, towns and cities. Rojava is mostly a dirt hill desert, nine months of the year. It has both agricultural value and oil wealth for Syria. Outside a few small cities; Qamishly, Kobane, Mambij, Raqqah and Al-Hasake it is largely small villages and towns. Al-Hasake is the largest city of around 600,000, Qamishly, Kobane and Afrin (until it fell to the Turkish proxy forces in 2018) are the Canton administration centers. Raqqah and Mambij are large, majority Arab cities whose populations have questionable loyalty to the Revolution, both major centers of ISIS rule.
Amid this chaos; Y.P.G./Y.P.J. re-branded as the Syrian Democratic Forces (S.D.F.), in a shallow subterfuge enabling the United States to fund an obvious branch of the P.K.K. (who it declares a terrorist group) pandering to Turkey the second largest armed forces in NATO and with U.S. led coalition Special Forces and air support routed ISIS in Syria between 2014-2018. In 2018, the US abandoned it’s ally, the Turkish military captured the western most Canton, Afrin. In 2019 the Turkish forces captured a large swat of central territory.
Turkish and Turkish-backed Syrian rebel forces captured 68 settlements, including Ras al-Ayn,Tell Abyad, Suluk, Mabrouka and Manajir during the 9-day operation before a 120-hour ceasefire was announced. A formal agreement between the PYD (Democratic Union Party), Assad and the Russian Federation has temporarily frozen the Turkish invasion of Rojava.
In 2020 the Turkish Military began its fourth large scale operation and attack on the P.K.K. began in Northern Iraq.
Since 2012, when the first YPG pockets appeared, Turkey had been alarmed by the presence of P.K.K.-related forces at its southern border and grew concerned when the YPG entered into an alliance with the US to oppose ISIS forces in the region.
Turkey allowed tens of thousands of Islamist foreign fighters to cross into Syria and Iraq to support ISIS. The Turkish MIT was supporting ISIS throughout their insurgency.
The Turkish government subsequently refused to allow aid to be sent to the YPG during the Siege of Kobanî. This led to the Kurdish riots, the breakdown of the 2013–2015 peace process in July 2015 and the renewal of armed conflict between the P.K.K. and Turkish forces. According to Turkey there is absolutely no difference between the KCK aligned Kurdish organizations, YPG’s parent organization, the PYD, provided the PKK with militants, explosives, arms and ammunition. It is accurate to confirm that there is very little fiscal or operational separation amid these regional branches. Commanders regularly simply switch patches and uniforms, all are indoctrinated/ educated with P.K.K. approved texts and methods.
In August 2016, Turkey launched Operation Euphrates Shield to prevent the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) from linking Afrin Canton (now Afrin Region) with the rest of Rojava and to capture Manbij from the SDF. Such a successful push would have provided a linkage of the three cantons by land. The Hatay Province of Turkey was part of Syria during the Ottoman Period. Capture of Hatay would have provided a contiguous Kurdish corridor to the Sea.
Turkish and Turkish-backed Syrian rebel forces prevented the linking of Rojava’s cantons and captured all settlements in Jarabulus previously under SDF control. The SDF handed over part of the region to the Syrian government to act as a buffer zone against Turkey. Manbij remained under SDF control.
In early 2018, Turkey launched Operation Olive Branch alongside Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army to capture the Kurdish-majority Afrin and oust the YPG/SDF from region. Afrin Canton, a subdivision of the region, was occupied and over 100,000 civilians were displaced and relocated to Afrin Region’s Shahba Canton which remained under SDF, then joint SDF-Syrian Arab Army (SAA) control. The remaining SDF forces later launched an ongoing insurgency against the Turkish and Turkish-backed Syrian rebel forces.
In 2019, Turkey launched Operation Peace Springagainst the SDF. On 9 October, the Turkish Air Force launched airstrikes on border towns. On 6 October PresidentDonald Trump had ordered United States troops to withdraw from northeastern Syria where they had been providing support to the SDF. Journalists called the withdrawal “a serious betrayal to the Kurds” and “a catastrophic blow to US credibility as an ally and Washington’s standing on the world stage”; one journalist stated that “this was one of the worst U.S. foreign policy disasters since the Iraq War“.
Turkish and Turkish-backed Syrian rebel forces captured 68 settlements, including Ras al-Ayn, TellAbyad, Suluk, Mabrouka and Manajir during the 9-day operation before a 120-hour ceasefire was announced. The operation was condemned by the international community, and human rights violations by Turkish forces were reported. Media outlets labeled the attack “no surprise” because Turkish president Erdoğan had for months warned that the presence of the YPG on the Turkish-Syrian border despite the Northern Syria Buffer Zone was unacceptable.
An unintended consequence of the attack was that it raised the worldwide popularity and legitimacy of the northeastern Syrian administration, and several PYD and YPG representatives became internationally known to an unprecedented degree. However, these events caused tensions within the KCK, as differences emerged between the PKK and PYD leadership. The PYD was determined to maintain the regional autonomy and hoped for a continued alliance with the United States. In contrast, the PKK central command was now willing to restart negotiations with Turkey, distrusted the United States, and emphasized the international success of its leftist ideology over the survival of Rojava as administrative entity.
A Democratic Pluralism vs. A Vanguard Party
The Kurdistan Workers Party (P.K.K.) founded branches of the group in Iraq, Iran and Syria as well as throughout Europe. These branches are united in a Confederal framework called the K.C.K., around the principles of Democratic Confederalism. They maintain separate structures, but are for all intents and purposes branches of the same party, coordinated from Northern Iraq in Qandil, loyal to Abdullah Ocalan.
The Syrian Branch is the Democratic Union Party (PYD). To what if any degree these groups are different, distinct entities has only to do with defense or strategic priorities, not ideology.
As the Arab Spring reached Syria in early 2011, protests spread to the Kurdish areas in the north. The PYD, which had a large presence among Syrian Kurds, was actively competing with the Kurdish National Council.One of the main points of divergence related to the PYD’s stance of urging regime change, yet rejecting foreign intervention and alignment with the Syrian opposition. It claimed to offer a third way within the Syrian conflict, centered around self-defence and the primacy of non-violent solutions which did not support either the regime or the opposition, based on the organization of society and the formation of cultural, social, economic and political institutions in order to achieve “self-administration for the people”.
Despite this competition, the KNC and PYD agreed to work together within the Kurdish Supreme Committee (DBK), established in 2012 in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan. However, as local popular support tilted towards the PYD, the KNC eventually withdrew its participation. It accused the PYD of monopolizing decision-making and harassing its activists. The PYD responded by accusing the KNC of trying to establish a competing parallel force and divide the region into competing zones of influence, risking Kurdish infighting. In November 2013 the PYD, under the “TEV-DEM” umbrella, unilaterally announced the creation of an interim administration for the region.
The Movement for a Democratic Society (Kurdish: Tevgera Civaka Demokratîk, TEV-DEM, is a left-wing umbrella organization in northern Syria founded on 16 January 2011 with the goal of organizing Syrian society under a democratic confederalist system. It is a mobilization strategy dominated by the PYD to establish Democratic Confederalist structures throughout society.
By December 2013, TEV-DEM switched to a new governance model, dubbed the “democratic self-administration project“, with stronger ties to the PYD’s democratic confederalist ideology. This came to replace the “interim administration project” previously agreed upon with the KNC.
The Social Contract of July 2016 emphasizes multi-ethnic recognition in line with democratic confederalist ideology and dedicates articles 8–53 to basic principles of rights, representation and personal freedoms that match the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It also contains a number of other principles so far never applied in Syria or neighboring countries, such as the inadmissibility of civilians being tried by military courts and the abolition of the death penalty. In addition, the PYD adopts a progressive gender equality standard in its governance structures, with equal gender representation in all administrations and the establishment of a Ministry for Women’s Liberation – a standard that has been largely adhered to, including within the military.
Despite the radical leftist roots of the PYD in the decades-long connection to the ideology of Öcalan and the P.K.K., these multi-ethnic and secular components of the constitution met some fundamental requirements of Western international backers opposing the Syrian regime. The model of local administration in the region has fostered a number of positive developments, such as a focus on individual personal freedoms, and the local administration has helped to reduce the repercussions of the civil war on the population in Northern Syria by filling the vacuum left by the withdrawal of Assad’s forces from northern Syria; its nuanced position vis-à-vis the Syrian government allowed a continuation of the basic services previously rendered by the state.
Some differences have surfaced between the P.K.K. and the P.Y.D., in regards to ongoing negotiation and long term alliances. The PYD, directly threatened by ISIS, then Turkey is believed to have favored a long term alliance with the United States, while the PKK saw the alliance as temporary and sought a compromise with Turkey.
The PKK is very much a Vanguard Party, along with the Barzani family lead KDP and Talabani family lead PUK, these 3 parties have done the most by far to advance the Kurdish national issue and fight for Kurdish independence. In Syria, it is clear that during the ongoing war the PYD has used TEV DEM, the Movement for Democratic Society to dominate the war time political policy making. It has suppressed other parties, especially those affiliated with Barzani’s KDP, but in recent months of 2020 has allowed greater power sharing.
The PKK, from 1978 to 2004 was Maoist/Stalinist style vanguard party and shedding that mode of thinking will not happen overnight. Rojava has been under attack, is still under attack and allowing complete free speech and press and Party in fighting is not useful in this scenario. There is a great ideological difference between PYD and KDP-Syria/ KDP-Iraq. There are very different visions each party holds for a Kurdish future.
The contradiction of vanguard vs. Pluralism is probably only possible to experiment with after the war is over, unfortunate for all, the Syrian Civil War is an international proxy war. There might not peace anytime soon. Thus a question is asked, can Democratic Confederalism only occur in a war zone? Can a Democratic Union Party (PYD) emerge and form policy in a democratic nation, if such ideology is anti state? And what is the difference between government and administration? Is Rojava an unrecognized proto-state, like the Kurdish Regional Government of Northern Iraq- the K.R.G.?
The answer is that in regards to Rojava, Democratic Confederalism is very much a product of state failure. The structures associated with it are the forces that defeated ISIS and secured the lives of 2 to 4 million people. But this is not the only way Democratic Confederalism can be introduced.
The PYD/ PKK/ KCK are Democratic Confederalist structures. They are parties that seek to implement this ideology on the ground in highly imperfect conditions. That is not a state or a government; it is administration of military and social services in a power vacuum. The most obvious contradiction is not power sharing of parties in war time, it is receiving support from opposing power blocks.
Agent of U.S. Imperialism or Political Realism Under Siege?
When I.S.I.S. surrounded and besieged Kobane, everyone was sure a massacre would follow, as it had in the past with the Yazidis. Tenacious street fighting, support troops form the F.S.A., P.K.K. and Peshmerga aided. But above all else it was the air power of the coalition, target air strikes that leveled the fighting fields between ISIS and its opposition.
Over the next four years the US Coalition heavily armed the YPG/YPJ which made up over 60% of the Syrian Democratic Forces. It committed several thousand special forces for training, targeting and logistical support. Most importantly, from 2014 to 2018, the full force of U.S. hegemony protected Rojava. But when ISIS was finished off in Hajin, President Trump ordered the U.S. forces out and Turkey immediately attacked, 3 times.
To much of the Anarchist and Socialist left, Rojava was of course an imperfect utopia, but was clearly a utopia in progress or at the very least an ideological project that spoke to their desperation. Which is to say by 2014 there were very few left wing projects left. Cuba, the Zapatista Zone, Naxalite India, but not that many. Perhaps only 800 foreign leftists came to defend Rojava over the course of the war. The largest contributor were Turkish communist parties. Their contribution was negligible, a far smaller number stayed on after their 6 month tours to contribute on the civilian side.
A much greater number of leftists did nothing at all. In their minds Rojava was not a Utopian project or a leftist project. The PYD was taking Assad regime money, had an office in Moscow and was assisting a U.S. imperial ambition. Probably the majority of the leftists stayed away because they didn’t wish to die, Kurmanji is essential to participation and the contradictions are many.
Agents of Assad or Ocalan?
Abdullah Ocalan has not been heard from for several years. He has been badly tortured several times, he might be even be dead. The ideological shift that occurred in the P.K.K. from Communist Kurdish Nationalism to Internationalist Democratic Confederalism occurred between 1999 and 2004. During this time Ocalan and the Turkish State were in negotiations. There was long period of ceasefire and a massive exodus of P.K.K. military forces from Turkey to North Iraq. There was on again off again electoral victory and repression of popular Kurdish parties in Turkey. The PKK/PYD/KCK is operating in a war zone, amid 4 separate counties; Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. All of which have proven genocidal to Kurds. Nations have long used the Kurds to achieve their political and military projects.
Iran backs the PUK, and off again on again the PKK, but the KCK affiliate PJAK, takes CIA and Mossad weapons and money to fight Iran. Turkey backs the KDP-I, and will stop at nothing to defeat the PKK in a civil war that has killed over 50,000 since 1984. The KDP-I and the PUK Peshmerga cannot stand up to the Iraqi army, and lost 10-15% of the KRG zone including oil rich Kirkuk City, in 2018 right after the referendum on independence. Turkey has invaded Rojava twice and occupies Afrin and swathe of the central canton. Turkey has invaded and bombarded north Iraq to strike at the PKK bases in the mountains. The PYD and PKK have begun to publicly differ a great deal over the right next move. In the mean time, with Russian urging, Rojava has allowed the Syrian army back into all its major population centers and clearly sided with the Assad regime, perhaps worse than ISIS in its conduct of the war by all accounts.
This is not an easy place to win a revolution in. Nor should we look to Rojava for every answer about Democratic Confederalist thinking. But is is Democratic Confederalism in the real, beyond the theory of a Jew in the hills of Vermont or an imprisoned revolutionary leader who may never see freedom in his life again.
Ocalan is the main mind, or one of only a couple of minds that in the modern era have achieved any level of redemption and self determination for Kurds, one of the world’s oldest stateless people. Certainly the largest. What the Party, and working class parties of the future do is shaped but not dictated by him and the Kurds, but they are the first to attempt adaptation.
Serving Assad, is simply serving modern Oligarchy as the Assad family is the predominant Oligarchy in Syria and Syria is to Russia, what Israel is to the United States; the premier regional client. It is not useful to moralize the atrocious conduct of any side during the Syrian Civil War, as all sides were brutal though the Kurds far less inclined to it. War is war, violence begets violence. But by all accounts the Syrian Army backed by Russia and Hezbollah were more ruthless and rent less than ISIS. ISIS just seemed to want to video tape everything.
The largest contradiction to date is how can a pro-democratic, pro-human rights administration rely on the protection of an anti-democratic, ruthless Oligarchy, backed by Russia. In the end, this is the largest contradiction. If not resolved it will result in the end of Rojava as an autonomous administration. But that is perhaps preferable to a democide at the hands of the Turkish State.
Real Change or Pure Propaganda?
There is without a doubt a great deal of real change happening, although you would need to know Arabic or Kurmanji to participate in it meaningfully. There is co-gendered mandatory structures on all levels; head of Party, military posts, armed forces, every position has man and a woman. That is far more radical than any leftist group has ever gone.
Democratically speaking, there are multiple parties but really only two that matter. In power the PYD in opposition the KDP-S, the Kurdish left and right. To what degree were and are Arabs marginalized in Rojava. It was probably worse during the four years of active conflict with ISIS, but certainly the Arabs resent Kurdish rule. There have been efforts to role our democratic councils, structures and assemblies and compares to Assad autocracy, that too is a progress. But this is still a one party state, allowing highly limited questioning of the official line. It still appears that the Assad regime is keeping the lights on and paying all the civil servants.
Environmentally speaking, the place is one of the ugliest places on earth, mud and dirt hills and desert, grass land and farms between the mountains in Afrin to the west, North of the Euphrates and east of the Tigris. There has been almost no ability to do anything sustainable, trees are being planted. It is green three months of the year. Largely it is indefensible. There are oil reserves all over Deir Ez-Zor province, there is a lot of farm land. There has been no clear attempts to recycle, the streets are littered in trash everywhere you go. Water is being diverted away from Rojava by damming projects in Turkey.
Imports are nearly impossible over the Turkish norther border where a wall and mine field run the whole perimeter. There is on again off again traffic into and out of Iraq depending on political factors. There is trade with the Assad regime, but it is not so much trade as oil and civil servant salaries for goods.
On Communal Economics
Communalists are heavily critical of the market economy and capitalism. Believing that these systems destroy the environment by creating a ‘grow or die’ mentality and creating a large population of alienated citizens. They propose abolition of the market economy and money and replaces it with a decentralised planned economy controlled by local municipalities and cooperatives.
In such a municipal economy – Confederal, interdependent, and rational by ecological, not only technological, standards – Communalists hold that the special interests that divide people today into workers, professionals, managers, capitalist owners and so on would be melded into a general interest (a social interest) in which people see themselves as citizens guided strictly by the needs of their community and region rather than by personal proclivities and vocational concerns.
Here, it is hoped, citizenship would come into its own, and rational as well as ecological interpretations of the public good would supplant class and hierarchical interests.
In Rojava there have been several efforts to form cooperatives and establish some balance between Utopian values and ongoing needs of the war. In that regard only so far in the social sphere have Democratic Confederalist ideas been rendered into Policy, the economy is a war economy and nothing has been done for the environmental sphere besides planting some trees.
TheJazira Region (former Jazira Canton) is a major wheat and cotton producer and has a considerable oil industry. The Euphrates Region (formerly Kobane Canton) suffered most destruction of the three regions and has huge challenges in reconstruction, and has recently seen some greenhouse agriculture construction. The Afrin Region (former Afrin Canton) has had a traditional specialization on olive oil including Aleppo soap made from it, and had drawn much industrial production from the nearby city of Aleppo due to the fighting in Aleppo city from 2012–2016.
Price controls are managed by local committees, which can set the price of basic goods such as food and medical goods.
It has been theorized that the Assad government had deliberately underdeveloped parts of Northern Syria in order to Arabize the region and make secession attempts less likely. During the Syrian Civil War, the infrastructure of the region on average experienced less destruction than other parts of Syria. In May 2016, Ahmed Yousef, head of the Economic Body and chairman of Afrin University, stated that at the time, the economic output of the region (including agriculture, industry and oil) accounted for about 55% of Syria’s gross domestic product.
In 2014, the Syrian government was still paying some state employees, but fewer than before. However, the administration of the region stated that “none of our projects are financed by the regime”. But that is simply untrue.
At first, there were no direct or indirecttaxes on people or businesses in the region; instead, the administration raised money mainly through tariffs and selling oil and other natural resources.
However, in July 2017, it was reported that the administration in the Jazira Region had started to collect income tax to provide for public services in the region.
The main sources of revenue for the autonomous region have been presented as: 1. Public properties such as grain silos and oil and gas in the Jazira Region, 2. Local taxation and customs fees taken at the border crossings, 3. Service delivery, 4. Remittances from Iraq and Turkey, and 5. Local donations.
The black market/ informal economy of a war zone continues to thrive and the Kurds have a long history of smuggling and trade. But the trends from Rojava, will not be the trends from everywhere this method plays out, but it is the first set of lessons.
Expropriating and capitalization of/on public assets and property by the Party will always occur. To what level inner Party access translates into post-conflict ownership, like Russia and China’s revolutions is something to guard against. In Rojava, the oil and wheat that were once state owned now pay for local administration.
Taxation will always be reinstated in some form as will border duty fees. There is no alternative proposal to taxation in some form. But the diversion of Taxes from state to Party has occurred.
Service delivery has not been altered much from pre-revolution methods, suggesting small medium enterprise capitalism will not be regulated initially.
Remittances are a usual pattern of Diaspora support, it can be regularly assumed that all Workers Parties require a capital base in the Norther Diaspora.
Local Donations seems like an ambiguous coloring of a bribe. As in a person with an interest pays off the Party to allow it its special interest, by donation.
Oil and food production is substantial, so they are important exports. Agricultural products include sheep, grain and cotton. Important imports are consumer goods and auto parts. Trade with Turkey and access to humanitarian and military aid is difficult due to a blockade by Turkey. Turkey does not allow business people or goods to cross its border. The blockade from adjacent territories held by Turkey and ISIL, and partially also the KRG, temporarily caused heavy distortions of relative prices in Jazira Region and Euphrates Region (while separate, Afrin Region borders government-controlled territory since February 2016); for example in Jazira Region and Euphrates Region, through 2016 petrol cost only half as much as bottled water.
The Semalka Border Crossing with Iraqi Kurdistan had been intermittently closed by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), but has been open permanently since June 2016, and along with the establishment of a corridor to Syrian government controlled territory in April 2017, economic exchange has increasingly normalized. Further, in May 2017 in northern Iraq, the Popular Mobilization Forcesfighting ISIL cleared a corridor connecting the autonomous region and Iraqi government-controlled territory.
People’s Economic Policy
The autonomous region is ruled by a coalition which bases its policy ambitions to a large extent on the libertarian socialist ideology of Abdullah Öcalan and have been described as pursuing a model of economy that blends co-operative and private enterprise. In 2012, the PYD launched what it called the “Social Economy Plan“, later renamed the “People’s Economy Plan” (PEP).
Private property and entrepreneurship are protected under the principle of “ownership by use“. Dr. Dara Kurdaxi, a regional official, has stated:
“The method in Rojava is not so much against private property, but rather has the goal of putting private property in the service of all the peoples who live in Rojava.”
Communes and co-operatives have been established to provide essentials.
Co-operatives account for a large proportion of agricultural production and are active in construction, factories, energy production, livestock, pistachio and roasted seeds, and public markets.
Several hundred instances of collective farming occurred across towns and villages in the region, with communes consisting of approximately 20–35 people.
According to the region’s “Ministry of Economics”, approximately three-quarters of all property has been placed under community ownership and a third of production has been transferred to direct management by workers’ councils.
Views on Cities
Communalists are heavily critical of modern cities, citing urban sprawl, suburbanisation, car culture, traffic congestion, noise pollution and other negative externalities as having severe effects on the local environment and society as a whole. Communalists propose to run cities democratically and Confederally. A series of elected assemblies are integral to the Municipal Confederalist structure proposed by Murray Bookchin.
On a whole General Assemblies are popular councils for Revolutionary Sections, representing neighborhoods/ or clusters of villages, which are subdivided down to more manageable administrative units clustered around a few hundred families.
Canton Level Administration, Municipal Administration, Section Administration and Community Council Administration are the four levels of jurisdiction and authority.
Views on Nation States
Currently, the relations of the region to the Damascus government are determined by the context of the Syrian civil war. The Constitution of Syria and the Constitution of North and East Syria are legally incompatible with respect to legislative and executive authority. In the military realm, combat between the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Syrian government forces has been rare, in the most instances some of the territory still controlled by the Syrian government in Qamishli and al-Hasakah has been lost to the YPG. In some military campaigns, in particular in northern Aleppo Governate and in al-Hasakah, YPG and Syrian government forces have tacitly cooperated against Islamist forces, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and others.
The region does not state to pursue full independence but rather autonomy within a federal and democratic Syria. In July 2016, Constituent Assembly co-chair Hediya Yousef formulated the region’s approach towards Syria as follows:
“We believe that a federal system is ideal form of governance for Syria. We see that in many parts of the world, a federal framework enables people to live peacefully and freely within territorial borders. The people of Syria can also live freely in Syria. We will not allow for Syria to be divided; all we want is the democratization of Syria; its citizens must live in peace, and enjoy and cherish the ethnic diversity of the national groups inhabiting the country.
In March 2015, the Syrian Information Minister announced that his government considered recognizing the Kurdish autonomy “within the law and constitution”. While the region’s administration is not invited to the Geneva III peace talks on Syria, or any of the earlier talks, Russia in particular calls for the region’s inclusion and does to some degree carry the region’s positions into the talks, as documented in Russia’s May 2016 draft for a new constitution for Syria. In October 2016, there were reports of a Russian initiative for federalization with a focus on northern Syria, which at its core called to turn the existing institutions of the region into legitimate institutions of Syria; also reported was its rejection for the time being by the Syrian government.
The Damascus ruling elite is split over the question whether the new model in the region can work in parallel and converge with the Syrian government, for the benefit of both, or if the agenda should be to centralize again all power at the end of the civil war, necessitating preparation for ultimate confrontation with the region’s institutions.
An analysis released in June 2017 described the region’s “relationship with the regime fraught but functional” and a “semi-cooperative dynamic”. In late September 2017, Syria’s Foreign Minister said that Damascus would consider granting Kurds more autonomy in the region once ISIL is defeated.
On 13 October 2019, the SDF announced that it had reached an agreement with the Syrian Army which allowed the latter to enter the SDF-held cities of Manbij and Kobani in order to dissuade a Turkish attack on those cities as part of the cross-border offensive by Turkish and Turkish-backed Syrian rebels. The Syrian Army also deployed in the north of Syria together with the SDF along the Syrian-Turkish border and entered into several SDF-held cities such as Ayn Issa and Tell Tamer. Following the creation of the Second Northern Syria Buffer Zone the SDF stated that it was ready to merge with the Syrian Army if when a political settlement between the Syrian government and the SDF is achieved.
Syrian civil laws are valid in the region if they do not conflict with the Constitution of the autonomous region. One example for amendment is personal status law, which in Syria is based on Sharia and applied by Sharia Courts, while the secular autonomous region proclaims absolute equality of women under the law, allowing civil marriage and banning forced marriage, polygamy and underage marriage.
A new criminal justice approach was implemented that emphasizes restoration over retribution. The death penalty was abolished. Prisons house mostly people charged with terrorist activity related to ISIL and other extremist groups. A September 2015 report of Amnesty International stated that 400 people were incarcerated by the region’s authorities and criticized deficiencies in due process of the judicial system of the region. It is likely a higher number.
The justice system in the region is influenced by Abdullah Öcalan’s Libertarian Socialist ideology. At the local level, citizens create Peace and Consensus Committees, which make group decisions on minor criminal cases and disputes as well as in separate committees resolve issues of specific concern to womens’ rights like domestic violence and marriage.
At the regional level, citizens (who need not be trained jurists) are elected by the regional People’s Councils to serve on seven-member People’s Courts. At the next level are four Appeals Courts, composed of trained jurists. The court of last resort is the Regional Court, which serves the region as a whole. Separate from this system, the Constitutional Courtrenders decisions on compatibility of acts of government and legal proceedings with the constitution of the region (called the Social Contract).
Charter of the social contract in Rojava (Syria)
Preface :
We the peoples of the areas of self-administration of Democratic Kurds, Arabs and Assyrians (Assyrian Chaldeans, Arameans), Turkmen, Armenians, and Chechens, by our free will have announced this to materialize justice, freedom and democracy in accordance with the principle of ecological balance and equality without discrimination on the basis of race, religion, creed ,doctrine or gender, to achieve the political and moral fabric of a democratic society in order to function with mutual understanding and coexistence within diversity and respect for the principle of self-determination of peoples, and to ensure the rights of women and children, the protection defense and the respect of the freedom of religion and belief.
The areas of the democratic self-management, does not accept the concept of state nationalism, military and religious. It accepts the centralized management , central rule and it is open to the forms of compatibility with the democratic and pluralistic traditions, to enable all social groups , cultural identities , the Athenian and national to express themselves through their organizations, and respect the Syrian border and human rights charters and preserve civil and international peace. And to carry out the articles of the social contract , and to construct the democratic society through the self-management which includes the social justice , and in order to build the civil society ,all the goals of the consistent of Kurds, Arabs , Assyrians, Armenians, Chechens and others , the democratic self-management society have united according to the basis of unity in diversity, and has agreed to the will of the rest of the Syrian People’s constituents in order to make the areas of the Democratic Self- Management within the democratic multiple Syria as a political and administrative system for society and to represent this will and achieve these goals we have put and clarified this contract.
First Part
General principles:
Article 1:
This contract is called the Charter of social contract to the democratic self-management (in the provinces of AL Jazera –Koubany -Afrin), the preamble to the social contract of democratic self-mangment are an integral part of this contract
Article 2:
A. people are the source of authorities and the sovereignty exercised through institutions and elected assemblies, and not to any contradiction of the social contract of the democratic self-management .
B-The source and basis of the legitimacy of the people’s councils and administrative bodies in society is based on the democratic principle and does not account for any individual or unique group in its location.
Article 3:
a- Syria is a free democratic independent country, with a pluralistic, federal parliamentary compromise system.
b-provinces of democratic autonomy are (Al-jezera , Kobanay , Afrin) .And they are part of Syria geographically .The city of Qameshlo is the Center of the democratic self –mangment in Al-jezera province.
c- The Province of Al-jezera is shared among Arabs , Kurds , Assyrians, Armenians, Chechens, and adherents of Islam ,Christianity and azidet . The relationship between the nationalities and religions is on the principle of fraternity ,partnership and coexistence.
The Structure of The Democratic Self –Mangment
in the province.
Article 4:
1–The Legislative Council 2- The executive council 3- The judicial council 4- The higher Commission of elections
2. the Supreme Constitutional Court. 5. The local councils
Article 5:
The city of Qamishlo is the centre of Al-jezera district and its administration.
Article 6:
All members and democratic mangment’s are equal in front of the law in their rights and duties.
Article 7:
Any city or geographical area in Syria has the right to join the democratic mangment county , after accepting the social contract.
Article 8:
ِِAll the counties of The Democratic self – mangment have the right in directing the local affairs and form its administration and departments by its own free will, and exercise all rights in a manner consistent with the articles of the social contract of democratic self – mangment .
Article 9:
The official languages of the Al-jezera province is Kurdish, Arabic, Assyrians with ensuring education for children of other components in their mother tongue.
Article 10:
The Democratic self-management departments bind not to interfere in the internal affairs of other States, and take into account the principles of good neighborhoods and work on solving conflicts peacefully.
Article 11:
Areas of Democratic self – management have a flag , a logo and an anthem which are defined by a law.
Article 12:
This self – management is a model of the administration of the democratic autonomy in Syria, and is part of the future Syria which must be based on the system of political decentralization, considering that federalism is the best political system for Syria, and regulating the relationship between the Department and the Centre on this basis.
Part two
Basic Principles:
Article 13:
This contract ensures the principle of the separation of legislative, judicial and executive authorities .
Article 14:
Based self – management binds the principle of transitional justice by removing all the projects and policies of discrimination against the population of the Department, left by successive Governments and dictatorships, and compensate them fair compensation.
Article 15:
People Protection Units is the only national institution responsible for defending the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the provinces, and is serving people’s welfare, and the protection of its national security, taking the legal right as a principle and defining its mission and its relationship with the central forces act according to a law taken by the Legislative Council of the self – management , supporting civil departments to face any serious internal security public order if necessary. And issuing orders to units by the General command of the people’s protection units.
The areas of The Democratic self-management has the internal body represented by the public administration of Al -asaish.
Article 16:
The text prohibits laws to fortify any act or administrative decision of judicial oversight.
Article 17:
The Charter of the social contract ensures that the effective participation of youth in political and administrative life is ensured in all laws.
Article 18:
There is no crime and no punishment without a legal text.
Article 19:
There is no tax and no draw without a legal text.
Article 20:
The Covenants and international conventions for human rights are an essential part and complements this contract .
Part III
Rights and freedoms:
Article 21:
The self-management ensures the human rights and his supreme values in accordance with the international covenants and conventions, and considers freedom the most precious thing that human individuals and groups own
Article 22:
The Department adopts the International Bill of human rights, the International Covenant on Civil and political rights and the cultural, social, economic and other relevant instruments as an integral part of this Charter.
Article 23:
A-All have the right to life according to the birth identity (ethnic, religious, ideological, traditional sexist , cultural , linguistic( .
B-everyone has the right to life which is commensurate with the environmental balance in the community.
Article 24:
Every individual or group has the freedom of opinion, thought, conscience, and expression of itself, as long as they do not exceed the ethical community structure and does not endanger civil peace and do not aim at exclusion and hegemony.
Article 25:
A. The personal liberty is inviolable and no one may be arrested.
B-Human dignity shall not be tortured mentally or physically and that who does that will be punished himself.
Providing a decent life for the prisoners to make prison a place for rehabilitation and reform not a place for punishment.
Article 26:
The right to life is fundamental and inviolable in this contract under which the death penalty is abolished.
Article 27:
Women have the right to exercise political, social, economic, cultural and all areas of life.
Article 28:
Women have the right to organize themselves, and eliminate all forms of discrimination on grounds of gender.
Article 29:
This contract ensures the right of children, prevent child labour , exploiting and torturing them psychologically and physically, and marrying them at a young age.
Article 30:
This contract guarantees every citizen:
1- The right to security, safety and stability.
2- Free and compulsory education at the elementary level .
3- The right to work and adequate housing, social security and health.
4- The protection of motherhood and childhood.
5- Ensuring the health and social care for disabled people , the elderly and people with special needs.
Article 31:
All citizens have free religion and belief, and should not be politicized and used as a tool to instigate and sow discord.
Article 32:
A. This contract ensures the right to form parties and associations, trade unions, civil society organizations and membership in accordance with the laws governing them.
–This contract ensures the protection of social and cultural diversity of the population management, and enriches the culture of social and political freedoms and of economic activities.
The religion alyazidet ,is a religion by it self and is followed only the right to rate regulation of social life, religious and personal status laws.
Article 33:
This contract guarantees freedom of media, press, publishing, and organizes its work.
Article 34:
Citizens have freedom of expression and peaceful protest and strike in accordance to the law.
Article 35:
Everyone is free to access to information , knowledge and artistic activities.
Article 36:
Everyone has a right to vote and to stand for all organizations, institutions and this shall be regulated by a law.
Article 37:
Every human being has the right to seek asylum and refugee politics, and he may not be returned without his consent.
Article 38:
This contract guarantees the principle of equal opportunities for all citizens of democratic management.
Article 39:
Wealth and natural resources are public wealth of the society and its investment and management and treating conditions are regulated by a law.
Article 40:
Land and public properties in the areas of democratic management belong to people and how to deal with and invest them is regulated by a law.
Article 41:
Everyone has the right to own property and private possession is protected, and nobody is deprived one dealing with it except in accordance with the law and it is not eviscerated except for the public benefit requirement but under the condition of compensation, fair compensation if he leaves his property.
Article 42:
The economic system in the areas of democratic management works on an equitable and sustainable global development based on the development of scientific and technological capabilities, which aim at ensuring the humanitarian needs and ensure a decent standard of living for all citizens, through the increasing production and efficiency, and ensure a participatory economy while promoting competition in accordance to the principle of democratic management “Each according to his work”, and prevent monopoly and apply social justice, ensuring the shapes of the national ownership of the means of production, and preserving the rights of workers and consumers, protecting environment and strengthening the national sovereignty.
Article43:
Every citizen has the right to move and emigrate and the freedom to travel.
Article 44:
Enumerating the rights and freedoms in this contract should not be interpreted that it had been limited .
Part IV
The Project of the Democratic Autonomy
The Legislative Council:
Article 45 :
The Supreme Legislature in the democratic management, is elected by the people by direct, secret ballot, and the duration of the course is / four / years.
Article 46:
The first meeting will be held on the 16th day following the announcement of the final results in all areas by the higher Commission of elections and the President of the temporary Executive Council convened the first meeting of the elected Legislative Council, and if the first meeting is not held for compelling reasons, the President of the temporary Executive Council determines another date to be held during fifteen days, and the quorum will be attained by (50 +1) attendants (fifty plus one) of the total, and the oldest member of the Legislative Council chairs the first meeting where the sharing presidency and the co-chairs and are elected. The meetings are public unless necessity demands another thing according to what its rules of procedure stipulate.
Article 47:
The number of members of the Legislative Council is one member for every fifteen thousand population representing all regions ,towns and villages in the areas of self-management, in proportion not less than 40% (forty percent) of the sexes according to the election law which takes into account of the positive discrimination of Syriac component representation, and the representation of youth in the election lists.
Article 48:
1-. No member of the Legislative Council elected has the right to run for more than two consecutive terms.
2-. Legislative Council may be extended in exceptional cases at the request of one quarter of the members or at the request of the Office of the President of the Council for six months and with the consent of two thirds of the members of the Council.
Article 49:
The voter age is not less than eighteen years, and the age of a candidate for Parliament is not less than 22 years, and conditions for candidacy and election are set in accordance to a special law.
Article 50:
The member of the council enjoys the parliamentary immunity during the time of his membership , and is not asked about the opinions he shows, and he may not be prosecuted legally without the authorization of the Council, except in case of flagrante crime and informing the Office of the Council.
Article 51:
The combination with the membership of the Council and any public, private, or any other profession is not allowed , and his job is suspended once he makes the constitutional oath, and he has the right to return to his job once his membership ends with retaining his full functionality rights.
Article 52:
For each of the provinces of the autonomous local councils are formed through direct elections.
Article 53:
The functions of the Legislative Council:
• Establish rules governing the work of the Council and restructuring it .
• Enact legislation and proposed regulations from the local committees and councils and organizations.
• Control over administrative and executive bodies and questioning them .
• Ratification of international agreements and treaties.
• Grants and no confidence in the Executive Council or one of its members.
• The Declaration of a State of war and peace.
• Ratification of the appointment of members of the Supreme Constitutional Court.
• Adoption of the general budget.
• Establish general policy and development plans.
• Approving and granting amnesty.
• Adoption of the statement by the Executive Board.
• Identify areas of democratic autonomy and the relationship between them and the Centre by a law.
Part V
The Executive Council
Article 54:
District Governor:
A. The provincial Governor and the Executive Council of democratic autonomy exercise the executive authority on behalf of the people within the limits set forth in the Charter of the social contract.
B- The candidate to the post of Governor of the province requires:
1. to be thirty-fifth-year completely.
2. to be Syrian and of the citizens of the regions of the province.
3. to enjoy civil rights and is governed by an offence prejudicial to honor and value received.
C –To run for the Governor of the province is as follows:
1-The President of the Legislative Council elected invites for the election of a Governor after the first meeting of the Legislative Council by 30 days.
2-Requests for nomination are applied to the Supreme Court, and are examined and a decision on their acceptance or not acceptance is put within 10 days after the deadline of registration.
3-The Legislative Council shall elect the Governor, the winner, the candidate who gets the position (50 + 1) of the number of members of the Legislative Council.
4-If no candidate receives the required majority is competition among the candidates obtaining the highest number of votes and a Governor who gets the most votes on the second ballot.
5- The term of Governor is four years from the date of its legal oath.
6-. The Governor’s says the legal oath in front of the Legislative Council before exercising his functions.
7-. The Governor called one Deputy or more, authorizing him, lead attorney oath before Governor after the legislature.
8- If any thing prevents the Governor to continue the exercise of his functions, one his deputies represents him.
9- In case the governor’s and his two deputies are empty for any reason , his tasks are given to the sharing presidency of the Legislative Council.
10- The Governor resigned in a letter addressed to the Legislative Council.
D-The ruler’s authorities and functions
1-The ruling ensures respect for the Charter of the social contract and the regular work of the public authorities and the protection of the national unity and sovereignty.
2-The Governor has to name the President of the Executive Council.
3-The Governor shall approve the laws approved by the Legislative Council, and issue decisions and orders and decrees in accordance with the law.
4- The Governor has to invite the newly elected Legislative Council to convene within fifteen days from the announcement of the election results.
5- The Governor has to grant medals.
6- The Governor has to declare a special forgiveness on the recommendation of the Executive Council .
E-the Governor is responsible in front of the people through his representatives in the Legislative Council. And the Legislative Council has the right to submit him to the Supreme Constitutional Court in the case of treason or onto an offence prejudicial or integrity desalination.
The Executive Council :
The Executive Council is the highest executive and administrative body in the Democratic self-management and is responsible in front of the Legislative Council in its scope and the implementation of the laws, resolutions, decrees issued by the Legislative Council and judicial institutions and coordinates work among the organizations of the self-management.
Article 55:
The Executive Council is consisted of a Chairman and a number of the Deputies and organizations.
Article 56:
The party or bloc winning a majority of seats in the Legislative Council are asked to form the Executive Council within one month from the date of assignment, and has to obtain the confidence of at least (50 + 1) of the members of the Legislative Council.
Article 57:
The Executive Council’s term is four years and it can not take more than two consecutive terms.
Article 58:
The President of the Executive Council may choose some advisers of the Legislative Council.
Article 59:
The Chancellor is the head of one of the bodies in the Executive Council.
Article 60:
The formation and organization of the work of the Department and the determination of the relationship between the departments and the other organizations is done in accordance with a law.
Article 61:
After the formation of the Executive Council and granting the trust it issues a report setting out its agenda for the next phase, and it is obliged to implement it during the session of the Executive Council after an approval by the Legislative Council.
Article 62:
The selection of staff in special grades of agents and representatives of democratic autonomy, is done through the nomination of the competent authority and the approval of the Executive Council and the Legislative Council.
Local administration Councils:
1- The districts of the democratic autonomy is consisted of administrative units and are preserved by the management and make the necessary adjustments when necessary.
2- The organization of the local administration units is based on the application of the principle of decentralization of powers and responsibilities, and shows the relationship of these units with the law of the administration of the province and the financial revenues and control over their work, as well as the manner of appointment or the election of its Presidents and their specializations and the specialisations of the Chairmen of its affairs .
3-Local administration units have to elect the councils, secretly and directly .
Part VI
The Judicial Council:
Article 63:
The independence of the judiciary is the base of justice and represents the conscience and morals of society and ensures speedy disposition of cases by the competent courts.
Article 64:
The accused is innocent until proven guilty by a court concluded.
Article 65:
Gender representation in all institutions of the Judiciary Council is of not less than 40% (forty %).
Article 66:
The right of defense is sacred and inviolable at all stages of an investigation and trial.
Article 67:
The judge mayn’t be removed unless by a decision of the Court of Justice.
Article 68:
Judgments and judicial decisions are issued on behalf of the people.
Article 69:
A refrain from execution or implementation of a crime punishable by law.
Article 70:
Not trying civilians in front of military courts, and creating special or private courts.
Article 71:
No violation of housing and special places may not be searched except by judicial authorization.
Article 72:
Everyone has a right to a fair and public trial.
Article 73:
Detain personal freedom without clues is an offence punishable by law.
Article 74:
For each of the error or omission damaged as a result of the staff of the departments and institutions and administrative bodies while observing their right to claim equitable compensation in front of the competent courts.
Article 75:
The Judicial Council is regulated by law.
Title VII
The higher Commission of elections
Article 76:
It is an independent body competent to regulate the deserving of public affairs and composed of a number of members in each province consisting of 18 members appointed by the Legislative Council.
1-decisions on The higher Commission of elections are made by eleven votes.
2-The members of this body can not candidate for the Legislative Council.
3- The higher Commission of elections election determines the dates and posting of elections, and receives requests of candidate for the Legislative Council who meet the requirements for nomination.
4-The Commission considers, as indicated in article 50 on the candidate to the Legislative Council for the purpose of certification of candidates, a judicial authority decide on election appeals submitted to it.
5-The work of the higher Commission of elections is done under the supervision of the Court and representatives of civil society organizations and observers from the United Nations if possible.
6- The High Commission invites candidates to the Electoral College at a determined declared date by this Commission , and declaring the accepted names for nomination of representatives of regions and localities to the Legislative Council, under the supervising of the Commission itself, assisted by the (Court of Justice)
Section VIII
The Supreme Constitutional Court:
Article 77:
A. It consists of seven members, one of whom is a Chairman, proposed by the Presidency of the Legislative Council, and their competence, experience and integrity of judges, law professors and lawyers, with practical experience not less than fifteen years.
B-it is not permissible to combine membership of the Supreme Constitutional Court and took the Executive or legislature, the law specifies other acts which cannot be combined with the membership of the Court.
c-The duration of the membership of the Supreme Constitutional Court is four years renewable once.
Article 78:
The functions of the Supreme Constitutional Court
1-The interpretation of the principles of the Constitution.
2- Consideration of the constitutionality of laws enacted by the Legislative and Executive Councils decisions.
3-Disputes concerning the application of this Constitution between the legislative, judicial and Executive.
4-Trialing the provincial Governor and any member of the Legislative and the Executive Councils in case of breach of any principle of this Charter.
5- Taking its decisions by majority vote.
Article 79:
A Supreme Constitutional Court Member cannot be dismissed except only because of the integrity, and the court has a law regulating its functioning.
Article 80:
The Supreme Constitutional Court has the observation on the constitutionality of laws as follows:
1- Consideration of the constitutionality of the law and in accordance with the following:
A. If 20% of Legislative Council members object on the constitutionality of a law before its promulgation, this stops it until the Court deals with it at a period of fifteen days from the date of registration of the objection, and if the law is characterized by urgency the Court shall take a decision within seven days.
B-if 20% of Legislative Council members object on the constitutionality of a legislative decree within fifteen days following the date of submission to the council , the Court will take a decision within 15 days from the date of the registration of the objection.
C-If the Court decided to break the law or decree and regulations of the Constitution, it will be void as contrary to constitutional texts retroactively, and without any effect.
2- Consideration of the constitutionality of law and decision in accordance with the following:
A. If an opponent in challenging the constitutionality of provisions of the law applied by the Court is in question with its decision, the Court of appeal has to order a new payment and requires to decide on the appeal, suspending the proceedings and referred to the Supreme Constitutional Court.
B- the Supreme Constitutional Court decision on payment within 30 days from the date of entry.
Part IX
General Rules
Article 81:
This contract is implemented in the transition phase of the self-management , which is modified by the approval of two thirds of the members of the Legislative Council.
Article 82:
This contract is displayed on the Provisional Legislative Council for discussion and endorsement.
Article 83:
Neither of the other nationality can serve as Governor and Chairman of councils and Councilors and members of the Supreme Constitutional Court.
Article 84:
This contract ensures that an appropriate solution to the consequences of decisions and decrees and special laws with a law.
Article 85:
Elections to form the first Legislative Council under this contract is carried out after four months from the date of the approval and ratification by the Provisional Legislative Council and it has the right to extend this period, taking into account the circumstances.
Article 86:
The Constitutional Oath of the Democratic Autonomy.
I swear by Almighty God to respect the Charter of the social contract and its laws, and to keep the welfares of the people and their freedoms and safeguard the safety and security of areas of the democratic autonomy, freedom and right of protection, and to work to achieve social justice in the belief of the democratic nation.
Article 87:
The proportion of the representation of both genders in all institutions, administrations and bodies is of at least 40%.
Article 88:
The work with the current Syrian Ordinances (criminal and civil) in a manner consistent with the provisions and articles of this contract .
Article 89:
In case of a conflict between the laws of self management and central management the Supreme Constitutional Court for the province considers that and applies the law of the fittest for self-management.
Article 90:
This contract ensures the protection of the environment and improves the participation of citizens and considers the preserve of the environment as a moral and a sacred national duty .
Article 91:
The new curriculum removes policies of exclusion , chauvinistic and racist concepts and turnover in notions of enriching human and tolerance values, and promotes the concepts of cultural and social diversity.
A- The new curriculum include the definition of districts , their people , history ,geography , landmarks and wealth.
B- strengthen curricula, the media and the scientific institutions of human rights culture and scientific culture.
Article 92:
A. This contract includes the concept of separation of the State and religion.
B. The freedom of belief is absolute and respect all religions and sects and guarantee freedom of worship under the protection of, that is not in breach of public order.
Article 93:
A-A balanced development of the regions culturally, socially and economically a cornerstone of unit administrative institutions and the stability of the system.
B-the illegality of any contradiction Charter live together.
Article 94:
Emergency:
The Governor of the provision declares the state of emergency and cancels it with a decision at the Executive Council made in the meeting chaired by the Executive Council by a two-thirds majority of its members and has to expose it to the Legislative Council in its first meeting for authentication and the law shows the special rules for that .
Article 95:
The Executive Council Bodies
1-The body of the external relations .
2- The body of defence and self-protection
3-The internal body
4- The body of Justice
5-The local and municipal governing body’s Committee of statistics and planning
6-The body of Financial authority: followed by a General Secretariat for banks 2 – Secretariat General of customs
Understanding the Theoretical Basis of our Struggle
What Does this Mean to You?
This question is always asked at the beginning of each lesson.
It is an old Israelite question from the Passover Seder from the rebellious son or daughter. We are beginning a small Academy class. Training together to establish the parameters of answering that very same question. A sort of “proof of relevance” for the time we will take from your life, which cannot ever be returned.
In short, this is a course which will give you a new way to look at the world, your world and my world which is actually dying. You would almost have to be an ostrich with your head in the very sand not not know some of that. Most of the people on earth are very poor and maldeveloped. Most of the resources are well on their way to being exhausted. The actual temperature of the planet is rising as if to kill us through a fever. There are many wars and pandemics and incredible inequality.
However it is not your shame, guilt or even rage we play to right now. It is a desire on the personal level to have a Free Life. Your consciousness and your level of awareness, as well as your level of political indoctrination are really not the subject matter of this training program. This course is geared toward those who were born awake and never went to sleep. But it is your very self-interest cultivated in Capitalist Modernity, the governing ideology of the World System in the 21st century that we do play to. Your sense of responsibility is always to be secondary to your motivation. Your personal willingness to trade hours of your life to listen and learn and ask questions is a bridge of course to action.
This lesson is devoted to ideology. Technology and philosophy of thought. We ask you to watch, read and participate not because you believe in the collective. Or because of the terror the world to come might bring your progeny. No, because you wish to better your life. Because you seek a way to gain a set of material and social rights, attain a position of greater security that is simply going to be impossible working yourself to death all life long.
It is just not true that by simple virtue of hard work you will set yourself and your family free. That is actually the logic of the German Nazis, posted on their work camp gates. Depending on where you live in the year 2020, you are likely to have been born into a vast open air work camp called a country. There are 206 of them, even in the top developed 40 life is hard. The idea of a “Middle Class” is an illusion, as is the idea that one state, or group of states can seal itself off from the others is an illusion. The victory march of Euro-American Capitalism which supposedly began in 1989, was just an enormous illusion. Especially for all non-Europeans. We train you now to examine truth into its innermost parts and pursue a line of questioning
We are in the business of developing a united paradigm. For achieving a set rights, freedoms and equality that have virtually never existed for our kind. A paradigm that will allow humanity a type of collective action we have never unleashed before. A way of organizing ourselves in a way that take back a human way of living that was denied us.
If you do not develop for yourself a world view and philosophy rooted in emancipation, justice and collective action then you will be sold an alternative ideology based on slavery, underdevelopment and death. Or worse be so numbed, distracted and apathetic that you basically not only don’t care when other people die, you don’t really care what happens to your own life.
What is an Ideology?
An ideology is a body of theory explaining social, historical, economic and political relationships. Based on the writings of varying social theorists, philosophers and economists ideology establishes a paradigm of reality and change (a rationale for how change comes about in the world), advocates systems of governance (structures of rule both local and international), outlines social policy (specific laws that establish societal norms) and codifies relationships between individuals, societies, corporations, and states. An ideology explains, or tries to explain the chaos in the world of the real.
Everyone has some kind of Political Paradigm. Normally established by their parents, early education and religious values, or by the media sources of their state. An ideology is more scientific than a paradigm, more dogmatic than basic learned political values and beliefs. An ideology uses elements of history to establish a narrative. This narrative is then cultivated to introduce new values, new modes of behavior and new ways of understanding reality. By not having an ideology, or paradigm most people become frustrated, and then religious. Which is to say they absolve themselves of this world and imagine justice and peace only in another world, which absolutely no one has come back from to verify.
Thus all ideology relies on establishing its own “Subjective Version of History”, its own interpretation of largely unknown previous epochs, current events and future possibilities.
“Those who control the past, control the future: those who control the present, control the past.”Eric Blair (George Orwell), British Political Novelist, 1984.
What is Our Objective History?
According to theorists such as Foucault, we have absolutely no way to establish any objective history before sometime in the mid 17th century. That is because there are very few competing narratives. Usually history was simply commissioned by the ruler or rulers of the victorious state.
There is very little about history we can ever say is “OBJECTIVE”, non biased. Virtually every single state has a contradictory narrative or set of narratives on historical events. There is both national bias, and historical bias. National bias is the distortion of a war, or event to subscribe importance to a current ruler, ruling parties paradigm. Historical bias is taking poorly documented, poorly understood events and prescribing importance and meaning, although very few accounts remain of such events.
Thus almost all history, even history presented in this training book is a type of propaganda made to alter or reinforce your political paradigm, I.e. your ideology.
An example of National Bias, for example is when certain historical events are included and others omitted or not disclosed. Such as when a history book in USA talks about the Berlin Airlifts, Cuban Missile Crisis and Russian intervention in Afghanistan, but mostly omits the Cuban Revolution, Cuban/Russian support for Angolan-Namibian Independence and the defeat of South African Apartheid, and fails to mention the United States killed 2 million people in Vietnam. Both Russian and the US have clear Cold War narratives they wish their people to adopt.
Another example would be Egyptian and Israeli history books on the war of 1973. The clearest cases of NATIONAL BIAS are found in high school level history text books of each state.
An example of Historical Bias would be an American text book that ignores that while 450,000 Americans died in WW2 21 million Russians did during the same period. An American student is taught the Allies defeated the Axis, but distorts the burden each group paid in lives.
Another example of historical bias would be the importance of Roman Law and Greek Philosophy to the modern world, but to not teach Confucianism or East Asian Philosophy. The clearest case of historical bias would be whether or not to use any of the Torah/Bible as a reference to actual historical events.
National bias, places loyalty to the nation state, its patriots and leaders at the center of the paradigm and excludes or down plays the importance of other rival states. Historical bias basically fabricates and twists major events in a way that re-imagines their role and importance.
Historical Materialism is a Marxist historical focus on “material conditions” over ideals or spiritual developments. Marx and Engels asserted that a society’s mode of production, how it organizes labor and productive forces, the relations of people to production is the single most important factor in determining a society’s development.
Thus the Superstructure of institutions, laws and customs had to be built upon an economic base. This superstructure is in fact an ideological expression of how production is organized.
The trajectory so far of human modes of production have included primitive communism (tribal communalism), slave societies, feudalism, mercantilism and capitalism.
In general all ideologies throughout all time can fit within one or more of these twelve sets of general sub-classifications. Establishing differing elements of their policy poles, advocacy of certain relationships between workers and Modes of Production and their varying systems of governance. It is important to state that not all political scientists are in agreement about what parties where in which classifications, at what times.
The Social Democrats vs. The Democratic Socialists
Authoritarian vs. Populist
State Capitalism, Neo-Liberalism and Other Styles of Modern Oligarchy
Democratic Confederalism
TRIBALISM
Before recorded history, which is to say Egyptian hieroglyphs, Babylonian Cuneiform, Mayan ruins and much later Dead Sea Scrolls we can deduce from cave paintings and the characteristics of remote tribes not in contact with modernity; that the earliest human organization before the creation of nation states, mass agriculture and nationalism was varying forms of hunter gathering, nomadic tribes. It is not useful to create a golden age around this period, or discount it as barbaric because until the “creation of Gods and Kings”, this was the dominant mode of human organization for over 10,000 years.
The tribe, a wandering ethnic unit persisted in some form until the widespread enslavement of the Africans in 1500-1800. However, as a dominant form of organization it was replaced after the Neolithic Age by the beginning of the State system. Large, unified agricultural polities ruled by a priestly class that would wholly transform every aspect of human life.
It is actually impossible to know how society was organized in the Pre-agricultural hunter gathering societies that existed before 7000 BCE in the Neolithic Age and before. We have reason to suspect that social units were much smaller in scale, much less gender dominated by men, animist/ polytheistic and reasonably directly democratic in some regards. There were likely far less specialized economic roles, far looser conceptions of private property and limited to no agricultural cultivation.
During this period there were no known hierarchical class structures or capital accumulation. No rigid conceptions of Private Property.
The RELIGIOUS VS. The SECULAR PARADIGMS
For almost all of recorded history political leaders claimed that a God-head, divine force or forces gave them the ability or mandate to rule. It was not until the 16th century did any secular parties begin to emerge and not until 1776 in the USA, 1789 in France and 1812 in Latin America did any secular parties take full power. Today only two countries Shi’a Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia are fully functional Islamic Theocracies. Israel also maintains some very specific religious laws in its territory.
Beginning in the fertile crescent, the area of modern Iraq and Iran (Babylon) in the year 7000 BCE a large scale process began of agriculture, private property accumulation, trade and the construction of Ziggurats.
A Ziggurat was a massive temple where at the very top levels supposedly dwell the ancient Gods. On the level below it is an administrative center for high priests. On the level below that was a vast market, a depot for surplus and a production center for skilled workers.
This was the beginning of both capital accumulation, rigid social classes and the centralized state.
Thus we are able to deduce in fairly objective historical analysis that from the year 7000 BCE to 1700, around 8,700 years the dominant polity was a theocracy, a hereditary monarch, a divine monarchy or some kind of monarchy supported by priests of an aristocracy.
Secular rule, with very few outliers, has only been a reality in the past 300 years. Experiments with Retrograde Socialism, mostly huge bloody failures, are only 100 years old beginning in 1917.
The fundamental difference between a Religious and Secular Party is where they derive their theory of change and governance. A religious Party believes they represent a divine mandate to impose religious laws on a nation. A Secular Party bases its legitimacy for governance on a specific ideology, rule of law and a constitution.
Historic examples of Religious Governance include the Ziggurats of Babylon, the Egyptian Pharaohs, Chinese Dynastic Rule, Hindu Kingdoms in India and virtually all of the Medieval European Monarchies.
Modern examples of religious parties are Torah Judaism/Shas in Israel, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Ayatollah/I.R.G.C. Regime in Iran.
HEREDITARY MONARCHY, CONSTITUTIONAL MONARCHY &
THE ARISTOCRACY
An Aristocracy is an established hierarchy of land holding wealth and nobility arranged by title around a King, supported by a priesthood or Clergy.
Until the British Magna Carta, there were no limits or checks to a King’s Power. Until the American Revolution there had been no political formations divested of such authority. Until the French and Russian Revolutions; there had been no precedent to remove, place on trial and subsequently execute a King.
The Hereditary Monarchy is a biological line of succession normally along the male line for autocratic regimes, generally though not exclusively deriving their mandate from a deity, or religious cult.
The Constructional Monarchy developed in England now common to all surviving Monarchies in Europe, checks the power of the Monarchy with a constitutional supported Parliament, largely relegating the Monarchic to ceremonial roles.,
Most monarchies are supported by, or are regulated by a lesser nobility or aristocratic class. A stratification of title and power by rank. In most instances these two elements of society are breeding grounds for intrigue against the monarchy. Historically it is rare that a Monarch is ever deposed in favor of aristocratic rule, proto-Oligarchy, kleptocracy and aristocracy usually disguise themselves behind a figure head.
Hereditary Monarchy is where a King passes power to a prince, typically their first surviving male heir. In the numerous instances where pretenders to the thrown, illegitimate children, assassination, or failure to produce a male heir interrupted the Monarchy, new nobility were often put in place or less direct ascension occurred.
It is usually the case that a priestly class supports a theological claim for a divine blessing on the Monarchy. The Monarchy thus uses its centralized power to enrich the priestly class and aristocracy. Typically nothing short of foreign invasion and prolonged occupation can dislodge a Monarchy.
The most frequent challenge in the past 200 years has been through Military Coup (African and Arab States) or Popular Revolutions (France, Russia, Iran).
The development results of Monarchy and Aristocracy is generally to establish some form of Feudalism as a mode of production where large segments of the population are bound to the land as Serfs or Peasants. Typically miserable, powerless and illiterate, these serfs or peasants have no rights and no freedom of movement.
MILITARY DICTATORSHIPS & JUNTAS
It is not unheard of for a Warlord or General to assume somewhat consensual power and take on the formation of a hereditary monarchy. Such as varying Romans rulers, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and far later Napoleon.
However in recent decades all that is typically required is for the military to stage a coup. In this case an officer will set themselves up as a dictator/president or will rule the country through a council of officers; a Junta.
Such arrangements are very rarely ever going to produce well functioning governments. They were brute force usurpers and have no legitimizing mandate besides the threat of force. They are generally inundated with high levels of cronyism, lack of vision and rigid chain of command found in the military that generated them.
There are virtually no examples of a Juntas or Military Dictator producing useful, helpful or transparent governance.
That then said the largest contiguous human empire was that formed by Mongol Warlords; around a quarter of the world’s surface area. But what is taken by force is relinquished by force such is the nature of violence.
THE LEFT AND THE RIGHT
Left Wing and Right Wing are highly SUBJECTIVE TERMS, differentiated state by state. Left and Right mostly divide along liberal/ conservative lines in their relationships to social policy, the economy, defense, markets and private property.
They tend to differentiate a politician or parties policy stance, particularly in regards to private property, taxation, social spending, trade, foreign policy and immigration.
Liberal Ideology generally advocates using a larger portion of the tax base to fund public social programs such as schools, hospitals, public housing and welfare programs. Liberal ideology tends to be more inclusive of minority groups, women and homosexuals. It is always pro-capitalist, but generally more responsive to public policies that support social justice and environmental protection.
Modern examples of Liberal Parties are The Democratic Party (in U.S.A.) or the Labor Party in Great Britain.
Conservative Ideology generally wishes to spend public money from the tax base largely in defense and commercial infrastructure. It is generally majoritarian, male chauvinist, family centered and hesitant to spend money on public services. It supports privatization (the providing of government services by private industry), policing and national security, is always pro-Capitalist, and generally protective of large corporations, banks and high net worth individuals in society.
Modern examples of Conservative Parties are: The Republican Party (in USA)
In general Liberals want slightly larger government/ government spending with a rhetoric of social justice, inclusion, greater equality and a belief that good government can uplift the poor.
In general Conservatives want smaller government/ less taxation with a rhetoric of tradition, religion, family values and protections of private property and corporate welfare with a belief that national security and privatization will uplift all citizens who work hard.
Both Liberals and Conservatives have a left wing/right wing to their parties. In varying ways both liberals and conservatives are free market oriented, equally willing to engage in interstate warfare and are typically drawn from the upper classes of their societies.
The REFORMIST vs. The RADICAL PARADIGMS
What we are talking about here is the speed of an advocated social change.Radicals demanding rapid, unprecedented policy shifts, Reformers more gradual policy shifts. Radicals seek a swift break from tradition and Reformers a cautious progression. Most importantly Radicals do not require the policy shift to occur inside the established frame work of governance and Reformists do.
Radicals tend to always be more willing to resort to violence, or allow violence as a result of a policy.
The fundamental difference between a Reformist Party and a Radical Party is whether they plan to engage in the electoral process, run their candidates and then try to be elected OR do they plan to overthrow the government. A reformist party usually believes that their program is achievable through the electorate through established political channels. A radical party typically does not and seeks to use violence/force/protests/terrorism to impose its program on a country without any mandate from an established system. That established system may have little to no popular mandate to begin with.
Examples of Modern Reformist Parties are the Democratic Socialists of America and Social Democrats of Europe, examples of modern radical parties are the Kurdistan Workers Party and the Socialist Equality Party.
The REVOLUTIONARY vs. The REACTIONARY PARADIGMS
The difference between Revolutionary vs. Reactionary radical parties and their ideologies take the difference between Reformist and Radical even further. A Radical Party can be classified as “Revolutionary” by its means; I.e. Political violence and its ends; I.e. “Radical Social Policy” once in power. Which is to say policy shifts in economic, social and environmental spheres that make rapid departures from the policies of the defeated factions.
Revolutionaries can be RIGHT or LEFT, can be secular or religious. They designation can mean a break with past systems of governance, or a break with a line of policy. However, revolutionist thinking, revolutionary consciousness must depart from the established, normative traditions of the national unit and embark on a wholly new political direction. A reactionary and their parties are backwards thinking, traditionalist conquests of power.
A“Reactionary Radical” or their parties are a) right wing radical/revolutionaries or b) advocating regressive fascist social polices. Fascists and Religious Fundamentalists for instance such as the Nazi Party, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and the Klu Klux Klan. Such parties seek chauvinist, statist and nationalist futures. They are ethno/religious centrists. They look back towards a “Golden Age”, an imagined time before some fall from Eden. They are generally hateful to minorities if not outright genocidal. They seek to impose their views on all others.
Extreme reactionary theory is best called “Fascism” and is best understood by the Nazi Party of Germany (1933-1945). The “National Socialists”, imposed a radical roll back of all civil political rights, carried out genocide against minority populations (Jews, Gypsy, Homosexuals, Slavs) and planned to depopulate large segments of Russian and Ukraine for “living space” for Aryans. Their brutal and murderous rule resulted in the Second World War.
Fascism existed also in Italy, Japan and Spain but with variations on the Nazi paradigm to racially purify the earth. The Japanese carried out mass rape and pillage as part of their “East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”, the Spanish maintained their “neutral” fascism into the 1980’s.
Fascism can be Oligarchic or can be any ideology that backslides, or justifies a rapid consolidation of power. It typically devolves into some form of one man rule, is authoritarian in nature and has no regard for any rights of the citizen. It is regularly interested in foreign imperialism and ethno-centrist in its implementation.
Here linguistics plays a role. The idea of a “Revolution” is a rapid turning, connoting a rapid progress, a rapid shift in political direction. Of course many revolutions are subverted, collapse in chaos or civil war and or take on reactionary characteristics once they seize and consolidate power. Almost all of the 20th Century Revolutions associated with Third World Liberation and Socialism/Communism took on Retrograde Characteristics, movement away from progress toward toward militaristic, fascist one party rule. Since absolutely no nation that embarked on a so-called “Socialist Revolution” under the leadership of a Vanguard “Communist Party” met well established Marxist criteria; I.e. advanced industrialization and a developed bourgeoisie; all of these revolutions, without a single exception; were Revolutionary in intent, but Reactionary in their regression. Thus we refer to them as Retrograde Socialist projects.
Some which literally cost hundreds of millions of human lives; Stalinist Russia and the Great Leap Forward-Great Famine-Cultural Revolution in China. Some which devolved into such reactionary violence their democidal result bore no relationship to the ideals their founders set out to establish. Most obviously in Khmer Rouge Cambodia and the Juche Theories of North Korea.
CAPITALISTS vs. SOCIALISTS, COMMUNISTS & ANARCHISTS
Capitalism is the dominant economic order in the world today. The post-Cold War Pax-American 1989 to 2003 established a mono-polar world with Euro-American firms setting the terms for the World System. But the Pax-Americana was never accepted by either the People’ Republic of China or the Russian Federation. It was proclaimed unilaterally by America and its N.A.T.O. allies.
Although the defeat of the U.S.S.R. and the 1986 embrace of Chinese State Capitalism was held up as a proof of Communist inefficiency/ totalitarianism and ultimate defeat; over 1/3 of the human race had lived under some form of Retrograde Socialist country, and Marx remains the discourse of critique. It remains the theory of change most relevant to secular opposition to Capitalism. The only nations with a Communist Party ruling them are China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam. Only Cuba and Laos still attempt to enforce any normative socialist policy.
Capitalist Modernity is an economic order which has dominated the world system since the 1500s, but has acquired a universal dominance since 1991 through the ideology of Neo-Liberalism and Globalization and the defeat of the U.S.S.R. and retrograde Communist satellites in 1989-1991.
The narrative of Globalization is that technology + capital + entrepreneurial spirit will make the world safer, freer and more safe.
Capitalism involves investors, capital and financial firms (Corporations), utilizing wealth to control government policy to create even greater transnational wealth. Mega-Corporations control massive portfolios of labor, industry and natural resource extraction and relentlessly exploit both the global work force and endanger the planet itself. The entire Capitalist system revolves around large banking institutions, the Internet’s ability to constantly solicit consumer engagement, technologies ability to sustain the market logistics and extractive industries; notably natural gas, coal and oil which power the entire system.
This “World System” is dominated by large firms in “Core Countries” who can use their aggregated wealth to control a political order favorable to their economic interests.
The current World System as developed as a concept map by Sociologist Emmanuel Wallerstien has been a shifting block of relationship zones dominated from a Global Core. In this period called Capitalist Modernity an economic and hegemonic shift is taking place between the E.U.-U.S.A. and the P.R.C.
Beginning with social theorists Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels in the 1850’s, articulated in the barely readable tomes of Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto, revolutionaries began to adopt varying tendencies/ or streams of left wing ideology as the primary adversarial critique of Capitalism.
In general Marx believed that society has and will progress, evolving over time from feudalism, to capitalism, to advanced capitalism, to socialism, to communism and finally to a classless, stateless society called Anarchism.
“We do not have any historical record of such a society existing, but varying theorists and historians suggest something like Anarchism existed in the Neolithic Age and in Pre-Colonial Africa.”
Varying parties and groups attempted to implement so-called “Retrograde Communist” regimes between 1917 and 1991; none from societies that had archived the requisite levels of development. Most of these regimes emerged in post-colonial societies they over threw, or feudal, or peasant societies/ under foreign occupation or amid war they came to power during.
The Cold War, or ‘Third World War” was a series of massive proxy wars fought between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. between 1945 to 1991 which resulted in Communist defeat in virtually all countries besides China, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos and North Korea.
Only Cuba and Laos maintain anything similar to a primitive Retrograde Communist system, Vietnam and China are one party State-Capitalist states run by so-called “Communist Parties”, though no modern Communist Party is very interested in Socialist Policy.
There are many Tendencies within both Socialism and Communism, as well as many actors and factions laying claim to “Real Socialism”/ “Pure Communism”; the largest ideological divides have to do with divergences amid Lenin/Stalin/Trotsky; advocating or denouncing Socialism in one State; I.e. the U.S.S.R. v. internationalism. Divergence between Stalin/Mao and Russia/China on role and importance of serfs/peasants means to rapid-industrialization. Most Parties today trace an ideological linkage to Marx-Lenin-Stalin, or Marx-Lenin-Trotsky. Or Marx-Lenin-Mao.
Some follow divergent theorists from Yugoslavia, Albanian, Cuba or Tanzania where different modals were tried, or follow intellectual theorists unsullied by the legacy of Retrograde Socialist experiments.
In short Socialism, as per Karl Marx is the stage one the way to Communism. A series of pro-working class policies that dismantle capitalist exploitation and control, replacing it with a more just and equal society. Communism, as per Marx will eventually evolve into a “Stateless/ Classless society” called Anarchism. So they are a continuum. Under Socialism there is still a state and a party to establish the policies of the transformation. The transfer of consolidated unequal wealth to communal wealth. Under Communism a more rigorous shift has occurred to a more “communal existence”, largely explained as the end of social classes and under the final stage there is no longer a need for a state.
“Anarchism”, which is according to Marx the very last stage and most advanced stage has rarely ever been successively implemented as social policy except very briefly during the Spanish Civil War in Catalonia and Russian Civil War in Ukraine. Anarchist militias are usually defeated by Communist or right wing forces rather quickly and have never held any territory long enough to attempt to govern it. Anarchism has several tendencies, I.e. ideological variants. In Anarcho-Syndicalism; the labor federations will declare a general strike and replace capitalism with confederations of labor. In Anarchic-Primitivism; a Luddite, anti-technology sentiment awaits an inevitable collapse of the world system a reversion to primitive chaos. General Anarchist antipathy to parties, hierarchy and authority structures place them quickly at violent odds with almost all other factions. They are usually annihilated by other Left groups or remain marginal in general.
The major Theorists of Anarchism are Pierre Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and Emma Goldman. Major Anarchist military mobilizations with territorial self-administration occurred in Spain during the 19030’ Civil War and the Ukraine during the Russian Civil War in the 1920’s. Both were defeated in under 3 years. In the Modern North-West Anarchists for the most part are a counter culture not even closely linked to struggles of the Working Class. The ANTIFA Movement is largely composed of such cultural anarchists.
The Anarchist theorist most responsible for developing modern civic applications of Anarchist theory was Murray Bookchin, who devised Social Ecology, Municipal Confederalism; and through his correspondence with Abdullah Ocalan; in essence caused the massive ideological redirection of the Kurdistan Workers Party away from Communism toward Anarchism; a result called “Democratic Confederalism”.
The SOCIAL DEMOCRATS vs. The DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS
From 1991 to 2001 there was a Western economist theoretical attempt to declare an “End to History”. It was crude and boorish argument that Capitalism was triumphant and no external threat to the order existed or could exist. Francis Fujiyama was the cheerleader of such Polemics.
This was not reality, only the glee of victory which was put out across Europe and America before 19 Islamic radicals carried out the 9.11 Terror Operation in September of 2001 and the American military Juggernaut was subsequently bled indefinitely in Iraq and Afghanistan in Multi-decade wars of attrition.
During this time, what was left of the left had to present an acceptable discourse for Socialism. A narration de-linked from Russia and China, a less threatening, less radical form of Marx presented in two flavors that had always existed alongside revolutionist leftism; Social Democrats and Democratic Socialism.
In Europe there has been extensive social welfare policies enacted such as single payer heath care, subsidized education, guaranteed income and environmental regulation. A social democratic ideology seeks to use a reformist method to pursue some socialist policies in certain sectors. Such as single payer universal health care, state subsidized education and guaranteeing incomes.
In essence a Social Democrat seeks to raise taxes off a Capitalist economy to fund social programs for the citizen similar to those of an ideal Socialist country, without driving out capital or capitalists.
A “Democratic Socialist”, more explicitly Socialist in their ideology seeks to use a reformist method, elections, to to pursue actual elected socialism. Such as Salvatore Allende in Chile or Mosadegh in Iran.
The major difference in that a Social Democrat doesn’t see the need to abolish most if not all forms of Capitalism while that is at least the stated goal of Democratic Socialist, none has advanced into power so far or survived long enough to show that is a viable method.
If Europe had to pay for their own defense they would not be able to afford such programs either. Such is the only useful thing President Donald Trump has ever brought to public attention.
AUTHORITARIAN v. POPULIST PARADIGMS
A Populist Party simply says what it must say, and sometimes does what it must do to remain loved by the people it champions. Populists do not have to have any highly dogmatic ideology at all, only knowing and expressing what their constituency wants to hear or see. A Populist Party is in tune to the feelings of the masses, but also can cleverly manipulate the masses by speaking to their needs while at the same time carrying out a purely ideological line.
A Populist rules by pandering to the expressed needs of the masses.
An Authoritarian Party governs with little or no regard for popular will and feedback. It governs with near total disregard for popular will and presumes to lead from a position of power that the public can neither critique or understand. It has no need to consult the public or allow the public to participate in governance. All Retrograde Socialist/Communist regimes and Fascist Regimes are Authoritarian. Most are also Totalitarian, where no feedback or critique is even legal. In fact it would be considered a grounds for detention or summary execution.
Most ideological paradigms slip into Authoritarian rule quickly during war time no matter what their proclaimed ideology may actually be.
Authoritarian rule simply means a wide gradient of systems where the public are not consulted on governance. This could be a one party state system like China, also called State Capitalist, or multi party parliamentary systems where really only one party is in power, such as Russian Federation. A monarchy, theocracy, military junta, or basic dictatorship can all be “Authoritarian”.
This ideology is beyond the Capitalist/Socialist, left/right paradigm. It simply means that there is little to no consultation with the population in ruling them.
A Populist Ideology, often confused with or called “Democracy” means that there are multiple parties, regular elections, checks and balances to power, typically a robust civil society and activist judiciary. In general populism is an ideology which panders to “giving the people what they want” while Popular ideologies have varying levels of participatory government, relatively free media and courts which citizens can achieve justice.
Most of the world’s so-called Democracies are based on the British Parliamentary System or the American Congressional system. Most have two major parties, one liberal and one conservative.
Most have branches of government which are typically an executive or presidency, a congress or parliament with two chambers and a court system. Most have term limits and regulations framed by Constitutional Law.
STATE CAPITALISM, NEOLIBERALISM
and OTHER STYLES OF MODERN OLIGARCHY
An Oligarchy is any arrangement of power, where the elites of a given state divide and control the mechanisms and levers of power. It’s superstructure may take different forms, but Oligarchy is different from Fascism, it is less obvious who the power brokers are. They disguise the centers of power. They maintain power for powers sake, nor for a grand ideological project.
The most powerful nation states in the world today are the United States of America, the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. All European powers are tied to American Hegemony and beholden to her for their defense.
The U.S.A. and its European North Atlantic Treaty Organization vassal states, including South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, New Zealand and Australia are all forms of “Neoliberal Democracy”. Because of campaign finance rules and lobbying all of these Euro-American states are still forms of Corporate Oligarchy.
The single party Technocratic Oligarchy, a Communist Party in the People’s Republic of China has been State Capitalist since 1986. People connected to the original Communists who overthrew the government in 1949 have enriched themselves in the new nation. Therefore the Red Princelings are a type of Oligarchy too, a fairy hereditary revolutionary aristocracy profiting off access to levers of one party power.
The Russian Federation is an Explicit Oligarchy formed from a merger of inner party, intelligence, military, police and mafia interests. After the fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 varying power brokers took control of formerly state assets. Vladimir Putin and the United Russia Party successfully reined these varying interests in.
“Oligarchy” simply means rule by an elite group. All three of the world’s great powers are Oligarchies of some form. In the United States these are derived from Corporate power, in China from connection to the people who staged the revolutionin 1949 and in Russia powerful criminals who seized assets when the state privatized in 1991.
“My government name is not relevant to you Hevalin, as they say.” Havalin is the plural of Hevals, multiple friends.
Says Heval Errdal, a cheeky British Jew of left wing leanings with many Kurdish friends. He sits with his old friend Ana Montgomery Campbell from Lewes, U.K. who later died a Martyr in the defense of Afrin Canton. The British pipeline begins in Birmingham. Actually hundreds of ISIS Islamists had been recruited from Birmingham. Literally many hundreds.
“You may call me by my Kurdish guerrilla name is Heval Erdal. I’m lanky and have a highly disarming grin, so say the ladies. I’m just having a kid, which is to say a laugh; the ladies don’t say nothing like that. I’m British clearly, but also part a cheeky Jew. It’s not a very well thought out part to be honest. Don’t practice any of it. I became active in the Kurdish movement protesting Turkish arms deals and attending cultural events at the centers. My working class British city had literally hundreds of Jihadists who took off for the Middle East and joined Daesh. Fuck all mate, hundreds! They took wee kids and wives with them. They thought it was the end of times. Well it had end of times properties, I’ll give it that.”
So I was always a ‘wee activist’ with politics of the progressive kind, but I love them Kurds man! They’re so awesome. Humble, principled mountain people. Leftists. Warriors. Love um! Sometime in August of 2016 I made up my mind to travel to Kurdistan and join up with the People’s Protection Units; the famous and glorious Y.P.G..
So I worked a bit more than usual. I saved up about 2,000 quid and there I had a chance to ask the right questions about who to contact, literally just an email address called YPG REVOLUTION, and I answered a bunch of questions for them. Then I was approved to go. It didn’t take nearly as long as lots of chaps complained. Britain has the second largest contribution of foreign fighters to Y.P.G./Y.P.J. right after Turkish leftists.
But life happens, you have a girlfriend you can’t bring, and you have an apartment you can’t just leave. You also have a bit of fear in you. No one wants to die! Unless you’re one of these Jihadist tossers. You make various excuses. Well not me, I don’t worry about dying. I had a pretty boring apartment. My job was bullocks. We all have bollocksy jobs so it made it easier to leave mine and go, knowing how much I hated my current situation in what Kurds call Capitalist Modernity. Also, there were brave Hevals who went in earlier, when things were more desperate and asymmetrical.
I had become friendly with Heval Helen Qerechow, whose British name was Ana Campbell via the various protests and Kurdish events. She was far more ideological than I was. She was what we called later a ‘true believer’ a committed revolutionary. Me, I just wanted to kill Daesh, and also the Turkish fascists. I wasn’t stupid to the politics mind you, but I was more of the fighterly mind set. I had set myself on a warpath. I grew up working class and I would die working class and revolution would never come home to the U.K., but if I could contribute well to the Y.P.G. and aid the Kurdish resistance then I would feel like I was a man of my word. All these years yelling about arms deals and Turkish coups all didn’t ever do much, but it was how you made friends with Hevals and aspiring Hevals. Heval in Kurdish means comrade/friend. It’s what movement people call each other affectionately and ideologically.
Actually they had met just one weekend before her self deployment to Syria. I went out with Ana and we talked a little bit about what we were risking and why were risking it. She went in about five months before me. This was maybe on the eve of.
“I’m all in the game mate, I’m just all about it. As an anarchist and as a human, this is the real deal as I see it,” Ana declared.
“I mean eye to eye sis, I agree,” I tells her.
“I mean as a woman and as an activist this seems so big, so important, how could we ever just go on and ignore this and act like we have and validity to our own fight?”
Ana always talked in big questions, rhetorical like ones for circular thinking.
“I mean are you scared?” she asks me, “I’m not scared at all.”
“No, not scared to die. Maybe scared to be tortured or maimed, but all part of a revolution I guess,” I reply.
“You have to be brave. Everyone is watching us. The Kurds and the vultures, you know they want to make up stories about why we went out there, going out there to die in a foreign war, a Kurdish war! It’s our war, it’s a last stand for idealism.”
“It’s pathetic so few leftists are going, have gone,” I say.
“No, it’s up to us to be an example of trust worthy European leftists and what we can contribute. Everything has to be about possibility not fear!”
“You’re a shining star,” I tell her.
“Serok Apo says that Womens’ leadership is what saved the P.K.K. in Qandil, and has saved the Rojava revolution.”
“Well surely it has,” I just agree with her now because I’m not ever one to argue with her on either Feminism or what Serok Apo said. She’s very ideological and I am not, so it’s easy to avoid contentious bickering.
“I’m so happy we’re both finally going,” she says.
“Yeah, good times,” I reply.
“We probably won’t see each other that often. The Y.P.J. has its own separate structures. How do you feel about that? I think I prefer the old way when we were all together.”
“I think I read they need to be able to tell the conservative Kurdish village fathers their daughters aren’t getting banged out in the P.K.K., and also because Kurdish Women’s Movement wants their own self-governing spaces.”
“Yeah both probably. But anyway we will meet up for tea and have long fireside talks about ideology like you love so much,” she smiles.
So I was scheduled to begin the Academy in Qerechow in August of 2017. I had booked a direct flight to Erbil from Heathrow. Ana was in the class before me for the Y.P.J.; Women’s Protection Units, the co-gendered womens structure.
We had both been arrested several times scuffling with the Turkish security service at this demo or that. Never did any hard time either of us. Well why should we have? We were fighting for Kurdish Freedom, for peoples’ freedom; against fascists and Islamic terrorists, the kind that lived in Birmingham and migrated to Syria with their families for the war.
Now my motives were pure, but they were not purely ideological. Apo didn’t make me do it! I just felt that Daesh was a heinous evil. I felt the Turks to be true aggressors. And I wanted to avenge the fact that so many people from my city had headed over to the enemy. An enemy which throws homos off roof tops. Kidnaps and sex enslaves young women. Commits genocide! And until the Operation Inherent Resolve I.S.I.S. was gradually taking over the entire Middle East into their “Caliphate”.
So I packed my bag and joined the volunteers. About five months after Anya went down to Rojava to join the Y.P.J. The proud, inglorious 500 or so who ended up with the Y.P.G. and its various affiliated structures. The embarrassingly low turnout compared to the well over 40,000 Jihadists who turned out to join I.S.I.S. is a matter of leftist defeat, human cowardice, ineptitude of Kurdish propaganda, and the psychological barriers of joining a violent shit show that no one is clearly going to win.
On April 25th, 2017. A few hours ago the Turkish State rocket bombed our training academy on the plateau of Mt. Qerechow. 18 Hevals died, some of them foreign volunteers. 5 Peshmerga also died in the strikes. The training base has been moved down the ridge into the oil pumping facility. It is unclear what makes the new location any safer. A new batch of internationals has just arrived from Sulaymaniyah. The lessons and training must continue.
Jansher is a mustached bear of a man, clad in a forest green multicam uniform gesticulating all his lessons with his animated hands.
“People were being massacred and sold into sexual slavery. Gang rapes and decapitations were gleefully being live streamed. What exactly would you have done?” recounts Heval Jansher the intellectual Georgian Kadro responsible for the ideological and historical training of new Internationalist volunteers.
“We came down from the mountains in convoys of pick up trucks, semi-armored school buses and on foot. We moved in fearless columns committing perhaps half of our remaining beleaguered armed forces. Tens of thousands of Yazidi men, women and children were huddling helplessly and exposed in the Shengal mountains. Without our intervention all their men would have been massacred and their women sold off in markets. In Kobane around this same time Daesh has surrounded our Syrian Kurdish brothers and sisters and were on the verge of wiping us off the ground in North Syria. At that time ISIS was 30 miles from Baghdad and 100 miles from Damascus. Every day hundreds of foreign fanatics were joining them. Entering easily with the help of the Turkish state.”
“We broke through the Turkish lines and along with American airstrikes saved Kobane from total destruction. We literally saved the lives of over 50,000 Yazidis trapped in the Sinjar facing Daesh genocide. We took up positions in Kirkuk awaiting an inevitable Daesh or Iraqi Army attack.”
Perhaps sometimes we changed out of our baggy green guerrilla uniforms into those of local forces or simply took the uniform off. Without the Party, without the People’s Defense Forces which bolstered every Y.P.G./Y.P.J. position there would have been no one for the Americans to arm as it would have all been Islamic State territory.
It is possible that the P.K.K., that is to say the Kurdistan Workers Party did some very nasty things internally and externally during its thirty year war with the Turkish State. Certainly there were both internal purges of real and imagined counter revolutionaries as well as deliberate attacks on civilians, but war is war and war is very brutal on absolutely everyone.
The P.K.K. was trained in war by the Palestinians in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon in the 1970’s. There is a historic sympathy that the Party has to the cause of Palestine as a thankful result of this early collaboration. It is completely unacknowledged, and unsubstantiated that the Russians also trained the P.K.K. But that’s who was hanging out in the Bekaa Valley in the 1980’s. Palestinian guerrillas. Iranian special forces. Lebanese Shiite partisans. Russian spies.
The P.K.K. got openly involved in the fight against ISIS first in Kobane and then in Sinjar. It can be said in unambiguous terms that without the leadership of the Party, assisted by coalition air power the revolution in Rojava would not have survived the Islamic State onslaught. Abdullah Ocalan has been in prison since 1999.
A variety of tactical and ideological innovations have had to have been made for us to survive. However, the adaptation of Democratic Confederalism is not a publicity stunt or mere revisionism. The Party has had to adapt, Ocalan has helped us find the context to adapt. Without his leadership the P.K.K. would not have withstood the tumultuous collapse of global state socialism in the 1990s.
The Revolution in Rojava is of course a product of Party discipline and functionally speaking there is very little difference between the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. and the People’s Defense Forces of the P.K.K., the majority of the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. commanders are P.K.K. cadres.
In the insurrection against the Turkish State which began in this phase in 1984, over 50,000 people died and the majority of them were Kurds. If nasty, brutal violent things such as burying people alive, executing busloads of Turkish civil servants, carrying out suicide bombings, periodically purging the ranks of real or accused counter revolutionaries.
But even though we are declared a terrorist organization because Turkey is so important to N.A.T.O. and the Kurdish issue is so intractable, the U.S. led coalition of course used the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. dressed up as the Syrian Democratic Forces to annihilate ISIS. The Turkish state had a daily telephone riot with their American counterparts. No one was stupid. Everyone knew every dollar, every rifle and every bit of training given to the Syrian Democratic Forces which was over 60% Kurdish Y.P.G./Y.P.J. anyway would be routed to the P.K.K. when the war with ISIS was over and the fighting resumed in earnest between the Kurdish allies and Turkish Army. But, in 2015 after Kobane there was no other reliable ally on the ground and the Turks had to wait for the dust to settle. In Kobane the tide was turned for ISIS and the S.D.F. became the default U.S. Coalition proxy in Syria. Between 2015 and 2018 the S.D.F. smashed ISIS towns and cities from the North and the Assad Regime aided by the Russians hit them from the West. With no friends, under attack in every direction the once seemingly invincible Jihadists of Daesh were defeated, falling back to Ar-Raqqah and holes in the desert to hide. The Regime forces, Hezbollah, the S.D.F., the P.K.K. the Coalition, the Iraqi Army, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the al-Hashid ash-Sha’bi Popular Mobilization Forces we all ground them under our boot heels on all sides. Now only Deir Ez-Zor is left to liberate. But once these Cheta Daesh are temporarily defeated, isolated, trampled on and crushed in some shitty desert town that will change nothing. The Saudi funded and Pakistani spread Wahabbi-Salfist virus By no means will this war be over any time soon.
By 2014 around the time that the Y.P.G./ Y.P.J. militia, assisted heavily by the P.K.K.’s People’s Defense Forces, the K.D.P. Peshmerga and the Coalition airstrikes were battling their way out of the ISIS siege in Kobane, effectively cementing for five years an American led Coalition- leftist Kurdish alliance and changing the dynamics of the Civil War in the North of Syria completely. But no one was stupid, not Turkey, not Daesh not the American Special Forces sent to arm and coordinate airstrikes with us. There were acrimony upon acronyms, there were shells of meaningless letters to make the American Congress feel better about releasing military aid. But, no one Heval was completely stupid. We all knew that the very minute Daesh was defeated we’d be alone and that all these enemies and friends knew the truth. That nothing happening politically or militarily in North Syria would be decided except by the Party.
The P.K.K. Our Party, the Kurdistan Workers Party! To the Turks we are nefarious terrorists. They want to hunt us down and kill us all. For we are an existential threat to the Turkish State. All states, really Hevals.
They convinced America and Europe to adopt that line. To the Kurdish people the premier Party of Resistance to oppression and total annihilation as a coherent people. The very last defense against seemingly triumphant Capitalist Modernity. The only military force capable of defeating I.S.I.S. on the ground. An entity that is outside the immediate theatre of war, with the possible exception of Russia and China, still very much considered a terror group by the West and N.A.T.O. forces of which Turkish State contributes the second largest military force. Over 250,000 combatants.
No one in their wildest dreams can imagine that when the smoke clears and ash settles that the first Democratic Confederalist polity, safeguarding some 4-5 million people will be allowed to survive. But for now the total rubble of what was left from the siege of Kobane has in defiance been rebuilt in the sprawl of white brutalist two to six story dwellings buttressing in defiance the long white wall and treacherous minefield the Turks built across the entire northern border.
Says Heval Commander Cancer, pronounced ‘Jansher’ the Guerrilla from his notes,
“Actually, I tried to prepare them for a lifestyle of revolutionary militancy. Kill the enemy. Kill the enemy before the enemy can airstrike, execute, torture or disappear you and your friends. I don’t think they all got it. The training was just too short. They retained much of their Western bourgeoisie privileges. They thought it would maybe be like a movie. It’s a shame the British woman died, she was the one with possibly the very most revolutionary potential, for a foreigner excluding the Germans. That’s all I can say about that, Heval.”
Heval is the Kurdish Kurmanji word for friend, or comrade. In case you had forgotten that. Sometimes I find it best just to repeat myself over and over and over again to make sure you’re paying attention. I was born in Georgia. I’m not even ethnically Kurdish, actually.
Within the Kurdish movement there is a tendency to imbibe a rather endless amount of black tea. A tendency to have poor sleeping habits. A tendency to chain smoke. But, they also light their own cigarette. To let another light your cigarette is ideologically suspect.
Sometimes the Party has debated on banning cigarette smoking, like it has alcohol, drugs, sex, romance, having kids, having a family, contacting your immediate family and acquiring any material things beyond what fits in a ruck sack, in service of the war effort. However, being a revolutionary militant is quite stressful actually. And there sure are a lot of things that can kill you faster than a cigarette. A whole lot of things, actually.
“The legend goes that in a meeting in a tea house in the village of Lice near Diyarbakir City, on November 25th of 1978 a group of young students lead by Abdullah Ocalan founded the Kurdistan Workers Partyand launched a revolution unlike anything the world had ever seen before it,” explains Heval Jansher. A Guerrilla in good standing with the Party. Good standing means trust. Good standing means not being a Pizkarek; a problem. Bad standing, means re-education, prolonged isolation or indefinite detention. Eventually it means a bullet.
Bahaa Ilyas and Roza Saeed Al-Qaidi are Yazidi activists. This is mostly their words. Taken from reports after the genocide.
“The sun greeted me as I woke on the morning of 3 August 2014. I was a researcher at the University of Duhok, 200 miles from Sinjar. It was to be a happy day as I was waiting – first for my salary, and then for Roza, my then-fiancée. Roza and I had plans to go shopping for our engagement party, which was to take place a few days later. We were excited, our future now starting to unfurl before us. We have not felt that way again since.”
As Roza and I waited at the bank, uneasy murmurs started around us, and phones began to ring. My phone vibrated; a friend was calling. ISIS has attacked Sinjar, he said frantically. Time stopped as the news took hold of us. Roza phoned her sister who was at her home on the outskirts of Duhok. Her sister told her that videos were being published online of ISIS fighters in Sinjar, and that there were news of killings of Yazidis in the streets. I called another friend, a Yazidi man in a village in Sinjar, who described ISIS vehicles with banners and heavy artillery driving past his home. My mother who was in my family’s town of Bashiqa, also called to say she had heard that ISIS was slaughtering Yazidi men and taking away women. Yazidis are fleeing, she said, urgently.
I withdrew as much cash as I could and ran outside to flag down a car to take me to my mother in Bashiqa. Roza waited for a bus to take her to her family’s village outside of Duhok. We said goodbye tearfully, but quickly. We weren’t sure if and when we would see each other again. I made my way to my town, into which ISIS had not yet advanced. My entire family was put into the cars and drove to Lalesh, the Yazidi holy site near Duhok. Concerned that ISIS would advance to Lalesh, women and children were then driven by car to Duhok. Some of my uncles and myself followed on foot. Two days later, ISIS had occupied Bashiqa. My family survived, but thousands of Yazidis in Sinjar did not.
The Yazidis are a religious minority that has existed for millennia. With less than a million individuals, most of us live in the Kurdish Region of Iraq. Other Yazidi communities live in Syria, Turkey, Russia, Armenia, Georgia, as well as farther afield, in Germany, the US and elsewhere. The Yazidi faith descends from the ancient religions of Mesopotamia, and today we believe in the one God. That the Yazidis are a pre-Judaic religion, and so are not ‘People of the Book’, has long motivated the political, economic and social marginalisation of our community.
At various points throughout our history, attempts have been made to wipe us out– we regularly refer to the ‘73 genocides’ that we have suffered. Prior to the ISIS attack, it was the Ottoman Turks who had made the most successful attempt. Misunderstandings of our faith are deeply rooted and it is not uncommon for people to casually – and wrongly – refer to us as ‘devil worshippers’ or ‘those who worship stones’. ISIS founded its genocidal attack on these old prejudices.
In the early hours of the morning of 3 August 2014, while I was still asleep in Duhok, ISIS fighters left their bases in Iraq and Syria and moved towards the Sinjar region in northwest Iraq, close to the Iraqi–Syrian border. Hundreds of villages are spread out around the base of Mount Sinjar, with one main town, Sinjar town, huddled at the base of the southeastern side of the mountain. Mount Sinjar, an arid 100-kilometre-long mountain range, forms the region’s heart. Before the ISIS attacks, the majority of the region’s inhabitants were Yazidis, with a smaller number of Sunni Arabs. The relationship between the Yazidi and Arab communities, who lived together in Sinjar town and in some of the other villages, was built on friendship and neighbourly relations that extended across generations.
ISIS attack on Sinjar came two months after they occupied Mosul in June 2014. It was quickly apparent that the Yazidis were their target, our existence perceived to be a stain on their so-called caliphate. Some families fled into the Kurdish Region of Iraq. Others escaped to the upper slopes of Mount Sinjar, where they were besieged by ISIS. Thousands were trapped under Iraq’s August sun, with no shade, water, food or medical care. Hundreds died on the mountain before the Syrian Kurdish forces, operating under the cover of Iraqi and American airstrikes, rescued the survivors.
ISIS captured thousands of Yazidis in their villages or on the roads during their attempt to flee. Within 72 hours, most of the villages had been emptied, with the exception of Kocho, which ISIS did not vacant of its residents until 15 August 2014. Upon capture, ISIS fighters separated Yazidi men and adolescent boys from their families. Almost all of the men and boys were executed, often by a shot to the back of the head. Their families were sometimes made to watch. ISIS fighters then moved the Yazidi women and children deeper into ISIS-controlled territory where they were registered. ISIS took note of the ages of the women and girls over the age of 9: whether they were married or not; whether they had children and, if so, how many. In short, they were pricing them.
Yazidi women and girls have been sold and resold into sexual slavery, beaten, starved and forced into labour in the homes of ISIS fighters. ISIS does not permit the sale of Yazidis to non-ISIS members, but the money to be made is enough for fighters to risk their own lives breaching this rule. Fighters sell women and children back to their families for tens of thousands of US dollars. Yazidi families are selling all they have, and borrowing more, to buy back their women and children from the men who raped and tortured them. There has been tremendous media attention on Yazidi women and girls who have been enslaved – but there has been little attempt to understand how the crimes ISIS commits against our women and girls fit into the group’s attempts to destroy our community. The Yazidi women and girls held by ISIS are not ‘sex slaves’. They are genocide survivors, and for those who did not survive, they are victims.
Boys over the age of 7 are taken from their mothers and forced into ISIS training camps, where they are indoctrinated and taught to fight. Some have died fighting on ISIS’s frontlines. It has been difficult to locate the boys and rescue them.
As ISIS-controlled territory in Iraq and Syria came under aerial attack by the US-led coalition, Yazidi captives, trapped in fighters’ houses and on ISIS military bases, were reportedly among the casualties. As the ‘caliphate’ crumbled, ISIS fighters fled, taking the captured Yazidi women and children with them. Their fate and whereabouts remain unknown.
Today, I am back living in Duhok and working as a research assistant on the LSE Middle East Centre’s project ‘Documenting Yazidi Victims of ISIS‘. The project aims to build a consolidated database of Yazidi victims by age, gender, location and crime(s) suffered, using rigorous demographic techniques modelled on the methodology accepted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Our team will – with the consent of the survivors and their communities – create and organise data collected for use in accountability proceedings, identification of remains in mass graves, humanitarian interventions, community-building and broader advocacy. It is specifically envisaged, and is an integral aspect of the methodological planning, that the documentation project will play a significant role in achieving justice for Yazidis against the crimes committed against them by ISIS. The data will ground existing advocacy for accountability processes in national, regional and international courts and tribunals. Once courts or tribunals seize the cases, the documentation project’s data will provide reliable information of high probative value for use before various existing and future accountability processes. I am proud to be part of this effort.
For the Yazidis who have survived, most of us now live in displaced people’s camps, unfinished buildings and in rented accommodation in the Kurdish Region of Iraq. A small number have received asylum in Germany, Sweden, Canada and elsewhere. Others, in their desperation to find safety, have fled on dinghies to Greece. Some, including people I know, have drowned in the Mediterranean. A few have taken the risk and returned to Sinjar, which – though destroyed – is now under the control of the Iraqi central government. The region, littered with IEDs, is not yet safe. Mass graves holding the remains of Yazidis are regularly uncovered. There is a need for forensic preservation and analysis, as well as more generally for the reconstruction. Living with dignity in Sinjar remains a challenge.
The Yazidis continue to hope for the rescue and return of the women and children still held by ISIS. We hold out hope that some of the Yazidi men captured have survived and might also be reunited with their families. We have survived, for now, ISIS’s attempt to destroy us, but we remain a deeply traumatised community in need of support: psycho-social support, educational and livelihood initiatives, including those specifically aimed at increasing female social and economic independence, forensic documentation of mass graves, reconstruction, including infrastructure for potable water, healthcare and education – our list is long. But if I were to summarise, I would say the Yazidi community, displaced from Sinjar and desirous to return, needs three things: assured security, justice for the crimes committed against us and recognition of the genocide. The prejudices against our community must be uprooted and made to wither in the light. This requires the calling of the crime committed against us by its true name.
The morning I awoke thinking about my engagement belongs to a more innocent time, one to which Roza and I cannot return. This morning, I sat in front of my computer. On its screen are the names of thousands and thousands of Yazidis.
They are categorised: killed, kidnapped, missing. I know they, like me, once woke up looking forward to the day ahead of them.
Written by:
Bahaa Ilyas is a Yazidi activist who has been in close contact with internally displaced people through different agencies and organisations since 2014. Currently, he is a researcher on the LSE Middle East Centre’s ‘Documenting Yazidi Victims of ISIS‘ project.
Roza Saeed Al-Qaidi is a Yazidi activist. Since ISIS’ attacks on the Yazidis in August 2014, she has been involved in humanitarian aid and has interviewed Yazidi survivors, particularly women and girls who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS fighters, on behalf of a number of different organisations.
The Yazidis live in and around a holy mountain called Jabal Sinjar. It lies along the Syrian-Iraqi border 80 kilometers West from Mosul in the Nineveh Governorate. Their holiest site called Lalish, the tomb of their avatar for the Peacock Angel “Tawuse Melek”, Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir is found between three mountains. The Arafat, the Misat and the Hizrat.
On the highest peak of Jabal Sinjar is the Chel Mera Temple. “The Temple of Forty Men”. The temple is so ancient no one actually remembers how it got that name, but it is believed forty men were buried there.
The Yazidis have three hereditary castes; the Murids, the Sheikhs and the Pirs. In some ways their beliefs are linked to Sufism and Zoroastrianism. They believe in reincarnation and forbid intermarriage with other groups. Although some claim they have holy books called the Kiteba Cilwe (Book of Revelation) and Mishefa Res (Black Book), there is great reason to believe these are forgeries created in 1911-1913 and virtually all Yazidi religious theology is a chain or oral transmission called Qawls; hymns with cryptic allusions and supporting stories.
The Yazidis are ethnically and linguistically Kurdish. They speak Kurmanji, like the Kurds of Syria and Turkey. They are concentrated in North western Iraq in a highly mountainous area called Sinjar by the Arabs or Shengal, by the Kurds. They are monotheistic, Gnostic religion. Over the years Sunni Muslim Arabs have typically accused them of devil worship, because of their belief in a pea cock fire angel. In 1414 their sacred Lalish was razed. In 1640, Ottoman Turks carried out a pogrom killing around 5,000 of them. In 1892 Turkish Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II mass conscripted the men to eradicate their faith. In 1974-1975 Saddam Hussein deported Yazidis and re-settled Arabs in Sinjar. Around 137 Yazidi villages were destroyed. In 2007 there was a Jihadi campaign of bus bombings, kidnappings and terrorism that left as many as 300 Yazidis death and over 1,500 injured. In 2009 Al-Qaeda used a series of truck bombs in Sinjar to kill upwards of 500 Yazidis in Qahtaniya and al-Jazira. So Turks and Arabs killing Yazidi is as Sunni Islamic as tea and shawarma.
The story of the woman being fed her one year old son. A later story.
In August of 2014 “Those who run from death”, the KDP Peshmerga, abandoned their positions and allowed almost all of Shengal to fall to ISIS without firing a shot. ISIS then began a rapid campaign of summary execution, forced conversions, sex slaving and out right genocide. On August 3rd 2014 ISIS captured the holy city of Sinjar. A massacre began. Over 200,000 Yazidis fled into the surrounding mountainside. 50,000 of them were trapped on Mt. Sinjar exposed to the elements with ISIS bandits raping and murdering their family and friends.
ISIS Cheta shot 70 to 90 men in Qiniyeh Village, 360 in Harden village. 200 Yazidis were lined up and shot in Sinjar city. 60 to 70 killed in Ramadi Jabal. 50 in Dhola village, 100 in Khana Sor and 200 more on the road between Adaniaya and Jazeera. Dozens in al-Shimal village and more on the road from Matu to Jabal Sinjar. Women were gang raped. Children were buried alive. In most cases the Yazidi girls and women were separated for rape and sex traffic to various ISIS held cities. Old women were shot.
Using “rape as a weapon of war” Daesh bandits actually had gynecologists examine their captives to set slave prices based on virginity. They were treated like cattle. There were online price indexes. Sales on Telegram, Facebook and WhatsApp. Prices varied. Between $2,000.00 and $10,000.00. Less than 5 women actually escaped. Many died in captivity or allied bombardment.
The Sinjar Mountains are over 100 km long range running east to west. The lower western segment in Syria and eastern higher segment in Iraq. The range is viewed as sacred by the Yazidis who consider them the place where Noah’s ark came to rest.
On August 8th the United States President Barack Obama ordered airstrikes against ISIS in the area of Sinjar. Air strikes and supply drops for the Yazidis hiding there.
The 50,000 Yazidi besieged on top of Mount Sinjar began to die from hunger and thirst and exposure to the elements. On August 10th P.K.K. and Y.P.G. guerrillas, with truck mounted heavy machine guns supported by mobile light infantry charges broke the ISIS siege and began guiding Yazidis to refugee camps and shelter. Some were evacuated by the Peshmerga via Cezanne and Telkocher roads to Dohuk, Iraq-K.R.G. Though the majority broke out with the P.K.K.-Y.P.G. safe corridor to Rojava.
They fought most of the rescue operation from pick up trucks or on foot. With small backpacks which mostly had been loaded with extra magazines and hand-grenades, canteens of water and sometimes a few cans of Mortadella. Or canned olives or whatever there was left before they shipped out. Clad in green baggy fatigues the PKK made a rapid incursion through ISIS held territory to launch the largest humanitarian evacuation of the war, saving the lives of tens of thousands of civilians hiding on the mountain.
By August 8th most of the remaining Yazidis had been evacuated by the P.K.K. to the K.R.G. areas and Rojava. On August 10th airstrikes opened up a passage for another P.K.K. evacuation into Syria of some additional 20,000 to 30,000 Yazidis. But there were still around 10,000 trapped on the mountain still by 13th August recipient air drops of food and water from the coalition forces. Eventually the guerrillas got almost everybody out.
On August 15th there was a large massacre in Kojo. Over 80 men were killed outright. The entire male population of Khocho, around 400 men were butchered. Around 1,000 women and children were abducted for sex slavery. In Tal Afar 200 Yazidi were shot at the prison. A report in late September concluded over 5,000 Yazidis had been exterminated. Several thousand, perhaps as many as 7,000-10,800 women and girls were carried off to Mosul, Raqqa and other ISIS strongholds. The confirmation of the missing verses the dead has not been cleared up yet many years later.
Repeated raids by P.K.K. commandos rescued 51 Yazidis in March and 53 in April. The majority of the abducted women and girls are still missing, having been living in brutal, in-human slavery for over four years. Most have all been presumed dead. Mass graves keep getting found all over the liberated areas.
“From time to time a young woman, an escapee jumps off Mt. Sinjar. That will probably go on for many years to come.”
“They were all mentally and definitely physically abused by the vile bearded ones in ways we cannot ever probably comprehend, that few can even bear to hear,” said the Guerilla Commander Jansher, Comrade Spirit of War, explains to a small cohort of internationalist volunteers recently smuggled into Rojava.
“All of the buildings appear to be so very permanent. Almost invulnerable, blyat. These elegant high towers of blue and black, glass and steel, towers built in defiance of gravity and common sense. Like mega sculpture, like a love song to the invisible hero called American Capitalism. You look down at all of the City, even all Downtown and Midtown and imagine all the utter debauchery other people are having at your expense. Well anyway I have my name on my own little cage here. So I too can say I’ve made it in New York City. So I’ve made it here in America!”
In the background a saxophone cacophony erupts!
As told by Heval Daria Andreavna. A Russian Sympathizer now held in a small electrified cage in Midtown West. A gated community for the ultra-rich called the Hudson Yards. They call her Goldy the Goldfish.
I live in a tall residential tower complex in Western Midtown in a costly new development named the Hudson Yards. Right in the very heart of success. A tower complex built in recent years above the train yards of west 34th street. I work my sweet ass off to keep that apartment rent free. The game I am playing with this chubby Indian Brahman venture capitalist roommate, is eating off his plate without him imagining he’s becoming my patron. Drain the clock, nit his cock as they say. But really he annoyingly proposes marriage as often has my Sergei had. And the others. And the other. I am waiting for a Russian Jewish doctor. He will love me again. I know it. The stars say as much. As for Sebastian. I think he’s calling himself Kawa now.
“He writes to me. I don’t write to him back,” I would later tell the FBI, or the CIA, or the Police Dept. and the Department of Homeland Security or whoever else I was being forced to talk to. But I, of course blat, I do write him back, I’m his muse. He creates well, though most of it chaos.
I once remarked to Oleg the Bear, a common friend; “A relationship with Comrade Adonaev is like a roller coaster. Extremes of up and down, drama and thrills. But like all such thrill machines. You can tolerate it only in increments, you must step off and stay off. Sometimes for years.”
My blonde hair is convincingly dyed from light brown. I told Sebastian that once and he said I was beautiful either way, but should try brown hair like him. I don’t hate him. I just prefer not to have him around, thinking he can save me, heal me. Get me to higher ground on his terms. I just don’t like giving him hope that we have a future of any kind. I’ve always been adamant about that. Sometimes against my better judgment I’ve kissed him and those kisses gave him too much hope. That he can save up, get it together and save me, he can’t. I’m a kept woman. That comes with a price tag and comes with responsibilities. Like sex on demand. I’ve told him that, but I’ve told him many not true things so maybe he can’t put it all together. He thinks it’s love. It’s maybe some kind of fucking weird 19th century muse lust love, blat, but it’s really a product of his mental illness, not my encouragement. His writing is pretty prolific, some of his paintings are highly unique. Overall, he’s impressive. But not patron or marriage material, as he is broke.
Not long walks and art making and picnics with couscous and chicken blat with no value. The book and paintings he’s made me don’t help my mom immigrate to the U.S.A. Or get me a passport, for that matter now that it’s looking like my special marriage hasn’t resulted in anything.
“Let me roll up my sleeves and also my skirt, a little! Look at me in the eyes! I have all my teeth to bite. So sexy and educated and multilingual. What a catch to catch if you can. I am a wild debutante, elusive and amazing. I am a graceful fighter of course, forced to pour men off shots in a tavern downtown.”
“Zdrastvistia!The purpose of my sponsor is to buy and sell luxury carrots. Also a flying carpet to get you home after all the bullshit we will make you sit through telling Russian American tales. Also to warn you about Chechens, and also to distribute out a phone number where slaves with abused lives can get J 1, S 1 or go to college. There is singing and poems. We will try and pour you things called Vodka, but it’s not Vodka. To us it’s like water for wound care.”
“Good and also bad men went to war and women also went to war, and Americans and Russians watched out the corner of the Newspaper or telescreen. And of course supplied the arsenal and the airstrikes. But, ultimately it was a far away spectacle happening far from both empires.”
“The papers called them “the New Chechens” because when the war kept going, people came back trained in god-only-knows how much carnage capability. The war I’m referring to is the Syrian Civil War/ the Revolution in Rojava which was a phantom menace to all. But it was more a dark dream based on improbable odds. Chechens, are in fact a very real jihadist menace that fought us to the last bullet in Mosul, Raqqa and Deir-A-Zor. They brought their whole families into their fun little Jihad. These re-moniquored “Chechens” aren’t like them. They were secular and young, and mostly on the Kurdish or Shi’a side, or the Peshmerga. They all left our families at home. There were plenty of war path teams and factions, mine/ ours was the most moral, but lived in a state of total delusion. They were following a pudgy faced aging man in Turkish solitary confinement. We thought breaking rocks was a useful form of soliloquy.”
My latest patron is a Brahman, which is something pretty fancy in India. He’s a tech guy but looks and acts more like a Wall Street guy. He’s just too fucking rough on me. It has a lot in common with rape my own home. He goes deep up my ass too often. He’s pulling my hair and slamming me against the bar. He punches me in the head as hard as he can. He gets what he pays for. He slams me for about five minutes until he cums. Like a Quisling, snorting pig. I’m the star of a very private show!
Sebastian wrote me the other night to go down memory lane and formally tell me he is off for Syria soon. Well I guess this is the end of him finally. I don’t feel that bad, or much of anything. He wants to end it like this anyway. He’s living up to an expectation of himself. He wants to die a martyr, that is up to him.
My patron climbs off me eventually. A lot of meat to him, I’ll need to stretch it out. Jon isn’t really just a Jon, he’s my roommate too. He’s the one paying me to live somewhere nice with him. A Brahmin. They do what they want. Including fuck my asshole on a Tuesday afternoon. Am I fucking to not pay my rent? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I wish I had something better, someone better to do but I don’t. The Russian doctor, well he said I was “a little too high maintenance.”
I haven’t seen Comrade Sebastian Adonaev since the end of the summer. The time we gave it another go, the poetry for some kissing. The hopeless romanticism in him. Well anyway he’s the same old man and I’m the same old gal. He’s still broke and still just a shiftless adventurer, romanticizing the Chornay. He once wrote an 800 page book for me, yet I’ve only read the first couple chapters. He wrote me over 200 poems, but they all sound about the same. Words rhyming about love, hate sex and devastation in Angliski. He painted and framed a painting in Brighton and bought a gold frame for it. It’s still up. I was dating a doctor, but he left me. I was dating a Corporate lawyer but it was never serious. My original patron cut me off over my first Adonaev affair. Now I’m fucking the so-called roommate to cut down on expenses. Well anyway “my roommate” has a pretty big Indian style Xanny Kama sutra cock. He manages some tech finance derivatives scheme in L.A., could be anything.
Later on, in a year when I was arrested by the secret [police and they demanded that I tell them about what Sebastian was to be doing in Syria, honestly I didn’t know that much. I wasn’t that interested or directly invested.
He periodically would send me all these miserable looking photos, but I didn’t want to see any of them. He would beg to be allowed to see me. But in reality I wanted very little nothing to do with him. I live my own life. It’s mine. I chose it and made all the bad decisions!
Later on I’d message his WhatsApp and tell him to ‘Come home please’. But I didn’t, mean, to me. He would probably survive the war. He is tough in his own way. The roommate likes to choke me. I need a new roommate. Or I should just pay cash, every hole is too many holes. I’m working on a possible patron with a place by the beach in Miami.
I remember thinking only a little bit about his Syria objective. What I failed to see, though Sasho, our old boss explained it to me, was that he was actually going to Syria to impress me. How ludicrous, nothing could be further from impressive to me. He was going to live I was sure. But to do what? Live to be a mentally broken person that I could never imagine how to heal.
We have some fun but also very messy history Sebastian Adonaev and I, blat, but I think going to this war was the stupidest thing he ever did, far worse than Haiti, worse than loving me. It was hard on me anyway. I will certainly not be meeting him at the airport, should he survive the war. I am tougher than he, but it’s still not nice to make a person watch un willingly your attempt at self murder. Functionally speaking that man is dead to me. I have to insulate myself from mad men seeking high publicized means for suicide. The man just wants to die in a meaningful way, but that doesn’t help my situation at all! Yet, I still have all his letters, I still have the two published books about me. I still have the gold framed multi-color pornograph on the wall.
When the secret police dragged me in to find out where Sebastian went, I told them “He is probably in Havana”.
“He’s not in Havana toots.”
They then did pretty nasty stuff to me just to punish him, or maybe just cause I don’t have any actual papers? Or maybe because degrading a Russian blonde is as American now as apple pie.
Eventually my patron bails me out. He lectures me about “pussy footing around with terrorists that don’t have my best interests at heart.”
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 