“When you open your paper, turn on your TV, or boot up your smartphone and attempt to understand what is happening; you are already tuned into people paid well to validate a view you already had.”

Homage to Rojava, Al-Prologue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#1492 

Krik Krak

Who is Where

 Dear Dessalines,

You care, or, more likely.

You really don’t care.

The physics inhibited erecting a guillotine there.

We still cut some heads,

The good life, for a darker skinned woman, or man, 

Is shockingly rare. Is life as it stands ever fair?

   Smallest Fiddle we!

You Blan Beware,

The long rewarding of the chosen color, 

 Shade of colored color.

Mulat miserable, blood mixed other, 

   Ethnic patronymic passport to declare,

The less we know the better really, culpable then, when all aware, 

The pale of ones skin is a portent;

The kink of ones hair, does the complexion of consonance,

Concessive, conscience cry; end in total despair! 

the who will prosper,

Who will simply die for the cane cash. 

Who will languish in the forgotten Northern places,

On pure regressive welfare?

“The absence of care”

Up is always up! Down is now a very deep down,

Black or Brown? Is the world upside down,

Is Black cool for Sports and Song, and shooting, Brown, a sing along?

You tell your bastard child, nothing, not one speck of nothing is ever, ever: fair.

The tear is a waste one ones water,

Beat your own damn chest!

Tear on your own damned fucking, sagging Clothing, 

The color of a privilege? The rest, a real test. 

Don’t ever go there! 

Don’t you fucking dare.

But look-look-look! You can even mother fuck a stare!

Who did what, who did daggers unto to whom?

Who is North who is South of a whip, a face cage with rats, a rape or a push broom,

 Some Bronco Busting? Some other level of our doom!

Some carnal Carmel sugar? Some full dead coffin ship, doom doom. More doom!

Another reprisal yester day, 

The slaughter of an up close cannon boom!

  Africa? What and where the fuck is Africa? I was born in Saint Domingue, I Don’t fair, from here or there, I have white like skin, white like manners, 

A white sword play, a clear shot; 

I have a black mans heart, I have black man’s hair.  

Who is even really left over, over there?

What for brother, how now; you long for home, where is home, from where?

   Do you still have a native language?

Do you have some lesser always drumming culture to declare?

      Hispaniola, Saint Domingue, Ayiti; the song all sounds like bullets,

 The dead, still stare. 

The dead, they fall into the Ocean,

We the living, are just dead souls with caution tales to beware.

On the Haitian side of terrible things all the people are still quite Black, 

And speak back, tales in something still like French,

Can you bring us to Paris to Commune, to care?

In Santo Domingo, 

All the more most moor; darker shades of still being Latino,

  Wishing in all ways, praying in all ways, thinking in always- Spaniard,

Boot licking the Gringo,

Their ever tall Sugar fields and chubby whores, 

Abound in cash, bags and bags,

Chubby, but still in Tin shacks, still in peasant prayers, really just spirituality rags.

 Or the little neon, hotel highway brothels, no customs declare, 

No compare? Young girls, always for very good prices.

   D.R. is always open for trade,

 Young boys for the fags. 

   For the right price two or three can you can share,

No Border controls; 

When too black at the Border, Now a new Parley massacre scare! 

Haiti, always are fire, always a cleansing flood,

 The blue for the Ocean, they ripped out the white, 

Red for the martyrs Blood!

As tire fire riots belch a cantankerous stench,

White is quite rare.

In Haiti, we, they, historical circumstances, well we; made sure to kill every single last Blan,

       Left a good trusted German or two, 

a doctor or two, a half-Polish blue eyed prefect,

Someones white girlfriend, some ones white buddy, a wife.

      But mostly, you died if your eyes had blue. Died not with easy pistols, died by the knife.

Had to just kill most of the Pale ones, the ghosts. 

That were left in the end,

       Pale skin is barbaric, pale skin is defect. All others a forced blend.

              Toasts for toasts.

Over in Cuba, more mixture, more mixing, more open land. 

More to take or to share.

        In Cuba, soon after our rising, three wars in total,

  Machete charges, a massacre mind set, Masons, then Castro s, then a Russian nuclear scare,   

       Larger to study, really same land mass, some ingredient parts.

In Cuba, the tide of rebellion broke later, not much later,

      In three waves of rebellion, red white and blue upstarts. 

More tumult in less time period, 

At hand, more Black, White and Latino collaboration.

Understand, Negroid slaves, Spanish soldier pirates, French planters,

   British sailors, Ara-wack Taino? Cross cuts, Mosquito darts. 

Cholera kills, invisible! Masonic lodges, Black, Black hearts.

The New World Woman, Yellow fever pending,    

    A victim of gang rape. The New World man, a set of bloody island com-parts.

Cuba and Hispaniola! 

Same land mass, two large Island ramparts.

The Old world very forcefully inserted into the new,

Cuba, a slender Spanish shark of ten days foot traversal,

Hispaniola, to the east, a raised machete 

Speak of death!

Bold to speak of boldness,

Black and Mulat eyes gouged, dead lungs dead hearts, 

A sugar death camp, a tropical factory gulag, 

That swallows all that set on it, the guiltiness, and the heads roll off axes, into waiting carts.

But now, who looks like who?

Who has what now?

What new formed race, is it the pylon, 

what race is just the screw?

Who is where?

See Black Mountain over there?

Pale skin, pale tits and blondish hair?

People do, still and will, still stare!

Dominikani over 200 years, they hate all Haitians clear!

But you can find very white ones, still all speaking Spanish lingo,

Ruling the cane fields and sex tourist traffic 

from upper class manor or Santo Domingo, 

Luxury housing always being built there.

WHO!

What!

Where?

Santo Domingo, home of the Columbus light house,

The whites in Santo Domingo are mostly found on posters,

Mostly found in the short term places,

  They’re playing cards with human lives, 

low profile, 

It seems unspoken, declared some how normal even fair.

 They’re running for office. 

Fair to who? 

In plain sight ; the Old world, it still rules the new, 

The shadow of Columbus was the age of Trujillo.

The ever looming Inquisition,

The bloody, bloody, bloody.

Since 1492!

Four numbers can make one wince,

  I remember, 

A long hot summer, 

In the other Capital,

The City of Port-Au-Prince.

The voodoo drums beat out into night,

Why do I care, with my fair hair?

Supposedly four different whole mode of people, collided in existential struggle, right there!

Four people’s, three or more many common tongues, 

The Francophone chic and the radio Kompa,

   The rain fall sky drop, the ginger bread spires, the Prestige, 

       The smoke of fires of Legbe, it infiltrates the lungs.

Kop Tete, Boulay Maison!

Your head cut still here, your house burned where?

Very few French today left , or even in careful concealment few descendants of France are left there.

Very few French is a good thing. Very few Spanish, very few British, very few trampling of rights,

They got rid of the Whites,

Very few masters,

Except masters with black skins and white masks,

 Very few 24 hour, keep on the lights. 

Very few good old boys left for masquerade murder,

Except the Macoutes, Am I right?

    Sou-see emperor Christopher commands us,

Toussaint long tortured, dead in France, kill every white on sight!

Fewer French. Is a very good thing,

Fewer Spanish too,

Dessalines knew, his list did a grim final part in the fight, 

Petion gave Bolivar good Staging and black troops am I right.

In Cuba, tumult came just 50 years later,

Black and Brown and white asks white for some rights,

Blow everything up! Tear the New World apart.

The Dominicans went back to Spain three whole times.

Cuba and Dominican Republic, 

Many years happy under happy American rule. 

One got two Lavalieres and the Tonton Macoutes, 

Cuba once Spanish, an American play ground,

Hispaniola; forever, discouragable. Divided. 

The same long mountain paradise island, 

In three parts, it was decided.    

Cuba, it went Marxist Red.

Whatever you history book said, most Cubans can read, they all go to college,

They have tens of thousands of doctors exported abroad,

There lights stay mostly on, they mostly stay fed.

There’s a lesson about who went where.

I’ll change cadence,

It’s silly English words.

You use them often for in all the story who took, who gave,

In Haiti, Eastern one third of Hispaniola,

Case in total,

Utter collapse of a promise,

The revolution gave in to King Sugar,

Despot after despot, a quarenteen; a grim meat grinder,

Doesn’t for a minute cease to grind us.

Sweetest killer, sugar lingers,

 Bleeding succour, a sucking vampire like upon our children’s children godchildren teat,

Leave the indemnity behind us. 

France, Spain, England all still quite white.

And hyper-normal.

At least with those in charge.

Here in the Caribbean Sea all three imperials stand depleted,

The shadow still looms so so large.

All people have the same old stories,

To make the young more brave.

I have seen all parts of all three nations on both two island countries.

I’ve tasted the sugar cane, I’ve seen the largest unmarked grave.

The wastelands now of Haiti! 

the out right decay,

   The voluptuous, the drumming of the night life, the Santeria and the Voodoo, the bag man bad man fray.

The gun play!

Is D.R. good for much more?

But white sugar sells less or more, 

the newest oldest sin, the black, white or brown whore?

 Mountains and beaches,

   But did Dominikani did they ever do some lasting thing?

     Tourist ghettos, they are calling you!

       Some musical display, dollar euro peso bring!

Who is who, and where is what?

Blow for rifle blow, shot for shot, machete cut!

 Two island, three nations! A series of struggles? 

For what? 

A book slams shut.

A beach with cheap drinks, a place to get your throat cut.

In Cuba, from what I’ve seen;

Go on;

 Roads are all paved. The lighting stays on. Averages of reading and living life spans above the statistical averages, the Party lives on.

But Haitians have dignity too, 

You do what you have to do,

When quite horrible things were done unto you. 

The sun will always glare.

There is no justice spoken in a vacant look, a grim broken 40 meter stare.

Well European son, half baked sun, African son,

Native Son, native to none,

You should care!

Care that white, never made right. Took all; after each fight, or flight, how do you now sit in your towers,

Towers of U.S. or towers of Europe

How dare?

We have a solution, its built on these two islands.

But, before you can go there,

You must care.

The color your dealt is the color of skin suits,

The length of your nose is not a thing,

The size of any eye ball, not a thing.

The skin your in, is a skin you must wear.

The ugly history, that division,

Where so many peoples were brought to bear,

There a song I can can sing,

There’s a tale tell can.

3 Nations, 2 Islands a war of many peoples,

A series of plots and events.

The rise and fall of more than one man.

In at least three types of language, one shout:

Swords out.   

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The radical project

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

Fundamental Principles of False Necessitarian Theory:

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

Chapter (1) One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part I: 

BAKUR

Prelude

“A Special Period

In Times of Peace” 

SET IN: 

HAVANA, CUBA

 1989

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “What brought it all down?” Norma asks.

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

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

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

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

Pro-logue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To whom it may concern,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. What is the age range and gender demographics?

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

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

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

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

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

7. What materials/ equipment will be needed?

1 classroom for 40

1 medical facility for observational rotations

1 open space/ field for drills

40 Stools/chairs/desk table space

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

2 large tarps

2 extension cord cables

2 external hard drives

2 power strips

2 power point projectors

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

5 large drop mats/ rugs for drills on the ground

4 equipment boxes/ gear bags

Printing capability

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

Approx. 1,920 pages.

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

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

Reams of paper needed to accommodate above need.

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

Medical Equipment

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

Essential Moving and Assessment Equipment

10 stethoscopes

10 blood pressure cuffs

10 penlights/ small flashlights of any kind

5 boxes of examination gloves

5 carrying stretchers 

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

2 stair chair devices

5 cervical collars

10 CPR pocket face masks

10 Bag valve masks

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

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

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

4 oxygen regulators/ impossible to substitute

4 non-rebreather masks

4 nasal cannula oxygen lines

4 sets of oropharyngeal airways/ bend metal spoons

4 sets of nasopharyngeal airways/ impossible to substitute

Dressings & Splints

10 short splints (size of forearm)

10 long splints (size of leg)

5 boxes of triangle cravats

5 boxes of 4×4 dressings

4 boxes 5×9 ABD pads

2 boxes of 2 inch tape

2 boxes of 1 inch tape

1 box multi-trauma dressings

1 box of duct tape

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

GCC instructors require the following things from the hosting organization.

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

9. What translation activities must be provided?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Defining a Social Movement for Emancipatory Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PAMPHLET (2)

“WHAT WE WANT/ WHAT WE BELIEVE IN 2021”

The Immediate Goals of the Clandestine Movement

What We Want

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What We Believe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Medicare for All: 

Single Payer Insurance Schemes as they apply to EMS

    In the United States, money and profit are the driving forces behind all aspects of the healthcare system. There is a price tag on every item, every procedure and every level of medical intervention. Effective January 1st, 2021 a BLS Ambulance ride will cost $900 before millage and Oxygen. An ALS ride will cost $1,600. Although we think of ourselves as a real economic powerhouse, our medical system is ranked 27th on the planet. The Covid-19 Pandemic also exposed the full extent of the “two-Americas”; one with a set of marginal, broken public services for the poor and full speed, hyper modern and efficient services for those who pay.

Single-payer Healthcare is a type of universal healthcare in which the costs of essential healthcare for all residents are covered by a single public system through the tax base. Single-payer systems may contract for healthcare services from private organizations, as is the case in Canada, or may own and employ healthcare resources and personnel directly, as is the case in the United Kingdom. “Single-payer” describes the mechanism by which healthcare is paid for by a single public authority, not a private authority, nor a mix of both.

There are generally five primary methods of funding health care systems:

1. General taxation to the state, county or municipality.
2. Social health insurance.
3. Voluntary or private health insurance.
4. Out-of-pocket payments.
5. Donations to health charities/ Non-Governmental Organizations.

In most countries there is a mix of all five models. This varies across countries and over time within countries. Aside from financing mechanisms, an important question should always be how much to spend on healthcare. For the purposes of comparison, this is often expressed as the percentage of Gross Domestic Product spent on healthcare. In OECD ( Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ) countries for every extra $1000 spent on healthcare, life expectancy falls by 0.4 years. A similar correlation is seen from the analysis carried out each year by the Bloomberg Group. Life expectancy is only one measure of a health system’s performance, but there is direct causality found between investments in healthcare in relation to life expectancy and infant mortality rates. 

In 2011, the healthcare industry consumed an average of 9.3 percent of the GDP or US$ 3,322 (PPP-adjusted) per capita across the 34 members of OECD countries. The U.S. (17.7%, or US$ PPP 8,508), the Netherlands (11.9%, 5,099), France (11.6%, 4,118), Germany (11.3%, 4,495), Canada (11.2%, 5669), and Switzerland (11%, 5,634) were the top spenders, however life expectancy in total population at birth was highest in Switzerland (82.8 years), Japan and Italy (82.7), Spain and Iceland (82.4), France (82.2) and Australia (82.0), while OECD’s average exceeds 80 years for the first time ever in 2011: 80.1 years, a gain of 10 years since 1970. The US (78.7 years) ranges only in place 27 among the 34 OECD member countries, but has the highest costs by far. All OECD countries have achieved universal (or almost universal) health coverage, except the US and Mexico. In the United States, where around 18% of GDP is spent on health care has been one of the least efficient among developed nations in distributing it.

The Nordic countries are sometimes considered to have single-payer health care services, as opposed to single-payer national health care insurance like Taiwan or Canada. This is a form of the ‘Beveridge Model‘ of health care systems that features public health providers in addition to public health insurance.

The term ‘Scandinavian model’ or ‘Nordic model’ of health care systems has a few common features: largely public providers, limited private health coverage, and regionally-run, devolved systems with limited involvement from the central government. Due to this third characteristic, they can also be argued to be single-payer only on a regional level, or to be multi-payer systems, as opposed to the nationally run health coverage found in Taiwan and South Korea.

Healthcare in the United Kingdom is a “devolved matter”, meaning that England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all have their own system of private and publicly funded healthcare, generally referred to as the National Health Service (NHS). With largely public or government owned providers, this also fits into the ‘Beveridge Model’ of health care systems, sometimes considered to be single-payer, with relatively little private involvement compared to other universal systems. Each country’s having different policies and priorities has resulted in a variety of differences existing between the systems. That said, each country provides public healthcare to all UK permanent residents that is free at the point of use, being paid for from general taxation. In addition, each also has a private sector which is considerably smaller than its public equivalent, with provision of private healthcare acquired by means of private health insurance, funded as part of an employer funded healthcare scheme or paid directly by the customer.

In England, funding from general taxation is channeled through NHS England, which is responsible for commissioning mainly specialist services and primary care, and Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), which manage 60% of the budget and are responsible for commissioning health services for their local populations. These commissioning bodies do not provide services themselves directly, but procure these from NHS Trusts and Foundation Trusts, as well as private, voluntary, and social enterprise sector providers.

      Since 1935 there have been several attempts by U.S. politicians to implement some form of universal healthcare for the American people. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt planned to include federally sponsored health insurance to be part of the Social Security Act of 1935, but it was thrown out to speed the bill through Congress. President Lyndon Jonson tried to pass a similar universal healthcare bill in 1965, the power of the health insurance industry was so entrenched that he met too much resistance to get it passed. As this was happening in the U.S. The rest of the developed world was passing their own versions of Universal Healthcare. Mitt Romney while governor of Massachusetts and President Barack Obama both established a wide range of legislation to advance hybrid versions of single-payer/ private payer Health care. 

Supporters of single-payer or Medicare for All note that minorities and the poor, as well as rural residents in general, are less able to afford private health insurance, and that those who can must pay high deductibles and copayments that threaten families with financial ruin. Advocates also argue that single-payer could benefit from a more fluid economy with increasing economic growth, aggregate demand, corporate profit, and quality of life. Others have estimated a long-term savings amounting to 40% of all national health expenditures due to the extended preventive health care, although estimates from the Congressional Budget Office and the New England Journal of Medicine have found that preventive care is more expensive due to increased utilization.

Any national system would be paid for in part through taxes replacing insurance premiums, but advocates also believe savings would be realized through preventive care and the elimination of insurance company overhead and hospital billing costs. A 2008 analysis of a single-payer bill by Physicians for a National Health Program estimated the immediate savings at $350 billion per year. The Commonwealth Fund believes that, if the United States adopted a universal health care system, the mortality rate would improve and the country would save approximately $570 billion a year. 

Opponents argue that access to health care diminishes under single-payer systems, and that the overall quality of care suffers. Opponents also claim that single-payer systems cause shortages of general physicians and specialists and reduce access to medical technology. However, a wide international consensus is shareds that Healthcare is both a Human Right and a national priority. Obtaining Universal Healthcare for the member states in part of the United Nations sustainable development plan. 

Universal healthcare (also called universal health coverage, universal coverage, or universal care) is a health care system in which all residents of a particular country or region are assured access to health care. It is generally organized around providing either all residents or only those who cannot afford on their own, with either health services or the means to acquire them, with the end goal of improving health outcomes.

Some universal healthcare systems are government-funded, while others are based on a requirement that all citizens purchase private health insurance. Universal healthcare can be determined by three critical dimensions: who is covered, what services are covered, and how much of the cost is covered. It is described by the World Health Organization as a situation where citizens can access health services without incurring financial hardship. The Director General of WHO describes universal health coverage as the “single most powerful concept that public health has to offer” since it unifies “services and delivers them in a comprehensive and integrated way”. One of the goals with universal healthcare is to create a system of protection which provides equality of opportunity for people to enjoy the highest possible level of health. As part of Sustainable Development Goals, United Nations member states have agreed to work toward worldwide universal health coverage by 2030.

Single-payer healthcare is a system in which the government, rather than private insurers, pays for all health care costs. Single-payer systems may contract for healthcare services from private organizations (as in Canada) or own and employ healthcare resources and personnel (as was the case in England before the introduction of the Health and Social Care Act). In some instances, such as Italy and Spain, both these realities may exist at the same time . “Single-payer” describes only the funding mechanism and refers to health care financed by a single public body from a single fund and does not specify the type of delivery or for whom doctors work. Although the fund holder is usually the state, some forms of single-payer use a mixed public-private system.

In Fax-Based Financing, individuals contribute to the provision of health services through various taxes. These are typically pooled across the whole population unless local governments raise and retain tax revenues. Some countries (notably the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Portugal, India and the Nordic countries) choose to fund public health care directly from taxation alone. Other countries with insurance-based systems effectively meet the cost of insuring those unable to insure themselves via social security arrangements funded from taxation, either by directly paying their medical bills or by paying for insurance premiums for those affected.

In a Social Health Insurance system, contributions from workers, the self-employed, enterprises and governments are pooled into single or multiple funds on a compulsory basis. This is based on risk pooling. The social health insurance model is also referred to as the Bismarck Model, after Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who introduced the first universal health care system in Germany in the 19th century. The funds typically contract with a mix of public and private providers for the provision of a specified benefit package. Preventive and public health care may be provided by these funds or responsibility kept solely by the Ministry of Health. Within social health insurance, a number of functions may be executed by parastatal or non-governmental sickness funds, or in a few cases, by private health insurance companies. Social health insurance is used in a number of Western European countries and increasingly in Eastern Europe as well as in Israel and Japan.

In Private Health Insurance, premiums are paid directly from employers, associations, individuals and families to insurance companies, which pool risks across their membership base. Private insurance includes policies sold by commercial for-profit firms, non-profit companies and community health insurers. Generally, private insurance is voluntary in contrast to social insurance programs, which tend to be compulsory. In some countries with universal coverage, private insurance often excludes certain health conditions that are expensive and the state health care system can provide coverage. For example, in the United Kingdom, one of the largest private health care providers is BUPA, which has a long list of general exclusions even in its highest coverage policy, most of which are routinely provided by the National Health Service. In the United States, dialysis treatment for end stage renal failure is generally paid for by the government and not by the insurance industry. Those with privatized Medicare (Medicare Advantage) are the exception and must get their dialysis paid for through their insurance company. However, those with end-stage kidney failure generally cannot buy Medicare Advantage plans. In the Netherlands, which has regulated competition for its main insurance system (but is subject to a budget cap), insurers must cover a basic package for all enrollees, but may choose which additional services they offer in supplementary plans (which most people possess).

Community-based health Insurance is a particular form of private health insurance that has often emerged, if financial risk protection mechanisms have only a limited impact, is community-based health insurance. Individual members of a specific community pay to a collective health fund which they can draw from when they need medical care. Contributions are not risk-related and there is generally a high level of community involvement in the running of these plans.

Fast forward to today, the U.S. is now ranked 27th in healthcare behind Costa Rica, Canada and Colombia. New Zealand which has a full coverage tax payer healthcare being ranked number 1 according to Cigna Global. The body count in the Covid-19 Pandemic has so far gone above 290,000 deaths and the number is only growing.

     So what does all this mean for EMTs and Paramedics? Well, there are some positive effects and some challenges we could expect. With a growing segment of the U.S. population uninsured and underinsured, we will see a more healthy population under universal healthcare. Instead of people going to the hospital when they’re absolutely dying because they didn’t want to go when they were a little bit sick, we will see more people going to doctors offices and clinics for preventative reasons or to treat their illnesses before they get out of hand. We will see less people going to the hospital instead of using the ER as their doctors office. We will see the continued rise and importance of Community Paramedicine as well as more “treat in place” protocols. Inability to pay for healthcare costs is the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the United States, according to a 2019 by the American journal of public health, and when these uninsured people finally go to the hospital, they’re very sick, They’re also unable to pay for their ambulance rides. This puts more pressure on the need for funding from private insurance companies, medicare and medicaid payment. If ambulance services were able to be fully paid for every ambulance trip, municipal budgets would experience much relief from the pressure to close deficits due to the mandate to offer care to everyone despite the patient’s insurance situation. There would be a balancing effect. Another structural aspect is the separation of our service based on who is paid by whom, which is to say FDNY Municipal being paid by tax revenue, Voluntary Hospital units paid by Hospital Groups and the Privates paid by commercial firms. With single payer we will all be absorbed into a singular EMS service. There will no longer be pressures to collect billing information as it will all be one unified insurance system.

      Medicare and Medicaid are federal programs that get distributed to the states and then to the municipalities. Medicare is public healthcare for the elderly over 65 and the disabled, while Medicaid is health care for the poor. When asking how we would pay for a universal healthcare program, many Americans are not aware of the use of American modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Since the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1971, we have used what is called a “fiat currency”. That means that the dollar is not tied to any commodity to give it value except for taxation itself. When federal taxes are received by the federal government, they are immediately deleted and all federal spending is done with new money. So when we want to give billions in subsidies to foreign dictatorships who are also our allies, we use MMT. When we want to pay for a permanent state of war, we use MMT. When we want a system of single payer-universal healthcare, we’re asked, “How are we going to pay for it?” With new money! Just like we pay for everything else.

What we would ultimately see is a population that will become less chronically ill, diabetics who can receive insulin at no cost, cardiac and hypertension patients who can see specialists instead of going months or more without medication because they can’t afford it. We will see overweight people lose weight due to better overall preventative health. On our part, we might see an actual drop in call volume. France, which is usually in the top five countries in worldwide healthcare requires a copay for all ambulance rides. Since implementing this co-pay, they’ve seen a steep drop in abuse of the Emergency Medical System. The burden on towns and cities would be relieved greatly due to no more treatment of uninsured patients and the end of bankruptcy due to unavoidable illnesses. 

Medicare in the United States is a public healthcare system, but is restricted to persons over the age of 65, people under 65 who have specific disabilities, and anyone with end-stage renal disease. A number of proposals have been made for a universal single-payer healthcare system in the United States, among them the United States National Health Care Act (popularly known as H.R. 676 or “Medicare for All”) originally introduced in the House in February 2003 and repeatedly since. On July 18, 2018, it was announced that over 60 House Democrats would be forming a Medicare for All Caucus.

Advocates argue that preventive healthcare expenditures can save several hundreds of billions of dollars per year because publicly funded universal health care would benefit employers and consumers, that employers would benefit from a bigger pool of potential customers and that employers would likely pay less, would be spared administrative costs, and inequities between employers would be reduced. Prohibitively high cost is the primary reason Americans give for problems accessing health care. At over 27 million, the number of people without health insurance coverage in the United States is one of the primary concerns raised by advocates of health care reform. Lack of health insurance is associated with increased mortality – about sixty thousand preventable deaths per year, depending on the study.  Harvard Medical School conducted a study with Cambridge Health Alliance showed that nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with a lack of patient health insurance. The study also found that uninsured, working Americans have a risk of death about 40% higher compared to privately insured working Americans.

It is almost criminal the situation we are in today where a global pandemic has exposed that in our nation there are vastly different results for the rich and poor in health and social well being. In true matters of access to care and the results being life and death. Rebuilding our nation and healing the wounds inflicted by our outgoing President Trump should begin by the reconstruction of our healthcare system and the endorsement of every American for the concept of health equality and Medicare for All.

Chris Jacobs, FDNY Paramedic

#012: Muse of the Brighton Bathhouse   

I interrogated you with Newport cigarettes pursed at my lips.

          And you sized me up like a slave on the market block.

Emergently my covered wagon has been jettisoned and set ablaze by a blonde haired savage, 

a mercenary in clad multicolored finery with war paint under both blue eyes.

        Brandishing a spear and also a bottle of Russian Standard.

She’s since infused my life with her Red Bull risings and cynical parables on the subject of snow ball fighting with General Winter.

“Drink!” she whispers out her demands.

“Until in naked oblivion you can pronounce my name in full glory!

Take in all its parts and thus know my demons and also my saints. 

Extoll me as your eternal choicest muse. Make me your goddess and savior, secretly.”

     And thus I went to work.

My pen and pipes, belting out prose, parable and promises to fight for her to the death. 

And she beat me half to tears with the venyike.

In a wild Peony Ambush, 

She put herself upon me,

Robbed me bandit blind. 

Of my heart, and second soul as I made art to celebrate the coming of she into me.

Penniless as a proverb!

I marshaled all remaining vagabond tendencies into the rigorous use of my baller ball point pen.

“Woman, you are a golden locked lioness. Boxing with me, you strike incite and nerves unnerving furious fascination.”

Womb to tomb!

You Caspian blue terrorist! 

Thing of profoundest beauty.

Drag me down the Brighton Boardwalk and set me as an effigy of hopeless romanticism on the sand of Sea Gate!  

Sky high on fire.

Take me to pyre.

When our correspondence first began in September it was like a report on a Cherokee Indian massacre. 

Communicated via the passing of notes.

We conducted then a lively human traffic in roses and poems and also in promises.

A triangle trade.

You dripped wax on me shortly after.

I wrote you a play. 

“I will try to believe any stories I tell you and you will make me immortal!”

         In words and in dreams.

“Pull!” 

I produced on demand and she shot each product down.

Exploding clay pigeons with poems tied to paw, 

And smoke signals playing out on the prairie skies, steppes and later the chalk marks made on the promenade off Banner Ave were the guarded displays of my awe.

       “More fire!” 

       She proclaimed, by not proclaiming.

You tied me to a post and blind folded me so that in a mirror I’d not see my manly limitations, my grinning devils leering. 

I, the artist would then yell, “fire!”

And poems would be fired off, absconding into night with you as their target, their words would roll out the barrel of my wit without even seeking to dress themselves in the fine garments of rhyme.

        “The essential quality of a muse is that she will be perfect.”

While at the same time being deeply flawed. 

         At times she will desire to taste you and be fueled on your fluids, intoxicating herself on your writhing talents taking the form of depiction and futurist words. 

                   She is thrilled to test my will, 

Taking me into the shadows of some late night, 

Smoke inundated, poorly lit alleyway. 

Kissing me to tears under gas lit wind swept boulevards.

         At other times, she teases out my rough savant best by ignoring me completely. 

         Make me create in some wilderness cave like a mad Hebrew prophet, 

In some Warsaw ghetto tenements, creating “brave new worlds”, 

Burn apart in the steams of the bath house,

 Old dead tragic pasts until the proper 13th hour when she calculates just when I will be ready to perform.

Then dripping I emerge!

The greatest show; the highest form of art is after all the private performance you give her, 

     While these are not immortal, their audience of one is the source, the very foundation and subject of all the war effort!

    The muse is not there to please you! 

She is there to drag you uphill, in an assault on the profane glory of false gods and the smallness of men who plot in listless towers!

             Oh yes. Only an artist can challenge the gods and the shackles of mortality they put upon us.

       The essential quality of the artist is that he, or she, will possess some skill and some embattled implements that when rendering her muse perfections, and converting her human flaws into deeply troubling, yet inspiring cautionary apropos that; 

         This bipole, this anomaly of the creative process will then allow the artist the widest canvas to cast her into the form of goddess, a celestial being, a savior, a seductress, or an angel.

The artist regardless of his weaponry will be fighting his way up Bunker Hill.

When he gets there he will declare: 

“Love me until your love overwhelms the white gates of heaven.  Ravish me blind until I only see myself in the blue ocean of your eyes!”

            Her greatest strength as a subject is her ability to assume the form of desire but also to unleash a savage and indiscriminate rejection of the artist unless each piece produced is an improvement on her immortalization.

             For were the muse to be a submissive Siberian doll, an inanimate beauty, well that is just an act of painterly masturbation.

Useless to me.

Please excuse for,

“My Muse Makes Art a Contact Sport!”

And in the steam of the banya I assume the form of Krepki Mushik, 

Strong men making fearless art.

She’s a most capable gypsy partisan. 

A hooligan seductress.

A wild eyed savage, she holds herself up as a virtuous courtesan, lady at heart, source of great and the granddaughter of “a Jewish Baroness”.

Under her folds I do utter,

  When the steams clear and no one occupies the coffin ship but we:

“I’ll lick your tits and drink Borjomi.”

And then compose a body of American poems that will put all previous to shame.

#808

Fearless_Hopeless_Hearts 

        “Tell me storytime!” 

         She curls up on me, her ethanol engine exhausted.

        I want to fly us, so far away: 

This cab is now a magic carpet for a story cabaret.

            Using-a-punchdrunk-kitten in the back seat of a  Breuklyn-southbound-gypsy as my muse. One doesn’t choose,

  _the muse they use. Or when.     

There were worse assignments.

Given to more cowardly men!

And my constitution is and always will be_a wide canvas for futurist painting_ 

My-heart-when-fainting_

Is grinding, then breaking it_causes Brighton to flood and post Haitian earthshaking: 

  My soul is for barter_sign the dotted line, 

I’m a phantasm now-shaking collapsing-and up for the tainting.

  Exsanguination! Being bled dry!    

 There’s blood in my eye,

 A mind game, that’s fine, but the mind can unravel before the right time, and the things it envisions; the things you complete; like a thousand lifetimes emptying out of your whispers_ 

_Like two shots in the dark_unloading my heart on the cold of the street! 

Vasa, she whispers:

 “Why so sad all the time?_Tell me a story  with Camels and Bandits and rhyme!- and keys strung to kites_ mix your biwinning antics and Arabian nights! Make more epic poems! Can-we-not-agree_the audience cannot swallow_ an endless account, as you wallow in all of your feelings for me.”

Starry night burns bright, I begin again:

I have the will!

 In a previous life she believed mostly in kill-or-be-killed. 

She comes from place_ So brutal, so base, frustrated, consumed by the men in her face, 

The following ointments, which vodka let boil to a brine of pure hate_ juxaposed with the partisan flame of  my zeal, 

 I’ve been reborn in a futurist gate.

 _And invested with powers to steal or to heal!

Absorb all of your pain_ and restore your ideals! And  you will open my chest with your fingers: And start spinning the wheels_ 

It’s Russian Roulette, the way that she feels! 

Magic carpets to carry us so far from this place where we are_Highspeed races and chases_

_ Drive bys taking place without use of a car! 

Her kiss is the bullet of deady surrender.

The sweetness of service she’s willing to render_greatest by far:

To enroute replace my pumping mechanism, without medical training_without even leaving the hint-of-a-scar!  

       A pipe dream_a pipe bomb_ a zen.

 Near endless composition, the art of story telling unleashed from my phone or my pen_   

In base thirst for a woman I’ve known in other lives. 

And desire to keep knowing forever_

  _If forever could just be again, and again.    

I am trained to fix a broken heart, my own excluded.

For the heart is a time bomb_ your emotions are fire ball bearings_

_Your wiring is now made faulty, 

your rational mind is at times misguided-deluded…

• “Vasili, please, I’m lying here counting on your story to ease, I want erotic adventure, daring or fun, no more talk of feelings or the latest bombastic-head-fuck-with-a-gun, I like alegory, the-cave-with-the-thieves? What’s the name of that story?! No more tales of the mechanical heart, right before bed,”

• “I’ll tell you my dreams about star crossed Chechen peasants instead”.

II.

How can I, live so many lives; But be without you so many nights?

  Cold sweats. And the ache of seperation, imprisonment and then exile:

 Broken bottles or spears or my pen’s wronging rights, 

Sweat itself often passes as tears. 

While Writing my politics off as mere hooligan fist fights?   

I didn’t mean to trouble you with me, But we seem unable to end it quickly,

  Or end me quietly.

I have been hunted like a partisan and I found refuge in your secret kisses.

      Now we are partisans together I suppose, but you warned me you prefer the cities to the forests. The Peoni to the Rose. 

     What about Peoni verses Prose?

I prefer bath houses to General Winter_and the wearing of my solitude below four layers of my clothes.

So how now? 

Where will we find shelter?

We’ve run helter-skelter on the glass-bottle-broken-beaches or that Bulgar tavern where we hide.

            They have done so many things to me, 

Until now I cannot recognize my own face. 

I listen it seems, but prefer to confide.

            But it is just the face of a man claiming love! 

Cupids arrows mutilate. 

The barrage burns apart my barricades like katusha rockets, raining from above. 

Don’t fail me fearless heart, 

Ill get back to you! 

From Shali, the mountains, Brighton or Grozny too!

With  black eyes, black ties, last tries; this is no mere seduction, or simple desire:

 It’s a visceral longing to woe.  

Putin has declared war! But foolishly I long for just peace on this front line fight_

_A lull in the violence allowing me to steal my way back to you_guided by moon and my tragic-parachute-knockaround-daggerman-incite.  

 The barricade-we-made was cobbled together with useless albiet pretty word; 

Damn all my gradiose promises,

The misuse and abuse of fables and myth that confuse what I see with that which you claim that you heard.

I am almost quite old.

  In old soul time. 

I bought what you sold. Dash my face against Dagestan’s rocks, break all my bones if in this life I am more coward_more villain than hero and bold…

“Silly Vasa,” she giggles, pulling her supple  body supine even closer to closeness of mine, “Your passions on fire when you press your fingers to prose,_I’m drawing a line_ press your fingers to hold, I want Ambulance Action Peoni ambush_No thorns of the Rose, and my grand design for the story this time is to hear about the dark in your soul, the black rabbit hole where your ambulance goes!”  

III.

 A Poet paramedic: warm body, heart now made stone cold. I have the will, I carried bodies in piles through Bed Stuy, 

Up moutains_we always will battle the Reaper uphill.

 I never cried then, I did not even wince, 

Every night I’m not dreaming of loving your company, kissing your lips_I’m flashing right back_senses under attack: to life tremmors we trembled_in the City of Port-au-Prince! 

We carried legions off to what passed as hospitals.

 I’ve had to watch ten thousand die, now all I want is to carry you away from the coast of Brooklyn, magic carpet fly.

Fly in the face of your husband, your secrets; 

The dance I do with my stories, in trains or in cabs, returning with you 

To the place that you lie. 

But I dance again from time to time.You bring it out of me.

“Why cry old soul?” She whispers.

“I saw things I wasn’t meant to see.”

“Women like me?”

“You’re a dangerous creature we both can agree.” 

She gives me fourth and fifth tries, the body dies, but the song of the heart is timeless, therefore free.

IV.

Because when you are gone there are only words. Words make the basis of poems_ forming a plee from the deepest depths of my heart’s agony.

When each parting seems so long my mind invents monsters which lurk which are not even there!

In a silky, billowing dress_ I’d hide under your covers, I’d caress the folds of your being, run fingers through darkness through the locks of your hair.

• “Until I’m safe too?”

• “Like my fallen angel with her wings on gold fire; Dorogaia I need you.”

I pace the Brighton Boardwalk so long that all these lives mesh together ’til the story seems too wild, too Noire to be true; 

• “Turn this cab toward the seaboard, turn Idlewild, let’s run away, before we break day_”

• “You haven’t a clue! Mad man! A poorly laid plan!” 

Begging for some proof of goodness of his kind.

• “The validity of his mind!” 

A million cold stones acquired over long tenuous adventures, but regrets are for traitors on rewind.

Battles and then conflicting accounts of my enemies treacheries abound. 

An escape plan is successful only when the underlying logic is found! 

The logic is half based on a whisper, and half on a dream. 

 Their scissor hands dripping from love of the kill. Demons enter the portal with intention to scheme. To make you a mark, turn me to a skell or a shill.

They separated me from my humanity, loving you is against my rational will.

She’s half in the old world, 

and half in the new, 

half iron curtain, half crystal glass shoe. 

The cab nears the Verazono precipice, the Brighton abyss where we will be seperated anew. 

Tell me Odysseus: What mean me to you?

Was that voyage anything but unjust for all involved? 

 Once I had a white motor cycle, I was a fugitive slave, I was evolved. I killed the master and stormed the plantation and then half of the problem was solved!

And on it you waited to escape north toward the blue moon. 

• “Sooner than soon? Did your love for me grow after the rooftop fist fight in the light of my murderous swoon?”

• “Dorogaia that’s right.”

• “I don’t want such a life; a life of no humor, a life or death struggle, the terror of night.”

• “Stories for night, are about all of the wrongs swept away by the dawn and the light. I require one muse only. One significant. One longing. Never again in the trenches so vast, so empty and so lonely.”

• “The story of us? Us is a wild tragic roundabout fuss!”

• “Is_to_be_a_tale_of_triumph. Over the hopeless heart via the art of romantic prolonging!”

• “Righting or wronging?” 

• “I sought out your company.” 

• “Do it again.” 

• “I do it still out of the longing.” 

I have a voice and I have a loud pen. 

And I have passion and it overflows my body until I see miracles in the streets. 

The strength of forty men!

And the moon winks. 

Then on Banner Ave. the story completes. 

And then again, the world’s smallest violin plays just for us, she thinks. 

            Why does such a long shadow fall over his house every time he drinks?

            We are not star crossed.

            We are not divided by a sea.

            Or by barricades. Maybe we’re just in defiance of destiny.

            Or the flaming up of the ghettos in the latest Caucasian raids.

            When I looked to the sky I saw three ships sailing us apart.

            You off to marriage and the world of the continent.

            Me, bound forever to the belly of the ship enslaved only to my own fearless heart.

            And as they sailed us apart, to never meet again,

Some sailors sang out, “The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria!”

            “To the glory of the new world!” they toasted. 

Vain Braggarts and white men.

            But I begged the moon: 

“Dasha, Dasha, Dasha! Why can’t you love a wild peasant like me?”

            What fate was this where we have to part our story time in endless tragedy?

            Death itself could not stop this kind of beating in my chest.

            If am reborn another thousand lives,

            Each time waking from a long kiss good night,

            Each life I will call out to you again as my test. 

The body will die, but its sleep is the cousin of rest. 

            So, tied again to the mast.

            Shackled and blinded I swagger on hopeless, fearless heart.

            In dreams, don’t forget me. 

This was begged long ago.

            I will steal away and climb to the roof of Mt. Olympus if I must to give the gods a show.

            I’ll ask for the help of the spirits if God has no time for us artisans.

Wild peasant partisans, from good families with magic carpets and reckless biwinning minds. The heart yearns, the back breaks, the soul is on fire, the real man, he grinds. 

Black until blue.

Carrying me, one day, with wings home to you.

            And if you read my verses see if I still appear a slave.

            And we can say we knew each other when I was a free man and you were a free woman. I’ve traded my weapons of war for the power to save.  

            There is only one chain I cannot learn easily how to break.

            And that, is the one I first broke to be by your side. By your side, give or take.

            I long for you.

            It will always be that way. It has been that way since Labor Day.

            But then, story time is easy for an old soul with a pen. 

• “You’re not like other men!”

• “Hopeless, Fearless Heart, how long apart must I wait to stay gone?”  

• “Vasa, I don’t know, forever. Or Until Dawn.”