Scene 3

Havana, Cuba

“The Fall”

Janaury 5th, 1989

As per Heval Sandra Santiestiban a Cuban Comrade:

Sandra Santiestiban has jet black hair and is petite. She’s vaguely malnourished for a Cuban, but still attractive and dynamic. 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.

“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.

And I knew, 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 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.

And I am not sure that we prepared adequately for this day, actually. I’m not sure really we believed this day would come.

And 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 the chief; 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?” someone named Sandra Santiestiban 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 of 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.

Scene 2

Diyarbakir, Turkey

“Nawruz Everywhere!”

February 25th, 1978

As told by Heval Kawa Ahmedi a Bakuri Kurdish Guerrilla:

“The legend goes that in a meeting in a tea house in the village of Lice near Diyarbakir City, on November 25^th of 1978 a group of young students lead by Abdullah Ocalan founded the Kurdistan Workers Party and launched a revolution unlike anything the world had ever seen before it.”

I was born in Diyarbakir City, a poetic place. An ancient citadel of giant black stone walls and total martial law. A town of prisons, stories, heroes and valance in the epoch of the Kurdish people. Little wine bars, a thriving literary scene. It cannot decide whether to be eastern or western, Turkish or Kurdish. The epicenter of a great revolt, or the dystopian mockery of the full blown repression of a colonizing power forcing a boot heel on our neck.  As Kurdistan is a powerful and long repressed enduring idea, that idea is becoming a reality on the barricades here and long running fight in the mountains. An imagined community of over forty million souls who are wrongfully, shamefully divided between the imposed nation states of Turkey, Syia, Iraq and Iran all things have two names, all things are both real and imposed upon us. As if to be a Kurd requires an act of insanity, and an act of double thinking. A persistent zealous fight to make the world acknowledge our rights and identity. To admit we have a right to survive as a nation beset with enemies on all sides.  

Following the Turkish military coup of 1980, the Kurdish language was prohibited in public and private life. The prison of Diyarbakir filled up and the endless wails of rape and torture propelled the movement to full mobilization and to take up arms again.

 Diyarbakir, which in my people’s tradition is also called Ahmed has now swollen to nearly 4 million people since the eradication and ethnic cleansing of over 5,000 Kurdish villages in the great ranges of mountains to the east. The priamry battle grounds between the Party and the Turkish State. Growing up there, there was of course no Kurdish allowed in school, no Kurdish books or music except deeply underground. Were in within the Turkish State’s power, we would not even have Kurdish names! We would admit to being a backwards people of “Mountain Turks”. I was born in the year of the largest, latest and greatest uprising. And although since the days of the Medes there have been  “one thousands sighs and one thousand failed revolts”, this uprising was to be completely different.

 In 1984 Abdullah Ocalan and the Kurdistan Workers Party simultaneously attacked three Turkish army posts and police stations in Bashur and announced the beginning of their revolution. For the next thirty years, almost without pause the P.K.K. and it’s armed guerrilla would battle the Turkish military across Bashur, the name we call the Turkish occupied zone of Kurdistan which means “the North”. Over 50,000 would die, the Turks would engage in vast acts of scorched earth barbarism and we in the Party would eventually turn to out right terror. In the end, the majority of the deaths were Kurdish civilians. In the end the only liberated ground was a handful of villages deep in the mountains of North Iraq, the Qandil.

Now, Kawa is not my real name. It is the name given to me by the guerrillas of the P.K.K. when I joined the Party at age 16. In the year 2000. By that time we were fully surrounded in Qandil being attacked on all sides and death seemed certain. Total defeat as well. Our great leader had been kidnapped in Kenya. Major leaders of the movement including the brother of Abdullah Ocalan, Osman, had completely betrayed us. Our own Iraqi Kurdish brothers in the K.D.P. and P.U.K. Peshmerga were collaborating with Turkey and American to annihilate us.

How do I tell you my story? How does this even begin or end for an outsider. For people who do not even know where Kurdistan begins of ends, or even care. As Turkey is a NATO ally, and no matter what it says or does will remain a beneficiary of great power largesse.

I cannot tell you my real name. I cannot speak for the Party, not can I fully disclose the deepness of my hope and my hate to a stranger.

I will try and say somethings for the benefit of doubt, that non-Kurds could care about us so much that they would come to our land by the hundreds. To fight and die alongside us not simply fighting in resistance to Islamic radicalism, genocide and repression, but also because they grasp the larger idea. The total an utter radicalism and implications of Abdullah Ocalan’s vision. For the survival of the revolution rests not in securing a Kurdish State, but instead to export these ideas abroad. To make the blood of the martyrs raise the flood waters of all mankind and provide a blueprint for liberation.

Of course we began as communists, we began admiring the Cubans and it was the Russians and Palestinians that first trained armed the resistance in the early days in the Bekka Valley of Lebanon. But we are not Communists or Nationalists anymore. Our thinking on the subject of liberation has evolved. The Cuban connection and the Palestinians connection are very real and enduring parts of the story.

But, when we all almost died on the mountain top, surrounded and out gunned in 2000 there were no Cubans, or Russians or Palestinians to help us as they were all defeated or fully besieged. By some miracle, or just by sheer will the Party survived. And the 1989 defeat of Communism internationally required us to climb higher, dig deeper to criticize and self-criticize. To adopt an evolution in our thinking. With our ranks decimated, the armed struggle In a complete stalemate, declared a terrorist organization by almost every European country; we evolved. The revolution could not ever be won with arms and ideology alone. Nor could we secure Kurdistan while every other nation on earth embraced Capitalist Modernity. To secure our victory and survival as a people in Bakur, Bashur, Rojalat and Rojava we would embrace the ideas of a Jewish anarchist from Vermont, as re-interpreted in prison by Ocalan and implemented by the new largely female leadership of the Party. This methodology called “Democratic Confederalism”, adopted by the Party in 2004 would soon find actual expression in Rojava. The Wild West of Kurdistan, the North most area of Syria. In 2014 when the Civil War broke out the Party and its allied militias seized control of major towns and cities across Syria abandoned by the Assad regime.

And thus we came down from the mountains, out of the underground and prepared to make stand in Rojava where the radicals of the Islamic State were terrorizing out people and butchering everyone in the their path. If we go back to the mountains it will signal only our isolation and defeat. If we hold these cities, if we showcase that we are fighting to defend not just for Kurds but for Arabs, Assyrians, Yazidis, Circassaians, Chechens and Turkmen too; if we show that Democratic Confederalism is the solution, the way ahead for all oppressed peoples; then others will join us. And like the Nawruz mountain fires this uprising will spread everywhere.  

ACT I:

BAKUR

Scene 1

Deir Ez-Zor Province, Syria

“On a Cold and Bloody Front near the River Euphrates”

November 25^th, 2017

As told by Heval Ciya a Scottish Soldier & YPG Volunteer;

“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 half way 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 store front 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 an 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 boney towns leading to Hajin, the last stand of the caliphate. 
Very bad intelligence. 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. Motor cycles with snipers affixed to re-position.  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 an very, very small airforce 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 postion 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, pick up 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 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 riots 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 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 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 Kasedeah, 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 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 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 New Yorker and I talk about the girls back home. I talk about my Ashley. He talks about his Daria.

“Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your lips. Late into the long trip back to Brighton to you 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.”

He was more a poet medic, me just a Scottish warrior.

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. The 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 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 the 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, are not angels they are fighting for democracy, feminism, ecology and tolerance in the heart of the Middle East.

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 beard.

Prelude

Erbil, Iraq

“Night falls on the Oldest Continually Inhabited City on Earth”

May 28^th, 2017

As told by Heval Kawa Zivistan a New Yorker, Jew, Paramedic and committed Partizan:

The air ship lands in Erbil. Everyone claps, as if they don’t know this is exactly what a plane should do. Everyone on the plane proceeds to take their safety belts off and clog the passage way. Welcoming me on the morning of Ramadan 2017 to the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth, are bored but friendly police and overweight militia men. Erbil was voted “the next Dubai” a few years ago. Before it almost fell to the Islamic State bandits and the price of its illegal oil sales dropped out. It’s still busy and modern and very, very secret policed. The Iraqi Kurds and their Peshmerga militia of the K.D.P.; Kurdistan Democratic Party based here almost fled in sand person baggy mass when ISIS got within half-an-hour away and got turned back by the god fire called coalition airstrikes. It all been that close.

“Did I do it all for a woman? Or a series of women? I might have.”

When I leave this place, it will be in hand cuffs or a bag. Or I will walk out the door of a plane in Cuban made linen shirt, with a fake gold watch and a green partisan cap. One of the brothers will show up with a stolen car and get me at the airport. A Russian woman is going to throw her arms around me, and then I’m going to go to medical school. Or I’m gonna die here ingloriously and get buried in an unmarked grave, probably after being badly tortured.

But this is what they trained me for. Grandiose dreams verses nightmares!

The other night in Russia I helped the Kurdish Mafia sell a list of 5,700 foreign ISIS fighters to an unknown foreign intelligence buyers in Beirut, probably Russian or Israeli. In return for my traffic and troubles, they gave me the keys to an empty apartment in the South of the City or Erbil. And faceless 300,000 Iraqi dinar to buy some street food, get a cell phone and see the city. I arrived as planned on the day Ramadan began in late May. When airport security was believed to be at its least inquisitive in Turkey and Iraq. I will trade my medical skills and my cunning, also hard drives and enemy flags for food and shelter. The supporting mini-brigade of volunteers will all be coming in on different flights, on various days. I’m the second man in. The rest will come in the summer and fall. Some are healers and some a professional killers, but I think we’re all a little crazy to be doing this pro-bono. At least half of us believe in ’the Revolution’ and wish it to succeed, survive and spread. Some, I’d imagine are big game hunting Islamic fundamentalists.

“I don’t think she’s gonna meet me at the airport, dead or alive. War or medical victory. In triumph or a corpse. If I some how make it back to New York in a year or so after this is over, well over for me as a volunteer. I will return to only a small group of supporters and friends.”

I arrived in Erbil, called Hewler by the Kurds, with $200 dollars American and two black boxes of cargo; the necessary instruments I need to establish a clandestine camp for emergency medical training somewhere inside Greater Kurdistan, but most likely in Northern Syria. In the autonomous zone called Rojava. The quickly expanding liberated territory with what reports describe as an obsession with Abdullah Ocalan, and his radical paradigms about womens’ liberation, ecology and non-state democracy. Anything could be happening there, but all I know is they are crush the ISIS Cheta kilometer by kilometer at rapid speeds. Raqqa is completely besieged by the Y.P.G., which stands for People’s Protection Units, the largest mostly Kurdish fighting force the U.S. backed coalition fights through in Syria. Cheta, means bandit, which is what we all equate the Islamic State fanatics with being. The phrase denies their ‘Islamic-ness’, their political grievances which in many ways are valid as well as their ecclesiastical claims to be a Caliphate. But, some could suggest that the internationalists have bandit qualities too. Angels and devil, vagabonds and misfits, even cannibals they say in the oral history of the war.

I am only a semi-ideological man. In that some of the varying Utopian currents of the ideologies speak to my better half. Well, I was until recently a bit more of neutral humanist. I will now call myself a highly sober and reasonably well-read man experimenting with Kurdish ideology. I have to say much of the writings of Abdullah Ocalan are very compelling. The Kurds declare that every life needs a leader, and perhaps that is true; because I am not as hard as Apo, he sets a path of incredible elevation. He demonstrates the impossible is sometimes possible, he does it from prison. Though I play an activist of sorts on the stage of life, I’m not one to take a creed and make it my religion. I am also a non-sentimental man. Though I cry sometimes for myself and my predicament as an agent of progress. An aspiring revolutionary or a real one maybe. Though it is my profession to indiscriminately prolong human life. I’m a paramedic. Waiting for me back in Russia, though how long she will wait is anyone’s guess; is a lover with a young son who isn’t mine. An age seven Syrian Russian Druze, his father fucked off back to Dubai. This woman has low expectations of my happy return. She presumes I will probably die in Syria.  The Druze are highly secretive religion which is something like Islam and something like Hinduism, which amongst other hidden details believes in the reincarnation of their people, with documented memory of past lives.

Waiting for me back in New York City is a mother and father who are scared, my father is also slowly dying. My brother runs a racket in Barcelona. It’s a growing but benign racket. Guiding the wealthy towards football games and wine. Waiting back in Brooklyn and Haiti is an underground army of nearly 2,000 ambulance workers and their sympathizers, theoretically. My 33 birthday was very well attended as was my Passover Seder held the night before I departed to Havana. Though history if it remembers will both absolve me, but call me a Jew, it is only half of me. My sentimental half you ask? No, my cunning, ruthless and deceptive half. No, just a half. I’ve become a bit anti-Semitic in my middle age, from self-hatred. The blood is neither a help nor a hindrance. I am at a loss to say, except for perhaps one occasion, when being a half Jew never got me anywhere or anything extra or adventitious.

You will have to forgive me when I say that out here, I know I am completely alone. Now of course there are the hevals, the stranger comrade friends. And some I think I feel real solidarity with, some. Even the Kurds and Arabs with whom we can barely even communicate. I get that politically speaking, militarily speaking even I have friends. But the feeling of being alone is based on this inner sense of what I’m doing here. What I see, and what drives me day by day up the treacherous mountain out of this wasteland toward my goals is clearly much bigger than me. But it is not a political theory or an imaginary friend. It always feels so pejorative when Americans accuse me of ‘trying to save the world’, which this is clearly not. And this time, it is not a Russian woman pushing me along. Though certainly a few them of can be found hanging around feigning excitement or outrage in regards to my work. Actually both my lover and my artful muse both begged me into their own ways of begging to not undertake this at all.

Regarding the nature of my work, well it is of course the training of emergency medical technicians with overlapping with training instructing them how to self-sustain medicine and Democratic Confederalism, which is to say ‘bold freedom fighting for stateless democracy’. But I emphasize importantly that I am impartial as to the success of the training if the success of the revolution is accomplished. Of course I do not have total megalomaniacal self-importance. I know quite well I am a tiny historical semi colon, not even a foot note. Probably only remembered, if at all because I kept a journal and wrote it all down. In the Cuban tradition which I have studied and admire one mixes politics and medicine in service of the poor and oppressed.

I have a non-linear mind. I remember the day I founded my first ‘American Workers Party’ about as well the deaths of most of Hevals in defense of Rojava. There were tens of thousands of Arabs, Kurds, Yazidis, Chechens, Armenians in the glorious Syrian Democratic Forces who died before I arrived and perhaps only forty something international volunteers who fell.  Numerically and militarily I’m not sure how much we mattered alive, but martyred we brought a global flurry of attention and headlines. Well that’s a simplistic deduction. Just like to say all of my woman and men of the tabors in which I fought perished in a physical sense. Since of course shahid nemarin, martyrs never die! But some of us came back in boxes. Some they never found the bodies. But did we all die in Rojava, the West? Did we lose something inside us trying to discover something? I am confident that we travelled to that war torn land with great optimism in our hearts, and we all left with partial understandings. Feeling as though we lived and others died, many other died for something that was not yet secure as a fact on the ground.

For in “the West, the Land where the Sun Sets” amid that Rojavan Revolution I almost died both physically and mentally many, many times. But their saying held true, ‘martyrs never actually die.’ To have survived my tour I should consider myself lucky, but luck is not what I feel. I feel shame, pure and total shame. More so I feel that I went up a mountain to attempt to validate the better feelings I hold of an optimistic human nature. And now back in Capitalist Modernity all I can do is watch my friends die on a telescreen. Knowing what I know, the secrets I am forced to keep; I have become somewhere in between a phantasm and a Martian. But, though I do not recognize my face anymore, I recall my motives and I am impressed with all the things we attempted. But I am not the same man who left for Kurdistan a year ago.

Notes

I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to hide and what I can give away. I’m actually very detached from Western thinking so don’t even know what makes compelling propaganda in the West anyway. Actually, the sly and looming enemy knows most of our real names, and frankly were there not many informants amongst us, it is simply a matter of sad fact that to get their passports back many of the French and British volunteers gave us away. Not to snitch jacket, but with a little lean on anyone can make a person flip. Really, there were not that many of us internationalists to keep track of. As the mad China-man Andok said, “the hard drives containing our data were barely even secured and this place is awash in spies.” Our overall numbers were estimated to be around 500 strong of which around 50 perished. Mostly in combat, some later from a wave of alleged suicides. We were small enough therefore for the various security services to keep track of.

So what is the actual purpose of this manuscript? It is certainly not to glorify or denigrate the volunteers. I think it brave we went there but I don’t think we game changed a single thing. Perhaps we were all only there to bear witness that the revolution has even happened. It is surely not my aim give away military secrets and name names, because I am many things but not a Josh, a ‘donkey ass betrayer’. Suffice to say the C.I.A. and the M.I.T. know all our names.
I heard some comrades sang like little opera singers to get their European passports back. All speculation, none can actually say. Americans, we had the easiest deal. After ISIS is finished maybe it will not be so black and white, fighting a NATO ally and what not. Assisting a revolution for stateless democracy, womens’ emancipation and social ecology in the heart of the war torn Middle East. ‘Heval Ciya’ the Scott always used to say that the 231 Sniper Unit changed the entire game, but really only the United States and the Coalition airstrikes probably, certainly did. When the last of the under 2,500 U.S. Special Forces leave the Turks will invade in force and try and undo everything.
There’s a story we heard about a Y.P.G. Euro volunteer vacationing in Turkey immediately after his tour. He was of course arrested and will serve life in prison. He probably should have made better choices for leave and decompression. There are lots of crazy people here. You have to be little crazy to travel half way across the earth to enlist in a revolution inside a bloody brutal civil war amid a great power confrontation placing Russia and Iran directly against the United States and N.A.T.O.
I was told by ‘Heval Jansher’ the Y.P.G. guerrilla who helped train us that, that if I survive the war I should “write something about Rojava that does justice to the over 12,000 martyrs. That does justice to the cause of Kurdistan. Honors Abdullah Ocalan and upholds the values of the revolution.” That it should humanize this resistance struggle inside a revolution inside a civil war inside a great game for the Middle East.

“Maybe, just make it a kind of strange love story,” Jansher joked with me over cigarettes and endless tea.
So I hope this account manages some of that, compiling the oral history, experiences and many martyrdom’s shared amongst the approximate 500 foreign Y.P.G./Y.P.J./I.F.B. Internationalist fighters. At the very least I’d like to capture what it was that made us enlist in this hell to take part, to fight and die and kill and try and help, to be less than a foot note in the epic tale of Kurdistan. But still a part.
“It has to be a love story or they will never make a movie about it comrade,” Heval Jansher once said, “to the West without a Movie, it is perhaps like this struggle is not even happening at all.” But he also said a ‘real revolutionist’ has no love except for his or her people. That any romantic love is a “bourgeois luxury for civilians”.

“Our love story is for the Resistance of the Age” he used to say, but then Heval Jansher also laughed and noted Jake Gillenhaul was then already shopping around a script where he plays an anarchist falling in love for a beautiful Y.P.J. fighter and another action exploitation of the Y.P.J. was coming out soon in France. But that will likely not go anywhere useful.
“You see, in real life we would probably platform and deport this stupid volunteer and the Y.P.J. comrade, she would be shamed and sent briefly to prison” Heval Jansher told me. A famous saying states that the “Kurds have no friends besides the mountains.” Well that’s no longer completely true. The 500 who served and the 45 who died besides the 10,000 Kurdish and Arab martyrs of the battle to defeat ISIS and defend the Rojava Revolution will live forever in the Kurdish tradition, since in Kurdistan ‘Martyrs never die’. Shahid Namarin. These were kind of talks we had at the Qerechow Academy.

That then said this is not a love story at all. It’s not ever a Middle Eastern Western. The revolution itself has hardly been secured. The struggle is hardly over. The iron heel and might of the Turkish army looms right over the border to the North. Ready to descend quickly and murder us all. Undo everything that has been fought for against the so-called Islamic State. The Forces of the bloody dictator Assad backed by the Russian army and Hezbollah dig in to the south of the Euphrates river. The collaborationist Iraqi Kurdish K.D.P. Peshmerga, the Iranian supported Hashid Ashabi popular mobilization forces, the Shi’a dominated Iraqi Army and all manners of Iranian revolutionary guards to the south east in Sinjar. To the West the Jihadists of Al Qaeda’s latest rebrand and Islamists of different types in Idlib.

Enemies of the revolution on every single side! In fulfillment of my promises I will try and present our little part of the story, as the defense has really only just begun. And everything might be wiped away before you even paid attention to vastness and hope of it.  



108 Workers Life

Raise that black chai high!
Serchevan! Nine hours of fire later and for now the tea is now gone.
A flat land of wheat and Masood is where I start.
I can read the human heart, I can take over crowds with no mike. Kurdish, Assyrian, Arab alike.
I was trained to fire from a dirt bike. At close range into enemy face not vest,
You cannot run from an airstrike. We’re doing our best.
The terror, the horror is rife,
And you know I’m all about that struggle person life.
And you know I’m living wrong.
I save lives sometimes, but sometimes we take them with an AK or the edge of a knife.
I need a Dragonov wife.
I gave her something to believe, and then death flowed freely.
Laela Naesh (live your life), believe me ill need you to see me. Indomitably!
Go in, crowd control it, and survive if you can to sort the plot points out,
Was your vision clear, motivation high, did you walk away understanding what this revolt was all about?
Live your life!
It’s not more important! A smile and a blush formed over the thrill of a save or a kill.
I have to hold you tight, into the life of night, show you the strength of my resilience, my sheer Kurdish will.
Black tea for you, for us all, here comes the debka circle dance, for those about to stand, and those about to fall. Middle East says winner take all.
Shahid namaray, were dancing for the dead. Put that bright kafia around your neck, and visions in your head.
And believe me, was the last thing she said, we believe in this struggle as if it were love,
Push came shove,
And then she was dead.
When the great revolt is over I’ll take ya,
To far away Haiti and also to Jamaica.
To wine ya, to shake ya.
Trinidad is the place I’m secretly from. Wickedest wine and brownest rum. Take away all my suffering pain,
Return me soon to the city of Port of Spain.
Perwerde,
You cannot run from an airstrike.
But you can kill a man with gun play from a dirt bike.
These are dangerous front lines where freedom will die or prevail in bullets hail,
I’m a medium dangerous man so I’ll take you there in the event of a hike, a hike toward some violent truth, things the future will need not the present will like.
We’ve been fighting so long it breaks my resolve, I many times bleed, I have no longer some sense of those things that I loved, I wanted for happy or id likely even need.
I’m not highly seduced by TV or the material creed. I have a militant mind set developed to fight, ethically sound and morally right, based on what loved comrades suffered not things we read.
Black tea for you, for us all, here comes the debka circle dance, for those about to stand, and those about to fall. Middle East says winner take all.
Shahid namaray, were dancing for the dead. Put that bright kafia around your neck, and visions in your head.
And believe me, was the last thing she said, we believe in this struggle as if it were love,
Push came shove,
And then she was dead.
It’s harder now to breathe,
It’s a struggle sometimes, just to remember to believe.
Now im treading water for the loose ends. Capitalist modernity has the manacles for loyalists, serfs as well as the play pretends.
I remember breaking pita bread with hand grenades traded, I remember the names of my latest dead friends read on the TV, signal style far faded. And we all try to see,
What they took from Syria and your people wasn’t exactly what was taken from me.
Of course the jihadists also attacked my city, never again, that’s what patriots still say. Never forget 911, means never pity or play.
And it’s wonderful, to get to see your bright eyes. It’s wonderful to not be judged for the monster or the radical some would make me out to be. They say I believe too much Middle Eastern logic, thinking too democratic confederally.
Black tea for you, for us all, here comes the debka circle dance, for those about to stand and those about to fall.
Shahid namaray, were dancing for the living and the dead. Put that bright kafia around your neck, and motivations in your head.
I was just trying to live life free. I was trying to get my blade marks into the tree of history, maybe. I was trying to give my big apple comrades something to believe, but there was nothing up my sleeve.
No reinforcements to release us, quite a lot of cadro talk is still land of make deceive.
What’s an AK to an airstrike? What’s a dvotchka with a dotchka to a modern tank? Before we treaded in the ghettos and mountain bunkers, then we soared and then Afrin sank.
Now watch me run the crowd control, on these trains airplanes and human tapestry of crowds. I do it confident and loud, they trained the craziest for the best, and those of us who would survive the war were no faster than the rest.
The changes we made with Kalashnikovs was not what this revolution needed most or particularly Best.
Thunder, lightning now many of our hevals are one by one dead. Martyrs never die. I
In Rojava, you point to your poster, they nod and say what a truly dangerous gal or ideological guy.
But we keep the red, green yellow flying high.
And you can bury yourself when the right moment comes, but they still know how to kill us from the sky.
Black tea for you, for us all, here comes the debka circle dance, for those about to stand, and those about to fall. Middle East says winner take all.
Shahid namaray, were dancing for the dead. Put that bright kafia around your neck, and visions in your head.
And believe me, was the last thing she said, we believe in this struggle as if it were love,
Push came shove,
And then she was dead.

The only suitable ‘policy’; since we are playing a game that is set up for us to inherently remain powerless is a new resistance strategy, which incorporates nine broad elements; (1) Analyze precisely how Israelis, Irish, Cubans, Iranians and Bangladeshis have utilized ‘development technology’ to secure their states; then apply it to a more localized nation. (2) Decentralization, decentralization and decentralization. (3) Utilization of the Human Rights instruments as a base line set of demands. (4) Utilization of ‘militant non-violence’ to resist daily rights violations carried out in every country. (5) Securing the means of development via a broad application of ‘development technology’ poured into ‘mass capacity’ training modules. (6) Formation of ‘parallel state’ formations to deny the existing governments’ tax revenue and stated functional purpose. (7) Harnessing bloc purchasing power to boycott all goods corporately owned by the domestic or foreign oligarchy at the periphery and semi-periphery. (8) Disruption of all supply chains back to the core; (9) Emancipation.

#36

Her Bright Eyes Tell Men Lies

_The longest road to nowhere is not a distance travelled,

        But a speculation on hopeless amounts of flesh,

         Under garments torn in heat of passion_unfastened, ripped 

 Unraveled.

_And her bright eyes told men lies_

        Catch note of lusty thinking in her steamy alibies_

Parabelem allegory_

Omissions how she tells a story_ She left me crumpled like her panties-panting-purgatory 

As a foot note to her foot upon my spine.

“I don’t need you, you need me.”

 “Don’t think I can set you free, you are my poem spouting puppy, 

And now you are performing; 

Exclusively for me. 

And your art charade of unrequited lusty love or misadventure_
      Beats out for my attention_ more persuasively than all the violence and soap operas on Amerikan TV.”

What made this Dvotchka such a G? Will I dash my best intentions on the violent rocks of her siren’s symphony? 

Her words once free from Stoli’s demons are always formed and fully chosen.

The body of my work was once made a sullen corpse.

             A derelict and body frozen.

Bleak times had befallen me, 

I had been fully stripped of all my honor and my human dignity,
      And the vultures flying far ’bout my corpse were blotting out the sun,
      She sought my solace via seperation_
Of the bullets from the chamber, of my mostly self destructive, less than lethal gun.

And then from what I must assume, 

She laid her hands upon my corpse and undertook reanimation_ 

And the cold dead corpse did come alive and danced across the room.

Frosts are setting in_

Ice now coats the biggest apple;

Baptize me now in bath tub gin; 

And exercise these wicked spirits that sing;  

Vodka soda lullabies, 

And pander to the shift work differential of ego driven battle cries. 

It’s no post-modern Cold War thrill! 

There are weapons-and these weapons aim exclusively to kill. 

The full intention of her will_is to obliterate, 

And set on fire as many of our feelings as we can.

        There will be no perestroika of my conscience or a glasnost of her heart_ 

She has not a single double standard she won’t utilize and put upon to thwart the worst intentions of a man.

No Dvotcka over us held so much power!

Zeus himself came to come_to take her flower.

And she cracked the neck of his transfigured rapist swan.

In the form of a banker or of trader. 

Or accountant tax evader,

My response; I ought evade her,
Undergo a series of cold showers and get gone.

This is not a competion,
          That’s a woman! Not a  prize,
  A predator who in prim palaver pulsates promiscuity,
            Under even handed guize.
The best of masclinity, will crumble before conquest_affront their inginuity and she will take them by surprise.

        “You’ve made a goddess out of me! You extoll my slightest movement,
        Into a some Brighton Boardwalk Odyessy,
And I can’t trade the car I’m utilizing for a verile half mad horse,
To get to where I’m going I have shed my sentiment and surely if it’s needed_ All of my remorse.
        I could lick you, I could kick you, I could leave you in the snow for dead,
      As you lose yourself forever in words I’ve never even said.”

There are rules my friend,
            And if one doesn’t opt for game and sport you ought cash out_before a grim retort will set the revolvers spinning barrel against you at the recieiving end.
          Don’t be hasty in your conduct, the cards of your emotions you have laid already on the table fully plain,
          If her bright eyes told men lies, and she desists from incriminating, slick replies.
      Know she has maintained herself besides you in her efforts to absolve you of your pain.
And there are  many lives to live,
And if your life you seek to give,
    Beware a quick draw shoot out with an un-loaded gun, be careful with your promises
Or the wrath you may incur.

    She’s happy just to work you.  To make you work so hard, so make an honest woman out of her.  
 
 

#05 Champaign the Friend of Cigarettes

Written for Daria Maccluskey

12/05/12

How do you cope with a newly broken heart?

For the best way to get over on a man, is under another man, she told me.

I’ll tell you how to make tovarish me¸ happy.

    First, we have to make art constantly.

        Found art; forged art, undressed art; lewd, crude and out of control; art.

    It doesn’t have to be pretty or even rhyme really;

            But we have to make it together somehow.

Second, you have to sing for me; freedom songs; epic ballads you have to remember the old tongue;

    Remember the rights notes, the hooks, and the disposition of the love, in the beginning and the end all at once.

        I’ll back you up, best I can, refrain. But they need to be songs from the soul and the heart both at once, like the sound of a circle.

    Third; we have to travel; like a great endless escape.

        New cities, new cities, sites;

        Holding hands under the vanilla skies and when the sky breaks open too.

            Rick shaws, picnics and gondolas and mandalas too, whatever the fuck a mandala even is. Or a gondola. Pistols out and moving forward on adventure.

        Constant endless walk toward adventure!

            And the world never getting old, getting stuck, and getting choked up amid the champagne and cigarette smoke. Fifth, we need to save the world, it’s true.

        Sixth, we need to eat nice foods as available to us.

        Seventh; kids, probably they say we have to make lots of kids happy and well raised.

        Eight; never leave my side please.

            Ever for too long.

            And back to number 4; We have to make love again!

In all best forms and low forms and high Russian and low English and all the between ways to say; defy. Defy all that is being said about cynical loves, and opportunistic loves.

    We are the very same age and class born on opposite sides of the lines.

Chapter 6

 

 

“Don’t listen to the words I say, the screams all sound the same, though the truth may vary our ship will carry our bodies safe to shore,” she hums the Monsters and Men.

 

The boat ride to shore through sloshing blue black waters carrying their clandestine squad of four had gone off much more seamlessly copasetic than McIntosh had feared, who being West Indian did not know how to swim.

So after the submarine ride which had to round the Cape Horn and run both tropics twice to reach its drop off point undedicated by the military intelligence of the U.S.A. a short boat ride thorough rocky waters brought Yulia, Adelina, Oleg and McIntosh to safe house on Block Island; via a small flashing green Beacon a woman named Lisa Starr guided them to shore, and quickly shuttled them in her jeep to the island’s underground railroad station at the Hygeia Hotel; where now they were most vulnerable for they were under the protection of a coven or witches, or shaman sorcerers it should be said, witches begin derogatory.

 

This coven could trace its origins back to the genocide in Salem when aligning with Irish pirates, bootleggers and Mohegan Indian they had fallen back to New Shoreham to take control of the island.

 

Lisa Starr looked like she was in her late forties with short greying hair by day, but by night she transformed somehow and looked half that age. Oleg when he awoke and came to find breakfast in the three floor yellow and red hotel that he barely recognized her. All the sorcery alarmed him and he wondered what drugs had been injected into by the sneaky Israelites, or fed to them enroot so he could be so susceptible to manipulation of the senses. Oleg had lived for some time in the Israeli city of Nazareth and served two years in its military police force before immigrating to America to not think the Israelis were one of the sneakiest, most manipulative peoples alive.

Oleg Medved feels the same way about Judaism as he does about witchcraft, but many a little more sentimental about Judaism because witchcraft doesn’t have any warm welcoming family holidays that he is aware of. Nor did the witches, shaman sorcerers rather help him obtain the blue American passport that makes him the only legal member of this little unit.

“So you want a Gaelic scone,” asks Lisa Starr.

“Why thank you,” he replies and pops the crunchy beige cake in his mouth.

“The orders are to separate your cell immediately. You and Ms. Yulia Romanova will leave for New York this morning from the mainland by car. The candidate shaman Adelina Blazhennaya will take her partner up to Boston and get your safe houses established.

“Don’t you think we need more time before we make contact,” he asks.

“No. The enemy made contact two weeks ago. We’re behind schedule as usual.”

“One ought not to be fashionably late to a revolution,” Oleg notes.

And Lisa Starr agrees. Even if he does not believe in the magic, it is clear to her that Solomon selected a very good team to get the network back online.

“Where are your truest loyalties Mr. Medved,” Lisa Starr asks him suddenly before he heads up to his room to get his gear in order.

“To the art I make and the money I’m paid and women that love me for both.”

“Fair enough, like all men,” she replies.

Yulia pops her slinky brundineet head into the dining room and says in Russian, “You have call from Moscow, they are saying we must be in New York by tomorrow’s nightfall.”

“The blue moon has a power that will dash the best of plots and largest of armies into lunatic disarray. You should make haste,” Lisa Starr says, “and please remember that for whomever you work for or actually report up chain of command to; you’re in the American Arm of the resistance now; we budget for bribing and drinking, but not for whoring and gambling.”

Oleg the Bear grins, “We are internationalists, and this is a free country.”

“What the fuck is a blue moon,” Yulia asks in Russian.

“You’ll know when you see its effects,” says Lisa Starr the Pagan sorcerous in Gaelic.

“We don’t speak gibberish,” Yulia declares, “Only English, French and Russian!”

But, Oleg inferred what she meant and decided that he was quite uncomfortable with the American resistance’s widespread use of magic. One could not bribe magic or placate it with whores, or get magic drunk.

Most unnerving work conditions to be sure.

Unlimited operations get fucking hectic.