SCENE 6
“Loose Lips Sink the Ships”

Explains Maria Silverrtova, looking all Russian and hot and shit. She’s just sat with Sebastian at the bar or the tavern for about two hours, listening, pretending her English is only rudimentary. He tells her more than he should.

“Rudely almost arbitrarily, we have introduced Sebastian Adonaev without presenting the Z.O.B. in greater detail. It is the clandestine organization of closet communists and mostly ambulance workers. You can’t be a communist in America, you’re done something wrong to even talk about it. Also of West Indian black market entrepreneurs. A fertile breeding ground for anarchist bomb makers, Russian petty criminals, Irish terrorists, reformed and active sex workers, strippers, vagabond utopian theorists and the secret forces of the great unwashed. A brotherhood and sisterhood that binds many of our friends together into a pact of lawless, perhaps degenerative mutual aid. Masquerading at times in the disguises of workers’ rights, human rights and maybe, maybe sometimes direct democracy the Z.O.B. spawns acronyms as if Kurdish trained to do so. This outfit is known to be persistent and hard to entrap.”

The secret police and intelligence circles focused initially on its bombing campaigns which extend back to 1999. First, using non-lethal white phosphorous smoke ordinances directed against slave labor textile depots. Later early during the Afghan & Iraq war years between 2003-2008, improvised explosive devices in its strategic bombing campaign against brothels and sex trading. Finally using Irish acquired military grade explosives against the cartels bringing cocaine and heroin into the City. The Z.O.B. almost never civilians. Never killed any cops, dirty or straight. Everyone also knew they had infiltrated Corrections and the New York City Police Department which is why the FBI Joint Terrorism task force got involved in 2005.

Steps were taken to suppress its underground newspaper distributed out the backs of ambulances to all the hidden places it went out to. The secret police tried to eliminate the flow of instructional pamphlets and curb the growing number of foreign expeditions its members trained their cadre on mostly in Latin and Central America. But the organization is dynamic, and it never let its members stay in jail very long, though several were martyred over the decade called the War Years; 2001 to 2011. This club and the clusters spun out of it is often called the Banshee Association. That name either came from the FDNY EMTs and paramedics who founded a branch called that or it came from the police. Since they never killed cops, never killed civilians and only blew up things that didn’t contain people, well the local police many admired it. Since everyone knew that anyone could be in it; a ghost shirt operation; hitting things that you couldn’t hit in you were in the system.

The original core of the underground according to the FBI was communists and anarchists, mostly from upper Middle-Class families. It absorbed several large student groups in 2004 who when they graduated infiltrated high and low. They suspected a foreign funding or training connection, but they never verified one. Then in 2009, the bombings slowed down, and the international deployments began. But by then the underground was too decentralized and too deep under the skin of the country to crack.

But these three letters; Z, O, and B better indicate the club’s inner most circle, and its place in the international freedom movement. Its linkage to the rest of the world on fire down the mountain.

“It’s a human rights version of the ‘Westies,’ that’s all I can tell you for now,” says Sebastian when asked. None of the other eight officers in the cadre cared to know for it was not just mere ideas but lived experiences that brought anyone into its ranks.

Taking a revolutionary between your legs does not induce belief via osmosis, or even diffusion.
On the contrary, nothing could make one quite so utterly antagonistic to the ideas of Marxist-Leninism quite like loving or fucking for any prolonged period a determined revolutionist. For both male and female revolutionaries are insane, highly demanding people. They must be as they have set out to make impossible things work as if, possible. And many are also demented by that failure and by protracted murder disguised as ideas.

“The rhetoric has always been ridiculous and dynamic,” once explained Trickovitch, “people began joining when we threw good parties then began punctuating those parties by invading beleaguered countries and executing pimps, bankers and other enemies of the working class.”
“We never kill anyone who doesn’t deserve to die,” Sebastian liked to say, “Just like in EMS.”
“What’s the Westies again,” people sometimes ask. Quite a lot of people have passed through the front groups and splinter groups, the business fronts and the house parties. The bedrooms solidify the rank and file as well, that is almost always a thing. There are always nine at the very core, almost always strangers. The Politburo, the Shura Council, and the Executive Committee all act on the policy created by this hidden leadership. Call it whatever since they always change the name. The FBI thinks it’s called the Committee for Public Safety, but that is further disinformation. The people who make the decisions about surviving the years until the ground war. In actually constitutional terms; the Steering Committee.

“The Westies were a small but ultra-violent, hyper efficient Irish gang from the 1980’s,” he often adds then distracts with some other story.

“What’s that stand for then, the Z.O.B.?” people ask Adon. People on the inner, outer circle, or people that see the pamphlets or the posters on the work trains. People that do associate Banshee with ZOB have put not too much circumstantial evidence together.

“If I told you….” and then he orders a round of water shots. He likes red wine. He likes Rum. He enjoys Vodka all by itself, or with a big feast, but when it is time to do business he is at his most serious, almost sober man. Close to Muslim in his discipline, but of course these are not religious people we are dealing with. Believers, but certainly not answering to imaginary friends in the sky.

People once heard him refer to the “Zealots of Brooklyn,” but sometimes they drank and took amphetamines for days and entered whole new unrealities. Parallel states of being that Sebastian drew and wrote stories about lying on the floor of the Penthouse with huge green eyes that didn’t blink after the third day in wake field. It had been a long time since they locked the Penthouse doors and tried to see the future in seven days.

So many people just call them the Banshee Association, the name of their largest political arm and Newspaper which came out irregularly as funds became available. They were described as ‘an emergency medical service proto-union underground’ in a recent write up expose about them first in DNA Info, later vice and still later in the New York Times. They are always being accused of being Communist infiltrators in the New York Post and Wall Street Journal.

Regardless, some civil servants just called it “the Club.” People come and go, they disappear, and some die. Sometimes people get tortured. Sometimes there is drinking and dancing, often enough to be called fun. There are always glorious toasts. There is always Afro-Caribbean music. Sometimes innocent people get shot up or blown up. That’s a thing. It isn’t ever taken lightly. The battle of ideas was lost a long, long time ago. The dubious morality of their political violence, the future being fought for; is all drowned in the terrors of the past and also present. But tonight was a casual night to talk about Russian women and or girls.

Maria:
Let’s pretend we’re back in an interrogation.

Sebastian:
Is it true you got manhandled?

Maria:
Let’s pretend we’re back in an interrogation.

Sebastian:
If it is true you were terrorized, I’m sorry I wasn’t there.

Maria:
Let’s pretend we’re back in an interrogation.

Sebastian:
I’m sorry you got water fire boarded and there was nothing I could do.

Maria:

But, let’s pretend we’re back in an interrogation. It happened to Daria not to me. I never suffered for your idealism, at best, I’ll call it. What’s a midnight rape at the hands of the boss? You sure terrorized those Albanians for no reason, imagining if you didn’t something terrible was going to happen to me. Nothing terrible happened to me, they called me a cab.

Sebastian:
I’m sorry anyone knew that part of me, or ever came across me crazed like that. When the gun arrives I’ll bring an end to all of the bullshit as fast as one spinning bullet can allow.

Maria:
I won’t let you Russian roulette yourself on my watch. I’m not heartless about you. I’m actually a little sentimental about the way you go crazy over me. You have a futuristic future being something great, probably. Something heroic or if not just heroic, artistic and recognized. If you take salt pills and stop giving away yourself to a tragic world. Maybe more people would listen to your songs. Maybe Polina and you will be re-united and it will be the Russian American Dream for you both; a condo in Brighton Beach! Maybe, just maybe you don’t have to be antagonist-protagonist; you can just live your life. Stop playing with guns and building bombs! Live your life and make yourself happy.

Sebastian:
These aren’t songs for people who build bombs.

Maria:
I won’t let you kill yourself. The capitalists can’t rid of you that easily!

SCENE 5
“A Radical Love Song”

Sebastian Adonaev reads:

Sometimes, old friend, I cry from own weakness. I bash my Jew face against various mirrors around town angered by my own lack of force, lack of seed, and lack of ability to carry my band more truly into glorious and successful battle. I beat my frail fists on concrete walls which always win! I ask my God why it untrusted me with anything at all. For I am so small and so unable it seems to be a good fighter, an adequate lover, or a good leader, or a good son, or a good husband to Adelina, a good much of anything. I started the game with such a strong position but have not leveraged that to advance my people and cause, even protect those I loved the most!

And then I remember my actual role, not the role my mad ego ascribes. I am but one single partial partisan. One isolated man with such true friends.

I am commanding, a funny word “commanding”, more appropriate term coordinating for can one even give orders to a volunteer? A force that numbers at any given time no more than ten to maybe twenty women and men. And no God nor man nor foreign government gave us marching orders; well at times a Russian woman gave me some directions, but only when at most desperate and bleak junctures, I had to no council to turn to. But, I brought almost all this chaos upon my house unaided! But this is hardly a wide conspiracy. But looking into my own soul I am not doing this for God or man, I am not simply avenging my losses, nor am I simply working off a duty to act. No, no; I am self-propelled and highly lucky. I am doing this because my eyes see fire. I am doing this because I have seen the view from the top of the Mountain, I have seen the killing fields too. I have a great empathy with my kind. I wish good to triumph over callous and well planned evil.

And the responsibilities that were impressed on me by the old leadership, they were small bits. And I say to myself that if our little band with no weapons and no training and no funding and the protection provided us only by our passports and various skin tones could do so much! Still we did accomplish a range of small things in the Americas and beyond. We took over buildings, and organized demonstrations, built unions, operated a substantial underground press. If we could build youth brigades and lay cells across four continents; if we could operate clandestine supply chains, raise tens of thousands in equipment and supplies, conduct hundreds of underground political trainings, infiltrate major city civil service organizations, if we could smuggle activists and trainers into distant countries uninvited and opposed by government. If we could do all of this with no outside support and do it with keeping all our partisans out of long term prison, and have only buried three men in seventeen years of war under questionable circumstances. Well perhaps we are all still young and the war shows no sign of being over. Perhaps we have a small latent talent for freedom fighting and if not killed or imprisoned could with a little guidance grow more professional.

And we have not killed one single person in seventeen years, in fact we have with our own hands saved the lives of thousands and counting.

“I’ve always said he has a fucking ton of potential! For good, for self or for evil, wherever his own heart ultimately sends him,” Daria once declared.

So, really as was explained to me then in 2012 before the uprising in Brooklyn by my confidant Dasha Andreavna; I could either surrender, collaborate or be utterly destroyed. But as she gauged my nature was highly American, she guessed correctly I would never tolerate a life of collaboration, so thus death or some impossible victory were the only moves coming.

I have been imprisoned twenty times. My brothers and sisters have never allowed them to take me for long. Each time they have chained me to beds, administered electricity, loaded me with drugs, asked millions of stupid questions to attempt to make me alter my perspective, denounce my own logic. I have observed members of the band lose their very homes and their livelihoods and their freedom and their health. I have seen men thrown through Plexiglas glass windows. We have been held in cages and also tortured. The deaths of McGaffey, Becker and Black were all sudden and violent and unexplained. I remember little Paul behind bars, I remember harassment and humiliation of Comrade Vik, I remember how much was sacrificed vainly in the name of this struggle. This struggle which absorbs my beingness as though it were the love of a woman, but I am a zealot. I am not good for anything but this. I am in love with my entire people and I have resolved that it would be better to be killed, to lose my privileges of skin and class, than to live in a world where a tiny vile few make the lives of the many, the lives of all I know and love a wretched grinding torture. Truly a half-life.

I cry sometimes, no longer in the presence of any others. Dasha mocked me so each time I failed to be a man. I cry because the horror is so vast and the injustice so great. And I have but ten to twenty partisans, several with wives and children. I worry that I am not going to be able to shoulder this struggle, that I lead my closest to sedition and doom. I worry I have not the moral fortitude, the calm patience of humble leadership, the organizational skills the funds we will need, the weapons, the uniforms, the petrol, the Planes, the will. For I am a man and I am seduced sometimes by wanting more good life, wanting to walk away. This is not your fight, she said, no one asked you to struggle!!

Friends, they torture me once a year. They tell me I have an unstable mind. They drag me away over and over and over again. I am grateful for such friends as you, who refuse to accept surrender. Who know that we can win the war! I wanted to tell you all, see what we do with just ten women and men. You have that many fighters too. Here we all are at the top of the mountain, assembled in the ghettos encircling the Isle of Man.

I loved her so much. Maybe only one or two of you know what I’m talking about. They took from me the only thing a man should care about.

I’m thankful for the resistance. I’m thankful for our little Otriad in Brooklyn. For the cells in Chicago, Philly, Baltimore and DC. The underground in Moldova, Cambodia, Haiti and occupied Israel. Thankful for Commander Reed in Mosul, Commander Bonhomie in Port Au Prince. Inspired deeply by the teachings of Solomon and DeBuitléirs. I love my family and my wife, I hope this is the year we go pro.

She is a million miles away, but she can hear me. She can see me. She liked me better before I found communism, liked me better before I rediscovered my religion. She even liked my used suits better than the grey uniform I wear now.

I raise glass to the East, for there somewhere out there I hope she is waiting for me, waiting for us to win. I raise my glass, I look my men and women in the eyes when I toast, “Long live the resistance, God protect the blood line of the prophets and the Meshiach and the Mahdi. God keep us moving along the straight path, not the path of those who are cowards, or those who have been lost and lead astray.”

For those of you who are joining us from home, for those listening from the trenches, from the fields or from the big house, or as servants in the towers. This is just a love song.
Yes, an epic Russian American love ballad set mostly in the Middle East. This is not a song for people that don’t know how to fire guns.

SCENE 3
“The Chechnyans”
Her waist was tight and breasts quite ample. It was all contained under a little black cock tail dress. Holding around forty plastic bullets of Vodka; she sells them in the Tavern for $4 a piece. Ethnically speaking she was clearly one of Russia’s 157 sub-ethnicities, perhaps a Chechen, perhaps part Tajik or Uzbek. I think she is very good listener, thinks Sebastian.
He has just returned from Syria. The duration of the deployment was around nine months were he to include Cuba and Russia and Iraq. He is haunted and despondent, a veteran of the People’s Protection Units; called the Y.P.G, you pronounce the G as ‘gay’. But officially there are no gay people in Russia, Iraq or Syria. As for Cuba, it’s a new tolerance.
Says Maria Silverrtova, “Let me roll up my sleeves and also my skirt, a little! Look at me in the eyes! I have all my teeth to bite. So sexy and educated and multi-lingual. What, a, catch to catch. I am a wild debutante, elusive and amazing. I am a journalist of course, forced to pour men off shots in a tavern downtown.”
“Zdrastvistia! The purpose of this play is to buy and sell luxury carrots. Also a flying carpet to get you home after all the bullshit we will make you sit through telling Russian American tales. Also to warn you about Chechnyans, and also to distribute out a phone number where slaves with abused lives can get J 1, S 1 or go to college. There is singing and poems. We will try and pour you things called Vodka, but it’s not vodka; to us it’s like water for wound care.”
Maria continues, “Good and bad men went to war and women also went to war, and Americans and Russians watched out the corner of the Newspaper or telescreen. And of course supplied the arsenal and the airstrikes.”
“The papers called them “the Chechnyans” because when the war kept going, people came back trained in god-only-knows how much carnage capability. The war I’m referring to is the Syrian Civil War/ the Revolution in Rojava which was a phantom menace to all. But it was more a dark dream based on improbable odds. Chechens, are in fact a very real jihadist menace that fought us to the last bullet in Mosul, Raqqa and Deir-A-Zor. They brought their whole families into the Jihad. These re-moniquored “Chechnyans” weren’t like them. They were secular and young, and mostly on the Kurdish or Shi’a side, or the Pesh Merga. They all left our families at home. There were plenty of war path teams and factions, mine/ ours was the most moral, but lived in a state of total delusion. They were following a pudgy faced aging man in Turkish solitary confinement. We thought breaking rocks was a useful form of soliloquy.”
Interjects Sebastian Adonaev, “I kissed her very hard against both our better judgment. Last time I kissed her like air. I saw her un-marked unpacked, un-made-up Slavic beauty face on her birthday, before we did one last job on St. Pat’s day. We weren’t supposed to do jobs like that in Midtown, people get upset.”
“I pulled her through to my reality, for the last time and she was completely pissed. The reality wasn’t very nice because it wasn’t the American dream she had set out to conquer on someone else’s name. That name and those papers had failed her mightily. I yanked her through to the other side. The serf side, the Warsaw ghetto side. I was still just a petty gun slinger, Syrian Civil War vet on the run from the war in Syria and my own mind. I did 80 days in Bellevue City hospital and filth was still on my fingers, elbows and toes. I hadn’t slept well even one night.
She was still just a high end whore a year later? Not fair but probably true. But she wasn’t like Maria from Moscow anymore, doing what she did and still does with her tits and high ball shots and take home party favors. She was way over long walks with artists. She was regressing into Capitalist Modernity, the place she’d always wanted to end up, was now boring. Her suitors never waned. Especially the pesky Brahman roommate.”
“It has been a long road from Havana to Brooklyn to Russia, into the Middle East and back. With stopovers in where civilization has come to a resolute end in the Fertile Crescent. Burning down river by river shore to deep sands of desolation.”
“My name was once Sebastian Adonaev, but the Kurds named me Blacksmith Winter, or Kawa Zivistan. The Arabs, they needed to name me too so they called me Zacharias Abu Yazan. Because my then girlfriend correspondent Polina has a son named Yazan. I was 33 when I deployed but looked and felt younger. Her name, my timeless old Muse was Dasha, but this isn’t about her. The other books were all about her. This is about the time a Syrian war vet caught feelings about Maria Silverrtova, a buxom little Chechnyan, like him. No, it was about picking up the shattered pieces of this nightmare, resiliently.”
“This is a cry for some extra hands, some Hamsas, that survived to talk about the Syrian Civil War. This is a love song after a series of hard fucks in Spanish and love making in Russian. This is a Post-Soviet Lullaby, written in Imperial English. I have heard on the wire that Anya is losing her mind in Baghdad and Ana Campbell, that optimistic young woman I have hand grenades to; well she dead and here I am in Capitalist Modernity’s heart, doing nothing but stupid love songs.”
In video recording a deceased Ana Campbell tells us, “Yes, forgive me loved ones, I died immediately in an airstrike in Afrin. My body was in, smithereens. Afrin was until it was overrun by Jihadists and the Turkish state, the Western most canton of Rojava; the besieged revolutionary movement called Democratic Confederalism that defeated ISIS and took over 45% of Syria, until the Turks began to genocide us in April 2017. I died pretty. I was a true believer. Sebastian blames himself for my death, but really I was a true believer in the cause. I could have died much worse if the Turkish Army or its proxies took my alive. I would have been gang raped. And had my head cut off eventually.”
“Sebastian lives with his guilt but Dan Newey another guerrilla I almost kissed, he does not. Dan Newey is in in British prison accused of terrorism. He mourns me loudly. Honestly, we all lost a lot defending the Rojava Revolution, but we internationalists that the papers call the new Chechnyans, we were actors on a stage of world events, but we didn’t do that much. Now I’m dead, which I’ll tell you seems like being on the mountain without being shot at. It’s peaceful, I’ll have him tell you that. I died with my AK in hand. I believed in this, I wasn’t mentally ill. I wasn’t a bandit girlfriend. This was, this is, big and important, but sadly as far as self-defense; a mirage. Without American airstrikes to back us up we melted under Turkish airpower.”
“At the time of writing this my corpse is still behind Turkish lines and it looks like Mambij and then all of Rojava will fall to the Turkish Army, a U.S. ally and second biggest in NATO. I am happy and dead. But vicariously I grieve for my Arab and Kurdish comrades who prepare to make Shahid Namorey, immortal martyrdom.”
Says Cancer, pronounced ‘Jansher’ the Guerrilla from his notes, “Actually, I tried to prepare them for a lifestyle of revolutionary militancy. Kill the enemy. Kill the enemy before the enemy can airstrike, execute, torture or disappear you and your friends. I don’t think they all got it. The training was just too short. They retained much of their Western bourgeoisie privileges. They thought it would maybe be like a movie. It’s a shame the woman died, she was the one with possibly the very most potential, excluding the Germans. That’s all I can say about that, Heval.”
Heval is the Kurdish Kurmanji word for friend, or comrade.

SCENE 2
“The Task is to Warn You”

I once tasked myself with building a small, disciplined revolutionary organization in Israel and the United American that could strike at human traffickers and or oligarchs as readily as it could train medical workers in zones of atrocity and deprivation or war. It was like herding drunk cats first of all. The State forces never even ever needed to repress it. I turned abroad to find my Fidel as it were. I liked the general idea of Che, I sought to apply myself as the revolutionary and the medical worker hand in hand. First, I went to Palestine and saw the nasty apartheid wall. I noticed the moral sickness as well in Israeli society, but this flirtation with a drunken peace process waned as I got older. In 2010 I was deported for good from Israel. Second, I went to Haiti and wet my hands with the blood of 316,000 plus or minus who died in the great quake. My otriad trained hundreds and it was here I developed the basic idea of medical capacity building, mass capacity building and remote application of Cuban medical internationalism. Then, I sucked in my chest and got ready for the death I thought immanent Syrian Civil War. I couldn’t look away from the atrocities in Aleppo. Then, reading of Democratic Confederalism I came to understand that most of my own rhetoric was being implemented by the PKK and its allies, following the mandate of Abdullah Ocalan, imprisoned by the Turks forever on Imrili Island…merciless Turks.
This organization which seemed to re-spawn itself in varying configurations eventually managed to outlive its purpose once we discovered Kurdistan. It now seemed superfluous. Almost an anachronism to see American allies as useful. Except as directly in the fight. For these endless agitations were all very fourth rate compared to the advanced Worker’s Party in the mountains battling both Turkey and the Islamic State.
I used the field hospital Wi-Fi and a Syrian sim card to let everyone who was listening know I’m alive. It’s not that many people anymore. It’s a blonde debutante in Midtown, following me out the corner or her eye from a high tower of captive luxury. There’s a sexy Harvard lawyer who gave me Mindfulness on the Go, and her cute little sentimental blessings. My parents say almost nothing, my brother especially. Polina Mazaeva, my lover, she has shut be off right during the final battle for Mosul. But I write to her anyway; “I’m alive, motivation is high!” “I’m alive, tell me the weather in Boston, New York and Nizhny Novgorod. Besides Ms. Chanie Rossi, Ms. Daria Skorobogatova and before Polina; no one seems to be keeping any track of my exploits. That mighty revolutionary organization we’d tried to build, well it crumbled in my absence amounting to zero less than nothing.
And all these three lovely ladies ever asked or said; “Are you alive, come home,” as if there was something good about the home I was from or life I had before the war. Secretly I always believed that I would fall gloriously as a shahid in patriotic defense of Rojava. Well so far 43 of 500 volunteers had. Mines had felled over half. Prepared, not eager, but certainly prepared to die I wished to be in two places that seemingly I could associate with a happy vacation, or at least one place it was logical I visit before I pass into the world to come.
I began in Cuba, then Russian Federation, then popularly mobilized Shi’a Iraq, also Kurdish referendum North Iraq and then into the hell of Syria. It all took about 9 months to ruin my resolve and completely lose my mind. Then in Cairo I waited two days in February and then into indefinite detention in the New York Hospital Camps; which swore I was a mad man. I recite in my cell a poem that was my 88th; made for one Elena Komarova, a confidant who can’t deal with my lifestyle anymore. It was about red and white Russians, about Moscow and exile and death and love and what I will refer to as my Special Period; my special period of love and war.
I had been to Cuba once before. It occupied a special place in the revolutionary epoch and I timed my arrival in Russia with May Day and Victory Day; in order to sort of pay tribute to the legends of the USSR.
First I must warn you, I’m a very powerful as a man in my own mind, half the year or more, in that I do not fear death and consider my well plotted deeds heroic. But, I’m jointly powerless before a woman who believes in me and so it was fate, misplaced silly fate, that when the war ended for me and none of my confidants were attentive, obsessively, yes obsessively I made a new muse out of a tavern shot girl. Not amorous, not frivolous. I just wanted that pretty stranger with the Vodka bullets to care if I was alive. I wanted her to believe in my seriousness as a hero and an artist, I wanted her to trust in my, ineffable might. And clearly I simply wanted to go to bed with her, because it had been one whole year since the last kiss of Polina Mazaeva until the unruly discharge from Bellevue hospital.
I’m about to try and tell you a story about my year in Kurdistan, but there is something hard about even doing that. For one thing, the ghosts of the dead haunt me. For another, many of my friends are dead, Rojava is being overrun by the Turkish military and I’m far from the front in America; survived to live my life and feel like nothing is where it should be.

SCENE 1
“A Pontification on the Middle East”

I was watching the news from the safe house, then the power went out. They’re killing Palestinians in Jerusalem again for the third day straight over metal detectors near the Dome of the Rock. Syria is completely on fire; the Russians are making slow, and decimating progress. Iran is fighting Saudi Arabia in Yemen. Iraq is on fire, the Americans are directing the Coalition of crusaders, and Mosul has almost fallen. Libya is on fire; they say life was normal just five years ago. There are rumblings about a major American troop increase in Afghanistan. The entire region is one powder keg after another. One group of after another ready to kill each other so the big powers get their oil.
The temperature reached 112 degrees today, the power goes out several times a day in this city. I’m on the roof of a housing complex to the South of the 60-meter road in Erbil. A referendum for independence is coming in two months. It’s a two-hour drive in any direction to an atrocity, but I’m bored. I’m drained, and I’m bored, and I’m wondering what my place in this is. There are things I can tell a person, and they think I’ve read a lot or traveled a lot, but mostly there are things I tell people that they can’t see and they can’t hear, so they shut down. They can’t believe the conclusions I’ve come to since they condemn me, they condemn where I’m from; they are uncomfortable conclusions about why this war is happening. Why it has always been happening. Who and what are to blame.
I have about 48 hours before the car picks me. These Kurdish gangsters with sympathies toward the resistance are going to put me and four duffle bags of supplies in a car and bring me to another city, to wait for a truck and then I’ll be moving on the road to where I’m supposed to be. Where I’ve been invited to work. I have many detractors. But I also have unfathomable love for the game.
Erbil is stunning in its dull mediocrity. It’s wasted potential and its sprawl. I’m seated in the fading dusk and dead lights; I’m about to make my last broadcast before I go over the border and then really, who knows. The city is shaped like a melted clock, a 7,000-year-old time piece with a citadel at its center. I’m on the roof of the New Ishkan apartment complex; I’m about to try and explain what’s happening here. For anyone who cares. Probably a couple of officers in the underground, only my mother and maybe Daria watch the whole broadcast. No, I’m lying to myself, probably I’m only talking to myself on the roof.
The trouble with seeing things no one else sees is that they call you insane. But, I’m not crazy. The world is crazy, the world is fucking insane. I don’t have a broad audience, and I have a small, devoted following from my previous works. I wonder what to say this time at the fire station; the rebel radio I send back to Brooklyn and places outside this wasteland.
Is there a message from all the things I’ve learned? Is there anything anyone needs to hear? Isn’t there anyone left to tell a story too? I don’t think so. Everyone knows what I’m doing here and how it will end. For I am not writing a novel, I am diffusing a series of dreams into a manuscript in English for a tiny chapter of the book of life that was manifested a year ago.
I smoke a cigarette. I comb my hair. I imagine she’s watching me. I look out over the city that never was and probably won’t be ‘the next Dubai.’ I pick up my notes and turn on the camera. I try and explain to the resistance and those who love me, the context of massive events that brought my unit here to Kurdistan.
I read and record segments one minute apart. As if anyone actually follows my posts on social media or has anything vital to contribute.
When you open your paper, turn on your TV, or boot up your smart phone 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 are 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 always to 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 provably 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 of State Capitalism in 1986 has propelled it to be a clear contester 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 USA invaded Iraq in 2003. 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. They 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-Hawijab, Deir-Ez-Zur). Most people here call them Daesh, the ac
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, accept 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 closest it 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 an 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 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 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 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 crises. 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. Pakistan 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.
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 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 it 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 call 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 world’s largest stateless people are seeking some viable means to safe guard 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 prophesy. 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 monarchy’s 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 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 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 Shar’iah 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 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 Arabic) 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 on 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.
As stated in 1988, towards the end brutal eight year of the Iraq-Iran War, in Chamchamal 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 it 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 flag in Erbil inside 5 Star Hotels and most government buildings. But the red, white, green emblazoned with a yellow multipronged star is virtually everywhere else.
The Kurds a 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 on an island prison near Istanbul. Reading the works of Murray Bookchan; 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 land locked) 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 Qamishly 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 Qamishly airport make it possible to have supplies airlifted in and about 20 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 two 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-Hashd 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 over run. 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.
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. ISIS 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 desolate barren zone in the Anbar a province (outside Kurdish zone) which also needs to be pacified.
All of this leads analysts to conclude ISIS 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 Azure will pale in comparison to the possibility of war between the Pesh Merga against the Hashid al Shabi and Iraqi Army in Kirkuk.

We have to get the unit into Syria and remain on the ground for around two years without being captured by the revolution or the enemy. There’s eight of us scheduled to go in, I recruited all the others one by one over three years. This entire context will not be affected by the tiny move, a maneuver of smuggling in foreigners into the Rojava Federation; there are many much bigger plots afoot. The commitment on the part of the resistance being minimal, this is a campaign of medical force multiplication. Surely any faction is worthy of the training and the system; this one is most in line with the fundamental analysis I have presented.
And that’s all I have to broadcast tonight. Probably not anything most analysts didn’t come to in varying degrees. If Daria saw it she’s bored. If Polina Mazaeva, my Russian lover and confidant saw it she’s annoyed, or worried or both. Daria is my old partner back in Brooklyn. Polina is my editor and my lover in theory. She lives in the City of Nizhny Novgorod in Russia. In reality Polina only has a little bit of emotional skin in this game.
I had my tongue between the legs of a foreign correspondent at a party a few weeks ago and she told about a room she found in Mosul filled with Turkish visa stamps, it was just the latest piece of conspicuous circumstantial evidence.
Everybody thought Talafar would be a battle not a ghost town.
The forces assembled in Rojava are democratic, feminist, ecological and non-aligned. They are multi ethnic, they are armed for defense. They are on good terms with the US and Russia alike. There isn’t any room here for mistakes. I will leave in two days with my companions are we will begin implementation of the training program as soon it is possible. My time in Iraq has been a series of disappointing nightmares, but that is not all fair. For I have seen some very heroic things amid all the catastrophes. But I will first the stories of many of the heroes and villains I met along the roads here as I awaited by passage to a place that inspires so much hope and fear. For everything out here is a circus of death, but it is not as though this is unusual for the region or the world. Life continues here amid all this. For both the foreigners, the colonists and locals all have human intentions. Human lives that the media and carnage obstructs the story of.
There are things I could teach you about politics and religion, that are lost on the great mass of self-interested and self-serving antagonistic protagonists described here. But those things are the back drop for our tale.
This story will attempt to provide a glimpse of the people that lived in or were drawn toward the fires of the killing fields when one world ended and new world began.

Prologue

“Hand Cuffs or a Bag”

The air ship lands in Erbil. 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 KDP; 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.
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 I helped the Kurdish Mafia sell a list of 5,700 ISIS fighters to an unknown foreign intelligence buyers in Beirut, probably Russia or Israel. 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 $300 to buy some food. Since I’ve been here about two months; I arrived on the day Ramadan began in late May I’ve traded medical skills and cunning, also hard drives and 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.
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 paradigms about women’s 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 YPG, 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.
I am a non-ideological man. Well, I was until recently. I have to say much of the writing of Abdullah Ocalan is 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 Druse, his father fucked off to Dubai. 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. Waiting back in Brooklyn and Haiti is an underground army of nearly 2,000 ambulance workers and their sympathizers. My 33 birthday was very well attended as was my Passover Seder. 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.
You will have to forgive me when I say that out here I know I am completely alone. What I see, and what drives me day by day up the treacherous mountain out of this wasteland toward my goals is bigger than me. But it is not a political theory or an imaginary friend.

On Non-Governmental Organizations

To prey upon the poorest of the poor once must invent an ethical pretext. I now will explore the relationship between non-governmental organizations and this great crime from the standpoint of our ethical development theorists. From Port-Au-Prince to Kigali; people must know the truth.

Poverty is a form of genocide. To disguise its vast and incorrigibly destructive effects a vast architecture has been erected in all sectors to carry out a massive & distracting scheme. It has perpetrators, beneficiaries and collaborators. I wish to briefly explore instances and dynamics of such collaboration within the global system illustrating their role in incredible structural violence (Galtung, 1969)(Farmer, 2003). Paramount to the maintenance of both dependency and ensuing extractive atrocities are both plausible deniability and diffusion of responsibility. The role and utilization of the NGO within the scheme of the development enterprise meets both ends.

In 1876 King Leopold of Belgium called a grand congress of scientists, explorers, cartographers and dignitaries to Brussels to found the International African Association. Its stated purpose was humanitarian intervention and the propagation of civilization in Central Africa. In 1884 the USA recognized his claims and later that year at the infamous Berlin Conference, all of Europe followed suit. By the 1908 an international movement lead by Roger Casement & E.D. Morel had helped expose the truth and strip Leopold of his territorial claims. Under the guise of humanitarian imperatives between 5-10 million Congolese had been systematically butchered in a gruesome wholesale rape of the nation (Hochschild, 1998). Rubber cultivation for bicycles harvested via a barbarous slave enterprise owned by one man. The very worst crimes against humanity have always occurred in plain sight but they are always obscured under the pretexts of some civilizing mission or police action.

Horton & Roche begin their ethical analysis dividing the NGO world into four distinct but increasingly overlapping Sectors; Emergency Relief, Service Delivery, Development & Advocacy. A series of complex political-financial configurations have thrust these rapidly proliferating actors into the heart of every former colony under the ethical pretext of poverty alleviation or humanitarian imperative. While seemingly issue based and independent; the majority of NGO funding comes from OECD countries that each have national interests (Dambisa, 2009). There are far more nefarious issues than ‘the pornography of poverty’. The vast deficits of coordination, accountability, fundraising, corporatization and cultural harm are just a starting place (Horton & Roche, p.8). The highest indictment is that not only are NGOs inefficient at all of the four sector objectives; they are a mangy carrot to a robust military intelligence stick. Paul Ronalds may speak of some liberal notion of ‘ethical responsibility of wealthy states; but in the Cold War context; their aim (and that of aid in general) was to keep a developing world nations from going Communist (Rostow, 1960)(Easterly, 2002). Not because of the ideological justifications but because every single nation that aligned with Russia & China was (regardless of one’s ideological imperative) being pulled out of the traditional world economic system (Wallerstein, 1991).
The Cold War is supposedly won; but the core nation status are shifting from the temporary hyperpower U.S.A. & E.U. to a new more multipolar economic alliance of Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa.

What was always more straight forward about doing business with the USSR and in post-Cold War era with China is that they were/are less concerned with the pretense of ethics. Developing national leaders then and today realize the flagrant hypocrisy of former Colonizers that continue the colonial extractive process under the veneer of human rights and democratization. Economically speaking the proof is in on the Washington Consensus; sustained GDP growth occurred only in 4 micro-nations of South-East Asia largely under strict military rule, Chile which was subjected to a CIA backed coup and direct supervision of Chicago School economists and Poland. The real development ‘miracles’ occurred in Vietnam and China (both still lead by the Communist Party) and India (non-aligned) which all completely rejected neoliberal theory (Rodrik, 2002). The ‘ideological war’ was not a contest of objective and belief it was for economic dominance over the world system core; the flow of commodities and trade back to an oligarchic collective. The Russian oligarchy as it is understood today was merely defeated in imperial intention and has diversified its trade systems from central planning to extra-legal trafficking and sale of oil and natural gas to Europe.

Chris Roche writes on ‘donor accountability’ but the macro issue is that money from OECD states have funded global NGO operations that not only failed alleviate poverty; in Sub Saharan Africa it worsened. Realist principles dictated that only nations with market economies could receive aid and direct foreign investment. But that aid was just the basis for dependency. Neo-colonialism as such was about using development aid to buy the loyalty of foreign governments and NGOs to fill the structural void that followed as nation after nation privatized their civil services, sold of state run enterprises to foreign nationals; and marshalled their populations often at gunpoint to fulfil economic imperatives of the ‘North’ in the name of comparative advantage. It is not that the donors were unethical, it was that they were utilized unethically. Adopting children, building orphanages, handing out malaria nets; this substitution effect takes the immediate imperative of welfare off corrupt foreign governments while still providing highly questionable social services. As Chris Roche stresses welfare is a right, aid is not. Which is say states are duty bound to provide social services to their own citizens but not to foreign populations (the Right to Development was voted down by the U.S. and not supported by 8 critical OECD countries.) Das asks if aid agencies are harmful. Not on their own. But regardless of what core power is re-organizing a developing national economy, or how corrupt a developing government is, Cold War over, or not; the effect of NGO proliferation has been to field an entire sector of so-called change agents that simultaneously shield political intent and perpetuate under-development.
How?
Lenneberg examines the dichotomy of ‘local’ respect’ v. ‘radical social change’ in the ethical performance of NGOs; but again subjectivity dominates. Local respect for culture or governmental authority? Propagating radical social change inside the former Soviet Union has been a favorite activity instanced explicitly in Color Revolutions & Open Society Empire. Horton writes about definitions of Cosmopolitanism; which at best is liberal fantasy of globalized New York City and at worst a rose colored lens to project deluded solidarity via increased charitable giving. Wheeler asks if humanitarian aid and intervention is violation of popular sovereignty. Brown replies that those governments that violate human rights have forfeited full sovereignty. Rawls writes on the subject of ‘distributive justice’ but frankly most of the developing nations are run by military dictatorships, plutocrats and leadership that has stolen billions from their population into Swiss banks without batting an eye. The vapid liberal rhetoric such as that of Bull calls for ‘moral concern with the welfare on a world scale’ but all of the liberal development economists live in developed nations, bellies full and secure off resources pillaged by their host governments right hand, while the left introduced a legion of NGOS.

We are in full agreement with Pogge; that poverty is an institutional arrangement. And so is aid and NGO development. Manufactured inefficiencies aside on the operational level, collaboration with vile regimes. If Linklater posits do no harm and cosmopolitanism I retort that what makes an NGO Class so nefarious is that they are middle persons between the carnage and beneficiaries; used in this context to mean the citizens of the developed nations that are the proven monetary beneficiaries of aid. Measured against the often far less than 0.7 % GDP pledged by developed nations they make a lion’s share in interest debt, commodity transfer and favorable access to resources. Singer’s utilitarian maximalism is another useless and offensive impetus. While I agree that maximizing good for the greatest number is clearly a wonderful liberal theory; all of these ethical practitioners ignore the scope of devastation and point blame to components not systemic parts. The nearly criminal collaboration of Stiglitz and Sachs informs us that ‘clinical economic’ neoliberalism tailored is a way forward. But, Shiva takes a more forward approach perhaps further than Pogge; globalization is inconsistent with justice; it is a ‘war on the poor (Shiva, 2005). It may well be that the theorists have been living too many days in the developed world, benefiting off its security and forgetting that cosmopolitanism is vain self-serving liberal paradigm, at its realistic best a cocktail. At its worst globetrotting development practitioners paying lip service to rights and capabilities but openly colluding with tyrants and exploiters.

The rise of the BRICS will mean that aid as such will shift from NGO meddling technocracy and international welfare; debilitating dependency to a new dependency. China’s rise especially means that developing nation oligarchies do not have to pay lip service to human rights. They do not have to allow meddling structural adjustment. Hardin’s lifeboat ethics will set in deeper in the so-called Global North as China consolidates. More Euro-Americans will doubt the efficacy of NGOs and call for limits on the already meager aid. Shue’s ethics over nationalism; its call for achieving basic rights in a structural way is not enough. Human rights discourse is unknown still to vast segments of humanity and when needs are not met there can be no talk of rights. Nussbaum has her short list. As does Sen. In varying ways theses are pathetic cop outs and pedantic simplifications. The Human Rights treaties are unenforceable and the lip service they are paid is still grim mockery. Kieran Donahue writes that collaboration amongst NGOs is the exception not the rule (Uvin, 2002)(Slim, 2002). Uvin demonstrates in a careful case study of the Rwandan genocide that the NGOs were aware of everything. That full genocide planning went on in front of all the biggest players and right up until the genocide the IMF was calling Rwanda a poster child of development (Uvin, 1998).

Roche talks about factors that inhibit organization learning, why in place like Haiti with more NGOs per capita (10,800 +) than any state besides India dependency thrives and the poor remain extremely poor; belief perseverance, conformity, vivid/pallid dimensions, and wishful thinking dominate. Congo, Rwanda and Haiti are perhaps extreme examples; in other places the NGO class is more or less subtle, more or less deceptive, more or less embracing monitoring and evaluation. More or less aware of the world system changing hands. Lenneberg writes of a cultural relativism; the rights of the North and the culture of the South. But there cannot be any rights without meeting needs. The likes of Sen and Nussbaum and their desire to articulate capabilities, or underlying values that transcend this enforced relativism are frankly offensive. Kelly gives us three brands; the missionaries, the liberal technocrats and the bright eyed cowboys all heading out into the wilderness of poverty and conflict ready to save and make change. In the end, history will and has already passed judgement.
As the poorest of the poor become self-aware and empowered, as needs pass to capabilities, pass to rights and pass to emancipation the unwritten history books will declare; while the collaborators of the NGO class tried to clear their conscience with talk of ethics: we confined them to obsoletion, we called them out as the middlemen of our devastation & dependence; and those simple things they lorded over us; their development, professionalism and privilege; these were things called rights we grasped intuitively. Once the iron heel was off our necks, once the bellies of our crying children were made full; we asked the questions: who asked you to come here? And what was it that you left behind that added value? I suspect the ethical question of the highest regard is; do people, any people have a right to come making changes, dangerous changes to place they have the ability to flee.

History will ask each and every citizen of developed nations and certainly every development practitioner; how did you leverage your privilege? For Leopold’s Ghost will whisper things you do want to hear; that in the name of humanitarian values and rights worth the paper they are printed on; “we participated in a holocaust.”

On Absolute Poverty

The oft repeated number is that absolute poverty means living at or below $1.25 a day and that there are 1.2 billion such people living at that level of deprivation mostly in the semi-periphery and periphery. Absolute poverty is a type of death sentence. It is the result of governments making choices. Choices such as buying armies not building schools. Choices such as stealing the tax payers money and putting it into Swiss Bank accounts not health spending. It is the systematic usage of the state architecture as means to steal from one’s own people. Corruption is so widespread, such an accepted reality that it is heard to even grasp what separates most politicians from polished thieves. Africa is notorious for this, but it is present in all governments.

Absolute poverty and relative poverty occur because of expropriation. Governments make decisions, rational decisions to spend on certain things. The United Nations is the global non-binding world government. Well-fed and well leveraged their diplomats have codified a shockingly prolific array of documents extolling each other forward toward a brave new and verdant world.

But poverty persists because of political choices. The choice between a well fed, literate population healthy body and mind is where the rhetoric truly crumbles away. For starving and dying of preventable disease in the ball mark of a billion lie and die a vanquished mass of human kind. A choice was made and policy signed that all of oligarchs could find no issue with; poverty is the price that is paid to keep us on our plantations.

On Relative Poverty

Poverty is not like weather conditions or the fate of a romance. It is result of deliberate and planned social policy, utilized to exploit the productive power of the vulnerable at the lowest possible wage or extract the resources from a powerless of corrupt regime collaborating with a hegemon power.

Poverty is pervasive multi-dimensional suffering that is the result of deprivation. It is an integral violation of human rights and an assault on human needs. Poverty is found everywhere, but hidden in plain sight at the core. Measuring poverty is controversial, so they do it as often as they can changing the yard stick every decade or so. First by GDP, then HDI now MDPI. However they (they being the United Nations and NGOs) are relaying on data provided by the 206 governments; all on massively divergent levels of capacity, transparency and ability to conduct a meaningful census.

Relative poverty is not like purchasing power parity, poverty is actually a reasonably objective multifaceted assault on wellbeing caused by deliberate distributive inequality. The solution to poverty in any country is a massive investment in healthcare, education and infrastructure. The kind that the Soviet Union (Russia), China and Cuba used to convert nations of starving, illiterate serfs and peasants into economic super powers. But the Development Enterprise is not actually about alleviating poverty it is about structural adjustment, wrapped in the form of an imagined humanitarian imperative to socially engineer and tinker with globalized supply linkages. Development in Europe yielded the world order of the North West as the US pumped reconstruction money into war ravaged former imperial powers. The final result was the Bilderberg group to coordinate policy and the World Bank to set up lending to third world nations and elf proclaimed neutrals.

Poverty according to the United Nations has halved with 680 less humans living at 1.25 a day since 2000. That has been attributed to China and India’s rapid ascent not development NGOs and aid. In Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and Haiti extreme poverty doubled in the same period. If we can get our head around this rough estimate that 3.5 billion humans throughout the five zones are living below $3.00 a day and that up to 5 million humans are under $10.00 a day and that means family per day; then we see poverty as very pervasive social phenomenon. Relative poverty is the idea that living at $4.00 a day is somehow normal in a place like Brazil or Haiti. That these people should consider themselves fortunate to not live in extreme poverty, or absolute poverty. I will assure you that no matter what nonsense you tell me about purchasing power parity; a plate of basic food in a Styrofoam tray in Brooklyn costs $5.00, in Sao Paulo costs $3.00 and in Port-Au-Prince costs $1.25; but I assure you in all three places living even at $10.00 a day is burden.

The GINI coefficient measures income inequality. The Palma does the same calculating for the radical jump in the upper quintile. Oxfam says that 85 people have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion, said it before and might say state it one more time before the essay is over.

Relative Poverty is a relative term, all forms of poverty are a hardship, humiliation and violation of human rights. But for the sake of this argument let us call relative poverty awareness of ‘starving in the shadow of plenty’, while absolute poverty is simply knowing you are starving and about to die terrified and abandoned.

Chapter Three:
On The Systems of Oppression
Understanding Deliberate Maldevelopment

“The hand you hold is the hand that holds you down.”

The Capitalist Consensus

It cannot to be said with a straight face that embrace of neoliberal trade and structural adjustment have resulted in true or equitable economic growth. Out of the Latin American nations only Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile exhibited growth between 1950-1980; only Chile has sustained it under the rule of a US backed military dictatorship and very extensive tinkering by the American Chicago School. All former Socialist countries have declined in GDP except Poland, some into poverty far worse that the American Great Depression. Sub-Saharan African nations have all gotten much poorer; extreme poverty is in fact growing (Rodrick, 2002). It is widely agreed using the Palma Index that inequality is far more pronounced in developed and developing nations alike than had been though under the GINI measurement. 85 people control the wealth of the bottom 3.5 billion (Oxfam, 2014). Asian Tigers (South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) exhibited growth but are markedly small countries all of which were under highly authoritarian rule for the bulk of their economic expansion and all had crashes in 1997 and 2008. Disruptive financial crises have plagued Mexico, Argentina, Russia, and Turkey. Even Southern Europe is bankrupt.

Nations such as Vietnam, India and China have refused all such neoliberal shock therapy and emerged gradually into strong market economies (Rodrik & Subramanian, 2008). China itself responsible for pulling over 680 million people out of poverty and is now driving a very different kind of development scheme in Africa.

Shock Therapy in particular and Neoliberalism in general is a means for American and Europe to carry out economic dominance wrapped in the veneer of sophisticated economics. The Soviet command economies collapsed because they could not efficiently regulate the market forces. People such as Jeff Sachs and Milton Friedman have advocated withdrawing state subsidies, rapid liberalization of domestic markets and large scale privatization. We would advise you not to allow foreigners to rape your economy. You will be simultaneously crippling your civil service sector, allowing economic advisors to dictate your policies and the only comparative advantage that will emerge is that you will be heavy debt to the World Bank, foreigners will control your assets and your people will be working in sweatshops. That is a high price to pay for some sneakers.

As of today you are neither a net exporter nor importer. In a very tangible sense although your resources are limited and you do not possess a body of technocratic expertise or specialization of sectors and are currently de-linked from the global economy. We advise the ministry from a position of careful economic and historical study. Clearly there is valid middle way in the global financial architecture that does not necessitate choosing between economic extremes. On the one side we have a choice of free markets borrowing from the World Bank, specializing for efficiency; allowing direct foreign investment and leveraging a perceived comparative advantage toward better competition on the international market. On the other you have notions of selective embrace of structures that allow us the maximum levels of autonomy and variety.

Clearly you exist in a globalized economy and a wide body of precedent supports caution in engaging within it rapidly. Looking at the Haitian, Guyanese and Tanzanian examples we need how disastrous it can be to presume that one can uncouple their markets completely. Or in Cuba’s case in the 90’s be tied to only one superpower. Or in Russia’s case to allow oligarchs to quickly buy off, carry off your state assets. There are wide range of consumer and industrial products your citizens may desire to buy that cannot be efficiently produced in your country. That then said we would caution against your borrowing heavily from the IMF or agreeing to any economic terms which link privatization and deregulation. You risk “immiserating growth” (Bhagwati, 1958) where by the hegemon powers can renegotiate trade terms against your interests and cut deals via their supposedly more sophisticated market instruments.

Follow the middle road. Play emerging BRICS bank off World Bank. Allow for clear and direct technical assistance for resource access schemes as pursued by China and Cuba. Make sure all natural resources are utilized to propel domestic scholarship, diversify your economy, maintain that no foreigner can buy land or have controlling stakes in domestic businesses and whatever you do; do not believe that economics is a science. It is more of a witch craft.

On Relative Poverty

Poverty is not like weather conditions or the fate of a romance. It is result of deliberate and planned social policy, utilized to exploit the productive power of the vulnerable at the lowest possible wage or extract the resources from a powerless of corrupt regime collaborating with a hegemon power.

Poverty is pervasive multi-dimensional suffering that is the result of deprivation. It is an integral violation of human rights and an assault on human needs. Poverty is found everywhere, but hidden in plain sight at the core. Measuring poverty is controversial, so they do it as often as they can changing the yard stick every decade or so. First by GDP, then HDI now MDPI. However they (they being the United Nations and NGOs) are relaying on data provided by the 206 governments; all on massively divergent levels of capacity, transparency and ability to conduct a meaningful census.

Relative poverty is not like purchasing power parity, poverty is actually a reasonably objective multifaceted assault on wellbeing caused by deliberate distributive inequality. The solution to poverty in any country is a massive investment in healthcare, education and infrastructure. The kind that the Soviet Union (Russia), China and Cuba used to convert nations of starving, illiterate serfs and peasants into economic super powers. But the Development Enterprise is not actually about alleviating poverty it is about structural adjustment, wrapped in the form of an imagined humanitarian imperative to socially engineer and tinker with globalized supply linkages. Development in Europe yielded the world order of the North West as the US pumped reconstruction money into war ravaged former imperial powers. The final result was the Bilderberg group to coordinate policy and the World Bank to set up lending to third world nations and elf proclaimed neutrals.

Poverty according to the United Nations has halved with 680 less humans living at 1.25 a day since 2000. That has been attributed to China and India’s rapid ascent not development NGOs and aid. In Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and Haiti extreme poverty doubled in the same period. If we can get our head around this rough estimate that 3.5 billion humans throughout the five zones are living below $3.00 a day and that up to 5 million humans are under $10.00 a day and that means family per day; then we see poverty as very pervasive social phenomenon. Relative poverty is the idea that living at $4.00 a day is somehow normal in a place like Brazil or Haiti. That these people should consider themselves fortunate to not live in extreme poverty, or absolute poverty. I will assure you that no matter what nonsense you tell me about purchasing power parity; a plate of basic food in a Styrofoam tray in Brooklyn costs $5.00, in Sao Paulo costs $3.00 and in Port-Au-Prince costs $1.25; but I assure you in all three places living even at $10.00 a day is burden.

The GINI coefficient measures income inequality. The Palma does the same calculating for the radical jump in the upper quintile. Oxfam says that 85 people have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion, said it before and might say state it one more time before the essay is over.

Relative Poverty is a relative term, all forms of poverty are a hardship, humiliation and violation of human rights. But for the sake of this argument let us call relative poverty awareness of ‘starving in the shadow of plenty’, while absolute poverty is simply knowing you are starving and about to die terrified and abandoned.

On Absolute Poverty

The oft repeated number is that absolute poverty means living at or below $1.25 a day and that there are 1.2 billion such people living at that level of deprivation mostly in the semi-periphery and periphery. Absolute poverty is a type of death sentence. It is the result of governments making choices. Choices such as buying armies not building schools. Choices such as stealing the tax payers money and putting it into Swiss Bank accounts not health spending. It is the systematic usage of the state architecture as means to steal from one’s own people. Corruption is so widespread, such an accepted reality that it is heard to even grasp what separates most politicians from polished thieves. Africa is notorious for this, but it is present in all governments.

Absolute poverty and relative poverty occur because of expropriation. Governments make decisions, rational decisions to spend on certain things. The United Nations is the global non-binding world government. Well-fed and well leveraged their diplomats have codified a shockingly prolific array of documents extolling each other forward toward a brave new and verdant world.

But poverty persists because of political choices. The choice between a well fed, literate population healthy body and mind is where the rhetoric truly crumbles away. For starving and dying of preventable disease in the ball mark of a billion lie and die a vanquished mass of human kind. A choice was made and policy signed that all of oligarchs could find no issue with; poverty is the price that is paid to keep us on our plantations.

hg
World System Analysis Revisited

The World System Analysis as conceived by Immanuel Wallerstein consists of a core, semi periphery and periphery; shifting zones that are defined by their economic relationships to each other. As stated in his volumes of analysis Wallerstein outlines a multi-disciplinary model that tracks the formation of the world system between 1500 and the present day (Wallerstein, 1974).

While previous empires such as the Romans, Persians, Islamic Caliphates, Mughals, Aztecs and Chinese Han dynasties had been trans-regional powers capable of expansive influence and trade; none had, until the construction of the world system, been able to fully project hegemony upon the full mass of the species living in all continents. Advanced weapons, epidemiological resistance and industrialization allowed the Europeans a competitive advantage in outward conquest (Diamond, 2005). The epochs of conquest, slavery and colonialism allowed an unprecedented capital accumulation to take place in Europe. The Industrial Revolution had modernized these societies and subsequently organized their social hierarchy into that of global power administrators. This is not to say class and race and gender were not thoroughly established in internal hierarchies. The conquest of the rest of the world was an outward disposal of the mediocre into pursuits of war and profiteering. Inevitably according to this analysis the hegemonic power passed from Spain, to the Netherlands, to England and after a series of World Wars ultimately between Germany and the United States to a bipolar world of the US-NATO Block against the USSR. While the 1989-1991 implosion of the Soviet Union defeated authoritarian Communism. The Russian Federation, with the world’s second most powerful military, a comparable stockpile of nuclear weapons and the largest reserves of natural gas and oil on the planet is checked but not defeated. As stated the People’s Republic of China was only a minor antagonist within this struggle for core control, but is emerging as the most serious contender.

To fully understand the world system beyond the allegory of the mountain we must break apart the zones Wallerstein and dependency development theorists categorized to establish what is it is these ceaseless proxy wars, all this diplomacy, defense and development spending seeks to acquire. A false construct such as nationalism or ideology is a superstructure disguise for it means to acquire core control. As stated, the Oligarchical collectives have a limited range of coordination and span of control. While an oligarch in the core may in fact collude with an oligarchy in the semi-periphery or periphery; the closer asset control and resources allocation is exerted to a core political and economic process; the richer and more powerful the fruits of the gain.

The New Core

The guiding features of the core include a unified financial architecture and banking system, stable governance which can safe-guard property rights and currency valuation and can upkeep the impressive military and intelligence forces needed to coerce compliance to its economic directives. Out of these 46 nations; 4 are Medieval City States, 1 is a Catholic Religious City State, 1 is a Jewish military colony, 5 are oil petrogarchy City States, 4 are the so-called Asian Tiger states and 2 are newly re-absorbed Chinese financial hubs (back into PRC two-systems one state in 1997); all participants align their economic and political directives with the OECD, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, International Monetary Fund and World Bank; The United States is the dominant hegemon in this block, supported by the financial prowess of the European Union lead by German and the economic strength of Japan. Interestingly these nations are all of the primary belligerents of the World Wars and hold all seats of the United Nations Security Council; excluding the Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China.

These 46 primary beneficiaries’ nations of the World System according to the 2013 World Bank estimate (of OECD countries) be 1.054 billion people. These national entities ca be sub-divided into three internal groups; core central, core critical and core dependent.

The following national entities, under the stewardship and hegemony of the United States of America compose the modern nucleolus of central core control.

Australia
Austria
Belgium
Canada
Denmark

Finland
United Kingdom
Germany
Greece
United States

Iceland
Ireland
France
Portugal
Italy
Japan

Sweden
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Spain

Financial Hubs

Singapore
Switzerland
Hong Kong

Garrison States

Taiwan
South Korea
Israel

Medieval City States

Vatican City
San Marino
Luxembourg
Liechtenstein
Andorra
Monaco
Malta

Petro States

Kuwait
United Arab Emirates (UAE)
Brunei
Qatar
Bahrain

Dependent Territories (Retained Colonies)

Cook Islands (New Zealand)
Puerto Rico (USA)
Guam (USA)
U.S. Virgin Islands (USA)
Guadeloupe (France)
Wallis and Futuna (France)
Martinique (France)
Saint Pierre and Miquelon (France)
French Polynesia (France)
Réunion (France)
French Guiana (France)
Jersey (?)
Cayman Islands (UK)
Falkland Islands (UK)
Bermuda (UK)
Guernsey (UK)
Gibraltar (UK)
Isle of Man (UK)
Aruba (Netherlands)

(Not complete listing)

Deconstructing the Core
Core Central/ Core Critical/ Core Dependent

Definition of Core Central: openly directs the imperatives and direction of the world system as well as imposes the dominant language, values and culture. There is clearly no contest at this stage with the United States of America.

United States

Definition of Core Critical: has disproportionate access and strategic/ military coordination with the hegemon as well as its own economic interests that is safe guards via connection to the core central power. Great Britain and its commonwealth dependents, Switzerland, France and Germany.
Switzerland
United Kingdom (Former Core)

France
Germany (Former Core contender)

Definition of Core Dependent: do not dictate the geopolitical direction but benefit from closely linked security, financial or ethno-religious ties.
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Canada
Denmark

Finland
Sweden
Germany
Greece
Hong Kong

Iceland
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Japan

Luxembourg
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Singapore

Spain
San Marino
Portugal
UAE Bahrain

Taiwan South Korea Vatican City Kuwait Qatar

Cyprus

The New Core Contenders

People’s Republic of China (Emerging)

Russian Federation (Defeated, Remerging)

A Core contender is an economic and military block lead by a robust, well populated and resource endowed nation state with the military, diplomatic and economic capacity to challenge the hegemony of the current core block central power.

From 1945-1989 there was a bi-polar world dominated by the US and the USSR each with their own competing systems of dependency. After the 1950-1952 Korean War in which the PRC directly battled the US-NATO block a combination of the Cultural Revolution and Den Xiaoping’s embrace of state capitalism pulled the PRC largely out of Cold War confrontations.

The economists of all great power craft highly competing narratives of both history and financial prescription. Although evidence now clearly debunks the Washington Consensus which held sway from 1980 to 2001; encouraging deregulation, privatization, structural adjustment and integration into the globalized Western core market; it cannot be said that the effects of these policies did not enrich the core deliberately. The purpose of the proxy wars was of course a battle to control the resource flows.

As of 2014; the logical core contender is the People’s Republic of China. The financial mechanism it has deployed to support this claim is called the BRICS Bank; a supposed counterbalance to the World Bank facilitating development lending from Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa.

The New Semi Periphery

The elements of the semi-periphery include; on-going and expanding industrialization; modernization of political architecture in that whatever system is place efficiently provides critical aspects of governance; participation as intermediaries between periphery and core; manufacture and export of goods and are typically able to act as region hegemons over peripheral powers.

Excellent examples of semi-peripheral states are Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, Vietnam, India, Poland, South Korea, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and South Africa.

Colombia is slowly emerging from a civil war raging since 1964 that have taken the lives of between 4,744,046–5,712,506 people (Silva, 2011). Mexico has been recently plagued with drug cartel killings that are directly related to its proximity to the Southern US border. However, trade relations with the US have made both integral parts of the semi-periphery albeit unstable ones.

All of these nations are middle-income developing nations that have vital intermediary roles in global trade or possess vital energy resources. China which prior to 1949 was a peripheral nation largely of peasants has advanced progressively since to assume a position of semi-peripheral transition to core contention. Russia which was a feudal semi-peripheral monarchy (Czardom) until its socialist revolution in 1917 has fallen something short of a super power contender but is still with is military and oil reserves a far more formidable power than any listed above. Interestingly as yet another death blow to the neo-liberal Washington consensus; of the nations listed above; only Argentina and Mexico followed much of the IMF/World Bank policies. The primary success stories are the four Asian Tigers; South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. China and India which cumulatively halved global extreme poverty by some 680 million persons and rapidly increased their economic growth did not follow nearly any of the consensus policy.

The key element of the semi-periphery is that enables the relationships of trade and mediates between core contenders as well as between periphery and core. While semi-peripheral counties (so-called middle income) may in face have largely impoverished populations, the semi-periphery does not depend as completely upon the core as the periphery does and can make a range of independent policy decisions. Cuba is particularly good example through its interventions in Angola and Ethiopia as well as its current policies of medical diplomacy. So is Saudi Arabia in its international support of fundamentalist Wahhabi-Salafist Islamic terror groups.

The Semi-periphery (like all of the nine zones) compose a spread. There are nations such as India and Brazil that are quickly closing economic ground on core contenders Russia and China. There are relatively independent semi-peripheral powers such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates that utilize their extractive resource wealth to further ideological policies of their respective elites. There are other nominally nation’s such as Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago that play little important role in international relations.

The semi-periphery is ultimately a structural buffer zone that unlike the illusion of the middle class described above, does not actually experience significant differentials in mass development. Most of the world’s 1.2 billion living below $1.25 a day live in middle income countries and within the semi-periphery. The local oligarchy of a given state if it can position the political elite of its nation to arrange the economic activity favorably can expect exponential capital increases but their nation achieving a semi-peripheral zone standing. Suffice to say in the 2014 list of Forbes billionaires Carlos Slim, a Mexican citizen is second from the top right below American Bill Gates. Here is listing of Semi-Peripheral states:

India
Brazil
Colombia
Argentina

Mexico
Cuba
Iran
Vietnam

Poland
Turkey
Pakistan
Saudi Arabia
Indonesia

The Same Periphery

What was once called the third & fourth world , or currently the developing world is a legacy of the colonial system. It lacks infrastructure, it is poorly industrialized and its governance systems are little better than a mix of dictatorship, military rule and out right corrupt practice. The peripheral nations should not be counted as such by GDP or HDI because they are peripheral in their importance to the world systems functioning. According to Collier there are fifty nine states (Sudan and South Sudan were not separated when he wrote his Bottom Billion report) in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and Haiti which show decline and dysfunction. Global economic convergence, the convergence of the developed and developing world has not proven itself as a valid reality.

The periphery has a disproportionately small share of global wealth and most of its capital and resources flow out of the country. Agriculture, cheap expendable labor and natural resource extraction make up most of its economic activity. Most of its population lives in extreme or relative poverty. Some peripheral states might be middle income, but do have and substantial role to play in the functioning of the world system. Peripheral state political systems are weak and they are often easily sucked into lengthy conflicts to control domestic uprisings or fight drawn out wars with their neighbors. A key element is their relative powerlessness to the rest of the state system. Most if not all of the periphery were former colonial holdings of the European powers. Their GDP and HDI often, although not always have improved the earlier they were liberated from the colonial system; Latin American countries are all much more developed than their African counterparts except for the Republic of Haiti which exhibits health and development indicators closer to Sub-Saharan Africa.

The following is a listing of the Peripheral States:

Africa:

Togo

Gambia

Burkina Faso Namibia
Benin
Kenya
São Tomé/ Príncipe
Uganda
Zambia
Ghana
The Gambia Botswana
Senegal
Zimbabwe

Cameroon
Congo
Gabon

Former Socialist

Mozambique
Ethiopia
Tanzania
Angola

Asia& Pacific:

Palau
Nepal
Papua New Guinea

Fiji

Bhutan

Thailand
Laos

Vanuatu

Post-Soviet/ Former Socialist:

Mongolia

Belarus
Macedonia

Bulgaria Montenegro
Kazakhstan
Abkhazia
Georgia
Uzbekistan
Latvia
Transnistria
Hungary
Kyrgyzstan
Kosovo
Estonia
Turkmenistan
Croatia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Albania
Romania
Czech Republic
Moldova

Lithuania Nagorno-Karabakh
Tajikistan
Serbia

Middle East & Maghreb

Jordan
Morocco
Algeria
Oman
Tunisia
Northern Cyprus

Latin America & the Caribbean:

Grenada
Suriname
T&T
Bolivia
Belize
Dominica

Costa Rica Paraguay
Ecuador
Dominican Republic
Panama
Saint Vincent

Saint Lucia
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Venezuela
Barbados
Chile
Guyana
Antigua and Barbuda

The New Failing States

According to our internal algorithm any three of these criteria in any state entity constitute a peripheral-failing state classification/ two in a country with an existing low HDI rank. Any state entity with three of these criteria is recognized by this survey as a peripheral-failed state. Four of the criteria or more occurring sets classification at state collapse.

Criteria for Failing/ Failed/Collapsed Categorization:

o Low Human Development Index Rankings
o Literacy Rates below 50%
o Life Expectancy below 60 years of age
o Famine events exceeding 100,000 deaths past five years
o Epidemic disease events killing 50,000 people past five yeas
o Active conflict within the national borders
o Coup/Revolution/ dissolution of national government past 4 years

In a “failing state” conflict is combined with under development to set in motion a series of degenerations. During this period, interventions of core and semi-peripheral powers will largely shape what social and economic orders emerges from the chaos. Periodically such as in the cases of Somalia and Yugoslavia the state collapses completely in recognizable form into total anarchy and long term dissolution.

Ukraine is currently a failing state. It is an ethnically divided energy pipeline hub for pumping Russian energy resources into Europe. Its (recently annexed Crimea) region is a major warm water strategic port for the Russian Navy; it has highly fertile soil, it is linguistically and ethnically similar to Eurasia not Europe; and it was until 1991 an integral part of the former Soviet Union. As part of the Second World (former Soviet Socialist States) Ukrainians have enjoyed economic, social and cultural rights markedly higher than the developing world even after collapse of the USSR in 1989-1991. However, following political re-ordering and oligarchic expropriation of energy assets and infrastructure across the former Soviet world; President Putin began a low intensity war to reclaim what in the Russian political consciousness is within the obvious and legitimate sphere of interests of those who run the Russian Federation. Specially all of the former Soviet Union and former Russian client states such as Cuba and Syria.

After the uprising in Maiden Square which looked likely to topple the pro-Russian president Russian military and intelligence operatives seized and annexed Crimea and triggered separatist warfare in the three eastern provinces. Organizing via its intelligence service the FSB (former KGB) the United Russia Party of Vladimir Putin is replicating the exact tactics it had previously used in Moldova, Chechnya, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Georgia to eliminate political order that sought to align those countries with NATO and the West. As there are 20 million ethnic Russians living in a wide range of former Soviet states such a rubric of ferment sedition, infiltrate intelligence operatives and fighters, provoke crisis, occupy and annex has spread to Ukraine made even more valuable because of numerous pipelines and the Crimea Naval base.
Because of these escalating actions heavy sanctions have been applied against Russia, but over 1/3 of Ukraine remains by default in Russian control. As in the cases of Moldova and Georgia, it is highly unlikely that any Ukrainian government will ever take back that territory. Russian Oligarchs and President Putin and his advisors have very little respect for the nation state system which due to Cold War strains, crippled Russia temporarily as a super power and core contender.

A failing state is state that due to corruption, bankruptcy and fiscal-social mismanagement an internal revolt or foreign intervention is predictably about to cause collapse state collapse and failure. A long running low intensity insurgency is not criteria for this classification. That insurgency, internal unrest or foreign invasion must produce a high likelihood of the citizens being left without a coherent political leadership and social services. In the cases of CAR civil unrest has developed into ethnic civil war ravaging large swaths of the population and leading to heavy violence against civilians. In Nigeria and Egypt mounting corrupt practices coupled with long running insurgencies place them here. In states like Malawi, Burundi, Chad, Niger, Mali and Lesotho government corruption on such an endemic level have deprived the populations of even the most basic services. A failed state is caught not in a “poverty trap” by Collier or Sachs description of such they are deliberately placed into a downward cycle of under development. Peripheral and failing states slip into failed state status based on the following twelve variables.
The Failed State Index (FDI) weighs in via twelve major indicators found within a territory indicating state failure:

1. Mounting Demographic Pressures
2. Massive Movement of Refugees or Internally Displaced Persons
3. Vengeance Seeking Group Grievance
4. Chronic and Sustained Human Flight
5. Uneven Economic Development
6. Poverty, Sharp or Severe Economic Decline
7. Legitimacy of the State
8. Progressive Deterioration of Public Services
9. Violation of Human Rights and Rule of Law
10. Expansive Security Apparatus
11. Rise of Factionalized Elites
12. Intervention of External Actors

Failing States include:

Myanmar
Mauritania
Egypt
Lesotho
Mali
Cote d’Ivoire
Ukraine
Guinea-Bissau
Sri Lanka
Niger
Nigeria
Honduras
Rwanda

The New Failed States

A state where its government has collapsed expect perhaps for diplomatic purposes in the capital and a few major cities; lost control of its territory; has ceased to provide social services and is at war with its own population can be described as failing state.. A secondary arrangement of this scenario zoning is when the state fully and indiscriminately unleashes its military against its population as occurred in Rwanda, Sudan and Syria. Where and when this occurs the population is at the full mercy of invading armies, militia groups and banditry. A sustained condition of state failure results in conditions best described in Thomas Hobbes book the Leviathan; a nasty, brutish and short life truncated by extreme violence and early death. The deployment of peacekeepers and NGOs can prolong the existence of a government presence; but the inevitable result of state failure is lasting underdevelopment coupled by internal human rights violation on a massive scale, war and atrocity (Rotberg, 2010). Failed State are also hot beds of opportunism for both oligarchs and criminal middle men to utilize the defunct governmental infrastructure to launder money and serve as transshipment hubs for bulk currency, narcotics, weapons, conflict minerals, expropriated oils and human cargo. Haiti is a primary port of illegal transshipment into the United States (Farmer, 1994). North Korea operates the largest and most sophisticated printing operation of duplicated $20 bills. Failed states are also breeding grounds for terrorist organizations and revolutionaries (Rotberg, 2002).

The following is a list of failed states:

North Korea
Islamic Republic of Sudan
South Sudan
Sierra Leone
Liberia
Palestine
Lebanon
Yemen
Central African Republic
Eritrea
Chad
 Guinea
Malawi
Burundi

On State Collapse

The collapse a state of anarchic non-governance differentiated from failed state in that large swaths of its territory are no longer under the control of government or under rule of law. The people unfortunate to live in these regions are not only severely impoverished they are subject to arbitrary and criminal attack and rights violation by marauding bands, rival militias, warlords and various social predators. Currently large swaths of the following failed states meet this description; the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire) since 1998, 1/3 of Syria since 2012, 1/3 of Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia which has not had a central government since 1992.

Yugoslavia (collapsed in 1991)
Somalia (collapsed in 1992)
Afghanistan (occupied since 2001)
Iraq (occupied since 2003; collapsed into three entities; ISIS, Kurdish Regional Government, and Shi’a central government)
Haiti (collapsed 2004)
Syrian Arab Republic (collapsed into Civil War 2012)
Libya (collapsed into Civil War 2013)
DRC (invaded in 1998, ongoing multi-dimensional conflict)

The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 1991 and 2003. Rwanda along with a variety of other African countries invaded Zaire (DRC) in 1998. Somalia collapsed after a CIA funded insurgency topped its government in 1991. Afghanistan was previously occupied by the Soviet Union from 1979-1989 where mujahedeen and political Islamists recruited trained and financed by the CIA, Pakistani ISI and Saudi Arabia (including Osama Bin Laden) were sent to give the USSR ‘its own Vietnam’. This pivotal military intelligence operation was critical to both the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spread of Wahhabi-Salafist Islamic militant ideology which would later in 2011 culminate in Arab Spring (bringing down the governments of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria); ultimately resulting in the Islamic State (ISIS)’s control of vast swaths of Iraq and Syria. (Blum, 2003). Since most of these states collapse near the fault lines of hegemon power proxy struggle or near and around energy resource fields another term for the failed state wilderness is a killing field where those that don’t die of poverty will perish in war.

Abyss

The Abyss is in essence what all development and progressive resistance to the callous greed of the oligarch collectives are attempting to avert; the total collapse of the world system with no alternative in place, disastrous climate change that results in famine and displacement and all-out war between Core powers like what occurred between 1914-1945. In essence an Abyss can be likened to Peak Development; a point of core hyperdevelopment that overloads and overwhelms our social, economic and environmental thresholds to the point where irreversible trauma is inflicted upon the human & planetary condition.

In “Peak Development” the governments of the core trigger any of three probably catastrophic events; all of which are likely if the World System continues on the current trajectory.

1. (Environmental) Disastrous, irreversible climate change proceeding until a 5 degree rise in global temperatures raising sea levels and triggering massive climate migrations, causing wide spread famine as a result of crop failure and exacerbate the periodically growing list of climate disasters.

2. (Economic) Peak Oil which we are expected to hit in 2020 levels off petroleum production paralyzing global trade and military function last, but first dramatically affecting the means in which we are supplied energy; which in turn leads to less power availability; which in turn limits internet connectivity. Peak Water which occurs in 2050 leads to new destructive conflicts over decreasing supplies. Wealth accumulation continues along the lines of Thomas Piketty’s analysis and the rise of an overtly elite class subsumes new levels of power and privilege. Critical divergence occurs with a micro-faction of the arch-oligarchic collectives gathering in secure citadels with a global degeneration of development reverting most of the human race to barbaric living conditions.

3. (Social) Multipolarity expands creating a more equalized power differential between the three primary core blocks. Proxy war heightens in the semi-periphery and periphery over resource scarcity. Inevitably all three of the core contender get sucked into a more direct confrontation which results in nuclear exchanges, genocides and democides.

The result of any of these catastrophic events being allowed to occur; permanent environmental damage, unmitigated oligarchic capital accumulation and or a more grisly and protracted series of World Wars will irrevocable trigger the degeneration of our species to sub-human conditions and inevitable extinction.

Human Development Algorithm

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a composite statistic of life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators, which are used to rank countries into four tiers of human development. A country scores higher HDI when the lifespan is higher, the education level is higher, and the GDP per capita is higher. The HDI was developed by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, often framed in terms of whether people are able to “be” and “do” desirable things in their life, and was published by the United Nations Development Program.
The 2010 Human Development Report introduced an Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI). While the simple HDI remains useful, it stated that “the IHDI is the actual level of human development (accounting for inequality),” and “the HDI can be viewed as an index of ‘potential’ human development (or the maximum IHDI that could be achieved if there were no inequality).”

Published on 4 November 2010 (and updated on 10 June 2011), the 2010 Human Development Index (HDI) combines three dimensions:
• A long and healthy life: Life expectancy at birth
• Education index: Mean years of schooling and Expected years of schooling
• A decent standard of living: GNI per capita (PPP US$)
In its 2010 Human Development Report, the UNDP began using a new method of calculating the HDI. The following three indices are used:
1. Life Expectancy Index (LEI)
LEI is 1 when Life expectancy at birth is 85 and 0 when Life expectancy at birth is 20.
2. Education Index (EI)
2.1 Mean Years of Schooling Index (MYSI)
Fifteen is the projected maximum of this indicator for 2025.
2.2 Expected Years of Schooling Index (EYSI)
Eighteen is equivalent to achieving a master’s degree in most countries.
3. Income Index (II)
II is 1 when GNI per capita is $75,000 and 0 when GNI per capita is $100.
Finally, the HDI is the geometric mean of the previous three normalized indices:

LE: Life expectancy at birth
MYS: Mean years of schooling (i.e. years that a person aged 25 or older has spent in formal education)
EYS: Expected years of schooling (i.e. total expected years of schooling for children under 18 years of age)
GNIpc: Gross national income at purchasing power parity per capita

 

The Nation State

 

 

The Nation state is the macro unit of global economic harvest (Proudhon, 1876). The natural resources, the commodities, the manufactured goods and most importantly the human capital; their labor and their tax base are bound via this system into manageable units for exploitation. (Gellner, 2008). Under the guise of order the state system crystallized dynamic ethnic relationships and power differentials into control zones. As of 1 January, 2015 there are 206 such units, loosely organized into three major power blocs; sub-divided into nine world system dependency zones claiming sovereignty over shifting swaths of geographic turf[2]. The cultivation of false consciousness subsequently divides humanity further into dominant and subservient genders, ethnic groups, religions, nationalisms, political tendencies and sexual orientations; all with imagined identities that are wholly constructed via socialization and neuroscience for the purpose of disunity (Engles, 1893).

 

While almost all nation states have relative sovereignty; constant and repeated foreign and domestic assaults on this sovereignty lock each unit into a dynamic hierarchy of the world system. The metaphor of the world system; the mountain is subject to power shifts; thus via culture, warfare and economics the dominance of the core has shifted. Each nation state’s Oligarchical collective controls its political leadership with few outliers regardless of proclaimed ideological tendency. Nation state level oligarchs enrich themselves by aligning the human and resource capital of their nation with economic prerogatives set by the core nations at both international forums such as Bretton Woods, Davos and the United Nations. As well as at closed meetings for oligarch coordination such as the Bilderberg Group and the Bohemian Grove. Ultimately whether the nation state takes the guise of authoritarian, theocratic, military junta, or trapping of socialism or democracy; via elite consensus, think tanks, policy groups, campaign contributions, as well as encouragement of soft or hard repression; the elite cluster in each of the 206 nation states formulates their capital accumulation in relation to taxes, labor management and trade relations with other states.

 

The three power blocs; USA-NATO, PRC and Russian Federation have since 1945 engaged in ceaseless proxy conflict at the semi-periphery and periphery (Lebow, 1994). Endless coups, interventions, wars, genocides and clientalisms have ensued. Their antagonism has led to vast destabilization of the state system. Because the nation state unit harnesses the competing identities of its implied constituents; those within its border are locked in combative contradiction between the citizens and the immigrant others; as well as a hierarchy of access, alienation and proscribed benefit ascribed to the citizens based again on arbitrary privileges; male over female, dominant ethnic identity over proclaimed outsider ethnic groups, citizen over foreigner an so on. With very few outlying examples most of these alienations and privileges have mutated or been purged via conquest, revolution and ethnic cleansings and have largely solidified their false conscious paradigm since 1945. Because every aspect of the world system is inherently an architecture for reducing us down to a profitable economic unit and telling us that our hard ‘work will set us free’.

 

The nation state rests its legitimacy on being a protector and provider for its citizens. It’s justification for being no matter upon what superstructure of ideology or identity it rests upon is to fulfill the obligations spelled out normatively in the nine human rights instruments. In reality it has to meet two more basic characteristics; secure collective needs, enable satisfaction of individual wants and provide security. If any of those elements begin to drastically disintegrate via warfare, invasion, occupation or pervasive corruption and impoverishment the nation state government loses legitimacy to rule.

 

The Nation state is predicated on the cultivated false conscious belief that the state of our human nature is [inherent self-interest] and that security for a small and privileged minority from the [imagined barbarism of the great majority]; necessitates an [endless war on that majority] and [an evolving sophisticated system of social control].