Recounts Heval Amraz, also known in certain circles as “Comrade Moving Target.”
AMRAZ:
“I found myself as a young man in Diyarbakir City, the place we long call ‘Ahmed’, the future capital of all Kurdistan.” The black walled citadel of Bakur. The proud capital city of a nation that doesn’t exist, yet.” And the wicked Turkish boots do grind the necks and general spirit of the people all around us.
A poetic if not fully epic place! An ancient citadel of giant black stone walls and total martial law. A town of prisons, stories, heroes and valiance in the epoch of the Kurdish people. Little wine bars, a thriving literary scene. It cannot decide whether to be eastern or western, Turkish or Kurdish. The epicenter of a great revolt, or the dystopian mockery of the full blown repression of a colonizing power forcing a boot heel on our neck. As Kurdistan is a powerful and long repressed enduring idea, that idea is becoming a reality on the barricades here and in a long running fight in the mountains. An imagined community of over forty million souls who are wrongfully, shamefully divided between the imposed nation states of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran all things have two names, all things are both real and imposed upon us. As if to be a Kurd requires an act of insanity, and an act of double thinking. A persistent zealous fight to make the world acknowledge our rights and identity. To admit we have a right to survive as a nation beset with enemies on all sides.
AMRAZ:
“Following the Turkish military coup of 1980, the Kurdish language was prohibited in public and private life. The prison of Diyarbakir filled up and the endless wails of rape and torture propelled the movement to full mobilization and to take up arms again.
Diyarbakir, which in my people’s tradition is also called “Ahmed”, has now swollen to nearly 4 million people since the eradication and ethnic cleansing of over 5,000 Kurdish villages in the great ranges of mountains to the east. The primary battlegrounds between the Party and the Turkish State. Growing up there, there was of course no Kurdish allowed in school, no Kurdish books or music except deeply underground. Were it within the Turkish State’s power, we would not even have Kurdish names! We would admit to being backwards people of “Mountain Turks”. I was born in the year of the largest, latest and greatest uprising. And although since the days of the Medes there have been “one thousand sighs and one thousand failed revolts” ‘, this uprising was to be completely different.
In 1984 Abdullah Ocalan and the Kurdistan Workers Party simultaneously attacked three Turkish army posts and police stations in Bakur and announced the beginning of the revolution. For the next thirty years, almost without pause the P.K.K. and its armed guerrillas would battle the Turkish military across Bakur, the name we call the Turkish occupied zone of Kurdistan which means “the North”. Over 50,000 would die, mostly Kurds actually. The Turks would engage in vast acts of scorched earth barbarism and we in the Party would eventually turn to outright terror. In the end, the majority of the deaths were Kurdish civilians. In the end the only liberated ground was a handful of villages deep in the mountains of North Iraq, the Qandil.
Now, ‘Heval Amraz’ is of course not my original name. It is the name given to me by the guerrillas of the P.K.K. when I joined the Party. By that time we were fully surrounded in Qandil being attacked on all sides and death seemed certain. Total defeat as well. Our great leader had been kidnapped in Kenya. Major leaders of the movement including the brother of Abdullah Ocalan, Osman, had completely betrayed us. Our own Iraqi Kurdish brothers in the K.D.P. and P.U.K.-Peshmerga were collaborating with Turkey and America to annihilate us.
How do I tell you my story? What does it really matter? How does this even begin or end for an outsider. For people who do not even know where Kurdistan begins or ends, or even care. As Turkey is a N.A.T.O. ally, and no matter what it says or does will remain a beneficiary of great power largesse.
AMRAZ:
“I cannot tell you my real name of course. I cannot speak for the Party, nor can I fully disclose the deepness of my hope and my hate to a stranger. I can only speak to a feeling shared on differing levels by thirty to forty million Kurds. ”
I will try to say something for the benefit of doubt, that non-Kurds could care about us so much that they would come to our land by the hundreds. To fight and die alongside us not simply fighting in resistance to Islamic radicalism, genocide and repression, but also because they grasp the larger idea. The total and utter radicalism and implications of Abdullah Ocalan’s vision. The survival of the revolution rests not in securing a Kurdish State, but instead to export these ideas abroad. To make the blood of the martyrs raise the flood waters of all mankind and provide a blueprint for liberation.
Of course we began as communists, we began admiring the Cubans and it was the Russians and Palestinians that first trained armed resistance in the early days in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. But we are not Communists or Nationalists anymore. Our thinking on the subject of liberation has evolved. The Cuban connection and the Palestinians connection are very real and enduring parts of the story.
But, when we all almost died on the mountain top, surrounded and out gunned in 2000 there were no Cubans, or Russians or Palestinians to help us as they were all defeated or fully besieged. By some miracle, or just by sheer will the Party survived. And the 1989 defeat of Communism internationally required us to climb higher, dig deeper to criticize and self-criticize. To adopt an evolution in our thinking. With our ranks decimated, the armed struggle In a complete stalemate, declared a terrorist organization by almost every European country; we evolved. The revolution could not ever be won with arms and ideology alone. Nor could we secure Kurdistan while every other nation on earth embraced “Capitalist Modernity”. To secure our victory and survival as a people in Bakur, Bashur, Rojhelat and Rojava we would embrace the ideas of a Jewish anarchist from Vermont, as re-interpreted in prison by Ocalan and implemented by the new largely female leadership of the Party. This methodology called “Democratic Confederalism”, adopted by the Party in 2004 would soon find actual expression in Rojava. The Wild West of Kurdistan, the North most area of Syria. In 2014 when the Civil War broke out the Party and its allied militias seized control of major towns and cities across Syria abandoned by the Assad regime.
AMRAZ:
Thus we came down from the mountains, out of the underground and prepared to make a stand in Rojava where the radicals of the Islamic State were terrorizing our people and butchering everyone in their path. If we go back to the mountains it will signal only our isolation and defeat. If we hold these cities, if we showcase that we are fighting to defend not just for Kurds but for Arabs, Assyrians, Yazidis, Circassaians, Chechens and the Turkmen too; if we show that Democratic Confederalism is the solution, the way ahead for all oppressed peoples; then others will join us. And like the Nawruz mountain fires this uprising will eventually spread everywhere! There is a historic destiny to our revolution. To be victorious where all others failed!
A most dramatic pause.
Out of habit, Comrade Moving Target lights a cigarette and pours himself a cup of black tea. On the walls of the small office set up at the training base, which is also his room, Comrade Amraz looks the dead in the eyes. Or death in the eyes? Or perhaps both. As the posters of the martyrs plaster all the walls and the war expands everywhere around us.
“It’s not always cold in Russia,” explains Polina Mazaeva, a Russian Chuvasan sympathizer and mother of a seven seven old named Yazan. Yazan was born to a Syrian Druze father who is not with them anymore. It’s complicated, yet not that complicated in virtually every society.
MAZAEVA:
“As men abandoning women with their child is a very old story actually in all cultures.”
A pause.
“It’s just that we have had to exhibit a certain moralistic coldness. A certainly ethical chill? This was the experience of growing up in the ruins of the Soviet Union. But we are not without beliefs. We are not without our sympathies. You just have to be careful how you talk about them. Things need to be rational, they need to be sentimental but only if sentimentality is kept in letters or behind closed doors.
Outside Moscow and St. Pete’s life is often lived poorly. Nationalism was at an all time high. When many have an internal critique about our leaders, or the price of buses. Or the treatment of homosexuals or Chechens, perhaps we keep it out of our heads. Because the United Russia Party has made many advances to restore us to national dignity. Curb the oligarchy to some degree and reign in the gangster-ism of the 1990’s. The infrastructure of the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, outside the downtown area remains largely as it was in the late 1950’s. Optimistically better than what Stalin provided, but still brutalist, soul sucking Soviet crumble. Certainly the upcoming bus boycott will test the limits of ‘free speech’. There are piles of dirty snow all about the fourth largest city in the Federation. The very tall statue of Lenin still stands near the Hotel Marins Park. He’s still the default father of the nation. Only the ultra-wealthy have any admiration for the Czars, except for of course Peter the Great who stands tall over Moscow.”
Russia is a multiethnic, mostly single party oligarchic federation of some 158 nationalities, immediately east four hours from Moscow is the Chuvash Republic. The semi-central Asian Chuvash people are vaguely European and vaguely Asian; almost all are orthodox Christian and have never in remembered Russian history run afoul of the central authority. Never got themselves butchered or deported en-masse to Siberia. No, no, the Chuvash play well with others. The Chuvashan capital is Cheboksary on the Volga, but many can be found in Nizhny Novgorod, the Russian Detroit, once a closed and secret city called Gorky.
Who is Polina Mazaeva? A coy Russian Agit-prop? No, No, she actually has fallen in love with this tragic radical, Sebastian Adon. And they are preparing to meet, but have composed a number of Russian American, or Americano Soviet love songs and scribbles.
Why and when Sebastian and Polina began to write to each other is of no great mystery, both were in pure existential crisis. They wrote often and eloquently in the year leading up to his deployment in Kurdistan Syria and Iraq. These letters and poems all sounded similar, but not the same to previous love affairs across the Cold War, but they reinforced each others’; motivation.
This is not a ballad for two people who move on. But fundamentally the reality of their underlying narrative was that one day Sebastian, who had more agency via his U.S. passport would fly to her and give her a new life. A more tragic but realistic understanding of the correspondence was that before he was going to do the hard part; give her and her son a new life; he would go to Syria, where obviously he could die.
She brought the contradiction up only seldom. Their worst fights were Polina’s frequent accusations of Sebastian’s womanizing. Which was real, but not as magnified as she made. He wasn’t sleeping with every single woman friend he appeared in a Facebook photo with. But, he had lovers she didn’t see. He assumed she did too, but in reality she did not. She loved the idea of him, but never expected him to ask for some mega long distance monogamous relationship. It was strange. But she had a son and little Yazan kept her more faithful. Sebastian in the meantime took under half a dozen women to bed, the idea of Polina was sentimental to him, but also not exactly real. Periodically she would flip out over a woman he appeared with on social media. But, it would fade. Several times he threatened to cancel the Russian leg of the trip, but he didn’t actually want to. Russia was something he needed to see before he died. And, he probably will die out there like the 600,000 plus others who had perished in the war so far. Maybe in an airstrike, but likely from a mine. ISIS had allegedly booby trapped every room of every house of every village, town and city they had occupied.
The correspondence was real. They uniquely relied on each other to float. The underlying assumption that their struggle was real, that Sebastian would die on some barricade rather than raise a family and that Yazan had sort of frozen her life into place. Sebastian had clearly acquired a revolutionary delusion of grandeur and was now enslaved to his own expectations of heroism. Polina had fallen hard for her baby’s father and been rejected and abandoned. The Russian state and her parents shouldered some of the costs of raising a seven year old, but her life was a dull repetition and a soft cage.
Yes, the struggle was quite real! Sebastian had several times averted ongoing suicidal ideations through her soft tone and patient words. Polina had taken on new online classes and high expectations of what was possible. While the flirtation with self-harm was mitigated by the responsibility of motherhood, she had dark times. They needed each other after a point. They waited happily for the next response which honestly flowed all day every day since he was an ambulance man and she was very per diem self-employed with information technology type assignments in graphic design. They wrote and wrote and wrote. Sometimes poems, songs or sketches. Sometimes he would tell her how hard he planned to fuck her, or she would write out something that seemed hard enough to be a rape scene. They both were getting what they needed out of it. A friend in a dark time. Two friends in long distance Post-Soviet love. Two dreamers who live in utter and total nightmares. It gave them something to believe in.
Polina Ivanova Mazaeva throws back her crimson dyed hair and makes a pouty Chvashan face for a selfie. I love only three men! I love my son the very most, he is the future. He is happy and free and built from diverse parts. Yazan is his name and he is seven. Like any mother I have to love my son very first, even before myself! I am sometimes a dramatic and hysterical person, but this is who I am. Also, a jealous wife.
My mother is of unknown ethnicity, unknown as her mother was adopted as an orphan during the Great Patriotic War against Germany. Her father is a happy smiling Chuvash.
I love second, my forbidden ex-husband, Damien. He is in Dubai now, we tried hard to make this work, but he is Druze and I am Chuvasan, and never the two can be together. We tried. But it was too complicated. I love him still, I fantasize about him returning for me and carrying me off to the high tech parts of the Middle East, but he is gone.
Only the face of my son reminds me of him a little. They make fun of him in school and call him Arab, but this is not Arab. He is Chuvash, and Druze. Holy, actually, a reincarnated Druze inside him will speak in parables sometimes.
“My third love, and final for now is Mr. Comrade Sebastian Adonaev. An American. A New York revolutionary, a medical worker on ambulances and a very gifted artist. Perhaps better understood an upper middle class malcontent. Aspiring revolutionary? I hope he will not die in Syria, but statistically, it is probable. He has my heart in some strange way. Actually only with his spirited words.”
Sebastian makes a lot of written reports, partly because he’s a writer and partly because his team is spread widely over four countries. He writes me love letters and also forwards technical reports. They are highly boring, but cast some insight into his Middle Eastern movements and affairs. I am not really invested in his brigade of foreign fighters bound for Syria, of course, but I admire them all for their relative bravery. Rather, it would be better if he just stayed in Russia with me when he arrives, which will apparently be on May Day 2017.
Sebastian writes to Polina Mazaeva frequently, as though the spirit of the 18th century coils still be alive with the tools and technology of Century 21:
Dear Pauline,
There are eight people in or supporting the growing expeditionary party into Rojava. Some are working on the field ground and some from the safety of the U.S.A. Demhat al-Jabari, a Kurdish patriot I met in university, is negotiating with me in Kurdistan. He will likely go to Rojava, but return for school in the fall. Shoresh is an actual anarchist, he doesn’t really have a role as much as he showed up to fight in the Y.P.G. and perhaps do some gardening. The constant gardener doesn’t care about any bigger picture or whether Rojava will rise or fall, he will come for six months and depart. He has a wife and young baby, so it’s better, I guess. Alacan al-Biban Rasool is a Kurdish fixer boss. He’s a local to Erbil. He does Fixing, without ever taking money. Yelizaveta Kotlyarova is a Russian doctor, actually just a podiatrist, and Dr. Jordan Wagner is an ER doctor and they will do medical control from the stateside. Pete Saint Reed is a marine leading a little medical detachment inside Mosul. Justine Grace Schwab is working with Alacan al-Biban, also with Pete, and maybe could be our 8th; but she has savvy and magic and cunning, but doesn’t play on a team well.
Our overall contribution to the humanitarian side of the war in the end was under forty women and men deployed in Iraq under the auspices of Pete Reed’s N.G.O. Global Response Management, and mere four volunteers from abroad, myself and a gardener named Spike going up in the mountains, and over the river and into the Y.P.G. A Peruvian nurse named Francisco who worked briefly with Pete in the battle of Hawija, and a Kurdish American negotiator named Demhat al-Jabari. So Pete Saint Reed was definitely a better commander and focused wholly on the work in Iraq.
“There are a lot of complications,” he claimed. One may have been the lack of a reliable hotel bar in Rojava.
My unit of four, really three in the end was actually all we could manage to get over there and into Syria. Several dropped out, unexpectedly? No expediently expected. The American activist drama queen, “VIP leftist” Cecily Macmillan. A medical assistant in training named Joshua Hunter and a Ukrainian EMT named Philip. Syria is not actually an easy place to sell volunteerism in America.
Few of these volunteers in the end proved dependable, but who could really blame them in the face of the Syrian Civil War bloodbath. Only the Kurds Alacan al-Biban and Roj did any leg work, out of patriotism. Oh yes, Spike did his seven months but certainly none of that was dedicated to the medical mission. He deployed to shoot.
Really Pete Reed’s success, if you can deem it any success what he actually accomplished, in Iraq was about managing to access the W.H.O. money. His military veteran can do bravery and being embedded with the Iraqi Special Operations Forces helped a lot. The potential disaster of our Syria mission had most to do with the near total inability to reinforce or evacuate our team once inside Syria, being therefore wholly dependent on the whims of the YPG. Which again, stands for People’s Protection Units, the P.K.K. mostly Kurdish militia fighting ISIS as the primary Coalition-led proxy. Who allegedly, and in reality have a deep “martyr culture” and a sort of contempt for Western medical workers.
Sebastian’s reports, like his mind, dig deep then ramble out into incomplete destinations. Actually almost no one read them besides Demhat, Alacan al-Biban and Polina; sometimes Mr. David Smith, or Arlington. On the subject of Polina and Sebastian;
“We are both writers and both artists, she took only a slight interest in my Middle Eastern Affairs.” So Sebastian thought, but that was not true she followed Russia in Syria closely. The Russian media anyway called it world war three. Polina wrote many email letters and some he printed out and carried with him in a leather binder.
Sebastian carried her letters about to reinforce himself when the weather was too hot which it always was and death would inevitably get too near, which it sometimes did. Such was one;
My Dear Comrade Sebastian,
Priviet,
Maybe because many of all in my life you don’t know. You are important for me, that’s why I am winding all, afraid to lose you. I don’t want to be selfish, it just happens. And I really didn’t want any relationship before I knew you better, because I needed to take a break after the last relationships, and do something with my psyche and my life.
Why do I love you? When you wrote to me in October, I just couldn’t understand why you sent me such long letters. Especially because most of them were difficult for me to read. I just wanted to be polite and answered when I could. But then I saw that you feel bad, very bad. And I have a rule – if I have failed so far in my plans, I need to support those who don’t see for themselves how much they can do. You can do all you wish. You can gather people and organize them for common activities. For a good deal. You are a wonderful person. You supported me later. And I began to be inspired by you. I learned how you feel, how you sympathize with other people, what your heart is. You have a beautiful smile and so much fire. Simply, we are all people, and we all have weaknesses that we have to contend with. And you too, and me.
Now you inspire me more and more, and I like your ideas, because I begin to understand them (it was difficult before because of the language barrier), and of course this feeling – I hate it, but I miss you constantly and I would not want to share you with anyone. I’m really unstable for the last three years, there were so many reasons, that’s why I did not want to get attached to anyone – it would create problems for everyone.
But you’re great, just know this. I love your strange smile. Your brown eyes. Even when they are tired after a hard day. I love your voice and I love your face. I love your body (so far imagined in the pictures), I love your thoughts and that thing which guides you, the reasons why you are and what you do. You are a very kind person, so you suffered a lot. And you are wonderful, in any case, even when your strength is running out. I just love you because you exist. I would follow you everywhere and support you in any crazy thing, and I would share with you my most beautiful night dreams. And if you were nearby, I couldn’t let you leave a bed, I would give you all of me. Simply, you are very important and forgive me, if somewhere my old complexes I project on you. I’m not perfect at this. Sorry. It happens in only one timeline, then leaves. Wait a little, please, you’ll see a lot of good from me. And I hope you feel a little better today or soon. If you need to speak about any of your problems I am always here.
Your comrade & your future lover,
Polina Ivanova Mazaeva
P.S.
Don’t have affairs with other lesser women or get yourself killed in the war. There are actually many people besides me who care about you!
It was only that we believed that in this transience, this short human life, it was preferable to die on one’s feet moving towards a just idea. Moving in solidarity, in defense of the powerless. Then it would be to die on our backs or our knees, half-lives, shuffling along like zombies. Always asleep. With meaningless, un-free lives wasted. Lives were spent like wallowing serfs and base slaves.
Have you ever had an amazing noble idea in your head? That simply refused to translate itself or find traction in reality? Have you ever risked everything, sacrificed absolutely everything for such an idea? Myopically, almost psychotically pushing forward in the face of a stubborn, intractable cruel reality. When you can bring yourself to do that. To engage in nothing short of overwhelming zealotry. Pursuing a new reality, a reality where the vast suffering of this world is mitigated. Where the chaos and carnage and daily humiliation that is the lot of most humans is undone by rights, by hope, by heroism. That is called the “motivation for the fight”.
It has been a very long hard bloody road to the mountains and back from them. From Manhattan to Jerusalem to Havana. All the trips to the City of Port-Au-Prince. To Greater Boston. Back to Brooklyn then to Russia. Across Russia on a train then into the Middle East to fight in Rojava. Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Egypt and then back to the Big Apple again. Riding on the backs of armored trucks and flying carpets. On horses, on tanks, on airships. Over the great rivers and through the woods. Mountains beyond mountains beyond mountains. With stopovers where all civilization has come to a resolute end in the Fertile Crescent. Smoldering villages. Enormous cities razed to the very foundations. Once historic places, simply crushed and undone. Burning down river by river shore to deep sands of desolation. A revolution within a civil war within an endless third world war. A place called Kurdistan which exists not on maps but in the hearts and dreams of perhaps forty million stateless, long oppressed people. Engaged a very long fight for their right to exist.
How do you make any sense of such carnage to people that were not there? How do you make an enjoyable narrative about bloody chaos? Articulate ideas that when they become facts on the ground, have vast contradictions. Have improbable capability to survive.
My name is Sebastian Adonaev, but the Kurds named me “Blacksmith Winter”, or Kawa Zivistan. The Arabs needed to name me too in a way familiar to them so they called me “Abu Yazan”. Because my then-part-girlfriend, part-confidant Polina has a son named Yazan. I was 33 when I deployed but looked and felt a bit younger. I felt brave or stupid enough to volunteer for a war. At the most desperate heights of the conflict, which would end up killing over 500,000 people, there was a cry for some extra hands, some Hamsas. Every side called up all available reinforcements. Just before Baghdad almost fell, the mostly Shiite al-Hashid ash-Sha’bi Popular Mobilization Forces called up half a million Iraqis to hold I.S.I.S. back. The Assad Regime enlisted thousands of Russian, Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah to fight Daesh and other Sunni rebel factions aligned with ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Free Syrian Army brands and the Al Qaeda reboot H.T.S. The so-called Islamic State took in over 40,000 foreign fighters and the mostly Kurdish forces in the “Syrian Democratic Forces” enlisted just 500. I fought alongside the Iraqi Special Operations Forces in Iraq and for the Syrian Democratic Forces, in the Y.P.G. Militia defending the idea of Rojava in Syria. I contributed very few bullets, mostly serving as combat medic during my time there. Mostly stopping hemorrhage and carrying the wounded to ambulances. Mostly trying to train people to save lives, actually, at a time when almost everyone wanted to kill.
After defeating the so-called “Islamic State” as a force holding any territory, the United States military all but completely abandoned their Kurdish allies and Turkey invaded Rojava. Yet, she did not fall.
We who survived to talk about the Syrian Civil War, we often found there were not easy words to describe what we took part in. This is a story grounded in history and ideology. The tale of a stateless people spread over 4 nations, over 40 million strong. This is a love song after a series of hard fucks in Spanish and some love making in Russian. This is a Post-Soviet Lullaby, written in Imperial English about Western privileges. I have heard on the wire that the Turkish Army is fully mobilizing to crush Rojava. A fully modern army of over 435,000 soldiers. That Anya is losing her mind in Baghdad and Ana Campbell, that optimistic young woman I once gave hand grenades to, well she died in an airstrike in Afrin. Here I am in Capitalist Modernity’s very heartland and loving embrace. Doing nothing useful for Kurdistan. Just writing stupid love songs. Composing vain self serving propaganda plays.
I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to hide and what I can give away. I’m actually very detached from Western thinking so I don’t even know what actually makes compelling propaganda in the West anyway. Actually, the sly and looming enemy knows most of our real names, and frankly there were many informants amongst us, it is simply a matter of sad fact that to get their passports back many of the French and British volunteers gave us away. Not to snitch jacket, but with a little lean on anyone can make a person flip. Really, there were not that many of us internationalists to keep track of. As the mad China-man Andok said, “the hard drives containing our data were barely even secured and this place is awash in spies.” Our overall numbers were estimated to be around 500 strong of which around 50 later perished. Mostly in combat, some in a wave of alleged suicides. We were small enough therefore for the various security services to keep track of.
So what is the actual purpose of this little manuscript? It is certainly not to glorify or denigrate the volunteers. I think it’s brave we went there but I don’t think we changed a single thing. Perhaps we were all only there to bear witness that the revolution has even happened. It is surely not my aim to give away military secrets and name names, because I am many things but not a Josh, a ‘donkey ass betrayer’. Suffice to say the CIA, MI6 and the MIT. have all of our names.
JANSHER:
“I heard some comrades sang like little opera singers to get their European passports back. All speculation, none can actually say. Americans, you have the easiest deal. After ISIS is finished, maybe it will not be so black and white, fighting a N.A.T.O. ally and what not.”
Assisting a revolution for stateless democracy, women’s emancipation and social ecology in the heart of the war torn Middle East. ‘Heval Ciya’ the Scottsman always used to say that the 231 Sniper Unit changed the entire game, but really only the United States and the Coalition airstrikes probably, certainly did. When the last of the under 2,500 U.S. Special Forces leave the Turks will invade in force and try to undo everything. There’s a story we heard about a Y.P.G. Euro volunteer vacationing in Turkey immediately after his tour. He was of course arrested and will serve life in prison. He probably should have made better choices for leave and decompression. There are lots of crazy people here. You have to be little crazy to travel halfway across the earth to enlist in a revolution inside a bloody brutal civil war amid a great power confrontation placing Russia and Iran directly against the United States and N.A.T.O. I was told by ‘Heval Jansher’ the Y.P.G. guerrilla who helped train us that, if I survive the war I should “write something about Rojava that does justice to the over 12,000 martyrs. That does justice to the cause of Kurdistan. Honors Abdullah Ocalan and upholds the values of the revolution.” That it should humanize this resistance struggle inside a revolution inside a civil war inside a great game for the Middle East.
JANSHER:
“Maybe Heval, just make it a kind of strange fucked up love story! Call it; A MIDDLE EASTERN WESTERN!”
Jansher joked with me over cigarettes and endless black tea. He probably would never have cursed publically. As he was living a life of “unlimited modesty”.
So I hope this account manages some of that, compiling the oral history, experiences and many martyrdom shared amongst the approximate 500-600 foreign Y.P.G./Y.P.J./I.F.B. Internationalist fighters. At the very least I’d like to capture what it was that made us enlist in this hell to take part, to fight and die and kill and try and help, to be less than a footnote in the epic tale of Kurdistan. But still a part of a part.
JANSHER:
“It has to be a love story or they will never make a movie about it, comrade! To the West without a Movie, it is perhaps like this struggle is not even happening at all.”
But he also said things like:
“A ‘real revolutionist’ has no love except for his or her people. Any romantic love, or sexual yearning is a bourgeois luxury. For civilians, actually. A Kadro moves beyond the physical temptations of life, not because they are sinful or weak. They are just weakening to a revolutionary militant. Distracting the focus one must have to maintain motivation for our fight”.
“Our love story is for the Resistance of the Age” he used to say, but then Heval Jansher also laughed and noted that Heval Actor Jake Gillenhaul was then already shopping around a script where he plays an anarchist falling in love for a beautiful Y.P.J. fighter and another action exploitation of the Y.P.J. was coming out soon in France.
JANSHER:
“But that will likely not go anywhere useful. By the time it comes out we will all be dead, or have achieved victory, actually.”
He always punctuates, or punctuated his thoughts with “actually”.
JANSHER:
You see Heval, in real life we would probably platform and deport this stupid volunteer and the Y.P.J. comrade, she would be shamed and sent briefly to prison” Heval Jansher told me. A famous saying states that the “Kurds have no friends besides the mountains.” Well that’s no longer completely true. The 600 who served and the 45 who died besides the 12,000 Kurdish and Arab martyrs of the battle to defeat ISIS and defend the Rojava Revolution will live forever in the Kurdish tradition, since in Kurdistan ‘Martyrs never die’. Shahid Namarin.
These were the kinds of little talks we had at theQerechow Academy. Like a father and son seated on the floor of a small office, in a tiny outpost at the end of the world.
That said, this is not a love story at all. It’s not even “a Middle Eastern Western”. The revolution itself has hardly been secured. The struggle is hardly over. The iron heel and might of the Turkish army looms right over the border to the North. Ready to descend quickly and murder us all. Undo everything that has been fought for against the so-called Islamic State. The Forces of the bloody dictator Assad backed by the Russian army and Hezbollah dig into the south of the Euphrates river. The collaborationist Iraqi Kurdish K.D.P. Peshmerga, the Iranian supported Hashid Ashabi popular mobilization forces, the Shi’a dominated Iraqi Army and all manners of Iranian revolutionary guards to the south east in Sinjar. To the West the Jihadists of Al Qaeda’s latest rebrand and Islamists of different types in Idlib.
Enemies of the revolution on every single side! In fulfillment of my promises I will try and present our little part of the story as the defense has really only just begun. Everything might be wiped away before you even paid attention to the vastness and hope of it. I worry, no sadly I expect, that long before this manuscript is ever published anywhere, all will be lost. My remaining Hevals will all likely be killed. The Turkish Army will literally roll over the border and everyone will be slaughtered. This isn’t really speculation, since it has happened many times before.
Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your lips. Late into the long trips home. I have no home, it was your home only. Only my ungly little flats around the Brooklyn Soviet. Rented in desperation, vulnerability, an admission of poverty. And I will never go back to that humilating life. I will never see you again, or see Russia, or Cuba, or Mehanta or any other type of slavery life. Your lingering Goldy. It forever remains.
Now deployed about ten days ago to the Soutehrn front near Omar Feilds. Daesh is nealrly finished they say. Assigned first to Tabor Shihad Lawrence, five quickly died by snipers and mines in the first night of the operation.
The twenty internationalist volunteers are all drifting in different directions. They prefer we not all die at the same time. There are supposedly around 500 international fighters in Rojava, mostly from the U.S. and Europe, also Turkey. But numbers and time to the Kurds mean absolutely nothing. So maybe there are 500, or maybe just 50. Who knows Heval, who knows!
Daesh is nearly defeated. The Islamic State once size of Great Britain at its maximal, poised to take Baghdad and Damscus is reduced to the wasteleands of the deep desert and a strong of indefeinsible towns along the Euphrates River south east. From the North the Syrian Democratic Forces supported by the Western Coalition advance. We are part of that force. On the other side of the Euphrates the Russian Army, Lebanaese Hezbollah, and the Syrian Army advance. We all try and not shoot at each other, at least until ISIS is finished. Over the border in Iraq ISIS has been largely crushed; the SHi’a Populualr Mobilization Forces, the Iraqi Army, the Iranian Pasdaran, and Western advisors and Special forces have all but driven ISIS from Iraq to the Syrian border.
The name I have been given is Heval Kawa Zivistan which means “Comrade Black Smith Winter.” I am a Paramedic in civlian life and therefore one of the highest medically trained foreigners in the brigade.
Heval Shoresh from Brooklyn, I have known him since child hood. He has a child back in America. And I judge him for being here were it my right to judge. But this palace this revolution is irresistible to us both. He is a gardener back home. Here he carries a heavy duty long range, high power rifle called a X which is about twice his size. Hard to aim.
There is Heval Sasson from Austria. He was an EMT who once travelled with his girlfriend all over Africa on a motocycle. He is quiet, ideological, principled and socialist in disposition. With also is Scottish Heval Ciya a former British solider. Also the mad man possible career criminal kicked out of the French foriegn Legion called Heval Sivan, who although he claims he was also a British solider can’t hit a target with an AK to save his reputation. He hasn’t let up for many days talking about the Order of the Knights Templar, talking aboutthe Knights of Malta; actually engaged in an unending pressure of speech manic diatribe about the new crusades, that we are allegedly in. There’s also Heval Azad from Albania, something of a gypsy, a besepckeld intellectual; an anarchist.
There is also a French Legionaire of enormous size, amost a giant. He is called Heval Gabar and speaks only of the Legion, reveals nothing of his life. He isn’t very well liked by the other internationals. There is also a young kid who loks not more than 16 but is allegedly 18 his name is Max. One of the few held back in the Academy because of minor injury. He is dbbed Heval Maslum, but evryone just calls him Max. And that is how he introduces himself. He’s allegedly from Salem, Oregon. No matter what sems to happen he just repeats, “I don’t care.”
After the 5 Arab conscripts were blow apart the first night they broke the internationals nto smaller groupings. Ciya and Sivan were sent to a YPG Cadro Tabor based on being British military they were sent to the front. Soresh, Maslum, Gabar were merged into an Arab unit and sent to the front. Sasson and I were attached to Kurdish Red Crescent outpost in the Naqta in Omar Fields. Gabar and Maslum dubbed “pizkereks” or problem makers were sent to guard a fox hole on the edge of some useless “liberated village”. No one knew where Heval Azad was sent, but Albanians are very tough craft bunker people.
“He will turn up and be fine!” Heval Sasson says, ever an optimist.
***
Then night came and Sasson and I were quartered in a farm house. The commander invited us over to the field command for tea. The mood was the war with Daesh was almost over and very soon we would all be fighting Turkey in the north and or Assads forces right over the river.
The Commander is named Heval Azadi. They basically cycle out the same 50 Kurdish code names for everyone seems like.
The commander in very broken Enlgish invites us for black Tea in one of the many pillow rooms they like to build.
“Trump say, no more guns for YPG,” he tells us the SDF is the brand the YPG uses to appear more inclusive, a little less Apoist, an little more not the PKK, but the commanders almost always say YPG or PKK, theres a lot of little acronyms for small armies out here. The YPG, or the People’s Defense Forces make up 80% of the SDF; the Syrian Democratic Forces. All the best commanders are Turkish Kurd PKK trained.
“Daesh done in Iraq. Two towns left,” Azadi tells us.
“24 little Gundes to take along the river,” he says. A Gunde is a village.
“In Moscow, the PKK make a deal with regime, “ he says, regime meaning Assad and Syrian Army, “Iran, regime, Russian make deal on autonomy and oil rights.”
We are engaged in an operation to seize Syria’s oil fields, Sasson had explained. There were not many ISIS fighters lift after Mosul and Raqqah fell. This all now about who can take as much oil fields as possible to negotiate the final settlments. This seems to discourage Heval Sasson.
“Really all that is lef now, “says Commander, “NUSRA Front and HDS in Idlib.”
“Al Qaedas Syrian brand,” Sasson tells me.
“The PKK make a deal in Moscow, we will end up terms with Assad. The HDS, the Nusra, the Deash all the Islamist proxies in Idlib, Bab and Jarabalus City they must be eliminated to close the gap.”
Closing the Gap we learned in the Academy was about pushing through the Islmists into Turksih Hatay Province to gain sea access for Rojava. The Gap also being closing the lines between Afrin and Kobane. Afrin Canton is hard to resupply and will be the first thing the Turks attack.
“As soon as Deash war is over Turkey will attack, you will fight with Turkey?” they all wanted to know that. Would we we all stay and fight the second biggest army in Nato.
“Of course we will,” Kawa claims, but Sasson knows is suicide and also problematic when they rertun to their home lands.
“When Daesh is done there will be no ceasefire. Turkey will attack immediately. 45% of call Syria now in Rojava. In SDF hands. Turkey will waste no time.”
We all sepcualted about “Fighting the Turks near Afrin” while in the Academy. It will be slaughter. A cadro boasts that “We have peace deals with USA and with Russia maybe also China!” But the dependency on the U.S. airpower is real.
“The Regime will not ever accept Rojava in any form, it is just too weak to defeat it right now.”
“Russia will never abandon the regime,” someone says in Kurdish.
“It is like America and Israel, you have Syria and Russia. The Regime gives Russian Medditteranian Seport access, the Regime is only alive because of Russia and Iran.”
“There are many factors. Russian is loyal, America is not. When Daesh is over there will be no more guns, no more air support.”
“How many Western volunteers do you think are still in Rojava,” Sasson asks the commander.
“50, maybe less,” the Commander says. “50,000 came to fight for Daesh, maybe over time 2,000 came to help the SDF. 1,500 leftists from Turkey and 500 from the West. Now, in country still, 50 maybe.”
“The airports in Erbil and Sulymania are still shit down because of the independence referendum. For now you are here to stay. Who knows what will happen. PJAK is now fighting in Iran again. Maybe soon more fighting between Iraqi Army and Pesh Merga. And Turkey! They are coming trust me heval.”
Goldy wrote that she might have to marry her rich ugly patron. Polina wrote she is leaving me since I am “on the other side of the planet now” Chanie is back with Charlie, so probably I will never hear form her again. Anya, my attache, sends me some news from Baghdad. “They are arresting Western volunteers without good paperwork coming back from Rojava. Slemani and Erbil airports are down everyone ahs to go out rom Baghdad.” But I have good paper work. I called my parents the other day. An Arab had sold me a Syrian SIM card. They seem proud that I’m there.
I hope I can hold it togeter and reach ‘the moutaintop’.
Like in my dreams, the EMT Program of Kurdistan is just a means to an end. An after thought, the G.C.C. barely useful or functional any more out here. My so called partners Andrew, Forti, Jessica, Matthew Smith, Ovid all have defected and left me out here with no help. Can I count on David Smith, Kaveh, Jonah, or Dr. Wagner, probably not or only for a little.
Everything here is an assault on my senses!
Daily, I mist learn ideology, discipline, war, Arabic, Kurmanji, keep Sasson and I from stepping on mines, dying in airstirkes, gettting enough water. Sasson has said he is willing to help me run the EMT program if only we can get authorization to do so. The Kurds don;t believe in time, they don;t believe in space, and they don;t believe in foreigners.
The others we trained with, the twenty are all dispersed to different positions. Ten to Afrin and ten to Der Ez Zore. They must chose their own adventures in Rojava. I do hope that Soresh stays alive for the sake of his 6 year old child and yong wife. Ciya and Sasson signed the G.C.C. paperwork, the cover contracts that they will claim later to the government sof Austtria nad Scottland that when they did out here was purely medical. But, its not so much will they stay 6 months to train an EMT program it s more will the war ever actually end to allow the time and space to justify one.
It’s impossible to know how far up the mountain any of us will really ever go. Heval Barron was there almost a year. The German heval said little good or bad about it, he barely said much.
So many ways to die out here. We or most of the 2,000, or 500, or 50 shared a noble goal. Deafeat Daesh, defend the Revolution in Rojava.
In the mean time Sasson and I have been training Arab fighters in life saving skills. We try and stay sane. I am sure I will have to use this AK-47 before this is all over. The thought doesn bother me but I don’t delight in the thought of any killing.
Today, a villager “gundi” handed me their sick infant and I listed to its lungs and heart, and helped prepare some pedilite mix. The child was sick but dehydrated and stable, the Arab comrades keep telling people an American doctor is in the camp. But even in Syria I am still just a a paramedic not a doctor at all.
So much responsibility is on my shoulders. They all have varying medical issues. Infected toes, rotting death, abdoinal pains. I do what i can. The Party purchased me huge rolling duffle bag of medications and medical supplies. So we saty as busy as we can.
I day dream, and hope Goldy thinks about me more than sometimes, but probably only Chanie does when she is allowed to. Goldy sometimes whatsapps me cute photos and sometimes Anya, the attache flirts from Baghdad. I have been sending Chanie letters via the U.S. Special Forces were run into coming thorugh the camps.
I realize that G-d or no G-d, Abdullah Ocelan is writing about a universal truth. This is the last stand. The last chance we will ever have or get again.
“Deash is all wiped out,” the Commander repeats, ‘BUT THE TURKISH ARMY IS COMING FOR SURE. To burn all we have built to the ground,” he sighs, “Serkaften, we will fight them too.”
So we all still probably have a lot more bleeding left to do no matter what happens.
Flaming, low-lying wreckage spreads out before us in every direction. The ruins of an already desolate land. Sprawling two-story compounds along a mighty river. Pock marked with rifle rounds. Misery found absolutely everywhere. Syria is now a bi-word for total warfare, over 600,000 have so far died. A Revolution in a Civil War. A Third World War using several dozen proxy armies is underway. Russia, Iran, China, America and Europe all have their boots on the ground. In Northern Syria, an unrecognized administration in three cantons protects 4 million civilians and internal refugees. A Kurdish lead project for democracy, ethnic pluralism, women’s empowerment, and something called ‘social ecology’. The sun bakes you and the dust gets into absolutely everything.
In Deir Ez-Zor Province, a wasteland along the North bank of the Euphrates, in a few hundred hamlets, from their ‘capitals’ in Raqqa and Mosul, Iraq the most hateful and radical of Islamic fascists rules over 10 million persons. Some happily embrace its Caliph Baghdadi as the fulfillment of prophecy. Over 50,000 Muslim Jihadists from around the world arrived to reinforce this effort. At its maximum the Islamic State occupied massive swaths of Eastern Syria and North western Iraq, threatening to capture Baghdad and Damascus.
Deir Ez-Zor was one of the very first Syrian cities in 2011 to stage large scale demonstrations against the Assad Regime. In 2014 ISIS took over the city with little resistance leaving only a small pocket of pro-Assad military and perhaps over 100,000 civilian supporters cut off in an airbase and small section of the city. Supplied by helicopters and high altitude drop services the besieged garrison deep inside the ISIS control zone resisted capture for over 3 years and 2 months.
The siege of Deir Ez-Zor Airbase garrison lasted a very long time. ‘Daesh’ controlled everything except a small military airport which the Russians and Regime supplied by air for all of the war, but could not re-take, along with the city until just a month ago when it was “liberated” on 3rd November, 2017 by the SAA and the Russians.
At some point the Regime soldiers made the local women trade sex for basic rations of food. There were rarely sympathetic forces in the war, besides ours. But even the Y.P.G. conscripts children, forces Arabs off their land and dabbles in war crimes from time to time, to time. Now, on the South bank, Assad Regime forces, Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary guards and Russian special forces push south east down the southern bank of the River while Syrian Democratic Forces and United States lead coalition forces pushed rapidly south to the Euphrates North bank, both sides maneuvering to secure the majority of the Syrian oil fields. The S.D.F. capturing most of them. Now we slowly begin the final offensive to capture Isis’s last strongholds, moving down the river toward Hajin. Trying not to kick off World War Three.
“Perhaps I am not where I am supposed to be,” muses Heval Ciya, “Perhaps here, I will die for nothing at all. We can be killed so easily by anything, then they will dance about with my corpse making speeches in Kurmanji for a day, until my death takes on significance that it probably never had.”
Heval Ciya Zinar is the name they gave me. “Comrade Friend Mountain Rock”. I am a separatist minded Scottish Soldier. Although still a member of the British army, I voted for independence in our latest failed referendum. I am a gentleman by most accounts and a Y.P.G. International Volunteer. I have absolutely no political sympathies with the Kurdish lead formations, though I possess formal military training, making me more valuable than most of these preachy, useless ideologically motivated volunteers.
“There’s dust in my beard and men die all around me!” exclaims Heval Ciya from Scottland.
As we grew closer to the Euphrates we can see fire in the sky and the night is lit up with heavy coalition airstrikes somewhere far away to the south. The convoy of nine trucks had left Al Hasakah, the largest rebel held city in the morning and drove about five hours south toward some forward operating base. The eight of us internationals had not been issued weapons until halfway to the front. We stopped of course several times for obligatory tea and some volleyball. The sport of ‘Apoist’ revolution. Sometimes we’d stop at what seemed like the same identical storefront kiosk, next to well stocked pharmacies. The road bodega of Kurdistan is stocked with energy drinks, smokes and Turkish day to day items, never toilet paper. All the toilet paper in Syria was now gone. There we bought energy drinks and cigarettes of a more potent type, as the party issued Ardens were lights or ultra lights at best. There was tons of canned Pepsi, but no Coca-Cola throughout the liberated zones. Real freedom evidently has not been won yet.
In the first battle that I participated in during the Syrian Civil War five Arab soldiers in our S.D.F./ Y.P.G. Unit were blown to bits by mines and mortars as we stormed the river basin a little after midnight. Evidently, there were far more Daesh entrenched than we had thought. From a dirt sand trench I fired my AK-47 shiftlessly over the wall, peaking out I saw an Arab comrade ripped apart by gun fire and collapse in the sand.
The fire fight resumed immediately after a short re-calibration of the battle plan, after Heval Commander Dalil’s men were buried. A larger number of Kasadehwere trucked in, barely trained. Half or more might have fought for Daesh or the Regime at some point. Child soldiers all over the place. A major conscription drive happened, even some cadro tabors were moved in. This was a race to secure as much turf north of the Euphrates as we could as quickly as we could, creating a defensible buffer against the regime, Russians and Iranians to secure the oil fields. Of course, implicit in all that was to finish Daesh for good. Smash their final positions along 60 to 100 hamlets and miserable dust cake boney towns leading to Hajin, for the very last stand of the caliphate. Very bad intelligence friends! The bandits were still very well dug in, refugee were swarming out and among them suicide bombers. Five so far. it was impossible to know anymore who was Daesh or not among the refugees flooding out. Some two dozen Arab Hevals were martyred the first night of the operation. We were down the hardcore of the elite, the foreign fighter zealots, their families. Motorcycles with snipers affixed to reposition. Sleeper cell deployment, suicide bombers, booby traps, tunnel mines, the usual. Now they would in four battalions capture about fifty tiny key destitute towns working south in several prongs toward the river. “If you see a helicopter, don’t shoot at it!” Dalal had said, it was our new resupply drop copters. We allegedly had a very, very small air force now. “Do not shoot at the helicopters in general,” was repeated several times in Arabic and Kurdish. “Also, also! If the regime forces fire, return fire, but do not engage them. Unless they actually cross the river.” Declared Commander Heval Brusk, which means ‘commander lightning’. Commander lightning then personally presided over a few hours on conscript drills. None of these bearded partisans were trusted with grenades. So the very next day, at early dawn, ten of the destitution ridden little seemingly strategic ISIS hamlets were again stormed. There was chaotic gun fire erupting everywhere. There were utterly ransacked two story brown buildings all unfinished, all about the same shattered look. From several positions Takimcommandos were firing endlessly from roof tops and sniper holes out toward where it was believed the enemy was hiding. A mosque about half a kilometer away. Well of course every Daesh position was in a mosque, hospital or granary since nothing else was defensible. This was a mostly one sided AK-47 and mortar barrage. Much of the war had proceeded like this, pickup trucks dripping light infantry to storm abandoned Arab homes and light up anything that moved. Loot absolutely anything that wasn’t made of sand and carry it back north. One pipe, one water basin, one carpet at a time. A small child ran out into the road and was blown away. Briefly a pause, until he was clearly limp and dead. A day or two more of endless AK fire, sometimes at night too. Eventually the Americans were told to bomb the mosque. Spotters transmit grid coordinates. Soon, about 5 minutes later an airstrike rips apart the mosque. Battle won!
Many people have written at length about “how boring” it can be to be at war, but it is more terrifying than boring, actually Heval. You do your best to not think about how men and women far more prepared than yourself took a wrong turn and then just exploded. Or how a sniper cut them down. Or how they died in a Turkish airstrike. Or contracted hepatitis because of poor local appreciation of pooping with toilet paper and hand washing, then eating. The boredom of war Heval is perhaps a cover for a sneaking debilitating fear, so that is what people write about. Being bored, instead of being afraid. And in a war such as this certainly you sit around quite a lot drinking tea, smoking weak Party issued cigarettes and standing guard. Or looking for strategic places to jerk off or poop without setting off a mine. But nothing for us was the same for very long and thus all the time you spent sitting around was better spent ‘conversating’ on the Revolution’s bleak future, or studying some Kurdish, or horsing around with the Arabs. Who loved to try and communicate actually. And also show you pornography and awkwardly try and steal, trade for or buy your hand grenades. Or ask you to bring them to America or Europe hidden in a bag. Jokes abound, but really it is only you who will be brought back to Europe or America in a bag. While very few of us actually spoke any real Kurmanji Kurdish or Arabic, it seemed that the Arabs were far more interested in us than the Kurds though. I would call the Kurdish commanders attitude, begrudging appreciation and that of the rank and file borderline insulting. I would go so far as to say that at this stage in the war, being fought in majority Arab zones now by the Euphrates river that an increasing number of the front line fighters were Kasadeh, non Kurdish Arab S.D.F. fighters. The Assyrians too had a small group, less than a few hundred men, many little kids and old men. Many poorly trained and poorly paid semi conscripts. Many were not even very against the Islamic State, more eager to shoot at the Russians and regime forces on the other side of the river. With the Kadrosbeing withheld in clear preparation for the impending defense of Afrin Canton.
In retrospect I assume that Heval Fermander Dalil probably saved our lives by abandoning us in a rear fox hole in the dead of night. The ten internationalists that I was aware of were placed further back in the rear, but Heval Shervan ‘the crazed Irish gypsy’ commandeered a Humvee and caught us up, without any invitation to the troops of “Fermander Dalil”.
I remember freezing out in the dunes all night long while the Arab fighters shared neither bedding nor blanket. It was so bitterly god damn cold! Sometimes Heval Kawa, the idealistic New Yorker and I talk about the girls back home. I talk about my Ms. Ashley. He talks about his “Goldy”. Some escort Russian he has some arty muse thing with. Pretty much this is what men at war do. Although in my case, I motorboated my female best friend. In his case it seems a bit more fucking dark and tragic.
“Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your lips. Late into the long trip back to Brighton to your so-called home. I have no home, only ugly little flats around Brooklyn soviet which I rent out of poverty, artless and shared. Decorated with trinkets. I’ll never go back! To you or to Russia, or Haiti, nor to Mehanata the tavern or even dear Cuba! All these things are a form of slavery now. Your lingering Daria, it takes the form of ruminations on WhatsApp messages telling me to “come home”. But to what? To nothing. Life here is hard, but it is free life as they say.”
Kawa, the so-called American, is more a poet than a medic in his heart of hearts. Me? I am simply a Scottish warrior. I long for the fight and I got some.
I was deployed into the Deir Ez-Zor Province wastelands about ten days ago to the front near Omar, Daesh is nearly completely defeated they say, but everyday we are taking martyr bodies back to Al-Hasake. Assigned briefly to the Tabor Shahid Lawrence; we lost fifty men in the first few battles to advance south on the mighty Euphrates river. After all that initial death it seems they aim to break up our group of internationalists into different places. They do not want us all to die at once. They do not really seem to have achieved consensus or a plan on where we should be or when and if we should die, or what we are actually even good for. Or what to do when ISIS is finished, and America abandons them and the Turkish Army rolls over the border to kill us all. A heated internal debate is constantly held in both Turkish and Kurdish. Sometimes also in Arabic. Which always ends inconclusively. Well its a complex matter anyway. So many ways to die out here for the greatest cause of our time.
On this matter Kawa and I agree, that whatever motives brought us all to this wasteland, this place of dying and suffering over made up Gods and ideologies, invented ethnicities and world war three style great power politics; this was the resistance of the age. This was a battle between good men, bad men and crazy men who could not sit out. Because when the smoke clears there will be a different Middle East, a different world. I am no ideologue. I am no dreamer or religious fanatic. I am a professional soldier. While it is not unreasonable to say the Assad Regime backed by Russia and Iran, the Turks, Al Qaeda and of course the Daesh, are unequivocal forces of religious fanatical reaction, of fascism, or totalitarianism and death, well they are. While the Kurds and Arabs of Y.P.G./Y.P.J./S.D.F. are not saints of course. We are not angels here to help do some God’s work. We are fighting for democracy, feminism, ecology and tolerance in the heart of the Middle East. As opposed to all the other groups that are fighting for radical Islam, chauvinism, fascism and the right to impose the will of the minority on the majority.
Did you know that when you take off a person’s uniform to bury them, you cannot tell a fascist corpse, from a democratic corpse, from a Daesh corpse, not even from the length of the beard? Those three and letter affiliations, they don’t matter anyway. It matters more, the stuff inside a person’s heart. Their moral compass. Not the length of the beard or who they pray to. Not the historic struggle of their people or their claim to the rivers. When true warriors die, they might not end up anywhere glorious. They might just be dead. The “immortality” we are achieving in our death here is thus rooted in the way the story is framed. Which is to say, whoever wins the war. But can you really win a revolution inside a civil war, inside a World War? I see absolutely no good end in sight. Most likely, we will all get killed ingloriously. But there is of course a timeless epic glory for young men of all cultures to join a seemingly impossible battle, risk their lives and join a pantheon of immortal heroes. Of course, the Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds, Turks, Checehens, Turkmen, Persians and all the other micro-ethnic tribes gathered here to make war, well they sadly all have no choices. These are the oil rich, strategic holy lands and mountains they were cursed perhaps by their gods to be born in.
How did we even get here? How did this motley group of around 800 mostly Western foreigners take up the cause of Kurdistan?
Well, it began with a letter of introduction. As well as four short pamphlets that were written by the Uncle Leader himself, while serving twenty-one years in solitary confinement on the Turkish prison island of Imrali. These pamphlets attempt to paraphrase thousands and thousands of handwritten theoretical documents smuggled out by his lawyers from Imrali. The name if this 8 volume treatise are called alternatively “Democratic Confederalism” or “the Defenses of Abdullah Ocalan.” Taken as a body of ideology these writings translated into Kurmanji, Sorani, German, French, English, Spanish and Farsi from Turkish for the theoretical basis for the military and political objectives of the Party.
Comrade Norma Olivia Sanchez has jet black hair and is petite. She’s vaguely malnourished for a Cuban, but still attractive and “dynamico”. Of course! She is and always will be a member of the Committees for Defense of the Revolution. The vigilant internal defense mechanism against Yankee imperialist aggression and unrestrained, insatiable sex tourism. Her mother was a fairly high ranking person in the Party, and told her of the struggles to defend socialism during the Cold War years. Told her of the deprivations and economic siege beginning in 1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed and virtually all proto-communist regimes along with it.
COMRADE NORMA OLIVIA:
“The U.S.S.R. was the sun and we were just a proud and tiny island fortress. When the sun went out, when we lost our greatest, sturdiest ally; we would be in the dark and there were many things in the dark that could ruin us.”
There would be no more petrol for the cars and tractors, buses and power plants. There would not be fertilizer for growing food. There would be shortages of absolutely everything on every level of consumption. There would be long lines and no electricity. There would be no fans or air conditioners, there would be zip-zero-nada. And in this proverbial darkness of our times ahead, our enemy which had sought to ruin us from the very day of our independence would move in, emboldened by the so-called end of history.
I have some understanding that was it not for decisions made during the revolution, if not for our Russian friends and of course the own solid base of our people in the historical context; we could be living in an illiterate and deeply unhealthy place; with a brothel and gambling embankment running from Miramar to Varadero. 500 kilometers long where foreigners could just cheaply, scenically fuck our women, drink our rum and smoke our cigars in the sun.
I knew, the minute I was called to the office that we would not surrender, our great leaders, well the two brothers still alive; would not for one human second consider that the fight was lost.
I was there the day they called us all together. The top nine, the big two; the Ministers and the deputies of industry, defense, finance, agriculture, and espionage later. We had known it was coming, the fall of our protector and benefactor. In embassy cables and diplomatic whispers; we also knew, it was our job to know that when the big bear fell down, died, and became reborn as god only knows what under American guidance! And its brightest, newest oldest and also highly questionable satellites began dropping from the sky; that nothing, not one thing would stop the aggressors to the north from moving in upon us.
We knew this was the beginning of the end of the revolution as we understood it, but what could we do? We suspected the Syrians and the Libyans would not give in easily to them at all. And we watched one after another as communist regimes collapsed in Eastern Europe and Africa. It was really our estimation, that by the time the dust settled; it would be only us, the Vietnamese, the People’s Republic of China (both which had embraced capitalism in most regards five years ago, Laos, and whatever the backwards hell they were doing in North Korea! We assumed Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Namibia and Angola would remember what we did for them but be in no position to reciprocate. And between 1989 and 1994, it would all come tumbling down. The failed architecture of a dystopian dream.
We sat together at a time when even the leaders were hungry and when anyone looked in a mirror they would not always recognize their own faces, for a look of despair had set in, inside oneself. All that we had willed as a people could be undone in just one year. We were all the same outside, for the siege had not begun yet, it would begin tomorrow and the next day and for the next ten or twenty years. And the Yankee enemy in the North, the pale colder place just a few days out by raft or one hour by plane; it would either soon invade, or try and starve us out. The ten million that had refused to defect. And the accomplishments of the last fifty years could go up in smoke, or simply in a long whimper, as the Dominoes began to fall.
But I understood, it was my training from Moscow to understand and my own Cuban sense of putting it together and taking it apart and refashioning. I knew that there was only one thing that could hold the country together, and so did Fidel and Raul. We needed to buy the time it required us to shore up. I am not sure that we prepared adequately for this day, actually. I’m not really sure we believed this day would come.
They drove us out to a farm. Well of course they didn’t tell us and we didn’t ask. And we were told in a meeting this was going to be a “special period in times of peace”, which was to say all the conditions of a siege and a war were to be upon us, and really the only question was how long could we last until the U.S. gets bored, not tired for they have never been in a rush. More until the empire is bored with us, less obsessed with us. Long enough for the opposition to imperialism to recoup.
I remember in the car to the ranch which disguised the room for these situations. I remember wondering if this was the end of our experiment and life as we understood it.
“This comes right from Fidel; you’re all going abroad in a week. Some of you will join embassy staff or medical missions, some as private people with foreign passports. You will be going to allied countries and Western countries, you will be going to make some hasty business.”
Well really the whole speech was so much longer. But this was the short of it. We were not told in any specific terms how long supplies and foreign currency reserves could hold out on the island. We were told in no uncertain terms that things were going to run out and that our job was to generate hard currency through the operation of a variety of legal and illegal businesses to shore up the essential purchase; food, fuel, and probably armaments.
“They’re rioting in Moscow, in Warsaw, and in Budapest. It’s all coming down. Even the Chinese are talking about calling it something else.”
I tell you it wasn’t all cigar smoke and mirrors and fake foreign names, Cubans look like everyone and we had trained long ago to act like anyone, and we’d been assimilating for years into the second world and there was a contingency plan for a cut off over time from U.S.S.R. foreign aid, not overnight.
COMRADE NORMA:
“What brought it all down?”
LEADER MAXIMO CASTRO:
“This isn’t a polite or immediate question, comrade.”
But, the answer was several things. First, the West was economically more exploitative and comparatively more ruthless. Second, the Russian Communist Party lost its popular imperative, and third, the endless wars in proxy had sapped its will. But there was something else no one said, which was being said in the West; that Capitalism was simply a better system, no-no no one would say that. But everyone was always hoping blue jeans and popular gringo music would fall off a favela cart or plane hatch back from Miami. And it often did. Luxury carrots for all or for none says the evil murderous and often sloppy C.I.A.! But ours was a hard-won thing that had the support of the people and would not be defeated by American imperialism and temptation.
We will do what we have to do to survive this! Too much is historically on the line, if we fall like the others this idea and all our sacrifices and gains will have been for nothing. We would plot and organize, mobilize and do anything we had to do to secure the revolution. We would survive this coming Special Period in Times of Peace. We will break the grim Yankee blockade and ensure the relevancy of Cuban-style Marxist Leninism for ten thousand years to come! And I will wear blue jeans when I have to. Four people with mixed but exotic features enter the room, two men and two women, clad in loose army green tunics.
Thus declares our jefe:
RAUL CASTRO:
“I would like to introduce the delegation from the Kurdistan Workers Party.”
“They are quite expert in smuggling, establishing European business fronts and of course, they are committed revolutionaries motivated by the same historical forces as our own people.”
That was the very moment that the special relationship between the Cubans and Kurds solidified. Skill in smuggling and commerce would be exchanged for medical specialists and engineers that could design impregnable bunkers. Ten years later, Comrade Norma Sachez’s half Argentine daughter Alina Sanchez would become one of the first Cubans to serve in the Medical and Engineering Brigades attached to PKK guerillas in Turkey. Her Kurdish guerrilla name was Lêgerîn Çiya. One of the longest-serving members of the international brigade mobilized to protect the revolution in Rojava.
“No blind faith or fanatical sentiments, and we may yet win this war!”
– Cirok Apo.
On February 17th, 2015.
We’re at the precipice of civilization. At a hotel roof bar in the world’s oldest, continuously inhabited city. Just me, a good lucking shall we call it’ journalist?’ My friend, Abu Hamza, a Kurdish patriot, and also a waiter chain smoking and watching the telexcreen nervously. I hold a book, well more of a rhetorical report on ‘capitalist modernity’. The order to evacuate Erbil were given just an hour ago.
“Total chaos,” says Abu Hamza.
Just outside the city, to the South West, in the darkness are literally gathering hordes. Bearded men in black hoods, capable of nearly unlimited violence. Perhaps many thousands of them. Actually? allegedly? Who knows. Not coalition military intelligence. With belt fed machine guns mounted on pickup trucks and ferociously sharp blades. The hord is at the gates. The City is understandibly in a total panic. Tens of Thousands have already fled for the mountains.
It is called “Erbil” by the Arabs and “Hewler” by the Kurds.
The citadel is looped by ring roads. And thus, from the air it looks like a target. Newly paved, well lit highways link hotels to malls to mosques to shopping centers. This a city on the very edge of an oblivion. Each tower, each pylon, each bolt, each cocktail; 6,000 years of human civilization brought to the full hilt. To the Maximum.
The defense of the City, managed by two factions of Kurdish Peshmerga and the CIA will revolve around using the hotels as sniper points, and fighting ring by ring.
On the second innermost highway ring, of the 1,000 Meter Road, atop the Dedeman Hotel. Here we find a mixed race European Justine. Her last name is slightly different on several official documents, actually. It’s a little hard to pronounce. She sits for twilight libation. If the defenses don’t hold and the air strikes don’t materialzie, it’s gonna be a real dry town fast.
“A contextual report on the Crisis in Greater Kurdistan”. From Case Officer Justine Tomas Falafarian to her colleagues in the Kurdistan Workers Party. On the eve of the battle for Erbil.
ABU HAMZA:
The temperature went over 114 degrees today in Erbil City Streets. I am on the roof of a newly erected brutalist slab housing tower on the One Thousand Meter Ring Road to the southeast of Hewler. I take a little break. To watch the last lights of the sun dip below the low range to the West of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. The whole roof is lit up in white lights. I will continue the broadcast. Any hour now we’ll be going over the border into what’s left of Syria. Into Rojava. Into a Revolution inside a grisly Civil war whose outcome is very much still up in the air. If Erbil falls tonight, sooner than later hopefully.
Abu Hamza looks a little dower. Probably calacualting how defensible the City is, base don how many Pesh Merga militia have fled, or will soon flee.
JUSTINE:
“When you open your paper, turn on your TV, or boot up your smartphone and attempt to understand what is happening; you are already tuned into people paid well to validate a view you already had!”
One such view is that there is a war going on between Islam and the mainly Christian Eastern & Western Bloc that affects China too. Both Russia and the United States have been poorly managing Wahhabi-Salafist terror in their countries since long before the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991. The United States by funding it and Russia by committing war crimes against whoever deploys it against them or their interests. China has been battling Islamic separatists that wish to section off 1/5 of its country to the Northwest in Xinjiang province. Perhaps what you tune into tells you it’s all some massive clash of civilizations. This ridiculous idea was popularized by Samuel Huntington in 1992. Other writers and pundits declare the events all part of a long-running proxy war extending past when Francis Fukuyama ended history after the Cold War. If you’re deeply religious, and much of the human race is, you might periodically wonder if this is the end of times. As humans have wondered many, many times before. Neither the media nor the thought leaders nor your religious intuitions are paid by telling the truth. They are paid because you like how they interpret horrifying, unpredictable events for you. You subscribe to their interpretations because they assist you in rationalizing, wholly irrational human behavior, predatory government malfeasance, and social policies that enable a virtually endless war.
From your house of worship or via your TV screen you might try to rationalize what’s happening here in the killing fields of the Middle East through the prism of your respective prophet’s scriptures or favorite pundit’s words. The news is a nasty circular addiction. A part of religion is a repetitive act of denial. You almost have to always deny that vast portions of the rest of your species are even loved or protected by God. This 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 Godly protection to a set of scriptures is always probably re-written and re-translated by a fallible man. It is implicit to accept the belief that your hands are washed off much of humanity’s 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 to be dispassionate! Objective and rational, without losing our solidarity or our souls.
I could only assure you on the political science and international development level it is wholly rational what is happening in the world today. Outside of wars for diminishing resources, prophetic revelations, and clashing civilizations. It is the product of high-level planning and an absence of low-level care. We might extend that to the human tragedy generally and the Middle East Highly specifically.
The steak is just as tender in New York, London, Geneva, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Beijing, Shanghai, St. Petersburg, and Moscow!
The politicians in these places and those who manage them live in a similar style of homes. People who 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 kids 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 G-d 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 allegedly ended history and “won.” But the Pax American of 1989 to 2001 was short-lived.
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 90s 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 at 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 it 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 back and forth two-party state and Russia is a multiple-party, one-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. This is why their ferocious Middle Eastern proxy war can’t be just about oil at all.
China has a strong one-party state, and it is run by the Communist Party. Its impressive economic growth since embracing State Capitalism in 1986 has propelled it to be a clear contender to the Western Hegemony. China is disinterested in both military interventions and experiments in the Middle East. All three powers have increasing energy needs that America and Russia can meet within their borders and China cannot, who therefore has elected to colonize every country in Africa. However, energy resources; oil and natural gas are the engines of both war and development.
America in 2017 has willing proxies in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. Its base for all Central Command, Military operations is in Qatar. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, as some may recall. It mostly withdrew in 2011 but 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 its only Mediterranean naval base there. Along with Crimea which it annexed in 2014 on the black sea, this is one of only two warm-water ports. The key Russian regional ally is Iran. Iran as a result of the American invasion of Iraq controls everything in Iraq that is not Iraqi Kurdistan, the Sunni Triangle, and the remains of the ISIS-held areas (Ar Raqqah, Anbar, Al-Hawijja, Deir-Ez-Zor). Most people here call them Daesh, the pejorative using the acronym.
For over 2/3rds of the human race, the very events critical to their respective, overlapping, and at times contradictory faiths took place in Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. For followers of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha’i, and numerous sub-sects of each, this is where their very prophets were all born, raised, and communicated with the source. From the very moment, according to their own religious texts, that the Israelites arrived out of Egypt there has never, except for several long authoritarian periods of Islamic Caliphate rule, been one even year of continuous peace. The Crusades were a several hundred-year series of barbaric attempts to establish a genocidal, white supremacist Roman Catholic foothold 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. Shia 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 through the United Nations are to be the extent of collaboration. NGOs will proliferate as donor trends determine. Regular military intervention will remove or shore up state systems intrinsically hostile to any of the three centers of global power; named Washington, Moscow and Beijing.
The World Wars and Cold Wars brought humanity closer than it ever has come to total self-destruction. But, there was nothing particularly stable about the Pax-Americana 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 that changes locations, ideologies, factions, and names. But, it is all in fact a singular ongoing war.
If we accept the validity of real politics being intrinsically hostile and equity in the international order; if we excuse every type of growing human rights violation as explained in the national interest; the center cannot hold. The earth has only so much capacity for economic pillage. The weapons of war are exponentially more destructive. The exodus toward the West is overwhelming. We cannot prove broad conspiracy nor do we have to. We cannot confirm or deny that something in 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 it has something to do with civilization, religion, or cultural clashes. It fundamentally has to do with two forces pushing from the East and the West toward an energy resource. But that is in itself simplistic since both the United States and Russia have some of the largest proven reserves under their own territory. A Middle Eastern market for the weapons needed for constant warfare is a vital aspect. Both the Western and Eastern Blocs are seeking to control the oil in the ground and sell the dozens of Middle Eastern players’ advanced and simple tools for defense but mostly more killing. The various holy sites for the numerous religious believers convolute the basic thesis but are the third pillar of the equation. Were there no oil, there would be no willingness to arm so many opposing players. Observe Somalia where Muslims are in a desert and absolutely no Western powers really care until high-profile piracy occurs.
Were there no arms racing there could only be very 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 landmass, Syria became the Russian proxy, and Egypt changed opportunistically sides. Next, they screamed about the containment of the Iranian Revolution rather 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 Americans 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 the 1990s where one in seven Chechens was killed were replied to with the 2002 Beslan and 2004 Ord Nost Hostage crisis. Hundreds of innocent Russian hostages died in both events. An estimated 240,000 people had died in Chechnya in two wars that 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.
ABU HAMZA:
“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 their sophisticated propaganda and branding. Pakistani intelligence coordinated it as they had in Yemen and Afghanistan.”
Then, the so-called “Islamic State” took dozens of Syrian and Iraqi cities including Mosul, which had come dangerously close to taking Baghdad, before being turned back by Iranian coordinated militias and Kurdish Democratic Confederalists. The Peshmerga and the Iraqi military had fled in varying ways exposing civilians to atrocity. But allegedly quite a lot of these Sunni tribes people liked living under the Islamic State’s brand of non-state governance! It validated their identity, it gave them something big and powerful to believe in. But, now they are near the brink of annihilation. It is actually not important to indict who thought up the Islamic State, and who planned it. Some say the Gulf States, some say Iran, Israel, and the West. The evidence though is clear that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar all fueled its development and Pakistan has the only intelligence service capable of working out the variables. It is pretty fucking childlike to believe it was created by Islamists and Ba’athist officers in U.S. custody.
It can be difficult to figure out what’s happening out here in the Middle East. It can become an abstraction of alien cultures, conflicts, and ethnic configurations that are easily blurred to an uncaring or untrained eye. It is hard to get your head around how the alleged cradle of human civilization became such an everlasting intractable bloodbath. Perhaps it is only the responsibility of the Western audience to know what is happening because the collateral of the carnage is spilling over into their European and American cities. No one will perhaps admit that, but yes. And it is also important to render the Middle East more human because the weapons distributed here are from the West or Russia. The oil being pumped is being bought and sold by Western or Russian firms. Most people living in the West don’t actually know what Kurdistan is, but that doesn’t say so much as most people in the West don’t know where a lot of things are. I would go so far as to say the majority don’t care.
Most probably won’t admit that they didn’t know that the Kurdish ethnic group existed until 2014. It was not until various pundits made it clear “the Kurds” were actively fighting the Islamic State did anyone ever hear about things like the Peshmerga, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), or about Kurds in general. The perversity and violence of ISIS kept it in the headlines for the past three years and the Kurdish issue has increasingly been at the forefront of understating geopolitics in the region. Particularly because Iraqi Kurdistan, administered by the Kurdish Regional Government as an autonomous area since 2003 is set to hold its next referendum vote for independence on September 27th, 2017. And it is sitting on top of the fifth-largest proven crude oil reserve on earth. No one should totally wash their hands of what happens in the Middle East because its conflicts are fought with Western and Russian weapons, paid for by American and Russian tax dollars. The companies pumping out the oil are largely Western or Russian-based firms.
JUSTINE:
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 claim they are Western Allies but can be linked to the Islamic State through one or two acts of deductive reasoning. And the 40 million Kurds spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The Kurds, who are the world’s largest stateless people are seeking some viable means to safeguard their long-abused community and of course, get rich off the oil under their Iraqi territory.
“I plan to be very repetitive with names and places that matter.”
Or places that have more than one name so the reader can try and learn them. There are a lot of overlapping players, a lot of acronyms, national interests, international interests, and underlying religious and ethnic antagonisms that go back thousands of years. There is a very long history of desert prophecy. This is certainly the land of Zoroaster, Abraham, Bab & Bahaullah (Iran); Moses (Egypt), Jesus (Israel/Palestine), and Muhammed (Saudi Arabia). Well documented and repetitive ethnic killing is the reality of life here for over 4,000 years punctuated by foreign occupations, colonies, and Islamic empires. Devastating foreign invasions on behalf of Mongolia and Europe altered the entire composition of the region; culturally, politically, and genetically. There is deep-rooted tribalism which has to be understood as a means of both loyalty and social organization. There are monarchies created by Europeans to crown their favored Bedouins as oil clients. There was the re-birth of the Jewish State for the third time in three thousand years. There was the re-birth of the revolutionary Shi’a State in Iran which carries a similar sense of Messianic optimism and zealous indoctrination to preserve for Shi’a what the Jewish one does for Jews. There is absolutely a more recent history since 1947 of several large and also small wars and protracted atrocities. Such as those experienced by the Palestinians at the hands of almost everyone in the region. You could rightfully say with a straight face that since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919; there has been a constant war playing out inside every single country in the region.
The Western Media’s linguistic and cultural detachment from these antagonistic protagonists borders on being 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. Frankly, the enduring miserable heat doesn’t help anything. While obsessing, that is the word I would use; obsessing about the regions 5 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians of Greater Israel, West Bank and Gaza take 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, most 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 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.
ABU HAMZA:
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 in a range of practices and beliefs, but are mostly divided over who was the rightful successor of the Prophet Muhamad. The Shi’a declare it was Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali and have been historically persecuted by the Sunni caliphates and rulers. Sunni Islam, which is the majority sectarian faction of global Islam (say 70-90%) Shi’ism is the smaller (say 10-20%) faction of the Ummah or Global Muslim community which is about 1/3 of the human race.
Kurds are also the world’s largest stateless people. Linguistically, culturally, spiritually, and often militarily Kurds are a great deal like Persians.
The nation of Iran has been a Revolutionary Shiite Islamic State since 1979, and is about 65% Persian, or say 50% of its 80 million people. There are also 9-10 million Kurds living there. While they are certainly not free from Iranian Sharia law; they are generally better treated than everywhere else in their historic lands of settlement. In Iraq, a genocide called Anfal happened in 1988 which brutally killed 180,000 Kurds. In Turkey Kurds and Turks have been in an open civil war since 1984. In Syria, Arabization campaigns and forced resettlement made them third-class citizens. Iran had an anti-Western, anti-Shah revolution in 1979. The United States promptly armed U.S. client Saddam Hussain to the teeth. Then sold guns secretly to Iran in the Iran-Contra Affair. While North Korea, Libya, and Israel all sold arms and also secretly advised the Iranians. An 8-year war occurred in the style of World War I with trenches and poison gas where over a million people were killed. In the last days of the war, Saddam Hussain ordered Al-Anfal or the systematic killing of 180,000 Kurdish Iraqis.
The nation that used to be Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussain and the Ba’ath Party until 2003 when the US successfully “liberated” the nation. Only the Kurds would call it liberation as both the Shi’a and Sunni Iraqi Arabs both for the most part hate the United States. The Ba’ath party which was nominally Arab-Socialism but really a one-man dictatorship is also found in Syria. It is the political party of President Bashar al-Assad, who is an Alawite, but we will come back to that. It is certainly neither irrational nor poorly documented that historically everyone out here has at one point tried to annihilate each other. As most of the groups out here have at one point or are actively today trying to obliterate each other. None of this is helped by the obvious fact that the biggest Western powers & Russia cannot and will not allow control of natural resources under Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States to go unspoken for. Or be nationalized. Or be made inaccessible by virtually endless conflict.
Sometime around 0-400 there were the mechanized sounds, the rumbling of the hord, the incursion. Followed by death from above. The coalition airstrikes light up the wastelands. These Cheta scum, these ISIS bandits are blown apart just sixteen kilomters from the outer most ring road. Unbeknownst to them the city was virtully defenseless, all the Pesh Merga and most of the civilians had fled. If not for the Coalitio nairstrikes Erbil would have fallen in hours.
Alan Medved, an intellectual, also a Ukrainian gangster.
Dmitry Khulushin, a businessman.
Maria Silverstova, “a journalist”, perhaps also a spy.
Shoresh Kesk, an anarchist.
Anya Campbell, a lovely martyr.
Errdal Old Newey, A poltical prisoner.
Peter Saint Reed, a dead colonial marine.
Anna Belle Rhubarb, a courtisan and mystic.
Abu Hamza, an intrepid fixer. A Kurdish Patriot.
Cormade Mountain Rock, a Professional soldier.
Comrade Spirit of War, a Georgian guerrilla.
Daria, sometimes called Dasha, sometimes called Goldy, “a consort and a Courtesan.”
“A MIDDLE EASTERN WESTERN”
ACT ONE
SCENE 1
SET IN:
NEWYORKGRAD
Sebastian Adonaev enters the Tavern. A place of refuge! The double doors swing shut and seal him inside. The place is entirely deserted. Music plays lightly. He is a fugitive and a soldier returning from a forgotten foreign war. He is losing his mind. A shot girl, Maria Silverstova with forty bullet shots, sells Vodka based drinks. They meet eyes.
SONG PLAYS:
Well I guess I didn’t die in the war!
I’m alive!
But my friends are dead.
I survived to say the most and do the least.
We are the ones who held the barricades
I just returned,
On a shuttle from the fires of the Middle East,
I survived, I survived by happenstance,
This I know!
When dozens that I slept beside are now in coffins,
In the ground below.
This revolution is a first, and perhaps also the last chance.
Their fearless faces,
Are now martyr posters on a wall,
Reports are now coming in, the Turkish Army is fast advancing;
Rojava will most likely fall!
Well I guess I didn’t die in the war!
I’m alive!
But my friends are dead.
I walk in concentric circles, I try to tell our story,
A story etched upon my brain.
I tell the tale to many scared civilians, they look at me like a mad man,
A foreign person. A person gone insane!
Thanks to the fallen, the Islamic State is now defeated.
Thanks to the YPG and YPJ these bandits have retreated.
Now raise the glass or the flag!
For what we’ve done!
American thanks, still it remains unsaid.
There was a clear and present danger,
A vile Jihadist menace,
Lives lost, flags flown high, the dead cannot mourn the dead.
Thanks to my training:
I can stay awake for days,
Here I am!
Here I am.
I’m alive, I’m alive but my friends are dead,
Find me the means, count me in all the ways!
Back in this fortress of a city,
In the heart of the Empire,
Make a stand;
You know the way!
This is your land.
What we gave and what we lost is a nightmare that forever will replay!
On the very soil of my homeland,
the total safety of this place,
I beg my God, I beg my family and my lovers,
Give me bullets!
Let me not die in disgrace!
In my adopted not-a-country Kurdistan,
The enemy advances
The Turkish Army kills my people, burns our cities,
Aims to defeat our revolution,
What are the odds,
What are the chances?
I know forever I will carry, the faces of my dead friends, dagger etched inside me the on the innermost compartment of my mind,
There was so much hurry up and waiting, there were bodies on the road,
40,000 died for Kurdistan!
Everything around you could explode!
There was fire on the mountains there, there was bloody murder in the streets,
There was marching, there was dying,
And defeating
There was attacking,
There was terror,
There was going forward then retreating.
Thanks to my training,
I can take apart a rifle. I can put it back together.
Thanks to my training,
I can engage in democracy, I can believe we can do better.
Well I guess I didn’t die in the war!
I’m alive! I’m alive!
But my friends are dead.
I was hiding in that Tavern,
then Adonaev said:
ADONAEV:
During our border reentry run from Rojava back into here, most of our column was blown apart in missile strikes. We hid in a P.K.K. dugout bunker for two days. I was covered in piss, shit, blood, mostly other people’s blood, mostly my own piss. Heval Jansher, my mentor and immediate commander, I think he died in a drone strike. Died getting us out of Rojava before the Turkish invasion began. I turned 33. An Armenian volunteer bought me an oriental woman. But all I wanted to do was take a long hot shower. Wash the filth and death off of me. Get out of that fucking uniform forever, and get on the next evacuation shuttle. Get back to Daria alive!
I spent the evening of my 33rd birthday in a Chinese bathhouse on the outskirts of Sulaimaniya. Yet, not one thing in it was made clean. Or for bathing. “Suly”, or also called “Slemani”, is the more libertine of the Kurdish cities in liberated North Western Iraq. A liberated, but unrecognized country politically divided by two city states.
The Chinese sex worker bore witness to a madness that would soon follow. My colleague, balls deep in something carnal his way come. I just kept washing myself vigorously. The filth I felt of cowardice. The shame of retreat. She put her hands on me for only a moment and I shuddered. Pushed her away. I then fell on my knees and I cried. I picked myself up, and the Armenian volunteer paid our bill. We had a beer in the adjacent bar. Right before midnight we took a cab back to the safehouse. They went through our bags to make sure nothing would flag us at an airport. Some party men put us in a van with tinted windows then we were hustled through security. My magic carpet landed in Baghdad. Then a 24 hour layover in Cairo. Almost fell out of the sky over the Atlantic several times. Then with no questions asked I was in JFK.
Now! I am back in Newyorkgrad, far from the war raging in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. But! The war and the ghosts never leave me. I ride the train with plump and ignorant civilians. Some Chornay put on an obnoxious ‘show time’.
By way of Baghdad then Cairo, now I am back. My mind isn’t where I had thought I’d left it and neither are any of my friends and family. Is it March? It’s March or it’s April. I have just done an eighty-day bid in the hospital. Might have been eighty with a two-day run for the mountains in between. I might be facing an assault charge. I might be tailed. I hide in the only place I think I can fit in. A Tavern on Ludlow street. I call Sasho from a pay phone. He says to lay low and head to the Tavern right before nightfall. I don’t know what the hospitals did to me, actually. I just want to kill myself.
I showed up at the Tavern very early. The place is empty. The owner Sasho isn’t around nor is my friend and associate, the Gangster Medved. On the wire, I heard Ms. Daria will get married tomorrow on her 29th birthday, right after the curtain call on a play she sings in, in Midtown. She wrote to me every day during the war. I think I’m just too late.
I think I’m being followed. I threw my phone in the river. Now I don’t have a phone. I’m either chasing myself in a circle around the Isle of Man, or the follow-follow men are trailing me. Seeing who I meet with before they pick me up again.
Well anyway, there’s only one way in, but four ways out of this Bulgarian tavern.Other than a pity coffee here and there, everyone is nervous about me and giving me tons of space. Avoiding me that is to say. Not Medved, he’s buying me a drink. Out in the wide open. Like he doesn’t give a fuck!
In walks a newly hired shot girl Maria Silverstova. A chesty young thing. She says she is “from Moscow” but is actually from the glorious nation of Bulgaria.
ADONAEV
Zdrastvistia.
SILVERSTOVA
Why hello my very strange one! My wayward and my leeward Amerikanski. You can say Privet to me, my old new friend. For I do know you naked.
ADONAEV
I had met Ms. Maria at the Bulgarian Bar the very night I got off the evacuation plane. I first met her again on international working women’s day.
She gave me a good price. There are 70 Rubles in Dollar. Her shots cost 280. Her body is far more. Her mind is not for sale.
SILVERSTOVA
I tell people “I’m from Moscow”, though of course I am not.
My waist is tight and breasts are quite ample. It is all contained under a little black cocktail dress. Holding around forty plastic bullets of Vodka; I sell them in the Tavern for 70 Rubles apiece. Ethnically speaking I am clearly one of Russia’s 157 sub-ethnicities, perhaps a Chechen, perhaps part Tajik or Uzbek. I think I am a very good listener.
Sasho said you were coming to hide out with us.
ADONAEV
I’m looking for Medved.
SILVERSTOVA
And Medved, he looks for you, droogy.
SILVERSTOVA:
Sasho said, “try and make him happy”.
Sasho has a long history with him. Aiding and abetting a terrorist. The Bulgarians have never really expelled him from that ugly little tavern. In an on-scene kind of way, maybe they encourage him. Giving him a refuge.
Adonaev doesn’t remember meeting me 80 days ago. He came here right from the airport. Had Sasho the Voorhi sort him out some work and some papers.
He looked and still looks like a terrifying person, a real mad man.
He had just gotten that very same night in a stupid fist fight, beat a Chornay half to death yelling racial epitaphs. And almost was asked to exit, relinquishing his tavern card last Saturday.
I draw him over to a small table, though on duty as a shot girl I remain an inquisitive journalist.
ADONAEV
Maria, Tovarish Maria how goes the life of night?
SILVERSTOVA:
I’m alive. It’s a start from which all options can follow. Would you like a drink?
ADONAEV
Not on your ruble.
SILVERSTOVA:
There are other Rubles to pour from. Let’s sit. Tell me about the Civil War. A little bit, enough to have a sense of what anyone is supposed to do about you or your friends who came back to us.
ADONAEV:
More good was done than any evil. By my Otriad anyway. I’m sure the others killed more Jihadists and I did more medical care, but it was all a group effort. But really, few of my single serving friends have survived the war. The Arabs and Kurds are just going to grind away until Turkey rolls in to squash the entire revolution.
SILVERSTOVA:
What Otriad did you serve in? I’m a little familiar with actors.
ADONAEV:
I served in the Shahid Firat Tabor of the People’s Protection Units, the Y.P.G.
SILVERSTOVA:
Ye-Peh-Gay? Or WHY-PEE-GEE?
ADONAEV:
The Kurdish Militia received American support to defeat the Islamic State.
SILVERSTOVA:
Freedom fighting and or U.S. Imperialism, maybe both? Same, same; not different?
ADONAEV:
We were defending the only alleged Democracy in the Middle East, besides the alleged democracy in Israel. Turkey was bombing us from the North, Al Qaeda attacking from Idlib in the West, the Hashid Shaabi Popular Mobilization forces from the East, and ISIS from the south.
You take guns from who offers them in that kind of situation, nu.
SILVERSTOVA:
So, on the news tonight. Turkey has begun a new Operation against Rojava. You are aware Afrin Canton is almost completely overrun and Mambij is next and the Turkish army will probably undo all if any progress you all had made out there, against whoever it was the Americans had you fighting? And have now abandoned.
ADONAEV:
I don’t sleep well anymore. I use combinations of masturbation, drinking, and drugs to put the lights out, I guess some emphasis on the drinking too. I get it. We all died or almost died or didn’t die and it was all for nothing. I get it. And Goldy and I will never see each other again, and I writhe in pain avoiding my face in the mirror.
I need help from you or Medved. A different kind of bullet.
SILVERSTOVA:
Prosto! You just need a new whore! Excuse me, I mean muse. Someone to pay to love you even better than before. Not me, I’m too much for you too. I too want luxury carrots to remember. Not paintings or any poems. The couple times we eye to eyed, we french kissed, it all just makes me pity you a lot.
You’re basically not a man to me or your Goldy. You have no car, no good job, no property, and for right now no ability to move beyond your own paralysis. I and she and others like us have to think about papers.
ADONAEV:
Ne-yet Prosto. Not simple. I need a revolver so I can restively and decisively shoot myself in the head like a man! Or turn it on her fat ugly Patron. That will be enough. I should have died with my friends in Afrin.
Do you even possess the understanding to know what is on the table there? Do you even have the care? They were liberating the women, they were instituting democracy and they were planting trees. I feel like I briefly defended a utopia, only to be cast out.
Sent back here where I am less than a man. Less than a criminal!
SILVERSTOVA:
Prosto! (Simple) Go back to the beginning of the narrative and explain to me your motivation!
Tell me how your valiant and slightly suicidal mission began and the connection between your ideas on free life versus a meaningful life in motion. Be, fucking linear! Tell the tale from beginning to end instead of dancing around like a crazy person.
ADONAEV:
Tovarish Maria,I would like a dance from you first. I will pay the full amount in green dollars.
SILVERSTOVA:
Your money Tovarish, they say is no good here. You can’t pay for a bullet or a dance. You can’t pay in Rubles, Dollars, or the now faceless Dinars.
You can buy time with or without sympathy.
ADONAEV:
Sympathies with the resistance?
SILVERSTOVA:
Sympathy with an American Mayakovsky, and those who enjoy his performances. Shamelessly flailing, shamelessly throwing himself in front of armies and trains, over what?
ADONAEV:
You do in fact know what!
SILVERSTOVA:
You know I don’t partake in the lapland for free. Don’t you have a forest wife in Nizhny Novgorod as well as a son somewhere? It will cost you nine hundred dollars to degrade yourself and me tonight. That is actually 64,800 Rubles an hour. Supply and demand. I don’t think you even have enough for a bullet. Certainly not enough to buy the only thing you really want.
ADONAEV:
I don’t have 100 Rubles to my name.
SILVERSTOVA:
Then you get what you pay for! Which are nothingly nothings.
ADONAEV:
What is my story worth?
SILVERSTOVA:
It’s worth less than a lap dance.
ADONAEV:
I need her, you know.
SILVERSTOVA:
Oh that we all know that story.
“It doesn’t take a weather man or woman to know which way the winds blow.” Old American saying?
ADONAEV:
I don’t follow your pretty little allegory.
SILVERSTOVA:
Old Russian saying, “I want to dance on your face until your mask falls off.”
ADONAEV:
That one I understood, perfectly.
SILVERSTOVA:
As if I was making reports in Russian, or Turkish.
“He has just returned from Syria. The duration of the self-deployment was around nine months were we to include Cuba and Russia and also Iraq, Turkey, and Egypt. He is haunted. And despondent, a veteran of the People’s Protection Units; called the Y.P.G, you pronounce the G as ‘gay’. He has been without any doubt ideologically indoctrinated by the Kurdistan Workers Party and given some basic military training. Brainwashing. He is to be watched if necessary: eliminated.”
Well I guess you didn’t die in the war.
ADONAEV:
Well I guess I didn’t die in the war.
There was a lot of shame in that. I was mysteriously back in New York, trapped and totally useless. All my best efforts were forgotten and amounted to less than one nothing.
SILVERSTOVA:
Stop talking and thinking only about yourself for a minute, blat… Tell me about your murdered Comrade Anya Campbell. Tell me about your soon-to-be-dead Kurdish friends. Confirm a little rumor I heard?
ADONAEV:
A rumor?
SILVERSTOVA:
Stop talking and thinking only about yourself for a minute, blat..now I heard a rumor. It’s a, how do you say, doozy, of a rumor.
ADONAEV:
Go on.
SILVERSTOVA:
I heard that the same people that did 9.11 basically created the Islamic State from scratch.
Enter the Gangster Medved, Sebastian and Medved bearhug embrace.
MEDVED:
Loose hips sink ships! Say no more serious things to this chesty one, my one old friend! Maria, call up some of your friends! This man needs a serious distraction.
But Sebastian Adonaev, being the Sebastian Adonaev, who I invest too much time and energy in; hopes to fully convolute the narrative. Blur apart the story of war and Islamic militancy and revolutionary fervor with busty sexcapades, pornographic poems, and perhaps some borrowed prophecy and Haitians. Chornay dancing about the room waving their flags in the air!
SILVERSTOVA:
A simple patriotic task.
MEDVED:
One night at the tavern, about one week after Sebastian arrived home. I was sure he was being followed. Shortly after our reunion, he was taken.
Shall I call them “American secret police?”
His voyage, quest perhaps, which began in Cuba, then to Russia, then Iraq, Turkey, Iraq, Turkey, Iraq, and then finally Syria, then out via Baghdad and Cairo. The detention lasted 80 days. All were behind him for now. He tries to tell me about his time in Kurdistan. In the end, the sad conversation always goes back to Ms. Daria.
ADONAEV:
What news do you have about Daria?
MEDVED:
Listen, man, not again. She’s all cleaned up. Singing on Broad Street. Has a nice place in Midtown.
ADONAEV:
She wrote to me…
MEDVED:
…every single day of the war?
ADONAEV:
Da.
MEDVED:
They have apps that can do that now. Robots can also write to you every single day too. You don’t even need to pay them, or sponsor their citizenship.
ADONAEV:
She loves me. And I love her. And the rest of the details can get figured out. For nine months she urged me to stay alive and come home. I need to find her.
Medved:
You can’t even consider supporting Daria, look at the state you’re in.
Even if you were rolling in it, why would you support a woman and her son, who isn’t your son, to stay here? Out of made-up imagined duty to act? A perverse Russian American lovesickness?
The kind that sent you to Syria in the first place. You can’t even be your own damn Patron. She’s taken anyway, man. Someone else has been paying her rent, credit cards, and keeping her papers in order.
ADONAEV:
Sergei? Dmitry? The Chubby Brahman? Corporate Robert Bruce?
MEDVED:
What does it matter? Other people’s property now. Other people’s problems.
ADONAEV:
I need to see her tonight.
MEDVED:
Impossible. She’s a kept woman. Kept a lot closer now.
ADONAEV:
Well, I have her tower address. Maybe leaning towards possibly, possible.
MEDVED:
Leave her alone. If you know what’s good for her. Also for yourself.
ADONAEV:
I need to do this. She wrote to me every day during the war.
MEDVED:
Nope. You do not! In a month, or less, you’ll have another woman. Or girl if you want. In the meantime is Daria even talking to you?
ADONAEV:
No, she is not. She cut the letters off a couple of weeks ago.
MEDVED:
Prosto, that’s it. You too were an okay team once. You supported each other, in a very strange way. But really, that Suka is a curse.
ADONAEV:
She’s only with whoever she is with for some money and the green card.
MEDVED:
And you actually want a paperwork marriage and a world of work?! You’re not stupid Sebastian, but your head is not on the right path, again. Go slap yourself in the bathroom. Go jump on the shot girl for a ride.
You have less than 100 Rubles. Two whole fucking American dollars.
You cannot afford a woman like Daria, I will just come out and say that. You do not have enough shiny gold things.
ADONAEV:
Not yet.
MEDVED:
Not yet. What do you plan to do when this is all over?
With additional statements or reports and writings from Polina Mazaeva, Bahaa Ilyas, Roza Saeed Al-Qaidi,Gareth Bronwne, Ismet Kayhan, Rebecca Grant, Agah Hazir & Heval Macer Gifford.
Dedicated to the Martyrs of Rojava
Dedicated to Shahid Peter Reed
Written 2017-2018
An Introductory Email from Friends
Dem Baş Heval,
We are glad to hear that you want to come to Rojava and support the YPG.
This is a standard procedure we follow in order to determine whether you seriously consider coming here. In order to proceed to our communication, you are expected to answer the questions below. If we know you better, we would figure out how you would help us during your stay here. This is not a one sided phase. The more we know you, the more you will be informed about our principles, our expectations and about the challenges you will face. We do not want you to be disappointed and frustrated here. We highly value those who want to offer their solidarity and struggle with us shoulder to shoulder against the enemies of humanity in the name of freedom and justice.
The YPG strives for a democratic, ecologic, and anti-patriarchal system of self-organization; it takes its power from the people and fights for the people. We struggle to defend the dignity of being a human when there is no one around to defend it and to create an ethico-political society in order to realize ideals of equality, justice, freedom, and self-determination. We wage a war against all forms of fascism and capitalist hegemony that try to enslave the peoples and destroy the nature. We get our inspiration from the philosophy of Serok APO whose ideas have become a torch in the jungle of oppression for the poor and the downtrodden; not only in Kurdistan but also in all around the world.
The YPG is more than a military force. It is a revolutionary organization that protects the transformation towards the ethical-political society against its external and internal enemies in accordance with the principles of democratic confederalism. So its fundamental mission is to defend the people and the Rojava Revolution. Based on the philosophy of Serok APO, the YPG struggles for a free and democratic Syria where tolerance towards other political views, religions, sects, ethnicities, cultures, and languages is a fundamental value. In this sense the YPG is democratic and legitimate self-defense force against hegemonic assaults of capitalist modernity and against pathological ideologies such as ISIS that had been produced by capitalist modernity itself along with a deep crisis in the Middle East.
The YPG is one of the forces in the Middle East that offers an alternative to capitalist modernity and its freakish products: the solution of democratic modernity. This alternative solution is not an abstract formulation; nor is it a salaried speculation. It offers ‘economic community’ as an alternative to capitalism. It confronts the industrialism of capitalism through an ecological-economic community. It contests nation-statism through an ethical-political society. This, however, radical and realistic position the YPG defends militarily, creates enemies more than it creates friends. The Turkish state in the north for example is cooperating with ISIS. The KDP as the representative of the primitive-nationalist and petty-bourgeois line in the Middle Eastern political spectrum cooperates with the Turkish state, and tries to suffocate.
Rojava with closed borders and with embargoes, and even attacks to Kurdish people in collaboration with the Turkish state. If the Assad regime does not attack the YPG now, it is because it has powerful enemies around itself that wait for an opportunity to strangle
it. Despite the defensive position of ISIS, it seems that it will take more time to defeat these murderers completely. But that the YPG struggles with enemies of humanity and defends the transformation of Rojava in the direction of a democratic modernity is being appreciated every day more and more by many. Dozens of the YPG martyrs from Germany to Australia and of the internationalist revolutionaries who fell fighting shoulder to shoulder with the red star of the YPG and of the YPJ are proof that the Rojava Revolution has already become an internationalist revolution that would never be extinguished.
To achieve a revolution is hard work, to protect it is harder; if not the hardest of all ethical-political activities. If a revolution does not gain a global dimension by establishing a network of solidarities everywhere, it is bound to be defeated by the reactionary forces and byproducts of capitalist modernity. Hence, as Serok Apo points out in “Democratic Confederalism” that has been translated by International Initiative, “We need to put up a platform of national civil societies in terms of a confederate assembly to oppose the United Nations as an association of nation-states under the leadership of the superpowers”. So, people from all around the world, those who think that another world is possible and that one has to fight and confront the monsters to make another world possible, would contribute to the platform that would spread the revolution of peace and justice.
You can download the books below and learn more about Serok APO’s ideas that inspire us. Please let us know about your opinions on the books that are expressed in the four works by Serok Apo we are sending you below.
If you want to support the YPG in Rojava you should then do this for the values of humanity, and not only for your own agenda. You won’t be fighting here for money. We won’t tolerate those who only seek fame through our struggle. What we can offer you is the possibility to join an honorable struggle for the values of humanity in the search for the truth and the right way of life and the possibility to learn more about the most important progressive revolution and struggle right now on the planet.
We prefer to have people here who want to be part of this for the right reasons. We don’t need people who think that they are Rambo – and please no Fascists. Rojava is not an adventure park, this war is not a Hollywood film and the YPG is not a PR-Agency. The YPG is not a place for people who like to kill people because of their beliefs and identities. We won’t tolerate people here among us in the YPG who are actual members of police, army or intelligence services. There are other channels for these institutions to contact with the political and military institutions of the Rojava Revolution.
Supporting the YPG in Rojava is hard work, and you will need much effort and patience. Rojava is not a place for exotic holiday trips or for adventures. Supporting the YPG is not a game, and no fun activity for bored people. Read this text carefully, these are the most important basics that you have to know and understand if you want to support the YPG in Rojava. When you have read this text and you are still willing to come to Rojava to support the YPG then you should answer the questions below.
These are the characteristics that people should have who wish to support the YPG in Rojava:
1. Serious in thinking, speaking and acting.
2. Honest and determined.
3. Respectful for different ways of thinking and living, cultures and beliefs of the people in the Middle East and ethical and cultural values of the YPG.
4. Willing to integrate into the system of the YPG and willing to learn, work, and live in a collective way.
5. Disciplined, sincere, and modest.
6. Patient and able to build up strong social relationships.
7. Open-Minded and ready to criticize and to be criticized.
8. Positive thinking and constructive acting.
9. Respecting the idea of womens’ liberation and its practical organizations.
10. Willing to embrace defending and serving the people as the most important principle.
You do not need to be ex-special forces, even not a former soldier, but of course military experience would be helpful. We appreciate people who share their tactical and technical knowledge and people with experiences and constructive criticism, but you should keep in mind that we are not amateurs. Our six years of experience against our enemies would easily prove this. However, we are always open to learn new things, to develop ourselves, to work with a self-critical approach, and to overcome our failures for better outcomes.
People with special skills and knowledge would do a plethora of things here in Rojava and in the YPG, but to be able to do that you have to learn a basic level of Kurdish and you have to understand some basic things about the Rojava Revolution and culture, history, ethical values and mentality of the people of the Middle East. Besides, you should have some understanding of political, economical, social, and military situation of Rojava, Kurdistan and the Middle East. You will find a completely different reality here. Without a certain level of understanding of all this, a sense of frustration would be inevitable. In order to prevent this, basic training will be provided for you.
If you are physically and mentally fit and healthy, open-minded and patient, willing to respect our culture and values, and ready to learn, to work, and to fight constantly for a minimum of 6 months in a war-torn Middle East country; then you would support the YPG in Rojava. Do not expect Western standards of material luxury and prepare for a life without internet and smart-phones. Do expect harsh conditions concerning food and sleep. Be aware of the fact that you will have to adapt to a foreign cultural and ideological context and military standards and rules.
What we want to know about you:
The following questions can be a help for you to write a text which is able to show us how serious and realistic you are with your decision to support the YPG in Rojava. The last part of the questions, you just have to answer with yes or no. Copy and paste and write your answers next to the questions.
UNDERSTANDING ANTAGONISMS BETWEEN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA POST-2015.
Walter Sebastian Adler, NREMT-P
Development Analyst
Heller School for Social Policy & Management,
Brandies University
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Contents
PROFILE
GAME THEORY
P A R T 1
POWER BLOC PROFILES
POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT WHAT IS THE NATION STATE
WHAT IS THE WORLD SYSTEM
WHAT IS THE CORE
WHO ARE THE CORE CONTENDERS
WHAT IS THE SEMI-PERIPHERY
WHAT IS THE PERIPHERY
WHAT IS A FAILING STATE
WHAT IS A FAILED STATE
WHAT IS THE WILDERNESS
WHAT IS THE ABYSS
P A R T 2
WHAT ARE THE EMERGENT ISSUES
POLITICAL ISSUES
ECONOMIC ISSUES
SOCIAL ISSUES
ACTORS
USA
RF
PRC
OUTLIERS
IS THERE A HISTORY OF CONFLICT
WHAT ARE THE CONFLICT AFFECTED AREAS PROXIMATE CAUSES
TRIGGERS
DYNAMICS
TRENDS
FACTORS PROLONGING CONFLICT
FACTORS FOR POSSIBLE PEACE
CONCLUSIONS
ANNNEX
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Profile
The wide array of structural problems within the intrinsically interconnected fields of development, humanitarian relief, human rights advocacy, peace building and coexistence work are rooted in that they attempt to treat a disease [conflict, war and endemic global poverty] by diagnosing wrongly and then prescribing inadequately remedies for singular systems of the global body; namely the states. They proscribe their treatments as if the national unit was an isolated system that needed critical care in imagined isolation. As sub-system after sub-system are sucked into a violent pathology it is still wrongly presumed in the West that this collectively atrocious mass behavior is in our very nature (Konner, 2000); that it is the normative clash of civilizations and states (Huntington, 1993); or that policy premeditation of this planned atrocity on behalf of poly oligarchic elites is not a feasible hypothesis (Fitzduff, 2014). This analysis attempts to provide the reader with a more holistic diagnosis of the world conflict. For if any nation and its people are to ever be healthy and secure we must frame our interventions on relevant causality; not provide treatment based on partial data and imagined regional motive. Nor on faith in national particularity or the misunderstanding that the parts of a whole are supposedly independent of each other.
Game Theory
It is my hypothesis not that some oligarchic collective controls all world events, instead that three competing poligarchic blocks (Oligarical Collectives) unleash war and trade policy into a world system that synergistically amplifies their carnage throughout the state system. This theory of [ inverse consiationalist republicanism ] runs as follows; within each nation state a
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hierarchy of local oligarchs called dismissively as elites forms a network around shared culture, educational experience, business ventures, military and or family ties. The more developed a nation is has less do with the actual wealth of this national oligarch collective than how much it can leverage the state architecture to enrich itself and how efficiently it can shield its wealth from taxes and scrutiny (Winters, 2011). As well as how it can accumulate that wealth in assets and amassed capital. On the state level these oligarchs are all in conflict with each other to control means of capital accumulation and they vie for control as well over politicians, opinion makers and religious leaders. According to inverse consiationalist theory; eventually the arch oligarchs arrive at a collective bargain where by sectors of the population and special interests within a nation are pitted against each other to keep the social sphere of a society unstable, unable to effectively coalesce into a resistance movement.
Taken to the world system level we arrive at three particular groupings with particular interests at stake. The Euro-American Oligarchy, the Post-Soviet Petro-KGB Oligarchy and the Princelings Oligarchy; all of which function under the basic rules of this nine principle theory1.
1. Elite groupings in each nation form combines to enhance wealth and pit population ethnicities and value groups against each other.
2. Elite groupings diversify their portfolios by washing their money in foreign banks and investing in venture capital, infrastructure, real estate and extra-legal enterprises.
3. Elite groupings utilize their wealth to control overt political authorities.
4. Elite groupings from Oligarical Collective frameworks to direct state policy to their advantage and default high degrees of control over states and power blocks.
5. These three paramount Oligarchic Collectives are in direct competition with each other but there are relative bounds to the degree that they will destabilize each other’s domains, rules to the game as it were.
6. All major conflict hostilities will be limited for the most part to a resource control axis that falls within the under-developed and developing world and fought through proxy whenever possible. Incursions and terror attacks outside of that zone are to be avoided.
7. All Oligarical Collectives are rational actors with power and profit as their uncomplicated bottom-line. Ideologically, ethnically and ethically dissimilar they do not all share normative values about property rights, collateral damage and social policy. They are all however alarmed by Jihadist tendencies of Political Islam2 which is an adversarial ideology not compatible with any of the three block interests that threatens all three blocks asset controls.
8. All of the blocks encourage and amplify conflict violence on a variety of levels. Violence as psycho-social methodology directed outward at rivals interests and inward towards each other’s populations is implicitly linked to the conduct of each block.
9. Crucial to the maintenance of power inside each core and core contender’s powerbase is the paramouncy out the Westphalian state system. More important than any other identity variable the belief in the sovereignty of nations and nationalism fuels all other subordinations.
1 The Euro-America Oligarchy being oldest is more traditional. It’s organized in social clubs and exercises the most control via campaign finance, control of banking and media sectors and longevity of control. The predominant coordination points for this Oligarchy are Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg Group and Davos. The Princeling Oligarchy is a direct familial link between blood descendants of the Eight Immortals called princelings; an estimated 147 people in charge of the most important aspects of the Chinese political and economic architecture. The Russian Petro-KGB Oligarchy is the newest grouping based upon various KGB
2 Which can be loosely sub-divided into Sunni Wahabi-Salafism (Spread by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan) and Revolutionary Shi’ism (Spread by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps).
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BRIEFING PART ONE
Power Bloc Profile
There are three major power blocs that while they differ in their development theories, national cultures, state ideology and psycho-social interpretations of international relations as well as each other; they are all firmly vying for core dominance of the global economic system. They are via their foreign policies, trade relationships, consumer cultures, militaries and intelligence services responsible for virtually all ongoing 35 medium-large scale armed conflicts3. They fuel the vast planetary degradation via their rapid and massive scale industrialization drives. They have in differing capacities triggered the underdevelopment of half of the human species; 3,500,000,000 people living today at and below $3.00 a day. At least 1.2 billion on less than $1.25 a day (World Bank, 2014) (UNDP, 2014).
The political leaderships of these blocs are pragmatic and non-ideological, even if their political classes are varying degrees to the left or right of center in embrace of liberal democracy, democratic oligarchy and state capitalism with a socialist face. They cannot be purely referred to by the respective nation state that officially marshals them: The United States of America (the declining Core hegemon) is financially coupled with the European Union, Switzerland, the Holy Sea, New Zealand, South Korea4, Australia and Japan. The Russian Federation (the defeated core Contender) relies on a co-dependent fusion of resource clientalism and extra-legal mafia cronyism rooted in the now defunct KGB to exert varying degrees of control over former Soviet nations and former satellite states. The People’s Republic of China (the emergent Core hegemon) has massively invested in African nations, trade relationships in the Pacific and $ 11 trillion of US bonds and debt. Simplifying as such would be a gross minimization of the US’s integral allies, especially in the European Union & Switzerland. Or the more nuanced post-Cold War cooperation between RF its Post-soviet former satellites where 20 million ethnic Russians reside (cite); and its Middle Eastern allies like Egypt (prior to 1971), Syria, Iran, and before the US invasion and its complete disintegration; Iraq. Or even more significantly the PRC’s investment in nearly every country in Africa regardless of political tendency or crime against humanity5. These blocs cannot also be purely gauged by their military alliances, trade pacts, or proclaimed ideologies as repeatedly stated. For while the US-EU-NATO alliance is normatively neoliberal, democratic and pro-market its participating governments have funded overtly and covertly all manner of dictatorship, non-aligned oligarchy such as arming Saddam Hussein against the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1980-1988); as well as helping to establish the training bases, weapons supply and advanced training of proto-Al Qaeda Mujahidin formations attacking the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979-1989).
The Russian Federation is a vast oligarchic transnational mafia state. Over the course of the Cold Wars Russian provided a wide array of military and technical aid to numerous
3 See annex for listing of the 35 Conflicts, casualty counts & durations.
4 The USA has been invited to occupy Japan since 1945 serving as its default army and the Korean peninsula since 1950 buffering the South from the massive North Korea army.
5 Chinese oil purchases and arms shipments to Sudan are directly responsible for the Darfur & Khortofan genocides.
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developing countries fostering incredible regional loyalty particularly in Cuba, Angola, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
The People’s Republic of China is state capitalist authoritarian regime lead by the Communist Party. It’s interventions in North Korea and Vietnam played pivotal roles in both nation’s independence. It has intermittently provided military and intelligence aid to a wide range of Asian and African groups. Each block rarely has aligned foreign policy except perhaps in regards to Islamic terrorism and the environment. Each core tender also faces long running internal ethnic antagonisms with minority groups at their country core; African Americans & Caucasians in the USA, North African & Turkish immigrants in the EU, Tibetans and Uyghurs in China and a wide range of Turkic and Central Asia minorities in Russia [notably Chechnya].
Each block is governed quite differently with varying adherence to rule of constitutional law. Kleptocratically in Russia, Nepotistcally in China and via Legislative Capture6in the USA. Through a variety of arrangements rule by a diffuse elite of oligarchic collectives networked around shared financial interests as stated, but each extracts wealth and exerts influence quite differently (Princeton, 2013)(Winters, 2011). As well as direct accesses chains to the the national policy makers. In the USA and EU they utilize campaign finance structures quite overtly and constitutionally allowing state sanctioned bribery. In the RF a more direct cronyism based on shared Soviet networks is in place. In China elite privilege is enabled by direct family relations. The elites are all beneficiaries of the existing financial order regardless for the most part of which of any of the three existing blocs hold the core. A critical core shift from USA to China will not radically effect the holdings of the most prominent oligarchs.
It was estimated that 85 members of this elite are worth cumulatively what that bottom 3.5 billion poorest of humanity are worth combined (Oxfam, 2014) and this bears some repeating because state relations between the USA, the RF the PRC and their allies, proxies and clients are not beholden purely to political interests; but by it is this Oligarchical Collectivism that governs the world system and drives its subsequent carnage (Piketty, 2014). While it is highly tempting to believe these oligarchies cannot properly coordinate nor can the governments they set up in power; it is crucial to understand that what a government perceives it is doing in its own national interest is often a directive, a pre-written policy package drawn up by the national oligarch collective. Or individual oligarch with the means to do so.
The fundamental question is what are the likely chain of conflict, development and economic events that will result in the next ten years due to the core shift from USA to PRC. It is those predictions that is subject of this analysis. And while the US-EU media and political apparatus has been quick to declare the irrelevance of Russian Federation; this defeated core contender is an integral player in upcoming core transition and conflict.
Political, Economic and Socio-Cultural Context
The World System Analysis, as developed by Immanuel Wallerstien posits that the world’s nation state system as an arbitrary socio-political patchwork of cultivated identities that divide humanity presently into 206 manageable, unmanageable and mismanaged units for the purpose of aligning their economies to the benefit of the Core Hegemonic power block. Before
6 Legislative capture is a system of elite control via campaign financing.
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1500 CE it was impossible for any singular national unit to completely dominate. The globalization of trade and warfare via industrialization, slavery, colonization and the World War had by 1945 erected an architecture of trade regulations, protectionism, direct foreign investment, banking, lending, development and ensuing dependency that all but two Superpowers; the USA and the USSR were aligned in varying semi peripheral and peripheral dependencies back to either power. With the exception of the People’s Republic of China which after its 1949 Revolution, Cultural Revolution and 1978 economic realignment has emerged as the logical core contender after a period of unipolar USA hyperpower hegemony which lasted from 1991-2001. A mere ten years.
The 1945-1989 Cold War was a global engagement between the intelligence, development and military forces of these two blocks which the PRC for strategic and practical reasons did not align directly or over commit to the subsequent proxy wars. After directly engaging the USA on the battlefield in the 1950-1953 Korean War proxy struggle the PRC has quietly built its formidable base via the non-aligned movement, all of whose members over the course of the Cold War aligned, realigned or disintegrated. The key conflicts in checking the United States were Vietnam (1950-1975), Afghanistan (2001-ongoing) and Iraq (2003-2012). The key conflicts for checking the RF (then USSR) were Afghanistan (1980-1989) and Chechnya (1994-2010). The PRC has not had to pay for a costly confrontation since the Korean War in which it instead had to long term subsidize a costly and inefficient failed state.
Let us for analysis remove the national borders of the Peter’s world map the one where all things are represented at their actual presumed size. Let us examine it inverted. Let us look at it East on top West, then South on top of North. Note the arbitrary placement of not only national borders but also spatial embarkations and hemispheric directions. As if the sun still was through to revolve around the earth or that the earth was clearly fat. Let us again for analysis abolish those markings too. Let us turn it from a two dimensional boundary maven into a three dimensional sphere, then pull up like a hand on a cloth the developed northern nations as if into a the shape of a mountain, a mountain where the OECD countries are the core on top and down the mountain are arrayed the middle income than low income town the bottom of this precipice.
On this mountain and its foothills live roughly 7 billion humans broken into 206 national plantations. Identity driven work camps each with their own flag and imagined identities. Half (3.5 billion) are living below 2.50 a day in a range of miserable impoverishment. While extreme poverty according to Millennium Development goals has been halved via China and India; extreme poverty is actually expanding in Sub-Saharan African and Central Asia. A full 5 billion humans live at around and below 10 dollars a day bound for most of their lives to their wage slavery in a range of industrial or agricultural tasks (World Bank Data). The rate of environmental exploitation and pollution have gotten so egregious that disastrous climate change has begun resulting in more catastrophic climate disasters than any time in recorded history( ). Over the course of the Cold War there were no less than 17 documented genocides and 23 major proxy war engagements (cite) as well as 37 democidal purges7. In 35 of 206 plantations violent conflicts have broken out and are spreading, but only at the base of the mountain. They
7 Please see attached annex of Proxy War listings and Democide Listing. A democide is defined as a state unleashing it’s military against its own people in ethno-political purge of civilians. While the Jewish Holocaust in Europe is the oft cited example there have 17 subsequent genocides (such as Former Yugoslav Rwanda & East Timor) and 37 total including Democides (Duvalierist Haiti & Argentine Dirty Wars)
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increasingly are to be fought intra-state with ethnic cleansing, criminal profiteering, and the targeting their own repressive and failing state systems (Kaldor, 2013).
In the year 1492 CE the Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand of what would become the nation of Spain instituted a massive purge coupled with torture, expulsion, and general atrocity directed against the Muslim and Jewish populations of that emerging nation. Simultaneously they sponsored the imperial expedition of Christopher Columbus which would alongside the Portuguese conquests of Brazil and West Africa would trigger an unprecedented bloodletting over the next 500 years of slavery, colonization, decolonization, World War, Cold War and Global Jihad. All of these manifestations based on manufactured identities (Anderson, 1983) as well as local greed and grievance variables ( ). Most importantly these endless conflicts were harnessed for the control of the means of local production and the profiteering off of trade routes. All of which raised the capital necessary for the formation of the nation state system.
By 1500 CE the social, economic and environmental underpinnings of human civilization were consolidating around the dominance of a world system (Wallerstien, 1974). The globalization of markets with an ever more authoritarian institution of sovereign states were the logical evolution of capital accumulation (Marx, 1887). Humanity would be subjugated, brutalized and reduced via these emerging nation states into more manageable social units for economic exploitation and administrative consistency. Although ideology, normative rights, cultures and religious mobilizations would vary tremendously by the year 2014 the World System had in affect crystalized around three primary trade & power blocks or hegemons; USA EU, Russian Federation, and the People’s Republic of China. The Global Core, under a steady evolution of socio-political justifications has passed from Netherlands, to England, then finally to the United States of America. After the defeat of the German contestation for core power in 1945 a series of unending proxy conflicts began under the mantle of decolonization, but were more particularly a battle over markets, extractive resources, commodities and trade relations between the USSR lead by Russia and NATO allies lead by USA. The Chinese experiments with Maoist communism via their 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution resulted in the deaths, starvation and purge of and x and removed them from hegemonic position until in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping and the Party embraced state capitalism (Gao, 2008). After the economic defeat of the USSR in 1989 American neo-conservatives posited a strategy for a New American Century (CITE ) which involved amongst other things redrawing the map of the Middle East and by default controlling the life blood of the globalized transport system; oil & natural gas. By 2001 directly advising the Bush Presidency in USA they began implementing this reconsolidation package. As the Russian Federation accelerated theirs under President Putin (Politkovskaya, 2005). However, by 2001 the US-EU had reached Peak Hegemony.
All nations have their national mythologies and state ideological narratives in varying doses and degrees. The world system is based on which ever power or power block can marshal the supply lines and coerce with aid and trade all other powers into economic dependency. According to Immanuel Wallerstien; the architect of world system analysis there are core nations that via conflict, development and hegemony impose an economic order which sub serves semi peripheral and peripheral national oligarchies to organize their economies around core needs and enrichments. Semi peripheral nations such Cuba, Israel, South Africa, Brazil, and Iran have achieved moderate independence through some strategic action or relationship but remain irrelevant to shaping the world systems supply lines, trade relations and core economic demand.
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Peripheral nations such as Sudan, Egypt, Ecuador, and Bangladesh are organized to supply labor and commodities for the economic wellbeing of the core.
What is 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 crystalized 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; divided into five world system dependency zones claiming sovereignty over shifting swaths of geographic turf. The cultivation of false consciousness (Engles, 1893) 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.
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 Oligarical 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 blocks; US-EU-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
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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 nature is inherent self-interest and that security for a minority from some necessitates endless war for the majority.
What is the World System
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 modal that tracks the formation of the world system between 1500 and the present day (Wallerstien, 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 understand the world system beyond the allegory of the mountain we must break apart the zones Wallerstien 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 Oligarical 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.
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What is the 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 26 nations, 1 Religious City State and 1 newly re-absorbed financial hub (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.
The following nations, under the stewardship of the United States of America compose the modern nucleolus of core control according to Babones and Alvarez-Rivadulla (2007). Logical incorporation of South Korea and Taiwan have been amended to listing.
Australia Austria Belgium Canada Denmark Finland France Germany Greece8 Hong Kong9Iceland Ireland Israel10 Italy Japan Luxembourg Netherlands New Zealand Norway Singapore Spain Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom United States
Taiwan South Korea Vatican City
Who are the Core Contenders
People’s Republic of China (Emerging)
Russian Federation (Defeated)
8 Greece went bankrupt and was bailed out twice in 2010 and 2012. Greece is only a core country by virtue of its inclusion in the European Union.
9 Hong Kong was territorially reabsorbed in 1997 into the PRC, but will retain financial linkages and independence until 2047.
10 Israel due to its military and intelligence linkages to the United States since 1976 is more nuanced in that is an independent state possessing no hegemonic capacity, however under direct US Clientalism projects vast region power on behalf of an in tandem with the USA.
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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 counterbalance to the World Bank facilitating development lending from Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa.
What is the 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.
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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 Wahabi-Salafist Islamic terror groups.
The Semi-periphery (like all of the five 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
Cuba11
Iran12
Vietnam
Poland
Turkey
Pakistan
Saudi Arabia
What is the Periphery
What was once called the third & fourth world13, or currently the developing world is a legacy of the colonial system. It lacks infrastructure, it is poorly industrialized and its governance
11 Cuba is an anomaly in that it is one of only five surviving Communist states and the only one that still largely applies full Socialist policies. That has made it a semi-peripheral power is its unusual projection of development technology particularly in the Healthcare sector to be a ‘Medical Internationalist’ power abroad disproportionate to size or resources.
12 Iran is a second interesting anomaly as it is the only Shi’a Islamic State and been locked in proxy warfare with the United States since its Revolution in 1979.
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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 Peripheral states:
13 Those without their own recognized states such as the Kurds, Basque, Yazids or Palestinians.
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Africa:
Togo
Gambia
Burkina Faso
Namibia
Benin
Kenya
São Tomé/ Príncipe Uganda
Zambia
Asia& Pacific
Palau
Mongolia
Papua New Guinea
Fiji
Post-Soviet/ Former Socialist
Belarus
Macedonia
Bulgaria
Montenegro
Kazakhstan
Abkhazia
Georgia
Uzbekistan
Latvia
Transnistria
Hungary
Kyrgyzstan
Kosovo
Estonia
Turkmenistan
Croatia
Bosnia and
Ghana
The Gambia
Botswana
Senegal
Zimbabwe
Cameroon
Congo
Gabon
Guinea
Bhutan
Thailand
Indonesia
Laos
Herzegovina
Albania
Romania
Czech Republic Moldova
Lithuania
Nagorno-Karabakh Tajikistan
Serbia
Mozambique Ethiopia
Tanzania
Angola
Vanuatu Nepal
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Middle East & Maghreb Jordan
Morocco
Kuwait
Algeria
UAR
Oman
Qatar
Tunisia
Northern Cyprus Cyprus
Latin America &
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
What is a Failing State
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
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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
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Failing States include:
Myanmar
Mauritania
CAR
Egypt
Lesotho
Mali
Cote d’Ivoire
Ukraine
Chad
Guinea-Bissau
Sri Lanka
Niger
Yemen
Nigeria
Honduras
Malawi
Burundi
Lebanon
Bahrain
What is a Failed State
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:
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North Korea14
Yugoslavia (collapsed in 1991)
Rwanda15
Sudan
South Sudan
Sierra Leone
Liberia
Haiti (collapsed 2004)
Palestine16
Libya
Syrian Arab Republic
What is the Wilderness
The Wilderness is 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.
Somalia (collapsed in 1992)
Afghanistan
Iraq
DRC17
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
14 North Korea in whatever ideological rendering it casts itself is little more than a criminal oligarchy exerting pure authoritarian control over its citizens imposing massive deprivation, famine and human rights violations while maintaining the fourth largest standing army, nuclear weapons and active participating in global counterfeiting and human trafficking.
15 Rwanda experienced a much analyzed genocide in 1998 where a Tutsi invasion triggered a Hutu launched genocide that cumulatively killed over 800,000 civilians over three months. What is less understood is that Rwanda’s newly victorious Tutsi minority then spear headed an invasion of neighboring Zaire which toppled the Mobutu government, provoked the African World War which sucked in over 17 countries and left an estimated 5.6 million dead; followed by Rwanda’s exploitation of the genocide, Western guilt and strategic placement to profit off of the conflict mineral trade flowing out war ravaged DRC.
16 Palestine has never been recognized officially as a State but both the Fatah government’s corruption and Hamas government’s refusal to recognize Israel have facilitated the continued occupation of Palestine. 17 It is estimated that 5.5 million citizens of the former nation Zaire have perished horrifically since 1998.
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operation was critical to both the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spread of Wahabi-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.
What is the 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 the
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 (Adler, 2015). 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.
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BREIFING PART 2
What are Emergent Political, Economic and Social Issues?
• POLITICAL ISSUES
Because of incredible, unprecedented access to media and data on a global level via mobile phones and the internet; a wide range of global communities can coordinate their economic and political participation circumventing traditional, government controlled forums.
Democracy has been broadly exposed to be as prone to oligarchic control as authoritarian one party state (Winters, 2011). Civilians no longer have to rely on one or two corporate news sources to distil the events of the day. Ideological bankruptcy has caused widespread contempt and condemnation of political tendencies that have hardly ever reflected domestic or international conduct. While it has been said democracies don’t go to war with each other (because largely of intertwined financial systems); nothing has stopped them from going to war with their own populations or fueling war through a proxy or series of proxies.
The current political context is that history doesn’t repeat itself at all. It structurally evolves the world system with each major disturbance. Since the critical year of 1789 following the revolution in France and its parallel manifestations in the USA (1776), Haiti (1791), Latin America (1810), Europe (1848); a violent and expansive ideological confrontation began between proponents of [normative human rights] liberal or leftist and [realist authoritarian state sovereignty] monarchist, theocratic, authoritarian or fascist. This political battle was merely a rhetorical explanation of economic systems that by 1968 had established themselves rather evenly over half the world’s nations; command economy socialism, free market capitalism and theocratic amalgams. The World War from 1914 to 1945 had solidified USA as the Core Hegemon of the free market system. But that core status was thoroughly contested until the end of the Cold War(s)18 which went on from 1945 to 1989 resulting in the defeat of the Revolutionary Socialist USSR; the primary ideological and structural core contender. It has also resulted in a supra-national confrontation between various proxy and emerging powers whose oligarchic elites and revolutionaries declared themselves any number of political shades in the process. Nationified best in the form of the People’s Republic of China which became a Socialist nation in 1949, attempted Communism in 1967 and in 1978 made the shift from failed Communism into State Capitalism. Subsequently pulled 680 million humans out of poverty (UNDP, 2014) as well as enhanced semi-peripheral power like India, South Africa and Brazil.
China is the clearest contender for control of the global core (French, 2014). While it has long been described as an unlikely probability of some meaningful alliance to emerge between Russian Federation and the PRC; BRICS is making that more and more likely. Should they succeed in coordinating a development bank they would not be a far cry from better coordinating a military pact.
18 Both Immanuel Wallerstein and other historians agree the Cold War was a series of ongoing concurrent wars not a singular static period.
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• ECONOMIC
Trade has driven the World System since 1500 CE. Trade, Humanitarian Imperatives and Imperial Warfare have been used to justify subjugating vast segments of the human race to extract their labor for free [or inexpensively] as well as to bring to the Global Core goods unavailable to the upper middle classes and elites of those nations. After the World Wars19 the Bretton Woods Institutions notably the World Bank erected a vast financial architecture that would craft dependency in deep and intrinsic ways. Preferential access into semi-peripheral and peripheral nations for Core firms; heavy loans and debt; literal structural adjustment of economic systems and of course flows of raw materials and near slave labor of the export processing zones.
The current economic context is that as Core power dominance is slowly re-aligning axis from the USA to the People’s Republic of China. In all nations regardless of development, regardless of world system supply placement’ capitalism have triumphed as the dominant economic order. The BRIC economic alliance and development bank is as of 2014 the only counterbalance to the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank/ IMF). This Multipolarity will simply be a far more sophisticated hegemony organized by China and implemented via regional hegemons Brazil, South Africa, India and the Russian Federation. This alliance represents nearly 3 billion people, a combined GDP of US 16.039 trillion, and 18% of the global economy (French, 2014).
In a very limited reconsolidation window there is a unique possibility of severing the control lines of dependency, re aligning local economies to allow greater indigenous planning and utilizing development as means to break dependency from Europe and the USA, without realigning with China and BRICS.
This idea of self-reliance cannot take the form of inefficient command economies but instead rely heavily on shared economy modals. The informal sectors that manage resource exchanges while circumventing taxes. The tax base of most countries excluding the advanced welfare states is a means of extracting wealth from citizens without compensating them adequately in social services or political representation. An economic re-alignment behind the BRICS Bank and China will not mean a more just and equitable world. China and Russia have never shown moral scruples about arming human rights violators. India manages a state where 74% of the population is living below $1 a day and 24.9% of Dalits and tribal minorities are exploited as fourth class citizens. Brazil and South Africa both struggle from deep ethnic divides, rampant corrupt practices and meaningless populist sloganeering. What is crucial in the economic context is to divest as much tax base from governments as possible and block trade policies which take resources out of peripheral nations fare below value. Or reduce peripheral and semi-peripheral populations to race to the bottom wage slaves turning out consumer goods for the North West and soon China.
• SOCIO-CULTRUAL
The socio-cultural context is that a considerable majority of the human race has not ever left its nation of birth, but a mass exodus has begun away from the violence prone periphery (Collier, 2013). Macro-level political and economic systems mean very little in the face of the
19 Wallerstein argues in his Analysis that it is inconsistent to separate World I and World War II into separate events because they involved the same core belligerents triggering the worldwide warfare for Core Control transfer from England to either Germany or the USA.
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daily battle for survival that half of humanity is facing, yet the economic and the political drivers shape every single regional conflict now ongoing. It is the common person not the economist or ideologue that suffers under the mounting global attrition. The basis of false consciousness is that imagined identity and nationalism subsume human solidarity. Profoundly different from the issue of class consciousness is human solidarity founded on conscious thinking. Because of incredible deprivation and imposed scarcity; race, religion and gender become key instruments the local Oligarchic Collective uses to impose meaning on socio-cultural bonds. Male supremacy over women. Ethnic pride and power over ethnic other. The use of unseen, imaginary deities based on written testaments transcribed at times before objective data was possible encouraging the murder and subjugation of whole other groups of non-believers20.
Because most of humanity is physically fighting to survive, breaking down these imagined identities has been highly difficult and outside major cities it is uncommon to have poly-ethnic communities living in peace. However, rapid urbanization and climate migrations will increasingly thrust new groups into greater proximity. This will not necessarily result in the aggressive coexistences of places like New York or London, each secured by a small armies worth of police and precarious at best.
It is integral though to any successful element of resistance to the intended re-alignment to foster deeper bonds of human to human solidarity thus coupling efforts of development to those of resistance. As can been seen in Russia, China and India; an elite ethnic configuration has in each country clearly denoted the extent of privileges based on race and ethnicity. The Han in China, the Slavs in Russia and the Brahman Caste in India.
ACTORS
United States of America (U.S.A.)
Population: 319.2 million people
Primary Strategic Alliance: North Atlantic Treaty Organization (N.A.T.O.) Active US Direct interventions: Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syria. US Total Economic & Military Assistance: $50.6 Billion, FY 2013.
US Proxy Conflicts: Israel (directed against & Iran), Saudi Arabia (directed against Iran), Colombia (directed against Cuba & leftist insurgency ELN & FARC-EP), South Korea (directed against PRC); numerous via War on Terror.
US Sanctions/ Embargo: North Korea, Syria, Russian Federation, Iran & Cuba21.
20 Certainly tendencies within Christianity, Islam and Hinduism are by the far the most aggressive. 21 Lifted by President Obama on 16 December, 2014.
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Primary US development & military aid recipients (FY 2012 highest to lowest): Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Colombia, Haiti, Palestine, South Sudan, Russia, Somalia, Tanzania, Congo (Kinshasa), Uganda, Nigeria, Sudan, South Africa, Mozambique, Ukraine, Yemen, Bangladesh and Liberia.
Strategic Allies: England & Israel.
Primary Clients: Israel, Egypt, South Korea, Taiwan, Colombia.
Russian Federation (RF)
Population: 144 million people
Primary Strategic Alliances: Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).
Active Russian Direct Interventions: Ukraine & Georgia.
Russian Proxy Conflicts: Syria (against Israel& Saudi Arabia), Eastern Ukraine (against EU), South Ossetia (against Georgia)
Russian Sanctions/ Embargo: none.
Primary Russian development & military aid recipients: Cuba, Syria, Belarus, Turkmenistan, other former Soviet states.
Primary Clients: Armenia, Belarus, Transnistria, Turkmenistan, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Uzbekistan, Serbia and Syria.
People’s Republic of China (PRC)
Population: 1.36 Billion
Primary Strategic Alliance: Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)/ Shanghai Pact (SP) Total Economic & Military Assistance: $ 189.3 billion FY 2011, (RAND estimate) in 93 different countries.
Chinese Direct Interventions: [ None openly, regular clashes with neighbors over South China Sea]
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Chinese Proxy Conflicts: none openly.
Current Chinese development & military aid recipients: Pakistan, Myanmar, North Korea & 93 countries predominantly in Latin America & Africa.
Primary Strategic Allies: Pakistan, Russia & India
Primary Clients: North Korea & Myanmar.
Outliers
Cuba: A former Russian client turned into a Medical Superpower now has over 38,000 MDs working in its International Medical Brigades with comparable numbers of teachers, nurses and construction workers on infrastructure projects. Cuba alongside Venezuela are attempting to build ALBA as a counter weight to the hegemony of the three blocks.
Iran: Is beholden to no great power’s full influence though it is a nominal ally of RF and PRC. It is the only Shi’a Majority Shari’ah State. It is exporting revolutionary violence systematically throughout the Shi’a world particularly Bahrain and Lebanon. It has a long view of history and remembers clearly the US-English Coup against Mosaddeq, US-Israeli support for the Shah and US support for Iraq during the grisly Iran-Iraq War. It trusts none of the three power blocs but is clearly willing to sell oil to Russia and China. Iran has the most potential to disrupt or collaborate with the upcoming core shift and is integral to the Middle East’s strategic dimensions; it contains Syria, props up the Lebanese, Syrian and Iraqi states; and is the only regional force besides Israel that can stand up to ISIS (Baer, 2008)(Nasr, 2007).
India: Alongside China as a possible future Core Contender, India is far more unstable. 74% of its population lives belie $1.25 a day. Over 16% of its population is classified as Dalit untouchable and marginalized & exploited. It has a growing Maoist insurgency to its Center East and an ongoing Islamist Insurgency to its North West fueled by Kashmiri occupation and its natural antagonist Pakistan. India will likely work closely with China, but it is the most serious of the economic and demographic contenders besides those listed.
CAUSES
• What are the structural causes of conflict?
The structural cause of the conflict as stated in oligarchic greed and their influence upon political leadership to expand foreign markets for goods/ resources; and dominate the weaker powers of the semi-periphery and periphery. Nominally each Core power seeks to protect and enrich the middle classes and upper classes of their respective nations. Nominally each seeks to exert maximal leverage over the rest of the global populace to adopt its stated ideology, state ideology. To that end these is only a finite amount of resources to fuel industrialization and expansion. Natural resource completion is only a factor, albeit an important one. Market expansion allows stronger powers to off load goods upon weaker ones. While the World Bank has held an almost undisputed monopoly on lending to peripheral and semi-peripheral nations BRICS Bank will make a far less invasive lending base available, certainly less interested in the trappings of human rights and democracy.
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Therefore structural competition is also about banking. Who can lend the money the developing world needs to industrialize effectively.
A third structural source is arms sales. The resources such as fossil fuels, natural gas, extractive metals, coal and soon water might be a driver. As is the ability to loan the billions the developing world requires without debt to the North West. Arms sales however are drivers for those oligarchs with shares and control of the arms industries which sell to every developing nation to fuel the relentless conflicts throughout the world.
A fourth structural cause is inequality. As Thomas Piketty has illustrated in his work Capital in the 21st Century; the rich are getting much richer. Salary wealth is out pacing inheritance. Conspicuous consumption and corrupt practices have fueled demonstrations and uprising across the world. The internet now connects people like never for and the Arab Spring has emboldened students, unions and radicals all over the world to confront their state systems. It has not ended well so far. The government of Tunisia merely tinkered with the constitution. The US backed Egyptian dictator Mubarak was toppled, but shortly after a coup brought the military back to power in Egypt. The Libyan people with Western backing through airstrikes toppled and executed Kaddafi and plunged Libya into anarchy, nothing functioning well except besides the oil wells. Protests in the United States were suppressed. In Brazil and Bulgaria coopted. Yemen has become a low intensity civil war. Protests in Ukraine over the former President Yanukovych’s subservience to the Russian Federation have devolved into a Separatist war in the three eastern states and the Russian annexation of the Crimea. Non-violent protests in Syria have erupted into nearly 3 years of civil war with over 202,354-282,354 dead (December 2014 SOHR estimate) and the emergence in July of 2014 of the Islamic State which as conquered 1/3 of Syria, 1/3 of Iraq and has declared an Islamic Caliphate and is now just twenty miles from Baghdad, holding back largely because of the Shi’a Militias backed by Iran (Nasr, 2006). In newly independent South Sudan the US backed embattled Salva Kir government is fighting rival ethnic militias and waging low intensity war with the Bashir government of the north fully armed with Chinese bought weapons and advisors.
The fighting now present in all of these struggles is based on similar lists of grievances, but fueled by very different alignments of state interests. The PRC has refrained from being involved overtly in any of the above conflicts, the US and PRC have sold arms and clandestinely supported via their intelligence communities the client of choice in each conflict. Syria has been a Russian client since X; Russian arms shipments have firmly buttressed the Bashar Assad regime even after he used chemical weapons against his people.
Structurally we can dedact the world system in 2015 to the following six primary structural causes:
1. Legislative Capture & Oligarchic Control
2. Resource & Market Competition
3. Imposed Scarcity
4. Control of Economic Development Banks
5. Arms Proliferation
6. Rampant multilateral Human Rights violations
7. Rapidly growing inequality
• What issues can be considered as proximate causes of conflict?
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While it is highly unlikely any of the nuclear armed super powers or core contenders will engage in direct warfare, each has Bar Lev line that will unnegotiable trigger another World War. Because no power is irrational, and each is very familiar with the losses that would result in such a confrontation; each will continue to fight each other via proxy and intelligence operations. These Bar Lev lines are inflexible, however proxy war in the resource axis will intensify. Here is a summary of the proximate cause of conflict for each bloc.
USA-EU: The Bar Lev line for the US is the most flexible. After the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan the American people are war adverse. Their adversity is flexible. Large scale terror attacks on US soil are certain to trigger counter strikes and imperial reprisal. The policy course of the period since 2001 is all most a play book reconstruction of war plans drafted by the Project for a New American Century. It called for aggressive American action abroad after a “Pearl Harbor type event” and for conquest of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and assertive action abroad to safe guard the Jewish Colony Israel. Israel has been completely reliant on US aid since 1976 and could not maintain its sophisticated army and nuclear arsenal without such aid. Israel has long provided the US with sophisticated weapons and communications systems, as well as valuable intelligence. The Bar Lev line for the US is existential threats to Israel, terror attacks on US soil above 100 casualties and any invasion of Europe. The US-EU is largely underinvested in Africa and is unconcerned what transpires there. It’s investment in South Sudan is a foil to China who’s ally Sudan supplies it with oil. It’s investment in Rwanda is in relation to Rwanda’s regional intelligence and its role as an export point for critical minerals coming out of the DRC conflict. The USA-EU has invested a good deal of money in Colombia not falling to its Marxist rebels the ELN & FARC-EP. It has largely succeeded in supporting the right wing Colombian government, making Colombia the primary US ally in all of Latin America. While the CIA did everything in its power to halt the rise of Latin American Socialism through coup, right wing paramilitaries, torture and assignation of leadership (Blum, CITE)(Silva, 2011). This hasn’t done much to actually stop the spread of left wing ideology. The US is a fading imperial core power and it is propping up a European elite that doesn’t have the population or the military strength to defend itself.
What Conflict Prone/ Affected Areas can be situated within the Context?
Following the World Wars even the staunchest hawks of NATO (US-EU) and the Warsaw Pact sought to avoid direct confrontation between superpowers understanding that nuclear weapons would result in a zero sum game of mutually assured destruction. Therefore warfare beyond espionage would focus on proxy conflict. The metathesis of the Cold War strategy into the modern framework of international relations still adheres to basic set of rules:
a) Avoidance of any direct military confrontation with another power block, particularly those with weapons of mass destruction.
b) Prevention of semi-peripheral powers from acquiring nuclear weapons or other technology to prevent interdiction in their affairs by core powers.
c) Propagation of continuous violence at the peripheral level via proxy.
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The economic realignment of China in 1978 and Russia in 1989 have not affected this conflict variable. The misunderestimation of ethnic and identity and the sheer level of extreme poverty found in the peripheral nations have resulted in the so-called New Wars; the civil conflicts unleashed since the Cold War ended. But these so-called low-intensity conflicts that are spreading so explosively are still fueled by economic prerogatives of the contested core.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) remains the predominant global military alliance but recent discussions in Dushanbe in June of 2014 to merge the Collective Security Treaty Organization22 with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization/ Shanghai Pact23 an alliance which at its core will unite the military responses of Russian Federation, PRC and tentatively Iran and India.
History of Conflict
The following conflicts listed on International Alert & UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Database have been grouped around their continental geography, resource supply and patron axis. Some state that there are 35 ongoing conflicts. We have tabled up a minimum total of 64 major sub-state conflicts. Surely many are under-covered or overlapping. Each warrants a rigorous examination of drivers, spoilers, causes, grievances and psycho-social motivations, and
22 Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—signed the Collective Security Treaty. Three other post- Soviet states—Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Georgia—signed the next year and the treaty took effect in 1994. Five years later, six of the nine—all but Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Uzbekistan—agreed to renew the treaty for five more years, and in 2002 those six formally agreed to create the Collective Security Treaty Organization as a military alliance. Uzbekistan rejoined the CSTO in 2005 but withdrew in 2012.
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such have been conducted at length. What this micro-briefing will seek to demonstrate is that each is a result of Core and Core contender planning. Examining each we note that while triggered by basic human rights violations each conflict expanded most dramatically when Core support or intervention occurred. This is not to suggest none of these conflicts could not have occurred in isolation based on grievances present; they could not have however resulted in such massive loss of life and functional infrastructure.
Where a causality chain is present the conflicts have been linked into a Conflict Axis.
North America & Europe
The War on Socialism [Red Terror & Cold Wars]: During the 20th century, peaking in the 1950s-1980s anti-Socialist hysteria reached a high pitch in the United States. Politicians, particularly Nixon and Reagan utilized the US Military and CIA in previously unprecedented destabilizations of foreign governments thought to be Socialist, or Socialist leaning. Why this is relevant in 2015 where all but 4 Communist governments remain in power (China, Vietnam, Laos & Cuba); is that to achieve that political result the US gave aid to some of the most unsavory, human rights violating regimes throughout the world appearing flatly hypercritical as a proponent of democracy. And fostering a multi-generational hatred for the USA that would result in the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001.
War on Terror [Wahabi-Salafist Islamic Jihad]: It is actually impossible to declare war on a tactic of war, but in 2001 this is exactly what then President George Bush, Jr. and his Neoconservative cadre of advisors did as they unleashed a global war against Wahabi-Salafist Jihadists. This War has expanded to the full invasion and occupations and state collapse of Afghanistan & Iraq resulted in x casualties and resulted in widespread domestic surveillance under PATRIOT ACT 1 & 2. Allegations of widespread use of torture and drone strikes against civilians have stoked anti-American sentiment across the world.
War on Drugs, Crime & Illegal Immigration [Minorities in the USA ]: The underlying grievance is that throughout the rise of the US Empire Native Indigenous American Indians, African Americans, People of Color and newly arrived Immigrants have all been shut out of patronage networks and lack basic social services granted to the Euro-American majority. Undocumented immigrants have been periodically exploited for cheap labor as well as rounded up and deported. Various pretexts of terrorism, criminal justice, policing, drugs and human trafficking have all been used to militarize the police force in America. While all of the roughly three dozen low-casualty domestic terror attacks were home grown operations; none appear to have been financed or directed by foreign operatives with the exception of the highly irregular 2013 Boston Bombing Recently. Against the back drop of mass incarceration, NSA mass surveillance and the alleged killing of a person of color by police violence every 72 hours; a new civil rights movement has catalyzed in the months after the shooting of Ferguson, Missouri resident Michael Brown (cite).
Minorities in European Union: In the capitals and cities of the Old Empire the populations are aging and birth rates are declining. Debt crises and the War on Terror have heightened tensions against Muslim minorities from Turkey and North Africa, as well as to the Roma Gypsy population. Terror attacks in London, Madrid and Paris have heightened xenophobia against
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Muslim communities as have regular riots in the suburbs of Paris over police violence against North Africans.
Eastern Europe & Central Asia
Russia (North Caucasus Insurgency): Since 1994 Russia has been fighting a protracted to put down separatists movements in the Caucuses. There have been two atrocious wars in Chechnya and a range of rebel incursions and terror attacks post-2000 throughout the Russian Federation including the grisly school Siege at Beslan and the Nord Theatre (insert dates). The insurgency has been largely neutralized
Russia & Moldova (1992): Since its independence from the Soviet Union, the Russian military has held onto a defacto independent strip of Eastern Moldova called Transnistria running along the Eastern bank of the Dniester River.
Russia, Armenia & Azerbaijan (1993): The Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast: a defacto, mostly unrecognized independent state within a region which is majority Armenian & land locked inside Azerbaijan has been a long running low intensity war that the RF has generally backed Armenia militarily which is Orthodox Christian like itself although attempted mediation on behalf of both former Soviets.
Russia & Georgia (2008): Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and occupied two States; South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia continues to occupy both states which are nominally ‘independent’ but now for all intents an purposes annexed to the Russian Federation.
Russia & Ukraine (2014): After pro-western demonstrations and a national uprising toppled the pro-Moscow regime Russian Special Forces and military have sense annexed Crimea; and set up separatist governments in Ukraine’s three Eastern provinces.
Asia & Pacific
PRC-Hong Kong: Hong Kong will remain fiscally tied to the North Western economic order until 2047. That has not stopped it from being the new epicenter of Pro-Democracy, Arab Spring-Occupy Wall Street tactics which have surged since September of 2014. The PRC must maintain a tight grip over this global economic mega-city in such a way that it can suppress the protests without hurting economic activity or creating Martyrs.
PRC-Tibet-Uighurs: The PRC has been waging a rather brutal campaign of repression to secure it two Western provinces. The Tibetan Buddhists have largely embraced exile, immolation, social media, passive resistance and leader worship of the Dali Lama. The Muslim Uighurs have declared a Separatist Jihad and been actively exchanging violence with the Chinese State. Both provinces which make up more than 2/5 of PRC territory also contain energy reserves the Core Contender will need to sustain growth. The Tibetans and the Uyghurs are two of several hundred ethnic minorities in the PRC; they are the two most likely to cause protracted difficulty in differing tactical capacities for the Han dominated Chinese state.
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PRC & Taiwan: US Client and home to the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang; the defeated politico-military party which retreated to the island in 1949. Over 2 Million defeated soldiers, sailors, intellectuals and business elites fled there from the mainland advance of Mao Zedong’s Communist Revolutionary Armed forces. They took with them most of China’s gold and foreign currency reserves (Dunbabin, 2008).
PRC & Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos: PRC helped facilitate the 1975 American defeat in Vietnam but now regularly clashes with communist leaderships in Vietnam and Laos which are wary of the explosive growth of their longtime patron. Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia from 1978-1989 removing the ultra-violent, democidal regime of Khmer Rouge; a then Chinese proxy which killed over a million of its own citizens. China and Vietnam fought a War in 1979; the third Indochina War. Currently all three of these nations fall into the Chinese sphere.
PRC& Nepal: China has quietly aided the Maoist guerrillas which after a lengthy war are taking part in the newly allowed elections and hold 239 of 575 seats in the Nepalese Constituent Assembly (largest party). This has been the PRC’s intelligence and supply line to supply Indian Maoists with weapons and support via proxy.
PRC & Myanmar (Burma): Due to internal Buddhist pressures, ethnic strife, 2008 Cyclone Nargis which may have killed upwards of 200,000 Burmese; the highly isolationist Chinese backed military Junta collapsed and elections were held in 2010. The Union for Solidarity & Development (liked to the Military and China) ruled until 2014 when power supposedly changed top the National League for Democracy. Civil Wars have long raged in Burma; particularly the Kachin & Rohingya tribes against the various governments. As well as the Shan, Lahu and Karen ethnic groups. Two of the three biggest parties (in opposition) are funded by the military. Both China and India have been heavily invested in the Myanmar energy sector before the advent of ‘democracy’.
PRC & Bangladesh: The Bangladeshi oligarchy maintains a precarious balancing act between India, China and the US companies it manufactures and assembles textiles for. Bangladesh is highly strategic leverage point for China on India because when occupied it can easily sever India into two zones. Bangladesh also deploys more UN Peacekeepers than any other nation and while supposedly non-aligned is often ideologically in the Socialist camp.
North & South Korea: In 1950 the US pulled its war allies into a direct confrontation with the PRC in the Korea Peninsula; by 1953 USSR, China and the North Koreas had lost an estimated 367,283-750,282 soldiers; the US lead international coalition had lost 178,426 soldiers and over
2.5 million Korean civilians were slaughtered. North Korea under PRC protection built the 4th largest army on earth and 29,000 US troops are still stationed along the 38th Parallel line. The North is a nuclear armed failed state that cannot feed its own people without Chinese support. The South is vibrant developed nation that is an integral US ally.
India-Kashmir-Pakistan: India has occupied Muslim majority Kashmir since 1948 and despite innumerous rounds of overt & covert war with Pakistan; it remains a veritable breeding ground for Islamist insurgency directed against India from the North West.
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India-Naxalites (Communist Party of India); in 2004 a coalition of Maoist and Communist groups emerged in Central India; they now effectively control most of Central & Eastern India’s red corridor, the poorest most densely populated area of the country. The insurgency is regarded by the Indian government as its greatest existential threat (after the Pakistani ISI & the Kashmir rebel groups); the Naxalites are operating in an estimated 77-83 districts across 10 Indian states with an estimated resistance army of 47,000 volunteer fighters and are supply networked to the Nepalese Maoists & Chinese intelligence services.
Afghanistan: Has largely been a full blown war zone under British imperial rule, Russian communist occupation, War Lord Feudalism, Taliban Sharia and now a bloody US military occupation. This ungovernable country appears to have its insurgency fed via Pakistan’s intelligence service the ISI.
Pakistan: There is something truly alarming about a nuclear armed, terrorist training ground, with a sophisticated intelligence service, with war time excesses against India and Bangladesh that amount to genocide; fully run by its military; a major recipient of US aid money; but strategically aligned to PRC overtly. China is Pakistan’s largest supplier of weapons and third largest trading partner. The ISI aids China in combatting its internal Tibetan, Taiwanese and Uyghur threats. There is a free trade agreement between the two countries.
Latin America & Caribbean
Latin America is a highly important theatre of this core shift because it is a comparatively stable group of nations with middle income growth, far fewer active insurgencies yet with growing Socialist power in almost all countries. The Mexican-Cartel Wars are getting increasingly bloody along the traffic routes into the USA. The Honduran-Cartel Wars are the bloodiest and Honduras may have the highest non-political conflict related homicide rate on earth. US-Venezuela antagonisms are growing and sanctions may be immanent. Venezuela is Cuba’s energy supplier and life line. The Colombian Civil War may be winding down with renewed peace mediation talks in Havana. Brazil has emerged as the regional power and will be the BRICS continental player. ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America) launched in 2004; is the Venezuelan & Cuban led alliance between Antigua & Barbuda, Bolivia, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent & the Grenadines and Saint Lucia with Suriname & Haiti pending entry and with Syria & Iran as observers. Honduras was dissuaded by the US from joining the emerging bloc bilateral trade deals are conducted in a cyber-currency known as the SUCRE. NAFTA, ALBA and BRICS will all be competing for Latin American hearts, minds, dollars and Oligarch support.
The government of Nicaragua has just authorized the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Company (HKND Group) to build a “new Panama canal” that will be in direct completion with the US controlled Panama Canal in just five years (2020). The US can expect a great deal of competition in a region already very hostile to it.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Both RF and USA, because of cultural legacies of racism have limited military and strategic ties with African nations. Russian Federation is seen more favorably due to its Cold War support of anti-colonial Independence movements. PRC is the dominant power.
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The PRC & Africa generally have seen unprecedented growth in development aid and trade. China is involved in the economic affairs of virtually every country on the continent. In Sudan the Chinese military support has led to the genocides in Darfur, Khordofan & South Sudan. Ethiopia has moved from a USSR client to after its war with Eritrea; a current US client. Somalia, a former USSR client has been without a government since 1992; Puntland & Somaliland are defacto independent states. Somali piracy is on the rise throughout the shipping lanes of the African horn. Central African Republic has devolved in Christian-Muslim ethnic warfare. Endemic corruption is exacerbating the Nigerian Boko Haram Islamist insurgency.
South Africa has been tapped by BRICS to be the focal point of development. USA Rwandan relations enable the protracted genocide that has killed up to 6 million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo; fuel by extractive metals being moved out of Rwanda on the black market (Nzongola-Ntalaja, 2002).
Middle East & North Africa
Israel & Palestine though getting a great deal of attention is minor conflict which exacerbates all regional tensions, but doesn’t cause them. The more serious antagonism is a Sunni-Shi’a one between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Jordan is a pliant US client and military staging area alongside Israel. It is 74% Palestinian and would collapse quickly without US and Israeli intelligence and aid. Libya has completely unraveled into low intensity civil war. Egypt, another unusual US client has broken the back of its secular revolution and Islamist electoral victories and returned to defacto military rule and full US dependency. The Muslim Brotherhood and local opposition has by no means been destroyed. In Lebanon Iranian proxy Hezbollah governs much of the country and has been instrumental in the invasion of Syria to shore up the Assad regime. Bahrain with its Shi’a majority is well within Iranian influence and its Sunni leadership will eventually crumble. Iraq for all intents and purposes is a proto-Kurdish para state, a Shi’a Arab adjunct to Iran and an ISIS control zone. Saudi Arabia the birth place of virulent Wahabi-Salafist, fundamentalist Islam is using its US backer to protect it from Iran while spreading that money across the region to Jihadists. United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman surely wish they could build higher walls and sit things out. Yemen is amid civil war, Syria as stated has gone from being a multi-ethnic, developed Russian client state to a civil war zone with over one hundred factions fighting. Iran continues to develop nuclear weapons as leverage but also a pragmatic safe guard from Israel and Saudi Arabia. Turkey continues to be a staging point for Syrian opposition to Assad and Kurdish revolutionary nationalism.
What Triggers Could Contribute to the Outbreak/ Further Escalation of Conflict?
Major Flashpoints:
Israel Palestine; is a demographic, nuclear armed time bomb. Arab Israeli Palestinians now make up over 20% of the total Israeli population and that number is growing. Regardless of outcomes of Statehood for the West Bank of the ongoing Hamas-IDF battles in Gaza; time is running out on the Jewish state by birthrates. Over the next fifty years the Jewish Colony will get uncomfortably authoritarian as they attempt to hold the apartheid. This will place a pressure upon the American Jewry to lean harder to protect Israel despite its mutation into a racial
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apartheid regime oppressive and bankrupt; neither fully Jewish nor able to sustain the mythology of Post-Holocaust impunity (Chompsky, 1983)(Blumenthal, 2013).
Syria; Syria is Russia’s Cuba of the Middle East one of its longest regional allies. Syria supplies Russia with its only Mediterranean port and naval base. It is also a long running recipient of Russian aid and weapons. Although the Assad government has control over only 1/3 of Syria. There is no way the RF will let that regime fall. In the meantime Syria and Iraq will escalate as multi-state proxy battlefield and dozens of combatant groupings. RF will continue to arm Assad’s government; Iran will continue to support its ally Assad via Hezbollah and the IRGC; Qatar and Saudi Arabia will back various constellations of Sunni Militants; the US and Israel will back the Kurds and Turkey will back the Syrian Free Army. This will be a quagmire that continues for some time Lebanon in the 1980’s x ten.
Ukraine; the Russian Federation is interested in restoring as much of the USSR territory under its hegemony as it can. It sees piecemeal engagements as a means to retake territory; especially warm water port or resource rich territory. As with Syria, the Russian Federation will not lose warm water ports. It is far easier to rely on the 20 million Russians abroad for intelligence and operational support than to realistically think the world will accept these conquests. However, while RF may succeed in getting defacto control of Crimean and the three eastern provinces; a combination of sanctions and general antagonism will drive RF into closer collaboration with the PRC.
ISIS & Iraq; is now effectively three para states. Kurdish North autonomous and under siege from ISIS. The Shi’a majority region directly collaborating with Iran. And the Sunni Triangle now largely under the control of ISIS. Iraq and Syria will effectively cease to be states as warlords, Jihadists and proxy armies’ battle for control of the oil. If Baghdad falls the following scenarios are likely:
1. Give ISIS claim Statehood
2. Trigger previously unimagined sectarian warfare in the Islamic world.
3. Give ISIS theocratic legitimacy as a Caliphate.
4. Trigger a Sunni Jihadist convergence around its Wahabi-Salafist World view 5. Everything between Israel, Kurdistan and Iran will fall shortly after24.
Taiwan; any assault on Taiwan would likely trigger a direct US PRC confrontation. It is however an integral objective of the PRC to recapture the island and they believe they can do so in 48 hours. This assault would have to take place while the USA was occupied with a conflict which ties down its navy. Or would be negotiated beforehand.
North-South Korea; the regime in North Korea is a Chinese client. But it is reckless and heavily armed. It fails at even the most basic dietary needs of its population. It has recently acquired nuclear weapons and acted erratically amid its third dynasty change. M53ost problematic is that it is the precise fault line where the USA and PRC fought a war between 1950-1953. 48,000 troops so close to China is an ongoing irritation.
24 These are the general observations of political scientist Thomas Poole
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Shi’a Revival: The central hypothesis of political theorist Vali Nasr is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps will build up Hezbollah type para state organizations in the Shi’a communities of Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, and Afghnistan and will successfully merge Bahrain and 1/3 of Iraq into a larger Shi’a Islamic State. Iran will develop a nuclear weapon deterrent to the core powers and trigger a larger, more organized Islamic revival to match the three Blocks already formed. It will defeat its regional nemesis Saudi Arabia and come to terms of detente with US backed Israel, largely because both will possess nuclear weapons and have equal antipathy for ISIS. Sunni Jihadist ideology will slowly lose ground as it has been a bankrupt tactical failure and a Shi’a Revival will occur in Islam (Nasr, 2006).
African Spring: as unlikely as it sounds there is a rumbling from the continent that the Chinese will trigger with their investments and speculations. African spring may be several decades away but when it comes it will serve to cut every outsider off from the resources in the continent. Likely trigger locations for African Spring are incredibly hard to predict since most of Africa is already caught in a combination of conflict and poverty traps not leaving much room for non violent opposition anti-oligarch movements to form. However, South Africa, Nigeria, Botswana, Zambia & Ethiopia would be good bets as they have larger more educated Middle classes.
What New Factors Contribute to Prolong the Conflict Dynamics?
The United Nations: While it may appear that the United Nations is an incredible outlet for ongoing negotiations towards human rights and global governance; it is in fact an enormous charade. While there are certain benefits to having several alternative channels open for alternative track negotiations; the UN, its development mechanisms as well as its Peacekeeping forces are a mockery of the values it claims to be upholding. All three Power Blocks hold veto votes as Permanent members of the Security Council; China, Russia, and the Great Powers of the World Wars USA, United Kingdom and France. 10 non-permanent members are hardly any kind of counterbalance. Peacekeeping missions in Haiti25 Kuwait, Namibia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan and the DRC can only be described in highly nonacademic terms as ‘a series of fubar shit shows.’
Elite Lobbies: A fundamental problem is access. The Oligarchs via their wealth have incredible access to politicians and policy manufacturing. As PRC rises it will avoid being sucked into major wars but remains by far the most stable Oligarical Collective with princeling blood networks founded on the mass understanding the eight immortals and their policies brought incredible progress to China. China is also a one party Communist state that values meritocracy and efficiency despite numerous allegations of inside dealing and corrupt practice. The Oligarchic Collective in the USA is less stable than China, but more than capable of buying off the politicians they need to keep things in their favor. The Russian Oligarchy is unstable but ruthless and access to United Russia Party is not as certain as the American oligarch’s ability to purchase Republicans and Democrats. Periodically the Russian inner Oligarical circle those most
25 Haiti is the only UN Peacekeeping Mission in place without any formal ceasefire in place. It is now widely understood that the Nepalese contingent of the MINUSTAH UN Peacekeeping operation introduced Cholera to the Republic of Haiti.
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tied to the old guard KGB network will kill or imprison and Oligarch previously thought to be untouchable. The European oligarchy will be most vulnerable. China will encroach on numerous post-colonial African holdings, its influence will wade as its population ages, its socialist benefits are lost to increased austerity and USA becomes less willing to engage on its behalf. Expect Fortress Europe and bunker mentality that will involve drafting or recruiting foreign legions to do its dirty work.
The Russian Reclamation: The RF will continue to go after countries from the former USSR leaning towards the West to restore what it believes to be its sphere. It will not be able to re exert power over Poland, Lithuanian, Estonia, and Latvia but gradually via FSB intelligence, Special Forces operations, and interventions on behalf of its ethnic diaspora; or via proxy it will restore its USSR era hegemonic sphere for similar reasons that China will annex Taiwan. Access to warm water ports, historic fear of devastating Eastern (Mongol), Western (French & German) and Southern (Tartar) and demographic dispersion propel Russian foreign policy, not ideology.
The Chinese Expansion: The PRC will act recklessly. It understands America is in decline and understands Russia’s economic disarray and lack of cohesive political identity. Post 1978 the first phase was internal; uplifting 680 million of its own citizens and reestablishing it’s oligarchy of princelings. The second stage was investment in Africa where over 45% of its foreign aid goes. The third stage is BRICS; leveraging a major economic power on each continent (Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa) to break the monopoly of the World Bank/ IMF. The fourth stage will be to assert financial hegemony in Asia & the Pacific. The fifth stage will be to annex Taiwan and humiliate Japan concurrently or in stages. Make no mistake that the Chinese Political elites will wait until there is no way the US can intervene militarily or with sanctions, but the Chinese are running a dangerous long game that views Taiwan and Japan as enduring humiliations that will be dealt with in time. Unless the USA is awash in domestic crisis, civil war or simply exhausted as world power the PRC will not risk striking at two integral US allies in the Asia/ Pacific region.
The Second American Civil War: There will be another civil war in the United States prior to the physical expansion of the PRC into other Asian countries. It will result in the disintegration of the union into Northeastern, Western, Texan, Mormon, Southern and Middle American states
which will devolve the USA into something between Yugoslavia’s collapse and the USSR’s. The chain reaction of such a civil war will be rapid Chinese conquest and annexation of Hong Kong, Singapore Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Whatever is left of the country after the Second American Civil war will be isolationist. Europe will be wide open to RF expansion. The Global Core will switch to Beijing.
Energy Demands: While all three core contenders have vast energy reserves, industrialization, urbanization and continued modernization and fueling sophisticated armies; USA, RF, and PRC control require a level of energy supply that can only maintained with outward expansion to secure energy fields. That has been a driver of conflict since the World Wars. As we know there is a finite amount of fossil fuels and all of the developing world relies heavily upon them for basic matters of maintain developed world standards of living such as 24 hour electricity, cars and nearly every aspect of the high tech society. While Peak Oil might be 2020 or 2050 or further; energy resources; oil and natural gas in particular will propel conflict. As violence in the
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Middle East escalates the USA will rely more on fracking and shale; Russia (largest energy exporter and reserves on earth) will push further to exploit Siberian field and sell to rising core contender China; driving Europe to be more nuclear dependent. This spells a more isolationist USA and closer economic co-dependency between PRC and RF.
Water Demands & Climates Refugees: Peak Water is theory that by 2025 we will be unable to meet the clean water demands of the earth’s population due to structural supply configurations (Palaniappan, 2008). This will result in wars for water similar to the current wars for extractive energy. This will be less problematic for Russia; a major beneficiary of global warming trends alongside Canada; large swaths of barely habitable tundra will become farmland. This will be a huge issue for the developing world triggering climate migrations of unprecended scale particularly towards Australia and Europe. The net result of the Climate Refugee scenario will be boarder defenses in Europe similar to what exists between Israel and Palestine. By 2050 there will be literal citadel security states throughout what we call the Global North. PRC, USA and RF will absorb some of small percentage these refugees but not to any extent that will alter fundamentally core ethnic demographics.
Drones: Before long PRC and USA will have the capacity to operate mechanized drone infantries when projecting power abroad. Few powers will have this ability but it will be integral to Chinese policing of its African holdings. The PRC will avoid direct military confrontations by any means necessary except in any scenario of US-EU weakness to capture Taiwan. Drones remove a great deal of political pressure of war making. The Chinese ability to use them effectively will be an element of Chinese Neo-Colonialism. The USA will step up drones of all kinds because of how sensitive the US population is to protracted wars. If you are uncomfortable with the volume of drone strikes currently occurring; imagine tanks without drivers.
State Failure: State collapse will rapidly proceed in the Middle East followed by Africa. The New War phenomenon of protracted irregular, semi-or-overtly criminally connected ethnic purging will expand in vile new directions particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Entities such as ISIS will emerge and hold new amorphous territories.
What Factors can contribute to peace?
Aging & Mixing Population: The European World population is greying as are the ethnic majority populations of Russia and Japan. Developed world populations simply have less children. The short life span in Russian Federation for men is comparable to Sub-Saharan Africa. The Russian State is having to provide large financial incentives to induce couples to even have children. What will occur is that populations of Developed countries will become even less ethnically homogenous and the leading ethnic demographics will begin to die out or be sub subsumed via mixed-ethnicity couples. The USA will become increasingly Hispanic and lean left towards Latin America; the EU will become increasingly Muslim and lean towards the Middle East; this phenomenon will create coexistence linkages and diaspora connections that are vital to Cosmopolitanism. The RF will become slowly more Muslim, more Turkic and more Central Asian. Japan with a highly aging population and smallest demographic of integrated minorities will face the greatest challenge and eventually be conquered by the PRC during whatever period of hostilities allows for conquest and annexation of Taiwan. In short, the demographic of the
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American and European Oligarchic; white and Christian is slowly receding. Regardless, the grandfathers of the existing world order must pass and the new generations must be further intermixed. This will effect Africa & PRC the least.
Peak Oil: When the Oil runs out, unless cold fusion or a green alternative emerges such as solar charging more advanced lithium batteries; freighter tanker traffic will slow to bare essentials and most modern armies will revert to warfare strategies closer to the World Wars. Fracking on a mass scale will occur first as well as more extensive use of nuclear power at the core. Because modern armies are so reliant on petroleum, the closer we get past Peak Oil without arriving at an alternative energy source will force a slow down on modern war machines. Although Kaldor makes a very strong case for the rising violent tide of civil wars and intra state killing; the sheer ability of the three blocks to project power and manage trade routes is for now completely tied to a finite supply of natural gas and oil.
Advanced Communications: For the first time in history we are getting real time data about conflicts and political events that would never have been on our radar two decades before. Of course in the developed world this is increasingly part of the state control and socialization system. But, as with the next item these advanced communications allow us to achieve unprecedented solidarity of action and freedom of information.
Shared Macro-Economies: In the same way that technology is letting civilians cut out middle persons and avoid taxes, there is no reason to assume this cannot be done with all kinds of financial matters; as transnational criminals have used BITCOIN and TOR to do for years. The internet is not only a communications, knowledge and data repository; it is of course a means to organize our lives without big banks or big states. Shared Economies, removed from all the escalating conflicts are shown well in organizations such as BRAC; the world’s largest so-called NGO. BRAC couples microfinance with social programs and extends a fascinating array of services to the poor in 14 nations. Coupling together Shared Economic principles with good non state intuitions allows the poorest of the poor the option to sit out some of the upcoming new and old wars.
Core Shift: Any time there has been a previous Core Shift there has generally been incredible interstate warfare between European powers. This will be the first time that the Core is shifting to a non-Caucasian country. The Chinese were once the Middle Kingdom and will be again, but they do not have an historical precedent of slavery or genocide as the Europeans do. This is not to say China will bring an era of tranquil global dominance; simply put it will bring an opening for change in the structures of the World System itself.
Multipolarity: At least until the Core decline of the USA an equilibrium will set in where all three Blocs are relatively equal and own enough of each other’s assets to make interstate war between them unlikely. For whatever period this lasts for; likely until 2100 or the slowdown
effects of Peak Oil; willingness to fight conventional Old Wars will continue to decrease. US-EU will decline and PRC- BRICS will rise.
Supply Side Resistance: SSR is about breaking dependencies from developing nations to semi peripheral and core nations, by shutting down labor and supply routes. Social movements in the
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Resource Axis Zones; the Developing World so-called will have a limited window of 200 years during core shift to either align with PRC-BRICS, remain tied to decline Euro-American powers or fight for self-reliance. Grievances in the developing world are many. Arab Spring is occurring
and African Spring is inevitable. However, whether these continue via armed struggle or other means will decide to what degree the carnage occurs and to who these economies will depend on.
Peacefare: Is militant nonviolence. Quite literally making use of nonlethal weapons against oppressors. Against modern armies this will fail. Against police forces and irregular New War armies this tactic will bring regional oligarchies to their knees. Peacefare is an understanding that developing nations must bring down their own corrupt oligarchic collectives before they can affect those of the three power blocs (Ackerman & DuVall, 2001).
Core Blockade: The final stage of a Peacefare Campaign is to cut the core powers off from a cheap flow of labor, natural resources and commodities of any kind. Starving the core occurs when this is happening throughout the Resource Axis zone and Core nation minority and subversive groups use the reverse sanctions to trigger revolts there.
Parallel States: Throughout the world via solidarity networks, shared economies, deterioration of state social services and as survival mechanism; a variety of Zionist universalisms will come to take shape. Armed entities like ISIS and Hezbollah; non-violent development actors like BRAC and IRC; religious formations like Scientology, Mormons, Baha’i and the Holy Sea; break away states like Puntland; all will better establish Parallel State mechanisms as unrest spreads, new war intensifies and the existing 206 states cannot justify themselves indefinitely.
Conclusion
This is a desperate time and future does look quite bleak if human kind refuses to act in solidarity with its specifies instead of it’s state.
Described over seventy years ago by political scientist George Orwell as Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia (Orwell, 1984) there are three block locked in vicious conflict. The only difference to his futurist predictions is that the USSR never took control of main land Europe.
• What are current conflict trends?
China will rise and US-EU will decline as the Russian Federation profiteers. Few if any developing nations will meet their so-called 2015 Millennium development goals and the proxy wars as new wars will expand. The BRICS will rise the Bretton Woods Intuitions will decline. ISIS will expand, Kurdistan will emerge, Israel will decline and Arab Spring will be joined by African Spring. ALBA will consolidate in Latin America and US will dissolve into a civil war.
• What are windows of opportunity?
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The future rests in the people’s ability to achieve solidarity and utilize new technologies to circumvent states. ALBA represents a fertile ground for a truly multi ethnic civilization to thrive in the dark days ahead, but surely any para state configuration will be aligned to one bloc or another. The best window of opportunity will be in the next 200 years. Either core shift will means opportunity to break dependency or it will usher in one of the most protracted periods of authoritarian rule in history presiding over the death of the planet and human life.
• What actors can be identified as spoilers? Why? Are they inadvertent or intentional spoilers?
The Oligarchs are the worst spoilers of all. They pay for the all the terrible things in this world and reduce us to nothing, powerless wretched nothing. Were it only so simple as to murder them as they in the millions murder us; then we do have a good list. Alas, violence has only bred greater violence and the Oligarchy is so diffuse you would not catch them all easily. Instead of violence we must harness development to be our liberation not our chains. We cannot obsess over the details of the micro-conflict when most conflict has but three primary sources.
Our human objective must be to coordinate a means to support para state development coupled with the objective of starving the core. No matter which power bloc takes control know they will exploit us in various guises. The only solution is to be able to be self-reliant for when the time comes to shut them off from energy, labor and resource flows up mountain. The World System is a killing machine that strips on of their humanity and reduces you to faceless number to work out your life as a slave.
Between an Eagle, a Dragon and a Bear lies our future.
Let us not be left with scraps.
REFERENCES & FURTHER READING:
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Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso Books. Baer, R. (2008). The Devil We Know: dealing with the new Iranian superpower. Random House LLC.
Biermann, F., & Boas, I. (2010). Preparing for a warmer world: Towards a global governance system to protect climate refugees. Global Environmental Politics, 10(1), 60-88.
Bills, S. (1986): The world deployed: US and Soviet military intervention and proxy wars in the Third World since 1945. From: Robert W. Clawson (Ed.): East West rivalry in the Third World. Wilmington 1986, p. 77-101.
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Bloom, A. D. (Ed.). (1991). The Republic of Plato. Basic Books.
Blum, W. (2003). Killing hope: US military and CIA interventions since World War II. Zed Books. Blumenthal, M. (2013). Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. Nation Books.
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Rotberg, R. I. (Ed.). (2010). When States Fail: Causes and Consequences. Princeton University Press.
Rummel, R. J. (1998). Statistics of Democide: Genocide and mass murder since 1900 (Vol. 2). LIT Verlag Münster. Taylor C. Boas, Jordan Gans-Morse (June 2009). “Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan”. Studies in Comparative International Development 44 (2): 137–161.
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Winters, J. A. (2011). Oligarchy. Cambridge University Press.
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ANNEX 1: Resource Axis Distribution
ANNEX 2: Proxy Wars since 1945
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ANNEX 3: Chinese Aid
ANNEX 4: Economic Pacts
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ANNEX 5: Conflict Map A
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ANNEX 6: Conflict Map B
ANNEX 7: Listing of Genocides & Democides since 1945
ANNEX 8: Listing of Major Oligarchs & Highest Net Worth Individuals ANNEX 9: Listing of Major Oligarical Collectives by State
Set on the Onderdonk Fields between the border of Breuklyne and Queens on Friday morning of the Labor Day Weekend. A warehouse district of tumbleweeds, scrap metal dealers, and the smell of burnt fuels.
Newyorkgrad is sizzling with fete and fever. Thousands of people are about to be gunned down in the streets of Breuklyne. They just don’t all know it yet. Most of the high class Blan are still in the countryside. Most of the Neg have a three day weekend they don’t understand. The sun is shining and also baking us all alive. The late summer humidity. It remains oppressive. The Flushing Avenue highway leads from Breuklyne deep into the greener pastures of Queens passing through a vast industrial district along the border. In a sense it and the Dutch Kills creek are the East to West Breuklyn-Queens border. A heat wave of unprecedented proportions has been ravishing the city for the entire three weeks.
They put that little bitch Greta on TV again, to talk about Global Warming. She mumbles something in Norwegian about no longer using airplanes. But really it’s all just Capitalist Modernity. You can only gang rape the earth for so long before she begins to die inside. And then die outside too.
Dozens of multicolored tents have been erected at the top of a green hill whose perimeter is a steel fence. At its north side is a small Dutch historic home and the rest a campground in the badlands of Industrial Bushwhack. A big band stage is almost finished in erection to blare live Gypsy Latin music is being set up and sound tested. A four day proclamation of lawlessness has been posted, but only the social club staff and its regulars will truly be encamping. At forty dollars a day, it’s a rather pricey venture to go camping in a field in the heart of a barren industrial wasteland between Breuklyn and Queens known for salvage yards, construction material stockpiling, biker gangs, and various front operations. A railroad to a poisonous green river called the Dutch Kills Creek separating Breuklyn and Queens officially.
Slavi, stone faced with black hair until he cracks a jovial grin only to those he knows is Sasho’s brother. The sometimes grinning Bulgarian enforcer is at the gate nominally charging people whom he doesn’t recognize as the spoken for “regulars’ ‘. Justin O’Azzello, “the General Manager ” is cooking up “kielbasa” and barking grinning efficient commands on set up.
“What are the kielbasa made of,” asks Viktoria, who has booked all the bands and done much of the production work to make this Bohemian Festival occur.
“What are they made of Pendejo,” repeats her husband Raphael.
“A special type of chicken,” says Justin with his mouth, but ‘people’ with his teeth and she refrains from trying.
At various points Justin Toomey O’Azzello has come and gone as Mehanata’s General Manager. He’s quit, gotten fired, quit, gotten sober, quit, found HaShem, rehired, lost HaShem, gotten wicked drunk, gotten very sober, and now, he seems to be conducting business well enough and is back in the good graces of the management. Which means Sasho, and maybe to a lesser degree in reporting and accounting; Misha Kishbivalli, but Sasho is the boss. The Onderdonk Fields are now held by a colorful gypsy mafia. Sasho and his young son join a game of football game now underway.
Around 16:00 pm Kawa Zivistan shows up. He’s carrying a large red medical tech bag. The big red bag contains various basic life support that should hopefully not be utilized, and also two bottles of red wine. He joins Victoria and Raphael on the top of the hill by the main encampment. Raphael and Kawa comrades embrace as they always do. They grin because they know what is coming in the next 72 hours. Debauchery punctuated with acts of defiance and sedition.
A large and gregarious man rises to introduce himself as Oleg. A slinky, slender dark brown-haired woman at his side does not introduce herself at all. Also seated in the main encampment at the hill top are Lia Monteleone with her big French tits. Georgie Rabanca and Dasha Andreavna Skorobogatova. Daria ignores his arrival completely, as though she doesn’t know or care who he is. The burly Post-Soviet Oleg with a cropped beard and fashionable dress with a camera around his neck steps up and offers his hand.
“Oleg Medved is my name,” the big Russian fellow says.
“Kawa Zivistan,” Zivistan replies, “this is my ambulance partner Jared Forgetter, medical partner for the encampment, not homosexual lover to be clear.”
Oleg grins and pours everyone drinks. Zivistan takes out a large bottle of Spanish red wine and uncorks it. He passes out real wine glasses wrapped up in socks.
They all then dance and dance and drink and steal and make art and chat about the world. The fearsome, but utterly kindhearted Ukrainian Illubadori gangster Oleg Medved ‘from Boston’ takes a wide assortment of photos of former and Post Soviet models. Victoria has arranged a series of photo shoots and allegedly Alan, who most call ‘Oleg the Bear’ is local celebrity “up in Boston” and he takes tons of fashionable pictures. Kawa in his blue paramilitary-style EMT uniform with a red bandanna arm band is soon dancing the half tango, half salsa with Dasha clad in a yellow mesh cocktail dress with blue Indian war paint under her eyes; it makes for a lovely picture. “I didn’t recognize you in that faded blue uniform and your strange little partisan cap,” Daria exclaims.
The four day Bohemian Gypsy Festival is on Friday day one full swing by evening. It’s a very Old Soul-Old School movement of a moment. They’ve taken a barren camp ground in a bad part of the warehouse district and turned into something of a cross between the Gypsies of Patagonia and or a cold war partisan encampment. Zivistan has little actual medical work to do. Zivistan begins working on a sketch of Georgie and the big French tits on Amelia. Georgie with a laugh mentions he found black and blue marks all over his woman’s body the night she went back to Kawa’s home two weeks prior. ‘The night Dasha nearly killed you.’
“I fell down some stairs,” is all Amelia says. Georgie laughs it all off because he knows Kawa is a very tragic man. A good man but a tragic man. Kawa doesn’t have it in him to have any affairs. We barely even ask anyone to dance. Georgie who is a CUNY Graduate Center professor and also a computer scientist has affairs all the time, but he is not an American, or tragic, or rarely ever sad. However, Amelia’s black and blue marks are from someone fucking her dirty and rough. Not fucking her with love making. Just one week ago. Georgie wonders when it will be that Dasha Skorobogatova gives him the opportunity for a good fuck. How much will that cost? Admittedly such a conquest seems expensive in a few regards. Probably a grand an hour. Georgie feels sad for Kawa at times. He buys him drinks periodically with an ugly Romanian smile. Recently he became aware of the possibility of the small and short affair between Kawa and another regular Tavern mistress, the French girl named Amelia. He was shocked that any beautiful woman could find pleasure with such a sad, broken man. Kawa can’t dance and Kawa doesn’t ever smile.
Low and behold Dasha and Kawa are dancing up a storm tonight. To the Latin Gypsy Ska Jazz Band Escarioka now playing a cover of the ‘DunDunbanza’. Followed by brass jazz of the Sunny Side Social Club. Their front man blows through coke like a champion snow blower. George has never even seen the ‘Kawabumga man’ dance more than two or three highly forced times. No use of hips at all!
Daria is a woman at the tavern that turns all the heads. Even more so than that American girl Jessica who always takes off her clothes and climbs the downstairs stripper poles. Even more than Amelia who has slept with almost everyone. Even more than the Moldovan twins who kiss all the time. Daria arrived perhaps six months ago and now certainly has a very regular card. Kawa turned his card in for some time and has just begun to reestablish it. A Mehanata regular doesn’t just show up early and stay late two or three weekend days open. They make themselves part of the tavern’s ecosystem. They have riotous affairs. They get into fights with the Shqiptarëtis. They make a huge scene to the scene!
“Now I could not have seen that happening,” says George to Raphael, “he never ever dances!”
“She’s just fucking that hot, Prosto,” Raphael says. Prosto is Russian for simple as can be.
Daria Andreavna is never far from the fact that Kawa not only has steel-toed boots and two left feet. She takes him up on his hand to dance over and over. Kawa is so happy to be dancing again. He aims to do it well. He swore to her on the night she almost killed them that he never dances anymore. So that night before the fall, she made him two-step in a mirror as she watched and pressed her weight against his hip until he came correct.
“Your hips man! Move your goddamn hips.”
He almost crushes her bare foot with a steel toed combat boot dip.
Rafael is wearing a gold baseball cap and sits watching with his wife Viktoria manically trying to direct this shit show. Bands not showing up, nothing going to schedule everyone getting more and more furiously drunk. In yesteryear and future years Raphael commanded men, now he mostly makes life. With his music twice a week at the tavern as part of Bordel Dali and he also makes love with his camera twice a week and always maintains a slave job at a boutique blue jeans fashion repair shop where wealthy clients send their favorite expensive jeans for salvage. But, a revolutionary is a revolutionary and when asked by the resistance three weeks ago to activate his cell and raid the big blue tower to deposit the transmitter for the Fire Switch Station to broadcast orders and shut down government coms during the Labor Day Parade, he agreed. Jumping out of planes, carrying out raids and building non-lethal bombs, or taking hostages is like riding a bike, you never forget how to do it.
“I like to see him pretending to be happy,” says Raphael to Viktoria.
“They are too tricky. A thing moving too fast,” states Viktoria as she watches out of the corner of her eye. Viktoria is very happy with herself for it was she who made this four day festival come together. It is mostly out of control, of course money was never Sasho’s aim this time. She has no idea her husband and most of the Peruvian Ska band Eskariokaare about to stage a raid on the tallest building in Queens. She has no idea that Oleg Medved and Yulia Romanova are poisoning half the camp with vodka based neurotransmitters. She has no idea there is a dead hooker in the tent next to hers. She has no idea that an Iranian sleeper cell is carrying a bomb into the heart of Times Square to black out the city in an electromagnetic pulse early Monday morning. She has no idea that 2 million black women, men and children are coordinating their revelry amid an armed uprising. She just isn’t aware of those things.
Viktoria doesn’t know about all that many of her husband’s affairs. She certainly doesn’t know he used to lead a guerrilla band in Peru. Called the ‘Bolivarian Hotshots’. They had gunned down many capitalists in the Fujimori Years. She loves Raphael, her husband with all her heart. She partially likes Kawa Zivistan as her tragic brother. She loves but also hates Sasho who gives her a platform for her fashion, art and music. She came to this city and got a job at the Tavern as events producer and tavern has taken over most of her life and time. She doesn’t see the world like Raphael does, or Kawa did before his friends put him into sleep. ‘Sleep is the cousin of death’, but not physical death. It is simply reducing the size of the world one can see, third, fourth and fifth and sixth dimensionally.
Kawa and Viktoria can only really see a couple days into the past and future. Whereas people like Raphael, and Dasha Andreavna can see things much further back and forward, see things happening in other realities. It makes them very, very functional in this reality. The more one drinks, the less they see. If Viktoria Contreras was aware of any of the danger near her, she’d have a baby heart attack. Probably move back to upstate New York where the world is a bit safer. Back to her hippy parents’ Alpaca farm. Way out of the coming crossfire.
“She can’t be tamed by any man or any other being,” declares Raphael in Spanish.
“He will try, but when he fails I’ll have to pick up the messy pieces yet again,” states Viktoria. She’s already had to coax him gently from his old Russian geisha Ms. Maria Parsheva. As well as his Yelizaveta Aleksandrovna and then to freedom and then through the affair where he broke the French girl Amelia’s heart. It’s now back to the bondage of his wanton reckless emotions from the look of it. Kawa’s habit of loving early and often is the source of his exceptional art and writing. She admires that about him though, she’s a hopeless romantic herself. It is Viktoria’s shoulder where Kawa does his most cathartic crying over the past three years since they all met on Floyd Bennett Field at the original Bohemian-Gypsy-Tabor festival on the abandoned tarmacs of the abandoned Idlewild airport. A cool breeze breaks the city’s August humid heat wave.
“Spin me even faster man!” commands Dasha. He is under her spell.
She feeds him still more red wine. He can be known to drink in uniform when a General like Sasho gives him the green light to do so. Kawa has at least some discipline, but like a regular rank and file loses this discipline if the drinking lets him and the front seems far. And surely it takes a lot of drink to render him incapable of splinting extremities or dealing with overly intoxicated people, the most likely of injuries. But now, he’s really not good for much but chasing this woman. He knows nothing of Nikolai’s “great big hectic job.”
As a card-carrying ‘Banshee member’ he has several local ambulance crews on speed dial, worse comes to worse. There are endless bottles of wine and vodka miraculously stashed away about the encampment. All need more than tasting.
Kawa Zivistan is no obvious martyr today, or yesterday. Obviously for all his past mountains of zeal he’s built up, he saw the loveliest girl in the camp teach him how to dance and then try and kill him two weeks prior. He cannot be unaffected by the contrasts there. And if he was aware that his closest circle is up to something very large and possibly violent, he “is asleep.” He is out of the chain of command until reactivation after his paramedic graduation. Which is in Nivôse.
After his work in Haiti, they brought him to the bathhouse. They submerged his consciousness in the great waters of a temple buried in the earth; and to keep him safe they closed his eyes and made him aware only of what was around him in a small circle of seeing. A hint that there was a close bout with death has been made. Did our protagonist antagonists actually plummet to death off a rooftop? The night Daria and Kawa boxed ferociously after he yanked the cigarette from out her mouth, she shoved him off a roof. That was two weeks prior from the night before the Blue Moon now. He grabbed out for her and they both died falling into the deadly drop pit. She did shove to kill, but rather than make suicide assembled he pulled her along, to death. They definitively toppled off the roof into that pit of death. But angels quickly and immediately came to their rescue, in some form. Only Nanoseconds after lying broken and dead in a pit of death having killed each other over nothing. Over posturing and arrogance and lack of respect for physics. For the pair reality reset. ‘The angels’, on behalf of ‘the spirits’ , took their two souls from their corpses and went back in time five seconds. Put the souls impolitely into two new bodies of Kawa and Dasha, waiting in a clear blue-white chemical bath. It took just five human seconds to reload them. A near-death experience was now a vodka-based-near-life experience. Because ‘the spirits’ were protecting them both.
Panting hard, as if post-coitus she grabbed his right hand. Daria then bit down into his right index finger to draw blood. He made no reaction; his animal soul hasn’t fully absorbed itself into his new body. Then they lay panting by the edge of the precipice staring each other down, bitten hand clasped and bleeding; and then she confessed to him things that were highly unnerving. Some were true. And some were white lies.
Now, back to the festival!
Now, “she remembers nothing” and keeps urging him to explain their first night of misconduct under the good night almost blue moon and tell her what happened on the “roof of the financial district.”
Had they fallen into that pit having no spirits or angel to aid them you could have taken their bodies out a side basement door and it wouldn’t have even been real news. Senseless tragedy only bothers all of the living as everyone is missed by someone. So now they dance and self-seduce, she would say she is incapable he is above it, so they self-seduce. They are engaged in a passionate stare down, but it is more playful than hot. She is very used to drunken men desiring her. He is very used to being a sober gentleman and sometimes also a drunken man.
Viktoria Lynch can see the steam and glow from the tent camp at the top of the hill. It reminds her vaguely of the wild passion that came over her several years ago when she wrested Rafael from the arms of a wealthy temptress and got the ring of marriage around his ways.
Kawa is a marvelously incompetent, albeit enthusiastic dancer. Dasha drags him off here and there and they imbibe relentlessly without even seeming to stagger.
Night comes and the darkness falls.
“Tender to see you saving the life of Sasho’s son,” Dasha had whispered earlier, making a dry Russian joke out of his earlier handy work.
He had put an ice pack on a not that sprained ankle of the eleven year old son of the club’s owner. But, it was a smash hit. Calling an ambulance can cost between $475.00 and $4,000.00 in Newyorkgrad.
“Saving lives is much easier than taking them,” he says with a grin, “in the long run anyway.”
“So what happened again on your fateful roof! Tell me the whole fucking story!” she demands.
“So no one meta died, or really died. Only almost died. Because when dawn broke two weeks prior we were still standing, I called you a cab and we begrudgingly agreed to meet again, only by fated coincidence, as we are both members of the same social club.”
“Fascinating talk!” she says, staring out into the bonfires of the encampment. Pouring perhaps the fifteenth glass of wine. Knowing behind her bluff they were about five three dimensional seconds were warm, bloody broken and dead.
They had gotten quite drunk on wine, then Astika, then Rakia and then Russian Standard Vodka, eventually.
Again she pressed him for, “The whole of the fucking story blat.”
“We boxed out. You drank hard and boxed me harder. Then we fell twenty stories to our deaths in a sub-basement pit,” he explains, “Prosto.”
“And now we dance like two lovers who could have been just two separate funerals, in two separate languages, with Raphael Rafael and Victoria being the only overlapping guests of note,” she notes and winks at him.
The festival has become an alcoholic blur to all involved by midnight thirty.
Dasha and Sebastian dance, dance, and dance like they almost died for nothing just a week before. Under a bog moon taking shape in the night sky above the border between Queens and Breuklyn.
Earlier in the day Oleg Medved took a good many pictures of her and the three lesser former and Post Soviet models from Bucharest, Bulgaria, and Transdeisnester Republic. And also of lovely Victoria who always looks lovely and charming and caring for this rowdy band that gravitates to the tavern. While refusing to let the sometimes dirty laundry of her marriage ever be aired in public views. Though there have been improvements lately.
Kawa kisses Dasha’s hand at the end of the song, then lets her swoop low and he catches her in his arms as she gets an inch from the ground with her long golden locks. It is not a smooth or graceful motion, but he tries the best he can. They nearly topple over.
Then she has her lips pressed to his neck. And they eye into each other, taking in the passion that they are generating without necessarily acting any further on it.
“I will call you Sebastian!” she declares. “My name for you from this point out will be the name on your passport. The name you were given at your Trinidadian birth.”
“I will call you Dasha. As I have from the very beginning.”
“You are like a devil, you have way too many strange names,” she smiles.
Drunkenly they declare what each had planned to name to the other already. Then more dancing, dancing and more dancing; sway and grind like they almost died for nothing. Kawa kisses her hand at the end of the song, then lets her swoop low and he catches her in his arms as she gets inches from the ground with her long golden locks. For the second time now with not much more grace than before.
Then she has her lips pressed to his neck. Again. I could fall for her quite hard, he thinks, but he obviously has thought such thoughts before. A rather ferocious amount of wine first. Then the Russian Standard Vodka Oleg the Bear has in a large Casque and also numerous Astika beers are consumed. These are not amateurs by any means.
“A little party never hurts nobody! An Old Illubadori slogan of the night,” says Oleg.
Finally around 3 am the camp gets quieter, the Bohemian festival dies down enough for Dasha and Kawa to sit almost on top of each other, leaning in, coloring the sketch he’s made of their near fall and of her beauty over two pages of his black archive.
Daria then colors away at his sketches enthusiastically. She smiles radiantly and takes each color rendering his work into a superior rendition via the brightness of the combined war effort. Then they go and dance their asses off.
Finally around 5 am the camp gets quietest, the Bohemian festival dies down enough for bonfire calm without drumming. Rafael , Dasha and Kawa sit at the edge of a terrific fire now also dying down. They are quite drunk. “Derangedely” speaking on the subject of “phantom physics” and “meta-reality”. Kawa is waxing philosophically, as Dasha’s eyes roll, on the theoretical possibility of parallel reality and past lives. He pulls this from somewhere, according to Dasha, “His own ass.”
A little faux-intellectual rant positing his personal theory of existence.
Raphael Contreras nods in agreement, adding his own deductions. His own Mayan prophecies mixed with some Peruvian socialist folklore of the Arequipa Province.
“What if there are other lives running right alongside this one!” exclaims a dazed and inebriated Kawa Zivistan, “other possibilities, other potentialities had tiny little digressions been made on the course we follow in this waking life? What if, mind you, the slightest digression and decision had yielded a vastly different outcome from what we experience now? And, what if there was some way to step from one reality to another. Moving about time, changing your body while keeping your soul and memories intact?”
Ironically, as if he had ten thousand spoons and all he needed was a knife; Kawa Zivistan has in his drunken stupor articulates exactly what has happened to both he and Dasha just two weeks before.
“Fascinating talk boys before we die,” remarks Dasha yawning.
It is to Kawa Zivistan like one of those grand conversations he once one had in the East Village coffee house Yaffa Cafe over red wine when he was younger. Or on the Golan Heights hills in Syria. Sweet and danger-filled mental nostalgia.
“Do you believe in your past lives?” asks Rafael .
“Well certainly! It’s so primitive to think this is all a showdown between god and the devil over souls, one person, one life, one try! How pedantic!”
“So then you believe in alternative realities, and also reincarnation?” Rafael asks.
Dasha makes faces at Kawa as they go on. The fire continues to die down.
“Tovarish Philosopher I’m tired and need to be put to sleep,” she says.
“Soon, soon,” Zivistan says.
“The Old Soul is what I heard it called once,” says Rafael , when I was a boy in Arequipa Province, “the body is but a vessel my father and mother said. Like a suit for the soul strolling across time, across many lives. An Old Soul remembers these lives and in doing so has a mission to accomplish, what the Hindu call a dharma.”
“Boys! To bed!” yells Dasha.
Kawa asks her for five minutes to finish his idea. She scowls and gives him three and takes off in a pout.
Raphael Rafael with a devilish smirk says, “Speak of reality later. Go after her or I will.” Kawa catches up with her mid-hill and takes her hand.
“Lie down with me,” he says.
“That conversation was a lot of bullshit, you know,” she says.
“It’s fun to speak about this bullshit sometimes.”
“Where will there be the best sleep for us?”
“I have a blanket,” he says, forgetting about the inflatable mattress.
Dasha and Kawa sit almost on top of each other at the top of the hill under the trees. He pulls a black and green Arabian blanket from his rucksack. She finds another bottle of wine as if out of thin air. Pours them both glasses. Watch him prepare the bare accommodations. She pages through and returns to late-night coloring the sketch he’s made of their fall and of her vastness over two pages of his black archive.
She stares into him with Old Soul eyes.
“Will you be my sweet Tovarisha for the whole of the festival?” he asks her, “We can share our wine and food and I will watch over you.”
“Ha, ha! Tovarish is gender-neutral. It is not changed to “Tovarish-a” for women. We are not Hispanish! We were all equals in Soviet Russian. Only word in Russian without gender inflection. Also, I need not be watched after. I am always safe!”
“Be my Tovarish then and look after me then.”
“We will see. For now; this is just an okay plan. I will leave you in the morning.
They draw closer into a cuddle and then complete a spoon. She wraps herself within his arms and he holds her like it is his duty, but it is also a thrill of some buried passion. He holds her tight like a little partisan as the trees whisper and the two double blue moons that are out late can blot out reasonable doubt. He likes to hold her. They curl together on an inflatable mattress and a green Arabian blanket. They are both, for a variety of reasons unaccustomed to the perfect fit of a well-intentioned cuddle.
They fall into what passes as sleep, her first. As if on demand.
“We almost died for nothing,” he says.
“What if I just kill all your hope,” she mutters in a foreign tongued whisper.
“What if I love you until you know just what hope is truly so good for?” he responds to her in a muted tone. Possible in Hebrew.
“Don’t speak now of such goddamn stupid and impossible things,” she whispers.
They lie together in that Gypsy camp draped into each other on the air mattress and floating on a dream the only two partisans without tents. He dreams of escaping the struggle against the reaper to be forever in her arms and she dreams of a big black cat with a fiddle while a man on the moon plays the world’s smallest violin just for her little Amerikanski. No, that’s just a romantic little literary device. He dreams of her and she dreams of nothing at all. Nothing at all she will ever, ever talk about to a man. And that nothingness is subjective, but not the objective of her “inebriations”.
A good night for Kawa is not to dream at all; his dreams are clusters nightmares. She has thus rendered him peaceful. A good night for Dasha is to drink and dance until the night is a blur of happy smiling, swirling dance movies and escaping in a peaceful haze. He watches the moon and feels her breathing heavily against him. He is reminded of some great peaceful moment. Whether that is because a beauty lays in his arms, or something more ephemeral, magically real forms an underlying narrative, he cannot say.
“We will leave these bodies and make our way to higher ground,” is the last thing she tells him in primal low Ivory. Almost Aramaic. Strange that she speaks any Ivory at all. Being so fucking Russian and surly. And mad. And also quite Blonde.
She snores at him just a little. Makes unintelligible little cute moans. The last thing he thinks holding her looking up at the huge blue moon is that if some hideous monster or bandit came from the tree line, if bad men, werewolves, monsters or devils came to hurt them, if they sky fell out above them, if the blue moon became a meteor, he’d never, ever leave her behind. He’d fight on whatever level he had to keep this woman safe, to marshal every ounce of his abilities to deliver her from any impending strife.
It all felt like a terrific overpowering déjà vu, as if it happened a few, or perhaps very many times before this very moment. Daria sleeps indifferent to his hold or his guard. Daria has survived a nation of thieves to get here and scuttled through a den of vipers since arrival. Sleeping in a park, with or without “protection”, with or without a mattress or a pillow, these are not so high on her hierarchy of concerns.
Amid many other pressing troubles, the Vodka and his many yarns sung her eventually to sleep. The big blue full moon lit up the sky marking on the lunar calendar the end of an epoch and beginning of a functionally existential war for what will ultimately be the fate of this backward species. So much work to emancipate a mostly self-interested race of violent monkeys with space guns.
The partisan Kawa Zivistan, named such by the Arabs and Kurds of Rojavawho’s American passport documents say he is also “Sebastian Adoneav ” has also an Ivory name. So does Daria Andreavna Skorobogatova. Amid all the slumbering carnage of the Gypsy encampment, two old souls are reunited. Their breathing synchronizes chest to chest. Their beating hearts match up, and then. Then, there is no beating, no breathing and also no heart beating anymore. Two very attractive husks clasped to each other. As if they had done it so often, for so many lives it was now just a drill. To die and become reborn wherever and whenever they pleased.
Set in the Atlas Park Hotel in Brighton Beach, Breuklyne. You can rent a hotel room with the expectation that no one cares what you do there. That’;s true in almost every part of the civilized and uncivilized world. If you pay by the day, the month or the hour. People stay quiet. You get what you pay for, which is that quiet.
“Make another fucking dirty movie, blyat, or we’ll slow kill your fucking mom,” he said. So she ended up fucking nineteen guys in a series of movies. “I’ll kill her in front of you bitch and make you eat from her fucking corpse.”
In pre-revolutionary Czarist Russia a beautiful woman of the gentry, with a powerful father and a substantial dowry even if she were so inclined, was not able to release thousands of photographs and short videos of her pretty face and enormous ripe breasts indiscriminately to potential suitors, horny aristocrats and common serfs, and petty criminals. The technology simply did not allow it in the 18th and 19th centuries. And frankly speaking then, never mind honor and propriety and the status of women; it would not have been strategic for an adventitious coupling. From a matrimonial happiness point of view, but we are not in the 19th century certainly we are not. It is the future now. Women have no dowry, they have rights! Our gentry is far harder to access but not as bound by protocol and convention.
“Sometimes I’m highly classy lass, and sometimes I take off enough of my clothes over a smile.” That’s what Dasha’s private Instamatic declares. In the City of Penza where she grew up she was a brunette, but now while in America a meticulously dyed blonde. Her name at the agency is ‘Gold Fish’.
So she sits there in her modest Brighton Beach apartment, sometimes in suites paid for by suitors in the then Atlas Park Hotel or the Waldorf Astoria, the Benjamin or the Sofitel. By the hour she has to work, and she takes a lot of pictures of herself. Thanks to technology, thanks to the future over 160,000 men, well they get these pictures immediately. Sometimes with a selfie stick, sometimes on remote, sometimes she has a professional photographer, but it’s hard to make men do things on a long enough timeline without putting them in.
She’s never depicted of course with her john’s only where they take her. It’s sophisticated art showing strangers on the internet that you’re classy and upper-middle-class and unavailable for immediate purchase, but you like things.
She has a shape that wins her many admirers. 176/57 93-61-95, serious measurements to shape her like a highly erotic, but angelic doll, one social media account is more doll and one is more tits. But the modern man, maybe all men like doll and tits in tandem. It’s hard to say whether this venture is actually sustainable, but she is getting popular. It sure beats working. As a student, a model and lover of fitness this has been a good racket so far. She’s just 24 in this life. It’s sensible but not impossible to get the kind of man who will send a 100 rose bushels across town, to you know, buy groceries and pay your rent.
It’s hard to get in her head, that’s the idea. Her smile is a perverse fake smile, it’s not a happy smile, and you have to work real hard to have a good and winning fake smile. Often thanks to technology men in London or Newyorkgrad can see her rub her enormous breasts and do strange little things with her belly, or play with a cat. She does it all from her iPhone, links it into VKontackte and Facebook via Instamatic to two accounts. And then the offers come in. Most of them are just kind of disgusting. Well at least she can afford to fly her mother here once a year.
She’s never walked a European runway, that’s for sure. What she is a student of no one could guess. Her father thinks this is beyond dishonorable, but she’s his favorite daughter. And honestly despite having big baby eyes, and a tiny, tiny waist and ‘tits for days’ as she says, truly massive breasts for a petite figure like hers, and everything is real. Well suggestively is the color she paints with. It’s gotten her an international following.
Because that is how the modern commodification of flesh works, the horizontal voyeurism, but not consumption, of designer curves and suggestiveness. On SUPEyou can get more, shall we say intimate with Daria Andreavna’s form.
“You’re getting way too skinny,” Sergei Abromovich once told her, it was almost the first thing he told her and you have to be careful telling a woman like that she’s anything but perfect. “It’s totally normal” she told him,” and referred him to a website of Russian models, but honestly none were as slim as her.
Sergei supposedly works as an accountant at the Atlas Park Hotel in Midtown. Though that is dubious. He pays for her classes, her rent in the shared apartment, he pretty much pays for everything. He loves her too much to be a legitimate sponsor.
Now no one wants to believe they are exploited, or being manipulated. No one likes to be deceived, you want to get what you paid for, you want out more than you put in, this is capitalism. Exponential reward for diminishing volume of work.
“I worry that in your desire to please your clients you take on dimensions that are unhealthy. And I mean not say this so boldly, you must consider your own health and longevity above the peering eyes and thick wallet of the fans,” Dmitry Khulushin, her top sponsor wrote.
What a stupid, almost Ivoryish thing to say, she thought looking at this message from the Atlas Park Hotel. I am adored exactly how I am. In all my skinny and all my round. I will make someone send my favorite dumplings, she says. Or roses, or new victory bras for my big and beautiful, you know. Maybe Red bottoms, also a new puppy. New Years is coming, options, so many options. Hopefully a brand new life, in a brand new time and place. In a brand new life, everything could be okay. It would all be simply amazing. Should the impossible become possible, the untrue become true and the nightmare somehow transmogrify into a happy dream.
“I’ll tell you what though. Whatever they do, did, are still gonna do to me. My sisters had it much worse in the long run. Because I was eventually allowed to die. They both had to live with what our father was capable of.”
If I give in and I eventually marry Sire Dmitry the Oligarch I can move to the City and put all this, shall we call it; ugliness, behind me. He will be able to secure me. Stupid people say that money cannot ever buy happiness. But it certainly can buy one of all the main options. Thus, with many options you can get about as close to happiness as human life can get. But, when you are cold and hungry and have no green card. Both options and happiness are just abstracts. First comes security at all necessary costs.
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WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 