27 Tuesday Mar 2018
Tags
American politics, cultural birthright, ethnolinguistic co-evolution, ethnolinguistic cultures and statehood, heritage and land, Israel, Land of the Hebrews, middle east cultures, middle east politics, Native American
School of Media and Public Affairs (SMPA)
George Washington Univeristy
805 21st Street NW
Room 309
Washington, DC 20052
Phone: 202-994-6227
smpa@gwu.edu
Google Maps
–33–
14 Wednesday Feb 2018
Tags
authoritarianism, autocracy, autocrats, creation of political chaos, dictatorship, Erdogan, i24, malignant narcissism, New Nationalism, Orban, political narcissism, Putin, Reflexive Control, Ryan Mauro, terrorism, Trump
When Russian jets first overflew Turkish airspace in 2015, Erdogan stood fast in his refusal of apology.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/11/26/middleeast/syria-turkey-russia-warplane-shot-down/index.html
Six months later, he did what Netanyahu had done in relation to the Mavi Marmara: he apologized.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/27/kremlin-says-erdogan-apologises-russian-jet-turkish
Setting aside the Israeli story a moment, points of leverage may have involved the “Turkish Stream” energy project, a piece of “realpolitik”, and an appeal to the narcissistic concept of cultural leadership and state in which the “Great Leader” is the embodiment of the living state concept _and entitled_ to aggrandizement and glory without limit (or, clinically, “unlimited narcissistic supply). Putin’s vision appears to me to be that of the medieval world sustained with raw power put in place of democracy.
The look of the mode — big palaces, nepotism on a royal scale, confusion in relation to the boundaries of person and state (and the state’s treasury) — marks the medieval mind and related revanche.
Men like Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Erdogan, Orban may consider true popular democratic government as impeding their own authority, sovereignty, and will. While the term “autocrat” sounds quite bureaucratic, similar concepts — caliph, emperor, king, sultan — fit these guys.
Because we know of the “Moscow Apartment Bombings” and that Russia has been arming the Taliban in Afghanistan — and there’s more back there with Zawahiri and others — it may not be too far fetched to suggest that Moscow has manipulated terrorism to induce in struck targets a predictable patriotic new nationalism and that “the terrorists” — ISIS or PKK — now provide a platform for conflict, all against all, and without end. Where Putin has held sway, he has turned back history’s clock.
Our President Trump has had no issues bearing and wearing the mantle of authority, but it would be facile to say he hasn’t had some issues with the “Estates” of a matured democracy. In that regard, he may fit the world to which Putin has wished to return the world.
Inspiration for the above note:
–33–
16 Saturday Dec 2017
Tags
2014, bereavement, madness, Pakistan, Pakistan's Blackest Day, Peshawar Army School Massacre, Taliban
Verbatim from source but redacted to spare the family a perhaps too broad and tragic notoriety: “We Remember Army Public School Incident December 16, The pain is endless. Mother of Shaheed ______ (APSACS Student) ______ was the only son of his parents. After his death in APS massacre , his mother used to visit his School for 3 Months and waited for his son to come out till packup time.When all the students left the school she used to cry and shout for his son to come back! Now she has been tied with chains so that she can’t go out to find his martyred son.. Their pain is endless.. May Allah give them patience. Ameeen. She lost her mint. The psychological effects.”
Killed: 144 (minimum as reports vary)
Predominant Age: 12-16.
By Obaid Raza (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
BBC News. “Pakistan School Massacre”. Multiple entries.
Briggs, Billy. “Remembering the Peshawar School Massacre.” Al Jazeera, December 16, 2015.
Wikipedia. “2014 Peshawar School Massacre”.
BBC News. “Pakistan Taliban: Peshawar School Attack Leaves 141 Dead.” December 16, 2014.
NBC News. “Pakistan School Massacre.” Multiple entries.
Pakistan’s Black Date appears set in myriad videos — news reports, memorials, reenactments.
What is too little?
What is too much?
And what has one to add to so heinous a crime — some “big men” armed to the teeth creeping through a cemetery to climb over a wall and enter a sanctuary for decent education with the sole purpose of butchering children in their studies?
These are my three select — a day-after news report; a reenactment with a song (English in subtitles); and a children’s memorial:
–33–
23 Thursday Nov 2017
In the above slideshow, Khaliji Qaumi Ittehad tribesmen in Quetta, Pakistan protest the threat of expulsion to Afghanistan posed by Pakistan’s government and military, according to BackChannels’ contact in the region.
Source claims that Pashtun tribes have been ordered to produce “proof of locality” before 1976, and toward that end, the state has sent out notices ordering tribesmen to submit national identity cards to the government. In response, the Khaliji Qaumi Ittehad have undertaken a hunger strike — after four days of that, readers may see that the ambulance had to show up to rescue those who had essentially victimized themselves through that action — and related street protest.
Here follow a few excerpts from correspondence (lightly edited for readability and sense).
Historically all Pakhtoon are Afghans.
There were Indians and Afghans in the region.
Then the so called Durand Line was drawn in1893 that divided the Afghans…After Pakistan csme into being Pakhtoon on their own land were living. Thus assumed the nationality of Pakistan which they heartedly not accept today. However with passage of time they merged into Pakistani society. Now they are seen as alien people .
The Afghan migrated after Soviet invasion is also the factor.
It is hard for Pakistani government to differentiate between immigrants and original Pakistani tribes.
Today, as a whole, they treated like animals
Wars make a mess of cultural and social relationships, and the Durand Line region separating Afghanistan from Pakistan while sitting astride the Pashtun tribal belt has seen more than its fair share of disruption through criminal and martial violence.
Above: “This is the form of chic (STET) which requires attestation of two grade 17 govt officers. Which is hard to find two officers.”
Below: “Now despite completing the process they are still denied.”
This note comes from earlier in the conversation:
If one marry to lady, the lady also has to prove herself Pakistan and provide the evidence of 1970.
In number of families the male is considered Pakistani but his wife with so many children is declared Afghani.
Most of tribesmen have stopped visiting bazaars or the main cities and remain at hope to avoid the danger of arrest by the state security agencies
A web search for the Khiliji Qaumi Ittehad will show that the tribe has been active in anti-western protests involving drone strikes as well as anger with former General and President Pervez Musharraf, and one may find online images of the same burning American and British flags.
Source notes the following:
Pakistan still think Taliban is strategic assets for it. Pakhtoons are so dependent economically that even I can recruit thousands for any ill cause for very less amount. Most of low rank Taliban fight it as holy war while their high ranks fight for money.
We the local see that war is the most costly exercise. If they are not supported by state, they would never be able to challenge the mighty NETO — by state supported Taliban I mean those fighting in Afghanistan and those killing the Pakhtoons.
Madrassah is main factor for cheap recruitment. in madrassah they r only taught religious text. They live in a controlled environment. I live in the area where Taliban are kept and trained.
BackChannels shared David Satter’s coverage of the false-flag Moscow Apartment Bombings with the source, who responded, “Wow Putin and our rulers are so similar in action.”
BackChannels would question the conclusion; however, here is the bottom line as regards a part of Pashtun tribal attitude toward the State of Pakistan:
Sir I’m hopeless here. How would we survive since we r short of basic needs and education. I know Russia backing Taliban. But the US role in the region is skeptical too. A country spends 700 billion dollar on defense and not able to defeat Taliban?
…
Quetta, the capital of Balochistan sees protest on the part of tribals live on their land even before the emergence of Pakistan.
They in all grounds of life were kept backward by state of Pakistan. They are economically poor and less educated. Since last ten years they are being deprived of national identity.
Now these tribals receive notice from govt of Pakistan to submit back the identity cards that were issued to them. Give says that the state secret agency has declared them aliens.
Now an organization of these tribes under Tribal leader Nawab Salman Khilji (STET) is observing hunger strike till death. It’s 4th day of the strike but no govt official has contacted the hunger camp. They may turn violent if someone dies in this hunger strike.
Their camp is at door of Quetta Press Club but receives no media coverage . . . because media here is state controlled
While BackChannels may relay the above testimony as regards conditions, it may not — or not yet — from its desktop independently verify all of the source’s claims. Nonetheless, comments on the depth of poverty in the region, presumptions about the character of the Pakistani State as experienced by “tribals”, and related beliefs about State — and American — culpability for terrorism would seem to ring true with other domestic and xenophobic mistrusts.
The Pashtun have been rudely treated in their remote and semi-autonomous areas, and it may be difficult for the earnest to convey a more accurate state of affairs.
With the Soviet / post-Soviet “toolkit” involving criminal activity, anti-western disinformation campaigns, and false-flag operations designed to channel political perception, it may be especially difficult for remote Pashtun to develop reliable conclusions about the political states of affairs that surround them.
–33–
17 Friday Nov 2017
Tags
Active Measures, agitprop, aristocracy, authoritarianism, Chinese and Russian Totalitarianism, dictatorship, Global Information Space, information space, information warfare, malignant narcissism, oligarchy, propaganda
The prompt from my conversational partner: “. . . to solve these problems, we need cooperation, not war. And the main question is why does the government not understand this?”
The response:
Paper, scissors, stone, and “paper” (money) covers and suffocates all beneath it while “liberating” those who have it and, perhaps (I don’t want to find out!), those who might believe themselves above it – or those of merely modest material ambitions.
My personal approach has been “Money Matters!” but is not everything; however, and this especially with our health care industry, there are forces producing polices I can’t field, and of course that inspires a yet impotent resentment.
Our government should be Christian, good-willed, and muscular (academic term “muscular Christianity” works in this regard), but it’s bending toward the criminals in the great mansions and penthouse suites, and I’ not talking about Bill Gates or most “plutocrats” but rather those who believe there are no boundaries between their perfect embodiment of the “isness” (I will find the word, literally) of their state and themselves. The businesses, the courts, the military and paramilitary elements, and legislatures are all theirs to exploit and manipulate on behalf of their preferred . . . associates. That’s dictatorship.
Let me see if I can find the word for existence as the authentic expression of spirit . . . .
“Esse” and “essence” were not what I was looking for but for an esoteric term having to do with the being of the thing within the thing. Believing in the singularity of person and state (as Ceausescu had; as Erdogan and Putin do) may comprise part of the messianic delusion suffered by dictators but unfortunately visited (with fist in the velvet glove, at best) on their subjected people.
I’m finding my reading of Russian history steeped in punitive control, and that doesn’t come with interest in “the masses” half so much as in the developing and sustaining of wealth beneficial to the image and power of the central figure in power.
On today’s Chinese and Russian totalitarian aggression in Global Information Space:
BackChannels maintains a brief bibliography of accessible and general volumes on Russia’s political history in the “Russian Section” of this blog. For greater insight into the authoritarian-patrimonial experience of the political culture from the 9th Century forward, I would recommend Richard Pipes’ fine history, Russia Under the Old Regime.
Punitive control: in geopolitical space and in the various ages of the “rule of the strong”, including for Russia and surrounds domination by the Mongols, the power to control space produces arrangements with in to produce wealth. Pipes’ — in the above cited volume — steps off with economic variance in the productivity of Russian land compared to soil fertility to the south to explain motivation for the social arrangements that would ensue in history and effect Russian political arrangements to this day. What Pipes appears to find essential — and what most concerns this blog — is the prince’s (or equivalent or greater in power) considering the ownership of property and persons the same thing. Worse — the test of sovereignty becomes the permit to engage in the wholesale destruction of both!
Now have another look at Assad’s destruction of Syria and incubation of ISIS as a useful foil and political tool (“Reflexive Control’s” little helper) as well as the very emblem of the worst of the worst of destructive forces.
Who has the control of it?
Moscow-Tehran.
Note: keyword tags are related this time but not directly addressed except beneath the category that is “Dictatorship” and its essential and unfailingly malign narcissism.
–33–
29 Sunday Oct 2017
Tags
Burma, Islamic extremism, Islamist victimization of Muslims, Islamists, Myanmar, political infiltration, political theater, Rohingya, terrorism
But not everyone wants to be sacrificed. When vigilante mobs and Myanmar’s soldiers burned down his village, Noor Kamal, 18, tried to flee with his 6-year-old brother, Noor Faruq. Both were hacked in the head by ethnic Rakhine armed with machetes and scythes.
At a bleak government hospital in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Noor Kamal shivered with outrage at the ARSA insurgents from his village in northern Maungdaw Township, who attacked a local police post last month. “We are the ones who are suffering because of Al Yaqin,” he said. “They disappeared after the attack. We were the ones left behind for the military to kill.”
The Rohingya, marginalized in Burma / Myanmar and ripe for agitation by Islamist organizations have been forced into conflict by way of the agitation and provocations produced by the latter.
As you read through the excerpts chosen by BackChannels for display and continue following the story, the image of the “poor Rohingyans” being placed at the mercy of Myanmar military may need to be modified by the barbaric criminality produced by those who have infiltrated their numbers.
Still, what compels Myanmar to use so much force against the Rohingya?
BackChannels would venture that earlier border insecurity and inability to defend informants and detect the Islamists for arrest have contributed to the wholesale response.
In essence, the Ummah is especially being “played” — manipulated! — by Islamic extremists who have learned how to abuse the innocent among Muslims to turn them into the victims of larger but also legitimate forces. This is the same model that Hamas has used in its rapacious abuse of the Palestinians to create the showcase of victimization while the leadership and patronage system make off with billions in loot wrung from global sympathy.
https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-east-asia/myanmar/283-myanmar-new-muslim-insurgency-rakhine-state – 12/15/2016:
The insurgent group, which refers to itself as Harakah al-Yaqin (Faith Movement, HaY), is led by a committee of Rohingya émigrés in Saudi Arabia and is commanded on the ground by Rohingya with international training and experience in modern guerrilla war tactics. It benefits from the legitimacy provided by local and international fatwas (religious judicial opinions) in support of its cause and enjoys considerable sympathy and backing from Muslims in northern Rakhine State, including several hundred locally trained recruits.
The emergence of this well-organised, apparently well-funded group is a game-changer in the Myanmar government’s efforts to address the complex challenges in Rakhine State, which include longstanding discrimination against its Muslim population, denial of rights and lack of citizenship. The current use of disproportionate military force in response to the attacks, which fails to adequately distinguish militants from civilians, together with denial of humanitarian assistance to an extremely vulnerable population and the lack of an overarching political strategy that would offer them some hope for the future, is unlikely to dislodge the group and risks generating a spiral of violence and potential mass displacement.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/12/asia/arsa-rohingya-militants-who-are-they/index.html – 9/12/2017
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-14/al-qaeda-urges-muslims-globally-to-aid-rohingya-in-myanmar/8946390 – 9/14/2017
Al Qaeda has warned Myanmar will face punishment for its “crimes against the Rohingyas”.
“The savage treatment meted out to our Muslim brothers … shall not pass without punishment,” Al Qaeda said in a statement, according to the SITE monitoring group.
“The Government of Myanmar shall be made to taste what our Muslim brothers have tasted.”
*
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/13/myanmar-rohingya-crisis-islamic-terror-groups-may-take-advantage.html – 9/13/2017
But not everyone wants to be sacrificed. When vigilante mobs and Myanmar’s soldiers burned down his village, Noor Kamal, 18, tried to flee with his 6-year-old brother, Noor Faruq. Both were hacked in the head by ethnic Rakhine armed with machetes and scythes.
At a bleak government hospital in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Noor Kamal shivered with outrage at the ARSA insurgents from his village in northern Maungdaw Township, who attacked a local police post last month. “We are the ones who are suffering because of Al Yaqin,” he said. “They disappeared after the attack. We were the ones left behind for the military to kill.”
http://www.mizzima.com/news-domestic/uehrd-begins-reconstruction-houses-rakhine-state
Myanmar has launched a project of re-construction of destroyed houses in conflict-torn areas in northern Rakhine state under a mechanism of the Union Enterprises for Humanitarian Assistance, Resettlement and Development (UEHRD), Xinhua reported quoting the Myanmar News Agency.
Someone always has to pick up the pieces — and the terrorists never do.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/mounting-evidence-of-genocide-in-myanmar-watchdogs-warn/ – 11/16/2017. Related: BBC – “Tillerson Calls for Myanmar Rohingya Investigation” – 11/15/2017; CNN – “Tillerson refuses to label Rohingya crisis ‘ethnic cleansing,’ calls for investigation” – 11/15/2017; Sky News – “Tillerson: Scenes of Rohingya suffering ‘just horrific’” – 11/15/2017.
–33–
26 Thursday Oct 2017
Alptekin, an ally of Erdogan, had already agreed through one of his companies to a $600,000 contract with the consulting firm of Michael Flynn to research Gulen. Flynn was also a Trump campaign adviser and later became his national security adviser before being fired in February.
Woolsey was a member of Flynn’s firm, the Flynn Intel Group, according to a Justice Department filing by the firm and an archive of the company’s website, although a spokesman for Woolsey disputed that characterization, saying he was an unpaid adviser and his affiliation was “loosely defined.”
Read the Whole Sorry Thing: Exclusive: While advising Trump in 2016, ex-CIA chief proposed plan to discredit Turkish cleric.
These events would seem to have complemented Moscow’s efforts to encourage Erdogan in his redevelopment of feudal absolute power in Turkey.
35th Annual Conference on U.S.-Turkey Relations. “K. Ekim Alptekin”. October 30 – November 1, 2016.
Arnsdorf, Isaac. “Flynn’s Turkish lobbying linked to Russia.” Politico, April 25, 2017.
–33–
09 Monday Oct 2017
Tags
capitalism, cultural annihilation, cultural defense, democracy, Kurdistan, PKK, secret wars, socialism, TEK, Turkey
The Kurds have also been persecuted by the Turkish government for decades. Gültan Kışanak and Fırat Anlı, the co-mayors of Diyarbakır, for example, were arrested on October 30, 2016 for “being members of a terrorist organization,” and Turkish authorities then appointed a custodian to run the city. In addition, there are currently 13 Kurdish MPs — including the leaders of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) — in Turkish jails.
*
While the Kurdish community garners western sympathy in its effort to survive both Arab and Turkish efforts to diminish and eventually destroy its existence, the fight between the two appears often to take place in the shadows and with fathomless ambiguity.
The “TAK” AKA “Kurdistan Freedom Hawks”, appear to operate autonomously from any Kurdish command structure, including the PKK’s, a U.S. Department of State listed terrorist organization.
Of course, one may suppose that for a secret war an intensely secretive military organization — there would seem no other option! — would fit with state adversary whose own aggression and transgressions were apparently masked off from general public view. Then too, Turkey appears to have chosen to interpret rebel reactions to its own assaults in the most gross terms: in the state’s mind, all of the Kurdish community is PKK (just as all opposition to Assad must be ISIS or “The Terrorists”), and the community needs be sustained bare for eventual cultural erasure beneath the Turkish banner of Islam.
Related in Wikipedia:
Certain academics[who?] have claimed that successive Turkish governments adopted a sustained genocide program against Kurds, aimed at their assimilation.[35] The genocide hypothesis remains, however, a minority view among historians, and is not endorsed by any nation or major organisation. Desmond Fernandes, a Senior Lecturer at De Montfort University, breaks the policy of the Turkish authorities into the following categories:[36]
Forced assimilation program, which involved, among other things, a ban of the Kurdish language, and the forced relocation of Kurds to non-Kurdish areas of Turkey.
The banning of any organizations opposed to category one.
The violent repression of any Kurdish resistance.
Wikipedia. “Human rights of Kurdish people in Turkey”.
As if the confusion accompanying a secretive lowest-intensity war between Kurdish rebels and a new autocratic and potentially fanatic Turkish state were not enough for the devil’s amusement, the rebel’s hero Abdullah Öcalan draws from the defunct Soviet perspective for his presentation of democracy as prelude to the popular soft “democratic communalism” that would preserve the Kurdish community and make way for a hypothetical cultural Eden:
That the solution to all national and social problems is linked to the nation-state represents the most tyrannical aspect of modernity. To expect a solution from the tool which is itself the source of problems can only lead to the growth of problems and societal chaos. Capitalism itself is the most crisis-ridden stage of civilisation. The nation-state, as the tool deployed in this crisis-ridden stage, is the most developed organisation of violence in social history.
Öcalan, Abdullah. Democratic Nation. Cologne, Germany: International Initiative, 2016.
The short excerpt from the book may be considered an injustice given the lengthier reflections of the author; however, as well demonstrated in Syria by Moscow-Tehran (with baby Damascus between) if not elsewhere in the post-Soviet sphere of influence, deriding liberalism and the solutions produced by the west to ecological, economic, and humanist interests needs must come first: the conflation of unbridled capitalism with the nation-state is treated as unassailable and the very idea of nation-states (and their boundaries) needs must go.
With that in mind, have a look at where “Assad v The Terrorists” began in 2011 and how the state looks today.
Given the usefulness of what might be a binding ideological cause — and who would not be for Earth and her People? — there would seem in Ocalan’s latest book the persistence of dreadfully romantic ideas already long failed and left behind.
*
For the record, BackChannels may suggest that all successful polities pay mind to cultural, ecological, and social issues within their purview to construct in law and physical fact the distribution of capabilities and responsibilities that may then create healthy and productive regions — ask any urban or rural developer or planner you may know about who builds “infrastructure” and how that gets done, economically, politically, and physically.
Also worth noting of the post-Soviet sphere: the littering of the globe with kleptocratic dictatorships that appear to offer convincing and sweet-sounding programs to their people while in fact exploiting the same in the development of powerful systems of patronage .
With the Soviet Union dissolved 26 years ago (Dec. 25, 1991), the true hearts of communism have perhaps turned — say as the Communist Party has done with Jacob Zuma in South Africa — to calling out the crooks among their own.
*
Still, must everyone wind up alienated and enslaved by by remote power?
Must all minority cultures — anywhere — assimilate themselves into disappearance becomes of some asshole’s fascist jones for one language, religion, or national purity, or political solidarity within or beyond his own area of influence and zone of control?
We should all hope not!
It would seem most natural for communities and person to seek for themselves good accommodations without reversion to criminal force where opportunity and respect may be considered as given.
🙂
BackChannels does not know how central the PKK, much less mysterious autonomous spin-offs like the TAK, are to Kurdish cultural integrity, but it appreciates for the communities representing the earth’s fewer than 7,000 living languages the idea of ethnolinguistic cultural survival and co-evolution. From that perspective, the Turkish speakers would be noble to leave the Kurdish speakers with freedom and security on the land across which their language developed — and the Kurds would seem right to push back against the forces of their own cultural annihilation.
Since 2015, the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been attacking Kurdish-majority areas in the country. … The clashes have taken their toll on Turkey’s Christian population, which is caught in the crossfire. According to a November 2016 report in The Armenian Weekly,
Entire neighborhoods have disappeared, reduced to rubble. The Surp Giragos Church in Diyarbakır has escaped the fighting relatively intact structurally… But the Turkish security forces have used it as an army base, desecrating the church, burning some of the pews as firewood, with garbage and smell of urine everywhere.
Last week, the Turkish government announced it was joining the war against ISIS. Since then it has arrested more than 1,000 people in Turkey and carried out waves of air raids in neighboring Syria and Iraq. But most of those arrests and air strikes, say Kurdish leaders, have hit Kurdish and left wing groups, not ISIS.
Dominique, Callimanopulos. “Kurdish Repression in Turkey.” Cultural Survival, 1982.
During Turkey’s war for independence, Turkish leaders, promised Kurds a Turkish-Kurdish federated state in return for their assistance in the war. After independence was achieved, however, they ignored the bargain they had made.
Months after the declaration of a Turkish republic, Ankara, under the pretext of creating an “indivisible nation,” adopted an ideology aimed at eliminating, both physically and culturally, non-Turkish elements within the Republic. These “elements” were primarily Kurdish and Armenian.
A 1924 mandate forbade Kurdish schools, organizations and publications. Even the words “Kurd” and “Kurdistan” were outlawed, making any written or spoken acknowledgement of their existence illegal.
According to Association France-Kurdistan, between 1925 and 1939, 1.5 million Kurds, a third of the population, were deported and massacred.
Human Rights Watch. “Ocalan Trial Monitor”. n.d.
There are State Security Courts in eight cities in Turkey, dealing with thousands of cases brought under the Anti-Terror Law. The definition of “terror” contained in this law is so broadly drawn that alongside cases of political arson and murder, a State Security Court may try respected politicians, journalists, human rights campaigners, and schoolchildren. Defendants branded as terrorists by conviction in State Security Courts include Recep Tayyip Erdogan, mayor of Istanbul, currently serving a ten-month sentence for quoting a poem that had been approved by the Ministry of Education but was deemed as provocation to religious hatred by the court, and Yasar Kemal, Turkey’s most prominent novelist, arraigned for writing about the Kurdish minority in a German magazine.
Öcalan, Abdullah. Democratic Nation. Cologne, Germany: International Initiative, 2016.
The Kurds, as individuals and as a society, must conceive, internalise and implement the construction of a democratic nation as the synthesis of all expressions of truth and resistance throughout their history, including the most ancient goddess beliefs, Zoroastrianism and Islam. The truths that all the past mythological, religious and philosophical teachings as well as contemporary social sciences have tried to teach and that all resistance wars and rebellions have individually and collectively tried to voice are represented in the mind and body of constructing a democratic nation. It was this reality and its expression as truth that was my point of departure, not only when I re-created myself at times but especially arriving at the present as I tried to re-create myself almost at every instant. In this way, I freely socialised myself, and concretised this as a democratic nation (in a Kurdish context), and presented it as democratic modernity to all humanity, to the oppressed peoples and individuals of the Middle East.
The fine voice from the Left would seem laced with the last century’s intellectual poison.
From a different source:
The religion of ancient Persia as founded by Zoroaster; one of the world’s great faiths that bears the closest resemblance to Judaism and Christianity.
Kohler, Kaufmann and A. V. W. Jackson. “Zoroastrianism”. Jewish Encyclopedia. n.d.
The tiny world wide communities of Zoroastrians are no doubt pleased to get any mention in Cif belief – even if it is only to provide alphabetical balance to a list starting with the Bahá’ís. Even those who take a close interest in the more exotic or esoteric of religions tend to have a vague grasp on what the followers of the ancient Persian (or maybe Bactrian) prophet, Zarathustra (Zoroaster in Greek) – born around 800 BC – actually believed. This is a great pity since even a non-believer must be impressed with the evidence of how the religious ideas first expressed by Zoroaster were fundamental in shaping what emerged as Judaism after the 5th century BC and thus deeply influenced the other Abrahamic religions – Christianity and Islam.
Palmer, John. “Zoroaster — forgotten prophet of the one God.” The Guardian, July 13, 2010.
As conceived or delivered by Muhammad in the 7th Century, Islam may not be said to have been an ancient — much less practiced ancient — belief or belief system. To say or suggest so is to pander to the very egoism of the listener or reader for whom the Qur’an appears to have intended humility before God.
At stake — and so often mentioned in this blog — seems ever a contest between feudal absolute power plus medieval worldviews and modern checked and distributed power accompanied by extraordinary pluralism and tolerance.
In the end, all of God’s children — our 7,000 living language cultures — are all on one Earth and together visible, all to all and to the All.
Wikipedia. “Human rights of Kurdish people in Turkey”.
The use of Kurdish language, dress, folklore, and names were banned and the Kurdish-inhabited areas remained under martial law until 1946.[7] In an attempt to deny their existence, the Turkish government categorized Kurds as “Mountain Turks” until 1991.[8][9][10] The words “Kurds”, “Kurdistan”, or “Kurdish” were officially banned by the Turkish government.[11] Following the military coup of 1980, the Kurdish language was officially prohibited in public and private life.[12] Many people who spoke, published, or sang in Kurdish were arrested and imprisoned.[13] Since lifting of the ban in 1991, the Kurdish population of Turkey has long sought to have Kurdish included as a language of instruction in public schools as well as a subject. Currently, it’s illegal to use the Kurdish language as an instruction language in private and public schools.
–33–
