The debt to Rojava
In 2011, about 2 million people in the north-west corner of Syria successfully mounted a revolution that changed the world. Just how much will only become clear as this century unfolds. What’s beyond any doubt is that their audacity, courage and vision have cast a beam of hope across the planet. Now, under threat of annihilation by Western-backed former Islamist terrorists and Turkey, and with us once again in the all-too familiar position of looking on helplessly, I want to share exactly what this fragile revolution has meant to me.
I never encountered this movement through mainstream media. It would have been at anarchist cafes and via leftist blogs that I first heard how, in the desert, in one of the most war-torn and politically reactionary parts of the world, a group had somehow successfully staged a feminist, democratic and ecological revolution. This was lesson one. Revolution is always possible.
Since then, it has taken years of accumulating scraps of insight from friends, blogs, podcasts and the handful of books written about Rojava, to actually grasp what was happening here, that a movement of militant Marxist-Leninist Kurdish revolutionaries transitioned to an intricate new understanding of history where feminism, democracy and ecology are central. The second lesson was learning what this means.
Political campaigns pick key “issues” to campaign on: bread, land, freedom, etc. The interweaving of feminism, democracy and ecology is not like this. These aren’t poppy issues selected to build a coalition, but tenants of a totally different way of being in the world that takes you from scarcity, domination, competition and the State, to cooperation, freedom, love and the community. In this story of who we are, inevitably oversimplified, but deeply powerful nonetheless, the last 10,000 years of human history has involved a contest between two rivers running side by side, while one, currently stronger, represents capitalist modernity, the other, ever-present and in desperate need of our energy, represents democratic civilisation.
As a student, in his early 20s, I was fairly happy to assume that such a gorgeous idea would do the work of revolution for us. But the third lesson is that none of this matters without commitment and collective discipline. This I get largely from Bringing the Rojava Revolution Home, by Jenni Keasden and Natalia Szarek. When they visited the revolution as internationalists (we will undoubtedly celebrate Western internationalists like Anna Campbell in the same way we celebrate Orwell or Hemingway fighting with the Spanish anarchists in the 1930s), they learned that they needed a much deeper commitment to the struggle, one that could withstand conflict and hardship. It wasn’t that they needed to toughen up, but that a collective culture of discipline makes everyone stronger, that burnout in our activist cultures is a symptom of individualism meeting collective challenges.
The last lesson, which has never been clearer to me than right now, is just how much of our awareness of the world is mediated by forces beyond our control. In the last ten years, I have watched countless reports of the ‘SDF’, the ‘Peshmerga’, and the ‘Kurds’ fighting and defeating ISIS, but never once have I heard the news tell us why these people were able to fight with such conviction and what kind of society they are trying to build. It makes you feel insane.
It’s up to us to make sure these people on the frontline of the fight for a democratic civilisation are not ignored, abandoned or forgotten.
Here’s how you can support:
Attend demonstrations in your local area on the Kurdish Solidarity Network website
Publicise public statements condemning the actions of the STG
Donate to the Kurdish Red Crescent
Keep up to date with the latest news from reliable news sources such as The Amargi and @rojavaic
A few more ways the Rojava revolution has changed how I see the world:
good to see that Greg is back. I thought he had finally gotten digested