Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Turks, Kurds, Americans: the Kobani riddle

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Turks, Kurds, Americans: the Kobani riddle

Click here to access article by Pepe Escobar from RT.

Escobar cuts through all the propaganda bull-shit we are subject to here in the US, and reveals some very significant developments in the complicated scene in Syria and Iraq.

In the young 21st century, it’s the female barricades of Kobani that are at the forefront of fighting fascism.

Inevitably there should be quite a few points of intersection between the International Brigades fighting fascism in Spain in 1936 and what is happening in Rojava, as stressed by one of the very few articles about it published in the mainstream Western media [as an example, see this post].

If these components were not enough to drive crazy deeply intolerant Wahhabis (and their powerful Gulf petrodollar backers) then there’s the overall political set up. ”

He concludes this report with a warning:

Kobani is now a huge pawn in a game manipulated by Washington, Ankara and Irbil. None of these actors want the direct democracy experiment in Kobani and Rojava to bloom, expand and start to be noticed all across the Global South. The women of Kobani are in mortal danger of being, if not enslaved, bitterly betrayed.