thirdplace posted:i don't really understand this beef. i mean, i see that graeber completely misunderstands his critics and says dumb things as a result. but i don't understand the part before that. is graeber wrong about the actual facts? i certainly don't have the means to verify whether or not there's some baby chomskitopia in northwest iraq.
or is it just making the assumption that transferring imperial arms to a anti-capitalist statelet in a war zone goes beyond risky and into impossible/implausible? b/c i would agree with that but at the same time am not inclined to be mean to people who feel differently.
the US has always supported the ethnic cleansing of Kurds and always will, and will always be be against any sort of Kurdish independence. What's currently going on is the continuing effort of empire to destabilize the region and facilitate regime change in Syria (gunning for Lebanon as well, concurrently or eventually) and will do precisely fuck all for the Kurdish people aside from conveniently getting them killed along with Syrians and Iraqis. As folks like Graeber have made obvious this sort of maneuvering has already been a successful propaganda coup in acclimating more of the left to these particular machinations of empire, prior to this business with the kurds there was somewhat of a resurgence in antiimperial sentiment and action and this has done wonders to swing things more generally toward total support of the ongoing annihilation of Syria and total strangulation of Iraq etc. You can bet your ass that the US, Turkey and the Gulf States wouldn't tolerate for a second a free sovereign Kurdish nation and Graeber is a fool to think for a second that Amerikkka would do anything towards those ends. hoap this halps
aerdil posted:
oh hey its me in 20 years
chickeon posted:thirdplace posted:i don't really understand this beef. i mean, i see that graeber completely misunderstands his critics and says dumb things as a result. but i don't understand the part before that. is graeber wrong about the actual facts? i certainly don't have the means to verify whether or not there's some baby chomskitopia in northwest iraq.
or is it just making the assumption that transferring imperial arms to a anti-capitalist statelet in a war zone goes beyond risky and into impossible/implausible? b/c i would agree with that but at the same time am not inclined to be mean to people who feel differently.the US has always supported the ethnic cleansing of Kurds and always will, and will always be be against any sort of Kurdish independence. What's currently going on is the continuing effort of empire to destabilize the region and facilitate regime change in Syria (gunning for Lebanon as well, concurrently or eventually) and will do precisely fuck all for the Kurdish people aside from conveniently getting them killed along with Syrians and Iraqis. As folks like Graeber have made obvious this sort of maneuvering has already been a successful propaganda coup in acclimating more of the left to these particular machinations of empire, prior to this business with the kurds there was somewhat of a resurgence in antiimperial sentiment and action and this has done wonders to swing things more generally toward total support of the ongoing annihilation of Syria and total strangulation of Iraq etc. You can bet your ass that the US, Turkey and the Gulf States wouldn't tolerate for a second a free sovereign Kurdish nation and Graeber is a fool to think for a second that Amerikkka would do anything towards those ends. hoap this halps
that's not what he's saying though. like, at all...
discipline posted:Whether or not you think that David Graeber is correct in witnessing a few roundtables and having someone translate for him and deeming, finally, what is happening in Syria as a "revolution" (this is key) there is no denying there was a significant movement of the beloved Kurds from KRI to Kobane to assist in pushing back Daash that the Turkish Army lets crossed completely unopposed. This was basically an invasion of Iraqi soldiers into Syria.
David Graeber would like to pretend borders don't exist in the Middle East (guess who agrees with you right now David) but it's actually a pretty big deal to send a bunch of teens from Iraq into Syria for any reason. But either way he erases ANY AND ALL MENTION of American soldiers and airstrikes, which are present in both northern Syria and Iraq right now and who actually "fought back the invading ISIS hordes" and I say this because putting a few Tomahawks into a handful of pickup trucks is the weakest use of the word fighting and the number of Daash pushed back hardly qualifies as hordes. And again, as for the word "back" let me remind you
There's not very far back to push here is there?
Being that close to what have been modestly billed by Empire as "The Most Terrifying Barbaric Threat to Anyone in Recorded History" will scare the living daylights out of anyone including the Kurds who will run when rumors of giant legions of Daash bearing down on Erbil start circulating. The PKK has little to no real presence in Erbil (Barzani's PDK has women soldiers too btw David) and just because they stuck around while the Pesh fell back, I don't think they're the ones who saved Erbil. Erbil is a huge city and full of Kurds who refuse to speak Arabic and generally despise Arabs. It's not a relative backwater like Ayn el Arab oh sorry are we still erasing Syrian authority? Oh OK, I meant Kobane. Daash isn't going to take Erbil just like it's not going to take any other Kurdish major city.
But to completely erase the influence that NATO is having on this area right now is obviously bad faith and borderline criminal.
and this
the Rojavans have it quite easy in class terms because the real bourgeoisie, such as it was in a mostly very agricultural region, took off with the collapse of the Baath regime.
This is actually for sure a pure lie and in fact criminal.
And this bullshit about feminism really rankles me because the Kurds have always culturally less restrictive about women than their regional neighbors but guess who else used to have that cultural predisposition? Oh that's right the Syrians and the Iraqis you piece of garbage. This is total revisionism and pure propagandizing. The PDK, as mentioned, have women fighters and their Asayish (this is a Kurdish word for Security and just means Police, David) sure don't have mandatory 6 week classes on gender. The USA has women walking around with rifles too and there's at least a 33% chance of being raped in that military.
holy shit this is more incoherent than what he said in that interview.
let me ask you this question instead: forget graeber, what do you think of PYD and their current situation?
discipline posted:what do you not grasp? he completely erases the fact that the US and PDK are elbow-deep in what's happening and tells lies about what happened in Erbil and how the bourgeois were "chased out" of Syria or something
ok. but I do not find the fact that the US and PDK (and Turkey) intervened in Kobane not very interesting. as you said these interventions were negligible and were more intended as pr moves and build up legitimacy for PDK and their allies among the Kurdish population. PYD has made it clear many times they are very much aware of this and was skeptical of the aim of these interventions, particularly the ones from Turkey.
And the pr battle is what largely graeber is talking about in regards to Erbil. he may be wrong at the details but what or who saved Erbil and who had the larger presence is secondary. his larger point is PKK scored a propaganda victory by just being in Erbil. I don't know if that's true or not because it strikes to me as PKK propaganda and he really, really wants to believe it and basically doesn't know anything.
And I don't know anything about the bourgeoisie in Syrian countryside, so I'd be interested in learning why do you think its a complete lie.
discipline posted:I'm confused at your apathy of US/PDK intervention. In either case, these have not been insignificant interventions - though clearly Graeber and others are trying to paint it that way by not even mentioning it. Maybe this is why it's not interesting to you or most people even. The US has bombed Kobane and surrounding areas ~540 times. The KRI sent soldiers and supplies and are still doing so. I was speaking more to the threat of ISIS to Erbil as being fairly negligible - the response was and is anything but.
This raises the question of why would they genuinely help Kobane though. It's still a bloodbath and maybe that's what the US and Turkey wants. To keep it going and only intervene when Daesh is closer to sealing it. I do not ever see the US and Turkey letting a PKK-affiliated quasi state or whatever to survive in Syria. A PDK-led Kurdistan, on the other hand, is a very different possibility.
A quick visit to Erbil will clear this up for you as there is the largest CIA base in MENA there and the sky is teeming with drones. Bizarre foreign capital pours in and labor prices dip because a significant portion of the population are living in camps. The threat against Erbil was used to shore up support of Americans for intervention in Iraq, as well as to pressure the USG to devote more resources to protect American capital in the KRI and to support the KRI more generally. To put it in perspective and depending on who you ask, there are between five and ten thousand Americans currently living and working in Erbil. Just Americans - not counting other Europeans, Turkish and Israeli interests. To ignore this dynamic completely is gross negligence on Graeber's part when speaking of the situation.
Yeah, I agree with all of this. Rereading it, Graeber's "this guy I met said to me that everything was totally awesome there for revolutionary forces. Wow!!" is completely laughable. He really wants to believe it and it casts doubt for the rest of his account about his little trip. On the other hand he realizes Iraqi Kurdistan is far too important for imperialists to give it up though.
As for Syrian refugees, considering that around half of ALL SYRIANS are currently displaced I find it just plain incorrect to assume they are of the bourgeoise. Knowing what I do about refugees from Kobane and the areas around it they are not primarily the bourgeoise. I'm sure that many fled, as they always do when conflict rolls in, but so does most everybody else, everybody who can. A lot of Syrians are living outside right now, and possibly you know how cold it is around here? The way he paints it as well yes lots of people left but it's an opportunity for the Kurds is grotesque.
The majority who ran from ISIS continue to be Sunni Arabs. As I hear it, another group that's fled from Syria happens to be factory hardware moved to Turkey. There is a class question here but we cannot divorce it from imperialism and we cannot divorce what Graeber is doing from how people will see the YPG/PYD as well as the situation more generally.
Hold on. Where did you get he was talking about the refugees? There isn't anything there to suggest that:
However, the Rojavans have it quite easy in class terms because the real bourgeoisie, such as it was in a mostly very agricultural region, took off with the collapse of the Baath regime. They will have a long-term problem if they don’t work on the educational system to ensure a developmentalist technocrat stratum doesn’t eventually try to take power, but in the meantime, it’s understandable they are focusing more immediately on gender issues.
What I got from that line is that he's suggesting with the collapse of Baathist authority in the countryside, all the regime's educated and wealthy allies and notables abandoned their property and left the town for the capital cities. He's correct in that this is an opportunity for a revolutionary movement; an opportunity that does not exist in Turkey or Iraqi Kurdistan, which is what he's comparing to. Nowhere he mentions the refugees were bourgeoisie anyway and I don't know anyone who would claim that.
He is avoiding the above facts to paint a picture for his audience. The question is: what kind of picture is he painting? What is different about it than the NYT in hysterics about a few pickup trucks who got lost outside of Erbil (a huge city of around 1.5m) and subsequently blown to bits? The aim is the same, but the audience and the language is different - neutralize opposition of imperial involvement in the area.
I think you are really reaching at this point. I do not understand how somebody would read that interview and be more sympathetic to imperialist intervention, unless you believe PYD is a pro-imperialist movement or have goals consistent with imperialism. Remember he's an anarchist and he's talking to an anarchist audience and trying to convince them PYD is not "Stalinist."
The PKK and its affiliates are in a delicate position in which they have to work to maintain a complicated balance with forces on both sides of the regions several major fault lines who are generally unsympathetic to encouraging their legitimate aspirations for national autonomy. I doubt that they would allow themselves to be simply turned into a Bosnia or a Kosovo (though one never knows) if only because Turkey remains both incorrigibly chauvinistic and a strategically vital NATO member. It is not the PKK who are being primarily criticized here, I think. Rather its first world anarchists and liberals like Graeber who wish to frame their struggle in such a way as to turn the Kurds into a sort of chosen people in a sea of regional polities that might as well be bombed by the Yankee because, Revolution gonna come y'know.
Edited by RedMaistre ()
It is really not surprising that someone with such a cavalier attitude towards the concept of international law and international institutions would have a blase-to openly supportive attitude towards American regime change.
I think their honest answer would have been more like: we want to maintain an at least workable relationship with the SAA, if at all possible.
But they knew Graeber was an Western anarchist from New York who wrote pieces for the Guardian, so.....
Edited by RedMaistre ()
The parallels with the Spanish civil war seem apt, because there's a decent portion of the left that supports Assad (or at least we can keep hearing they do), same as those that supported the government forces in Spain, but there is a portion of the population in the country taking advantage of the chaos to be even more revolutionary. Now their chances aren't good obviously, but shouldn't we support them trying? Pragmatism led to the end of the Spanish revolution, can't idealism have a chance in this one?
I didn't c&p it, but I'm guessing you mean it doesn't sound like what someone from our community would post. Which is probably fair. But seriously, I don't see how supporting the PYD is necessarily in support for imperialism. I mean, are the Kurds in Syria even anywhere near the top of the shit-list for Assad? It seemed to me that the government forces left the Kurdish parts of Syria when the rebellion didn't really take hold there, and they were really needed elsewhere. They continue to be needed elsewhere, so the Kurds don't needlessly antagonize them. If that's wrong then enlighten me. I do read this site to learn, and to learn how to more effectively self-criticize. It certainly doesn't seem like they plan to be puppets of the West like the Kurdish leaders in Iraq.
Lastly, what's with the vitriol towards his analysis? As I said before, definitely corrections if due should be made, and even communicated to him, but I don't see the need to aggressively attack him. For example, him mentioned all the capitalists leaving and not mentioning the poor struggling masses that are refugees doesn't seem a slight, just not particularly relevant (to his specific topic, not in general). Even if he is foolish, he doesn't seem to be a supporter of imperialism, or capitalism. Do we really need to be so harsh on a fellow leftist? I'd have thought all the split ism in western leftism was due to the nefarious actions of COINTELPRO, but apparently not. Unless COINTELPRO's lackeys still lurk among us?
discipline posted:Hey y'all what's it like this eve living in a world where fascism won
discipline posted:Hey y'all what's it like this eve living in a world where fascism won
stegosaurus posted:debt was alright. that i remember.
i thought debt was ok too, until i found out who david graeber was, and about his zeal for ethnic cleansing