I did laugh but I can understand how views can evolve over time leading to something like this mess but 🤷🏾♀️
In the US it’s very likely that if you’re a leftie at least part of the shift was hearing good things about Bernie and then the Panthers, so as long as they don’t idealize Bernie too much now, I don’t think it’s particularly contradictory.
Bernie is the Western leftist gateway drug.
Öcalan is a healthy observation because Rojava is a contemporary movement with many vying interests. When people look at the history of Kurdish struggle they begin seeing how often there was collusion with imperial interests, how nationalism varied, how different states exploited ethnic Kurds. They can examine the faults and victories, how some groups had been excluded from the struggle (such as lesser representation of Assyrian, Turkmen, Arab and Yazidi minorities), the Turkish stance, pan-Turk nationalism, the Assad dynasty, and so on.
Reading about resistance fighters, I found many considered themselves Marxists first, or else Kurdish. I found how different the internationalists were from the YPG and PKK. Found the US collaboration with the SDF, the fight between US-Turkey-Syria over resources in Rojava, how or whether the Kurds are regarded as Syrian separatists, the expulsion of ISIL in Rojava, and so on. It’s a very complex geopolitical situation that anyone can benefit from understanding more of.
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I can get it.
I’m not American and my dive into left-wing politics predated the 2016 election and Bernie’s popularity, but I can understand why he’d be a gateway; I certainly (initially) admired how he talked about socialism.
For me I was quite into the PKK and Öcalan for a while, which I suppose is quite niche (from a Western perspective). That’s because, at the time, the Kurds were leading the fight against ISIS and I was more Anarchist-aligned at the time. Rojava is often touted by ‘less authoritarian’ types. Again, my interest in left-wing politics predated a lot of the online culture of ‘political compass’ memes and ‘muh authoritarian’ but I was initially a sceptic of outright Marxism-Leninism at the time, and being an Anarchist with an ostensibly living example of more libertarian socialism really elevated the PKK in my eyes.
Why isn’t Cabral on there?
