A Self-Critique
A self-critical statement on my work, in a time in which the liberal mask of the violent imperialist system is crumbling in real-time. To be read with an open mind.
Criticism and self-criticism are important accountability mechanisms in the quest for truth and justice. I write this text intending to offer a self-criticism, and to clarify my current position on a set of matters, having reached new knowledge and realizations before and after the original publication of my book “The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice”. I hope that this addition can offer some critical, further context for readers who wish to engage the content.
The book, first published in 2022 and written for an international audience, is a product of an eventful time, characterized by great and historic political, ideological, and epistemic battles. It expresses a political commitment to account for a decades-old organized struggle in a world in which anti-system organizing is repressed, criminalized, and attacked. As one author, I could never do justice to the magnificent resistance and the countless sacrifices rooted in the lives of millions of ordinary people in and beyond Kurdistan.
While it is indeed important to write with empathy for and solidarity with the oppressed and their struggles, one must always maintain a principled and reflexive approach. In the following, I address what I see as problems in my work. I contextualize my self-criticism with reference to trends in the realm of political knowledge production under contemporary conditions. It is not inconsequential that at the time of the book’s completion and publication, I held a fixed-term position (and with that, a certain mentality) at the University of Oxford, a site of intellectual-ideological generation and replenishment of imperialist and colonial cultural hegemony. I now write having left academia. Moreover, I write in a time in which the liberal mask of the violent imperialist system is crumbling in real-time - a global moment of anti-systemic politicization in society.
As mentioned in the book, 2014 marked the year in which Kurdish people, in the context of the fight against the so-called Islamic State (Daesh), entered global consciousness on a larger scale for the first time. In the period ever since, Kurdish struggles and the geopolitical contexts they inhabit have rapidly grown and changed in unprecedented ways. New dynamics emerged, many of which are difficult to comprehend or absorb even for those well-acquainted with this legacy.
In this context of war and chaos - nonetheless in a new age of mass digital media and communication and one in which moral, political, and philosophical concerns within intellectual production are increasingly subject to market interests-, the wider social and historical implications of representions of reality became secondary across the ideological spectrum. On the one hand, there was an obvious concerted Euro-American statist effort to direct and control information on events unfolding in Kurdistan and the wider region along geopolitical interests. On the other hand, a common desire to de-stigmatize terror-labeled Kurdish struggles at a time in which they came under global spotlight as protagonists in the fight against Daesh, a brutal group that changed the demographics of the region and whose truth remains obscure to this day, generated narratives and discourses (especially in the Anglophone realm) that aligned with liberal imperialist and militarist Euro-American frameworks, instead of challenging them. Many people, myself included, were able to build or advance their political agendas or personal careers in this new information market, as communities continued to suffer.
The colonized mind often constructs the global North, especially a perceived liberal face of it, as the ‘international audience’ it aspires to be heard by. Growing up having to justify the very claim to a cultural existence, I wrote with a concern to render histories of oppression and resistance in Kurdistan more visible, especially after seeing how radical, militant dynamics of Kurdish struggles - aspects that are fundamental to their nature and to successes-, were being deliberately left out in emerging accounts. I was often dismissive of skepticisms that I - due to their liberal ideological roots or class positionality - found to be in bad faith or detached from the realities of hardship and contradiction faced by revolutionary struggles operating in contexts of war and destruction. But meanwhile, more critically: for various reasons, I lacked the will, capacity, or courage to understand and tackle certain questions around geopolitics and power and to meaningfully criticize arising contradictions within political processes in Kurdistan, particularly a creeping proximity to agents and institutions of neo-colonialism and imperialism. I speak for myself here, but my case is also part of a larger collective phenomenon.
In the book, the sections focusing on Rojava/Northeast Syria emphasize the Kurdistan freedom movement’s popular-level politics, ideology, and history of struggle. This emancipatory peoples’ legacy, with all of its complexities, undoubtedly remains one of the most significant developments in recent regional and global history. Kurdish revolutionaries and organized masses managed - single-handedly and with great sacrifice - to mobilize to halt the advance of Daesh in different places in Iraq and Syria before states had even uttered the existence of the group, displaying one of the most magnificent instances of popular resistance and victory against fascism in recent history. Without the militant interventions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) cadres in 2014, unanticipated in most actors’ calculations, the Middle East would look very different today. However, suppressed social resistance histories and grassroots or left-revolutionary practice aside, geopolitical conditions subsequently contributed substantively to the development of Rojava/Northeast Syria into a relatively stable entity in a war-torn country. Without properly accounting for these, one runs the risk of misrepresenting world historical events, including factors that determine movements’ successes and failures in any given context. Omitting deep geopolitical analysis, partial accounts of political trajectories are attractive (and popular), but, ultimately, do not serve quests for national liberation and internationalist unity against global structures of domination in the long-term.
The US and allies have maintained a decades-old strategic agenda of targeting Syria. Over the past decade and a half, this has involved an extensive campaign of sponsoring an Islamist-led armed insurgency and other clandestine warfare and intelligence measures, largely hidden from the public eye, against a sovereign country. While mainstream accounts have focused on state violence, the presence of externally-supported, sectarian violence, later with increasing participation of non-Syrian mercenaries, shaped the events (and the state’s reponse to them) from March 2011 onward, sowing deep societal divisions and decimating the country’s economic capacities. The talking point that radical Islamist forces only later on ‘hijacked the Syrian revolution’ obscures the scale of documented destructive and planned Euro-American policy and warfare in the wider region (among other things, premeditated plans for foreign-backed regime change and territorial disintegration, which, as elsewhere, in addition to direct coercion, also involve soft power means, such as via the work of the National Endowment for Democracy or NED, for the engineering or co-optation of oppositions and civil society circles favoring pro-interventionist agendas). Similar to their backing of anti-communist counter-revolutionary paramilitaries in Central America and elsewhere throughout the 20th century, the US, the UK and other western powers, with the cooperation of regional allies, have historically recruited, funded, trained, and armed reactionary, mainly Islamist, organizations from Afghanistan to Libya, first against the Soviet Union and left and anti-colonial movements during the Cold War and later against sovereign states not under the western sphere of influence. The watershed events of June 2011 in Jisr al-Shughour, narrated in an evasive manner in my book, need to be reconstructed behind this backdrop. Given that this false flag massacre committed against (and, with journalistic complicity, falsely blamed on) Syrian state forces took place on the border to Turkey, a NATO country, a Gladio-style stay-behind operation to escalate is a possibility in this case. The overt side of US military intervention in Syria (following years of secret CIA-run operations to collapse the state) was presented to the world as an outcome of the decision to ‘support the Kurds’ as ‘boots on the ground’ against Daesh, itself a product and part of the war on the country. Today, by aggressively imposing sanctions and seizing oil, justified in part via the cooperation with Kurdish forces, the US and allies continue, in the name of ‘fighting terrorism’, their old project of Syria’s destabilization at all costs – Syria, as a country, being a military and logistical front in the regional resistance to Israel, a pillar of US power in the region. The case of Syria, in turn, must be understood along with larger-scaled agendas for intervention in the Middle East and North Africa region. These are not only military in nature, but increasingly employ population-centric special warfare methods to undermine national sovereignty and curate global consensus, with intelligence, civil society, and knowledge production playing major, inter-related roles.
People around the world have struggled and continue to struggle to change their conditions in many different ways. Wherever there is oppression, people will resort to different means to resist. At the same time, under the current global conditions - marked a.o. by cognitive warfare, facilitated by intelligence through mass data extraction, surveillance, and other deceptive and clandestine methods to gain aggragated insight into our hearts and minds -, existing dissent, struggle, and social contradictions are also occasions for foreign intervention. In other words, political movements and the narratives around them are at the heart of modern warfare today. The United States and its allies (other states, but also corporations such as big tech companies) dominate the realm of information globally. As documented both in military doctrines and leaked cables and emails, the means at their disposal – from ‘soft’ power and influence (e.g. ‘democracy promotion’, civil society funding, human rights and humanitarianism frameworks, media, academia, etc.) to economic coercion to ‘hard’ military power (including highly secretive black ops) –not only aim to impact the nature and direction of movements but also shift the terrain and terms of confrontation. While one must be cautious not to take such dynamics as reason to generally dismiss all causes and oppositional streams as illegitimate foreign puppetry, honest acknowledgment and critique of realities is crucial for intellectual and political analysis and action.
To return to the case at hand: I committed multiple wrongs on this topic. Firstly, despite new insights, I refrained from saying meaningfully critical things on Syria and the wider ‘Arab Spring’ episode, in part out of confusion but also out of a concern of being labelled ‘regime apologist’ or ‘counter-revolutionary’. People with critical insight and valid perspectives had been smeared or silenced for challenging the mainstream narratives. This, in turn, further clouded one’s understanding. Secondly, primarily concerned with defending Rojava, the smallest part of a to-be-liberated Kurdistan, a place that represents the decades-old labor and sacrifices of left revolutionaries and ordinary struggling communities, I psychologically refused to accept or tackle the full nature, depth, meaning, and implication of the by now one-decade-old relations with the US and allies inside Syria. In the attempt to center local struggle against oppression, I ended up downplaying the material impact of imperialism, a factor affecting millions of Syrian and other regional peoples every day. I feel the consequences of directly or indirectly apologizing for policies of Euro-American power in the region more severely since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, an unforgivable, western-backed genocide of Palestinians, ongoing at the time of completing this text.
What is more, this misguided, narrow mindset ultimately contributed to my failure to pose meaningfully what I believe to be one of the most important unanswered questions of our time: what really is Daesh?
Given the trauma that Daesh inflicted on our peoples, the priority of defeating the group came at the cost of attempting proper understanding of its true origins and nature. Similar to the wider case of Syria, independent intellectual analysis deeply suffered and failed here. The timing and way of Daesh’s evolution aligned well with agendas to re-shape the region. It would be naive to believe that the group did not coordinate with a number of states. However, even speculations around such matters were silenced or marginalized in favor of apolitical narratives early on. Today, a distortive official history is being written in European courts that, while claiming to bring justice to victims, curates the story of Daesh along state agendas. The truth, however, is key for any possibility of meaningful justice.
Writing in a risky political territory and not always confident about my knowledge and understanding of deep politics, I often remained (and in someways continue to remain) reticent. For example, in the absence of full ‘proof’ and amid blunt deception campaigns, I had to be mindful about claims I could make about the full role of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (or KDP, a regional NATO ally) in the Daesh genocide on the Êzidîs. Exposing the full truth behind this catastrophe and those who tried to cover it up from the start is on the conscience of humanity. This must be a collective effort (and one organized outside of hegemonic and colonial knowledge economies) since even touching on such issues is dangerous.
After the publication, I delved into the history of symbiosis between western imperialism and particular manifestations of violent political Islamism and have since felt the urgency of fundamentally challenging hegemonic narratives around the phenomenon called ‘Daesh’. Fixating, as I and other have, on the role of Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia in the rise of groups in the tradition of al-Qaeda in Syria must not conceal the role and interests of actors like the US, European countries, and Israel.
The Kurdish compliance with the dominant historiography around Daesh is a tragedy in its own right. The Kurdish movement’s discourse on Daesh and Syria shifted in some ways after 2014 upon entering in relation with the US and allies. Previously, the emphasis on how NATO powers and their regional allies empower groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda to target the region was more pronounced. With time, even as Kurdish populations continued being attacked by NATO, some political and military classes emerging in and around Rojava/Northeast Syria, at odds with otherwise rooted and proclaimed ideological lines, actively co-curated narratives that normalize the presence and actions of colonial and imperialist forces in the region, while claiming to protect the region and its peoples. Mobilized by the urgency of defeating Daesh, diaspora and solidarity circles (myself included) echoed these without foresight (and in some cases, people selectively took aspects of the newly-discovered Kurdish context as occasions to legitimize crypto-imperialist stances, often driven by Islamophobic, anti-Arab, and even Zionist agendas. This also created opportunistic patterns among Kurdish organizers and empowered right-wing and conservative nationalists that parasitized the efforts and sacrifices of left militants in Kurdistan, who are labelled as terrorist in the west and thus taboo-ized even among some activists. Unsurprisingly, given the levels of erasure of the rich and sacrificial revolutionary history in Kurdistan in favor of a liberal or ideologically-confused apolitical pro-Kurdish discourse framed primarily for the western world, all Kurdish struggle is today met with suspicion among some anti-imperialists. Conveniently, valid criticisms are often tainted by defeatism and existing anti-Kurdish chauvinism, but this discussion is beyond the scope of this text).
The ongoing Turkish military campaigns and occupations in Rojava/Northern Syria (and Northern and Southern Kurdistan) raise a real question: what else should have been done? Peoples struggling for survival, surrounded by hostile forces, indeed do not have the luxury of picking their allies in this world. I do not have a clear answer to this. However, there is a deeper moral-philosophical point here related to truth, power, and historical consciousness. Not in the position of having to decide over the fate of millions under fire, people claiming to be knowledge producers do owe intellectual responsibility. Even well-intentioned people who are deeply affected by the massacres in the region and have lost comrades and loved-ones to attacks by the Turkish state and Daesh should acknowledge the ultimate consequences of certain discourses and material relations. Narratives create perceptions of truth, with real-life impact on populations far beyond one’s immediate community and time – indeed, they affect people’s ability to act politically. They make the world.
My own emotional, political, and professional attachments prevented me from more principled and courageous analysis (including, a.o., questions around the contradictions of struggling for non-state liberation in a context of full-scale imperialist and capitalist aggression on national sovereignty in the region). I used to see the ‘co-optation’ of the image of Kurdish women fighters, something I critiqued since 2014, as a mix of Orientalism and perception management to erase the Kurdistan freedom movement’s emancipatory legacy. However, this aside, a deeper function and aim of this political media tactic was to revive the dead idea of the US as a benevolent actor in the region in the aftermath of the murderous wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and to divert focus away from the deep and old relations that European countries, the US, and other NATO allies historically upheld with fascist and reactionary groups and oppressive regimes as assets. In the precarious pursuit of short-term stability, little was meaningfully done to protect the legacy of women guerrillas from such levels of commodification. In a tragic twist of history, and at odds with the principles with which many martyrs took up the fight, the most powerful and meaningful symbol in the fight against Daesh fascism became the most attractive cover for the latter’s roots in the hands of the dominant history-writers. The surrender of the historic question of the emergence, rise, and true nature of Daesh to the world of states, intelligence services, mainstream media, and think tanks funded by NATO and Gulf states, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces’ compromised rhetoric around ‘fighting global terrorism on behalf of humanity together with our allies’ are an injustice to the people, who suffer from and die fighting against Daesh and similar groups and in the many wars and occupations plaguing the region.
Such collapse of references for meaning, value, and purpose is a historic disaster on the moral and spiritual level. Moreover, politically-motivated intellectual laziness or complicity, even if driven by a desire to support particular causes or create hope and solidarity, more generally affect our knowledge and awareness about key events and developments, and with that, our ability to act in the world with informed political consciousness. For instance, that mainstream mediatic and academic descriptions of the set of events and dynamics framed as the ‘Arab Spring’ did not account for hegemonic powers’ deep geostrategic interests and interventions in Western Asia and North Africa reflects a larger tendency in representations and discussions in the Anglophone world around popular mobilizations, no matter how shortlived or thin (especially in countries of interest to western hegemony): the feverish overamplification of transient people power instances - often marked by attributing photogenic images and symbolic moments with immense agency, profound meaning, and romantic historical significance -, over deeper levels and actors of politics and history. The prioritization of discourse and aesthetics over material analysis (and politically, visibility over actual organized-ness and capacity) is a major contributor in the perception pollution through information overflow that society is subjected to in the mass communication age. A more critical understanding of how protests, uprisings, social movements, and revolutions (the investment in biased characterizations of ephemeral mobilizations prematurely and distortively as ‘revolution’ or ‘revolutionary’ is not just an analytical question or theoretical debate) are represented for geopolitical gain by external states (that themselves repress domestic dissent) and institutions close to them (especially media, academia, and think tanks) is necessary, especially as sophisticated and population-centric forms of special warfare, including psychological operations, become more effective and dangerous with new technologies like artificial intelligence. In any case, honest and sober analysis is necessary for those who believe in genuine liberationist change through principle and serious organization. Meaningful transformation in the sense of system change does not happen just because people get platformed to construct and circulate exciting fantasies that do not match reality. Distorting the truth cannot help political struggle.
Months after the original publication of this book, protests and uprisings erupted in Rojhelat (Eastern Kurdistan) and Iran after the death of Jîna Amînî, a young Kurdish woman who had been detained by the ‘morality police’ for not complying with the patriarchal dress code imposed by the Islamic regime. Soon, a decades-old slogan of the revolutionary Kurdish women’s movement ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadî’, chanted during her funeral, traveled around the world. Very quickly, however, these words - a product of the resistance experience of thousands of terror-labelled guerrillas, political prisoners, and revolutionary organizers, many of whom had died in the fight against the second-largest NATO army – was used as a decoy in the hands of Persian monarchists and other elites and NATO states and regional allies who could not care less about struggles of ordinary people but pursue, as elsewhere, strategies of regime change at all cost, even gambling with the collapse of countries, civil war, and regional chaos. The flagrant emptying of the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-systemic philosophy and collective practice embedded in the slogan’s legacy was deliberately crafted and directed on an international scale. Some of the Euro-American establishment figures that shed crocodile tears for women in Iran are among the fiercest backers of Israel’s genocide, which is also a femicidal one.
Such dynamics demonstrate the need for ideological vigilance, clarity, and self-defense in a spirit of internationalism. None of this diminishes the countless people in the region and around the world, who, daily, risk their lives to fight for justice and liberation. On the contrary, honesty around the abovementioned issues is a political and moral duty, as people seek and build unity of struggles around the world. There can be no doubt about the fact that radical change is necessary in the face of oppression, but how and on whose terms? The amplification of particular struggles – regardless of their nature, moral integrity, or capacity – at certain times by global powers is never cost-free. Top-down surgical, temporary and tactical decisions from the imperial core regarding local contexts always come at the expense of the possibility of wider liberation from the dominant capitalist system on a global scale. What is more, in addition to dependency on foreign actors, they often create deep and vulgar divisions among people at the cost of the prospect of independent or sustainable solutions, from autonomous indigenous struggle to regional solidarity or dialogue. At a time in which reckless lobbying for foreign-sponsored regime change even at the risk of war and destruction is normalized as political activism, it is important to fight defeatism-driven discord and insist on principled processes and perspectives that stand for the idea that, ultimately, people must be able to live together in peace and justice and look each other in the eye still - of course, based on freedom for all.
In this sense, I hope that readers will not romanticize Kurdistan – or any place for that matter - as an already-liberated zone or ‘case’ to be in solidarity with, but rather, approach it with complexity, as one of many entangled sites of struggle in the world, a place with contradiction. Liberation, as Kurdish revolutionaries often stress, is based on permanent struggle, even within the struggle, even within the self. Our ability to truly believe in and commit to the idea that it is possible to transform conditions in the world depends on our capacity and will to fully and seriously grasp the violence and deceptions that organize the world. This means struggling against make-believe attitudes among ourselves. This is a duty to all of those who have fallen on the path of resistance. I hereby take responsibility for my own wrongs in this regard.
Now, a final point about the politics and morality of knowledge production given the world of the present and the one to come:
Idealistic about the power of education and research, I have long been genuinely unaware of the extent to which counter-insurgency concepts penetrate the tissue of information production with the aim of social and political pacification. As I see more plainly now, honest descriptions of reality are impossible under the shadow and influence of imperialist state propaganda – inevitable especially in places like Oxford and other institutions that are invested in the arms industry and entangled with government, the military, intelligence, and capitalist accumulation. The so-called ‘academic literature’, i.e. the body of vetted written work, developed mainly by middle-class liberals invested in structures of western power, often creates more confusion than clarity. Over-investment in it, coupled with an ideologically-motivated refusal to engage with popular anti-systemic theories developed in the resistance against the forces of oppression, inevitably reinforces passive, liberal worldviews (and lifestyles) even among those scholars that fashion themselves as critical. Moreover, as academics like to think of themselves as critical, complex thinkers, they are often less likely to accept the influence of total information warfare on their understandings of the world. Serious and sensitive questions around deep state politics are usually anxiously avoided, ridiculed, or swept under the carpet. A more rigorous grappling with the ways in which the world is organized would profoundly shake the fundaments of the western academy, and so, psychologically clinging onto conventional arguments and discourses is the safer option for one’s individual career. I regret that I witnessed a period of ideological assimilation and pacification within my own self; enchanted with and distracted by aesthetically pleasant word acrobatics, I partially surrendered my perception of the world, blocking off newer insights and becoming less confident in my pre-existing, more solid anti-systemic perspectives, which I owe to different political struggles.
While trying to highlight an invisibilized resistance culture by writing about its existence in the mainstream seemed to be a legitimate option at a time in which nation-building and international attention were dramatically intertwined in public narratives, I am no longer invested in knowledge cultures that reproduce capitalist modernity in the service of power, at war with truth. In any case, the most important meanings of anti-system theory and practice run the risk of getting lost when incorporated into the registers of the dominant system. Peoples’ struggles do not need such validation to be legitimate. They already are, in the eyes of millions. I no longer want to be part of an intellectual class that, wittingly or unwittingly, aligns with colonial and imperialist agendas while claiming to produce (materially inconsequential) anti-capitalist critique. I should have known better to begin with. As put forward by revolutionaries in Kurdistan and elsewhere, liberationist knowledge production should not serve to appeal to or appease systems of power. It should enlighten, galvanize, and activate people, not pacify them. And in any case, it is generated inside active struggle, not merely passively in ivory towers. Now more than ever, it is important to build autonomous research and education, outside the system, in addition to sovereign university infrastructures in the global South.
In this spirit, with a renewed commitment to knowledge and truth, I commemorate my immortal comrade Nagihan Akarsel (Zîlan), a revolutionary people’s educator and militant, who was assassinated on the orders of the Turkish intelligence in Silêmanî on October 4, 2022. Her light, courage, stance, and devotion to radically transforming the world are seeds for the struggle for freedom in our lifetime.
Thanks to those who contributed to this text with their perspectives and comments.