Did you know: Opening a nice big can of whoop-ass on Islamic State in Kobane, Syria in 2015-6 was a threat to world order, apparently. International terrorism is everywhere except at centres of hegemonic imperial power, according to imperial power structures; we have to bring our A-Game against terrorism and be on it.
And then you are, and do. And you’re the darlings of the West sending Islamic State in Syria packing. And somehow, at some point, after the West is done making you their darlings, they make you their terrorists again. Huh?
We know from the last geopolitical iteration of counterterrorist conspiracism that it’s only called terrorism when Western elites don’t benefit. Ask Noam Chomsky. The “terrorist” label is no more supposed to make sense than then “anti-semite” one at this point; the point of a label, as every preppie and clique-slave knows, is not to rise above and resolve conflict, but to apportion blame in bad faith and typically worse conscience.
Applied to the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and its heroic inhabitants, this label serves the same purpose as Tough Love abuser psychology in any other context: to try to construct harm as a service to the victim’s own best interests. The Kurds are causing their oppressors harm by not being their slaves and knowing their place as brood mares for yet another empire.
It is a no-brainer that positive images of women in the fight for Kurdish autonomy are threatening to fragile patriarchal theocrats (cue the old joke from Peter Griffin to distract a theocrat before running away: look there’s a woman reading). It is hardly coincidence, then that these same theocrats, be they christian or muslim, put the People’s Defense Units on a moral par with the fundamentalist jihadists they defeated by an imperial hegemon who sponsors them through its minion Saudi Arabia.
How about that making yourself cause and cure of the same problem and keeping capitalism ticking over destroying surplus through military keynesianism and endless war. Terrorists are everywhere; they bloody well had better be. We have a hard time selling the imperial protection racket if people aren’t afraid of the barbarians.
Whether it’s extractivist resource imperialism or domestic abuse, projection and gaslighting rule the day; the abuser has to recast themselves as the REAL victim. Thus actual victims of their predation bring harm on themselves through the sin of pride and of rebellion against their predators I mean superiors. Palestinians had it coming by being terrorists. Women had it coming not knowing their place as care-slave surrogate mothers to grown men and brood mares for capital. The fighting Kurds of Rojava have it coming wanting to be free.
There are other issues at stage besides the fragility of autocrats and psycho control freaks. There are also the hundreds of billions of dollars in natural gas deposits in the sea off the coast of Gaza. The people with the rightful claim, who need it more than ever, are terrorists and subhumans, allegedly. Also Zionists need lebensraum. As do domestic abusers presumably; home is the cornerstone of the fatherland.
Where the imperial attitude towards Rojava is concerned, it seems like there’s a bit of a pattern forming. Maybe “Jihad” Al-Julani in Syria–Al-Qaeda-HTS immediately prior to forming government–is pissed at Kurdish women for taking up living-space as well as not knowing their place. Let’s not miss this wee factoid: the Syrian Government itself, the government that replaced Al-Assad, were formerly Al-Qaeda. And it’s the Syrian Kurds trying to live free and unmolsted who are the terrorists.
I bet I know what the real issue was:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx20n55yxrlo
Oh yeah and on that note also, the value of the US dollar has been tied to the flow of oil since Kissinger and OPEC agreed for the latter to sell only in dollars in 1973 in return for buying US debt (whoops are we financing our own invasions now). Nixon abolished the gold standard (hey who needs grounding in causality and floated the dollar on international money markets (causality is a communist conspiracy against the freedom of the individual). As long as the oil flows, the US dollar remains healthy because you have to buy dollars to buy oil. It’s in Two Treatises of Government commies.
How about that amazeballs free market, if it’s not subsidies from military keynesianism its subsidies from unpaid domestic labour. Boy how do these two grifts share coercive control psychology, I can’t even begin to figure. It does figure that they conjoin in the paranoid Othering of Kurdish autonomists. It also reveals the lie of counterterrorist consipiracism; all the other actors are state terrorists. ‘Jihad” Al-Julani is both retail and wholesale terrorist. Terrorism is only violence from which Western elites don’t benefit, so the story goes. HTS are no longer terrorists now that they pay tribute to the imperial core.
Rojava reflects the contradictions of counterterrorist conspiracism no less than Palestine. In both cases, the forces bearing down on them are balls-deep in genocide and ethnofascist, totalitarian ideologies. In Syria, the YPG fight Al-Qaeda in government, paying tribute to imperial sponsors and perpetrators of terrorism grouped around NATO–staffed from inception with quite literal National Socialists who fought for Germany in WWII.
These are the defenders of civilisation and Western democracy to whom Benjamin Netanyahu appeals as principal architect of counterterrorist conspiracism. The Fourth Reich is protecting Israel from the anti-semites who want to perpetrate another holocaust like the one Israel has been perpetrating for years now–which organisations like NATO won’t do anything about because they like them.
Maybe one of the most triggering aspects of Rojava for the various tribes of theocratic butchers and manics around the region is just being even halfway sane.
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