Posted on 06/07/2016 9:06:39 PM PDT by Theoria
Billymark's is the most working-class bar in Chelsea, if not all of Manhattan. On a Thursday afternoon in early March, union guys play darts as both TVs air a CBS report on the early days of Syria's fragile cease-fire. A few minutes after five, Guy, 22, and Hristo, 23, walk in and we grab a booth next to a group of day-drunk FIT students. The minute we sit down, it's clear something is different. The two men are vibrating with excitement.
"You need a punch?" Guy asks me, as he always does at such meetings. He's asking if I need his dime-size tool to pop the SIM card out of my iPhone — to prevent it from being surreptitiously turned into a microphone. He passes it across the table, and we all remove our SIM cards in silence. Then we turn our phones off — can't be too careful.
"So the first thing we should tell you is we bought our tickets," Guy says. As usual for them, though, there's been a hiccup. The bank has put a hold on Hristo's credit card, suspecting fraudulent activity, so technically they have only one ticket. But after a year of planning, the moment is almost here.
In eleven days, Guy and Hristo will leave the comfort of their families' homes in Chelsea and south Brooklyn, respectively, and attempt to smuggle themselves into Syria to join the Kurdish militia known as the People's Protection Units (YPG). They will become the first reported American anarchists to join the leftist group, which is based in a swath of northern Syria that has been renamed Rojava.
(Excerpt) Read more at villagevoice.com ...
'They have been surprised to discover that the YPG, the U.S.-supported group that has consistently beaten ISIS on the battlefield, is, at its core, organized around Marxist and feminist principles. As one Army vet named Scott put it in an interview with Agence France-Presse, the YPG is "a bunch of damn reds."
Oh, look, Obama supporting commie scumbags ... WHAT a surprise!
I skimmed the article, and these sub-sentients haven't the vaguest clue of what war is. It would be funny if our Communist state department actually kissed him off when this Guy idiot shows up on LiveLeak in three or four separate parts, thanks to an Air Force drone strike.
My take on them is not that simple. They have no aim to conquer the world. They have shielded Christians and Yadizi's from ISIS butchery. They have done that on multiple fronts. The reports I read indicate they are reliable allies and they are good at killing ISIS butchers. Even their young women are good a killing ISIS butchers.
No, they aren't Capitalists (whatever that means today). But much of our Corporate executives are not capitalist either. They are Fascists who seek to use government to end their competition and determine the business winners and loosers along political lines.
Yep, the Syrian Kurds (YPG/YPJ/PYD) are radical leftists. Like the PKK, they follow Abdullah Ocalan’s philosophy of “Apoism” (they call him Apo). It has been compared to a Maoist movement.
The Iraqi Kurdish Parties (KDP and especially PUK) used to pretty well pull the Soviet Communist Party ideological line back when the Soviets were their main source of support for their undercover independence movement. Since circumstances have changed though, they now practice a kind of crony capitalism, even if they still give lip service to socialism. They are nationalists first, it seems.
So it is possible (even likely) that the Syrian Kurds politics will get more pragmatic, when they really have to run things.
Apo himself has moderated quite a bit, since he has been in jail in Turkey. He has become a fan of the obscure American radical, Murray Bookchin, and now emphasizes more moderate sounding local democratic decision-making (Local Control Councils), equality for women, and inclusion of other groups in governance. He advocates a federal system with autonomy for Kurdish areas, similar to the situation in Iraqi Kurdistan.
They still have a pretty strict culture of military discipline and political indoctrination, but that has been watered down a lot recently, as they had to expand quickly for the war, and brought in lots of people who are more nationalistic than ideological.
Being a “communist” is good cover if you are Muslim and no longer believe or you wish to convert. In Muslim countries if you come right out and say “Allah isn’t real and Mad Mo was a nut.” you are a dead man. If those who know you don’t kill you then the Islamic governments come after you.
Commies and jihadists. Damn. Who do I root for? I’m going for mutual destruction. I hope they kill each other with great efficiency.
A sadly accurate take on our sorry state.
Times have changed along with point of view consensus.
If someone had said this during dubya’s term, they woulda been flamed as a DUmmy Ron Paul troll.
RE: “No, they aren’t Capitalists (whatever that means today). But much of our Corporate executives are not capitalist either. They are Fascists who seek to use government to end their competition and determine the business winners and loosers along political lines.”
(Complicit Obamacare insurers, too-big-to-fail banks, and defense contractors prove your point).
Hope they like bathing in nitric acid!
I’ve often felt that if there is a parallel to history in Syria it is the Spanish civil war. Should we have done more in 1936 to stop Franco, backed by the Italians and Germans? Would it have changed things? We do know that the Spanish civil war taught Stalin not to trust the west and is one of the main reasons of the Molotov/Von Ribbontrop pact which gave Hitler the room to invade the low countries and France.
Let’s keep in mind that a large majority of the French resistance fighters that we relied on during WWII were commie reds. In the end, when they were no longer useful to us, many of them met their fate and suffice to say France did not go red after the war.
I don’t have a problem with using commie sympathizers to defeat ISIS. The Peshmerga are our best fighters over there. As John Donne and then Hemmingway reminded us, do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. The commie Kurds may find one day that it does toll for thee. War is a rotten business....
I’m not sure I fully understand Kurds, but what I’ve seen of them in the past and the ones I have come to know on the web are tough brave soldiers, they know how to kill ISIS, they have a reputation of doing what they say they will. So unlike most of the Muslim world. They also tolerate Christians and others among them and even risk their lives to defend those who cannot. What is not to like about them?
Sad but true statement indeed.
They're deliberately traveling to a war zone with no weapons and no weapons training. Oh, good.
each of them, for example, makes a point of telling me he is bringing a pair of wrinkle-free pants. "I feel like I'm going to test that to the limit," says Hristo. Two pairs of pants each, a few pairs of shorts, a few T-shirts and button-downs. Guy is bringing eight pairs of socks — Phoebe suggested ten — and ten pairs of underwear; Hristo is bringing fewer of both. They're also bringing cameras, lenses, hard drives, and microphones to set up their propaganda shop. Hristo tells me he's bringing two video games...
Words fail. Might I suggest, oh, I don't know, a water bottle? Some aspirin? A plastic bag they could tape over their heads to commit suicide themselves and save others the bother of killing them?
I highly recommend George Orwell's brilliant Homage To Catalonia for an idea of what these spring chickens are wandering into. Want to know what happened to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade? That's what happened. Oh, but they had some great songs...
The YPG is fighting some of the nastiest mozlems on the planet. More power to them.
I myself am a big fan of the Kurds and I’m really mad about how our government has been treating them. If we have to go into the Middle East again we should fix the borders so that they contain cohesive groups of people, after we level everything that makes modern life possible. When we blow up the mosques we should make sure there’s plenty of Muslim imams, sheiks, clerics, and religious police in them.
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