frandroid

The PKK has held its Congress and has announced that it is disbanding.

Leyla Zana welcomes PKK Congress outcomes, urges responsibility for a democratic future

I'm in shock. Clearly the entire Kurdish freedom movement won't just disappear, and has always skilled at adopting multiple identities depending on the circumstances. "The PKK" itself morphed from the whole to being a one component of the Kurdish Communities Union (KCK), which itself was the inheritor of the mantle of the Kurdish armed struggle movement. (i.e. the KCK is the "real" PKK, while "the PKK" is the Turkish faction hiding in Iraq, itself divided between the political wing, and its subsidiary the HPG, which itself is the "armed" group.

Here's a simple chart of the armed movement:


Here's a more complex map/chart of the movement, with links to other political parties who officially claim to have no link to the PKK (lol) but do have a fair degree of independence. Their members/politicans do routinely get arrested and/or deposed under false accusations of terrorism by Turkey (and in Iran, where they often get straight up executed, though it is a much smaller movement there)

Link to Wikipedia if it doesn't allow hotlinking to images

There's also a complex number of supporting political organizations in Europe, mostly in Germany and somewhat in Belgium, France and possibly Sweden. Amberin Zaman mentions business interests as well, and the PKK has been accused of being into drug smuggling before. So I'm pretty sure most of this isn't going away, even if Erdogan's demand was that "all related organizations" disband. And the PYD/YPG/YPJ/SDF aren't going away any time soon in Syria, which Turkey does consider to be an even more serious threat on its border. But the PKK had effectively lost the armed struggle against the Turkish state, which kept using it as a scarecrow, so maybe this shift will allow for political movement in the right direction? It's definitely been going in the WRONG direction in Turkey since 2015, in terms of Kurdish political and civil rights.

Anyway I have a meta-post about the PKK, Hamas and armed resistance brewing in my head, which I should start drafting soon....

(Parenthesis: Apparently Öcalan was allowed to zoom in at the Congress, and that clearly would have been a presence very difficult to contradict in the movement, in light of the absolute personality cult around him in the movement.)

It's been a while since I've highlighted an episode from the Pirate History podcast, but here we go: Episode 269 - Scurvy Schoolmasters

Do you remember when I was posting about Pirate Utopias, and being rather upset that some of the core trade that the pirates at Salé engaged in was slave-trading and kidnapping? One of the early incarnations of Libertalia, another "Pirate Republic" in Mauritius, decided to ally itself with a local tribe, marry their women, and all benefited thanks to the trade that they were doing, mostly in cattle meat for other pirates to stock provisions. Eventually they started selling weapons to only that tribe, and the pirates and the tribe started raiding one of their rival tribes. First they were capturing cattle, but eventually they decided to capture their women, and enslaved them in a bordello for the use of the local pirates and other visiting pirates. So we're once again very far from progressive anarchist fantasies of piracy. The slaves eventually manage to make something good out of the situation but I won't spoil the episode further...

I was kind of tired when I was listening to the episode and can't recall why it's called that, sorry.

A few entries this week...

Revolutionary Left Radio -
Modern China pt. 4: The Deng Reform Period to Today w/ Ken Hammond. This was a 4-episode Modern China history series by RevLeft Radio. An absolutely banger of a series, with an American guest, Ken Hammond, who spent years working in China and studying China. I particularly enjoyed the last instalment of the series, because it starts at the market shift initiated by Deng Xiaoping, demolishes the Tienanmen Square mythology (did you know that dissidents had killed hundreds of soldiers before the regime finally cracked down??), comes to the present, and then peers into the future. The "present" part discussed what happened in the 2008 economic crisis and the 2020 COVID crisis, and the contrast with the United States is very stark, highlighting why socialism works in China. Then looking at the looming population decrease in China, which here would create an economic crisis (or at least economic stagnation, as seen in Japan in the last 30 years), Hammond, without uttering the words, nearly summarizes China's plan as "fully automated communism". My heart swelled.


The Great Battlefield - Progressive Messaging with Anat Shenker-Osorio of ASO and Words to Win By. Earlier in this tag I recommended episodes of the Words to Win By podcast. If you don't want to load up on the whole thing, this interview with her is a great summary of her way of thinking and how progressives must shape their messaging to win their campaigns, particularly focusing on the current American election. It's quite delightful to listen to sharp thinking. She's a clear descendent of Saul Alinsky in how she's able to look at issues from a different angle to be laser focused on what's going to move the needle. Jagmeet could use some of her insights... She'd be wasted on the Liberals.

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An anti-recommendation of sorts here:
Everyday Anarchism - Q&A: Who Counts as an Anarchist?. I've mentioned this podcast before for its early Christian and LOTR episodes... Then I came to this episode where the host admits that even though he got a PhD in late 19th and and early 20th century social and political movements, he never studied anarchism??? And then it took him 20 years to organically synthesize anarchism on his own, until a student pointed him to... Oscar Wilde?? "But no one told me [about anarchism]!". Like, dude. Dude. Duuuude. I mean kudos to him for catching up since then, with 100+ episodes of his podcast, but holy cow.

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#PodcastFriday is a tag where people recommend a particularly good episode from a podcast. The point of this tag is NOT to recommend entire podcasts--there are too many podcasts out there, and our queues are already too long, so don't do that. Let's just recommend the cream of the crop, the episodes that made you *brainsplode* or laugh like crazy.

What have you finished reading: Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling. Well, I've finished the novella, I still have to finish reading to post interview. But anyway. It did not get any better. So much potential, such wooden writing.

When I was in secondaire 1 (grade 7), we had a French creative writing assignment that was fairly open, so I decided to write a sort of American detective short story, like some sort of Noir thing even though I didn't know this genre name at the time. I made such a pastiche of it that my teacher accused me of plagiarism, and gave me a D instead of a better grade. I was too flummoxed and timid to challenge her so I got stuck with the grade. That year in general was pretty bad in French for me because it turns out that my elementary school had decided that some parts of the French curriculum were optional, and my peers from that feeder school had to play catch up in secondaire. ("Mais ou et car ni or"? What's that? Conjonctions de coordination? I'm still not sure.)

Anyway, I feel like Sterling wrote that novel in the same type of pastiche I did back then. It's so wooden. The only good thing about it is that when I saw a reference to Fiume in Pirate Utopias, I knew what that was and I still plan to hunt that French book down.

Actually the public library has a number of books about Gabriele d'Annunzio...

https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/search.jsp?N=&No=10&Ntk=Subject_Search_Interface&Ntt=D%27Annunzio%2C+Gabriele%2C+1863-1938.

https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDM3957715&R=3957715

Alright, we have a carpool to Montréal for the Anarchist bookfair and we're only three people right now, after someone dropped off... We could use one or two more bodies. We're coming back either Monday during the day or Tuesday night. I have a preference for the latter but we'll see what happens. :) Including gas, I'm estimating a cost of $50 if we're four, or $40 if we're five people. Please save me from having to drag strangers off Craigslist into my rental :P

This dude had a shave before having his press conference:


Civil servant arrested in government leak case is an anarchist, has helped open infoshop (The Star)
"He's also a drummer with the punk band The Suicide Pilots, which has an album called Rock Against Harper." (CBC)

Oh yeah. He says Harper sucks, his government is vengeful and is trying to intimidate civil servants. But you know. Anarchist in the news. That's the news.

*** ETA: He's a former OPIRG member, and also a member of Books to Prisoners! (nat'l post) This article has a fuller portrait of him.