frandroid | Entries tagged with kurdistan

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.)

Okay no one else cares about this, but this was my recent podcast highlight: LSE Middle East Centre: The History and Development of Kurdish Studies with Professor Martin van Bruinessen

Van Bruinessen is the quintessential Kurdish scholar in Europe, who has continued to contribute to the field well into his retirement (he currently supervises a friend's post-doc, for example). At the inaugural Kurdish Studies Conference, his opening remarks described the evolution of Kurdish people and culture as a subject of inquiry, from colonial anthropologists and intelligence agents to today's Kurdish scholars, both in Kurdistan and the diaspora. It was a fascinating talk. It concludes with a funny anecdote about hitchhiking across the Middle East in 1971, how he came across Kurdish people and started getting interested in them.

What is something that's bothering you right now?

My exploding relationship. My massive ADHD.

What was the last sporting event you attended?

I think it was a Marlies game (the Leafs' AHL farm team) at Ricoh Coliseum, before the pandemic. I used to go on my own, get smashed on a couple pitcher-sized beers and enjoy the cheap hockey and the family-friendly atmosphere. If you went to a weeknight game and they won, they gave free tickets for a later game, and sometimes I was able to snag more than 1.

Do you enjoy staying at hotels?

Sure? I liked stayed in rooms in people's AirBnB homes. You got to meet a local who could tell you a bit about the place, or something. But then we got into a few rooms where the whole house was AirBnB'd, and F started wanting more privacy. She always needed a lot of privacy.

What was in the last package you got?

Zines. I'm low on zines and I've been rushing to re-stock on some stuff for the fall tabling season.

Who is/was your favorite animated character?

I can't think of clear favourite one. I remember liking Albator, known in English as Captain Harlock, but I think I liked the show's æsthetic more than anything else. They came out with a film a few years ago that I didn't watch. Maybe I'll get to watch that now.

If you could move out of your home country permanently, would you?

Moving to English Canada has always felt like moving to a different country. So I feel like I have. I could see myself move to a West European country for a lover, or to the United States for a job. I know a number of developer friends who took jobs in the Valley. But it's not something I'm seeking out. If anything, I might move back to Québec one day. The likelihood of that is going up.

Do you play the lottery?

F was dreaming of winnign a jackpot so we started buying tickets. I would sometimes bring her tickets home as a small gift. Myself, I'm in the "it's for people bad at math" category. But then again, some relatives won a big jackpot recently, so who the fuck knows. These relatives won their share of a jackpot in a purchasing group, which seems like a much smarter way of buying tickets. It doesn't seem to be a thing here, whereas in Québec tons of convenience stores manage purchasing groups.

Do you shut off the water while you brush your teeth?

Of course.

What was the last good news you received?

Getting hired for this current job was pretty cool. I might also make a big move in my life soon, it feels imminent.

Are there any projects or goals you've recently abandoned?

Repairing a relationship.

What are your top five books?

I used to read voraciously but the internet ate my brain. I don't really have favourites at this point, just some books I've enjoyed more. I used to mention Dune here but I've re-read it last year it left me wanting. Actually God-Emperor was my favourite book of the series, and that one I've only read once, though it's pretty seared in my mind. Maybe I should finish reading the series a second time. I'm curious to know whether I would enjoy Dune: Messiah more because it was really meant to be Dune's part II, and was also more philosophical, like God-Emperor.

Would you ever sky dive?

My mom did it at age 55. It was a life-long dream of hers so we bought a tandem-jump for her birthday. I'm afraid of heights but it's a balance thing, so once off the ground I guess I'd be fine.

If you could "install" three complete languages in your brain what would you choose?

Spanish or Italian. I feel lots of closeness to these languages for obvious reasons; one of these two would suffice. Turkish or Kurmanji, though these days I'm feeling like walking away from the Kurdish freedom movement, or at least the Toronto component of it. (Turkish because that's the true language of the PKK, or Kurmanji if I felt more like working on the cultural side of things.) I would have said Gujarati in the past (maybe even Hindi!) but my interest in that is now gone. Arabic.

What holiday is your birthday closest to?

Christmas. Between those two, F's birthday.

Do you use a wall calendar?

I looked at the calendar on my office wall last week, an art calendar provided by an indigenous education organization I donate to, and noticed that it was from September 2022. I took it down. I like the idea of wall calendars but that age is over.

First foreign vacation?

I don't know if the USA counts as foreign too much, and my first couple trips to the U.S. were more like gatherings with BBS folks. Ah! I went to France in October 2001, right after September 11. That was really weird.

Actually, now I remember that we went to Old Orchard Beach, Maine, when I was 6 or something. Back then we didn't speak English so that felt foreign enough, though the beach was like, half Québecois.

Do you watch any anime?

There's some hentai I find amusing but I don't seek it out. Akira remains a classic for me, Ghost in the Shell, Murakami... I think that's it. Well, when we were kids there were a number of French-Japanese animation co-produced TV series, I watched a number of these back then. There was a Three Musketeers one where the characters were all dogs, and my first contact with Treasure Island was with a French/Japanese coproduction as well. I watched the hell out of that one. The Cities of Gold, that was also a huge mainstay. (I cringe, wondering how racist/colonial that might have been? Even with a main Maya character...)

Do you prefer to keep a clean workspace or are you somewhat messy?

It's a horrible mess. Yesterday a plumber was here to fix my leaking toilet, he realized that the toilet's water valve was leaking a bit too, so I had to shut down the apartment's east-wide valve, which is in my office. Not only was it behind my bookshelf, but I had a file cabinet in front of the bookshelf, and a whole ton of crap in front of it. I think it took me 25 minutes to make space. And it was dusty, so dusty.

I might have to take all of this away soon.

What portion of your day is typically spent outdoors?

Almost none. Now that it's raining more and gardening is over, possibly less. But I'm turning into a zeppelin so I need to go out more. I need to buy a bike. I miss riding my bike.

Did you get an allowance as a child?

I *sometimes* got $5 for mowing the lawn, but rarely. I sometimes got paid for splitting and cording wood for my dad in spring, though I actually enjoyed the workout and was willing to do it for free. My parents preferred to watch me search through garbage bins at the gas station across the street to fish out cans and bottles with a return deposit. (In Québec, aluminium and glass pop containers have a return deposit so there's a lot more of them than just the alcohol containers). It was a busy gas station so during the heavy summer vacation days I could make $20, $30 bucks for an hour of work once or twice a day, which is worth about twice that much now. I think it was very cheap of them not to give me a basic allowance instead; I think with just $5 a week I would not have bothered with the garbage. My father was making good money working under the table at night on top of his daytime union job. I remember asking my parents if we were poor, because my father was so tight with money. We were not poor.

Fascinating...

What are you currently reading?

Murder in Mesopotamia : a Hercule Poirot mystery by Agatha Christie.

So this is the first time I read Christie in English but this feels just like reading her in French translation back in the day. It's another house whodunnit except this time the house is an archæological base by a fictional northern Iraq/South Kurdistan tell. The "natives" are unintelligible artefacts who the spoiler bad guys try to blame for the murder. This time the narrator is a nurse who was brought in to look after the woman who was murdered. Half the book is about assigning people characteristics based on their ethnicity (many characters are Americans, some with German roots), which tracks with random conversations you'll have when visiting Europe even today. The word "Kurdish" was mentioned once, and I don't think it'll be mentioned again. They're close to Mosul or something.

I'm kind of a sucker for this junk food.

( CW - murderous attack )

Can you believe that Canada's submission to the international feature film category at the Oscars didn't have American distribution 2 weeks ago???? Thankfully now the producers will have a much stronger hand to get a good deal than before, but still.

Documentary about jailed ISIS fighters is Canada's international entry for 2024 Oscars

I'm kicking myself for not looking at the Hot Docs schedule this spring because I missed Rojek, by Montréal Kurdish filmmaker Zaynê Akyol. And now it's Canada's submission to the Oscars. Her previous film, Gulîstan, about women fighting in Rojava, was phenomenal.

This film features interviews with ISIS militants and families detained at Al-Hol, the miserable prison camp that the SDF has setup in the desert after capturing them. The Rojava administration has been begging countries to repatriate their nationals. So far, only the U.S. has fully repatriated its people, and Canada has repatriated some, under secret trials or some other mysterious process. The UK has famously renounced the citizenship of Shamina Begum and Jack Letts, amongst others, washing its hands of the problem. Many of these people are still hardcore jihadists--some of them have been radicalized further in the camp. Some women have been killed by other women for collaborating with their jailers. Some of the women detained were Yezidi slaves, which were freed once identified, sometimes after years of captivity. It's possible that there are still some Yezidi (or other) slaves in the camp, bullied into silence. Many children, some brought to the caliphate, some born there, some born in the camp, are detained there, usually along with their mothers. It's such an immense clusterfuck. I find Akyol courageous to tackle this topic head-on, which wasn't even the reason she went to film in Rojava for, as discussed in the review below.

Une très intéressante critique ici, qui discute des changements de parcours de Akyol.

Une autre critique intéressante.

An English-language review. All three reviews and complementary of each other.

Trailer with French subtitles:

Watch on YouTube

Trailer with English subtitles:

Watch on YouTube

Current Music: Björk - Crystalline (Omar Souleyman Version)

The first five people to request it in the comments will receive 5 questions from me. (These questions came via

ioklopon)

1. Who is your favorite pirate (real or fictional) of all time?

I think Blackbeard's depiction in Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides is my favourite.

2. What's your favorite recipe to make?

Ohh, interesting question. There's a vegan belgian carbonnade that I make which is quite tasty, made with seitan and brown belgian beer. It's a bit of work so I don't make it too often. A more regular occurrence is this dish, Aloo Tama Bodi, which we discovered at a Nepalese restaurant ages ago. It's a creamy curry with potatoes, bamboo shoots and black eyed peas. Also recently I've started making my own seitan/okara sausages, and I'm trying different flavourings every time. It's a fun recipe to work on.

3. If you could have one dish ready-made that you could eat whenever you want with zero effort and zero expense, what would it be?

There used to be this falafel place in Vancouver named Desert Falafel. I think it was run by Israelis. Anyway, white people and definitely not Arabs, which is rare. This is where I had my first falafel and it remained the best falafel I ever had for years. At some point they moved to Commercial drive and became Oasis Falafel. They also made a latke pita, and if you wanted to be extra special, you could get the falatke pita, which had 2 falafel balls and half a latke patty. It was amazing. I miss it. The best falafel I've had in recent years is from Falafel Yoni in Montréal, also run by Israelis. But really, I'm a sucker for falafel (with a side of crispy fries and a can of cola) and could eat it very often. I actually did eat it all the time when I first moved to Toronto, as I was living close to Sara's Falafel on Bloor, and there a dirt cheap place that made a lemony falafel close to work, and there was Akram's (Syrian) with his tiny and uniquely flavoured falafels in Kensington Market. I ate so much falafel that year that I had to take a months-long falafel break at some point, because I was getting sick of it.

There are at least 5 falafel shops within walking distance of my place but none are top notch, so I don't indulge too much. Maybe I will next summer. I'm realizing that I should be having way more falafel than I'm currently having. Falafel shops that don't sell French fries are stupid, even if they sell awesome garlic potatoes.

4. If you had a 10-minute segment on national TV to cover any topic you wanted, what would it be?

It would be on the Kurdish liberation struggle. I find that most mainstream reporting on the issue is superficial. I know 10 minutes isn't that long to get into it, but that would be my thing. Or I would get into it with radical lefties who oppose arming Ukraine...

5. What's your favorite hockey moment?

It's funny because my parents weren't into hockey at all, but in 1984, 1985 or 1986 they put me in front of the TV at the start of the playoffs and I was hooked. There was this intense Nordiques/Habs rivalry and it was the most ridiculous thing ever. Back then we had divisional playoffs and both the Habs and the Nordiques were in the Adams division, as well as the perpetually bad Hartford Whalers, the Boston Bruins and the Buffalo Sabres. I think that first year the Nordiques beat the Whalers, and again a year later, but they didn't go further. But I recall watching these series intently. Then I recall watching the Stanley Cup finals in 1986, Habs versus Calgary Flames, and even though I "hated" the Habs I could only admire this team that included many French Canadians, including le casseau.

After that follow a long drought at the bottom of the standings for the Nordiques, resulting in first picks Joe Sakic, Owen Nolan, Mats Sundin and Eric Lindros, so I had to fall back on watching Mario Lemieux carry the Penguins on his shoulders and win two cups in 1991 and 1992.

Then in 1993, with their young star players (though maybe Sundin had been traded to Toronto for Wendel Clark already at that point? I don't think so but can't be bothered to check) and the returns from the blockbuster deal that sent Eric Lindros to Philly, the Nordiques were competitive again, and qualified for the playoffs. Their first round opponent was the Habs.

The first two games were won by the Nordiques, good victories, so everything seemed to go well. Then the third game came, started, and the Nordiques were on fire, completely obliterating the Habs. They were everywhere on the ice. Then at some point Owen Nolan fired one of his famous slapshots but missed the net, and his shot smashed the glass pane behind the net, and everything fell apart. It took something like 10 minutes for the ice to be cleared of broken glass and a new pane to be installed. That break took all the wind out of the wings of the Nordiques. When play resumed, the Habs finally got their act together and eventually swept the rest of the series, 4 wins in a row. They then got a lucky break when Mario Lemieux's hand was broken by a Rangers player, so the Rangers could beat the Penguins. Then the Islanders beat the Rangers, but the Islanders were also the only team that hadn't won its regular season series against the Habs that year, and they once again couldn't beat them in the playoffs, so the Habs ended up playing Wayne Gretzky and his LA Kings in the final. They won the cup by playing the trap, ensuring that hockey would be boring for the next 15 years to come.

Two years later, the Nordiques were sold to Colorado and then promptly won the cup (after acquiring Patrick Roy from the Habs, something that would have been amazing had that happened in Québec City, since Roy was from there), making me boycott hockey for the next 15 years.

Chris Kreider broke Carey Price's wrist in the 2014 playoffs and I'm getting somewhat sick of Rangers players winning series that way...

Bonus questions, also from

ioklopon, from an earlier post!

6. Quel est ton livre préféré (qui est écrit en français)?

Oh wow. Way to call me out, I don't think I have anything good to report. :P J'ai pas mal arrêté de lire en français à l'âge adulte parce que les livres sur l'anarchisme que j'étais capable de trouver étaient en anglais, en ensuite j'ai déménagé à Vancouver et ça a continué comme ça. Quand j'étais adolescent j'ai lu Ça de Stephen King en français, d'une traite, je pense que ça m'a pris 22 heures, et c'était une drôle d'expérience de lecture, être complètement immergé dans l'histoire comme ça. Comme la fois à l'automne 2000 où j'ai lu l’hexalogie de Dune d'un coup. Mais ça c'était en anglais. Mais les deux fois, j'avais l'impression d'être gelé (high) tellement j'étais dans l'histoire. Un peu plus jeune, j'aimais la série Les Inactifs de Denis Côté, de la science fiction dystopique pour adolescents avec un personnage principal qui était pas mal un calque de Mario Lemieux. :) Mon auteur Québécois favori est Mordechai Richler mais il écrivait évidemment en anglais. (Les souverainistes haïraient cette idée que cet anglo pourrait être l'auteur Québécois favori d'un francophone.... :P )

7. What is one thing I should do the next time I'm in Quebec?

If you mean the province, I would say attend the yearly Montréal Anarchist Bookfair, it's an amazing event, the booksellers are awesome, many of the visitors are hot as hell in a punk way, and it's queer/trans as fuck. There are also awesome workshops on various topics relating to anarchism, and a dance party of some sort. It's usually held in May but was held in August this year, probably due to the pandemic. I'm going to bet that it'll come back to its May slot. Don't wait 10 years to visit--the original organizers have moved on and the new crew has less energy than before, though they're still putting on an amazing fair. Cindy Milstein helps organize from all the way over in SF, which gives you an idea of the change. (She's an amazing person to be getting help from though.)

If you mean Québec City, obviously visiting the old town is a must. You visit the old town, check out the shops, and then when you've had enough, you walk down l'escalier casse-cou to la rue Champlain and the Old Port. There you can visit the Musée de la Civilization (!!!), a decent popular museum. Some of their exhibits are great, some are shit, but it's a cool building. They have one or two good permanent exhibits about Québec culture. Otherwise you can visit the antiques shops or visit the maritime museum; I haven't been to the latter in 25 years but I recall it was nice. Then when the sun comes down, you get on the ferry to Lévis just so you can catch views of the old city from the St-Lawrence. You don't get off at Lévis; you just get back on the same ticket you boarded on. Another thing you can do from the old port is walk along the linear park along the St-Charles river, which used to be a concrete canal that has been renaturalized. It's impressive.

Then you go back uptown to rue Saint-Jean or rue Saint-Louis, inside or outside the old city, to one of the amazing bars like Le Drague or Le Temps Partiel. I can't recall if you're veg or not but it has a great meat-oriented restaurant scene and it really sucks for vegans, though it's getting a bit better on that side.

On the other side of Old Québec, uptown, at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, one can see Jean-Paul Riopelle's L'Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg. It's a 40-foot long spray-painted, goose-stenciled triptych. I'm biased because he's my favourite painter, but it's awesome. (Apparently there's construction on a new Riopelle pavilion so I'd check availability first before attempting to visit.)

8. How did you get into zines?

I think I had heard of and maybe even seen a couple zines before, but when I moved to Vancouver in late 1998, one of my favourite haunts was the Spartacus Bookstore, a volunteer-run anarchist bookstore. They had a small zine section, of which I bought a few. Above that was the magazine section, which was sporting the final issue of Factsheet 5, the zine-reviewing bible of the 1990s golden age of zine publishing. They were getting so many zines to review that they limited themselves to only review great zines since they could spare neither ink nor paper for the bad ones. So in this issue there was probably a few hundred glowing zine reviews from around the world (though mostly the U.S.). I ordered a bunch of zines and I was like "wow, this is so awesome". I had been part of electronic/online underground scenes since the early 1990s, was a subscriber to the first ISP in Québec City within its first few months of operations, was part of the very first wave of people getting on the web, had moved to Vancouver due to my contact with some of these scenes, but this paper-based scene was still extremely attractive to me. I wanted everyone to read the zines I was getting but I obviously couldn't just buy tons of zines and just give them away willy-nilly. Then I discovered that people were running zine distros, i.e. sold zines at fairs and sometimes had online zine stores, so I decided I would do that, and the rest is history.

9. What your favorite thing thing you made/did with code/computer skills?

Back in the early 1990s I ran two BBSes, one after the other. I really enjoyed that time. There was very little coding involved but a fair bit of modding, which would be the textmode equivalent of web design/systems administration today. I was an ANSI artist so that was kind of my thing. More recently I just thoroughly enjoyed working for thestar.com because it's the biggest paper in the country and among its largest liberal/progressive media organizations, but I don't have particularly salient accomplishments there.

One of my early low-skill programming projects was Stationary Groove... An acquaintance had manually surveyed passengers at every subway station in the city to see what music they were playing, and wanted to produce an interactive map showing that. I ripped off the transit company's own code from its site, and also built a barebones Rails app to handle all of the song tracking to put them in a DB, and then used all of this to generate this map. There was very little skill involved but my acquaintance was a good PR person, and got a front-page story on the Star (before I worked there) out of it.

I also used to hand code all of my HTML (and there was no CSS back then). My two biggest publications were Operation Rescue, an ANSI art reviewing site that published reviews of monthly art packs for a number of years (I took the name from the Bad Religion song of the same name, not knowing it was the name of a pro-life group they were critiquing!!), and later on I also hand-coded my zine distro's site. If I had properly learned backend programming back then I would probably be somewhat wealthy now, it was a great time to get into that stuff.

So huh, that's a lot of me here!

(Posting early because I forgot last week, and I'm accumulating too much material.)

Five different podcasts today.

Al Monitor’s On the Middle East - Kurdish struggle critical linchpin of Iran protests, says BBC Persian correspondent Jiyar Gol

Al Monitor is a kind of think-tanky (no, not tankie!!) middle eastern news/analysis site but they have some very interesting characters come on, and here a journalist from BBC Persian comes to explain the situation in Iran with an interesting section on the armed Kurdish groups in Rojhelat (Eastern Kurdistan, in Iran). This was a good summary of what’s happened so far with a look at future possibilities.

---
The rest of these episodes aren't recent but are still interesting:

Canadaland COMMONS: CORRUPTION 3 - The Trouble with Paradise: How Canadians Built the Offshore World

This episode describes how Canada was central to the creation of the tax shelter system.

Métis In Space - S5E7 The Blues Brothers

Métis in Space has decided to review some of their favourite films beyond their usual sci-fi-episodes-with-indigenous-people range. In thi episode, they watch The Blues Brothers, and it’s a load of fun. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of whether The Pope got to watch a special Vatican cut of the film or not. Either way, the Holy See apparently approves of the film.

The Breach Show - Canada’s Spiralling Military $ | Oil Lobby in Action | Amazon Union Win

This is a newish show hosted by Donya Ziayee, with regular panellists Pam Palmater, El Jones and Martin Lukacs. They’re all uber smart radical people and they really get to spread their wings here, in particular Palmater. It’s pretty entertaining.

The Brief Podcast - Destroying Yemen

This podcast brings Isa Blumi, author of Destroying Yemen: What chaos in Arabia tells us about the world, to talk about the origins of the Yemen conflict, how foreign powers have intervened in all kinds of ways, and how Yemenis who were at loggerheads before have come together to fight them. This is the most informative podcast episode I’ve heard on the conflict so far.

---
#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. Copy this footer so people don't start recommending whole podcasts. :P

---
Feel free to just post in the comments if you have podcast episodes to recommend and don't feel like making a #PodcastFriday post :)

I should pick a different name for this meme because I never write this on Friday. Anyway. Today I'm recommending three different podcast episodes which are accidentally* linked by the theme of Revolution.

(*: Because I'm totally not seeking revolutionary content in my podcasts as a primary interest...)

1) Neighbor Democracy - Justice Beyond Courts: The Conciliation Committees (Rojava Excerpt)
This episode is a short one, briefly discussing Rojava's system of community-driven justice. There's a strong emphasis on conciliation and diversion from the formal justice system, and trying to get at the root causes of crime to resolve issues and prevent further crime. I wish abolitionists in North America would pay more attention.

2) Green & Red - From Environmentalist to "Domestic Terrorist" with former Earth Liberation member Daniel McGowan
This is an interview with former ELF direct action partisan (!) Daniel McGowan, who did a fair bit of vandalism and set a few things on fire, eventually getting ratted on by a turncoat, was arrested by the FBI and did 7 years for huh, "green terrorism.". McGowan is super clear eyed about what he was doing, was well-studied in revolutionary practice, and now focuses greatly on prison solidarity. His journey is fascinating to listen to.

3) Revolutions - The Final Chapter. Alternate title: The Great Terror
This is Mike Duncan's last narrative history episode for the Russian Revolution, and for the Revolutions podcast as a whole. This was an insane 9 year odyssey that ballooned way beyond what Duncan planned. This episode is focused on Stalin's Terror, and what can I say? Stalin staged his campaign terror, then staged his own Thermidorian reaction, and basically wiped out the entire generation of early Soviet political and military leadership to ensure that no one with any kind of following or independent idea could even think of challenging him.

---
An anti-recommendation: I find Behind the Bastards to be an irritating podcast format. I enjoy the information but not digging the tongue in cheek/let's have fun while telling horrible things vibe. You can be funny while recounting terrible events (hi Mike Duncan) without making it a whole style.

----
#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. Copy this footer so people don't start recommending whole podcasts. :P

---
Feel free to just post in the comments if you have podcast episodes to recommend and don't feel like making a #PodcastFriday post :)

What have you finished reading?

Pirate Latitudes. See last week's post.

What are you currently reading?

I started To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, a collection of essays on Rojava from about 2016. Ohhhh boy. I don't know if it's the original texts which are heavy (many are interviews with Kurds, likely in Turkish, Kurdish or Arabic maybe even) or the translations which are bad, but it's pretty unreadable. I think the introduction wasn't too bad, and a short excerpt from Abdullah Öcalan wasn't too bad either, but otherwise this is like reading mud. It's also a lot of repeating the same point that it's a feminist revolution, which Changes Everything. (I mean, it does, but I need meat on that bone.) I had to stop midway through due to it becoming pretty boris, though I will power through to the end. (Especially since I "borrowed" my copy from a friend in Montréal, and I should make it worth it...)

So I switched to Rouge, jaune et vert from Bolivian-Canadian writer Alejandro Saravia. I was selling zines at Expozine in Montréal this weekend. Across from my table was Éditions Urubu, which specialize in translating Latin-American fiction to French. So I ask the person tabling there if they had any noir novels, because I had just seen the Latin Noir (geo-fenced to Canada only, sorry Amrikans) documentary. He says no, we don't, so I purse saying that some of these novels deal with countries either under or coming out of dictatorship, so he says, this book here, it talks about a Bolivian soldier was forced to commit atrocities, and how he's dealing with the memory of that in Montréal. I'm staring at the book because the books' colours (which are also its title) are the Kurdish colours, but you know maybe that's the Bolivian flag? I do a quick mental check, no, that isn't the Bolivian flag colours, it's red white and blue. (I finally looked it up online, I was wrong. That's totally the Bolivian flag's colours.) I ask him to say more and he tells me that it also blends the protagonist trying to reconnect with his Quechua language roots, and also deals with a freedom fighter named Bolivia that he meets in Montréal, who happens to be... A Kurdish woman. $20 has never come out of my wallet faster. A few minutes later I went back for a second copy, to give to Kurdish friends who don't speak French, but who are moving to Paris, so they can gift it to someone other Kurdish friends they make there. (I've since then discovered that there's also an English translation so if I'm quick enough I might be able to send them off with that too...)

So I started on this book and it's just the most wild prose, the protagonist riding the Montréal métro where he tries to connect with lost souls (or his own, really) in his broken Quecha, riding the electricity from northern Québec powering Montréal's steel intestines, which themselves bind the city's refugees and immigrant cultures, everyone in search of some sort of redemption or dreams. Okay it might sound like some pretty liberal multi-culti Canadiana tripe when I describe it like that but the writing works. It's just so exciting to read. We'll see where the story actually goes when I get past a couple chapters.

What have you finished reading?

I finished Havana Best Friends, a Cuban Noir novel. It was pretty crass, sexist, predictable and collapsed on itself at the end, in spite of an interesting turn of things when the shit hit the fan.

What led me to that book was Istanbul Noir, part of Akashic's series of "$city noir" short stories compendia. It was rather unequal but there was a fair number of good stories. The stories from women's perspectives were generally better, even when written by men. The American translator/editor lives in Turkey so there was no obvious Kurdish content, save for one story I think?

It think this was the first time I was reading noir novels in a long time, if ever? We've been watching a whole bunch of Western Noirs and the bar was set a little too high for these books... Back to science fiction and piracy for me.

What are you currently reading?
Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women's Liberation in the Syrian Kurdistan

It's a fascinating account of how they've tried to implement bottom-up, feminist autonomous social organization in a civil war context, with roots first planted by the PKK in the 1980s, then picked up by local underground activists in the 2000s after the PKK had to formally leave Syria (1998), and really picking up when Syrian society started erupting during the Arab Spring. Most of the survey concerns the years 2012-16 as Kurds took over their part of the country and set up social institutions to replace the state that they had ejected. It's really amazing and so frustrating that it's being absolutely blockaded economically and politically on all sides, just kept alive by the Pentagon because that suits the USA's geostrategic interests...

You'd think I'd be all over this but it's definitely /work/ to read. As usual with Kurdish things, especially a social survey like this, there are a gazillion names and acronyms of peoples, places and organizations to keep organized in one's head, and even for me who's followed Rojava for 5 years now, there is a lot of them that I didn't know yet.

I think this is book 3 or 4 of my targeted 6 Kurdish books to read this year. I'm afraid I might not achieve my new year's resolution...

Not ironically. There's no lasting Rojava today without his initial decision to go in.

zoefruitcake is doing a "365 questions" meme, which I can't be bothered to follow, but I just swiped the questions she's answering this week, because boredom.

February 21 - if you could have the perfect meal, what would it be?

That's kind of difficult, but I'd be partial to a vegan Parsi wedding meal, including dhansak dal and dar ni poori. Maybe if Vij's in Vancouver knew how to make those recipes (they're Punjabi, not Parsi, but who cares?), that could be good.
February 22 - if you had to permanently leave your home country, where would you go?

Right now, I would join the People's Defense Units of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, duh. I really wouldn't dislike living in Scotland, either.
February 23 - What is your first political memory?

Rooting for Brian Mulroney in the 1994 federal election, because he was from Québec. (!!!)
February 24 - When is the last time you were completely wrong about something?

Fuck me, I don't know when the last time was, I'm sure it was pretty recently. But the one that sticks in my craw is that I supported the U.S. efforts to depose Ghaddafi. Ohhh boy.
February 25 - What do you prefer to be called? Who named you that and why? Where did it come from?

My first name is François, which was my maternal grandmother's name (Françoise). I _REALLY_ disliked being called Frank, because that's how some of my school bullies used to call me. There are a select few people who aren't subject to this objection, and they delight getting under my skin.
February 27 - Five topics you’d like to download to your brain, and why?
1. Das Kapital, because I'm a poorly read marxist.
2. Ocalan's writings, because I'm just starting
3. The Ancient Roman Greek and Roman canon, because that would be cool.
4. I could let fate pick a language between Turkish, Kurmanji and Sorani
February 28 - Best moment of the month

I don't have restrictions, constraints or features which work on a monthly cycle, so the question is kind of irrelevant to me...

After your first language, what language would you most like to learn? (Say first language too)

French is my first language. My current language interest is split between Turkish and Kurmanji, but if I'm honest, in the long term, Spanish is the language I'm most likely to really learn well, because it's so close to French.

Does your country have a second language? What is it?

French. Furthermore, a few hundred other languages are spoken by immigrants from all over the world, in particular in my city, Toronto. This country also has a number of indigenous languages: Some of which are still spoken widely, some have died, and some others have less than a dozen speakers left. A white friend of mine is learning some form of Ojibway language I think, I'm jealous of his dedication. It's a really political commitment. I hope he gets to use it.

How many languages can you count to 5 in? To 10 in? List them.

French, English, Spanish, Gujarati, Japanese (I used to practice aikido, numbers are basically the only thing I can say/understand). I could count to 5 in Turkish a couple months ago but that's gone to the wayside.

What is the first overseas country you visited? And from where? (ie/ Timbuktu to Mars)

When I was 8 or so, my family travelled by car from Québec City to Old Orchard Beach, in Maine. It was a popular summer destination for working class Québécois people at the time. People don't talk about it much anymore. Flights are cheap now, I suspect people just fly further south. For Montréalers, Sandbanks, a provincial park which features a beach on Lake Ontario, about 4 hours' drive away, is also becoming more popular.

What country do you most want to visit? And why?

I went to Turkey in 2015, but I visited what I should call the Greco-Roman west coast, i.e. msotly the old ruins. (Plus 'Stamboul, of course). I was just learning about the struggle in Rojava (Syria) at the time, and hadn't fully grasped what Kurdistan was. If I was going to Turkey know, I would surely visit the Southeast. I also wanted to visit Aleppo and Damascus but the civil war in Syria scuttled that. (That's actually what drove me to visit Turkey). Ironically, if I really was going to the region today, it would probably be as safe for me to go to Rojava than Bakur/Turkey... I'm interested due to nature of the political struggle there, obviously.

Iraqi Kurdistan (Bashur, Southern Kurdistan) has seen serious unrest in the recent week. First, a bit of background. The independence referendum, which everyone could see would lead nowhere, did worse than that. It gave the Iraqi government and its Iran-controlled Shia militia, the People's Mobilization Units (PMU, Hashd al-Shabi), a pretext for moving in and taking back Kirkuk from the Kurds. Kirkuk has historically been a multi-ethnic but important Kurdish city, and as importantly, has serious oil fields in its vicinity. This oil was going to be an essential source of income for an independent Kurdistan. Qasem Suleimani, the leader of Iran's Quds Force, which runs the PMU, basically went to the Kurds and promised them total war if they didn't pull back from Kirkuk. The PMU was the most important military force in driving ISIS out of Iraq, way more than the Kurdish peshmerga, so the KDP and the PUK pulled out, and the PMU let Iraqi anti-terrorism forces move in and take back the city. This was a huge victory for Haider al-Abadi which was widely celebrated in the rest of Iraq.

The defeat was so complete that the Iraqi government was able to get the KRG to annul the results of the referendum. Massoud Barzani, who was the head of the KRG and the KDP, and controlled Erbil, stepped down, leaving his son Nechirvan to take his place. On the PUK side, long-time leader Jalal Talabani recently died so his wife Hero and some important PUK peshmerga general are fighting a succession battle for control of Suleimania, which is the center of the PUK sphere of influence.

Amidst all this, ordinary Kurds spontaneously (some say fuelled by local PKK media) decided to revolt last week, protesting and setting fire to various party offices all over, even that of Gorran (the Movement for Change), the PUK offshoot which has been way less corrupt than the other two parties and is seeking important democratic reforms. Using this unrest, the PKK, which has an important presence in the Qandil mountains, has declared a new self-rule region in Northern Iraq, which is an interesting development, copying its model of local governance establish which it has established in Rojava (Northern Syria).

The Turkish Air Force has been stepping up its bombardments of PKK camps in Iraq (it claims to have killed 11 PKK fighters yesterday) so that's kind of the downside of what's going on there. It's rumoured that the U.S. might sell bunker-buster bombs to Turkey to placate it for the support the U.S. has provided to the SDF/YPG. This would be disastrous to the PKK as it relies on its mountainous locations to survive Turkish onslaughts.