The Modern Fight Against Fascism

“Serekeftin – A Narrative of the Rojava Revolution” – by Marcel Cartier, 2019

Cartier visited northern Syria for about 6 weeks in what is now casually referred to as Rojava.  He writes this book from both a factual and emotional place.  He’s a self-described “Marxist-Leninist,” a British hip-hop artist and journalist who participated in Occupy in New York. This was one of a number of visits he has made to the Middle East. 

 

“Serekeftin” means victory in Kurdish.  This is what has been accomplished by force of arms against Daesh (ISIS) – a necessity for survival of the peoples living in Syria.  Cartier calls Daesh a fascist force, and indeed it is.  For any leftist who knows a bit of history, the situation in northern Syria brings to mind the Spanish Civil War, the 1917 Kornilov events in Russia, present day Venezuela, even WW II.  One could see the battle of Kobani as a smaller version of Stalingrad.  One is reminded of the Lend-Lease program through Murmansk. The unity of anarchists and socialists in Rojava as an improvement over that in Spain.  The Bolshevik and Petrograd Soviet’s block with Kerensky against Kornilov in August 1917.  The mass communes of Venezuela (and China) against reaction. 

Cartier defends Rojava as a radical leftist response to ethnic brutality, hatred of women, religious intolerance, centralist control and capitalist methods in Syria.

 

    1.    The Federal government of Rojava (“Democratic Federal System of Northern Syria) supports a multi-ethnic society and as part of this, is against an independent Kurdish state.  In the area Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Turkmen, Yazidis and Armenians serve in the armed units and have control in their own cities.  This is their form of internationalism.

     2.    Women have autonomous organizations, including military ones.  The leadership of the communes is always divided in half between men and women.  Forced marriages and polygamy have been outlawed.
3.    While most Kurds are Muslim, there is no official religion – religion itself seems absent in public. 

4.    The governing structures are similar to mass democratic councils / communes / assemblies, with membership and voting from the ground up.  Each neighborhood has one.

5.    Lastly, cooperatives are the basic form of economic organization, although Cartier’s details on this are incomplete.  He only mentions two examples – a bottled water plant and a large agricultural cooperative.  The issue of oil and the presence of small businesses and farmers is not remarked upon.

All this has been done in the face of war, but Rojava was years in the making.

One of the main threads running throughout the book is a polemic against the coffee-shop Facebook warriors who denigrate Rojava because it accepted military help from the U.S.  As Cartier points out, the survival of the peoples of northern Syria was at stake.  Any cursory glance at history shows a number of very important military blocks by leftists with anti-fascist bourgeois forces, WW II being the most prominent, but Spain, Venezuela, Nicaragua and the Russian revolution providing more evidence. 

YPG Improvised Vehicle

Rojava is surrounded by enemies – the nationalist Kurds in Iraq; the Turkish army; Daesh, al-Nusra and other Salafist forces in Syria, including elements of the FSA; perhaps in the future the Syrian Army. They have no doubt the U.S. will join that list when the military role of the YPG and YPJ is over. After all, these Rojava organizations were the key ground force crushing Daesh.  During the celebration of the victory in Raqqa over Daesh, the U.S. was very perturbed when the fighters rolled out a large portrait of the libertarian socialist Abdullah Oclan, the inspirational leader of the PKK.  Oclan has been jailed on a Turkish island for 20 years - very similar to the experience Nelson Mandela went through. 

The book also serves as a guide to the various organizations in the region. Cartier talks to internationalists who visited Rojava with him, along with international volunteers who came to fight fascism and for Rojava, some from the U.S.  He also meets many soft-spoken Rojava comrades during his weeks of education, touring and visits to a number of cities in the area.  This is an intentionally personal book, but it has enough facts to convince anyone paying attention that Rojava is a positive expression of current socialism and should be supported.

Other reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Rojava,” “The Management of Savagery,” “The Death of the Nation,” “What is the War on Terror and How to Fight It,” “War With Russia?” 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 25, 2019