CENTRAL NEWS
Warplanes belonging to the Turkish state constantly bombard the mountains, forests, cities, vineyards and gardens of Kurdistan. Putting the bombardments of villages, civilian settlements and even corpses to one side, so far hundreds of thousands of villagers have been killed in these attacks. The problem here is not an intensely political question where the balances are complexly misguided. This question is a question of conscience and demands a heavy self-criticism about why we started to treat people no different to us as culprits. As to why we allowed for human beings to be battered by tons of explosives falling daily from the warplanes of a dictator while we are too fragile to see blood on our television screens. Is Kurdistan’s geographical location so far that we do not hear its screams of agony? The definition of Orientalism is described in the dictionary as the “style, artefacts, or traits considered characteristic of the peoples and cultures of Asia.” In other words, “Orientalism” is a word developed by Europeans to describe the Orient: inferior, uncivilised and fugitive.
Kurdistan has been under the bombardment of the Turkish state, among other states, for hundreds of years. Still, Turkey is only assigned as the protector of boundaries it was granted by the US, England and France. Agreements signed between the hegemons who ripped Kurdistan apart have been made available across the web for anyone with the slightest interest to read, along with an ever-growing collection of documentation on civilian deaths and bombardments. With a population of almost 50 million, the reason why the Kurds have not yet achieved independence is bigger than just a problem of national unity. The Kurds living in Europe alone could bring the Turkish state to its knees. So why haven’t they?
The impact of capitalism on society
The capitalist system is an individualistic system which is based on extracting maximum profit regardless of moral consequences. It is a system which rejects morals all together, designing a handbook on how to live, through the aid of Law, ultimately and absolutely protecting its own interests.
An average person living under the capitalist system works in the retail sector, being paid to work the most hours at minimum wage. This person also happens to be the most in-debt. In this way, an army of workforce is constantly activated, keeping the wheels of the system oiled. Workers are fed just enough to be able to keep working, paying little attention to sociality or to the needs of society.
By training individuals with debt, the system contains any feelings of communality which happens to be the only way of life in Kurdish societies. This became the first and most vital contradiction in diaspora Kurdish communities, who began to integrate with liberalist European communities. The Kurds, who had been under the influence of years of colonisation, were yet to meet centuries of orientalist stereotypes, and to then embody those themselves.
Orientalism
The words ‘Middle East’ and ‘Orientalism’ are within themselves orientalist terms as they standardize a western viewpoint.
Orientalism is rooted in stereotypes of the East legitimising the assertion of power by the western capitalist states on the East, which is reflected in an uncivilized and helpless light. Orientalism in essence, means to look through Euro-centric glasses and was used in expanding colonialism, spreading the idea that Eastern people are too lazy to govern themselves, hence the need for Western intervention.
Orientalism dehumanises the people of the East, sometimes romanticising them and sometimes judging them, without understanding their culture or history. A person of orientalist views is a person that holds their western values as the standard and anything different as a reduction. An example is the liberalist legal system.
European legal systems compute individuals on the rights they do and do not have, drawing a border in which people are allowed to do anything the system makes them think they want. People who are being ripped away from humanity’s natural and historic form of lifestyle, i.e. society, are being taught to live individually and to have individual freedoms. Individual freedoms are unlocked like levels of a computer game and are generally characterised by economic stability and age. Millions of workers continue to feed this system hoping to one day reach actual freedom, or economic independence, on this basis. Much like the system of slavery.
A western ‘legal system’ does not exist in Kurdistan or many other countries in the Middle East as these countries have managed to preserve much from the Neolitihics, or natural society. Here, societies live within the norms of social ethics and social morals, where every individual works in line with the communual needs of their society. During the neolithical era, the harshest punishment given to an individual who had acted immorally was to dismiss the person from society. This highlights the importance of society whose absence is deemed as harsh as a life sentence according to today’s standards, but it also draws attention to the power of society to educate its members so that big crimes were rarely committed.
Nevertheless, most propaganda schemes for military intervention in the Middle East are based on unjustness and unlawlessness (from a western perspective), where hundreds of thousands of innocent people are killed, chemical bombs and sparkly new warplanes are tested. With war situations, the chances of democratic systems of governorship are annihilated. More states are won through coups than through elections, so dictators are born. This cycle of violence is caused by western states, leaving Middle Eastern countries in the chaos they claimed the countries initially were in. So the states which are imposing that countries can only be governed through states, are rendering their own system ineffective to be depended on.
How does this affect the Kurds? Individualised members of a society are less inclined to feel responsible to protect other members of it’s society, living in a system which eats away at traditional ethical and moral values, and instead being computed according to the liberalist legal system. This, married to psychological warfare and assimilation policies implemented by the fascist Turkish state, Kurdish youth (especially those from North) do not know how to speak their own language, and thus speak the Turkish language, making this their first tongue. Naturally, Kurdish youth feel more familiar with the Turkish language and are drawn to Turkish television programmes and in fact the Turkish culture.
In this way, Kurdish youth are fed years of anti-propaganda schemes before finally coming to the realisation that they are neither Turkish nor European. At this point, lies regarding the reality of the Kurds mix with their truth in a screaming match between Kurdish and Turkish television channels. Those who stray from the righteous tend to form extremists either religious or political views. Those who hear past the lies take the position of ‘showing solidarity’ with their own people and their own fight. The term ‘solidarity’ means for organisations to unite under a common goal, meaning Kurdish youth in Europe are looking in from the outside.
