In contrast to the increasingly autocratic Turkey to the north and the fragmented and warring countries to the south, the Kurds in the Rojava canton have consolidated a history of self-determination and resistance to external control by developing the kind of decentralized society based on communal decision making envisaged by US social scientist Murray Bookchin.
The History and Context of the Rojava Revolution
A long-form introduction to the history and the present struggle of the Kurdish people.
Two More References Below the Fold
Bookchin, Öcalan, and the Dialectics of Democracy
In 2012, a conference was organized in Hamburg, Germany. The theme was “Challenging Capitalist Modernity: Alternative concepts and the Kurdish Question.” Text was delivered as a speech to the conference.
The Ecology of Freedom – The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, Murray Bookchin (1982)
“.. a truly free society, based on ecological principles, could mediate humanity's relationship with nature. As a result, [Bookchin] began to explore the development of a new technology scaled to comprehensible human dimensions. Such a technology would include small solar and wind installations, organic gardens, and the use of local “natural resources” worked by decentralized communities. This view quickly gave rise to another – the need for direct democracy for urban decentralisation, for a high measure of self-sufficiency [and] for self empowerment based on communal forms of social life.”
Phi Beta Iota: Self-determination is probably inevitable. There are 5,000 secessionist movements around the world, including 27 in the USA of which at least have (Alaska, Hawaii, Texas, and Vermont) solid prospects with Hawaii the most imminent. From Catalan to Quebec to Scotland, the West is in for a major shift in the balance of power between abusive federalist authorities and more grounded local authorities.
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