It Could Happen Here - Rojava Solidarity with the Emergency Committee for Rojava

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

James, Robert, and Mia are joined by Debbie Bookchin (@debbiebookchin) and Arthur Pye (@TheArthurPye) to talk about the situation in Rojava, how listeners can help, and the ECR’s upcoming speaking tour. For more information about the Emergency Committee for Rojava and their upcoming West Coast speaking tour (May 11-17) featuring Debbie Bookchin and Arthur Pye, go to defendrojava.org or follow @defendrojava on any social media platform. For a more in-depth reflection on the Rojava revolution, Arthur's recent writings can be found in Strange Matters magazine. https://strangematters.coop/arthur-pye-rojava-reporting-preface/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Calls on media. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here. Back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here. And, you know, when we talk about, like, collapse, things falling apart, there's very few case studies that are more important for folks to be aware of than what has happened and is continuing to happen in northeast Syria, in a region of the world known as Rojava or the autonomous regions of Northeast Syria. And I'm here with James Stout. He and I have both reported from the Rojavan Project. And we are talking again with Arthur and Debbie Bookchin about what's going on there now, kind of as the struggle continues, so to speak. That's right. And thank you very much for joining continues, so to speak. That's right.

Thank you very much for joining us, Arthur and Debbie. And you're both here in your capacity as representatives of the Emergency Committee for Rojava, right? That's right. And thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for coming back. So I think perhaps we should begin by explaining what ECR is and does. I've been very fortunate to be asked to speak at one of your meetings.

So I'm familiar, but I think maybe some of our listeners wouldn't be. So could you begin with explaining what it is, what it does? Yeah, absolutely. So the Emergency Committee for Rojava is kind of the only standing U.S.-based organization focused on solidarity with the Rojava revolution. And what we do is we try to build a grassroots solidarity movement with the revolution in northeast Syria, with the Kurdish freedom movement more broadly. And we do that in a few different ways. One is like just trying to inform the public, right? So kind of public education.

One is like just trying to inform the public, right? So kind of public education. Another is advocacy, trying to sort of put pressure on the United States government to stop arming people who are trying to kill everybody in Rochefort and to support the people instead. But another thing that we do is try to build kind of movement to movement relationships, like finding social movements in the United States that we think share a lot of affinity with the movement over there, try to put them in touch and try to kind of facilitate dialogue.

Yeah. No, I mean, I think it's important to kind of start, as we often do, with the attempt to get the U.S. government to stop arming folks killing the people there, which in this case refers specifically to the the U.S. government to stop arming folks killing the people there, which in this case refers specifically to the Turkish military. I mean, we're all kind of dealing with, in a separate part of the world, how difficult it is to stop the United States government from arming people. Ain't that right? That's a great point, Robert.

You know, I think sometimes it's hard for people to even comprehend just the massive flow of weapons from the United States to Turkey. billion worth of Patriot missiles alone, you know, and then billions or at least millions in, you know, Chinook helicopters, the Cobra attack helicopters. There is just a huge flow of arms from the United States to Turkey. And as Arthur said, you know, one of the things that we really do try and do at ECR is to get people not only aware, but also into doing some advocacy on that. And one of the things that we're also trying to prevent right now is the sale of any more F-16s to Turkey, which as I'm sure your listeners know, are used in the bombing of people in Rojava and also in Turkey and in Northern Iraq. So that's a very critical issue, in fact. Yeah, yeah. And it's a critical issue in part because what we're seeing is a, I would describe it as a pretty concentrated attempt to destroy civil society in Rojava, right?

Like you're not just through the use of airstrikes, through things like blocking off access to water, but the F-16s that Turkey purchases from the United States and the continuing armaments to keep those things flying and firing missiles are a huge part of how they're able to continue degrading the capacity of the self-administration to maintain civil society. Exactly. I mean, there is really an aim, their aim to completely destabilize the society, to shake confidence in the autonomous administration, to break morale, to engage in psychological

terror, and frankly, you know, also to do physical harm. As I'm sure you know and your listeners know, Turkey very effectively uses drones and other methods to take out leadership, particularly female leadership, women who are leaders of the movement. There's not a day that goes by, really, that doesn't include strikes from Turkey into Rojava. I mean, I'm just thinking, you know, the Manbij Military Council just has reported in the last couple of days that the state of Turkey has shelled various villages in Manbij, you know, that Kurdish neighborhoods in Aleppo are really subjected to continuous embargoes by the Damascus government, but also, you know, Turkey intercedes to prevent supplies from getting to these places. So it's really, I think there's something

like more than 200 bombings by Turkey in Iraqi Kurdistan, even since just the beginning of the year. So it's really an ongoing assault. No, absolutely. I think, you know, for people who are less familiar with it, it's easy to kind of get bogged down in the weeds because all the details, they change every day. But I think the broad strokes are pretty clear and they haven't changed for a long time. I mean, Turkey sees this revolution, rightly so, as a threat to its own power, to its own ideology. You know, the idea that local communities would govern themselves pluralistically through autonomy is a direct threat to the idea of the Turkish state, which is basically a fascist nation state. And they kind of have a twofold strategy. I think you could see it this way, right? So like, for those who don't know, Turkey has already invaded Northeast Syria multiple times. It's invaded Afrin in 2018 sere khanye talabiyat in 2019 and

it occupies that territory still to this day um but when it's been unable to seize more territory directly it kind of has this twofold strategy where the other side of the coin is to just do everything possible to make life unlivable right so that's where the assassinations come in. That's where the sort of information warfare, blocking of water, sort of economic embargo. The basic idea is just to spread fear, to spread uncertainty into every sphere of life. And like you said, Robert, to basically attack civil society itself. Yeah. I wonder if you could explain, I think our listeners are maybe familiar with the campaign against civil society itself. Yeah. I wonder if you could explain, I think our listeners are maybe familiar with the campaign against civil society

and civilian targets that we saw like in October, November of last year, I saw some of while I was there. But Turkey's recently launched like a spring offensive, right? Which isn't exclusively unlimited to bombing uh but but also contains uh like like i guess combined arms you know infantry bombing can you explain what's happening there and what the sort of i think the plan you've sort of very well summed up already

right which is to make life unlivable for the kurdish freedom movement but can you explain what's been happening in the last few weeks for people who haven't caught up? So for one, for people to understand the connection in the first place, it's important to understand that really, while there are distinct organizations which are autonomous and are place-based within the Kurdish movement, they have their own parties and self-defense forces in Syria

and in Iraq and other parts of Kurdistan. It's important to see it also as kind of one big Kurdish freedom movement in another sense, and in an important sense because Turkey sees it in that light. So for the same reasons that Turkey wants to crush the revolution in northeast Syria, Turkey wants to crush the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, right? And the guerrillas of the PKK are based in northern Iraq. And time and time again, they've tried to sort of dislodge the guerrilla forces from the mountains, but it's pretty hard to do. You know, this is NATO's second largest military,

and they still, after decades, have not been able to crush this, like, insurgency. And so what we're seeing in recent weeks is not necessarily so novel. I mean, again, you can get into the weeds about the region of Matina and a particular road that they're trying to seize for logistics on their way to the mountain of Gara. But the truth is they're trying to crush the movement where it is and they're seizing an opportunity. There's often like a weather window for the fighting in the mountains as well. And so when the snow starts

to melt in the spring, you start to see an escalation of the fighting in the mountains, which often winds down in the fall again. But it's yet to be seen how this is going to go. I mean, y'all have, I don't have to tell you, right? Like you've done some recent episodes on technological developments with the movement and Turkey's been having a really hard time making gains on the ground. And also, I mean, as I think, as Megan Bodette noted on this podcast recently, you know, the Turkish leader Erdogan tends to take out any insults he feels he's suffered, and particularly election setbacks, as happened in the local elections at the end of March, on the Kurdish regions everywhere in Turkey, Iraq, Syria. And so we're seeing also crackdowns,

Crackdowns has happened also for quite some time, but on journalists, again, sort of cranking up again. It's funny that on World Press Day, which was May 3rd, a Kurdish journalist was arrested, stripped, searched, a, thrown in jail. And this is, you know, another sort of wave of politicians being arrested. Just again, on Monday, I think 13 politicians were sentenced to six years plus in jail, in prison. So this sort of policy that seems to show itself every time Erdogan feels a bit threatened is one that we're seeing right now, in part, I think, as a result of those election defeats that his party suffered. Yeah, absolutely. And sinister as it is, whenever they lose in the mountains, they often hit harder in northeast Syria and vice versa. So it's all just a big kind of ugly game that they're playing. Well, I want to get to some more here, but first we've got to take a quick break.

We're going to throw to some ads and then we'll come back and continue this discussion. discussion. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. And I'm trying to get a sense of how the situation is on the ground right now, despite the, or considering the challenges of the attacks on infrastructure that have continued to go on. Like, what are we looking at from a daily life point of view in places like Kamishlo? Well, you know, one of the things that I think is important to emphasize is just how strong a lot of the civil structures really are, even in the face of these attacks by Turkey. And I'm sure Arthur will have something to say about that, and also about maybe some of the sort of the military side of this.

But, you know, the extraordinary thing about Rojava is just how deeply engaged they are on the civil level. In our group at the Emergency Committee for Rojava, we're in contact with a lot of people in civil society. And I'm always amazed at how many sort of requests we get for, you know, exchanges of information and scholars, and they're building the university there to do more and more technical things, you know, whether computers or agricultural sciences or, you know, just a vast variety of graduate program they want to do right now in social ecology that I've been working with them on. And so even though there's this effort by Turkey to kind of terrorize the civilian population, and I'm sure, you know, people can imagine what it must feel like to have drones flying constantly overhead and wondering if you get into a car, whether you might, you know,

be the subject of a drone attack. Nonetheless, there is still this extraordinary sort of hopefulness and also energy towards building the society. And for example, one of the things that they recently did, and it took a long time, but they rewrote their social contract, which is what we would think of as a constitution, to empower women even more, you know, to empower various ethnic minorities more, and to make it a document that is truly inclusive in terms of how it was written and how it will be implemented. And so on the ground, I think even though they are suffering in a lot of ways, and they are because, you know, Rojava is also a region that is subject to terrible environmental dislocations because of global warming,

there's still a huge sort of excitement, I think, about the fact that they are self-governing and the fact that they are empowering women. And those kinds of activities, especially on the part of the women's movement, Congress, Star, just continue to go on. They've built an alternative justice system. They are increasingly turning their sort of economy as much as is feasible. And it's a slow process, but into a more of a cooperative economy. So all of those things are very much underway there. And education is a huge part of that. No, I mean, that's also true. It really is. But just to speak to kind of the other side of that, you know, Robert asked sort of what is life like, say, in a place like Kamishla right now? You know, I think in some ways,

it's a lot like it was when I was in a place called Zirgon, which is another frontline city, where at the same time, Debbie's describing, life goes on. People are trying to build up civil society. They're trying to organize the communes and the cooperatives. At the same time, there's a tremendous fear and uncertainty. Fear in an immediate sense around these drone strikes. I mean, you guys have been there too, right? Like I said, I've been home, I think 11 months now. And I still, every time I hear a small airplane, my body just, even if my brain knows that it's just a plane, like my body's convinced it's a

Turkish drone. And, and imagine, you know, you live your whole life in a place like that, or you've spent the last 10 years. So a lot of people are living in this constant state of, of fear and uncertainty, even on a practical level, you know, say you're a farmer and you're going to plant your seeds this year. Do you know that you're even going to have your land in a month or six months? You know, people are taking Turkey's threat of an invasion seriously. It hasn't happened again since 2019, but I can tell you, I talk to people there almost every day and they're taking it extremely seriously. So there's kind of this idea of an impending invasion sort of hangs like a cloud over daily life in so many ways.

And on top of all of that, of course, since I left northeast Syria, there was this major wave of attacks against civilian infrastructure right around the time you were there last, James. And you can probably speak to it more, but I mean, we're talking about power stations and oil wells and hospitals and schools and food storage facilities. So they're still really reeling from these infrastructure attacks. Cutting off electricity to a million people at a time and water supplies. Which is about a third of the population of the region. Yeah. I mean, you know, war crimes. There's no other word for it.

That's what they're called. Yeah. It's a very jarring experience, at least in my time there which is much briefer than the amount of time both of you have spent there to like go out in the daytime and talk to people and see this incredible optimism for like we are building a different world and like it's there and you can see it and we're moving towards it it's not like you know we're building a different world when we have encampments on campus too but this is a tangible societal project yeah well and that it speaks to that's why the attacks turkey is carrying out take the form they're taking right because the the

priority the the primary strength of of the self-administration is not in its arms. It's in its ability to provide a functional civil society that people are motivated to take part in, which is why their primary weapon is to try to destroy the ability of people to live. Yeah. And that's what it feels like. Like, you know, my experience with a brief, you know, we lost electricity every night.

People are not willing or people are less willing to go out and drive long distances after dark. There is very clearly damage to the infrastructure. I was in a couple of different places. One of them was having issues getting water pumped. There are massive funerals for people who have been killed and you get to see this what is a like it's a beautiful spectacle in a sense but also like you know you can't spend a week in roger and not see a little baby say goodbye to their dad uh or or just a dead baby uh and uh that that's that's terrible you know and like the. One thing that I noticed, which I think people might not have picked up on,

just sort of consuming media, the presence of people who are martyrs, as they call them, right? Shahid. It's everywhere. Like from the first place I stepped foot across the river, there were these portraits these yellow and green portraits on roundabouts in cities in people's homes like the scale of the sacrifice both to build this project and to defeat ISIS I think is very hard I mean the United

States has been a war for most of our lives but it has nowhere near the same impact on our day-to-day lives as it has had there. Yeah, that's so true. There's not a family really in Rojava. When you spend some time there and you meet with different people, there's not a single family that hasn't lost somebody. I mean, it's 13,000 people in the fight against ISIS alone. And now, and not to mention, for example, the 200,000 people who were displaced when Turkey's jihadi militias invaded Afrin, the westernmost region. So it's absolutely a fact of everyday life. Yeah. I spend a lot of time volunteering at the border as people listening know uh and every time we meet kurdish people often you know they're from like northern kurdistan right which is in turkey under the control of the turkish state i guess even like

the volunteers who are not super briefed out before rajava who are just people who want to help like everyone knows what it means when people when you talk to people and they have the little green picture or the little little yellow picture on their phone yeah which is it's it's a profound part of the lived experience of being part of the kurdish freedom movement or just existing as a kurdish person in that area and that's uh it's it's really hard to grasp the scale of that. No, it's so true. I mean, it just makes me think that it's kind of related to this larger sort of spirit of sacrifice that's part of what the movement calls like a revolutionary personality. You know, in a lot of ways, the families of, you know, what they call the martyrs, they also see it as their sacrifice. It's their contribution to the movement and it's it's easy

for i think westerners to kind of i don't know dismiss it or get really uncomfortable with it we're not familiar with that on a cultural level as much but i think it's it's a mistake to see it that way i think there's something incredibly profound about it that has to do with the way that people really identify their whole lives, the meaning of their lives, with the revolution, with the movement, that that is the purpose of their lives, that's the purpose of the life of their families, and come what may. That's something that movements here can't really relate to in the same way yet, I think. here can't really relate to in the same way yet, I think. Yeah. And I kind of want to talk a little bit more about that. We're going to throw one last time to ads, and then we'll come back and kind of flesh out this discussion.

Hey, I'm Jack B. Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,

we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. guys. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin

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of google search better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose this season i'm going to be joined by everyone from nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and i'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things

that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. And we're back. Talking about, like, what it means to be part of a revolution as opposed to someone who has revolutionary sympathies, which it's easy to be.

And we have a lot of those in the United States. I'm going to guess most of the people listening to this show have at least some of those, right? Whether or not you think there's any realistic chance of seeing that during your own life. Yeah. chance of seeing that during your own life. It's a very different thing from living it, which people do, about 3 million of them in Rojava every day. And the sacrifice is a part of it. The kind of continual conflict is another part of it. Because you know, it's worth emphasizing we're about a decade into the project right now, right? If we consider that being from, you know, the start of the self-administration in varying fashions. And that's not like – it's not a perfectly even process, right?

Because it occurred as part of this series of broader conflicts. But what you've seen is both the retreat of the government that had formerly controlled the area. You've seen a successful war prosecuted against ISIS. You've seen what you could look at as one conflict or kind of a series of conflicts with both these Turkish-backed militias and the Turkish military itself. And then also this continuing conflict, itself. And then this also this continuing conflict, both with the environment, you know, just because that that is really, that's a force at work here, this, the Cold War that kind of, that's not even a really a perfect way of describing the situation with the Assad regime, and with, you know, their, their backers in the Russian government, but it's a,

it's, it's a complex interwoven series of conflict, but kind of the result is just a life of conflict for the people who are part of this revolution as sort of just a fact of daily life. And I think that is really hard to grasp. I think that's true. And I think there's this part of it, like you say, that has to do with this sort of objective situation with the conditions that people are living in,

this perpetual conflict that you're talking about. And at the same time, I think there's also an aspect that's more like, I don't know, like subjective, you could call it. It has to do with the kind of movement that they've really actively been building for themselves and and the kind of spirit that their movement has taken on that they've cultivated themselves sort of painstakingly for years i mean i think one of the things that i know debbie and i really want to get to in our conversations in with the speaking tour that that we're working on uh which is coming up later later this month on the west Coast is we really, while we want people to be inspired by this revolution, we really don't want people to just

see it as this very like other thing on the other side of the world. You know, even those who are really supportive, especially us, us, you know, anarchists or you could say fellow travelers, we have a tendency to kind of maybe oversimplify or romanticize what's happening over there and think, oh, well, you know, if, if the state could just collapse here, I'm sure everybody would just sort of like melt into an anarchist utopia of statelessness. And, and that, that would be a mistake too. I think the truth is that what Rojava shows you is a real revolution is incredibly messy and they only were able to kind of face the threats and the opportunities that crisis brought to them in Syria because of the kind of movement they had built for themselves. And they had these practical tools to

kind of help local communities govern themselves in that sort of chaos, in the power vacuum that arose. And, you know, in a moment like this, the world over, especially here in the United States, you know, where the crises that we're facing, the crises that we're looking down the barrel of, I think there's been no more kind of relevant or urgent time to think about how those lessons actually could apply here and what it means for us. What kind of movement do we need to build to be ready for that moment? Yeah, you know, I really agree. And Robert, I'm glad you mentioned, you know, the fact that the revolution is over 10 years old, because I think, you know, and to follow up sort of just on what Arthur was saying, that sort of sometimes the crises that we face, environmental, ecological, global warming, and not to mention democracy itself, you know, can seem almost paralyzing or that we're constantly in a state of reaction.

that the revolution in Rojava teaches us is that, first of all, that moments of crisis can also be moments of great transformation, but really only if we're prepared for them. And that's why, you know, whenever I talk about the Rojava Project, I feel it's important to remind people that it didn't just spring miraculously out of nowhere in the moment of the Syrian civil war. The folks on the ground there had really been preparing for years, I mean, decades even, for the opportunity that opened up for them during the Syrian civil war. And in various ways, of course, they were educating themselves on radical history, And in various ways, of course, they were educating themselves on radical history, in particular, understanding, you know, the failures of classical Marxism, Leninism, you know, which had been embraced previously by the PKK. And putting also into practice clandestinely the kinds of grassroots democratic social structures that we see operating on the ground there today. So I think that that's one of the lessons that we here in the U.S. can absorb, that

we need to be able to exploit the crisis of legitimacy that's growing here today by thinking about what kind of alternatives we want to build and showing people that those alternatives exist. You know, yeah, and that and, you know, that's includes engaging in a kind of prefigurative politics that that really focuses on things like dual power, you know, cooperative economic project, but also local assembly, democratic politics. So that's one of the things that I'm also really excited about talking about, as Arthur and I make our way from Seattle down to San Francisco and Oakland during the course of these six presentations and chats and talks and discussions that we're really excited about having

beginning next weekend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's provide people with a little bit of information on how they might be able to attend and take part in that. So what should folks look up and look into if they're interested? And where are you guys going to be. Absolutely. Yeah, thanks. I think the best thing people can do is go to defendrojova.org. That's the website for the Emergency Committee for Rojova, our group. But right there at the front page, you're going to see a poster for our tour that you can click on. It'll take you to links for all the different stops that we're going to do.

We're going to be making our way all the way from Bellingham, Washington, which is up near the border of Canada, down to the Bay Area. And, you know, we really wish we could make more cities. There are a couple events that our comrades and colleagues are organizing on the East Coast around the same time frame. So be sure to look up the calendar on our website. But people can go to defendrojava.org to hear more. But the basic idea, like Debbie said, is we want to talk to people not only about what's going on in Rojava,

why we think it matters, how they can stand in solidarity, but we want to talk about what we're going to do in our own communities to take those lessons and apply them to our own context. We want to help connect people who are doing, you know, real community organizing in local movements and to try to kind of inspire and strengthen what's already going on,

rather than just to see this as being strictly about Rojava. Because, I mean, y'all probably were told the same thing. When you're over there and you ask people, what can we do to support? One of the things they'll tell you is you've got to organize the revolution at home. And that's on us. You know, it's easier said than done, right? And we're not saying we have all the answers. But what we do want to do is to invite local grassroots activists,

especially, to come join the discussion. And let's talk together about what it would mean to apply these basic principles, not to copy and paste them, but to apply these basic principles and lessons, principles of direct democracy, local autonomy, you know, cooperation, feminism. We haven't even talked about how central, you know, gender liberation is to the Kurdish freedom movement. How do we apply these things in our own communities? Yeah. And one of the things, by the way, if people are interested in getting some more detail and a real inside look at what is going on in Rojava in detail, is that Arthur has two pieces in the magazine Strange Matters, which is also online, which are just terrific.

And they're part of a series that he's going to be doing, I think, monthly over the next few months. And so that's some great background as well. Aw, shucks. Yeah, it's fantastic stuff. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, check that out. Obviously, folks, ifucks. Yeah, it's fantastic stuff. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, check that out.

Obviously, folks, if you haven't, we've also got a podcast series, The Women's War, that covers the earlier history of the Rojavan Revolution up to about 2019, late 2019. quite a bit of the impact that kind of this sort of feminist lens has had on what's happening over there and how it's actually persisted, you know, under the conditions that are really kind of almost impossibly challenging when you look at what these people are up against, which is part of, again, I guess ultimately why, as we've repeatedly come back to, I think this is so important for people in the West to study as things get worse for a lot of folks here, and as we attempt to arrest and take charge of the situation in our own lives, we have all these questions about how do we stop our government from arming not just Turkey, but all of these regimes around the world that are doing such terrible things? How do we stop? How do we arrest, you know, these problems that are continuing to affect, you know, really ultimately billions of people around the world? It's taking charge of our own lives in the same way that these people have. It's kind of making that slogan of the Rojavan revolution, you know, resistance is life, actually embracing that in a way that matters.

And when you focus on sort of the challenges, like the sheer amount of work that has to be done here, the very primitive state of any kind of meaningful resistance, the relatively primitive state of organizing on the left compared to, for example, the organizing that the right does in tandem with paramilitaries in the state. It can seem like an impossible challenge. But 10 years on, the people in northeast Syria are still fighting, you know? And I think you have to, I think paying attention to that makes it clear that it is actually possible to win. So true. Well, I guess that's kind of it for us today. Is there anything else we want to... I just wanted to go out on a better note. I'm writing a piece for Kurdish Peace Institute.

I'm manifesting this on the podcast, so I've actually write it about Myanmar-Kurdistan solidarity, which I think is cool. Great topic, yes. Yeah, I don't think we have a lot of time, but I think that one thing that I've learned from the friends in Rojava is that even when you are going through difficulties, you can still stand in solidarity with other people.

And God knows we're all going through difficulties in economic and political and state violence terms in this country um and i think that like one thing i really took from that was that uh it's never too hard for you to be in solidarity and i hope that folks who are in this country will, will appreciate that and be in solidarity with people and Rojava as well. Absolutely. Well, Debbie, Arthur, thank you both so much for being here with us and thank you for continuing to

do the work that you do to, to keep this topic alive in people's hearts and minds. Thank you all so much. Yeah. Always happy. Yeah. Keep up the great work yourselves. Thank you. All right. Yeah, always happy. Yeah, keep up the great work yourselves. Thank you. All right, everybody, that's the episode. We will be back tomorrow unless this

comes out on a Friday, in which case we might not be back tomorrow, but we'll be back, you know, Monday. You understand how this works at this point, right? It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

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