the Kurds are on the move
February 29, 2016 12:45 AM Subscribe
The Kurdish key - "Kurds are key to a Middle East solution as they hold the balance of power in Iraq and Syria, as well as being in the midst of an insurrection in Turkey. The US needs the Kurds as much as it needs the Turks in its efforts to defeat Isis." (also btw /r/Kurdistan: Who Exactly Are 'the Kurds'?; End Times for the Caliphate?)
When the current countries in the middle east were divided up by the western consortium was chopping the traditional Kurdish land intentionally planned? Looking at the maps it seems like that group was divided up between at least five other countries.
posted by sammyo at 7:25 AM on February 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by sammyo at 7:25 AM on February 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
Notice the Kurdish region, if made a state, controls water sources for every single neighbor?
Yes, it was intentional.
posted by ocschwar at 7:28 AM on February 29, 2016 [5 favorites]
Yes, it was intentional.
posted by ocschwar at 7:28 AM on February 29, 2016 [5 favorites]
The Atlantic article said something, what it did not explain is who the Kurdish people are.
I had a friend born in Azerbijan, of Armenian parents, who speaks nine languages, holds a degree in Middle eastern history. We were talking and I asked him who the Kurds are, and why are they left without a country and seemingly despised? He told me that Kurds are Christian in Christian societies, and Muslim in Muslim societies. They rob the dead on the battlefield and are considered jackals. At this point I was blinking and forming a question or two. I said, "So this is a common opinion, not just your personal opinion?" He said, "Oh yes, this is the universal opinion." I said, "Well you know the various have been going at it in the ME, since time began. You excavate and society after society has crumbled in easily discernable layers for at least 10,000 years. Is it that the Kurds are just more pragmatic survivors?" "I am just answering you question," he said. This person talking was not Muslim.
The individual I spoke with has been safely inside the US for more than twenty years, and he still wears the prejudices of that area like a jacket covered with patches each explaining one drift or another. The wounds of that area constitute a descriptor of the human life form there. They are there by design, and will not heal, also by design. This not that I hold one individual to have the definitive information on the subject of the Kurds, but all I see is one society after another denying them a place, and treating them like the other. They somehow or other, wear the universal kick me, sign.
posted by Oyéah at 8:56 AM on February 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
I had a friend born in Azerbijan, of Armenian parents, who speaks nine languages, holds a degree in Middle eastern history. We were talking and I asked him who the Kurds are, and why are they left without a country and seemingly despised? He told me that Kurds are Christian in Christian societies, and Muslim in Muslim societies. They rob the dead on the battlefield and are considered jackals. At this point I was blinking and forming a question or two. I said, "So this is a common opinion, not just your personal opinion?" He said, "Oh yes, this is the universal opinion." I said, "Well you know the various have been going at it in the ME, since time began. You excavate and society after society has crumbled in easily discernable layers for at least 10,000 years. Is it that the Kurds are just more pragmatic survivors?" "I am just answering you question," he said. This person talking was not Muslim.
The individual I spoke with has been safely inside the US for more than twenty years, and he still wears the prejudices of that area like a jacket covered with patches each explaining one drift or another. The wounds of that area constitute a descriptor of the human life form there. They are there by design, and will not heal, also by design. This not that I hold one individual to have the definitive information on the subject of the Kurds, but all I see is one society after another denying them a place, and treating them like the other. They somehow or other, wear the universal kick me, sign.
posted by Oyéah at 8:56 AM on February 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
The Kurds are in this only for themselves. They plan to emerge from this mess with an independent Kurdistan carved from the hides of Iraq and Syria. And since they are the best military on the ground in the theater and have the at least tacit support of both the US and Russia, this time they may succeed. Good for them...
posted by jim in austin at 9:25 AM on February 29, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by jim in austin at 9:25 AM on February 29, 2016 [3 favorites]
They somehow or other, wear the universal kick me, sign.
Well, at least they're not Armenians.
posted by Segundus at 10:29 AM on February 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
Well, at least they're not Armenians.
posted by Segundus at 10:29 AM on February 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
Well, at least they're not Armenians.
Funny you should say that, this is from today:
"Turkey's HDP Co-President Selahettin Demirtas answered to Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's earlier statement, in which he stated that "the Kurds like the Armenian "gangs" of those times are cooperating with Russians."
"In fact, when they say that we are like the Armenians that collaborated with the Russians, they want to say. "What we did with the Armenians in 1915, will also do with you." It does not mean anything but a policy of mass slaughter and death."
posted by ts;dr at 10:45 AM on February 29, 2016 [4 favorites]
Funny you should say that, this is from today:
"Turkey's HDP Co-President Selahettin Demirtas answered to Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's earlier statement, in which he stated that "the Kurds like the Armenian "gangs" of those times are cooperating with Russians."
"In fact, when they say that we are like the Armenians that collaborated with the Russians, they want to say. "What we did with the Armenians in 1915, will also do with you." It does not mean anything but a policy of mass slaughter and death."
posted by ts;dr at 10:45 AM on February 29, 2016 [4 favorites]
Oyeah:
When the Ottoman/Turkish government was taking Armenian lives in the early years of the twentieth century, they often appealed to the opportunism of the excluded Kurds to help them. They were approached as fellow Muslims to take up the cause as accomplices of the genocide. Now, obviously, modern Kurds are not responsible for those acts universally, and it is terrible that those accomplices almost immediately became victims themselves of attempts at ethnic cleansing, but it does not surprise me that someone of an Armenian background has an unfavourable opinion of them.
What is most bizarre to me about these conflicts is that so many Turks' ancestry is in the subsumed demographics of recent history. Turkey, like no other West Asian state, has managed to manufacture a national identity and absorb or coercively educate vast numbers of people into that special, modern idea of Turkishness. How many Kurds, Armenians, and members of other minority groups, were forced to stop passing down their language and culture for fear of reprisal, all the while continuing to live in Turkey? I would not be surprised to learn that swaths of those cheering on the air raids in Ankara, or Istanbul are more related to the victims of those bombings than they think.
It reminds me of those old ads borne of racially-framed enmity towards Irish people on the part of the British bourgeoisie and aristocracy, always depicting the Irish as ape-like and subhuman. Little did those buffoons realise that those they called "gorillas" likely shared a tremendous amount of cultural, and even moreso, genetic, history with them.
posted by constantinescharity at 11:52 AM on February 29, 2016 [4 favorites]
When the Ottoman/Turkish government was taking Armenian lives in the early years of the twentieth century, they often appealed to the opportunism of the excluded Kurds to help them. They were approached as fellow Muslims to take up the cause as accomplices of the genocide. Now, obviously, modern Kurds are not responsible for those acts universally, and it is terrible that those accomplices almost immediately became victims themselves of attempts at ethnic cleansing, but it does not surprise me that someone of an Armenian background has an unfavourable opinion of them.
What is most bizarre to me about these conflicts is that so many Turks' ancestry is in the subsumed demographics of recent history. Turkey, like no other West Asian state, has managed to manufacture a national identity and absorb or coercively educate vast numbers of people into that special, modern idea of Turkishness. How many Kurds, Armenians, and members of other minority groups, were forced to stop passing down their language and culture for fear of reprisal, all the while continuing to live in Turkey? I would not be surprised to learn that swaths of those cheering on the air raids in Ankara, or Istanbul are more related to the victims of those bombings than they think.
It reminds me of those old ads borne of racially-framed enmity towards Irish people on the part of the British bourgeoisie and aristocracy, always depicting the Irish as ape-like and subhuman. Little did those buffoons realise that those they called "gorillas" likely shared a tremendous amount of cultural, and even moreso, genetic, history with them.
posted by constantinescharity at 11:52 AM on February 29, 2016 [4 favorites]
Turkey, like no other West Asian state, has managed to manufacture a national identity and absorb or coercively educate vast numbers of people into that special, modern idea of Turkishness.
Perhaps not very West Asian but this is very typical of the Balkans. Greece, for example, spent much of the 19th century convincing illiterate Christian peasants to speak Greek and believe that their primary identity was 'Greek,' conceived nationalistically.
The Turkish success in crafting a nation-state presumably has to do with what's happening in the Balkans, and perhaps even personally with Ataturk, who of course lived through all this during his childhood in Thessaloniki. That city was the much-coveted prize of all the Balkan nation-states of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I assume those states poured a lot of resources into nationalizing its inhabitants (e.g. this Bulgarian high school, open 1880-1913). It would be interesting to know more about the details of the intellectual origins of Turkish nationalism -- I don't really know enough to compare it to Greece's efforts, for example.
posted by crazy with stars at 3:13 PM on February 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
Perhaps not very West Asian but this is very typical of the Balkans. Greece, for example, spent much of the 19th century convincing illiterate Christian peasants to speak Greek and believe that their primary identity was 'Greek,' conceived nationalistically.
The Turkish success in crafting a nation-state presumably has to do with what's happening in the Balkans, and perhaps even personally with Ataturk, who of course lived through all this during his childhood in Thessaloniki. That city was the much-coveted prize of all the Balkan nation-states of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I assume those states poured a lot of resources into nationalizing its inhabitants (e.g. this Bulgarian high school, open 1880-1913). It would be interesting to know more about the details of the intellectual origins of Turkish nationalism -- I don't really know enough to compare it to Greece's efforts, for example.
posted by crazy with stars at 3:13 PM on February 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
It reminds me of those old ads borne of racially-framed enmity towards Irish people on the part of the British bourgeoisie and aristocracy, always depicting the Irish as ape-like and subhuman. Little did those buffoons realise that those they called "gorillas" likely shared a tremendous amount of cultural, and even moreso, genetic, history with them.
Every culture that wants to believe in its cultural superiority (probably going through the later spasms of Imperialism) has Barbarians Next Door. I'm currently sitting in Mexico, a place I've not been to before, and I'm surprised at how surprised I am at the racism almost identical to what you're describing that I've unwittingly internalised from U.S. culture and media.
posted by Grangousier at 1:38 PM on March 1, 2016
Every culture that wants to believe in its cultural superiority (probably going through the later spasms of Imperialism) has Barbarians Next Door. I'm currently sitting in Mexico, a place I've not been to before, and I'm surprised at how surprised I am at the racism almost identical to what you're describing that I've unwittingly internalised from U.S. culture and media.
posted by Grangousier at 1:38 PM on March 1, 2016
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