With the firing of James Comey, and the Administration’s decision to arm the YPG in Syria, I am reminded of a political science class I was encouraged to take at Brooklyn College when I was a junior in high school. The year was 1975, just 13 months since Nixon’s resignation. I was 16, in a class of 19 and 20 year olds. The professor was Sunjo Han, the textbook was Michael Parenti’s Democracy For the Few (now in its 9th edition, all these years later), and when President Ford fired James Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense, many of us were quick to criticize the decision, because, well, because we were young, we didn’t like President Ford, and we were critical of the firing because we were critical of most things that Ford did at the time.
“You have to remember,” Professor Han admonished us, and I have remembered this through today:
“The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.”
He then reminded us of how Schlesinger was not really our political ally.
The best example to understand how the enemy of our enemy is not always our friend, is, of course, Stalin during World War Two. He was the enemy of our enemy, but certainly not our friend. And that brings us back to Comey, and the YPG.
Clearly, there is no love lost between Democrats and Comey. Nate Silver has written that the Comey probably cost Clinton the election with his letter to Congress in October. We know all that. We are outraged that Comey was fired, even though the enemy (Comey) of our enemy (Trump) was not necessarily our friend. I will let other pundits elaborate on this one. You get the idea.
The YPG is another matter. The YPG is the is the Kurdish Militia in Syria, of Rojava’s secular, non-state democracy. The New York Times Magazine had a cover story on Rojava in November, 2015, titled, “A Dream of a Secular Utopia in ISIS’ backyard.” It tells of the P.K.K., the Kurdish Workers Party, and how Abdullah Öcalan, it’s formerly Stalinist leader, discovered the work of Murray Bookchin, disavowed Stalinism, realized that the writings of Bookchin were intuitively within Kurdish sensabilities, and set out to create a decentralized non-state apparatus in Rojava, western Syria. There, they have women fighting alongside men, and they are kicking ISIS’ butt.
Sign at a climate march….
Rojava is a fascinating story, and I encourage you to read about Öcalan, Bookchin, and the government they have created that deliberately has no state apparatus. It is an anarchist’s dream, without a state and without anarchy. There is no centralized state bureaucracy. They are inclusive, egalitarian, and consistent with Bookchin’s writings, which have New England Town Meetings as a model of direct democracy. Bookchin’s work now has a new life, a decade after he died, for the most part, in obscurity. [Full disclosure: I was Murray’s friend and student (“Call me Murray. Only the FBI calls me Mr. Bookchin” he told me when we first met) for the last 25 years of his life.]
So Trump is arming the YPG, and I doubt he has a clue that the people he is arming are antithetical to everything Trump stands for. Turkey is apoplectic over this decision. Clearly, the enemy (YPG) of his enemy (ISIS) is not his friend!
We will see how this plays out….