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Summer 2010

Editor's Page
Editor’s Page
Michael Walzer
Politics Abroad
One State/Two States: Rethinking Israel and Palestine
Danny Rubinstein
Democracy Undermined: Constitutional Subterfuge in Latin America
Forrest D. Colburn and Alberto Trejos
Vietnamese Dissidents: Absent from the Western Mind
Dustin Roasa
Socialism Now?
Introduction
Michael Kazin
What Happened to the European Left?
Sheri Berman
Socialism and the Current Crisis
Robin Blackburn
What Would a Real Socialist President Do?
Jack Clark
Which Socialism?
Michael Walzer
Articles
Obama On and Off Base
Eugene Goodheart
Public Education as Welfare
Michael B. Katz
Achieving a More Integrated America
Richard Alba
Found Money: The Case for Financial Transaction Tax
Bill Barclay
Home and Homeland: Isaiah Berlin’s Zionism
Avishai Margalit
Life and Fetters: Chéreau-Janáček-Dostoevsky
Mitchell Cohen
Arguments
Hate Crime Laws: Punishment to Fit the Crime
Michael Lieberman
Jesse Larner Responds
Jesse Larner
Notebook
War, Economy, History: Politics by Other Media
Morris Dickstein
Michael Foot: 1913-2010
David Bromwich
Reconsiderations
Literature and the Vietnam War
Judith B. Walzer
Books
Ideas of Justice
Michael Rustin
Prisoner of Privilege
Siddhartha Deb
Enlightenment, Enlargement, and the European Union
Glyn Morgan
The Long Con
Akiva Gottlieb
Letters
Naming Violence Against Women
Cynthia Fuchs Epstein
Last Page
End of a Credo
Nicolaus Mills
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Jair Bolsonaro, at a debate about violence against women in Brazil’s chamber of deputies, September 2016. Photo by Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil.

Jair Bolsonaro, at a debate about violence against women in Brazil’s chamber of deputies, September 2016. Photo by Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil.

The front page of the Canard, February 28, 2018. Courtesy of Le Canard enchaîné.

Selling drugs in the shadow of an abandoned factory, North Philadelphia. Photo by George Karandinos.

Bundle of $10 bags of heroin. Photo by Fernando Montero Castrillo.

The left will not live forever on the sidelines of political power. When we have an opportunity to remake our healthcare system, we must be sure to seize it.

—Adam Gaffney, writing in our new issue

For more forward thinking from the democratic left, sign up for our newsletter:

A state employee reads the newspaper at the reception of the Defense Committee of the Revolution (CDR). March 2016, Havana, Cuba. Photo by David Himbert / Hans Lucas Studio.

A street vendor selling tropical fruits in front of a Benetton shop in Old Havana. May 2017, Havana, Cuba. Photo by David Himbert / Hans Lucas Studio.

On a dilapidated Havana street, an elderly man searches through the garbage. February 2018, Havana, Cuba. Photo by David Himbert / Hans Lucas Studio.

Students rally in support of the lecturers’ strike, February 23 (Bristol UCU / Facebook)

Part of a much larger painted banner in Bristol, February 28 (Bristol UCU / Facebook)

At the University of Bristol, February 28 (Bristol UCU / Facebook)

MORENA supporters at a rally in Itzapalapa, Mexico City, April 2015 (Eneas De Troya / Flickr)

Audience members waiting for the program to begin at a MORENA rally, March 2016 (Eneas De Troya / Flickr)

MORENA supporter leafletting against energy reforms, 2013 (Eneas De Troya / Flickr)

AMLO mural in Mexico City, 2007 (Randal Sheppard / Flickr)

Andrés Manuel López Obrador on the campaign trail during his previous presidential run, May 2012 (Arturo Alfaro Galán)

Courtesy of Robert Greene

Entrance to Alcatraz in 2008 (Babak Fakhamzadeh / Flickr)

Letter from the Indians of All Tribes to the National Council on Indian Opportunity, January 1970 (National Parks Service)

Sign on Alcatraz during occupation, 1969–60 (National Parks Service)

Proclamation of the reclaiming of Alcatraz by the Indians of All Tribes, November 1969 (National Parks Service)

Members of the People’s Guard on motorcycles, 1920. Courtesy of Eric Lee.

Armed group of the Menshevik People’s Guard, 1920. Courtesy of Eric Lee.

Eleven-year-old Liza Greenberg, daughter of David and Suzanne Nossel. Photo by Todd Gitlin.

Protest against neoliberalism in Colombia, 2013

At a protest against the alleged Pizzagate conspiracy, Washington, D.C., March 25, 2017 (Blink O’fanaye / Flickr)

NYC Dept. of Parks Water Carnival - WPA
Adult Education Project - WPA
Salut au Monde - Federal Dance Theatre - WPA
Barber Shop Quartet Contest - WPA
Barber Shop Quartet Contest - WPA
In a scene from HBO’s The Deuce, streetwalker Ruby presents an officer with a property voucher to avoid arrest. Courtesy of HBO.

The Kurds

[W]hen we refer to all Kurdish fighters synonymously, we simply blur the fact that they have very different politics. . . right now, yes, the people are facing the Islamic State threat, so it’s very important to have a unified focus. But the truth is, ideologically and politically these are very, very different systems. Actually almost opposite to each other. —Dilar Dirik, “Rojava vs. the World,” February 2015

The Kurds, who share ethnic and cultural similarities with Iranians and are mostly Muslim by religion (largely Sunni but with many minorities), have long struggled for self-determination. After World War I, their lands were divided up between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. In Iran, though there have been small separatist movements, Kurds are mostly subjected to the same repressive treatment as everyone else (though they also face Persian and Shi’ite chauvinism, and a number of Kurdish political prisoners were recently executed). The situation is worse in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, where the Kurds are a minority people subjected to ethnically targeted violations of human rights.  

Iraq: In 1986–89, Saddam Hussein conducted a genocidal campaign in which tens of thousands were murdered and thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed, including by bombing and chemical warfare. After the first Gulf War, the UN sought to establish a safe haven in parts of Kurdistan, and the United States and UK set up a no-fly zone. In 2003, the Kurdish peshmerga sided with the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam Hussein. In 2005, after a long struggle with Baghdad, the Iraqi Kurds won constitutional recognition of their autonomous region, and the Kurdistan Regional Government has since signed oil contracts with a number of Western oil companies as well as with Turkey. Iraqi Kurdistan has two main political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), both clan-based and patriarchal.

Turkey: For much of its modern history, Turkey has pursued a policy of forced assimilation towards its minority peoples; this policy is particularly stringent in the case of the Kurds—until recently referred to as the “mountain Turks”—who make up 20 percent of the total population. The policy has included forced population transfers; a ban on use of the Kurdish language, costume, music, festivals, and names; and extreme repression of any attempt at resistance. Large revolts were suppressed in 1925, 1930, and 1938, and the repression escalated with the formation of the PKK as a national liberation party, resulting in civil war in the Kurdish region from 1984 to 1999.

Syria: Kurds make up perhaps 15 percent of the population and live mostly in the northeastern part of Syria. In 1962, after Syria was declared an Arab republic, a large number of Kurds were stripped of their citizenship and declared aliens, which made it impossible for them to get an education, jobs, or any public benefits. Their land was given to Arabs. The PYD was founded in 2003 and immediately banned; its members were jailed and murdered, and a Kurdish uprising in Qamishli was met with severe military violence by the regime. When the uprising against Bashar al Assad began as part of the Arab Spring, Kurds participated, but after 2012, when they captured Kobani from the Syrian army, they withdrew most of their energy from the war against Assad in order to set up a liberated area. For this reason, some other parts of the Syrian resistance consider them Assad’s allies. The Kurds in turn cite examples of discrimination against them within the opposition.

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