Today we continue with Part II of our interview with Janet Biehl. In Part I, Biehl discussed the work of her longtime partner and collaborator, Murray Bookchin, whose biography she has written. In Part II we talk about her latest book, Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS, a work of illustrated nonfiction about the Kurds of Rojava. Bookchin’s ideas were embraced by imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan, and have helped to inspire experiments in decentralized democracy in Rojava, which Biehl saw firsthand and has now written about.
Robinson
[In Part I of our interview,] you mentioned that, at the end of his life, Murray Bookchin had not succeeded in creating the kind of movement that he dreamed of in the United States. But, what’s so wonderful about your new book, Their Blood Got Mixed, is that years after his death, his ideas have had an afterlife.
Perhaps we could transition to discussing the revolution in Rojava that you write about in the new book. What is it that has happened there that is so distinctive, and that moved you to write about it?
Biehl
This is something I have been following since the 1990s, actually. Murray’s books were translated into many languages, and I remember the day he signed a contract with a Turkish publisher. I remember him signing the contract, putting it in the envelope, and I dropped it in the mailbox. I remember thinking at the time, “Nothing’s going to come of this, but if they want to read it, okay.” Meanwhile, of course, there’s this very yeasty, bubbling, dynamic left in Turkey, always resisting the military and oppression there.
The next thing I heard was that this leader, Abdullah Öcalan, the chieftain of the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party], was arrested and tried. I remember watching that with Murray, but we thought he was just an old Marxist, and didn’t really think too much about it, although Murray was always very sympathetic with the Kurds. And then, in April 2004, we got a message from a Kurdish solidarity activist, a German man—there’s a lot of Kurds in Germany—and he wanted to organize a dialogue between Bookchin and Öcalan because, meanwhile, Öcalan had been sentenced to life imprisonment and was reading a lot of books about the left.
He realized that the PKK needed a new paradigm and had to give up Marxism because that was not happening for the Kurds. It needed to give up this ideal that the PKK had been fighting for to have a separate Kurdish state. He realized that that was not going to work, and was looking for new ideas. The translation that Murray had signed the contract for was in the box of books that his comrades had sent to him in his solitary confinement, and he realized that this set of ideas about bottom up democracy was incredibly relevant to the people who were the largest ethnic group on planet earth who never got a nation state.
So, it was perfect for them, and he said, “We’re never going to get a nation state, probably—it just doesn’t look like anything we can fight for still. But what we can do is try to achieve a degree of autonomy within existing national boundaries in the Middle East—in Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, the states where Kurds live—and carve out areas and have as much autonomy as we can get, and then govern ourselves through these kinds of assemblies and councils and committees that Bookchin is writing about.”
Öcalan recommended to the PKK that they read Murray’s work, and ended up proposing it as a new paradigm, and called it Democratic Confederalism. It was fought out within the PKK, as I understand it, between about 2000 and 2005. But by the end, they decided to accept his recommendation and embraced Democratic Confederalism. With the Kurdish people, it wasn’t just a matter of them deciding on an ideology, and then putting it on the shelf and admiring it, and saying, “Yes, that would be very nice, if only we could do that,” and then going about their lives. No, they arrived at, refined, sculpted, and pared it away. They added and subtracted, found the ideology that they wanted, and then they set about implementing it. They took it very seriously.
And so, even in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad is in power and throwing people into jail, using an incredibly cruel intelligence agency that’s repressing and torturing people in prisons, the Kurds started organizing and building counter-institutions, especially the women, but also men. The Assad regime thought women couldn’t possibly be political. At huge risk, they began like building up something like a shadow alternative society under these brutal conditions. Although it was a little harder in Turkey, suddenly, the Arab Spring broke out in late 2010, and reached Syria in March 2011. At that point, Syria entered the civil war that’s basically been going on ever since.
The Kurds decided that they did not want to take either side—they didn’t want to be on the side of the brutal Assad dictatorship, which had been torturing them and didn’t recognize them as Kurds, and they didn’t want to be part of the jihadist or FSA [Free Syrian Army] opposition because they didn’t care about Kurds either. Instead, they would go the third way—that’s what they actually said, “We’re going to go our third way”—with the ideology of Democratic Confederalism.
[Last year] we passed the 10th anniversary of the Rojavan Revolution. In July 19, of 2012, the moment came when basically Assad pulled his forces out of the Northeast to go fight the jihadist insurgents in the south—he couldn’t fight a two-front war. He knew he couldn’t defeat the Kurds allied with the jihadists, not that the Kurds would ever really do that, but they might to overthrow the dictatorship, so he couldn’t take that chance. So, he basically evacuated the northeast, not just militarily, but also pulled out of government buildings.
When I was there, whole fields were evacuated. Large landowners left and didn’t want to be left to the mercy of the Kurds because everybody knew what would happen in the Middle East once the Kurds were in power: there would be payback against the Arabs that tortured them all these years. That’s how the cycle of revenge works in the Middle East: one gets the upper hand, and then takes revenge against the one that went before. Amazingly enough, the Kurds and their allies did not do that. They said, “We are all in this together.” They had learned to work under the oppression of the Assad regime, and had learned to work together. And they said, “We’re going to do something new here. It’s not just that we will create democracy, and it’s not just that we will admit women as full participants, half of humanity, in this society,” which was amazing enough, “but we will break that cycle of revenge. We will work with people who want to work with us.”
The first time I visited in late 2014, the message that I kept hearing at different academies and its training institutions was, “No revenge taking. No payback.” It’s a marker of how seriously they took this ideology because Öcalan endorsed it and they had all agreed on it. They were going to create a pluralistic, multi-ethnic, multi-religious society—just astonishing. People were so glad to be free of that regime that they had to actually create layers of the base democracy beyond even what Öcalan and Murray had written about because people were pouring into the streets. They all wanted to go to the assembly and be part of the self-government.
Robinson
In the first half of this interview, when you laid out Murray Bookchin’s vision and ideas, we were speaking very theoretically about having a society with strong participation in democratic structures that is decentralized. These are very inspiring visions, but can be abstract terms. Could you go into some more detail about the extent of what has happened in Rojava? Does it embody these kinds of principles for an alternate way of doing things, and what does that look like for the people there?
Biehl
When I was there in April 2019 that I described in the graphic novel, I told one of the fixers that I’m really interested in the democratic institutions at different levels of the confederal structure, and he was more than willing to show me. We went to a commune, the base unit. Actually, he chose to take me to one that was in an Arab village on the Euphrates River, and there were these Arab people discussing principles of self-governance. Then we went to a neighborhood council meeting in west Bohtan in Kobanî, which consisted of eight people, one man and one woman for each of the four urban areas that they represented, their delegates. So, there were four men and four women, and they were talking about their activities on all different levels, in peace, the economy, self-defense, education, sanitation, and health.
At every level, there are these committees to deal with these problems. From there, we went to the city council in Kobanî, and I recognized some familiar faces because they had been at that neighborhood council meeting. They were the two delegates that the neighborhood council had sent to the Kobanî city council. They talked about how they managed, at their level, the kinds of problems they were dealing with, and again, in the same areas.
And then from there, it’s the self-administration, a cantonal level body. In a way, it’s more of a state and more based on elected representatives than at this local level. It’s more like a representative democracy at the upper levels of the self administration. They do vote, they’re elected, and it’s more conventional. It’s not what Bookchin and Öcalan projected, but maybe it’s the best they can do right now because they are in a war situation against ISIS and threatened by Turkey.
I don’t want to give the impression that it’s a pure assembly democracy. It’s not. But it has a strong element of it, and they’re very committed to ensuring that all ideas and voices are heard. In some ways, it also seems that this confederal structure is like a social service agency, too. They combined the functions of self-government with social service. This is a communal society, and they look out for each other.
So, in all these areas of education, health, and self-defense, they’re addressing the needs of people at all times. And then there’s a judicial structure parallel to that, as well, grounded in what they call peace and justice committees. The idea is to try to solve disputes at the local level as much as possible, without lawyers, using conflict resolution techniques. These peace and justice committees can be very large, but each party in the dispute can make their case, and then usually the group comes up with a solution to try to solve the problem in the most just way. There are upper level courts, but the idea is to attempt to keep conflict resolution at the local level as much as possible.
And then there’s also a parallel structure to all this—I know, it gets very complicated. There are numerous intricate institutions. There’s a parallel women’s structure to deal only with women’s problems because their principle is that only women should decide on women’s problems. You’re not going to get 70-year-old legislators telling women they can’t have abortions over there. If it’s a women’s matter, women decide about it, and that’s that.
Robinson
What are the ways then in which what they have built there differ from what we have here in the United States? What is unique about what they do that is so inspiring and contrasts with what we are used to?
Biehl
They’re eager to govern themselves. We live in a very individualistic culture, and it’s part of their communal culture to look after each other. They’re welded together by the war against ISIS—that’s the meaning of the title, Their Blood Got Mixed. That’s what a man in Kobanî told me because I had asked him, “Whatever happened to the aspiration to have a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society, gender equal society?” and he said, “Our blood got mixed because we saw each other and learned to depend on each other fighting ISIS.” That was just incredibly inspiring to me.
They try to address things as much as they can at the local level, whereas we turn to the nation state, to Washington, so much to solve problems. They are trying to do something that we have a lot of trouble with. Here, here we have a democracy that some of us really want to be multi-ethnic, but we have this big problem with white supremacists and people who are fanning the flames of hate and would rather turn our democracy into an autocracy, partly because of messages that we were getting from the center under the Trump presidency. Those messages did a lot to unleash the forces of hatred.
In Rojava, the messages are all about respecting and embracing each other, and accepting differences and not to try to convert people to your view, but respecting that people don’t have to look and think exactly like you to be part of your polity. That showed me how important messages from the center are because I think it’s really done a lot to ensure that the aim of communal solidarity stays strong there.
Nathan, when I went there, I just came from the United States where anytime a woman tries to get involved in politics at a national level, there’s a huge misogynistic pushback. I thought, “Men are bad, and it can’t be that different there,” so I actually really tried to find griping on the part of men. “There’s got to be backlash! I’m so accustomed to backlash here, there’s got to be!” I even went up to a guy selling sneakers in the street, thinking he’s going to have some gripes, and asked him about it. He said it’s not even worth talking about, because of course women are to be part of everything, just like men.
You can see it on the ground. So many of the people we met who were political actors there were women, and it was very refreshing. But the conundrum was, what about Arab women? Because a lot of them are educated to think that they have to stay home. The Quran doesn’t say that, but parts of their Islamic tradition does. One of the brilliant things that the women’s movement did from the very beginning is from that moment in July 2012, they started knocking on women’s doors, talking to every single woman in every single household and saying, “If you need it, there’s a battered women’s shelter over there that we just built. If you need education and reproductive health facilities, we got it over there for you. If you need to take classes on healing, we’ve got we’ve got a school over there. And if you want to get involved in politics, here’s a women’s house that can show you how to do that.” They made sure that Arab women were aware of these new women’s institutions that were being set up so that they would be ready when the women were ready to come over and be free to.
Robinson
I feel as if their model is so important, in part because we are so terribly disempowered here in this country. As you mentioned, for all of our problems, we look at Congress and hope that they can do something about it, and don’t feel like we have any control over what they choose to do. It’s a set of very distant, wealthy people who have our fate in their hands. Whether we do anything about the climate depends on what how Joe Manchin feels about it in the morning, and I have no say over it whatsoever. You can get so deeply disaffected and hopeless in a system like that. So to have a real life working model where ordinary people get to participate in politics, make decisions, and solve the problems that affect them, is something remarkable.
Biehl
It is very inspiring. I think Murray was a little bit premature—he overestimated the extent to which the United States is ready for this. I finally had to tell him around 2000 that I’m not sure that we have overcome racism enough here. If you decentralize the United States, what’s going to happen to Black people in Alabama? For me, that has to be a marker: what happens to disadvantaged Black people. I told him I thought the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s was super important. If you take away that, and take away the Voting Rights Act, we’re going to be in trouble. We will end up with white supremacist “Bantustans” here, and I told him I couldn’t publicly advocate for it anymore in this context. He was, of course, very disappointed, but he said, “I love you anyway.”
But, again, it shows how important the general education is because they have been able to overcome generations of hatred by education and messaging in Rojava. Another PKK institution is the academy—there are these little schools everywhere, and anybody of any age can go to them. They have academies on economics, democracy—academies where you can learn about all these different aspects of society. It’s a just general thing that people do where they study and absorb these messages of this ideology.
People here in the U.S. are very distrustful of ideology and think of it as communist or something like that, but it has helped create a remarkable degree of social solidarity over there that they have been able to have this decentralized system, without creating Arab or Kurdish nationalists “-stans” within Rojava. They participate together. I do think the war against ISIS did a lot to help a lot with that, but probably was heading that way anyway. They have martyrs cemeteries dedicated to people who died in the war against ISIS—11,000 did. There’s no Kurdish section, Arab section, or Assyrian section. They’re all buried together. Women buried next to men, Kurds next to Arabs, and the markers are the same. A commander doesn’t have a more elaborate gravestone than a rank and file fighter. The headstones are uniform. You could see in the organization structure of their cemeteries what they value in the way they organize their society.
Robinson
What they’ve done is so important also because at this point, post-20th century, it is so easy to become cynical about revolutionaries who talk of empowering the people because we’ve seen so many self-described socialists become authoritarians in power. We’ve seen everything from the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and in the 1960s, leftists adopting authoritarian, Maoist politics, to the point where you just inevitably think that any revolutionary movement ends in bloodbath and catastrophe. The ideals of a revolutionary democracy shouldn’t be abandoned and can be put into practice imperfectly, but not fraudulently—it is so important to keep that that flame alive.
Biehl
I agree with you, and it is under threat now, by Turkey. Erdoğan has made it very clear that he wants to invade northern Syria now. He’s exploiting the situation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine—all the world’s attention is there. He would like to do something that he’s always wanted to do, which is just to try to invade. Thirty miles is what he says he needed for border security, to protect himself against the attacks of the Kurdish-led Rojava. And Kurdish-led Rojava wants nothing except to live in peace with its hyper aggressive neighbor to the north, but Erdoğan made up this fairy tale that he needs protection from this menace.
He’s trying to set up a super patriarchal, autocratic, fascistic regime in Ankara. Maybe he’s right that it’s threatened by this democratic and gender equal society, but it’s not militarily, not by a long shot, and that’s what he’s trying to say. I fear it could happen at any time now. I’m certainly not the only one inspired by this new society that I’ve described. There’s plenty of visitors and Kurdish people who’ve been there who will tell you all about it. I’m not the only voice here. These were our allies in the fight against ISIS, the boots on the ground. If you’re concerned about that, we need to protect them against Turkey, our NATO ally. The fact that Turkey is a NATO ally creates all sorts of complications here. But you can’t just let Erdoğan become an autocrat and massacre a whole people. That he’s what he wants to do.
Robinson
Yes. Your book ends with a warning.
Biehl
Tell your elected officials not to let that happen. Tell them Rojava needs international recognition, and that Turkey has to be restrained.
Robinson
Yes, your book ends with a pretty dire warning and says directly they are under threat. We can be inspired by this beautiful story, but the United States can turn a blind eye and give Erdoğan a wink and a nod to do as he pleases. And it seems that Finland and Sweden have been making a dirty deal about the entrance into NATO in exchange for Erdoğan and Turkey’s support by declining to oppose the oppression of the Kurds. The United States always poses as the champion of freedom and democracy and the opponent of aggressive war, and this is the justification for our support of Ukraine against Putin’s aggression. But here we have a situation which is a real test of our principles. Do we consistently believe in supporting the rights of people to self-determination and freedom from aggression, or only when it suits our geopolitical strategic interests?
Biehl
Certainly, the track record in the past has been that we do ignore it. Erdoğan’s mercenaries, that he backed, invaded a place called Afrin in March 2018, and took it over. Now they’re doing demographic engineering by driving the Kurds out and bringing in Arabs to resettle. They’ve uprooted the ancient olive orchards and, of course, destroyed the democratic society that was there. After Donald Trump gave the green light to Erdoğan to invade in October 2019, Erdoğan went in and took over a place called Serê Kaniyê along with other parts on the border and is now doing the same kind of demographic engineering there to try to eliminate the Kurds and replace them with a docile Arab population.
And so, he’s shown us what he will do, and it’s not pretty. Folks, let your elected officials know that’s intolerable. There has to be a constituency of people that speak out because the Kurds don’t have a nation state. They’re not part of geopolitics, and keep getting overlooked—that’s why they were the losers of the 20th century. So, we have to stand for democracy, and help these people who keep getting the short end of the stick and who have been true and loyal friends of the United States in the war against ISIS. To me, that’s my favorite military alliances that the United States has made since World War II. We worked together to eliminate the caliphate in Syria, at least in terms of physical territory.
Robinson
Yes. They’ve accomplished so much under the most trying conditions, defeating the brutal Islamic State, and not just that, but pioneered a society built on principles of democracy and feminism. It’s just extraordinary. You have that wonderful drawing in the book of the spirit of Murray Bookchin hanging over Rojava, this kind of ghostly figure in the sky. It’s a wonderful illustration of the way his ideas have lived on after him, and I’m confident would have moved him so deeply. What’s wonderful is that they have not just taken and rigidly implemented his ideas as if he is some Marx-like oracle, but built on, transformed, and adapted them for local circumstances. It’s a model of the same thing that he did himself: taking the good ideas from wherever you find them and then having ordinary people empowered to decide for themselves what they think is best and how they want to do it.
Biehl
I think people love Rojava now, and they know more about face-to-face democracy than Murray and Öcalan ever did. They’re writing the next chapters right now. For any future organizing around these ideas, we’ll have to look to them.
