I… don’t know what’s going on here.
This is over Iraqi Kurdistan
America: Are we on it?
As per previously, nobody has any fucking clue what America is doing.
No clue. But the Turkish-Russian patrols are going swimmingly. As expected.
There’s an entire convoy of journalists following the patrol around watching people throw rocks at the Turkish soldiers.
What the Fuck? Why You Gotta Be Like This?
I should mention again that, while all this has been going on, a few days ago, Turkey stepped up it’s operations against the Kurds within Turkish borders, including air strikes.
So they’re attacking Kurds in three countries: Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Now, obviously, some of those Kurds especially in their own borders are PKK and enemies of the state and stuff. (Although, as Enes Kanter might point out, there might be good reasons for that.) But Erdogan has been taking the de facto position that all Kurds are terrorists. Moreover, he has publicly announced that the US killing of Baghdadi proves the legitimacy of killing terrorists, so they get to kill terrorists too.
One way or another, Erdogan has a real bug up his ass about the Kurds. Like, all the Kurds. That said, Turkey has a 100 year history of attempting to grind all of their ethnic minorities into dust, so…
I really don’t know what the fuck is up with Turkey. I guess the power of blaming ethnic minorities for all the world’s ills is strong tonic for people under totalitarian rule for keeping their political energies diverted.
It should be a sober reminder of what can happen, considering that Turkey is a pretty fucking advanced country. Totalitarianism can really fuck a people up not just politically but down to the fundamentals of society as it tries to fabricate its cultural history to support the regime. Americans like to believe this is a danger for smaller, weaker states, while conveniently forgetting the exceptions (usually by citing the move towards totalitarianism as occurring before economic development occurs). But Turkey is really fucking up the whole Jihad v. McWorld narrative whereby once people get sufficiently situated into a nice health liberal capitalism then they’ll start behaving well.
Instead of assimilating politically—and they’ve applied for admission to the EU as someone pointed out upthread—they found a way to hold European society hostage against their governments with the threat of unleashing a few million ethnic Muslims refugees on them.
Which, I guess… would be totally legal?
Rojava to Rock 