American Leftists Need to Pay More Attention to Rojava

[flamingdem]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/11/25/rojava_is_a_radical_experiment_in_democracy_in_northern_syria_american_leftists.html

There is an astonishing story in Sunday’s New York Times about Rojava, a Kurdish region in Northern Syria that’s ruled by militant feminist anarchists. Rojava’s constitution enshrines gender equality and religious freedom. An official tells journalist Wes Enzina that every position at every level of government includes a female equivalent of equal power. Recruits to Rojava’s 6,000-strong police force receive their weapons only after two weeks of feminist instruction. Reading Enzina’s piece, it’s hard to understand how this radical experiment in democracy in one of the bloodiest corners of the world isn’t better known internationally, particularly on the left.

At the start of piece, Enzina himself isn’t quite sure Rojava is real. It sounds too fantastical:

The regime of President Bashar al-Assad doesn’t officially recognize Rojava’s autonomous status, nor does the United Nations or NATO — it is, in this way, just as illicit as the Islamic State. But if the reports I heard from the region were to be believed, within its borders the rules of the neighboring ISIS caliphate had been inverted. In accordance with a philosophy laid out by a leftist revolutionary named Abdullah Ocalan, Rojavan women had been championed as leaders, defense of the environment enshrined in law and radical direct democracy enacted in the streets.

[fasttense]

1. Our so called liberal leaders with power are too busy

Making money for themselves and their friends to bother celabrating real liberal successs.

[flamingdem]

2. And chumming it up with Turkey

who'd like to bomb them to smithereens.

[LiberalEsto]

3. They don't want women elsewhere to get ideas nt