Richard.
Ezekiel. My most favorite Prophet.
Miriam.
I hope you discover that it is just a passing mood. I honestly
believe that we don't need to feel full of doom and gloom, just
because we see Mankind going to Hell in a hand basket...and taking the
planet with it.
If I were to feel doom and gloom with all of Life's negative
outcomes, then I would certainly curl up in a tight little ball and
bid the world goodbye.
Even though I know for certain that my days on Earth are
numbered...and the biggest number is behind me, I still wake up each
morning with some amount of joy over being alive.
Realizing that I had no hand in deciding when I would arrive on this
planet, or to whom I would be delivered, or in what health, mental and
physical, I would endure, nonetheless, I do have control over how I
live each day, within all of those limitations. Being miserable
because of the suffering of so many others accomplishes nothing
positive. Indeed, negative feelings are like chains about our bodies
and our minds.
So I choose to be filled with cheer. I choose to hold high
expectations for all People around me. And if by days end nothing has
changed for the better? Well, I still have me. And alone in a dark
room, I can be quite entertaining.
Carl Jarvis, going nowhere with all of this.
but happy!
On 10/21/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I, too, am all doom and gloom.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, October 21, 2019 11:24 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Pity the Kurds
As I read this article by Chris Hedges, I can't help comparing him to Donald
Trump. Opposites in virtually every way. One looking to adulation by his
followers, and the other looking for Truth regardless of where it leads him.
One is constantly in the news, stirring and agitating, while the other is
virtually unknown to Americans. But I can understand what drives many good
people to embrace Donald Trump.
They are confused and hope that, even though Trump is an unsavory character,
he might lead us to better times, while Chris Hedges has the feel of a
Biblical Prophet, all doom and gloom.
Carl Jarvis: following in the footprints of the Prophet.
On 10/21/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Pity the Kurds
Pity the Kurds
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
I stood on the wind-swept Kalowa Hill in the northern Iraqi city of
Sulaimaniya as Pershan Hassan, a stocky 53-year-old woman, clambered
quickly up the dirt track leading to where a mass grave was being
excavated. She clutched a framed black-and-white picture of a boy. She
pushed her way through the crowd that was looking down at the
unearthed remains of dozens of bodies. Suddenly, she let out a gasp of
pain and recognition as she saw the skeletal remains of her
13-year-old son, Shafiq. A faded blue blindfold was wrapped tightly
around his skull. The casings from spent bullets were scattered around
his dark brown bones.
"I know him by his clothes," she whispered, her voice breaking as she
lifted the garments and kissed them. "I raised him without a father."
It was December 1991, after the first Iraq war. Saddam Hussein had
ruthlessly crushed a Kurdish revolt in the aftermath of Iraq's defeat
that spring by the United States and its allies. Two million refugees
had fled toward Turkey and Iran in April 1991. Many froze to death in
the snow-covered mountain passes as they tried to escape. The
international community, responding to the heartbreaking images,
created havens for their return in northern Iraq, forcing Baghdad to
withdraw its troops.
I spent months with the Kurds as a reporter for The New York Times
after the Iraqi withdrawal, including living and sleeping with seven
Kurdish, or peshmerga, bodyguards after Baghdad offered bounties of
$1,000 for the murder of Western reporters and aid workers in the
Kurdish region. Several of my colleagues were killed or badly wounded.
Kurdistan, "land of the Kurds," is recorded as far back as the 15th
century by European visitors. The Kurds, who speak Kurdish and are
mostly Sunni Muslims, were promised a state by the victorious allies
following World War I and the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire.
Instead the Kurdish region was carved up among Turkey, Syria, Iran,
Iraq and the Soviet Union. The Kurdish struggle for an independent
state, an effort that has included numerous armed insurgencies, has
lasted nearly a century. And so have the brutal waves of repression,
extermination and betrayal to crush Kurdish aspirations.
President Donald Trump's abandonment of the Kurdish-led Syrian
Democratic Forces (SDF) in northern Syria is another chapter in a sad
and heartless game, repeatedly replayed, in which Kurdish forces are
armed and used to achieve the strategic aims of rival nation-states
and then discarded. An estimated 11,000 Kurdish fighters died battling
Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria. They were cannon fodder for the United
States.
Turkey's recent incursion into northern Syria is aimed at weakening
the ties between the SDF and the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK),
which has carried out an insurgency in southeastern Turkey since 1984.
The PKK, whose popular backing has been bolstered by the brutal
Turkish repression of the Kurds, has broad support and is a
surprisingly effective insurgent force.
When I was with a PKK unit operating along the border between Turkey
and Iraq I noted to the commander how well trained his unit appeared to
be.
"Oh," he said, "we tell our fighters to do their two years of
compulsory Turkish army service before they join us."
There are between 25 million and 30 million Kurds who live in the
swath of territory that stretches through northern Iraq into Turkey.
It is the largest ethnic group in the world without a state of its
own. Kurdish groups and clans, to survive, make ever-shifting
alliances, including the latest decision by the SDF to unite with
Damascus. Kurds have forged temporary alliances throughout their
history with the U.S., the Soviet Union, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey.
These alliances have always disintegrated, usually when the Kurds were
no longer considered useful. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the United
States' then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, for example, armed
the Kurds in northern Iraq as a way to destabilize Baghdad.
But the shah, in a secret deal with Baghdad, sold out his Kurdish
allies, allowing Iraq to carry out a scorched-earth policy against the
Kurds that created a humanitarian disaster and an exodus of Kurds in
1975 as devastating as the one resulting from the aborted Kurdish
rebellion in 1991 after the Gulf War.
The counterinsurgency campaigns against the Kurds, often unseen or
ignored by the outside world, have at times reached genocidal levels.
Baghdad dropped poison gas on some 60 Kurdish villages in 1988 and
razed 4,000 Kurdish villages in what was known as the Anfal campaign,
an attempt to annihilate the Kurds in Iraq. As many as 200,000 Kurds were
"disappeared,"
with tens of thousands rounded up and executed. I was present as mass
graves each with more than a thousand bodies in northern Iraq were
excavated, including one with 1,500 Kurdish soldiers in the Iraqi army
who had apparently attempted to rebel. I passed village after village
in northern Iraq that had been dynamited into rubble. There was no
electricity or running water and little food. It was not uncommon to
find families living like moles under the collapsed slabs of concrete
of their former homes, the land around them littered with land mines.
The withdrawal of Iraq from the northern Kurdish areas following the
1991 Gulf War created a de facto Kurdish state, the third this
century. But Turkey remains determined to destroy it once Turkish
forces finish with the Kurdish enclave in northern Syria. If history
is any guide, the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq will be
as short-lived as the other autonomous enclaves briefly carved out by the
Kurds over the last century.
The absence of Iraqi authorities in northern Iraq allowed me to pore
through stacks of police files, including photographs and videotapes
of torture and executions. I saw the long, typewritten lists that
chronicled killing after killing, sometimes for trivial offenses. One
man was sentenced to death because he had a picture of a rebel Kurdish
leader in his wallet. Eighteen tons of Iraqi intelligence files
documenting decades of repression, torture and murder were eventually
recovered.
The execution sites were often next to the mass graves. On Kalowa Hill
five tires filled with concrete marked the spot where hundreds of
people were shot to death. Earthen embankments bordered the site at
the back and two sides. Prisoners were blindfolded and their hands were
tied at their backs.
They were bound to 10-foot poles. I watched videos, left behind in
Iraqi detention centers, of many of these executions. I was once shown
a picture of three Iraqi officials squatting like big-game hunters
next to the slumped body of a man who had been shot to death. One of
the Iraqis, wearing a beret, grinned as he held a knife to the
corpse's neck.
Those who lived in the vicinity of Kalowa Hill, threatened with death
if they tried to peer into the high-walled compound, said they often
heard screams and volleys of shots. "The dogs used to come back with
human bones, after getting inside the compound," Yasin Khader Hassan
told me. "Then the guards began to shoot even the dogs."
Kalowa Hill is a metaphor for the tragic history of the Kurds. I
remain haunted by the images of women searching frantically through
skeletal remains in uncovered pits for their disappeared children or
husbands. I can still feel in my hands the skulls with their blindfolds
and bullet holes.
While boys and men, the majority of the victims, were usually
blindfolded and shot, girls and women were most often blindfolded and
strangled.
"Sirwan, Sirwan," Bahia Khader, another mother, sobbed at Kalowa Hill,
swaying over the bones and bits of clothing of her son, who
disappeared in
1982 when he was 15. "By the hands of these criminals, you have been
taken from me."
I walked one afternoon through the gloomy remains of a former Iraqi
detention center with Jamal Aziz Amin, then a courtly 45-year-old
headmaster. He stood in a soundproof room in the darkened basement of
Sulaimaniya's central security prison, where he had spent a year in
detention. Large metal hooks were suspended from the ceiling. The
prisoners, stripped naked, were handcuffed behind their backs and
hoisted from their wrists onto the hooks. They were questioned about
Kurdish guerrilla groups, beaten, whipped and given electric shocks
until they fell unconscious. A diet of watery soup, bread and thin tea
left prisoners weak and emaciated.
"You would scream," Amin said, "and it would sound as if you were
yelling from the bottom of a deep, deep well."
Kurdish fighters attacked the prison after the Gulf War. The 300
secret policemen and guards, including the warden, held out for three
days until all were killed. Amin and other former prisoners stood over
the bodies of their torturers. "We wanted them to all come back to
life," he said, "so we could kill them again."
The cells of the prison were marked with crude drawings, scratched-out
calendars and plaintive messages by those who sought to leave behind
their names and a record of their suffering.
"These were my friends, arrested with me," wrote Ahmed Mohammed, one
of those who left a message. He listed five names and scribbled, "All
were executed."
"Oh, mother, in this dark room my dreams trouble me and I shake," one
message read. "Then comes the kicking against my door and a voice
telling me to get up. It is time for my interrogation. I awake to the
unconscious."
Amin took me to the latrine, a hole in the concrete floor, at the end
of a corridor of cells.
"I wanted to show you this," he said, pointing up at a small shaft of
light streaming in from a tiny, barred window 14 feet above us. "Here
is where we would come at night so we could pull ourselves up the
walls to hear the sound of the dogs barking in the distance. To hear
the dogs, this was everything for us."
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the
college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by
Rutgers.
