Žižek: “if Europe betrays Kurds, it will betray itself”

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek wrote on The Independent that “if Europe will turn its eyes away from Kurds, it will betray itself.”

Well known Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek wrote on The Independent: “The fate of the Kurds makes them the exemplary victim of the geopolitical colonial games: spread along the borderline of four neighboring states (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran), their (more than deserved)  full autonomy was in nobody’s interest, and they paid the full price for it.”

Žižek added: “Do we still remember Saddam’s mass bombing and gas-poisoning of Kurds in the north of Iraq in the early 1990s? More recently, for years, Turkey plays a well-planned military-political game, officially fighting ISIS but effectively bombing Kurds who are really fighting ISIS.”

Žižek continued: “In the last decades, the ability of the Kurds to organize their communal life was tested in almost clear-cut experimental conditions: the moment they were given a space to breath freely outside the conflicts of the states around them, they surprised the world.

[…] In northern Syria, the Kurdish enclave centered in Rojava was a unique place in today’s geopolitical mess: when Kurds were given a respite from their big neighbors who otherwise threatened them all the time, they quickly built a society that one cannot but designate an actually-existing and well-functioning utopia.”

According to Žižek: “It is our duty to fully support the resistance of the Kurds to the Turkish invasion, and to rigorously denounce the dirty games Western powers play with them. While the sovereign state around them are gradually sinking into a new barbarism, Kurds are the only glimmer of hope.”

And it’s not only about Kurds, said Žižek “that this struggle is fought, it’s about ourselves, it’s about what kind of global new order is emerging. If Kurds will be abandoned, it will be a new order in which there will be no place for the most precious part of the European legacy of emancipation. If Europe will turn its eyes away from Kurds, it will betray itself. The Europe which betrays Kurds will be the true Europastan!”

The full article can be read here:

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/kurds-syria-trump-turkey-rojava-macedonia-greece-zizek-a9166206.html[1]