Here’s an interesting piece on Kurdish Syria, wherein the influence of American far-left thinking on the region’s secular politics is explored. Specifically, its influence on Kurdistan Workers’ Party co-founder Abdullah Ocalan, who is currently languishing in a Turkish prison:
One of his supporters gave Ocalan his first book by an obscure Vermont-based philosopher named Murray Bookchin. After Ocalan read it, he requested everything Bookchin had ever written. Oliver Kontny, a translator and P.K.K. sympathizer who was working for Ocalan’s lawyers at the time, told me that Ocalan let ‘‘all of us know that he was working on a paradigm change based on what he learned from Bookchin.’’
In solitary confinement, Ocalan studied Bookchin’s magnum opus, ‘‘The Ecology of Freedom,’’ at once a sweeping account of world history and a reimagining of Marx’s ‘‘Das Kapital.’’ In it, Bookchin argues that hierarchical relationships, not capitalism, are our original sin.
Bookchin favored what he called the ‘‘Hellenic model’’ of democracy, the type of direct, face-to-face government once practiced in ancient Greece.
Fascinating.
As W.E.I.R.D. as both Bernie Sanders’ supporters and libertarians are, the former really are less parochial.