Interesting about Rojava! Basically it sounds like they allowed tribes to do their own neighborhood (ie, tribal) security. This is actually pretty common in the Middle East.
What the Green Left page there might not understand is that Syrian society is tribal and they don’t tolerate outsiders (people from other tribes) wandering around their neighborhoods. I don’t think that’s what progressives have in mind when they talk about community security or defunding the police, but that is what would happen. Can you imagine what that would look like in the USA? We have this belief that anyone should be able to wander around any neighborhood any time of day or night for any reason or no reason. Syria, and the entire Middle East, doesn’t work like that, not at all. I was recently in Jerusalem during Ramadan and was told, “only ___ religion can go in this area”. Pretty hard for Americans to comprehend that this type of arrangement is normal in the Middle East.
Yeah that does change things quite a lot. I didn’t pick up that point. I think Tasers (not sure if all models or just some models) can do a contact shocking thing, but that’s really not very dangerous or lethal and it doesn’t seem like a reasonable fear of imminent death to be confronted by an unloaded Taser.
Thanks, hadn’t seen this!
And, just to be clear, the community policing isn’t telling “outsiders” they can’t walk around the neighborhood, like what Fefelo is suggesting.
Turns out community security needn’t be xenophobic. Who knew? /s
Rojava has based their ideas of how to run a society around the writings of two socialists, Murray Bookchin (from the US) and Abdullah Öcalan (From Kurdistan). The idea that local problems should be solved locally comes from Bookchin, and was adapted by Öcalan as part of the PKKs move away from Marxism-Leninism towards libertarian socialism. Öcalan rejects tribalism as he believes it to be a precursor to nation states (which he also rejects).
I know the idea of decentralised libertarian socialism sounds completely alien to the average American but it does exist and has functioned in various places around the world during the last 150 years.
About the only outsiders who aren’t welcome in Rojava (and the wider AANES area) are the Turkish armed forces/police and ISIL.
Everyone in the US except some of the far right would agree that anyone is free to walk around in any public place in the US. The laws of the US certainly agree with that.
I’m contrasting this with that happy and extremely naive (actually ignorant) article about the success 'community safety" in some village in Syria, where there are “community patrols”. Yeah, they have community safety - they don’t allow young males of other tribes to walk around their town without some clear reason for being there, and any who try that will get expelled, beat up or shot. That’s basically reality throughout the Middle East except in big cities. That article on the Green Left website made that situation sound so progressive, but it’s really not at all, it’s just tribalism, and it would look very much like the articles you linked if it were implemented in the US. I notice that that article made no mention of the words “tribe” and “clan”, which are actually how the entire system there functions.
The article didn’t give any examples of how safe that village is for, say, a Kalbiyya Shiite male to walk around there for no particular reason. Hint: not safe at all. FYI Rojava is Kurdish (Sunni) controlled, plus other minority groups which are powerless in Syria.
Green Left is giving this great example which turns out to be basically tribal rule and segregation, exactly what progressives here fight against. Rojava has Kurdish villages, Yazidi villages, etc, which are exclusive to those groups and can be defended violently. Can you imagine such an arrangement here?
I’m sorry but I have to call out the naivety of such articles, totally ignoring all the tribal and sectarian segregation that’s absolutely standard in the Middle East, and which would be an outrage to progressives here.
Yeah, exactly. That Rojava region that the Green Left website is so enthusiastic about, is effectively living under sundown laws that were common in the US 60+ years ago. That sign that says, “Stranger, don’t let the sun go down on you here” is EXACTLY how the “community safety” they are talking about works. What that article talks about would be a far-right fantasy (and a reality, 60 years ago) here in America.
There are no sundown towns left in the US. People who enforce such things are likely to end up like the McMichael, serving a bunch of federal and state life sentences. There’s a pretty good video of a black guy visiting the most racist town in America. He wasn’t harmed, although he did have some interesting conversations. It isn’t like that in this wonderful police-free Rojava described in the Green Left article.
I mean, there are towns that are not safe for black people to be in after sundown, but sure, there probably aren’t too many sundown towns written up overtly in law.
But are you using that same standard when you talk about Rojava – is beating up people from other tribes actually enshrined into law there? Or are you measuring with different sticks because you’ve decided Middle East = tribes and America = equality and you’re happy to equivocate anything that shows otherwise?
That’s the thing, though; lots of heinous fuckery that isn’t even remotely ‘legal’ anymore still happens, constantly.
Hell, getting back on the actual fucking topic at hand: it’s not legal to just extrajudicially execute Black men without ‘due process,’ a trial by a jury of their peers and yadda, yadda yadda… yet it still happens…
ALL. THE. FUCKING. TIME.
(Apologies if my ire seems directed at you; I assure you that’s not the case.)
Except Black Americans who get SHOT for fucking existing, actually.
Uh… no. You’re arguing that Black Americans can indeed walk around safely, and @Melizmatic and I are pointing out the facts instead.
And of course, there never was, because it’s unconstituional and was since the 14th amendment was passed - the Black Codes were struck down based on that. But it existed in fact, because racism is a thing that exists and laws were applied differently based on skin color. It’s how thousands of lynchings went unpunished, and how many shootings are STILL unpunished when carried out by police.
Sure.
“You can walk here, but you might not live to tell about it.”
Black men and women of every color experience this in the US.
You don’t seem to have an actual point.
