(* Entities and characters alluded to here are entirely fictional, and are here imagined for entertainment purposes only. Any resemblance to actual events or persons alive or dead is entirely coincidental.)

In a flurry of activity, the US Taliban, once known as the Supreme Court of Our Lands, has announced another in of its nation-altering faith-based decisions. Rock and roll will no longer be tolerated.

Rock and roll has been on shaky ground ever since Colonel Parker signed Elvis back in the mid-1950’s. For context, see Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS, currently in cinemas. Elvis shook his hips and the country went bananas.

Chuck Berry and Little Richard, back in the day, pushed those boundaries further. Would it be possible to be black and equal with Elvis, under the law, they posited?

The country’s highest courts at the time didn’t deem it the moment to weigh in on rock and roll, just yet. There was enough going on with the assassination of President Kennedy and the ever-opening chasm in our national schism called the Vietnam War.

Our courts’ decisions then, or non-decisions in fact, meant that we had to bear with Elvis through a decline in his powers until he became a pastiche of what he once was. Over time, his bellbottoms grew wider, his sideburns broader, his metal-studded belts wider and his waist – well broader again. Under Elvis’s reign, rock and roll took a tumble. And so the superstar Las Vegas show came to be.

On the other hand, Elvis’s decline opened the door for the British Invasion of American popular music. The Beatles came in, the Rolling Stones came in, Gerry and the Pacemakers came in. (Is it Pacemakers or Peacemakers – YouTube is still divided.)

The Supreme Court of our Lands hadn’t figured on that, truly.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Detroit loomed large in popular music. We had the Supremes, the Four Tops, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson, Martha and the Vandellas, Gladys Knight & The Pips and Marvin Gaye.

Our top courts eyed intervention with this large presence of Motown in our popular imagination. It was tricky there for a while until, with the arrival of Lionel Richie, the danger subsided.

Lionel Richie gave the Talibanists here at home time to regroup.

And so, for decades, popular music enthusiasts in the US thought they were home scot-free. Rock and roll morphed and splintered, and gave rise to an enormous myriad of forms, southern rock, country rock, disco, house, heavy metal, soft rock, independent, hiphop, rap, electronic … well, the whole shebang of popular music that has been our life since the boy from Tupelo’s first appearance on Ed Sullivan’s influential TV music show way back when.

Turns out, in the past decades, we were lulled into thinking that rock and roll was our right.

We rocked, bopped and discoed to the Doors, Bruce Springstein, John Melenkamp, the imported Rolling Stones, David Bowie (another import,) Bon Jovi, Prince, Carlos Santana, Donna Summer, Sister Sledge, Gloria Gaynor, Michael Jackson and the Village People.

We could never have enough music in our lives, we thought. Little did we know that we were, in fact, living in a rock and roll golden age.

Ominously, unnoticed, a misogynist real-estate upstart with an oversized ego announced the creation of a presidential exploratory committee on Larry King live in October 1999. How many rock and rollers were watching Larry King in October of that year? Not many.

The real-estate upstart-in-question never dreamed of winning the presidential election. But surely, he thought, he could attract attention to his business ventures with a populist-based political message that went something along the line of Drain the Bayou. At his first attempt at the presidency, nothing. On his second try, bingo!

Whoever could have imagined that this bloated egocentric parvenu would one day mean the end of rock and roll?

Somehow, this nouveau riche wannbe convinced enough people to vote for him, and he was elected the president of the land.

Once President, he was confused, having never anticipating winning, unsure of his charge, and wide open to the influence of his followers on the far right. Under their direction, he – through another twist of fate – came to be be in a position to load the Supreme Court of Our Lands with faith-based fellow adherents. Faith-based fellow adherents is not entirely accurate as our US, democratically elected Supreme Ruler had no principles at all, as far as could be noted.

Thus, we – the United States – left the middle road behind.

And here we are.

Just this past week, we allowed our newly imposed Supreme Leader’s chosen religious leaders to rule that we would no longer have rock and roll in our lives.

I guess our moment of pseudo-freedom was good while it lasted.

All of those songs erased in an instance from YouTube is shocking. The immediate disappearance of rock and roll from our playlists is unprecedented. Now, it appears that we will be prosecuted if we attempt to cross state lines to hear the rock and roll that was once embedded in our lives. Nashville is closing its doors. L.A. will no longer be L.A. without its music industry.

Without precedent, rock and roll is now, at seemingly just a moment’s notice, gone from our lives, Our lives are so hugely different from what they were just weeks ago that it’s hard to fathom. Will we ever return to what we once were? As of this writing, that is completely unsure. Will we ever be able to hear a rock and roll song again? As of this writing, I honestly don’t know.

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Edwin Starr sang it loud in 1970.

War, huh (good God y’all)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it, say it, say it
War (uh-huh), huh (yeah, huh)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, listen to me

You can see the full lyrics here. Starr was lucky to live in the USA where War not only got widespread airplay, but spent three weeks at number 1 on the Billboard charts. Starr’s intense anti-Vietnam War anthem hit a cord.

Imagine such a thing happening in Russia today, where any public criticism of the Kremlin line in its bloodthirsty and unprovoked war in Ukraine guarantees its citizens up to 15 years of jail time, no redress admitted. In Russia, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is fake news.

Edwin Starr’s War is just one in a long line of anti-war, protest and solidarity songs that are enshrined in our collective conscience. Joan Baez did her part with We Shall Overcome. Marvin Gaye gave us all a wake-up call with What’s Going On. John Lennon pushed us to Imagine. Dolores O’Riordan summed up the Northern Ireland conflict with Zombie. Jimi Hendrix sang there are many here among us who think that life is just a joke when he electrified Bob Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower. Putin foretold.

Putin miscalculated on many fronts, military, intellectual, strategic and cultural. His generals and foot soldiers are dying in unprecedented numbers on his self-determined battlefield. His true support comes only from those Russians and Belarussians brainwashed or ignorant of the facts, a situation that Putin facilitated by shutting down any and all media outlets that might have found him accountable. In terms of Russia’s importance in the world, Putin has sent his country back to the Soviet dark ages. And he completely underestimated the connectivity that defines the world outside of Russia in 2022.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is being photographed, televised, YouTube’d and tweeted in real time. Russia has no escape from the atrocities in which it is now complicit. Putin has no escape here. He is forever going to be damned for leading his country to disaster and for lending his reputation, or what is left of it, to a Russia diminished.

Putin was once an able chameleon, biding his time in a background role on the world stage. But now, thanks to his recklessness and inflated ego, he finds himself an emperor without clothes in a real world that has coalesced, and how, against him. It turns out that Putin is just the latest version of the Russian tyrant, dictator, despot and oppressor that we once knew as Stalin. Stalin died by natural causes. Putin can only wish for the same.

How do you protest such evil in song?

At a moment when so many people are dying daily in Ukraine, it may seem inconsequential, but it’s not.

Pink Floyd put out their first new song in 28 years to protest Putin’s self-delusional brain fart in attempting to redefine a Russia-centric world. Floyd’s song was called Hey Hey Rise Up, and featured Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Boombox singing in Ukrainian. And even though it spent a short time atop the Apple US Chart, the song didn’t resonate.

But then came Florence + the Machine. By some mechanism of chance, Florence Welch went to Kyiv in late 2021 to film the video for her latest release. This was months before the onslaught of Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine. By coincidence, or not, Florence’s song is called Free. Hers is not a protest song at all on the surface. Her song is an upbeat pop/rock dance track. Florence did the video with the actor Bill Nighy as her side portraying her anxiety. The lyrics don’t obsess over political freedom even though the video ends with Florence and her anxiety overlooking a graveyard in Ukraine. But Florence does sign off on the video with a dedication to the spirit, creativity and perseverance of our brave Ukrainian friends, and notes that the video was filmed with Ukrainian filmmakers and artists, whose radiant freedom can never be extinguished. The song may not be protest per se, but the video keeps Kyiv and Ukraine front and center on YouTube. It’s already been seen more than 2,144,546 times.

Keep in mind that not all solidarity songs need to be anti-war. Does anybody remember the Andrews Sisters? They had a huge hit during World War 2 with Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. The Andrews Sisters great contribution to ending the Second World War was in making our soldiers feel valued, loved, important and appreciated in song. The lyrics were secondary. The Andrews Sisters made everyone feel that a future with good times was still possible.

Just a week ago, Ed Sheeran premiered a new song 2step with a video also filmed in Kyiv before the Russian attack began. Sheeren is donating the royalties of his song to Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal. The DEC website reminds us that 18 million people are projected to be affected by Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, and that 12 million Ukrainians, more than a quarter of the population, have so far had to flee their homes. Ed Sheeren and Florence Welch show us just how badly Putin miscalculated. Ukraine was already firmly integrated, accepted and understood as European long before Putin’s botched attempt to claim it for himself and Russia.

Unfortunately, nobody in Putin’s coterie of yes-men gave him the message.

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In May 2018, more than eleven hundred American economics teachers and  economists, among them eleven Nobel Prize winners, banded together to sign an open letter to Donald Trump and Congress. In it, they warn that the Trump administration is on the verge of repeating the mistakes of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act— an act that was narrowly passed by Congress and signed by President Hoover in 1930, shortly after America and the global economy descended into the depths of the Great Depression. Intended to limit foreign competition and help save American jobs in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors, Smoot-Hawley imposed protectionist tariffs on more than 20,000 imported goods. Smoot-Hawley was a disaster, as the imposed tariffs exacerbated and deepened the fallout from the economic crash that ruined the lives of millions of Americans.

Fearing that history is about to repeat itself and Americans will again pay the price for ill-considered tariffs, the signers of this powerful letter call on Congress and the president to heed the lessons of the past. In their call for policies based on fundamental economic principles, they write that

“…in 1930, 1,028 economists urged Congress to reject the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Today, Americans face a host of new protectionist activity, including threats to withdraw from trade agreements, misguided calls for new tariffs in response to trade imbalances, and the imposition of tariffs on washing machines, solar components, and even steel and aluminum used by U.S. manufacturers. Congress did not take economists’ advice in 1930, and Americans across the country paid the price. The undersigned economists and teachers of economics strongly urge you not to repeat that mistake. Much has changed since 1930 — for example, trade is now significantly more important to our economy — but the fundamental economic principles as explained at the time have not.”

Quoting verbatim from the 1930 letter written by their predecessors, the present-day economists and teachers seek to demonstrate that nearly a century later similar economic factors remain at play and that those who will suffer the negative consequences of tariffs will, once again, be ordinary citizens. The following is the letter schooling Congress and President Hoover on the economic principles that the signers believed should have led to the rejection of tariffs—but didn’t.

“We are convinced that increased protective duties would be a mistake. They would operate, in general, to increase the prices which domestic consumers would have to pay. A higher level of protection would raise the cost of living and injure the great majority of our citizens.

Few people could hope to gain from such a change. Construction, transportation and public utility workers, professional people and those employed in banks, hotels, newspaper offices, in the wholesale and retail trades, and scores of other occupations would clearly lose, since they produce no products which could be protected by tariff barriers.

The vast majority of farmers, also, would lose through increased duties, and in a double fashion. First, as consumers they would have to pay still higher prices for the products, made of textiles, chemicals, iron, and steel, which they buy.

Second, as producers, their ability to sell their products would be further restricted by barriers placed in the way of foreigners who wished to sell goods to us.

Our export trade, in general, would suffer. Countries cannot permanently buy from us unless they are permitted to sell to us, and the more we restrict the importation of goods from them by means of ever higher tariffs the more we reduce the possibility of our exporting to them. Such action would inevitably provoke other countries to pay us back in kind by levying retaliatory duties against our goods.

Finally, we would urge our Government to consider the bitterness which a policy of higher tariffs would inevitably inject into our international relations. A tariff war does not furnish good soil for the growth of world peace.”

A full list of the signatories of the May 2018 letter can be found at this link.

To learn more about the economic fallout from today’s tariff war, watch this video, in which twelve executives explain how their businesses are being affected.

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The New York Times took the rare step, today, of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. The author, an unnamed, senior White House official, delivers an astonishingly honest account of how other senior officials are “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of Trump’s agenda and his worst inclinations.” Coming just one day after we began hearing excerpts from Bob Woodward’s new book about the Trump administration, the op-ed offers a timely confirmation of Woodward’s accounts.

Of course, it would be more satisfying–and morally much more courageous–if  the senior official had the temerity to come out of the closet. But, given his/her contention that the only way to save the presidency [and, perhaps, America] from the autocratic demagoguery of Donald Trump is to work from within, the anonymity is understandable.

It’s a sure bet that Trump is going to go ballistic over this, and launch his own internal “witch hunt” aimed at purging whoever wrote this. Undoubtedly, too, everyone who might be suspected of authoring this op-ed will deny that he/she wrote it–just as virtually everyone quoted by Woodward has already issued a denial [possibly a scenario they pre-arranged with Woodward as a condition of speaking to him on tape.]

Obviously, there’s going to be a big media kerfuffle over the author’s identity–trying to match the style of writing, the use of language, etc., to people closely associated with Trump. Eventually, we may learn his/her identity–everybody leaks everything in D.C.– and  he/she could be deemed a “hero” [whatever that means].  But the issues raised by this White House insider are more important than media speculation as to his/her identity. Kudos to the Times for recognizing the value of publishing this op-ed, and to the author for speaking out [ish]. That’s worth something.

Here is the full text of the op-ed:

The New York Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our vetting process here.

President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.

In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.

Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.

But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.

From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.

The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

The result is a two-track presidency.

Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.

Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.

On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.

This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.

Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.

The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.

Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.

We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.

There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.

The writer is a senior official in the Trump administration.

Let the wild rumpus of “who said it” begin.

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The March for Our Lives on March 24^th received much-needed attention from the mainstream press. However, March 24^th also saw demonstrations across the world in solidarity with Afrin, a region of northern Syria currently under assault from the Turkish army. This invasion is an attempt to crush Rojava, a Kurdish region whose people are conducting a radical leftist experiment, and whose military was responsible for the defeat of ISIS at Raqqa in 2017. Professor Djene Rhys Bajalan and leftist media personality Michael Brooks recently published an article  on the international implications of Turkey’s incursion. A few months ago, I sat down with Prof. Bajalan to discuss the broader struggle for Kurdish rights and autonomy in the Middle East. He was born in Birmingham, England in 1982, and was raised in Kingston upon Hull in Yorkshire. He studied History and Politics and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (BA), Nationalism and Ethnicity at the London School of Economics (MSc), History at Istanbul Bilgi University (MA), and Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford (DPhil). Prof. Bajalan has taught in Iraqi Kurdistan (2004-2005 & 2014-2016), Istanbul Bilgi University (2007-2010) and the University of Oxford (2011-2013). In 2016 he applied to Missouri State University and took a tenure track position in Springfield as a professor of Middle Eastern History.

Do you consider yourself as part of a diaspora community? What has your relationship been to Kurdish politics? What about that of your family?

I would not regard myself as part of the diaspora community. Although my father is a Kurd from Iraq, he moved to the UK in the 1970s and my mother is Welsh. I was raised in a mostly white city in the north of England and for most of my youth my father was one of only a very few Iraqi Kurds living in Hull. In 1999, a large number of Kurdish refugees from Iraq moved to the city, but that was basically a year before I left to study in London.

In terms of my links to Kurdish politics. I would certainly not define myself as an activist. I did do a little bit of journalism in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2004. I was involved in the establishment of the English language newspaper ‘Kurdish Globe’ – although that newspaper has now degenerated into a propaganda outlet for the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iraq. My activities have many been academic. However, given the politicized nature of the Kurdish question, my scholarship is inherently political.

In terms of my family, my father was the son of a Kurdish land-owning/tribal aristocrat. The Bajalan clan is a large one with a presence in both Iraqi and Iranian Kurdistan. My uncle Rashid Bajalan was involved in the formation of the Kurdistan Democratic Party back in the 1940s. Other members of my family have been involved in other Kurdish political parties, including the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Iraqi Communist Party. My father was at one time a student activist for the KDP (when he was studying medicine in Baghdad), however he later left the party.

As a result, growing up I was certainly exposed to the Kurdish question and Kurdish politics.

I should note, however, that I have generally felt closer to the Kurdish movement of Turkey – especially the parliamentary movement – as I spent 4 years studying in Turkey and made friends with many important members of the Kurdish intelligentsia. For example, my first book – ‘The Young Kurds’ (A play on the term the ‘Young Turks’) – looked at the Kurdish press in Istanbul before the First World War was published by Abdullah Keskin, the head of the Avesta publishing house – the leading scholarly publishing house on all things Kurdish in Turkey.

The big recent news is the invasion of Afrin canton (one of the three geographical districts that makes up Syrian Kurdistan) by the Turkish military. What are Erdogan‘s reasons for this choice?

Erdogan’s reasons are very simple, and I believe are driven primarily by Turkey’s internal politics. Erdogan is a political opportunist. Prior to 2014, he had been one of the more ‘liberal’ Turkish leaders vis-a-vis the Kurdish question. However, in retrospect, the efforts of Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party to ‘solve’ the Kurdish question were cynical. It was driven by a desire to win votes in the Southeast (Turkish Kurdistan). Turkey’s electoral system has a 10% threshold, which means that if a political party does not gain 10% of the national vote, it gets no national representations. This mean that, even though the Justice and Development Party did not win a majority of votes in Turkey’s Kurdish policies, they did win the majority of parliamentary seats. By liberalizing the Turkish public sphere vis-a-vis the Kurdish question, Erdogan hoped to consolidate his power over the Kurds. Indeed, he went so far as to open negotiations with the jailed leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan. However, in 2015, the pro-Kurdish HDP party was able to win more than 10% of the vote by forwarding a bold social democratic agenda and giving voice to Kurdish discontent over the slowness of reform on the Kurdish question. Many ‘reforms’ designed to allow – for example – the teaching of Kurdish in schools etc. remained largely theoretical. Moreover, many Kurds in Turkey were angered by the fact that Turkey seemed to be turning a blind eye to jihadis moving from Turkey into Syria, jihadis who attacked Kurdish forces in Syria.

The result was that the AKP lost its parliamentary majority. Interestingly the reason the AKP lost its majority in the summer of 2015 was not only because of the success of the HDP, but also because a number of nationalist Turks, angered by the peace process with the PKK, defected to the far-right National Action Party (MHP). Subsequently, Erdogan did an about-turn on the Kurdish question, taking a much more nationalistic stance on politics. Even before the 2016 coup, the AKP had introduced a law to allow for the state to strip members of parliament of their legal immunity (an important protection for parliamentarians in a country with a history of putting the opposition in jail). This law was supported by not only the HDP but also the main opposition party, the CHP which represents the old secular nationalist elite that had dominated Turkey before the rise of the AKP and the MHP. Since the failed anti-AKP coup in 2016, Kurdish representatives, including the party’s co-leaders Demirtas and Yuksekdag, have been imprisoned as part of a more general purge of opposition forces in Turkey. Using the ‘state of emergency’ enacted after the failed coup attempt, Erdogan has been consolidating power and crushing any centers of opposition in the country. Extreme nationalist rhetoric is Erdogan’s ally in this, and the deep anti-Kurdism within Turkish nationalism is being exploited ruthlessly by the AKP. At the same time, the war with the PKK has resumed.

Turkish President Erdogan claims that this incursion is an anti-terrorist operation. Could the Syrian YPG (People’s Protection Units) be considered a terror group? What about their Turkish associate, the PKK (Kurdistan Worker’s Party)?

Well, Erdogan is correct that the PYD/YPG is connected to the PKK (and organization which until recently he had been in negotiations with). How close these connections are on a day-to day-level is very hard to tell. During the1980s and 1990s, the Syrian government allowed the PKK to operate in its territory and recruit people for the war in Turkey. Many PKK fighters in Turkey were Syrian Kurds. So, the two organizations share a base. They also share an ideology, based on the writings of Abdullah Ocalan. However, the YPG operates independently and has sought to maintain cordial relations with Turkey. Thus, while the two organizations are connected, the PYD has not sought to intervene in Turkey’s Kurdish conflict.

We’ve seen contradictory statements come out of the Trump administration, some of which seem to support the Turks and some to support YPG. Where does the US foreign policy apparatus actually stand?

Well, as far as I know, many soldiers on the ground in Northern Syria have a great deal of respect for the YPG which has been at the forefront of the fight against ISIS. However, the US administration doesn’t seem to have a stance. The United States never really wanted to work with the YPG; it ultimately became necessary as they emerged as the only force that could take the fight to ISIS. The US administration has thus been pretending that the YPG and the SDF (which includes Arab fighters) are completely disconnected from the PKK. They know that is a fiction. But they just don’t have coherent policies. They have been trying to keep the Turks onside, but which the changes in Turkey’s intern affairs, the contractions within US policy have become too great.

What should Americans know about the conflict in Afrin that they don’t already know?

The fact is that the YPG are no angels. But in Syria, who is? They have been at the forefront of the fight against the Islamic State and have enacted some interesting democratic experiments. If anyone in Syria deserves our political solidarity, it is the YPG, especially if you are on the left. There are some ‘tankies’ who regard the Kurds as tools of imperialism (because they have taken military support from the US), but the fact is that they had no choice. It was either work with US, work with Assad, or let ISIS take over. Assad is a bloody dictator and ISIS are brutal reactionaries. Within the context of Syria, the US was the best option. It is super easy to criticize the Syrian Kurds for working with US ‘imperialism’, but when you have ISIS at the gates the political calculus changes. Indeed, if there is any US military engagement worth supporting overseas, it is the support it is giving to the Kurds in Syria.

Those on the Left who are aware of Rojava’s experiment in “libertarian socialism” tend to be supportive of that experiment. The expansion of women’s rights has been particularly impressive. What do you think of YPG’s “democratic confederation”?

Democratic Confederalism is certainly an interesting idea, although I often suspect that behind the ‘popular councils’ in Rojava, one can find the iron hand of the YPG. Nevertheless, the principles are cooperative economics and interests, self-governing communes and a rejection of the nation-state.

Can Rojava survive militarily against Turkey? Is this a likely outcome?

I think Rojava can survive but it could be a very bloody war. The YPG is battle-hardened and the Turkish Army has just faced a massive purge of its office corps. Nevertheless, the Turkish army is well-armed and organized (despite the purge). But they do have their hands tied to a certain degree. They can only really strike Afrin, because there are US soldiers based in other parts of Rojava. Moreover, the people of Rojava are mobilized for a popular struggle and that will be difficult for the Turkish military do defeat. Ultimately, the Turkish government could not defeat the PKK, which has been fighting since 1984, so I don’t really think they can defeat the people of Rojava.

How can sympathetic Americans help the Kurdish community in Kurdish areas and abroad?

Other than electing a progressive government in the United States, there is not much people can do. However, I would suggest this: People should let their representatives know that you are not happy with the actions of the Turks, which threaten a ‘US ally’. I would also recommend that people in cities with Kurdish communities, show their solidarity by joining any demonstrations organized by the Kurdish community in defense of Rojava.

Dr. Djene Rhys Bajalan currently teaches at the Missouri State University in Springfield. His previous work can be found here. He is an occasional contributor to The Michael Brooks Show.

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Joel Clement,  a scientist at the Department of the Interior, has just joined the legions of people quitting the Trump administration and leaving toughly worded letters of resignation as they exit.

Clement has worked at Interior for seven years. In his courageous letter of resignation, he cites three reasons for leaving: poor leadership—alluding to possibly illegal retaliation against whistleblowers, and to reassignment of employees to jobs where their expertise is irrelevant; waste of taxpayer dollars—a not-too-subtle reference to Zinke’s [and other Trump appointees’] use of privately chartered airplanes; and  climate-change denial—calling Zinke, Trump and others “shackled to special interests such as oil, gas and mining,” and therefore not to be trusted with the nation’s natural resources.

“Secretary Zinke, your agenda profoundly undermines the Interior Department’s mission and betrays the American people,” Clement wrote. “You have disrespected the career staff of the Department by questioning their loyalty and you have played fast and loose with government regulations to score ponts with your political base at the expense of American health and safety.”

[Zinke, a former Congressman from Montana, famously made a grand entrance on his first day on the job, riding a horse several blocks through Washington DC to his new office.]

Here is the full text of his letter of resignation as published by Scribd:

Dear Secretary Zinke, I hereby resign my position as Senior Advisor at the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI).

The career men and women of DOI serve because they believe in DOI’s mission to protect our nation’s natural and cultural resources and they believe that service to this country is a responsibility and an honor. I’m proud to have served at DOI alongside such devoted public servants, and I share their dedication to the mission and country, so it is with a heavy heart that I am resigning as a senior official at the Department. I have three reasons for my resignation:

Poor Leadership. I blew the whistle on the Trump administration because I believe you unlawfully retaliated against me for disclosing the perilous impacts of climate change upon Alaska Native communities and for working to help get them out of harm’s way. The investigations into my whistleblower complaints are ongoing and I hope to prevail.

Retaliating against civil servants for raising health and safety concerns is unlawful, but there are many more items to add to your resume of failure: You and President Trump have waged an all-out assault on the civil service by muzzling scientists and policy experts like myself; you conducted an arbitrary and sloppy review of our treasured National Monuments to score political  points; your team has compromised tribal sovereignty by limiting programs meant to serve Indians and Alaska Natives; you are undercutting important work to protect the western sage grouse and its habitat; you eliminated a rule that prevented oil and gas interests from cheating taxpayers on royalty payments; you cancelled the moratorium on a failed coal leasing program that was also shortchanging taxpayers; and you even cancelled a study into the health risks of people living near mountaintop removal coal mines after rescinding a rule that would have  protected their health.

You have disrespected the career staff of the Department by questioning their loyalty and you have played fast and loose with government regulations to score points with your political base at the expense of American health and safety. Secretary Zinke, your agenda profoundly undermines the DOI mission and betrays the American people.

Waste of Taxpayer Dollars. My background is in science, policy, and climate change. You reassigned me to the Office of Natural Resources Revenue. My new colleagues were as surprised as I was by the involuntary reassignment to a job title with no duties in an office that specializes in auditing and dispersing fossil fuel royalty income. They acted in good faith to find a role for me, and I deeply appreciate their efforts. In the end, however, reassigning and training me as an auditor when I have no background in that field will involve an exorbitant amount of time and effort on the part of my colleagues, incur significant taxpayer expense, and create a situation in which these talented specialists are being led by someone without experience in their field. I choose to save them the trouble, save taxpayer dollars, and honor the organization by stepping away to find a role more suited to my skills. Secretary Zinke, you and your fellow high-flying Cabinet officials have demonstrated over and over that you are willing to waste taxpayer dollars, but I’m not.

Climate Change Is Real and It’s Dangerous. I have highlighted the Alaska Native communities on the brink in the Arctic, but many other Americans are facing climate impacts head-on. Families in the path of devastating hurricanes, businesses in coastal communities experiencing frequent and severe flooding, fishermen pulling up empty nets due to warming seas, medical  professionals working to understand new disease vectors, farming communities hit by floods of  biblical proportions, and owners of forestlands laid waste by invasive insects. These are just a few of the impacts Americans face. If the Trump administration continues to try to silence experts in science, health and other fields, many more Americans, and the natural ecosystems upon which they depend, will be put at risk.

The solutions and adaptations to these impacts will be complex, but exponentially less difficult and expensive than waiting until tragedy strikes – as we have seen with Houston, Florida, the US Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico – and there is no time to waste. We must act quickly to limit climate change while also preparing for its impacts.

Secretary Zinke: It is well known that you, Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt, and President Trump are shackled to special interests such as oil, gas, and mining. You are unwilling to lead on climate change, and cannot be trusted with our nation’s natural resources.

So for those three compelling reasons – poor leadership, waste, and your failures on climate change, I tender my resignation. The best use of my skills is to join with the majority of Americans who understand what’s at stake, working to find ways to innovate and thrive despite the many hurdles ahead. You have not silenced me; I will continue to be an outspoken advocate for action, and my voice will be part of the American chorus calling for your resignation so that someone loyal to the interests of all Americans, not just special interests, can take your job.

My thoughts and wishes are with the career women and men who remain at DOI. I encourage them to persist when possible, resist when necessary, and speak truth to power so the institution may recover and thrive on

The post Why he quit: Dept. of Interior scientist blasts Zinke in resignation letter appeared first on Occasional Planet.

If you were looking for a hackneyed and inelegant metaphor for privilege and inequality, the building I work in would be an excellent choice. It’s a tower above a dilapidated shopping mall, and while there is constant construction, it’s always work on the offices in the tower. The shopping mall will probably never reopen. The bottom wilts, and the people at the top can safely comment on the noise the construction makes. It’s the only part of it that touches their lives.

I went in to work on September 15^th, 2017, around 7:30. By the time the coffee kicked in and I was fully sentient, it was 9:00 or so. Around this time we were called to the office center for a brief meeting about the Stokely ruling. “We’re not going to talk about this very long,” said a manager, “because that wouldn’t be office-appropriate. If you want to know more, Google it.” The manager laid out several options for us: Stay and work, go work from home, or just go home. Management was worried about the ensuing violence from protestors after the ruling. They seemed to think St. Louis would explode in the same way the major cities did in the 1960’s, or LA in the 1990’s. Protestors would ostensibly block highways, and roving gangs of brigands would rob us of our property, and perhaps our lives.

I opted to stay, thinking that the trouble was overstated. I dimly perceived various conversations about the ruling around me, as I frequently keep my headphones in at work.

“I’m going home, cause I’m white, and they might come after me. And if someone tries to hurt my wife, I’ll go to jail. And it’ll be a fair ruling.” I found this one difficult to parse. I can understand the desire to protect one’s family. I can’t understand bragging to a coworker about the pain you’d inflict on someone who would attack your family. And I can’t get inside the worldview that considers whiteness to be a persecuted identity. I should note that this quote came from an otherwise very kind and thoughtful person.

Later, I heard people watching the riots unfold on TV in another room. The media, of course, quickly focused on a burning car. My coworkers laughed and offered suggestions on what the protestors would do “if they were smart”. “Why would the protestors do that? It’s irrational,” they said of the car. I’m sure it was, but I don’t expect people willed with righteous anger at the murder of one of their fellow citizens to be the most rational and understated arguers. Just as I had trouble processing the person threatening violence against imaginary people who might hurt their family, they had trouble understanding why people might burn cars. Why don’t they just protest peacefully? I suspect the idea of systemic problems of racism or state did not enter their minds.

Sometimes I wonder if we could convince law-and-order types that police repression here has the same character as similar violence in Iran, or Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, or Russia, that they might come to their senses. These are, for me, fleeting considerations. I’m reasonably sure they wouldn’t change many minds.

I was second-to-last to leave, with the last right behind me. I drove home and did not see a single person blocking highways or acting illegally on the way. I took a nap when I got back. I didn’t join in the protests, though I was sympathetic, and plenty of my friends did. Lately I’m having trouble believing that my individual presence at demonstrations means much. I am not particularly proud of this.

According to friends who did go, a thousand or more people protested peacefully, and a handful did not. The narrative in the reactionary media, however, seemed to be that of savages bursting through ordinary society. Mob rule.

The police, on the other hand, used pepper spray and gas grenades and the other tools of repression against peaceful protestors. They trampled an old lady, captured in a disturbing video. According to the Riverfront Times, the end of that day saw 11 injured officers and 32 arrests. Doubtless the arrests have increased in the couple days since.

My friends and I went out for drinks that night. The streets were a little emptier, but we saw no protestors or vandals. I went home around midnight. My friends stayed out even later, and the only thing they noticed out of the ordinary is that the bars weren’t very crowded. My guess is that, like my coworker above, people were afraid of gangs of non-Caucasian bandits roaming the streets.

The city did not explode, though there were sparks and conflagrations here and there. But the specter of mass conflict frightens the complacent such that they would prefer police repression to justice.

When I returned from what felt like a lengthy weekend, the office was largely back to normal. The only comments I heard relating to Stokely and the protests were some hurried inquiries about some coworkers’ friends who were cops. Were they ok? Did someone hurl a brick at them? Just about no concern for the protestors. But that’s the advantage of the tower, I suppose: Surrounded by security, wealth, prosperity, girded by the violence of the state apparatus, we can see injustice happening at a distance. And we can safely ignore or denounce it at our will.

The post The View From The Tower appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Daniel Kammen couldn’t take it any more, so he quit. An expert in renewable energy, he was appointed by President Obama in 2016 as a science envoy to the State Department. That position was probably a good job under Obama. But when the anti-science, anti-knowledge, fact-averse Trump administration took over, it’s easy to conjecture that he found himself working in an inhospitable environment. Still, he persisted. Until this week.

On August 23, 2017, in the aftermath of the Charlottesville white-supremacy, neo-Nazi riot, Kammen

submitted a scathing letter of resignation, specifically citing Donald Trump’s “attacks on the core values of the United States.”  He also directly calls out Trump for actions that have “harmed the quality of life in the United States, our standing abroad, and the sustainability of the planet.”  Kammen’s full letter of resignation is worth reading, first for its courage and bluntness, and second, for its hidden message, “I-M-P-E-A-C-H,” cleverly embedded as the first letter of each paragraph.

Sharply worded protest statements and letters of resignation like this one are becoming a trend for the Trump administration, as frustration and moral outrage grow among government employees, industry leaders and knowledge experts spurned by the know-nothing attitude of this regime. We can only hope that others, staying on to try to contribute their energy and knowledge for the greater good, then finding themselves mired in a hopeless situation, will be as courageous, direct and honest in expressing what has driven them out.

Here’s the full text of Kammen’s letter, as published in the Washington Post:

Mr. President:

I am resigning from my position as Science Envoy for the Department of State of the United States. Since 1996, I have served the Departments of Energy, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the state Department in a number of roles. Working closely with the talented teams at State Department Headquarters and at U.S. embassies abroad, we have built significant partnerships in North and East Africa, and in the Middle East, around shared visions of national security, job creation in the U.S. and sustainable energy.

My decision to resign is in response to your attacks on core values of the United States. Your failure to condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis has domestic and international ramifications. On this issue, I stand with the unequivocal and authoritative statements of Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signor, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, Ohio Governor John Kasich, Senator John McCain, Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtenin, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, Dr. Cornel West, Linda Sarsour, the Palestinian-American activist and one of the organizers of the Women’s March, and many others.

Particularly troubling to me is how your response to Charlottesville is consistent with a broader pattern of behavior that enables sexism and racism, and disregards the welfare of all Americans, the global community and the planet.

Examples of this destructive pattern have consequences on my duties as Science Envoy. Your decision to abdicate the leadership opportunities and the job creation benefits of the Paris Climate Accord, and to undermine energy and environmental research are not acceptable to me.

Acts and words matter. To continue in my role in your administration would be inconsistent with the principles of the United States Oath of Allegiance to which I adhere.

Acts and words matter. To continue in my role in your administration would be inconsistent with the principles of the United States Oath of Allegiance to which I adhere.

Character is vital in leadership. I find particularly wise the admonition of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who cautioned that, “A people [or person] that values its privileges above principles soon loses both.”

Herein, with regret, I resign. I deeply respect and value the work of the many fine people I have encountered in our federal agencies and will miss the opportunity to work with and support them. Your actions to date have, sadly, harmed the quality of life in the United States, our standing abroad, and the sustainability of the planet.

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