First ever conference on Jineoloji

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In recent years Western media have found a new image to exploit, that of the female combatants of the YPJ, the Women´s Defense Units of Rojava, Northern Syria.
Women firing heavy machine guns mounted on pickup trucks, female snipers taking out IS fighters, YPJ women freeing other women from IS captivity and abuse, all this makes for some dramatic and exotic footage.

While the power of pictures is undisputed there is usually little background information on the Kurdish women´s movement, and while there is certainly wisdom in “A picture is worth a thousand words.“ a beautiful face can keep us entertained for only so long, but a beautiful mind can mesmerize us forever.

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Lady Death

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The world had seen a fighting force with lots of female combatants already before Rojava, when the Red Army defeated Nazi Germany.

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Gentlemen, I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist invaders by now. Don't you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?

Russian sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko aka Lady Death, adressing a crowd in Chicago in 1942

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The common denominator here is that the communist ideology had always afforded women a bigger role in society, in the factories and in the trenches, than the fascist or bourgeois ideology.
So when the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers´ Party, started its guerilla warfare against the Turkish state in Turkey in 1984 it also had some female combatants, their numbers steadily rising till they made up about 30% of the guerilla force in the nineties.

While the German Left always sympathised with the Kurdish cause, as an anarchist, to whom communism is the negation of freedom, I was always wary of the PKK because of their Stalinist doctrine. But then my favorite irony in history happened.

PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, meanwhile imprisoned in Turkey, came into contact with the works of American anarchist Murray Bookchin, based his Democratic Confederalism on Bookchin´s philosophies and ordered his cadres to implement some anarchistic ideas. Anarchism by Stalinism! 😉

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My favorite Bookchin rant

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Part of the PKK´s political training has been to teach men about the detrimental effects of patriarchy, they actually send their male fighters to reeducation camps, where the poor guys will be lectured by a senior female commander, always fun to watch on video!

So when the Kurds in Syria took advantage of the trouble Assad´s forces suddenly found themselves in and started their revolution in Rojava, naturally women were participating on all levels and of course also as combatants in the all-female units of the YPJ.
Challenging a very traditional, conservative Muslim, patriarchal society, more than anything else, the Rojava revolution is a women´s revolution.
For many young women, joining the YPJ is a way to flee the narrowness of their traditional, patriarchal families and still gain the respect of society in general for risking their lives in combat.
It is amazing how much respect women suddenly get when big numbers of them start carrying Kalashnikovs instead of handbags! 😘

Ok guys, don´t despair, you can still find solace in the fact that all of this was made possible by the insights of a man, a man who came up with this funny idea that “Without woman’s slavery none of the other types of slavery can exist let alone develop.“
And that´s the role I envision for more men in the coming years, becoming co-dependant enablers of women´s lib. 😘

@ecotrain

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