Projektive Engel im Dienst der Humanität? Die Linke und die Kurden

Jüngst schrieb als letzter in einer langer Reihe von Autoren Slavoj Žižek über die Linke und die Kurden. Ihm antwortet Mücahit Bilici in einem äußerst lesenswerten Beitrag:

The global left is guilty of exactly the same thing as the so-called Great Powers, which have long treated the Kurds as a plaything in their strategic agendas. They want to see the Kurds living out all their fantasies of a utopian society with no thought as to whether it is to the Kurds’ actual benefit. The destruction of the Kurdish post-national experiment in Syria costs Western progressives at most the cancellation of a conference appearance in Ankara (as in the case of David Harvey) and gives them the opportunity to lob a few choice insults at Turkey while serving up yet more fulminous praise for the brave, suffering Kurds. For the Kurds, however, it cost a once-in-a-century shot at independence.  (...)

The Rojava Revolution is more true in the minds of progressives and the self-promoting films of Bernard-Henri Lévy than it is on the ground.

Why, of all people, should poor Kurds carry the burden of the “European legacy of emancipation”, as Žižek puts it? How does it fall to the Kurds, in their desperate and fragile condition- the most deprived of all peoples in the region (“exemplary victims” Žižek says)- to be “the only glimmer of hope”? Is there not something abnormal at work here? When Žižek claims that “the Kurds ARE the only angels in that part of the world,” his rebuke to Trump is of limited value as a gesture of solidarity with Kurds, for it also represents a dangerous endorsement of the Kurds’ ideological self-delusions. In painting victims as angels, do we not deprive them of their humanity? 

The Rojava Revolution is more true in the minds of progressives and the self-promoting films of Bernard-Henri Lévy than it is on the ground. And surely the Kurds would be better off in terms of equality and the capacity for self-defense if they were not encouraged to become angels in the service of humanity. Unfortunately, as “exemplary victims” the Kurds have become sacrificial angels on the altar of the global left- a people whose labor is wholly exploited not only by the “imperialist” powers as proxies of war, but also as guinea pigs in the ideological labs of Western leftists. The so-called Kurdish experiment is at best a marketing gesture, at worst outright exploitation of a naïve local people by postmodern utopianism. Intellectual adventurists should not encourage the self-inflicted pathologies of the colonized. (...)

 While uncritical enthusiasm for the Kurdish experiment in Northern Syria serves the intellectual and class interests of its distant enthusiasts, it has prevented the Kurds from forming a proper grasp on their reality.