Andrew Sage

I think, yeah, because the anarchist experiments have been few and far between, unfortunately.

The major experiments, that is, the massive ones, the ones that make historical headlines.

And I think there is a temptation to, as you're saying, construct a hagiography to glorify and venerate these attempts.

I think it's very important for us to treat them with scrutiny, you know, to hold them up to certain standards and to evaluate their missteps and to highlight their missteps even more than we highlight their successes, because that's the only way we're going to succeed in the future is if we're willing to address and engage with those mistakes.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's the thing.

It's important to raise concerns.

It's...

It's sad that this phrase has been bastardized because it's a useful phrase, right?

That is, you know, critical support or critical solidarity.

It's been taken by certain internet actors to, you know, to propagate apologia for atrocities and erasure of state violence.

Mm-hmm.

But it is a useful way of, I think, framing the way we should engage these projects.

That solidarity doesn't imply that you keep your mouth shut, that you don't seek to learn, that you don't respectfully criticize.

That is, I think, the best way to engage these projects, not to, you know, close your eyes and just follow.

Getting back to I suppose what's been happening more recently, things have not been easy for the movement really since the beginning in 2012.

It has for a long time been caught in a web of conflicting and converging interests.

In addition to fighting ISIS and other jihadist groups, Rojava managed to receive backing from the US out of a coincidence of interests and tactical necessity, as I would put it, which is confused in some circles with the idea that Rojava is a US-designed puppet through and through.

So after the SDF liberated Raqqa, they began taking more heat from Turkey, which saw the YPG as inseparable from the PKK and thus a threat.

Remember, the YPG is the defensive army, the protective services rather, and the PKK is the Kurdish party party.