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BILL WEINBERG

Bill Weinberg is the editor of CounterVortex and contributing editor for Native Americas, for which he has won three awards from the Native American Journalists Association. He is the author of Homage to the Chiapas: the new indigenous struggles in Mexico and War on Land: ecology and politics in Central America.

What do you make of Noam Chomsky’s critique of humanitarian intervention?

In terms of US intervention and the notion that ‘our’ hands are not clean because ‘we’ committed all these terrible war crimes in Iraq and ‘we’ backed the Turkish government when they were killing the Kurds and ‘we’ backed the Indonesian government when they were committing genocide in East Timor… Well, yes, all that is true. The insight behind this critique is that we have to understand there isn’t any such thing as humanitarian intervention; I agree with Chomsky on that. The word ‘humanitarian’ is referring to motives and I don’t believe there is any such thing as pure motives in the realm of statecraft, and especially in the realm of geopolitics. Any intervention the US takes, whatever propaganda or even self-delusion is employed, ultimately is going to be about protecting US strategic interests. Which ultimately means the interests of the US ruling class. To me, that’s axiomatic; it goes without saying.

It isn’t merely incidental that the US backed genocide in East Timor and then it was shedding all these crocodile tears about genocide in Kosovo and Bosnia. The ‘but’ is that, for starters, you have these idiots who go to the next level and flip reality on its head and say that in situations like Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Darfur or Syria there isn’t any genocide or ethnic cleansing and the perpetrators are actually the victims and the victims are the aggressors. This is just repugnant bullshit.

But there is still another problem here, and that’s making it all about US motives. This isn’t the only question we should be grappling with. When the Kosovar Albanians say ‘Look, we’re under attack from the Serbs, our villages are being burnt down, we’re being forced to flee up to the mountains, somebody help us,’ I don’t think they have to be immediately concerned about the motives of those who are coming to help them. They can be forgiven for having bigger concerns than that.

During the Kosovo intervention, there was the critique that the US was supporting Turkish atrocities against the Kurds at the same time they were bombing Serbia to supposedly protect the Kosovar Albanians.

But if your village has been burned down and you have been forced into a refugee camp across the border, what difference does it make to you that there are Kurds in Turkey that are in a similar situation? How does that lessen your plight? The Kosovars overwhelmingly approved of the NATO intervention, while some notable anti-Milošević Serbian opposition forces did not.

I supported the nonviolent civil resistance in Kosovo led by Ibrahim Rugova. The world would not recognize their movement. People in the United States displayed no interest in knowing this movement existed except for a few lonely voices like me and my friends in the War Resisters League (and Albanian-Americans, of course). This civil resistance came under unrelenting pressure, and that’s when the hotheads prevailed and said, ‘Fuck this nonviolence shit, we’re going to form a guerrilla army’. Ibrahim Rugova’s movement was sidelined and the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] sort of stole the show and they become part of this big imperial game where the Germans were backing them, and the Russians were backing the Serbs, and the whole thing got really, really, ugly really fast, and it ended with NATO intervention. I see this as a lesson in the criticality of solidarity. If the Left is going to oppose US military adventures, it has got to get serious about solidarity.

You’ve written movingly about the Rojava Kurds in northern Syria. Do you think we should arm the Syrian Kurds and the Iraqi Kurds? My worry is that if ISIS defeats them, they will have more weapons.

The obvious answer to that criticism is: if they aren’t armed, their defeat is going to be more likely, isn’t it? Look at the analogy of the Spanish Civil War. No-one on the Left was saying that we couldn’t arm the Spanish Republic because if they lost the guns might fall into the hands of Fascists. Conservatives in the West were saying ‘hands off Spain, it’s not our fight’, and were assailed for this by the Left! People on the Left were protesting that the Spanish Republic had been betrayed by the world.

And despite all the conspiracy theories, the US is still doing nothing against [Syrian dictator Bashar al-] Assad. All their efforts are directed against ISIS and al-Nusra. They aren’t going after Assad at all.

What is the best way to support progressive elements like the Kurds in Syria?

Give them a voice, act like they exist! I’ve got friends who are organizing a book drive so they can send books to the university the Rojava Kurds have established in their territory, and that’s great. But what’s more important about it is the fact that by doing the book drive here, we are affirming that this social experiment in Syria actually exists and countering the stupid Left bullshit that all of the Syrian rebels are jihadists and therefore we should be backing Assad.

Who do you admire on the Left in America?

It’s kind of a desert out there. I like the Marxist-Humanists Kevin Anderson and Peter Hudis. I like my buds in the Rojava Solidarity effort, and the followers of the late anarchist thinker Murray Bookchin. I like Meredith Tax, who I believe first coined the term ‘imperial narcissism’. As for David Graeber, I have my criticisms of him, too, but he’s supporting the Rojava Kurds and I appreciate that. Many of the voices that most inspire me are not on the American Left but are Left and secularist figures in what is called the ‘Muslim world’. I’m talking about genuinely heroic figures such as Iraq’s Houzan Mahmoud, Iran’s Maryam Namazie and Algeria’s Karima Bennoune and Marieme Helie Lucas. These women intransigently oppose Western imperialism and political Islam alike, and speak with the moral authority of those who have placed themselves at risk.

You identify as an anarchist. Can you speak about what anarchism means to you?

Some people call it democracy taken seriously. About 25 years ago, when I was more dogmatic, I would have considered myself an anarchist and a pacifist. So, anarchism to me was not about violence, it was about nonviolence. I wanted to see a nonviolent revolution: people putting themselves in harm’s way to stop the war machine; and people dropping out of the system as a form of non-cooperation and eventually building a society based on decentralized co-operatives instead of centralized top-down structures. That’s what anarchism meant to me. Now, a generation later, I still consider myself an anarchist, although I feel the need to add the caveat that I’m not a dogmatic one: I’m a pragmatic anarchist.

Most of the forces I’m supporting in Iraq and Syria are not anarchist, although the Rojava Kurds sort of are. They don’t call themselves anarchists, but they are influenced by Murray Bookchin and his theory of ‘Social Ecology’, and they’re trying to put in place anarchistic experiments like direct democracy and so on, so they are anarchist-leaning and anarchist-influenced. The Local Coordination Committees that started the Syrian revolution in 2011 are a mix. Some are more consciously leftwing than others – there are anarchists amongst them. But for the most part they are basically pro-democratic, pro-secular – and I will take that, that’s good enough for me. In a dystopian context like this, that’s damn good, and to continue to advocate that in the face of everything from the regime and the jihadists is heroic. The people I’ve supported in Iraq for the past 10 years now – the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq and the labor unions – they are feminist and Marxist and they are coming out of the

Marxist-Humanist tradition. They are followers of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq, and the late theorist Hekmat Mansour, who founded its sibling organization, the Worker-Communist Party of Iran. And they are, by the way, very anti-imperialist in their politics. You don’t have to pass my anarchist litmus test to get my support.

I no longer can call myself a pacifist. I grappled with it long and hard. The year of 1994 was the turnaround for me. Two things happened that year that cured me of my pacifism: the Zapatista revolution in Chiapas [Mexico] that I went down to and covered and experienced. And at the same time the siege of Sarajevo was going on in Bosnia. And I thought: ‘You know it’s kind of condescending for me to preach pacifist purity from my privileged position.’ No-one was coming to burn down my village, so I couldn’t deny other people the right to self-defense. I believe in the power of nonviolence, but I don’t believe in turning it into an ossified dogma, and I do believe there are situations where getting your hands dirty in armed resistance is forced upon you and your choice is to do that or get exterminated.

Postscript by Bill Weinberg:

Since this interview took place in 2015, things have changed considerably in Syria – mostly for the worse. Thanks to massive Russian military intervention, Assad has reconquered nearly all of the country from the opposition and has arguably escalated the genocide. ISIS has been largely defeated, but through US military intervention, with the Rojava Kurds groomed as a proxy force by the Pentagon. In those areas (principally Idlib) still under the control of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and other rebels, Turkey has stepped in to protect these opposition forces. Yet Turkey is intransigently opposed to the Rojava Kurds. So this has had the tragic effect of pitting the FSA against the Rojava Kurds.

I hope the Syrians can rebuild Arab-Kurdish solidarity against Assad, ISIS and the imperial powers alike. And I hope that progressives in the West can find some way to play a constructive role – which thus far they have overwhelmingly failed to do. ■