Should I Shut Up About the Known Unknowns: Greater Kurdistan and the “Revolution™”?

by Scott Creighton

(Please pardon the stream of conscience rant. It happens sometimes.)

This is what baffles my mind. It’s why I lay awake at night, wondering about where this will all lead and why the hell I’m still doing what I do.

Chris Hedges recently wrote about how he sees himself on occasion and I thought how perfect it was as a description of where I am most days:

“I spoke three years ago to the sparsely attended state gathering of the Green Party in New Jersey. I felt as if I was a character in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.” In the novel, Mayta, a naive idealist, endures the indignities of the tiny and irrelevant warring sects of the Peruvian left. He is reduced to meeting in a garage with seven self-described revolutionaries who make up the RWP(T)—the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (Trotskyist)—a splinter group of the marginal Revolutionary Worker’s Party. “Stacked against the walls,” Llosa writes, “were piles of Workers Voice and handbills, manifestos and statements favoring strikes or denouncing them which they had never got around to handing out.” Chris Hedges

Sometimes I feel as if I’m a tiny little ant, a misguided Learesque ant, raging against a tempest of change that I have no hope of stopping, taking comfort in the act of resistance for resistance’s sake and for nothing more. The dusty fliers remain in the corner while the “Revolution™” is televised daily to massive critical acclaim.

Willy Loman remains an apt analogy.

What if I told you that the greatest nation-building exercise of the last 100 or so years was taking place right now … complete with all the nasty trappings of every nation building campaign in the history of mankind and then some: propaganda, bombings, terrorist mercenaries, chemical weapon “red lines”, ethnic cleansing, subterfuge, sabotage, regime changes aplenty, oil reserves, natural gas reserves, pipelines, weapons of mass migration, starvation, murder, rape, “freedom fighters”  thugs and the “deaths squads from above” favored by ObamaGod himself, drone strikes.

What if I told you all that was taking place right there in front of our faces… and no one gives a shit?

Have we become so desensitized to the suffering of others, suffering that we are causing, that it simply doesn’t register anymore unless somehow, someway, someone manages to make it personal to us by saying it threatens us?

Is that what we are now?

This is history unfolding, Birth of a Nation stuff, and I swear to God, if I wrote some bullshit about a pillow found on the face of a dead asshole in a billionaire’s little fun-time ranch for the rich and famous, that story would be all over the “alternative” press with thousands of views and hundreds of comments, while articles about the forging of Greater Kurdistan collect dust in the corner next to fliers calling for strikes that will never, ever happen.

I am baffled by it all and more than a little saddened.

Two days ago I was covering the Ankara attack, writing about possible motives, possible false flags, possible ramifications. And throughout it all, one story after another comes out confirming the motive behind the madness: the creation of a new Kurdish state from the wreckage of Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

I received a call from Moscow of all places while writing.

Little old me, broke, nearly homeless, disabled little me, chest pains and all, getting a call from RT international requesting I appear on live television to talk about the event.

They wanted to know what I thought of it.

They don’t really want to know what I thought of it. Because RT is busy day in and day out singing the praises of our new favorite freedom fighters. Is it al Qaeda from the Carter days in Afghanistan? Is it the Contras of Iran-Contra? Nah, it’s the Kurds. The wonderful, glorious, more than sympathetic CIA owned and operated Kurdish militias who are busy gobbling up little bits and pieces of Syria and now Turkey so they can contribute with someone else’s blood, sweat and tears (and land) to the formation of the new nation, the newest new nation, the newest new nation that will serve our “national interests” as payback for being a new nation… Greater Kurdistan… or should we say Barzani Kurdistan?

Same same.

I politely declined the invitation because even at RT, as we “truthers” know all too well, some truth is a little too much truth even if in the end no one can deny the truth but “unfortunately” it’s too late to do anything about it.

And that’s the real truth.

All the truth that’s fit to print.

As the scripted reality TV “Revolution™” plays out, it’s leader – a socialist who helped destroy a real socialist, who helped write the fascist ObamaCare bill, who screams about the “rights” of Israel as she bombs men, women and children in a besieged Palestine with impunity – shepherds the naive revolutionaries back to the plantation as he calls for more terrorists to be unleashed in the Middle East. His service to empire is the foundation upon which his endless political career has been built. Today he is the tenured “socialist” hero of the “Revolution™” while yesterday he was nothing more than an old man raving like King Lear against the tempest in the senate from his little podium, waving his arms, begging to be heard… to the ridicule of the establishment press… periodically.

This “election” service is his Swan’s Song, his final lap, his Kobe Retirement Tour.

Empire rewards it’s servants just as it must punish it’s detractors. This is the law. It is natural law. It’s survival depends on it.

“Sanders is, in all but title, a Democrat. He is a member of the Democratic caucus. He votes 98 percent of the time with the Democrats. He routinely backs appropriations for imperial wars, the corporate scam of Obamacare, wholesale surveillance and bloated defense budgets. He campaigned for Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential race and again in 1996—after Clinton had rammed through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), vastly expanded the system of mass incarceration and destroyed welfare—and for John Kerry in 2004. He called on Ralph Nader in 2004 to abandon his presidential campaign. The Democrats recognize his value. They have long rewarded Sanders for his role as a sheepherder.

Kshama Sawant and I privately asked Sanders at a New York City event where we appeared with him the night before the 2014 climate march why he would not run for president as an independent. “I don’t want to end up like Ralph Nader,” he told us.” Chris Hedges

It’s cold outside of the warm embrace of the Washington Consensus. Bad things happen out there. I know. So does Nader… and Kucinich… and McKinney… and Swartz.

If the “Revolution™” is televised, is it a revolution? We know the answer to that.

We know some things we don’t want to know. They are the real “known unknowns” and we live with them rattling around inside our heads everyday mocking us.

It is… impolite… to give a public voice to these voices in the backs of our heads. We all hear them. No need to be redundant. It’s vanity to imply yours are louder than mine.

A revolution is a painful, unsanitary thing full of running and screaming and crying but the “Revolution™”, well that’s little better isn’t it? More civilized in it’s application because it will never materialize. The perfect mate you never find and therefore will never hurt you. Safe.

Perhaps there is a lesson for me here. For how impolite I am to keep going on and on about the newest nation to end all new nations. Maybe it’s just another “known unknown” that shouldn’t be mentioned in polite conversation. There are so many of them now, it’s hard to keep track.

Perhaps I should sit back and wait to pretend to be shocked and awed when the flaccid “Revolution™” turns out to be much ado about nothing and revolutionary sheep are led back to the pen of the Washington Consensus for another round of “lesser of two evils” democracy.

Perhaps I should pretend to be surprised when Barzani Kurdistan turns out to be a thing and they turn out to be another brutal dictatorship in the model of Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps I should come to understand that there is a political correctness even among the politically incorrect and those who violate it’s rules will not fare well.

Unfortunately for me, I do not feel I am equipped to safely navigate these kinds of troubled waters. I guess I just don’t have the upbringing. A blessing or a curse? It’s fairly obvious I guess. After all, “do you want to be right or do you want to have friends?”, keeps rattling around in my head with the whispering ghosts of the known unknowns.

There’s a lesson here to learn but I’m not that smart. I’ll keep writing, you keep ignoring and in the end we’ll all end up in the same place anyway.

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