Murray Bookchin On The Roots of Libertarianism + Gary Johnson is a Complete Idiot

An excerpt from, “Murray Bookchin and the Kurdish resistance” By Joris Leverink, ROAR Magazine, August 9, 2015:

In 1999, Abdullah Öcalan — founder and leader of the PKK — became the subject of a diplomatic row between Turkey and Syria, from where he had been directing the PKK’s operations after having been forced to flee Turkey two decades earlier. Syria refused to house and protect the rebel leader any longer, leaving Öcalan with little choice but to leave the country in search of another refuge. Not long after, he was arrested in Kenya and extradited to Turkey where he was condemned to death — a punishment that was later changed to life imprisonment.

Öcalan’s capture was a breaking point for the PKK’s independence struggle. Shortly afterwards, the organization revoked its claims to an independent state in favor of demanding more autonomy at the local level. In jail, Öcalan began to familiarize himself with the works of Bookchin, whose writings on social transformation influenced him to give up on the ideal of an independent nation-state and rather pursue an alternative course he termed ‘Democratic Confederalism’.

.

.

.

It is no coincidence that the idea of Democratic Confederalism, as developed by Öcalan, shows many parallels with Bookchin’s ideas of social ecology. In the early 2000s Öcalan had begun to read Ecology of Freedom and Urbanization Without Cities while in prison and soon after declared himself a student of Bookchin’s. Through his lawyers, Öcalan attempted to set up a meeting with the radical thinker to figure out ways in which Bookchin’s ideas could be made applicable to the Middle Eastern context.

Unfortunately, due to Bookchin’s poor health at the time, this meeting never took place, but he did send a message to Öcalan in May 2004: “My hope is that the Kurdish people will one day be able to establish a free, rational society that will allow their brilliance once again to flourish. They are fortunate indeed to have a leader of Mr. Öcalan’s talents to guide them.”

In return, and as a form of acknowledgement of Bookchin’s critical influence on the Kurdish movement, a PKK assembly honored him as “one of the greatest social scientists of the 20^th century” when he died in July 2006. They expressed their hope that the Kurds would be the first society to establish democratic confederalism, calling the project “creative and realizable.”

Video Title: Bookchin: American Libertarianism is Propertarianism. Source: Spencer Thayer. Date Published: March 1, 2015. Description:

An edit from Murray Bookchin’s 1985 talk “Forms of Freedom” concerning the con the American Libertarian movement has pulled on the Anarchist community.

 
Video Title: Gary Johnson is a Complete Idiot. Source: Paul Joseph Watson. Date Published: September 6, 2016.