Janet Biehl reports on her trip to Syrian Kurdistan
Amidst the Syrian civil war and on the front lines of the fight against ISIS, the Kurdish people in northern Syria are building a face-to-face democratic, gender-equal, and ecological revolution from the ground up. Inspired in part by the ideas of longtime Burlington resident Murray Bookchin, the Kurdish people have organized an autonomous territory the size of Connecticut named Rojava, based on these principles. However, the Kurdish movement in northern Syria and in southeastern Turkey is facing extreme repression by the authoritarian government of Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.
Burlington resident Janet Biehl has visited Rojava twice on solidarity delegations, most recently in October, and will be discussing the promises and challenges the revolution is facing, as well as opportunities for solidarity in the US. She is the author of several books on social ecology, including Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin (2015). Her books The Murray Bookchin Reader (1997) and The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (1998) date from her 19-year collaboration with Bookchin. She has recently translated (from German into English) several books on the Kurdish connection, including Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan (2013) and Revolution in Rojava (Pluto Press, forthcoming).
Sponsored by Toward Freedom, Black Rose/ Rosa Negra Burlington, and the Fannie Lou Hamer branch of LeftRoots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=OCkAjqw1AyQ
