This book by Abdullah Öcalan is an incredibly ambitious* attempt to sketch a holistic picture of the history of civilisation originating from, driven by, and leading to future questions/plausibilities for the Middle East specifically.
Obviously a holistic history of civilisation is going to cover a lot of ground & I won't pretend that I'm going to be able to summarise satisfactorily every general thrust of argument & evidence in the book - but this blog is what it is, so I suppose I should at least give a rough outline of the contents. We start in what is typically considered the birthplace of civilisation - Mesopotamia: a new innovation in human relations, hierarchy, emerged & thus supercharged the development of complex societies out of prehistory. Gender norms calcified into patriarchy, class systems cemented themselves as cities became centres of activity, slavery boomed, & religious ideology developed to justify all of this as a new natural. These norms spread - in part organically, in part violently - across the ancient Mediterranean as other hubs of society matured. As states gradually shifted away from slave-owning to feudal systems, monotheisms like Christianity & Islam helped to ideologically & economically support & promote the status quo. These monotheisms had the side-effect of promulgating individualistic & humanistic modes of thinking & being, such that eventually feudalism gave way to capitalism: societies demanded a new relationship to the powers over them - and achieved a great deal thus, with democratic nations emerging as a new normal. However, capitalism being rooted in perpetual expansion & extraction, this trajectory could not be considered perfect in the long-term, ultimately being doomed to crisis & collapse. Öcalan argues that the concept of a democratic nation is poised to fill the void & provide the next step in humanity's civilisational journey. Finally, he takes up the implications of the history he's just walked us through to consider the ideological & socio-political challenges facing us in the 21st century - people must agitate & organise toward a democratic civilisation if we want whatever follows capitalism to be true progress rather than a deterioration: he obliterates the possible objection that "this is all simply theory" by applying these ideas to current situations facing the Kurds, Anatolia, Iran & Palestine (and makes a pretty solid case for his democratic ideology being a workable solution, imho).
Without committing several years of research into ancient&since history, I admit it's impossible for me to properly assess how accurate the pictures presented in this book are. However the general shape of civilisational development as shown here rings true in its overlaps with what I do know, and I don't know how much access to resources Öcalan was given throughout the writing process** (as Imrali, the Turkish island where he's imprisoned, isn't renowned for its library facilities) but if this book is even half-true it represents a momentous achievement of synthesised interdisciplinary reflection. Postcolonial history done to the highest degree. Absolutely recommended reading for anyone interested in world history, especially from a non-Western angle.
* Especially since it was written entirely from a solitary prison cell. This is the first and most scholarly such book, since being followed by a second about the PKK informed by Öcalan's personal experience & a third proposing a path forward between Turkey & the Kurds. This first volume provides historical context for the theoretical & practical concerns for the contemporary Kurdish movement as attested in his other writings.
** I mean, he must've had some access, because there's 12 pages of endnotes & a smallish but significant bibliography, and though I believe him to be a pretty smart dude I doubt he had all those precise references squirrelled away in mere memory.
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