Mini-Cast #9 - A Brief History of the Kurds - First Half - Much Too Long

It's still too soon to know much definitive about the atrocities transpired between Turkey and the Kurds in light of Trump's withdrawal of all forces from Northern Syria, except that it's most definitely an atrocity, and one for whose blood stains America's hands because of and all it took for unfathomable atrocities to happen is a day or two!

There are all kinds of rabbit holes I could jump us down into, dear listener, rabbit holes about the unfortunate and continued necessity of American military involvement in a number of overseas conflicts, about mismanagement of the Northern Middle East from both Republican and Democratic administrations: both the horrific fallout from Operation Desert Storm and the almost direct responsibility of George H. W. Bush  for one of the worst genocides in recent decades when he invited the Kurdish people to rise up against Saddam Hussein yet looked on from the sidelines while Saddam butchered anywhere from 90,000-230,000 Kurds without moving so much a finger in support of this ethnicity so key to the success of Operation Desert Storm; or about how the incompetence, of George W. Bush's Iraqi invasion, or perhaps even its very existence, now obscures the historical fact that Saddam Hussein was one of the bloodiest despots of modern times with a million dead for whom there is hopefully an afterlife where he must answer for it; or about how even Obama may bare enormous culpability for our new conundrums. How Obama may or may not have ruined the only opportunity we'll ever get to rid Turkey and the world of the perhaps now genocide-stained President Erdogan when Obama publicly opposed the Turkish military's coup d'etat in July, 2016, or about how Obama put the final nail in the Arab Spring's coffin by not taking Syrian rebels seriously, or that by not doing so he may have propelled the Syrian refugee crisis from a likelihood to an eventuality, or that his non-interference in Syria emboldened Vladimir Putin to make a successful gamble that Obama would similarly not interfere directly if Russia meddled in American affairs as it meddled in Syria.

None of these notions about the Obama presidency, even Obama's downplaying Putin's threat, can be pronounced with anything like complete certainty. But if we truly mean to examine our own role in the world, we have to entertain the possibility that the truth will never stop shocking us.

I'm not jumping us down any of those rabbitholes today, and the longer I can put off facing these questions, some of which are uncomfortable in the extreme for both listener and podcaster, the better off both I will be and my few listeners whom I don't want to alienate by chasing the most controversial subjects right away. The difference between being gifted at understanding politics and being incompetent at it is the difference between people whose predictions come true three out of ten times, and people whose predictions come true two out of ten times, and the same goes for the private sector.

Today, we should only talk about who's dying right now, and give some history to the almost faceless people that we read are dying in today's news. Here, with grotesquely truncated brevity and lots of help from wikipedia, is a history of the Kurds:

Nobody is genuinely certain about their origin, but the Sumerian tablets of 5,000 years ago refer to 'The Land of Karda', somewhere in what we now call the Anatolian peninsula, a protrusion that is Asia's western-most point and basically comprises the two-thirds of modern Turkey that are not disputed by Armenians. The Kurds use a calendar that dates from what we would call 612 BC, the climactic event of their civilization, meaning the same definitive occurrence like how the Western world's is the birth of Christ, is when the Assyrian capital of Nineveh was conquered by an ancient Iranian people called the Medes, a peoplehood hailing from North-Western Iran. Led by King Cyaxares, the Median Empire stretched at this time across the entire Iranian Plateau - to the West the Zagros mountains that bisect Iran and Iraq, to the north the Armenian Highlands and the Caucuses Mountains, to the South the Caspian Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, and to the East the Indus River of Pakistan. This basically means, at least it does to the Kurds, that a little more than 2500 years ago, the vast majority of everything that lies between the Middle East on one side and India on the other was Kurdish property. As we have George Washington and the English have King Arthur, the historico-mythic father figure of the Median people, and therefore perhaps the Kurds as well, is the king Cyaxares, who was greatly praised by Heroditus. When he was born, Media was ruled by the Scythians, Cyaxares killed the Scythian leaders, threw off Scythian control of Media, and proclaimed himself king. He then reorganized the Median army, allied himself with the Babylonian Empire, and even made peace and an alliance with the Scythians, so that he could overthrow the Neo-Assyrian Empire. This is, as we said, the climactic event in Median/Kurdish history, and afterwards, Cyaxares conquered Northern Mesopotamia, Armenia, and most of modern Turkey's eastern half.