"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." ~ 
Any world is an illusion, but within illusion, another world, a better world, seems possible. In the material world, the one we think is real, the divide between the 'left' and 'right' is an artificial one. This divide serves to keep us separate from each other and prevents us from seeing clearly that we in fact have shared interests and a common enemy. A better way to approach economy, politics, culture and society would be to take note of the ways in which our societies are divided horizontally: the interests of the few (the elite) and the many (ordinary people). The elite wants to oppress and exploit the rest of us. In a material sense, they are our enemy. They are working to establish a One World Company, aka a totalitarian New World Order. World government is the last thing ordinary people need. We need free and open communities with equal rights for everyone and a profound respect for the many differences between us. We want freedom rather than security. We want peace, not war. Above all else, we want truth, dignity and justice. ~ The Editor
XML FeedsThe Man in the Blue Pyjamas - Memoir of a Kurdish Political Prisoner
Kurdistan Commentary
Jalal Barzanji, Kurdish poet and journalist, will soon release The Man in the Blue Pyjamas: Prison Memoir in the Form of a Novel, his memoirs about the time he spent imprisoned under Saddam Hussein’s regime.
The first draft of the book, completed in 2007, was written in Kurdish. After many rounds of revisions and translations, the novel will be available in April 2011 from University of Alberta Press.
‘It is a narrative about a part of my life which I (held) for years in my heart and memory,’ says the author.
The part of his life Barzanji speaks of is from 1986-1989, during which time he endured imprisonment and torture under Saddam Hussein’s regime because of his literary and journalistic achievements—writing that openly explores themes of peace, democracy, and freedom. For those three years, Barzanji wrote only on scrap paper, smuggled in to his cell in Iraq.
As an outspoken critic of the censorship under former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Barzanji had been fully expecting to be either imprisoned or executed. ‘The regime was against freedom, and I was asking for freedom. I wasn’t a follower of the ideology and mentality of the regime. My pain was double – I was a modern writer and I was Kurdish…I was living in fear because I knew I was doing something dangerous, talking about peace, democracy, freedom,’ he said.
