Why do Kurds keep going around in a cycle of defeat..?

Hawkar Bahir – Activst

In the philosophy of history, a people who do not learn its lessons are condemned to repeat them. Kurds are the only nation that carries out ‘history’s experiments’ with pride, yet every time, they lose in the results. So let’s ask bluntly: why?

We are a people rich in sacrifice, but poor in achievement. Why don’t we learn from history?

Because we become Kurds only in times of crisis; in times of peace, we spend all our energy erasing each other, History shows no mercy to a people who shed the blood of their youth for freedom, only to hand that freedom to an occupier so he can rule over that people whose youth bled for it. This is the greatest historical paradox we live in.

Kurds are an emotional people, not a strategic one. We are quick to believe in a warm speech, an epic poem, or a loud promise of statehood, and we put all our eggs into one basket. International politics is not run on tears, but on numbers and interests, yet we have always dealt emotionally with a world that thinks only in terms of calculation and self interest.

We have repeatedly trusted ‘friends’ like a naïve child friends who entered our home only for temporary gain. The Kurdish problem is the absence of a strategy of friendship.

For us, a friend is someone who gives us weapons, but in politics, a real friend is someone whose interests are tied to yours. When our friends abandon us, it is not necessarily a sign of their treachery, but a sign of our own political poverty, and our failure to bind their interests to ours in a way that makes it impossible for them to walk away.

Oppression against the Kurds became a form of ‘inner peace’. We learned to blame all our defeats on the occupier, the foreigner, and history’. this turned the process of self reflection into a habit of scapegoating.

When you say, ‘Everyone abandons us’, you are shifting responsibility away from yourself.

Here lies the core of the problem: we do not learn the lessons of history because we always treat mistakes as coming from the ‘teacher’ (history), not as lessons for the ‘student’ (ourselves).

This people, when faced with liberation, no longer asks, ‘Why does everyone abandon us?’ Instead, they ask, ‘How can we make it so no one can decide without us?’

Until the moment when ‘defeat’ is only poetry and style for us, history will keep repeating the same page. When defeat becomes ‘the desire for change’, then history is forced to become a witness to the will of this people.