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The new world of news It is interesting that media groups like the Kurdish Rûdaw are now able to plonk their news on YouTube with English subtitles, giving us yet another perspective of what is happening beyond the usual suspects.
I find it fascinating. Of course it will be no less slanted depending on the sensibilities of the source, but the notion of being able to watch stuff from a Kurdish news organisation in Erbil would have seemed fantastical just a few years ago. The fact they provide foreign subtitles is very telling.
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They are learning from the ISIS
I want to see some beheading of ISIS fighters
Nah, just ‘ask’ them to go remove the booby traps they set in Sulaiman Beg
Well, they have the money…
All the Kurdish political parties have their own media outlets. Indeed there use to be a time not that long ago (say, 10 years), before the mainstream parties in Westminster became functionally indistinguishable, that if you wanted the party line you just had to read the appropriate newspaper. It is really only in the USA that they maintain the hilarious fiction of impartial news organisations.
Everyone else’s stories are ‘lies’ and ‘fabrications’ of course đ
Indeed. But only Rudaw is directly financed by the ruling party – which would make them about as reliable as the BBC? Make not mistake, I am not taking any news outlet as unreliable just because it is associated with a particular government or party. It depends. My point was about following the money and minding the context etc.
BTW, and outside the context of the current unpleasantness in Iraq: both Rudaw and TKT “smearing” them in my link could most likely be described by that immortal quip: “You are all socialists” đ
Actually from what I gather Barzani’s people are fairly ideology-free in practice beyond the whole Kurdish nationalism thing, just your typical Third World political party whose views can be summed up as “we should be in power”.
Don’t know about him and his people in particular, but my general impression has been that Kurdish politics tend to be on the Left side of things, economics-wise. On the one hand it could probably be explained by their relative lack of religiosity, among other things. On the other, I could be totally off the mark on this. Do you know more?
Not, again, that any of this matters in the context of the current war, of course.
Well the PUK is run by a ‘politburo’ which says something about their politics đ I seems to me the farther west you go from Erbil, the more Marxist it gets
They are not “lefter” than PKK though?
In other words, both quite reliable in the sense that you know before-hand what their slant will be! But I’m sure that the BBC, like its counterparts in other Commonwealth countries, doesn’t represent the ruling party at all. It represents the bureaucracy of the government, which is generally closely aligned with one party, whether that party forms the government or not.
To be fair to the CBC (Canada’s equivalent to the BBC), it’s much better than it used to be. The old guard of baby-boomer leftists have mostly retired or died, and the gen x-y-whatevers on air these days are actually more balanced. More balanced strictly within the confines of statist views, that is.
I asked my Kurdish friend that in an IM and she replied “chat later, heard explosions”… (not kidding). She lives near Kirkuk.
My impression is those folks are pretty damn left, but it is Barzani’s outfit that has all the money (i.e. the oil) so…
“Well the PUK is run by a âpolitburoâ which says something about their politics”
So 60’s Leftism without political correction. At least a bit less dishonest.
Heh Perry, I hope she’s safe…
Tedd: yes, you have a point, and we have a similar beast here in Israel. So in that sense a company like Rudaw is not so much like the BBC, but rather like…who exactly?
Alisa:
I’m sure there are media outlets in western countries that are de facto arms of political parties (the New York Times springs to mind). But I can’t think of examples of media companies that are actually financed directly by political parties. Doesn’t mean there aren’t any, I just don’t know about them.
By the way, can I even use the term “western countries” anymore? It’s starting to sound outdated, but I don’t know of another term to capture what it used to mean.
No, personally I don’t think it is outdated. It’s not what it used to be, but then what it used to be is not exactly what some of us like to think it used to be, if you see what I mean. Things change in life – both individuals and societies, and their cultures – they all change. This is how things are in this world, and overall it is a good thing. So it is with Western culture. It is constantly changing and becoming something different. What exactly? Well, as they say in MO: if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes. With culture ‘minutes’ are measured maybe in decades…
Just think of Tolkien’s Captains of the West, but the West gets more like Mordor every day.
You can have great fun with fantasy geography! When Kiwis try to overawe us Australians with New Zealand getting to play Middle Earth, we just remind them that the Gods lived just to the west of MiddleEarth, (Just as Aus. does to NZ).
As for news and views, my favourite paper (“The Australian”) has a section today (3rd Sep) on Energy resources of the future, and mentioned that many outback towns and stations had their own water and power supplies, and that many ‘grey nomads’ (pensioners in 4W drive cars) lived ‘off the grid’ i.e. carried lots of solar-powered equipment to be as self-sufficient as they could be. So if anyone wants to live an off-grid, libertarian, lifestyle, this might be the way to go!
This was posted today by Rudaw on their FB page:
Ok this is how it was explained to me by a local (who is a Gorran Movement supporter):
KDP (Barzani’s party) = centrist nationalist and ‘pro corruption’
PUK (Barzani’s uneasy partners) = leftist nationalist and ‘pro corruption’
Gorran Movement = very secularist and sort of right-liberal and ‘anti-corruption’
KIU = lunatic Islamist fringe
KIG = reformist confused Islamists
PKK = Turkish Kurdistan but now fighting alongside Peshmerga and YPG in Iraq and Syria. not a major factor anywhere near Erbil but makes Lenin look like Margaret Thatcher
PDP = fuzzy left Kurds in Turkey
DUP = Syrian Kurds (YPG is their military wing, allies with PKK), socialists but not quite a paleo as PKK
Confused? I know I am đ
LOL, and all of them are Kurds, including the Islamists?
I have to tell you, the more I hear about these people, the more they sound like Jews đ
Alisa, is it still true that where there are two Jews, you will find at least three opinions?
The best Jewish joke I heard was from Norm Geras’ site, as far as I can remember:
If a Jewish man gives his opinion and his mother is not around to hear it, is he still wrong?
Tim, the obvious answer to that is “No, because it is his mothers opinion” đ
đ
The Kurds are clearly the kind of people we should be allying with. Just watch that video of Peshmerga operatives. I didn’t once see a scene of multiple shrieks of ‘Allah u Akbar’ because some green recruit sprayed an empty building of no consequence with way too many bullets. Or ‘Allah u Akbar’ because one of their IEDs took out an enemy APC. Or ‘Allah u Akbar’ when a command and control centre was obliterated by an enemy Tomahawk missile.
The Kurds – they are determined, they see what their enemy is capable of and they’re confident they will overcome. They’ve lived through worse than ISIS. What’s more, they feel no need to praise some silly sky God every time their competence pays off, because they realise the former is of little consequence.
ISIS is a paper tiger. They are weak. They make a lot of threats against just about every major global entity you could think of, but they carry their atrocities out on the weak – people who could never pulverise them in the way that those they claim they will “liberate” – the US, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Hezbollah etc etc – could manage within a week.
ISIS is nothing. It would be nothing if Obama had any cojones.
Indeed.