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Comment by m00dy | Hacker News Reader

First of all, Turkey is not invading any country. This is just a military offence for securing our borders. It is a basic instinct that every state has nowadays. It is like border that US is now building on Mexico. Just imagine bunch of mexican gangs trespassing your US border and make some unrest. This is almost same situation. Turkey is the country that killed most ISIS fighters.

Having strong equality between man/women shouldn't be the only parameter when you are picking up your allies. US and Turkey are member of NATO and we have operations together since then. (Including Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq). Situation for Syria is a little bit different here. Because, it is too close to Turkey. If you cut connections to Turkey, it will cost you more.

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Turkey is stealing a 30km wide coridor from a different country. If they want a safe zone, they could implement it on their side of the border.

Turkey has been fighting with PKK for than 30 years now. I can say that having a safe zone within our borders didn't work so far.

And this magically will?

yes, according to famous book 'Art of War by sun tzu', you have to defeat the enemy at his place.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War

The enemy is in the heart of Erdogan. It’s corrupt and vile.

I’m not condoning Turkey’s actions, but this reasoning only works assuming there is a functioning government capable of securing its own territory on the other side of the border and that is not currently the case.

If hostile paramilitary forces were organizing attacks on the other side of the Mexican border at a time when the Mexican government and military itself had collapsed, I can promise you the US would have no problem establishing a safe zone beyond its formal borders.

The only good argument IMO is that the Kurd's YPG won't distance themselves from the (actual) PKK terrorists. If they made steps to do so then Turkey wouldn't have nearly as good of a justification and I wonder if this would be different. Although I'm doubtful Turkey would still make that distinction.

The border security argument is a bit weak. You shouldn't need to cross a border to defend a border.

YPG would still be mainly Kurds. So Erdogan would find a reason to kill them.

The fact that the PKK is a terrorist organization is not at all a given. It is propaganda pushed by the Turkish government. The US government follows and so NATO too but without real ground for it (other than disliking communists a lot, I mean). The UN does not consider the PKK as a terrorist organization, and the EU Court ruled that it should be removed for the terrorist organizations list.

I follow this stuff pretty closely. Any organization that suicide bombs civilian areas is a terrorist IMO.

The EU, NATO, Japan, etc didn't start using that designation for nothing.

PKK also had an estimated 3000 child soldiers which were also used for terror operations and in combat in Syria: https://hrwf.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Child-soldiers-in...

Both sides are using terrorism on civilians but the label doesn’t stick when the explosives come from a plane or gun barrel. Both sides are US allies and this can be solved with pressure from other states too.

The "both sides" diversionary tactic doesn't help anyone in these debates. It's the favourite excuse of every dictator and bad guy.

The radical Kurds aren't going to win anything by engaging in it nor will the more moderate Kurdish groups gain anything by quietly supporting them.

Turkey has much to lose in the years to come by exposing their soldiers in Kurdish majority areas and they are only further alienating themselves from Europe and the world, especially if they get too zealous in the process. They haven't even faced any real resistance yet since they focused on Arab areas first. Their decision making won't be without cost.

There's no way this will be easy ride for them. Nothing in the middle east is ever like that. This is just downtime between the next major conflict. There's only so much to gain for anyone involved.

> The only good argument IMO is that the Kurd's YPG won't distance themselves from the (actual) PKK terrorists.

It is not logical to call some people terrorists when they are being massacred by a large professional army and try to defend themselves by whatever means they have. If the kurdish nation exists in 50 years, today's "terrorists" will be remembered fondly, just as the glorious french resistance is.

> Having strong equality between man/women shouldn't be the only parameter when you are picking up your allies

It does become a lot easier for them to qualify as allies if they share core western values

Oh really ? How about political view of PKK/YPG ? Do you think they embrace western values as well ? They are Marxist–Leninist Communist.

Not exactly. I'm not going to go too much into the distinction between the PKK and the YPG, but they are not the same organization. The correction I want to make is to note that the official ideology of the YPG is [Democratic Confederalism][0]. It is a form of libertarian socialism, strongly influenced by the ideas of Murray Bookchin.

A brief quote from the Wikipedia article:

Democratic confederalism is a "system of popularly elected administrative councils, allowing local communities to exercise autonomous control over their assets, while linking to other communities via a network of confederal councils." Decisions are made by communes in each neighborhood, village, or city. All are welcome to partake in the communal councils, but political participation is not mandated. There is no private property, but rather “ownership by use, which grants individuals usage rights to the buildings, land, and infrastructure, but not the right to sell and buy on the market or convert them private enterprises.” The economy is in the hands of the communal councils, and is thus (in the words of Bookchin) ‘neither collectivised nor privatised, it is common.’ Feminism, ecology and direct democracy are essential in democratic confederalism.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_%C3%96calan#Democrati...

No, they aren't. They're fundamentally democratic confederalists, which is a leftist tendency, but distinctly different from Marxist-Leninism. There are some Marxist-Leninists among the PKK and YPG, but that's not the core ideology of either group. Furthermore the PKK and the YPG are not synonymous groups and viewing them as such is not an accepted position anywhere that isn't inundated with Turkish propaganda.

I would much rather have a society of equitable Marxist-Leninists (which they are not) than authoritarian far-right Turkey. At least their values would be in line with mine, regardless of their political ideology.

It's pathetic that you're using this red-scare nonsense to justify a borderline genocide.

Archbishop Hindo: violence and intimidation of the Kurd militias on Christians increase in Hassaké: http://www.fides.org/en/news/60791-ASIA_SYRIA_Archbishop_Hin...

Kurdish YPG/Asayish Forces Once Again Kidnap Christians in Northeast Syria: https://wca-ngo.org/wca-news/press-releases/607-kurds_forced...

Kurdish YPG Unlawfully Closes Aramean and Armenian Schools: https://wca-ngo.org/wca-news/press-releases/613-ypg_illegal-...

Video Shows Christian Property in Syria Seized by Kurdish Forces: https://wca-ngo.org/wca-news/press-releases/591-video-shows-...

Very strong Western values, indeed.

Additionally, a report from Amnesty International:

Syria: US ally’s razing of villages amounts to war crimes: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/10/syria-us-ally...

I don't know if we can call this "sharing core western values" without diminishing what it really is. From what I've read and what I've been told by people who lived there for a few months, I believe man/woman equality is much more important in Rojava than it is in Europe or in the US. Maybe not in principle but clearly in practice.

Regardless of wether you are wrong or right I believe you shouldn't be downvoted since your comment serves as a different point of view.

The comment should be downvoted for inacurracy.

"Turkey is the country that killed most ISIS fighters."

This is very doubtful and should either be supported by some facts or retracted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey%E2%80%93ISIL_conflict#2...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_military_interve...

Coalition killed ~80,000 vs Turkey killed ~6,000.

It's not _just_ a different point of view though. It's Turkish propaganda and even includes a "hordes of others" reference which comes from an ultra-nationalist viewpoint that is incompatible with modern values.

Furthermore, no one is censoring them beyond their comment getting a bit more gray, downvotes are not the end of the world. We don't need a community of people justifying massacres because they're scared of retaliations from the same foreigners they're subjecting to brutal oppression.

I think ”not invading another country” is factually misleading. It’s not another point of view.

There is no difference between “invading a country” and “establishing a security zone inside another country”.

There is no inherent value in having a different view. There's value in having a different view that has some value.

I find value in taking notes of different views, wether or not I or others grant them values (which in itself is of value to me).

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