One day I read a book and my entire life changed.
— the first sentence of Orhan Pamuk, The New Life (1)
Akın Özçer’s excellent column on foreign militants going to fight in Syria (2) reminded me of a topic I have considered from time to time as a foreigner who has long lived not only in Turkey but also elsewhere in this region. Özçer discusses the issue in relation to the manner in which young men are raised, and how they are typically exposed to violent games from childhood, which then devolve into masculine expectations, which also contain violent aspects, as they mature. By the time they become young adults and encounter ideology, some combine this easy relationship to violence with the struggle for a cause that attracts their conscience. Özçer notes that all sides in the Syrian civil war feature this sort of foreign combatant.
I live in Istanbul for many reasons, all of them ultimately personal. But I can say that one reason which has never appealed to me is that of a personal idealistic quest in the name of “the good” or “the just.” It is not in the name of any crusade that I have decided to live in Istanbul.
Why would this topic occur to me? I’ve met many foreigners here who are on some sort of personal quest, but mostly with peaceful intentions. From time to time, though, I have actually met people whom I understood to be involved in much more sinister activities for ideological reasons. And modern history is full of individual who have come to this region in the name of such ideological quests or crusades.
The prototype of this figure is George Gordon, Lord Byron. Byron, as is well known, lost his life in Greece during the Greek War for Independence against the Ottoman Empire. He went there on what would become a classic story of the Modern Era: to fight for the “good guys.” Byron was, of course, a product of the Romantic era; the “good guys” were the Greek rebels fighting an oppressor of Byron’s time, the cosmopolitan Ottomans. Byron did not actually die in battle, but that wasn’t the point anyways. The essence was the Cause: he was there for the Cause; so, acting as the Romantic Hero, he went and became a martyr for the Cause. His name lives on not only because he was a great artist, but also because the Cause he sacrificed his life for is associated, wrongly or rightly, with Ancient Greece as the “cradle” Western Culture. Suchh was the Philhellenism of the Romantic Era.
Since Byron, there have been many other Western men who have embarked on such personal quests. Less well-known is Howard Baskerville, who shared the same fate a century later, but fighting for Iranian democracy, not for Greek independence. (3) A Princeton graduate, Baskerville went to Tabriz in Iran as a missionary in 1907. When the Iranian Constitutional Revolution broke out, Baskerville decided to defend Iranian democracy with arms and gathered a small force to defend Tabriz. He was killed by a sniper in April 1909. Today Baskerville remains a revered figure in Iran, a martyr for Iranian democratic aspirations.
From my generation the most famous figure is already largely forgotten, John Walker Lindh, a.k.a. the American Taliban. Lindh was a confused, idealistic young Californian who converted to Islam as a teenager and then, after spending a year in Yemen in the late 1990s, went to South Asia and eventually joined the Taliban.
Lindh was captured along with a large group of Taliban militants during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Wounded and lucky to be alive, Lindh’s story created an uproar, as well as a great deal of confusion. How could a decent young American man end up in a place like Afghanistan, having become a convinced adherent of an ideology like the Taliban’s, and, most incomprehensible of all, ending up actually fighting against the United States? Currently, Lindh is in prison serving a twenty-year term for helping the Taliban.
The question that might be asked here is why Lindh was vilified for his actions while Byron is revered. Of course, seen from a Western perspective, one fought against, but the other for, the ethno-religious “other.” Beyond that, however, in essence what they did was identical: convinced of the justness of their Cause, they went to the conflict zone of their time to participate in violence. Byron died while Lindh ended up in jail.
Today in Syria there are many young foreign people like these “precursors” on all sides of the civil war. Some of them are dying, like Byron and Baskerville; others may like Lindh end up in prison. All of them, without exception, believe they are fighting for a just cause; all of them, without exception, believe that their efforts will result in a better, more just world. Whether they are fighting with the Kurds, with ISIS, with Asad’s forces, or with the Syrian opposition groups, they all believe that their death would occur in the name of the Cause.
Moreover, this is not only about men anymore; as human societies have changed with industrialization, young women have also become freer to embark on their own personal quests. Plenty of young women have also gone to Syria to fight for all sides. For example, the young female Kurdish militants in Rojava receive particular glorification. The ones who end up dead are sanctified on social media and in the Kurdish militants’ media outlets; the foreigners dying for the Cause receive special attention. (4)
So all I can say to those thinking of following in the footsteps of Byron, Baskerville, Lindh, and so many others have made is: reconsider. Don’t make that mistake. Don’t become someone else’s tool. Don’t sacrifice your life for someone else’s violent struggle. Whatever Cause you are engrossed by is likely to be capable of being supported through constructive, peaceful, democratic means. Using violence not only will mean the end of your life, but also the lives of others, often innocent by any standard. Violence is not a solution, and the Cause will always be in someone else’s hands.
I realized that this was the end of my life. But my only wish was to return home, and I had absolutely no desire to start the new life, to die.
— the final two sentences of Orhan Pamuk, The New Life (5)
NOTES
(1) Bir gün bir kitap okudum ve bütün hayatım değişti. The Turkish title of Pamuk’s novel is Yeni Hayat. The translations from Turkish in this essay are the author’s.
(2) Orta Doğu’da askercilik oynamak [Playing soldier in the Middle East], 21 July 2015. Yıldıray Oğur also touched on that issue in his equally excellent 22 July 2015 Serbestiyet column: Akın var akın ölüme akın [That powerful current pulling them toward death], but I didn’t read his column until several days after I had finished this article.
(3) A short account of Baskerville’s involvement in the 1909 Iranian Constitutional uprising can be found in Barry Rubin’s Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience and Iran. Baskerville also appears as a character in Amin Maalouf’s Samarkand.
(4) For examples, one can look at the “Martyrs’ Page” on the YPG’s website: http://ypgrojava.com/en/index.php/martyrs. The YPG is the militia arm of the PYD.
(4) Bunun hayatımın sonu olduğunu anladım. Oysa ben evime dönmek istiyor, yeni bir hayata geçmeyi, ölmeyi hiç mi hiç istemiyordum.