The truth seeker who insisted on another world
Our friend, internationalist revolutionary and guerilla fighter Michael Panser, Bager Nûjiyan (also Xelîl Vîyan) fell and became immortal on December 14, 2018 during a Turkish air strike on the Medya defensive areas in South Kurdistan.
Our hearts are full of pain, our heads full of memories. Heval Bager was a friend who remains in our memories above all with his insatiable and euphoric search for truth. His search and curiosity for revolutionary liberation movements has taken him to many places around the world. His greatest passion was to share his experiences and ideas with other people, to discuss them and to find his companions.
In 2012 he travelled for the first time to Kurdistan, where his deep connection with the philosophy and revolutionary leadership of the PKK and Rêber Apo began. However, he was driven by the idea of sharing his experiences and enthusiasm for the Kurdish liberation movement. He was convinced of the universal significance of the revolution in Mesopotamia for all freedom seekers, resisters and revolutionaries in the world. In a few years he managed to connect many people and movements with the liberation movement and to build bridges. In 2015 he himself returned to the revolutionary areas of Rojava to become part of the social change and also took his place in the defense of the Yezidi people in Şengal. In 2017, however, it led him back to the liberated mountains of Zarathustra in search of wisdom, true friendship, struggle and free life in the PKK.
The Internationalist Commune is also undoubtedly the result of his efforts and at least one of many dreams that have come true. So many dreams have remained unrealized, but his search has become the search of many more. The seeds that Heval Bager has sown on his many travels have begun to germinate and sprout everywhere. How we manage to appreciate the fruits and plant new seeds is now up to us who will continue his struggle until victory. We owe that to him.
It is difficult for us to do justice to our friend and comrade with words. So we want to let him speak for himself by sharing with you an excerpt from a text he sent us just before he died last winter:
“The system creates a totalitarian culture of material values that transforms every social value and meaning of communal life into something dead, purely material and overlays this with the lack of culture of limitless consumption. With this method, the truth (as a category of thinking, of the perception of reality) is stifled within the limits of the purely material, the measurable and the positivist scientific. Life loses all uniqueness, is ripped of every secret, without search, and becomes the pure administration of the everyday and banal. The emptiness that this kind of enforced life had left in our lives since the Nineties awakened dissatisfaction with the existing and set us on the move. We looked for answers and ways of how the right struggle for liberation could be led, how to live a proper life. We were aware of the disgusting nature of the system, but the intangibility of the domination of Liberalism and its ideological hegemony prevented us from thinking of real alternatives. The nature of liberal living, forced careerism, opportunism and individualism prevent communal experience and condemn all attempts of an alternative life to be pushed into isolation and marginalization. We searched for ways out by exploring historical internationalist struggles, revolutionary theory, and forms of life and culture outside the European metropolis. It is said that in the shadow of fortresses and cathedrals, and under police control of the system’s henchmen, free thinking is difficult, and so we left our old world. Any search for freedom, any attempt at deep understanding leads back to the source, and so our search led us to Mesopotamia, the site of the first great revolution of humanity, the source of culture, the revolution of language, thought and settlement. We learned that in the mountains, plains and cities of Kurdistan, the tradition of revolutionary internationalism continued, and here the struggle for a socialist society was linked to the resistance of the old, natural society, in which the power of the woman and the culture of the mother goddess still acting. Above all, in the struggle of the PKK and in the person of Abdullah Ocalan, we encountered a deep revolutionary leadership that far exceeded the limits of classical leftist movements and embodied the possibility of true revolutionary life.
[…]
In the mythology of the socialist movements, there was the idea of a last war that will end all wars. This war happens in the form from of a global war, centred around the Middle East and Kurdistan today. The path of revolutionary leadership is the solution to this war and for the struggle of a free society. In this sense, the experience of revolutionary leadership today undoubtedly represents a heritage of humanity. If we properly understand, our search and the way to lead our lives, to connect with the revolutionary leadership, we will be able to live corresponding intensively and to take the first step on the trace of revolutionary Internationalism to turn this war into the struggle of our liberation. This requires the courage, the hope, to overcome every border on the path of militant life through effort and the power of a deep consciousness and to insist on another world.”
Heval Bager followed in the footsteps of other German revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg, Willi Münzenberg, Hans Beimler, Ulrike Meinhof, Andrea Wolf, Uta Schneiderbanger, Ivana Hoffman, Kevin Jochim, Günter Hellsten, Jakob Riemer and Sarah Handelmann.
In the life of Bager Nûjiyan we see for ourselves an example of internationalism and the search for truth, freedom and brotherhood of peoples. We express our heartfelt sympathy to his family and all his friends. We turn our grief into anger, our anger into the responsibility to realize his dreams and efforts of another world, be it in Mesopotamia, Chiapas or East Germany. We commemorate all the martyrs of the Revolution who gave their lives for freedom. Their struggle is ours!
Entire text first published 12 December 2018
https://internationalistcommune.com/internationalism-and-the-question-of-revolutionary-leadership/