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ericw2
Reviews
Good Kurds, Bad Kurds: No Friends But the Mountains (2000)
fascinating story
The worst atrocity in American public schools (at least in my experience) has been that history is that American history is unjustly glorified and anything after 1945 is rarely discussed. As a result, atrocities such as the Turkish oppression of Kurds is not only ignored but unheard of. Everyone knows how horribly the Nazis treated the Jews and they just assume that everyone learned their lesson. So few Americans actually have any idea of the depth of culture and history in the Middle East (or really anywhere else in the world outside of maybe Europe) that allows such events to go unnoticed. The Turkish government outlawed the Kurdish language and no one knows about it! The US government's reaction is typical; they believe oppression of the Kurds is tragic, but Turkey is a key political ally. Anyone who thinks the US has gone to war with Iraq (or any war) just to stop the oppression of a people is hopelessly naive.
As for the video itself, while I think the information presented was fascinating, I think the creator is much better as a reporter than a narrator or a director. The directing seemed kind of silly, and the narrating sounded very amateurish. But in the end, it's a documentary, not a drama.
I recently had the opportunity to see Kani Xulam, who spoke to my political science class on Iraqi politics and found him to be an interesting person with an abundance of information on the topic. I saw him smile a few times, but I think his sadness for the suffering of the Kurds couldn't help but show through.