Capitalist modernity is history’s deadliest and most continuous crisis of civilization. In particular, the general destruction of the last two hundred years has disrupted thousands of evolutionary links in the natural environment. We are probably not yet fully aware of the devastation this has caused the plant and animal worlds. It is, however, clear that, like the atmosphere, both these worlds are steadily emitting SOS signals.

How long can humanity go on enduring this modernity, which has inflicted far-reaching environmental devastation and caused the disintegration of society? How will humanity soothe the pain and agony of war, unemployment, hunger, and poverty?

The claim that the nation-state protects society is a vast illusion. On the contrary, society has been increasingly militarized by the nation-state and fully submerged in a kind of war. I call this war a societycide, imposed in two ways.

First, power and the state apparatus control, oppress, and surveil society.

Second, the information technology (the media monopolies) of the past fifty years has replaced real society with a virtual one. Up against the canons of nationalism, religionism, sexism, scientism, the arts, and the entertainment industry (including sports, soap operas, etc.), with which society is being battered 24/7 by the media, how can society be defended?

It’s become quite clear that nation-statism in the Middle East is, in fact, one of capitalist modernity’s tools of domination. What the Treaty of Versailles was to Europe, the Sykes-Picot Agreement drawn up between the British and the French in 1916 is to the Middle East: “A Peace to End All Peace.”

Today’s nation-states have the same meaning in the region as the Roman Empire’s governors once had, but they are even more collaborationist with capitalist modernity — and stand even further from the region’s cultural traditions. They are at war with their own peoples internally, and with one another externally. The liquidation of traditional society means war against peoples — and maps drawn with a ruler are an invitation for wars between states. None of them are adequate to overcoming the deepening crisis; in fact, their existence further deepens this crisis.

In my view, a third world war is taking place globally, with the Middle East as its center of gravity. In terms of scope and duration, this war is both deeper and longer than the first two world wars. The result is decay and disintegration. And it can end only with the formation of a new regional or global equilibrium. I contend that the fate of capitalist modernity’s third world war will be determined by the developments in Kurdistan. This is manifest in what is happening in Iraq and Syria.

The existence of nation-states is an anomaly in Middle Eastern history — and the insistence on them leads to disasters. The Turkish nation-state believes that with a final genocide of the Kurds, it will make itself eternal — a nation-state now integrated with its own country and nation. Clearly, unless Turkey abandons this paradigm, it will be a mere gravedigger for the region’s peoples and social cultures — including the Turkish people itself. Iran’s future situation, similarly, remains uncertain both for itself and for the region.

But the situation of the Kurds — chopped up into pieces by nation-statism in the Middle East, imposing different forms of annihilation and assimilation upon each of these parts — is a complete catastrophe. Kurds are, as it were, condemned to a long-term, deadly agony.