Murray Bookchin’s explicit, public support for Israeli colonialism, and his equally strident condemnations of anti-Zionist leftists, have been quietly swept under the rug by a Western “libertarian” left that is eager to portray allies of US imperialism as the truly progressive forces.

With the international proxy war on Syria that began in 2011, Bookchin’s renown reached new heights. The Kurdish-led militia the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which is linked to the PKK and whose political program is based in large part on Bookchin’s thought, has enjoyed the support of the US empire.

The YPG rebranded as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in 2015, at the direct request of the Pentagon. It subsequently allowed the construction of more than a dozen US military bases in northeastern Syria.

The SDF’s spokesperson insisted in 2017 that American troops would be remaining in the region “for decades to come,” as Washington had a “strategic interest” in maintaining its military occupation.

A strategic interest indeed: this US-occupied area just so happens to have most of Syria’s oil reserves, and also serves as the nation’s breadbasket region.

US-backed Kurdish nationalists, proud followers of Bookchin’s anarchist ideology, have even acceded to Washington’s demands and held Syria’s own grain production hostage, refusing to sell wheat to Damascus, as a political and economic weapon.

In this roughly 30 percent of US-occupied, Syrian sovereign territory — an ethnically and religiously diverse area populated by not only Kurds but also Assyrians, Armenians, Turkmen, Arabs, and more — US-backed Kurdish nationalists created an autonomous region they referred to as Rojava.

Rojava was aggressively marketed as a utopian social experiment in egalitarianism, ironically by the very same corporate media apparatus that has spent decades publishing propaganda and justifying wars of aggression against any shred of socialism that has dared to challenge the US-led capitalist imperialist system.

Large segments of the Western left has fetishized the Kurdish groups in Syria with a kind of orientalist fixation, and mainstream journalists who are normally hopelessly antagonistic to the socialist left published report after report waxing poetic on how incredible, brave, enlightened, democratic, and feminist the YPG and its women’s wing the YPJ are — coincidentally right at the moment when these forces allied with the US and allowed American troops to occupy nearly a third of Syria’s sovereign territory. (By the way, there are women who fight in the Syrian army and allied militias, too — but they are dehumanized and disparagingly portrayed as “Bashar al-Assad’s female fighters,” as if they were his personal property.)

Writer David Mizner noted that the US government’s propaganda arm Voice of America, a longtime vehicle for CIA lies and information warfare against the international left, “even gave Bookchin a pat on the back,” praising the Vermont anarchist for inspiring Washington’s Kurdish allies in Syria.