I don't think I've ever read anything quite like Matt Broomfield's Hope Without Hope. It often seems like the world falls into polar opposite sides to a spectrum between absolute despair and naive optimism. My pessimism has grown as I've aged and part of me has thought that it's just because I've seen so much suffering and so many things go wrong. I tend to believe I've seen the reality from within communities that others on the left who aren't in them don't understand. I have also been destroyed by the internalization of the shame machine and call out culture, basically directing it towards myself all of the time. However, much of my outlook is just fatigue from being tossed about by the horrors of a dying world. All of this is of course very self-centered. Is my self flagellation and doom scrolling helping the humans and other animals I care so much about? I'm aware of it, but stuck.
It can be easy to feel lost and like there is no point. It can seem rational to take a look at things and decide that putting in effort will only be a waste of energy. On the other side of things, one can look at the world and see many instances where victory has occurred and believe that we can just copy and paste that and we will win. We act on an ignorant form of idealism, falling apart when the messy outcome isn't anything close to what we thought it would be. The author explains how we can acknowledge the bleakness of things without defeat. While Rojava is an anchor for this book, the book is not entirely about Rojava. The people and resistance movements of the AANES are more used as an exercise to explore in practice what it is like to have hope without hope.
Essentially, Broomfield uses his experiences in Rojava as well as other historic events (including war, atrocity, resistance, etc,) philosophy, religion/myth making, analysis of fiction, movement manifestos, and other vehicles to examine how we can both be in touch with the bleak reality of things, while also continuing to move forward. In fact we have to. There is much discussion of truth and factual accuracy and if/when that actually matters. All of this is wrapped up in the ever-present uncertainty of the future. While we may know that things are bad, we really have no idea what is going to work and where. And we have no idea if things that work will continue working or if they'll be obliterated by war tomorrow. I'm honestly finding it difficult to do the topic justice in the realm of a review as I'm still mulling over many of the ideas in my own head. I know that I agree with a lot, I'm not sure whether or not I agree with all of it, and I'm not sure if that matters. The thought exercise that this book has created for me was one that I had not really encountered before. It has challenged me in multiple ways for multiple reasons.
Broomfield is many things, but his journalism chops shine throughout this book and his work as a poet makes the writing all the more enjoyable. He has spent time on the ground and among the people of Rojava and has done his best to see and understand what is going on there as much as an outsider can. He discusses both the tendency of some on the left to idealize Rojava as an anarchist utopia as well as the tendency of authoritarian capitalists to view it as some sort of liberal stronghold. I do think that this book will be a bit easier to take in for someone with at least a little bit of knowledge. I went into it having red articles over time and listening to the women's war podcast. That is to say I don't have a ton of knowledge outside of a little bit of basic foundation. This is part of why I really took my time with this book and read slowly and carefully. Occasionally I would stop by Google to look something up, but a lot of the foundational information is there, at least enough to grasp the thesis.
The more specific discussions about the way things work in the AANES gave me even more respect for these movements. It helped me understand some cultural aspects that help people remain connected and motivated in the struggle. It helped me to understand the absurdity of things like Western media trying to compare Rojava to a small autonomous zone in the US (an actual assignment the author was given by an employer at one point.) What it really drives home is the power of community and the ability of people to create an impressively massive functioning society outside of the brutal authoritarianism it is pitted against.
One practice I have thought a lot about since reading this book is called tekmil. At risk of not doing it justice, I will say that it is essentially an accountability structure where people check in with one another to point out mistakes and how to improve. What I liked about it is that it is truly based and cooperation. You do not apologize in these sessions. They are meant to inform and improve, not to punish. It is also interesting to think of how they have dealt with the massive conflict with ISIS. They essentially have prison villages, but not like what you may imagine with cells and bars. They sacrifice safety in order to create a less controlling atmosphere. It's something I think about a lot with any sort of leftist revolution, especially as I watch my own country descend further and further into an embarrassing (and horrifying) cyberpunk oligarchy. What does a successful revolution do with the masses of people who violently and misogynistically disagree with it if the revolution includes people who are against prisons?
Broomfield also speaks on the way patriarchy and women's liberation work in Rojava. I knew a bit about this from the podcast and things I read, but he goes into it in more complex ways. At the same time he criticizes how identity politics can be used as cheap tokenism for ineffective action. Again, Broomfield is talking about a real world, rather than an imaginary one. At times I felt like his analysis of identity politics would contradict itself anyways I didn't fully understand. However, this book is literally an entire contradiction. That is the central thesis, so maybe that is to be expected. There are many more things about Rojava discussed within the book, but for brevity's sake I just mentioned a couple that stood out to me.
In terms of jargon, this book is divided into different discussions and some of them are more accessibly written while others are a bit more academic than average. I chuckled to myself on occasion, wondering if the author was going to say "neoliberal capitalist hegemony" in every paragraph. That said, I do think it's worth taking the extra time to read this even if you maybe put off by the heavier language. There are times where jargony texts seem to be that way for the sake of it, often hiding the lack of anything substantial behind the language. This book is not doing that. Broomfield is essentially trying to capture endless contradictions and complex topics that require discussion of complicated and specific concepts.
Make no mistake in thinking that this is an exercise in toxic optimism or the power of positive thinking. There is an entire chapter on the falsities in new age ideas (such as Frankl's damaging analysis of life in concentration camps.) The author is clearly critical and rightfully angry about the topics he is writing about. It is a book about straddling the realities of a complex world where we need motivation to keep going even if there is not a concrete and positive victory in sight.
Perhaps my only clear disagreement was the author's points on Westerners avoiding images of horror that those experiencing them must be exposed to every day. The author argues that we should feel bad and not be able to look away. For example, I stopped watching videos of animal cruelty in farming, etc as I realized I was re-traumatizing myself with information I already knew, rather than motivating myself to continue the fight. Rather than helping me keep going, it along with the isolation in a world that mostly does not care even on the left turned me into such an obsessive live wire that I burned out and had to quit everything because my health declined so badly. I've never really been able to psychologically recover from those years.
I remain more open to watching other atrocities in small controlled necessary situations, such as the videos of starving children in Gaza I saw last night. But, we must be careful. There are plenty of studies that show that people double down when faced with conflict (especially men,) desensitize, blame the victim, etc. Human minds will go to great lengths to protect themselves. There is also evidence that exposure to pain and trauma makes people more sensitive and fragile in pathological ways. The answer to atrocity isn't that everyone else should also experience it. It's that no one should.
All of that said, I also understand what he's saying here. Even if you quickly Google the author you see the kind of reporting he's done, the witnessing of violence that he has reported on, and the oppression he himself is faced from various governments including the UK anti-terror squad due to his reporting. I can understand why he and the people living through what he is reporting would scoff at the idea of people not wanting to see what they've endured for mental health reasons. It is a privilege to look away. But the thing about privilege is that privileges are things that everyone should have.
I cannot stop thinking about everything in this book. I feel that it has freed me in a lot of ways. It has reminded me how guilt takes up space, my negativity is not purely rational, my need to control uncertainty will never succeed. It has given new meaning to the "journey not the destination" mantra and has reminded me that even if the end is nigh, we still need to live together today. When there is no hope, it is not necessarily a grounded take to stop hoping. Critical, cynical, absurdist, (and many other adjectives used in the text,) hope not only motivates us to seek more extreme revolution, but to continue on with daily tasks that keep communities going- we need to peel those potatoes.
As many of us know, despair and depression kind of stop everything. Even if we are all careening toward the apocalypse, right now we have to do the best we can. We have to keep going and make our present and future as viable as possible. Many beings of many species including humans will live and die within the period between now and total annihilation if that is indeed what is coming. All of that existence matters.
This is one of my favorite books I've read in a while precisely because it has made me think in ways that I don't recall thinking before. It invites contradiction rather than trying to dispel it. It allows us to be complex, messy creatures who will make countless mistakes, rather than positioning us to the boxes that I and so many others love to place ourselves in. It is a call for action and community rather than to strive toward a guaranteed end point that is a victory. Even if we do only have 11 years left before total climate collapse, a lot can happen in those 11 years.
This was also posted to my goodreads and storygraph.
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