From the 'Tailed Kurd' to the Wingless Angel: The Grip of Colonial Morality

Rastinews — It was a large high school, and a crowded one. The school stood near police housing, so most of its students were children of police officers. Kurdish students could be counted on one hand. I had enrolled there in the final days of '93, in a Turkish city, following the sudden exile we'd endured that November. Almost every break, students slipped off to the bathroom to smoke. Among them was one boy, quiet, who stood out — and during these smoke breaks I noticed him watching me. I asked him about it once or twice; he brushed me off. One day, when I pressed him a little, he blurted out: "I'm curious about your tail." I had no idea what he meant. I'd never heard of the "tailed Kurd" cliché. It was my first encounter with the crude, classic discourse of dehumanization that the colonial mind produces.

It's well known that Kurds have long been degraded by such crude clichés and pushed outside the bounds of "humanity." Frantz Fanon saw this process of "zoologization," as he called it, as a defining feature of the colonial mind — one that confines the Kurd to a state of nature, stripping him of any historical or human agency. It's no secret that the mechanism we call dehumanization works by pushing the targeted group outside the realm of "moral responsibility," thereby legitimizing any violence committed — or yet to be committed — against them. The consequences of Western colonialism labeling Black people as "primates," Nazi Germany branding Jews as "vermin," and the genocidal mindset in Rwanda calling Tutsis "cockroaches" are recorded in humanity's bloody memory. What we're dealing with, in Susan Opotow's term, is a full state of "moral exclusion": Kurds, too, have been pushed outside the "moral universe" and subjected — and continue to be subjected — to various forms of violent "rehabilitation" and "cleansing."

I say "continue to be subjected," because while this classic, crude method persists, it has undergone a certain evolution over time. Alongside these blunt exclusions, a subtler and more insidious method has emerged in recent times: the Kurd is no longer cast merely as a "creature with a tail," but also as a "wingless angel." This image, which at first glance looks like elevation, actually corresponds to what social psychologists N. Haslam and J. Vaes call "positive dehumanization." Rather than degrading a group, this approach assigns it "superhuman" qualities — and in doing so, pushes it outside the realm of real life and rational politics. Just as in this construction, the Kurd becomes not an actor mature enough to make his own decisions, but a figure who eases the conscience of others. As Haslam has noted, someone elevated to "angelic status" isn't expected to defend his own concrete interests, but to serve the moral comfort of those who assigned him that role. Rather than expelling the Kurd from the "moral universe," the colonial mind now confines him within a narrow, sterile moral circle of its own drawing. In practice, this amounts to a moral vise aimed at binding the Kurd hand and foot.

Indeed, every strategic step Kurds take to survive tends to fall into this pre-set "moral trap" rather than being debated on rational terms. A nation's effort to secure its own existence in safety can easily be branded, on the spot, as illegitimate and immoral through banal accusations like "serving imperialism" or "colluding with Zionism." This rhetorical barrier is, in fact, a trap set by the colonial mind, which seeks to deny Kurds standing as a political subject. The Kurdish image's evolution over time from "tailed creature" to "wingless angel" is exactly part of this same mechanism — the story of a subtle transformation designed to cloak Kurdish will in a false sanctity and thereby paralyze it politically.

We can observe the effects of this moral vise especially often in recent times. Every pragmatic maneuver the region's nations make for their own survival is naturally received under terms like "strategic thinking/realpolitik/national interest," yet the moment Kurds even consider weighing similar balances, it's treated as "tainting their innocence." To give an example: I have never once seen anyone criticize Palestinian actors for the historical ties and strategic alliances they've built with the occupiers of Kurdistan. But if Kurds so much as dream of opening a dialogue with Israel, nearly every leftist and Islamist rushes to condemn the Kurd for tainting the "purity of victimhood." This reflects a desire to strip Kurds of the right to strategic reasoning and political will. The morality of the colonial mind, in different jargons, dictates the same thing to the Kurd: "Your existence is legitimate only as long as you remain an oppressed, passive victim; the moment you try to step onto the stage as a willful, worldly actor pursuing your own interests, you are cast out of the realm of legitimacy."

To take another current example: amid the chaotic ground created by the operations against Iran, every possible step Kurds might take to reclaim their usurped collective rights and secure a political status is met, from the very start, with the same banal clichés cited above. Because the colonial mind — both right and left — doesn't just subject the Kurd to benevolent dehumanization by dressing him in a decorative "angel" costume; it also turns this "sacred" script into a duty he must perform at every moment. The instant that duty is violated, he is cast out of the moral universe the colonizer has constructed.

This colonial imposition also operates through various mechanisms of control and surveillance. This control mechanism, which seeks to encompass not only political and intellectual action but the emotional world as well, goes so far as to try to dictate what a Kurd should feel at the death of his own killer. Indeed, when a tyrant who sent his own people to the gallows dies, the most human emotions a Kurd might feel are immediately expected to be suppressed in the name of "ideological sanctities." Here, the morality of the colonial mind whispers to the Kurd: "The blood spilled by your people is worth no more than my grand ideological narrative. So even if your executioner dies, you must still observe my ideological mourning." What we are witnessing here is, in fact, nothing less than a colonization of emotion.

The role assigned to the Kurd is not that of a rational actor with his own will — a homo politicus — but that of an "innocent," passive victim under all circumstances. Even his anger toward his own killer can be branded as "servitude to others"; because the idealized "innocent angel" has no right to feel joy or anger autonomously, or to put his own pain and anxieties first. This amounts to an insidious case of "positive dehumanization" that seeks to alienate the Kurd from his own independent existence and memory.

What's more, this moral vise we've been describing is also tightened from within. This colonial mindset finds an echo in the internal rhetoric of the Kurdish political elite as well. Mystical claims that Kurds are 'by nature' disinclined toward power, or 'ontologically' removed from the machinery of the state, have turned into a willing, internal reflection of the 'wingless angel' image constructed by colonial morality. By presenting the condition of remaining stateless and without status as a 'moral virtue,' such discourses sabotage, from within, any rational pursuit of status and the political will behind it.

In the end, this colonial morality wants to strip the political ground from under our feet while it swings us between two extremes: being an 'earthbound creature with a tail' and being an 'angel' in the seventh heaven. A nation's will to preserve its existence on its own soil, and to establish its security and sovereignty, is a founding right that needs no outside moral approval. If this is a matter of morality, then it is a profoundly moral act as well. The way for Kurdish political reason to break this grip is to tear off the garment of passive victimhood and sterile innocence cut for it, and return with courage to the worldly, rational terrain of politics. Refusing to be turned into an angel, and thereby refusing to have one's political and human will paralyzed, is the most basic, most moral step toward becoming a subject with a will over one's own fate.

In short: Kurds are neither devils nor angels. Kurds, with all their human qualities, are simply Kurds.