Bakhtyar Ali sharef – Activist
There exists an educational inheritance that extends to every corner of life—a cultural form rooted in a deep existential dread that manifests itself in Kurdish society. It is a legacy shaped by trauma and tension, now metastasized. Every day brings news of massacres in some corner. The Kurdish individual has become desensitized, to the point that pain and aggression are expressed not through discourse, but through mutual destruction—through hitting and dying, through internalized and externalized violence. Society has become engaged in a collective act of emotional freezing, a pervasive silence that stretches even beyond the grave.
We no longer hear or listen. The Kurdish individual has ceased to speak meaningfully. What remains is conflict, exaggeration, and the mutual erosion of one another’s dignity. Words have become commodities—we measure them in weight, in price, in emotional cost. Words no longer carry meaning; they determine the social worth of a person. This society treats language not as a tool for communication but as an instrument of valuation.
In Kurdish culture, a word often signifies a person’s value or their very identity. Words become filled with cultural illness; the kind of education that pushes a person toward the edge of death while offering no alternative but to remain bound to it. A toxic culture full of inflammatory speech, where individuals are fashioned like time bombs, ready to detonate.
It is an education measured by the scale of death: everything that is offered to the individual comes with an implicit death sentence. Every virtue—ethics, instinct, religion, happiness, property, and values—is weighed against death. It’s a binary: either the thing survives, or death prevails.
In our society, words shape people. They become the vessel for identity. If stripped of this identity, one self-destructs, because no alternative learning exists other than to choose death. People cling violently to things they do not understand, raging over symbols they can’t articulate.
We are left with individuals empty of meaningful words, yet full of shallow moral and cultural nothingness. Individuals perpetually descending from their better selves—each carrying with them death like a legacy into every space they inhabit. Death is closer than celebration, more present than a sip of water. This individual sacralizes everything to the point of sacrifice and collective slaughter.
Such toxicity in education produces a certain kind of person. This person shapes society, and society forms a nation, and the nation builds a state. Eventually, the value of life itself becomes obscured by the thin veil of death. A nation emerges in which life is perpetually at stake—where women, land, flags, honor, and morality are all turned into untouchable sacred symbols.
A boy’s desire for a girl can escalate to murder. Entire families can be annihilated because love is viewed as a violation of property or sacred honor.
This person builds a state through violence, and when a writer critiques it—like Kawa Garmiyani, Bakr Ali, or Sardasht Osman—they are silenced violently, often in front of their own homes. Days later, their bodies are found in ditches.
It no longer matters whether this person is armed or unarmed. Whether it is a bullet to the head or a hatchet to the back, the result is the same: a culture of death masquerading as moral order.
