The Museum of the Bible is offering a Christian nationalist vision of America’s past

(RNS) — The Museum of the Bible seeks to unite people of faith from various life experiences and convince them that modern political efforts to ‘reestablish’ a Christian America are rooted in America's founding.

“The Prayer at Valley Forge” (1975) by Arnold Friberg on display at the Museum of the Bible in July 2026. (Photo by Emma Cieslik)

Karen E. Park and Emma Cieslik

August 27, 2026 

RNS

(RNS) — Much attention has been paid to the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on the Smithsonian museums and on American history generally, attacks that have included, but are not limited to, the removal of signs about slavery, the reinstallation of the statue of a Confederate general in Washington and, most recently this summer, a new executive order mandating that the Smithsonian install signs outside of museum buildings “warning visitors about the ideological capture at the National Museum of American History.” 

What is less well known is that alongside their claims that the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History promotes “extreme political activism,” Trump and his allies are simultaneously using the nearby “Museum of the Bible” located just yards from the Smithsonian museums on the National Mall to legitimize an alternate Christian nationalist history of America. 

Just under a year ago, Trump spoke at the Museum of the Bible, praising its founders, Steve and Jackie Green, for creating a “museum to honor the most widely read book in history.” Trump even went on to say that “the Museum of the Bible had more come here than anywhere else.” Although his syntax is confusing, what Trump appears to be claiming is that the Museum of the Bible attracts more visitors than the neighboring Smithsonian and other DC-based museums, a claim that is false. 

This summer, as people flocked to the capital to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, the Museum of the Bible offered visitors a simultaneous and coordinated “museum experience” designed to pair with and augment Rededicate 250 and The Great American State Fair. The Museum of the Bible’s deliberate attempt to both capitalize on the 250th anniversary and offer its own alternative history is clear from the website’s landing page, which reads: “Award-winning and endlessly surprising, Museum of the Bible sits just three blocks from the US Capitol and offers something for everyone: rare artifacts spanning 4,000 years, immersive experiences that bring the biblical narrative to life, and conversations that will change how you see American history.”

On July 3, the Museum of the Bible debuted its new exhibit, “Sacred Liberty,” which “highlight(s) individuals whose lives were impacted by the Bible throughout American history—both historically influential figures and everyday Americans,” and “showcase(s) the ways these individuals used the Bible, (drawing out) themes related to the Bible in foundational and influential American documents.” 

Prior to opening this exhibit, (which is free to the public compared to the regular $35 fee for adults), the Museum of the Bible also unveiled an updated version of its flagship exhibition, “The Impact of the Bible,” now retitled “The Bible in America,” along with a brand-new exhibit, entitled “The Bible in Times of War.” Taken together, these exhibits provide an important window into the pseudo-historic world, which Christian nationalists would ideally like to implement in lieu of the complex version of American history preserved and presented by the Smithsonian. 

“The Bible in Times of War” exhibit at the Museum of the Bible in July 2026. (Photo by Emma Cieslik)

In these exhibits, the Museum of the Bible purports that not only was America founded as a Christian nation, but that the idea of a democratic republic was somehow foretold in the Bible itself. A label exploring “Monarchy and the Bible” states that “the Bible’s notion of kingship under a higher law represents an early chapter in the history of limited government and constitutional thought.” This claim would seem to be an attempt to de-emphasize American democracy in favor of the notion of a strong executive leader whose role is to consolidate religio-political power.

In another exhibit on the Declaration of Independence, a label describes the Bible as the “spiritual framework” of the burgeoning republic. This overarching claim becomes especially glaring with the display of Arnold Friberg’s “The Prayer at Valley Forge” (1975) at the start of the exhibit. Today, historians recognize that the story of George Washington kneeling in the snow was merely legend, yet the Museum of the Bible situates it next to a label that reads, “Friberg’s painting reflects a tradition which understands the nation’s founding as an act of divine providence.”

The label, titled “Faith, Freedom, and the American Story,” frames the Museum of the Bible’s renovation as a critical historical exercise: “As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, images like The Prayer at Valley Forge reveal how Americans have remembered their beginnings — not only a struggle for independence, but as a story shaped by the Bible.”

Another label goes so far as to explain how the Bible informed the constitutional delegates’ creation of founding documents, reading:

“The Declaration’s signers were steeped in the Bible. They heard it preached in church and they read it at home. Its teachings permeated their lives. As young men they also studied Enlightenment philosophy and were inspired by its ideals. The Declaration of Independence is a product of these influences. It marks the birth of American liberty and expresses the foundational belief that our rights come not from the state but from our ‘Creator.’”

An exhibit about the Bible and slavery at the Museum of the Bible in July 2026. (Photo by Emma Cieslik)

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The paternalistic idea that marginalized groups found justification for their rights in the Bible’s influence and presence in America’s founding documents repeats throughout the exhibition, with one panel explaining that, “though the Founders’ view of rights fully applied only to white male property holders, it opened a path for other groups who would fight for their own rights in future generations.” In sections exploring the arguments for and against abolition, women’s suffrage and civil rights, the museum reframes all liberation movements as developments out of a biblical form of Protestant Christianity. While Christianity was a significant influence in the lives of many American leaders, reframing American history as inherently tied to the Bible is both inaccurate and misleading. 

What is happening here is more than an issue of competing historical emphases or differences in interpretation. The Museum of the Bible, with the support of the Trump administration and its allies, is appropriating the familiar material aspects of museums (signage, interactive displays, artifacts) along with the very term “museum” in order to present a predetermined and Christianized version of American identity. 

The Museum of the Bible has an a priori set of conclusions (“From America’s earliest days, no text has left a deeper mark on the nation’s ideals, laws and culture than the Bible”), which means there is really no opportunity for the kind of critical engagement or narrative questioning that authentic history entails. This approach is not so different from what the Creation Museum in Kentucky has been doing for decades — that is, taking what looks superficially like a museum and using it not to invite questions and engagement but to funnel visitors into predetermined conclusions about both the nation and the world.

Of course, museums have never been neutral spaces. Historically, they have been used by colonial and fascist leaders to define national identity, promote racial superiority and marginalize some groups while centering others. In recent years, many museums, such as the Museum of Us, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology, as well as the Smithsonian’s many museums, have begun reframing and addressing these wrongs and facing them headlong. This process involves repatriating objects that were stolen or obtained under duress and also challenging the segregation, exoticization and racist display of Black and Brown peoples and their bodies in museum galleries. The Museum of the Bible is at the heart of this work, given that it has been involved in the looting and illegal smuggling of objects out of Iraq (which it is now returning).

But beyond repatriating objects back to descendant communities, museums are just beginning to confront the ways in which its curatorial work and collecting also fed into Christian nationalist frameworks. In exhibits that fetishized people of color, museums also exoticized non-Christian religious beliefs, using objects (many of which were collected by white people on evangelization missions) to argue that these spiritual systems were “primitive” compared to European (and American) Christianity. The Museum of the Bible builds on the second part of this framework, arguing that an ideal America was envisioned by and built on the foundations of white Protestant Christianity. 

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In fact, later museums created by and under fascist governments also built on this model of cultural and religious classification and moralistic ordering. For example, museums during the fascist era in Italy were markedly simpler and showier, Beatrice Falcucci noted in her 2020 article, and these spaces, such as the Museo Archeologico, opened in June 1930, served as vital “construction sites” for the nation, tethering together Italian colonies and the homeland through displays that encouraged and exalted the outcome of empire. As Falcucci explained, one “interpretative key for navigating the museum was the harmony between colonised and colonizers.” Religion was also part of this. “The theme of the exhibition layout was the recurrence of the past within the present,” Falcucci continued. “There was also an attempt to emphasize the importance of Christian influences: so much so that there was a plan to house a Christian Museum in the adjacent former mosque.” 

The Museum of the Bible does something strikingly similar in that it seeks to unite people of faith from various life experiences and convince them that modern political efforts to “reestablish” a Christian America are rooted in the very history of how America came to be. When neighboring museums like the Smithsonian present a more complicated picture of how Christianity not only emboldened but enabled colonial violence, segregation, slavery and discrimination, or one that challenges the idea that the Founding Fathers were all unequivocally Christian, the Museum of the Bible offers an easier, unified alternative, one where patriotism is likened to an unwavering belief in America’s white Protestant Christian origins.

When the administration officially praises the Museum of the Bible while the museum aligns its own marketing with the 250th celebrations (giving it the impression that it is officially approved or connected to the government), it creates yet another institution functioning to promote the well-being of, and faith in, a Christian nationalist state. 

(Karen E. Park is an acquisitions editor at Broadleaf Books and a writer and historian of American Christianity whose work focuses on religion, politics and public life. She publishes the newsletter Ex Voto . Emma Cieslik is a queer, disabled religious scholar and museum worker based in Washington, D.C. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Spiritual Politics

Oklahoma primary runoff answered a question about anti-Christian nationalism

(RNS) — The answer shouldn't please church-state separationists.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, left, and former State Senator Mike Mazzei during an Oklahoma Republican gubernatorial primary runoff debate on August 3, 2026. (Video screen grabs)

Mark Silk
August 26, 2026 

RNS

(RNS) — On Tuesday, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond lost the state’s GOP gubernatorial primary to Trump-endorsed former state Senator and Budget Secretary Mike Mazzei by half a percentage point. For supporters of church-state separation, this is bad news.

Here’s why.

In the early 2020s, Oklahoma’s most prominent Christian nationalist was Ryan Walters, who served as Oklahoma’s appointed secretary of education from 2020 to 2023 and its elected superintendent of public instruction from 2023 to 2025. Walters’ most notable legacy as a public official was a mandate that required all of the state’s public schools to teach the Bible in grades five through 12.

To facilitate this, he undertook to purchase 55,000 copies of the King James Version of the Bible, one for each public-school classroom. He also issued an order to integrate the Bible and character education into elementary-level social studies curriculum and solicited bids for instructional materials to that end. After the 2024 election, he sent public school administrators an email requiring them to show students a video of a new Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism, in which he prayed for President-elect Trump and declared that religious liberty had been attacked and patriotism mocked “by woke teachers unions.”

In response, a spokesman for Attorney General Drummond told CBS News, “Not only is this edict unenforceable, it is contrary to parents’ rights, local control and individual free-exercise rights.” The state Supreme Court, for its part, ordered Walters to halt his effort to purchase the Bibles, pending resolution of a lawsuit opposing the Bible education mandate. In a separate case, the court blocked implementation of the Bible-based social studies curriculum.

To understand the attorney general’s statement and the court’s actions, a little state constitutional history is in order.

When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, its constitution banned public material support for religion in no uncertain terms; to wit: “No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary, or sectarian institution as such.” That sentence remains in the state constitution to this day, as Article II, Section 5.

Not that the GOP-dominated Legislature in Oklahoma City hasn’t tried to kill it off. That happened in 2016, after the state Supreme Court ruled that a law installing a Ten Commandments display at the state Capitol (Mazzei voting in the affirmative) violated Article II, Section 5. The solons of Oklahoma City (including Mazzei) struck back by voting to institute a public referendum to get rid of Article II, Section 5. By a margin of 57% to 43%, Oklahomans voted no.

Then, in 2023, the Oklahoma charter school board approved a contract with the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa to establish St. Isidore’s virtual charter school, which was intended to participate in “the evangelizing mission of the church.” Drummond filed an action to invalidate the contract, and in due course, the Oklahoma Supreme Court did just that, in a decision narrowly upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In its decision, the Oklahoma court rejected the claim that Article II, Section 5 is a Blaine amendment, so-called after a failed U.S. constitutional amendment that resulted in some states banning public funding of parochial schools because of anti-Catholic prejudice. To the contrary, wrote the court, “Enforcing the St. Isidore Contract would create a slippery slope and what the framers warned against — the destruction of Oklahomans’ freedom to practice religion without fear of government intervention.”

“I think its genesis is in Christian nationalism,” Drummond told Politico’s Weekly Education newsletter. “There are believers that are confusing true religion — and religious liberty, and faith in God — with political power. And this Christian nationalism is the movement that is giving oxygen to this attempt to eviscerate the Establishment Clause.”

In October of 2025, Drummond, a decorated Air Force combat pilot and a rancher from an old Oklahoma family, announced his candidacy for the governorship. In due course Mazzei did as well, and the two finished one and two respectively in the GOP primary, resulting in Tuesday’s runoff.

In their televised debate earlier this month, they were asked whether they “support using taxpayer dollars to fund religious education.” “This is one of the big differences between Drummond and myself,” Mazzei said, going on to pretend that the Charter board’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was somehow a lawsuit by Drummond against the federal government.

“Drummond sued against the Trump administration to shut down an Oklahoma religious charter school,” Mazzei said. “He does like being the darling of the liberal teachers unions.”

In his response, Drummond was political enough to insert some Islamophobia, alluding to the UAE’s investment in a controversial $4 billion aluminum smelter — backed by both Trump and Mazzei — as well as implying that Mazzei’s support for religious charter schools in general would mean permitting Muslim ones:

I took an oath in January of 2023 to uphold the federal constitution and the Oklahoma constitution, and the Oklahoma constitution leaves no ambiguity: we shall not fund any religious school. Now Mr. Mazzei is supporting the Muslim monarchy, (and) we can anticipate will also support Sharia schools. I stood between that and the freedom to worship god when you wish with whom you wish and how you wish.

To which Mazzei replied, “Part of the reason President Trump supports me is he knows I will ban Sharia law in the state of Oklahoma and designate the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council of American Islamic Relations as foreign terrorist organizations.”

When Drummond announced for the governorship, it remained to be seen whether an outspoken critic of Christian nationalism could win a Republican primary in so red a state as Oklahoma. The answer on Tuesday was, not quite.

Zuckerberg May Finally Pay a Price for Preying on Our Children

Massive state and federal lawsuits take Meta to task over widespread harm to children.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

August 26, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

As a mother of two children who has often been on the losing side of family battles against screen time, I’ve been closely monitoring New Mexico’s landmark lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. State Attorney General Raúl Torrez took the company to task to protect children “from sexual abuse, online solicitation, and human trafficking.”

I was thrilled to learn that Torrez won penalties totaling nearly a billion dollars over the company’s inadequate warnings to parents about the harms of its product and the resulting impacts of constant social media consumption on children’s mental health.

The New Mexico lawsuit is “groundbreaking and also an affirmation of what many families have been experiencing and concerned about with Instagram for years,” said Haley Hinkle, policy counsel for Fairplay, a nonprofit working to protect children from marketing and predatory digital practices.

She explained that “the public nuisance claims are the first we’ve seen across the country where a state is saying, in general, ‘You have created a burden on families, on our resources, our education system, [and] our health system, in the way that you have treated children.’”

Digital screens are everywhere, and children’s brains are particularly vulnerable to the sophisticated algorithmic delivery of content on Instagram, Facebook, and other social media platforms.

Capitalist responses to children’s digital consumption place the onus of regulating exposure squarely on parents. In addition to navigating a world where sugary drinks and processed foods seduce young taste buds, gun violence lurks near and within schools, and fossil fuel companies jeopardize children’s future, social media addiction is yet another source of parental anxiety.

“What we hear many parents saying, including parents we advocate alongside who lost their children to social media harms, is that this really isn’t a fair fight,” said Hinkle.

Despite the US Surgeon General’s warnings about social media’s disturbing impacts on young people—from eating disorders to suicidal ideation—and federal regulations such as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA), social media companies like Meta have refused to place adequate guardrails to protect children.

“Meta and many other big tech platforms are designed to maximize engagement at all costs,” explained Hinkle. “What that really means is maximizing time and attention, how many clicks kids make on platforms, and how long they spend there. That’s really valuable to social media companies because they can show more ads the longer that a child or adult is on the platform.”

“The more a child does when they’re online, the more data they generate that allows them to be targeted to get more direct ads and targeted to spend more time,” said Hinkle. She called it a “vicious cycle that has been, in many ways, at odds with kids’ health and well-being.”

When public schools began rolling out laptops for classroom use in the early 2000s, I was horrified even as others were of the opinion that preparing children for the digital age was in everyone’s best interest. Today, schools across the country are admitting their overreliance on digital learning was a mistakeand are starting to reverse the misguided trend. For my children and others who spent their formative learning years staring at screens, this mea culpa comes too late.

On top of school screens, kids and parents have to contend with the tantalizing pull of social media feeds, just so Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his investors can extract greater profits from children’s constant online engagement.

The good news is that Zuckerberg and his ilk may soon face constraints on their near-limitless profit-making, thanks not only to New Mexico’s lawsuit but also to a new major federal lawsuit that just began. On August 18, 2026, California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey made opening arguments in a highly anticipated case against Meta. The attorneys general of the four states represent 29 states and are demanding a whopping $200 billion in penalties from the company over violations of various state and federal laws, including COPPA and several consumer protection laws. According to the New York Times, the $200 billion “would be just over 14 percent of the entire stock value of the company.”

California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill eloquently summarized Meta’s business model in her opening statement: “Hook the users. Hold them for as long as they can. Harvest their data. Hide the truth from the public when making public statements.”

This approach is similar to how Big Tobacco and Big Pharmaaddicted people to cigarettes and opioids, respectively. The good news is that the prospect of ending social media’s hold on our children via lawsuits is promising.

The trouble is that the technology underlying Instagram and Facebook’s sophisticated algorithms is generated by armies of programmers and moves faster than government regulators, members of Congress, or even Meta’s own investors understand. “What was difficult for so many years is that social media, [and] these platforms, [were] a black box,” saidHinkle.

Thanks to a former Facebook product manager, Frances Haugen, the public now knows how Meta spun elaborate webs to trap users, especially children. Haugen’s 2021 leak of internal Facebook documents was the basis of extensive reporting led by the Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Horwitz in what’s now known as “The Facebook Files.”

“Frances’ decision to come forward, and other whistleblowers since then, has been fundamental to allowing everyone to come together and step up and demand more information,” said Hinkle. Haugen’s role will be memorialized in a new movie releasing in theaters this fall called The Social Reckoning. It is a companion film to writer Aaron Sorkin’s acclaimed 2010 The Social Network, and could further shift public narratives against Zuckerberg and other tech billionaires.

Another Meta whistleblower, Arturo Béjar, who is the lead witness in the federal trial against his former employer, puts the blame squarely on Zuckerberg for the harm to children. Over and over, the Meta founder, who is worth nearly $200 billion personally, chose his company’s profits over children’s safety and well-being, according to Béjar.

Globally, Meta also faces other major lawsuits. In 2025, Australia enacted a complete ban on social media platformsfor people under 16 years, becoming the first nation in the world to do so. China, India, and other Asian nations, as well as Britain, France, and several European countries, are considering strong regulations and bans, and are launching lawsuits.

“There are limits to what these companies should be able to do, [such as] using advanced techniques to design the platforms that are… targeted at neuroscience and what makes our brains sort of light up, and what’s going to keep us all scrolling,” said Hinkle. “That’s really unfair when it comes to kids and teens, and what we have is really the state saying that enough is enough and you’ve gone too far.”

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Sonali Kolhatkar

Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Rojava’s Promise and the Dissolution of the SDF: Time for the Left to Rethink the Kurdish Question?

A Call for a Democratic Citizenship State, Social Justice and a Socialist Horizon.

By Rezgar Akrawi

August 26, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Montecruz Foto CC BY-SA 3.0

The People’s Palace: The End of One Experiment and the Beginning of a New Question

On 25 August 2026, Mazloum Abdi announced from the People’s Palace in Damascus that the mission of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) had come to an end and that it was dissolving as an independent military force, along with the dissolution of the Autonomous Administration (Rojava) and of the military and civilian formations attached to it, all of them absorbed into the institutions of the Syrian state. 

The announcement followed the broad military operation launched by government forces in January 2026, which cost the SDF large stretches of the territory it controlled and opened a negotiating track that ended in an agreement to integrate its forces and institutions into the Syrian state.

I regard this as a positive development, because it reduces the likelihood of devastating nationalist wars whose first victims are always workers and the labouring poor of every nationality. Yet while the successive agreements, from March 2025 to the comprehensive agreement of January 2026 and on to the announcement of dissolution, did lower the risk of war and spare the people of the region further destruction, they contained no provision whatsoever on the questions we fight for as leftist and progressive forces: women’s rights, the secular character of the state, an end to privatisation, protection of the public sector, guarantees for the rights of working women and men, the achievement of social justice, and democratic elections at all levels of government.

The model that a wide segment of the Kurdish and international left presented for years as a leftist social, feminist and grassroots democratic revolution ended by a decision taken at the top and announced from a presidential palace in Damascus, with no popular referendum and no declared decision by the councils and communes that the SDF had presented to the world as the bodies supposedly exercising popular sovereignty in what was called the “Autonomous Administration,” supposedly built on the power of the people. 

The United States, which had been the principal military and political backer of the SDF while simultaneously supporting the political and military trajectory of the new authorities in Damascus, was a central party in shaping the course of the war and then the course of its resolution. That fact alone reveals where decision-making power actually sat the entire time, and how far a wager on the major imperialist powers can be trusted.

What stands out is how the costs were distributed. The new state absorbed a section of the military and party elite of the SDF, despite the class-based, religious and authoritarian character of the new political order. A number of SDF commanders were appointed to military posts, others received ranks and administrative positions, and they became an active part of the military, political, administrative and security apparatus of the Syrian government, and of its capitalist class structure. Meanwhile the working people – Kurds, Arabs, Syriacs and every other community – were left facing the same social, economic and political problems that preceded the war, now sharpened by years of conflict and destruction.

In parallel, decrees were issued recognising the Kurds as a constituent part of the Syrian people, recognising Kurdish as a national language and Newroz as a national holiday, and lifting the effects of the unjust 1962 Hasakah census. 

These are real gains that generations struggled for. Yet the recognition came after the balance of power had been settled rather than before it, and rights granted by decree can be withdrawn by a counter-decree, all the more so under an undemocratic government resting on Islamist organisations with a history of repression and violence. What is required today is to turn these gains into binding constitutional text within a comprehensive political transition, so that they do not remain favours dispensed by an authoritarian power.

This warning carries double weight given the nature of the new authorities in Damascus, who have offered no clear and binding guarantees regarding the secular character of the state, women’s rights or public freedoms. On the contrary, their record of repression and documented violations raises fears of a new authoritarianism under a religious cover, no less dangerous than the one before it.

What Belongs in the Record, and What Cannot Be Buried

Objectivity requires that the positive side be recorded as well. In the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, international reports have documented the hosting of large numbers of displaced people from every Iraqi community, a level of stability and of social and religious freedom that in certain respects stood higher than in other parts of Iraq, and a role in protecting minorities from the threat of extermination during the rise of ISIS.

In north and east Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces played an effective military role in the fight against ISIS and paid a heavy price in lives. Attempts were made to build a civil administrative model under conditions of war and siege, and relative progress was achieved in women’s participation, which is rare in the context of the region.

Against this, international human rights organisations have documented serious and systematic violations in the Kurdistan Region: the detention and torture of journalists and human rights defenders, the suppression of protests against unemployment, corruption and unpaid salaries, at times with live ammunition, and serious failures in protecting women from violence, alongside wider documented abuses. In north and east Syria, extensive violations by the Syrian Democratic Forces have likewise been documented, including the recruitment of children under the age of eighteen in breach of its repeated pledges, arbitrary detention and torture, and the suppression of demonstrations. 

Human rights reports have also documented allegations of abuses against Arab residents and of forced displacement in some areas, as well as the closure of media offices and civil society organisations. Since the integration, United Nations investigators have continued to receive testimony concerning killings, enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention in Hasakah, while the humanitarian consequences of the fighting have been tracked by United Nations agencies, and the international commission of inquiry remains the body mandated to establish responsibility for such crimes.

The Gap Between Discourse and Practice, and the Wager on American Imperialism

The left, whether local or international, faces a complex challenge: how does it defend the legitimate rights of the Kurdish people while holding to consistent critical standards towards every authority without exception? That balance is the condition for the credibility of internationalist solidarity itself.

Solidarity with the oppressed Kurdish people and with all oppressed peoples is a basic principle of the left, grounded in values that reject national subjugation, class exploitation and every form of discrimination. The Kurdish people have been subjected to historic and continuing national oppression that has included genocide, forced displacement, the denial of cultural and linguistic rights, and political repression.

Such solidarity, however, does not rest on unconditional alignment. It has to draw a clear line between supporting the right of oppressed peoples to dignity, equality and self-determination, and offering unqualified endorsement to particular nationalist parties whose involvement in grave and documented violations has been established – parties that throughout their history have practised political assassination, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance and torture against their opponents, many of them from the ranks of the left.

A large part of the left was drawn to the concept of “democratic confederalism” and to the ideas of Abdullah Öcalan that influenced the Autonomous Administration as an alternative to the centralised nation-state. Practice on the ground, though, exposed a sharp contradiction. While the talk was of communes and grassroots popular democracy, military and financial decision-making was concentrated in the hands of unelected party and military cadres operating with a rigidly centralist mentality.

As for deploying the language of ecology, feminism and statelessness as a rhetorical cover, presented to Western and especially leftist public opinion, on behalf of a one-sided military authority working closely with American military and security institutions and receiving funding from them, my view is that this does no service to leftist thought. It empties that thought of its content and turns it into a force operating on behalf of those very institutions.

When movements that present themselves as revolutionary or liberationist come to depend on American financial and military resources, this is no passing tactical matter, since it gradually reshapes their internal nature. As the centre of gravity shifts from popular mobilisation to external funding, a movement changes from a social force rooted in a popular base into a military force dependent on external funding, and its survival becomes tied to the continuation of international support more than to the mass base that will ultimately decide its future. 

The moment the backer’s priorities change, the structural fragility is exposed all at once. This is precisely what happened, and it is what I pointed to in earlier articles as far back as 2018.

Washington lifted sanctions on Damascus in May 2025, received Ahmed al-Sharaa at the White House in November 2025 and brought Syria into the international coalition against ISIS. The January 2026 campaign then unfolded amid American and Turkish understandings. The American envoy Tom Barrack stated openly that his country does not support federalism in Syria and that the original purpose of those forces had effectively come to an end, while a former American envoy refused to describe what happened as a betrayal, explaining that Washington had always regarded the alliance as temporary, tactical and transactional. The testimony of the decision-makers themselves makes any further analysis of the wager on the great capitalist powers unnecessary.

The structure presented as an alliance among the region’s communities also came apart at the first serious test. Before that, its leadership had accepted, as a matter of fact on the ground, the role of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (the Barzanis) as the primary national reference point for the Kurds, despite its family and tribal rule, its corruption and its hereditary transfer of power. This became plain when negotiations moved to Erbil and Masoud Barzani took on the role of mediator and guarantor.

This is not a conclusion I am advancing today, after the SDF experience has ended, since I wrote in this direction years ago.

In an article titled “The Nation-State? Or the State of Citizenship and Rights?” published in 2018, 

I wrote the following about the experience of the Kurdish nationalist left in Syria:

“In my view, the experience of the Kurdish nationalist left through the Democratic Union Party and its affiliates in Syria, however far it develops, will amount to reforms of a leftist and radical civil character, resembling the Baath Party’s rule in Iraq and Syria in the 1970s, which was among the most significant historical experiences of nationalist left government in the Middle East, and every one of those experiences turned into a corrupt dictatorial and authoritarian regime.”

In the same article, I also warned about the nature of the alliance with the United States, writing:

“America, as the largest capitalist power, supports most of the reactionary and racist regimes in the world, and has never once stood on the side of oppressed peoples or of humane and liberationist values. It is present in Syria solely to secure its strategic interests there and in the region and to counter Russian influence. In my view, America’s alliance with the Syrian Democratic Forces serves to fill an American gap, the absence of large ground forces of its own on Syrian territory, whether regular troops or security companies, so it relies on the human military capacity of the Syrian Democratic Forces to carry out its agenda inside Syria. 

This alliance resembles the alliance that parts of the Iraqi opposition, through the Iraqi National Congress, formed with America politically and militarily on the eve of the overthrow of the Baathist dictatorship in Iraq. I believe it is a temporary and fragile alliance that follows American interests, that it lends legitimacy to American intervention and practices in Syria, and that it also helps to prettify America’s ugly and grim face locally, regionally and globally. America is known for abandoning its allies once their tasks are over, or when they conflict with its agenda, and we have many other examples of this. Its strategic interests with Turkey remain the most important and the decisive ones, and the matter is a question of time, nothing more.”

Similar Nationalist Cliques Speaking Different Languages

I have noted in earlier texts that no fundamental differences exist among the ruling nationalist cliques, whether in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq or among those that governed north and east Syria, nor between them and the ruling nationalist regimes and bourgeoisies of the region, in Baghdad, Damascus or Ankara. 

There are deep similarities in the nature of their power and in their class interests. What divides them concerns shares, influence, resources and the division of power, rather than the character of rule or the interests of the labouring classes, and all of them share, in varying degrees, in impoverishing the masses, suppressing freedoms and violating economic, social and political rights, whatever their national or religious starting point. Events and realities in both the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Syria have confirmed this reading to a considerable extent.

It is therefore not enough for the left to declare its solidarity with “the Kurdish people” in the abstract. Peoples are not homogeneous blocs. They are class formations in which national contradictions intersect with class contradictions, and there is no pure people or ethnicity free of internal class struggle.

The left has to settle its position: which class of the Kurdish people does it stand with? With a rentier bourgeoisie and party elites that monopolise power and wealth, or with the working women and men among Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen and the other nationalities living in those areas – people who suffer authoritarian rule, poverty, unemployment, marginalisation and collapsing services, whose right to independent trade union and political organisation is restricted, and who alone pay the price of nationalist wars with their blood and with the future of their children?

What has happened in Syria, and what is happening in the Kurdistan Region, make this reassessment all the more urgent, and it does not concern Kurdish nationalists alone. Part of the left in the Arab world defended dictatorial regimes for years, among them the Baathist nationalist regimes in Iraq and Syria, while another part defended other nationalist models and parties. What is required, then, is not to abandon solidarity with peoples and their right to determine their own future.

It is to reconsider the relationship between the left and authoritarian nationalist parties and regimes, and to free that solidarity from the uncritical justification of violations and of the authorities and political forces committing them, whatever their national or ideological identity.

The Alternative: A Democratic Citizenship State and Social Justice

While I am fully convinced of the right of all oppressed peoples to self-determination, local, regional and international conditions and present realities do not allow for the formation of an independent Kurdish nation-state in the foreseeable future, and no serious international support exists for such a path. 

The events of 2026 offered clear proof of this, when a quasi-state entity – the Autonomous Administration in Syria, backed by the largest imperialist military power in the world – effectively came to an end within months, as soon as the calculations of its funders shifted and the regional and international balance of forces changed. These developments could also be reflected in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, in line with shifts in American interests and alliances and in regional and international power balances.

At the same time, I believe that humanity’s intellectual and legal development, and the growing weight of the values of human rights, social justice and citizenship, compel a rethinking of nation-state projects built on ethnic and religious loyalties. The more worthwhile struggle, in my view, is a common struggle of the Kurdish people together with the other peoples of the region and its labouring masses, aimed at moving beyond the exclusionary nation-state and at preventing workers and the labouring poor from being turned into fuel for destructive nationalist wars that ultimately serve the interests of nationalist bourgeoisies and elites.

The alternative, as I see it, concerns more than the Kurdish question alone, offering a framework for addressing the various national and religious problems of the region: the democratic citizenship state, resting on a constitution grounded in international human rights conventions, on the neutralisation of nationality and religion within the state, on guarantees of national and cultural equality for all communities, and on the rejection of every form of national domination. 

It rests as well on a decentralised, democratic federal system with fair geographic and administrative foundations, allowing broad self-government within a unified state, alongside honest elections, party pluralism, separation of powers, an independent judiciary, freedom of the press and of trade union and political organisation, and a complete break with authoritarianism, hereditary power and family and tribal rule.

Such a state cannot be complete without social justice that guarantees the rights of the labouring masses of every nationality and religion, protects the public sector, and rejects privatisation and neoliberal policies that impoverish the masses and enrich the elites. Within this framework, the national and cultural rights of all nationalities, religions and communities can be secured, without placing any nationality or religious group above another.

The Kurdish cause is a just cause deserving genuine and principled solidarity. Genuine solidarity, however, does not mean granting nationalist parties and elites political or moral immunity. It means supporting the struggle of the Kurdish people and of all the peoples of the region for their rights, freedoms, dignity and social justice, and refusing to let the national question be turned into an instrument for entrenching the power of elites and protecting their class privileges.

I do not write these words from the position of an outside observer. I am of Kurdish origin, and in my youth I was part of this struggle. I experienced its aspirations, hopes and contradictions at close range. 

Criticising the SDF is therefore not criticism of Kurdish rights; criticising the ruling parties in the Kurdistan Region is not criticism of the Kurdish cause; and rejecting the nation-state is not a rejection of national identity or national rights. It is a call for a leftist and humanist alternative that moves beyond exclusionary nationalism towards a democratic citizenship state, social justice and a socialist horizon.

Rezgar Akrawi

Rezgar Akrawi is a leftist researcher specializing in issues of technology and the left, working in the field of systems development and e-governance.