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| In dogmatic mindsets and rigid ideologies, certainty suppresses inquiry and shapes the lives of unquestioning followers. |
His children lived in Ankara, and none of them could speak Kurdish. When I asked him why he hadn’t taught his children their mother tongue, he paused and said, “I wasn’t home for years.” It seemed that before abandoning his home and family to head to the Qandil Mountains, he had been a taxi driver. By the time we met, about five years had passed since his conviction. On the route from Iraq to Turkey, he had been arrested on Iranian soil—betrayed by one of his comrades. He was reportedly dressed in PKK attire and armed with a Kalashnikov. I never asked for the precise details of his capture. Our conversations revolved around our thoughts—our ideals, history, and minority rights.
I argued against armed struggle, advocating instead for a civil and peaceful approach, but he was deeply immersed in ideology. He was trapped in the rigid sanctity of the PKK, never once detaching himself from it. He never seemed to question anything; he wasn’t curious, nor did he doubt his beliefs even for a moment. He spoke as if he already knew all the answers, full of confidence despite not truly understanding the questions. He was a lover of certainty, and the PKK’s dogma satisfied that craving. Guns, after all, offer an uncompromising certainty, and he, a man obsessed with certainty, was also somewhat stern and grim.
Perhaps Doris Lessing’s words perfectly capture him: “True believers do not laugh.” According to Lessing, those who can laugh are better equipped to resist brainwashing. He had undergone such mental conditioning in PKK workshops, which might explain why laughter was so rare for him. To laugh at oneself is a sign of acknowledging the possibility of error—or at least the humility to accept it. That is why true believers, the rigid and authoritarian, never laugh at themselves. They cannot tolerate self-directed humor. Dogmatism is fundamentally incompatible with laughter, except when laughter is used mercilessly against “the other” to vent hatred.
Putting all this aside, his way of reasoning intrigued me. It was strange but telling. From his argumentative style, it was clear he had never faced deep challenges to his knowledge. His mind was stocked with predetermined answers, tailored only for questions engineered by the PKK—and nothing beyond that. Sometimes, he would refer to contemporary signs to support a particular narrative of history. I recall a day we discussed historical matters. He said their historical starting point was the 7th century BC, tracing back to the Medes empire. When I cited historians like Diakonov and Zahtabi, explaining that even now no definitive conclusions about the Medes can be drawn, he eagerly interrupted me and began presenting arguments to prove that the Medes were Kurdish.
His entire argument hinged on the similarity of names. He claimed that the prevalence of Median kings’ names like Diako among Kurds was proof of his thesis. I could only feel a mixture of astonishment and sadness at how cruelly the PKK could brainwash a person. How brazenly it could place the legitimate rights of the Kurdish people in a deadlock—so much so that its members, instead of teaching their children their mother tongue or peacefully demanding their human rights, practiced terror and spread violence and hatred.
Sometimes, nothing can be done. Convictions become so rigid and unchangeable that all one can do is mourn and hope for the passage of time—time that melts away stubbornness and replaces harsh certainties with dialogue and reflection. At times, all one can do is hope for a future where laughter is the shared image of all humans, regardless of language, nationality, or gender. A future where phrases like “You are wrong, I am right” are nothing but empty nonsense.