Analysis

In recent weeks, the regime, which has completely lost restraint, has launched an all-out attack to stem the rising anger and resistance. The pressure on the Kurdish movement continues to intensify with the appointment of trustees to municipalities, unlawful detentions, and the terror unleashed against Kurdish journalists. However, the attacks on the media are not limited to Kurdish journalists. The opposition press is being systematically intimidated through various forms of pressure. As seen in the detention of the editor-in-chief and two publication coordinators of the Birgün newspaper, journalists are being detained on flimsy pretexts, while house arrests or judicial control measures are becoming commonplace, all in an attempt to bring the media under tight control. The head of RTÜK (Radio and Television Supreme Council) has targeted opposition news anchors, threatening to impose the highest penalties on those who refuse to comply. The regime's unrestrained pressure, censorship, and self-censorship are not enough to satisfy it. Street interviews showing reactions against Erdoğan have led to widespread detentions and arrests, while even a well-known female astrologer has been arrested for allegedly “insulting Bahçeli and Erdoğan!” All of this reveals the depth of their fears.

It is obvious that 2025 will be a difficult year for labourers and dissidents in almost every aspect. The picture, which we have tried to sketch above, indicates the tendency of the regime to escalate its aggression to a higher level with its economic, social, political and cultural dimensions. In order to heighten the struggle against this, building a labour front is of burning importance. While some wings of the bourgeois opposition are hostile to the Kurds and some are playing the “red card” comedy, it is also important to make efforts to free the labourers from the artificial polarisation of “secular-religious”, “Kemalist-Islamist” and Kurdish hostility traps. It is also dangerous for the labourers to get caught up in the air that the regime is trying to spread as if it has conquered Syria. Not only is this air empty, but getting carried away by it also carries the danger of becoming the plaything of new bloody campaigns. A perspective based on the brotherhood of all peoples and the unity of labourers in the Middle East is the only real way out for the labourers.

In order to interpret the developments in the Middle East amidst the rising flames of war, it would be meaningful to emphasise the important points of the process we are facing, without chasing after the day-to-day moves. Because the details of the war raging in the Middle East as part of the 3rd World War can change at any moment. What we really need to do is to try to analyse the main tendencies and the general framework. Let us remember that years ago, the USA’s Greater Middle East Plan was introduced in relation to redesigning the Middle East. This plan still exists, expresses a strategy and its aim is to redivide the region. This project was put into effect after the collapse of the USSR. When the Soviet Union existed, the world was divided into two different systems, the capitalist system was not alone. There was a cold war between the two systems or blocs based on a policy of equilibrium under the shadow of nuclear weapons. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the old cold war period came to an end and the world began to witness wars of re-division between imperialist powers. The parties have determined their strategic positions accordingly. Greater Middle East Plan is the expression of this for the USA.

The Syrian war, which is a part and a front of the ongoing Third World War, has flared up with unprecedented speed after nearly five years. HTS forces, together with other partners, launched an offensive on 27 November, captured Aleppo and started advancing towards Hama. First of all, we must say that this wave of attacks following the war that Israel started in Gaza and spread to Lebanon is a sign of a new phase in the Greater Middle East Project. US imperialism together with its partners has decided to accelerate the project. The US, which has taken the war to a new level with Israel by using the excuse of the organisations it calls terrorist and their actions, is now accelerating the act of destruction through HTS, which it calls terrorist.

The Third World War is spreading and intensifying. US and British imperialism, despite occasional statements to the contrary from the mouths of their political representatives, are working both to intensify the Ukraine-Russia war and to spread and deepen the war in the Middle East on a much wider area. Today we face the reality of a world war and the way to put an end to it is through the revolutionary mobilisation of working people against militarism and capitalism. It is the most urgent need everywhere to create a united resistance front of labour against the economic destruction caused by capitalism, the rising danger of fascism and the growing world war.

Both the liberation of the Palestinian people and the liberation of the peoples of the world from becoming part of the new links of the war depend on the workers of the region, the Israeli workers and eventually the workers of the whole world to raise the struggle. Considering the impact of the short-lived general strike in Israel and the growing protests on the Israeli rulers, it is clear which way the workers of the world should take to oppose the war.

The working class has already shown the will to resist against the attacks it suffers and has been fighting for some time, although only partially. There are even big protests against the Zionist policy of massacres in the Middle East and the British imperialism that supports this policy. Similarly, the working class in France is raising the banner of struggle on different occasions. The anti-fascist protests and actions on the occasion of the last elections are another manifestation of this. As we mentioned in the beginning, the order has lost its ability to make improvements and reforms in favour of the working class. The multifaceted attacks continue with even more aggravation and the working class has no other way but to fight.

On the evening of 30 June, a terrible racist attack took place in the Melikgazi district of Kayseri. The next day, with the news that anti-Turkish demonstrations were organised in the cities under the control of the Turkish Armed Forces in Northern Syria and that Turkish flags and institutions were attacked, racist attacks spread to cities such as Antep, Adana, Antalya, Hatay, Konya, Urfa and Bursa. In Antep, workers’ shuttles were stopped and Syrian workers were hunted down, while in the Serik district of Antalya, a 17-year-old Syrian child worker was stabbed to death in the street and two of his friends were seriously injured.

It is obvious that today’s conditions, in which there is not yet a revolutionary socialist movement organised on a class basis and which is a centre of attraction with the power it derives from this, allow fascism to gain strength in a much more advantageous way. As the left sinks into identity politics instead of class politics, the working class is dragged behind bourgeois politics instead of turning to class politics. Ultimately, the failure to strengthen a socialist alternative based on the working class leads to the strengthening of nationalism instead of internationalism, of fascism instead of revolution. The way to fight fascism is clear: strengthen the revolutionary organisation and struggle of the working class! Otherwise it will not be possible to prevent history from repeating itself.

Before the 2023 May elections, the bourgeois opposition forces, who promised to put an end to this regime and bring good days, do not go one step further than pacifying the labourers and supplying blood to the regime with the policy they follow. They are accomplices in the descent of fascism on society like a black smoke. The recent experiences show once again that the working class has no choice but to rely on its own strength and struggle. Only the organised movement of the working class can disperse this smoke. That is what needs to be built up.