The Return of the Oppressed: Notes on Kurdish Anti-colonialism

This article critically examines the historical trajectory and contemporary manifestations of Kurdish anti‐colonialism. The analysis unfolds in two parts, dissecting the intricate relationship between theory and action within the Kurdish struggle. The historical dimension delves into Ottoman‐era Turkish‐style colonization, elucidating the displacement strategies employed by the Ottoman state. The study underscores the delayed integration of the colonialism concept into the Kurdish intellectual framework, shedding light on the challenges faced by the oppressed in articulating their anti‐colonial narrative. The second part scrutinizes the ideological challenges within the Kurdish anti‐colonial discourse. The instrumental use of the slogan “Kurdistan is a colony” is explored, emphasizing the dominance of socialist objectives over national liberation aspirations. The impact of socialism and pan‐Islamism on Kurdish politics and the linguistic complexities that obscure the colonial difference through language are examined. Contemporary dynamics, such as the Peace and Democracy Process and political violence, are analyzed to provide insights into the evolving nature of the Kurdish struggle. The resurgence of colonial theory within Kurdish society, particularly through techno‐Kurdishness, is explored, highlighting the role of modern communication technologies in reshaping the narrative. The article concludes by reflecting on the potential of the Kurdish struggle to inspire global resistance movements.

Why do the oppressed need theory? Why isn't action enough for the oppressed? Why do the oppressed feel the need to theorize their action? There is almost always something intriguing about the kinds of theories that oppressed people are interested in. In one respect, this interest shows the extent to which the universal messages of the ideologies promising liberation are reciprocated; in another, it shows the kind of intellectual responses oppressed groups give to these processes and through which processes they can produce emancipatory ideas.

The country of the Kurds, one of the oldest known peoples of the Middle East, has been subjected to military reconquest since the reign of the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II (d. 1839). It is now more accepted that it underwent the cycle of colonialism as a modern ruling philosophy. According to the renowned Turkish historian Ömer Lütfi Barkan, the “Turkish-style colonization” policy unique to Ottoman expansionism was executed through wars. The political aim of these wars was to displace the peoples living on the plains of the confiscated lands, to sweep them to the mountainous areas if possible, and to replace them with settler ethnic groups (Barkan 1980). Another recent study revealed that the Ottoman bureaucracy, in parallel with the Westernization of the Tanzimat Decree (1839), was interested in modern management technologies, especially colonial management philosophies (Deringil 2022). It was willing to borrow colonialism as an administrative technique. Ussama Makdisi (2020) explains that the Ottoman state also utilized similar colonial processes on the Arab peoples and their geography starting from the 1870s. As a result, although the tools and practitioners have changed over two centuries, there is sufficient evidence that the Kurds have been subjected to Turkish-style colonialism. Therefore, it is relevant to look at how the Kurds react to this sophisticated form of rule and what kind of (anti-colonial) ideas they turn to in order to gain their freedom.

In fact, we can argue that Kurdish history is also the history of resistance against these invaders. The geography of Kurdistan is in a region vulnerable to invasions, just like that of India and Italy, as Karl Marx (2018) underscored in the Grundrisse. Indeed, the great Kurdish thinker Ehmedê Xanî (b. 1707) clearly poeticized this invasive truth with his lines “Ev qulzumê Rom û behrê Tacîk/ Gava ku dikin xurûc û tehrik/ Kurmanc dibin bi xwûnê mulettex.” (“Like those Persians and Romans resembling the Red Sea / Every time they come out to start an operation / The Kurds are always covered in blood.”) (Xanî 2010: 155).¹ In addition, we may talk about a tradition of resistance accepted by the Kurds’ own neighbors (Averyanov 2010; Nikitin 2022) and commanders such as Helmuth von Moltke (2010), who provided military advice to these colonial campaigns and praised the resistance of the Kurds against foreigners who sought to conquer their lands.

We can argue that the Kurds developed a significant movement against the armies carrying out these colonial campaigns. However, these forms of action are traditional rather than modern. Instead of being universal, they succeeded by very oppressed people integrating their own local methods. As a matter of fact, from the middle of the nineteenth century until the end of the first half of the twentieth, we see that with Bedirxan Bey, Ezdînşêr Bey, Şeyh Ubeydullah, the Bitlis uprising, the Şeyh Said rebellion, and the Ağrı and Dersim rebellions, the Kurds enacted a series resistance against colonial campaigns that challenged modernizationist colonialism. Nevertheless, in this period we can determine that the effective resistance in the field could not be transferred to the intellectual world with its modern tools and components. More precisely, the anonymous organized resistance in the field could not be bonded with an anti-colonial idea at the ideological or intellectual level.

For the sake of argument, it is precisely at this point that we may consider the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm (2021). The silent masses, which Hobsbawm described as pre-political people who had not yet found or only started to find the original language to express their longing for freedom in the world, were not pre-political—these masses were the ardent representatives of material consciousness. It is clear that, contrary to what the great historian said, the Kurdish masses who resisted the reconquest campaigns were not pre-political communities. On the contrary, they held an anti-colonial perspective, which motivated them to overthrow the symbols of conquering authority, even if they lacked the modern discourses to express their aspirations for freedom. The letters written by Moltke, who participated in the colonial campaigns on behalf of the Ottoman army, not only archived the scenes of the brutality in the war but also recorded the nostalgic longing of the Kurdish villagers for their own rulers and sovereignty.

The Twentieth Century: A People, a Concept, an Anonymous Discovery

Undoubtedly, the idea of coloniality is a limiting experience from any perspective. As Walter Mignolo (2023: 19) observed, “Border thinking requires dwelling at the border.” The fact is that the modern educated Kurds seem to have discovered border thinking quite late, despite being experienced in living at the border. Indeed, it was only on the occasion of the existential traumas caused by the failure of the Sheikh Said rebellion (1925) that some Kurdish intellectuals connected with the literature of universal resistance for the first time. As the upshot of this rebellion, Kurdish intellectuals, such as the Bedirxan brothers, Nuredîn Zaza, and others, became interested in the grammar of resistance and began investigating the liberatory ideas of other people around the world.

It is noteworthy that the concept of colonialism entered the Kurdish repertoire of resistance around 120 years after the colonial campaigns. This being the context, at this stage, we need to ask the question, why is the determination/concept of colonialism and/or anti-colonialism significant? First of all, we have known since Frantz Fanon that decolonization is the replacement of one particular group by another. However, decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is a program of complete disorder (Fanon 2022). Clearly, in the case of Kurdish society, it can be argued that the intellectual history of decolonization corresponds to a program of disorder that is literally long overdue. We can speak about an irregular and eclectic praxis performance in which actors are dissimilar and intellectual production is anonymous.

For the reasons above, the use of the colonialism concept among the inventory of concepts in the Kurdish struggle has a unique history—one that is relatively distinct from the historical experiences of other colonial peoples. The term appears from a foggy historical background. In fact, it is still a mystery who first used the concept. Those who embrace its history hail from politically and ideologically opposing groups, highlighting the concept's irregular approval and indeterminate origins. However, it is also a fact that we are familiar with the circulation of some Kurdish concepts comparable to that of colonialism, through the corpus of Hawar Magazine (1932–43). For example, Celadet Ali Bedirxan used the word nîr in some articles and stories to describe living under someone's yoke. Nuredîn Zaza, in his story titled “Hevîna Perîxanê (Perîxan's Love),” published in Hawar Magazine in 1941, examined the social processes through which women could contribute to the struggle some eighteen years before Fanon.² Finally, in the lines of the great poet Cegerxwîn, we see how images, words, and representations that evoke colonialism approximate the colonial philosophy.

On the other side, the discovery and use of the concept brings to mind Fanon's words about reality. Among the people, says Fanon (2022), truth has always been a feature of the national cause. Naming the problem is undoubtedly always the first big and realistic step in solving the problem. Why, then, was this concept discovered in the second half of the twentieth century, and not at any other time? Or we could pose the question, When will we know that the conditions for the national liberation movement have matured?

A New Generation and the Changing of the Position of the Problem

Literature, especially the tradition of anti-colonial novels, can show us the answer to this question. African literary figures, among them Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart, 2019; No Longer at Ease, 2019), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (The River Between, 2016; A Grain of Wheat, 2014), and Erebê Şemo (Jîyana Bextewar [Happy Life] and Şivanê Kurd [The Kurdish Shepherd], 1994), the first novelist of the Kurds, begin the history of national liberation movements with native students going to modern schools. According to these writers, under the colonial system, oppressed fathers sent their sons (notably their sons, not their daughters) to modern colonial schools so that they can learn the secret of white supremacy and gain the key to liberation from the system. This is the first stage of the anti-colonial modern consciousness. The fact that the first founding core of the anti-colonial Kurdish movement discovered this philosophy of resistance from within the university curriculum undoubtedly bolsters such anti-colonial novels. Indeed, as was expected of them, Kurdish students who were sent to Europe, Ankara, and Istanbul from the 1950s onward returned to their societies with a new consciousness.³

There is no doubt the dynamics of the international struggle of the oppressed also motivated the Kurdish intellectuals. With the Second World War resulting in a huge disappointment for the Kurds, the anti-colonial and national liberation revolutions that swept through Algeria, Mozambique, Vietnam, Latin America, and especially Cuba were among the most fundamental sources of inspiration for the Kurdish movements of the time (Çelik 2020).

To illustrate, İsmet Şerif Vanlı, who was at the forefront of the Kurdish student movement in this period, participated in the Seventh International Students Union held in Leningrad in 1962. In his speech on behalf of the European Kurdish Students Association, he referred to the implementation of a “very special form of colonialism” in Kurdistan, referring to the states of Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. Thus, he justified the intellectuals’ works of fictions about the decolonization process through the education system. We can also trace the earliest use of the concept back to two institutions of mainly student origin: the legal defense of Sait Elçi, who came from the Kurdistan Democratic Party tradition, and the brochures and first texts of the Rizgarî circle, one of the socialist Kurdish formations.⁴ According to a witness of the period, one of the first to use the concept was Dr. Şivan (Said Kırmızıtoprak). Dr. Şivan apparently used the Turkish expression “like a colony” (sömürge gibi) to describe the Kurds.⁵ In a recently published book, İbrahim Gürbüz (2023) argues that the phrase “Kurdistan is a colony” was first used by İsmail Beşikçi in 1971. It is therefore noteworthy that the first people to use the concept were Kurdish students who connected with the ideologies trending around the world, the nationalist left tradition, and politicians who sympathized with the Barzani movement.

Yet when we look at the memoirs and documentary sources of the period, it is notable that the context which marks the ideological pattern of the colonial concept is more aligned with what Marx said about the Irish problem and with Vladimir Lenin's Right of Nations to Self-Determination than with Fanon.⁶ This ideological difference had to implicitly ignore Fanon's determination that infrastructure is superstructure in the colonies. And more importantly, it would be revealing to look for the key reason that the ideological content of the concept shifted from the library of socialism to the anti-colonial library, in the undeniable role the Soviets played in the collapse of the Mahabad Kurdistan Republic in 1946. The concept of anti-imperialism was gradually replaced by the concept of anti-colonialism, owing to the disappointment the Soviets caused the Kurds. At the same time, the face-to-face meeting of Nuredîn Zaza, one of the Kurdish student leaders in Europe, with the first president of Algeria, where the anti-colonial struggle had been successful, framed this historical shift. Following this in 1961, in his letter to President Cemal Gürsel and the chairman of the National Unity Committee, İsmet Şerif Vanlı referred to Glimpses of World History, a book by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, one of India's anti-colonial leaders (Çelik 2020). This was a signal that the grammar of anti-colonialism had taken the Kurdish political public by storm.

However, we may argue that it was the followers of Öcalan who took the concept from the books to the public sphere; or more precisely, they took the concept from the text to the people. Because the public encountered the thesis “Kurdistan is a colony” principally in collective trials of PKK members in the courtrooms, basic founding texts, written propaganda devices, and fiery political sessions. Considering the early texts of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and the ideological distance between the first core group in Ankara, the Turkish left, and the defenses of its members, we can see how the theory of colonialism was derived from Marxist and Leninist principles. Particular emphasis was placed on Lenin's Right of Nations to Self-Determination.⁷ Indeed, in this period of emergence, when it comes to anti-colonialism, the primary poetic concept of the movement was anti-imperialism. Anti-imperialism was used as an umbrella concept that included anti-colonialism. In this way, Fanon was just a flower that was later planted in the field plowed by Lenin. Indeed, as underscored in a very famous song of the movement, “liberation would be shouldered in the class war” and then “red roses would bloom in the mountains of Kurdistan.”⁸

The Problems of Anti-colonialism

However, we should also consider how the system's destructive/constructive discourse has been activated and intertwined with a series of discursive class and ideological problems since this period. First, the slogan “Kurdistan is a colony” was circulated in a largely instrumental and consent-producing context. In other words, the main goal was the ideal of socialism and its tools most of the time. The priority was to build a socialist order. Class was emphasized over nationhood, just as the concept of anti-imperialism superseded anti-colonialism. With this concept in mind during the first meetings of the founding cadres of the PKK, most of whom were students at the time, “Kurdistan is a colony” seemed like a stamp of approval for the public relations department of this ideological mystification. The fact that Fanon (2022), who said that the economic infrastructure in the colonies is also a superstructure, twisted or deconstructed Marx in the colonies was either unknown or ignored.

Second, no real theory has ever been proposed before or after this proposition. So much so that since the beginning of the nineteenth century, if we take the Mîrê Kor (1812) rebellion as the start, it is necessary to explain that the Kurdish struggle—as a people who have been resisting for more than two hundred years—has not been able to make a theoretical contribution to global anti-colonialism literature. Yet the recent Rojava revolution and the slogan “Jin, jîyan, azadî” (Woman, life, freedom) have started to break this unproductive cycle to some extent. The Rojava revolution shows a dynamism that fortifies the Kurdish anti-colonial spirit with universal values and theories of freedom, breathing life into anti-system movements.

Third, we can argue that the two factors that have marked recent Kurdish political history either blocked or provoked the “Kurdistan is a colony” theory. We can claim that the ideal of socialism and the ideology of pan-Islamism suspended the Kurdish anti-colonial theory from the very beginning, obstructing it and even making the self-colonizing desire practicable again. We can underscore that the proposition of leftist internationalism as well as modern Islamic universalism blocked Kurdish political public and largely convinced it of an image of a “colony without colonization” or a “colony without natives.” To put this more clearly, the policies pursued by the Kurdish branches of these two universal notions not only make the colonial status of the Kurds invisible but also promise to solve the problem within the schema of either the brotherhood of peoples or the brotherhood of Islam. In short, they obscure the colonial notion at the core of the problem and instead draw our attention to injustices or conflicts between brothers. In this way, socialism or pan-Islamism not only made the colonial difference to which the Kurds were exposed invisible but also changed the context of both physical and epistemic violence against the Kurds, condemning Kurdish anti-colonialism to intellectual bankruptcy.

All these issues were important topics in Aimé Césaire's resignation letter to the French Communist Party in the middle of the last century. Césaire argued that the colonial struggle of Black people against racism could not be used as a setting for the struggle of French workers against French capitalism. Going even further, he ventured to criticize the universalism of leftist internationalism, saying that the struggle of Blacks against colonialism could not be sacrificed to a Eurocentric universalism that was poorly formulated (Césaire 2015).

Fourth, in connection with this, the mainstream Kurdish movement, the PKK, has put forward new theses such as ecological society, radical democracy, and democratic republic, which have made the notion of “Kurdistan is a colony” invisible for a while, at least in the political field of Turkey. Likewise, traditional communities and Islamic institutions within Kurdish society are reinventing Islamic universalism in close contact with the Islamist government. It is obvious that colonial discourse has been ignored, at least in the upper echelons of the two circles mentioned, and those who talk about colonial theory are frowned on.

The Wound of Language

In his letter to Mustafa Kemal, Celadet Ali Bedirxan argued that there is only one existential difference between the Kurds and those who dominate them. According to him, the religion of the Kurds and those who rule them is the same, but the language is different. With Mignolo's exquisite concept, the issue of the difference in languages is the foremost of the “colonial difference,” alongside the difference in geography. The biological and cultural characteristics of the Kurdish people are more or less close to those of the people who colonized them. However, the difference is the single but colossal language issue. Conversely, the fact that Kurds often attribute a founding role to culture and politics but use Turkish instead of Kurdish language in these two areas makes this colonial difference—Kurdish—invisible.

Perhaps we should focus on the reasons for double consciousness in this regard, as conceptualized by W. E. B. Du Bois (1903). Why does Kurdish double consciousness operate as a dynamic that neutralizes itself? It remains a known pattern of behavior that Kurdish politicians and middle classes tend to see themselves in the mirrors of others at critical junctures. They often filter, position, and introduce themselves with either an Islamist lens or a Eurocentric socialist perspective. These dual consciousness holders, who put the struggle for socialism or Islamist policies ahead of the anti-colonial struggle, hold these two opposing ideals together in their souls and exist through them. When the synchronic adjustment of the double consciousness cannot be done well, this situation is, on the one hand, conducive to alienation, while on the other, the oppressed dare to carry the “white man's burden,” as Rudyard Kipling wrote in his famous poem. In other words, the oppressed have to carry the white man himself as well as his burdens—as if carrying their own heavy burdens was not enough. Anti-colonial struggle in the language of the white man seems to have such a meaning above all else.

In addition to all these points, the early founding cadres had serious difficulties in accessing the basic texts of anti-colonial theory. The fact that languages such as English and French are not spoken, for example, has created a situation in which those who are interested in this theory are unable to read the founding texts in their original language and are obliged to rely on Turkish translations. The selectivity, censorship, and translation of eclectic texts by publishers publishing in the colonial language have caused paradoxical situations, such as the Kurdish colonial idea being heavily nurtured by texts translated by Turkish publishers. For example, The Wretched of the Earth was first published in France in 1961, whereas it was translated into Turkish in the 1980s by the publishing houses of the Turkish left. It was translated and published in Kurdish for the first time in 2023. Paradoxically, the world of colonial language and colonial culture seems to have created its own opposition and even its own rejection by its own hands. Fanon (2022: 66) registered this new situation, which developed in the oppressed Kurdish imagination, word for word: “If they wanted to be free, their colonizer showed them the direction to go in.”

Finally, being content with applying the “Kurdistan is a colony” Band-Aid to every wound often risks making the wound invisible. It is evident that Kurdish colonial “theory” is a largely theory-less, content-less, and idea-less scheme, owing to the fact that colonial experiences from around the world, such as the Latin American cases, subaltern quests in India, and African colonial experiences, have been neither adequately translated into Kurdish nor explained to Kurdish society.

The Return of the Oppressed?

The Peace and Democracy Process (2013–15) offered the Kurdish people great hope. We can easily identify the nature of the extreme violence that emerged in parallel with the failure of the process as colonial violence. In the sixteenth century, Kurdistan came under the Ottoman rule within the context of the Ottoman-Safavid wars. This can be described as the first conquest of Kurdistan. The second period of conquest was in the nineteenth-century Ottoman context when the liquidation of the remaining Kurdish principalities was recorded as a “repeated conquest” (mükerrer fetih) in official documents. We know that these expeditions were honored with various ceremonies, and insignia were issued in the name of the conquerors to render their conquests immortal. In the same vein, the conquest of Kurdistan was announced in Takvim-i Vekayi, the official newspaper of the period, and medals were issued with the name and seal of the sultan. If we continue from this terminological framework of “conquest,” we can assert that the practices of colonial violence, which started with Koçgiri (1921), continued with Şeyh Said (1925) and Ağrı (1927–30), and ended with Dersim (1938), are the “third conquest.” Finally, starting in 2015, we can consider the burning and destruction of Kurdish cities from Varto to Sur, from Afrin to Nusaybin, as the organized “fourth conquest.” Especially in the case of Rojava, the Turkish state pursued a type of Lebensraum policy, taking reference from Ottoman expansionism.

In response to these repeated campaigns of conquest, mainstream Kurdish politics has adopted concepts such as radical democracy, democratic republic, the third way, and similar ideals. Between 2005 and 2015, Murray Bookchin was arguably the most iconic figure in the history of Kurdish political thought. The radicalization of the state with all its ideological and bureaucratic apparatuses—its reorganization into new codes of fascism, the inability of Kurdish politics to organize effective politics in theory and practice according to these new colonial codes—pushed the Kurdish society to novel quests. Therefore it makes sense that Fanon is by far the most referenced figure in the Kurdish political and cultural public since 2015, when the state has borne down with extreme violence. Perhaps we should ask why Bookchin suddenly retreated and gave way to Fanon. How should we read that Fanon and his associates were treated as saints in Kurdish society for the second time? What can Fanon give to this new Kurdish generation? And finally, what are the weaknesses of this generation's adoration of Fanon?

At this stage, it seems clear that a neo-unionist (neo-ittihatçı) generation ruling the state has updated the colonial factory settings once again. Thus, for Kurds, the question of the coloniality of Kurdistan has gained momentum once again. Undoubtedly, holding Fanon's placard in the face of colonial administrations that employ extreme violence has almost always been the most effective response. Nevertheless, the rediscovery of the anti-colonial narrative seems to have brought with it a number of obvious problems and serious troubles.

In a way, the return of colonial theory to Kurdish society has a Freudian character because what was repressed has returned. In other words, the rule has repeated itself: the repressed theory is showing signs of returning stronger than in the era when it was repressed. When the repressed theory returned, however, it returned with all the weaknesses and diseases it carried in the first place. In short, those who brought the idea of “Kurdistan is a colony” back into circulation also inherited the abovementioned problems that the first generation could not resolve.

Despite this, the first generation was either supplementing or making their theoretical inadequacies and intellectual infertility invisible with ultra-sacrificing practices. The lives of the first proponents of the “Kurdistan is a colony” thesis were spent on the mountainous frontlines, in the cells of dungeons, or in exile. Practice, therefore, was almost always ahead of theory, and, naturally, practice gave direction to theory. The current generation, on the other hand, exhibits a largely theoretical and practical disability. Both the weakness and advantage of the second generation is that it materializes this idea along with techno-Kurdishness. To a large extent, they circulate this idea within social media, through the opportunities provided by techno-modernity. Techno-Kurdishness makes fluid Kurdishness possible and offers a framework that provides fast communication and a loosely organized network thanks to mobile facilities. However, while the first generation we discussed were educated representatives, intellectuals, and politicians of the oppressed traditional Kurdish masses, it can be argued that this new generation is an anonymous, urban, and supra-class populace.

Techno-Kurdishness functions as the home and organizational space of the new colonial discourse. The idea that Kurdistan is a colony is processed in chat rooms, tweets, Facebook posts, sometimes through anonymous accounts, sometimes with quoted sentences that are like dynamite ready to explode, and sometimes with visual collages. Anti-colonial Kurdishness is re-popularized and accessed by new publics with these tools and methods. While anti-colonial education in the first period was generally appropriated in the divans of the Agha, village living rooms, coffeehouses, prisons, brochures, printed magazines, party training, and on the frontline, it is interesting how it is now carried to virtual environments.

Despite all its well-intentioned efforts, the techno-Kurdish organization gives the impression that, just like the early founders, it does not intend to adequately develop the theory of “Kurdistan is a colony.” The new generation sees the theory as a waste of time, watches YouTube videos instead of reading books, shares tweets instead of writing articles, and uses Fanon's pictures instead of reading his basic texts. Such a mass-building process inevitably employs all the facilities of populism. Simultaneously with right-wing and left-wing populism, anti-colonial populism is also reinventing itself.

It is noteworthy that this generation, just like the first generation, embraces the anti-colonial idea not in Kurdish but in Turkish. The fact that this generation is largely fed by cultural institutions such as the publishing houses of İletişim, Sosyal, Metis, and Ayrıntı resembles the stance of the first generation. One opportunity for this generation is that it can easily access universal thought centers with the help of technology. For this reason, they can benefit from a mixture of intellectual productions, mainly written in Turkish and Kurdish but also in other languages. In this context, we see that the Journal of Kurdish Studies (Kürd Araştırmaları Dergisi), established in 2019, has published and translated articles on anti-colonialism and decolonization, which have been carefully read and discussed by a wide audience from an anti-colonial perspective.⁹ It seems that technological developments have both diversified the sources of anti-colonialism and made them accessible. Thus, those who are interested in this theory popularize it with new technologies on the one hand and offer new contributions on the other.

Significantly, this generation, unlike the first generation, has almost no clue about the gender and class politics of the anti-colonial struggle. One of the biggest ideological handicaps of the first generation was the notion of “socialism (class) first and then Kurdistan”; that is, they were unable to calibrate class struggle and self-determination effectively on the ideological plan. In contrast, it seems that the current generation's biggest weakness is that the class or gender problem is secondary, encompassing a significant component of the Kurdish movement's base. The subordination of the issue has two short-term consequences: first, the rise of masochistic, sexist, and profane verbal attacks, which often manifest on social media. And second, this subordination risks becoming the symbolic capital of the middle class, which has lost its status and the ability to touch the oppressed poor classes. As such, for now, the potential for this new form of politics to morph into a right-wing nationalism of a male middle class seems highly likely for the reasons cited.

The class sociology of the first generation was of the oppressed, subaltern classes in the Gramscian sense, those of peasant origin who had just stepped into the city or university. The current generation, on the other hand, appears to be urban natives, largely losing their grip on the city or disliking their status in it, an angry and disappointed group of people facing the loss of class.

As a result, with a population of fifty million, the Kurds are the largest people in the world without a state. The freedom struggle of the Kurds may be similar to many people's experiences seeking independence in the world, but it is not a repetition. “Marx is alright, but we need to complete Marx,” Césaire (2015: 157) said in an interview, referring to the struggle of Blacks. His words still inspire us Kurds, but with one addition: “Marx is alright, but we need to complement him with Fanon.” At this stage, the Kurdish struggle for freedom can still inspire world resistance with experiments such as Kobanî. Anti-system movements around the world have something to learn from the Kurdish struggle for freedom, and the Kurds need the solidarity of these groups. For a new and freer tomorrow.

Notes

References