FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! | |
International Communist Workers Party | |
On July 15, parts of the Turkish military attempted a coup to overthrow the government of President Recep Erdogan. By the next day, with over 300 people killed, more than 1000 wounded, and thousands jailed, the coup had been squashed. Since the coup, there has been a massive purge of the military. Journalists have been arrested. Tens of thousands have lost their jobs and passports.
Erdogan accuses the US bosses of plotting the coup. He demands extradition of Fetullah Gulen, the billionaire Islamist preacher living in the US, as its presumed mastermind. While it’s hard to know for sure if the US was behind the coup, US imperialism was certainly behind the coup in Libya, and many more during the Cold War. And US imperialism would have benefited most if it had succeeded.
Prior to the coup, the dominant wing of the Turkish ruling class, represented by Erdogan, was reversing its position in the Syrian civil war and its relationship with Russia. On July 1, Erdogan apologized to Russia for shooting down a Russian plane last November. The pilots who shot down the plane have been arrested as coup plotters. A meeting between Erdogan and Russian President Putin, already planned before the coup, has been moved up to next month.
This threatens US imperialist interests and reflects the rise of competing Russian and Chinese imperialist influence. The US, more isolated, is more intent on creating disruption to hinder the growth of rival imperialists. This makes the world more dangerous and the need to build ICWP and mobilize for communism worldwide more urgent.
While workers worldwide are bombarded with patriotism, the imperialists are viciously attacking workers everywhere as they move closer to war. The workers, soldiers and students of the world must unite to organize a communist revolution for a world without capitalists, nations, money, wage slavery and imperialist wars. In a communist world, workers will not compete but collectively plan, produce and distribute the fruits of nature and our labor according to need.
Turkish Rulers’ and US Imperialists’ Interest Were on Collision Course Before the Attempted Coup
Unable to overthrow Assad, US strategy in Syria has changed. The US and France have established military bases in northern Syria with the support of Kurdish forces. This is a stepping tone for the creation of “Greater Kurdistan,” a nation to be carved out of historically Kurdish areas of Syria, Iran and Iraq. This oil-rich area would serve as a US military and political base, as Israel has been.
For the Turkish ruling class, this is an existential threat. There are 20 million restive Kurds, treated as second-class citizens, in Turkey, a country of 73 million people. Insurgent groups in Turkey have fought for independence for decades. US planned “Greater Kurdistan” would intensify this conflict, blow it up into open civil war and break up Turkey.
Turkey’s interest with regards to “Greater Kurdistan” is aligned with those of Russia’s and Iran’s. They all oppose US attempts to militantly carve out a “second geopolitical Israel” of Kurdistan. That explains Turkey’s softened stance on Syrian ruler Assad.
A strengthened Turkish-Russian alliance would help Moscow’s efforts to prop up the Syrian regime. It also promises to revive the stalled Turkish Stream gas pipeline project (the $15 billion project to transport Russian gas via Turkey to southern Europe). This project, when paired with China’s complementary Balkan Silk Road high-speed rail project from Budapest to Piraeus, is perhaps the most ambitious multipolar outreach to Europe that has ever been attempted.
The US, on the other hand, plans to establish a permanent NATO presence in the Black Sea, in line with their strategy to encircle Russia. Without Turkey’s cooperation, they couldn’t do it. The US bosses would have to build a powerful Rumanian navy from scratch to counter-balance Russia on the Black Sea.
In question now will be Western access to the Incirlik air base on the Mediterranean near the Syrian border where NATO forces are located and 90 percent of US tactical nuclear weapons in Europe are stored.
While Putin called Erdogan after the coup to wish him success in restoring order, US civilian and military officials have condemned the crackdown. And the US at least had some knowledge of the coup beforehand. Two F-16 aircraft and two tankers to provide them mid-air refueling that were used in the coup attempt actually took off from Incirlik.
The workers, solders and youth of Turkey, the US, Russia, Iran, and the rest of the world have nothing to gain and everything to lose by supporting any of these capitalist imperialist butchers! They all perpetuate their murderous exploitation of the working class. Our fight must be for a communist world where we will mobilize to collectively to fight for and meet the needs of workers everywhere. Join us!