Peter Boyle
When the latest serious escalation of the war in Gaza broke out, the leaders of the most powerful and wealthiest nation states in the world all united to condemn violence from the Palestinian side while ignoring the preceding and ongoing and much more deadly violence of the Israeli colonial settler state. The government here in Australia, responded (as always) in lockstep with the US and the UK.
The double standard on violence was glaring. Violence by the Israeli state was rendered invisible, sanitized or justified. Violence by the Palestinians was branded “pure evil”.
The history of occupation and colonial violence – which explains the conflict – were also blanked out.
The double standard on the victims was even more glaring. Israeli victims were given faces, names and stories while Palestinian victims were largely nameless and faceless.
Of course, this is just one more example of the racist double standard we have been forced to live with in this age of imperialism and the Kurds know this double standard only too well.
The oppressor states always unite to defend the regimes that help preserve their power and privilege and a powerful example of this was the conspiracy of nation states that was put into play 25 years ago to end the freedom of Kurdish liberation movement leader Abdullah Öcalan.
The secret agencies of the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Kenya and Turkey worked together in this conspiracy.
No doubt each of these oppressor states had had specific interests they were pursuing but more generally they are united in hatred of liberation movements, especially liberation movements pursuing liberation beyond winning a national state of their own, because they know such movements threaten the very system of exploitation that makes the rich and powerful so rich and powerful.
This was the reason for the conspiracy against Öcalan and it is also the reason for the conspiracy of silence on the ongoing war against Kurds by Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.
To break this global conspiracy of the oppressors we need a global unity of the oppressed, because one reason why their conspiracy of silence works is because the oppressors have turned the oppressed against each other: oppressed men against oppressed women, one nationality against another, and different religious groups against each other.
The Kurdish liberation movement, inspired by the ideas of Öcalan, is seen as dangerously subversive of the old orders of privilege and power precisely because it focuses on breaking down these divisions by empowering all the oppressed, starting with women. That’s why Öcalan is still the target of a conspiracy of oppressor states.
But those same “subversive” ideas are the reason why the issue of freedom for Öcalan is not just an urgent matter for the Kurds. The world’s oppressed must smash the shackles of hatred of other oppressed, for these are shackles of the mind that were fashioned by colonial oppressors to divide and rule. No people can be free while they oppress other peoples and the same goes for gender oppression. This is a necessary task for all real liberation movements.
Peter Boyle is a well-known journalist and political activist living in Sydney, Australia. He is also a correspondent of the Green Left Journal.
