In our previous articles we noted that “terrorism lists” prepared for targeting revolutionaries were an important part of the attacks by the AKP as it attempted to overcome its crisis in being unable to govern, as well as the basis of imperialism’s attacks at bringing about liquidation and surrender on the basis of “either change your beliefs or die”. The attack is an ideological one and an attack by imperialism. Moreover, it is a first in world history for a music group to be put on a “wanted list”. In this way, fascism shows its helplessness and essentially rotten condition by trying to destroy a music group ideologically and physically, for singing songs and signing albums. Putting a music group on a wanted list does not make their hands freeze. Fascism tries to legitimise its massacres by using phrases like “dead or alive”.

The wanted lists are not new. There are decades and even centuries of history behind them. However, it is important to understand the lists from the point of view of understanding the reality of imperialism and fascism today in the way that a music group and people’s artists can be placed on wanted lists. This is an indicator not of power but of powerlessness. An indicator not of a surplus of power, but of an impending dissolution and corruption. Just as we can say that “the folk songs of a people are more powerful than those who make the laws”, those who target the artists of the people are very close to their end. Henceforth folk songs have been turned into both hope and a means of organisation. Because Grup Yorum has never bowed to repression, it has always crafted politics that overcome repression, found a way and reached the people. In its folk songs, its marches, its theatre, its songs and its concept of organisation, it has never taken a step back, it has always showed the way forward. It is the thoughts that create this behaviour that are being targeted. The target is to isolate these thoughts that create this behaviour from the people, in order to create a wall of fear. This is essentially why they have created the lists, and have put people’s artists on the lists.

So that imperialism and fascism can continue their order without interruption, they have to create peoples who do not utter even one contrary sound.

The “godfather” of the lists is imperialism and the USA

Imperialism’s local collaborators and the US collaborator in our country, the AKP government, seek in every area to take examples from their imperialist master and they prepared these lists on demand from them.

Essentially the “terrorism lists” are meant to legitimise imperialist exploitation and destroy every obstacle to their exploitation, and to eliminate any dynamics directed at them. This is a direct reflection of neo-colonialism.

Imperialism is a most savage system of exploitation. Monopolies are created for the sake of capitalism’s extreme drive to make a profit. Monopoly means market domination. Monopolies have insatiable greed and need to seek out more markets. They do not want any barriers standing in the way of their exploitation. Collaborators behave coyly and sell themselves. This is how our country which drove imperialism out in the 1920s in the Liberation War entered into neo-colonial relations.

In the 1950s, the local collaborators and their party the DP at the time begged foreign companies, that is, the imperialists, to come into our country. In truth, since the first days of the Republic, the Kemalist government had opened our country to foreign companies and foreign capital. However, foreign companies did not come because they did not find convenient and privileged conditions, that is, PROFITABLE conditions. The imperialists and their supporters maintained that “your etatism and national economic policy is scaring away foreign firms…”

Yes, conditions foreign firms found PROFITABLE were lacking, so imperialist monopolies behaved in a coy fashion. Ismet Inonu, the prime minister at the time, expressed this reality: “Capital comes in person when there is a needy and weak climate.”

It would find the “neediness” and the “weak climate” under the DP government. And starting in the 1950s, imperialism would step up its sovereignty and create new dimensions to the ties of dependency in our country. For the local collaborators and the imperialist monopolies, the biggest obstacle to the coming of foreign firms and the development of capitalism, or more accurately, more savage exploitation, was the intellectual, cultural, socio-economic and political structure. In other words, the existence of every kind of revolutionary and nationalist thought and structure was an obstacle.

These obstacles had to be liquidated, collaboration had to be encouraged, and imperialism (ie. America) had to be admired and praised to the skies. This meant a correction to the economic, social and political system. National and revolutionary forces had to be terrorised. So every kind of opposition to imperialism, patriotism, defence of the interests of the people or thought of independence had to be seen and shown as a crime… In place of the attacks on “terrorism” today, the attacks then were on “Communism”.

Collaboration could not be made legitimate without this kind of attack and without encouraging an anti-Communist climate. The country could not have been sold to the imperialists piece by piece. The imperialists could not have been able to move around at will in our country. Our country could not have been made dependent, its natural resources plundered under the guide of “economic-military aid”, and their “economic cooperation” could not have been swallowed. The “anti-Communism” attack encouraged and boosted this climate.

Terror was sown against the people and the revolutionaries with the “anti-Communism” attacks and the only aim of those doing this, as well as the “democracy show”, was to systematise exploitation. American imperialism seeks to present Communism as an enemy of democracy, to pace countries, revolutionaries and progressives under pressure in this way, and to have an ideological effect. When imperialist monopolies could not enter markets to the degree that they wished, and found conditions restrictive for themselves and profit levels low, they would shout that there is “no democracy”. In reality imperialism has no concern for democracy. It is itself an enemy of democracy. Imperialism has itself created and supported fascist governments. From 1945 and into the 1950s, as the existence of democracy in Turkey was under discussion, fascist governments in Europe’s heartland like Spain and Portugal were not mentioned. While referring to “so-called” democracy, the American Congress described Turkey as despotism but the real and only concern of US imperialism was not to bring democracy to Turkey but on the contrary to turn Turkey into a police station, and it wanted it to be a neo-colony.

“In 1946, one of the first discoveries of supporters of freedom was that ‘there can be no freedom for the enemies of freedom.’ This slogan was successfully used to render revolutionaries, from the most extreme to the most moderate, ineffective, to ban leftism and land reform, village institutions, revolutionary movements were said to be Communist and destroyed. ‘Instead of land reform, agricultural reform,’ ‘instead of etatism, private enterprise and foreign firms’, ‘in place of an independent foreign policy, a satellite foreign policy’, ‘instead of village institutions, religious schools’, ‘instead of freedom, paragraphs 141 and 142 were made more severe; in the multi-party life of 1946 all this is enough to show who was really in a position to benefit.” (Dogan Avcioglu, “The System In Turkey”, volume 1, page 521)

INSIDE THIS PROCESS OF COLLABORATION AND NEO-COLONIALISM, REPRESSION IS NECESSARY OTHERWISE THE SYSTEM CANNOT BE CONTINUED, AND THE REPRESSION MUST BE CONTINUOUS

THE NAME OF THIS EXPLOITATION IS FASCISM

The ideological basis for this repression in the past was anti-Communism. So-called freedom and democracy. The imperialists are the ones exporting it to our country. In those days, in Turkey and everywhere where imperialism entered, every approach that favoured independence and opposed capitalism or was progressive was labelled “Communist” and “Muscovite”, and came under attack. To such a degree that some liberal circles expressed this, in exaggerated form.

Starting in 1946, supporters of Sharia began to emerge. Religion was promoted as an alternative to the left.

Every kind of revolutionary and progressive thought and action, every problem was dealt with by crushing it – the local collaborationist classes showed decisiveness on this score. On the ideological plane, the USA exported the weapon of anti-Communism and terrorised progressive circles, in the Middle East, religious fanaticism was used.

This situation was the condition of Turkey from 1945 and into the 1950s. In the conditions of the time, in which a third of the world had slipped out of the control of imperialism and socialism had a good deal of prestige among the peoples, in the countries still under US imperialism, their exploitation was presented as “innocent” and “benevolent”. And this policy involved an ideological attack on socialism and Communism, and psychological warfare.

The imperialists described any system that did not include them, any movement against them, as “international Communism”. This was a policy targeting all countries and movements outside imperialism.

Wherever American imperialism was in the world, it supported, directed and led all collaborationist governments with all its might against anti-imperialist forces, whether or not these were Communist. The basic attack of US imperialism was against those who reacted against the circulation of foreign capital. US IMPERIALISM SEES EVERYTHING THAT IS AGAINST THE INTERESTS OF FOREIGN CAPITAL AS AN ENEMY AND IS DIRECTED AT ELIMINATING IT.

From Latin America to Asia and Africa, US imperialism came out against the anti-imperialist and independence struggle and opposed the fight for social and national liberation.

US imperialism’s ideology of “anti-Communism” essentially covers over its struggle for empire and the reality of class, the need to expand its markets and to liquidate any movement that stands in the way of guaranteeing the future of exploitation… Every kind of ideological, psychological and physical attack had this as its aim. For this reason, it does not hold back from lies and demagogy.

Yesterday this was about “Communism”, today this is the root of the attack on “terrorism”.

Yesterday it was anti-Communism, today it is anti-terrorism, the aim is ensure limitless freedom to imperialist exploitation and make the peoples slaves

The demagogy of terrorism began to be used in the 1990s as one of the principal tools for an ideological and psychological attack on any kind of M-L, revolutionary, patriotic, anti-imperialist thought and action.

At the start of the 1990s, as the socialist system was being torn down, imperialism expanded its target lists. Henceforth targets of imperialism were socialist countries like North Korea and Cuba, revolutionary organisations like Devrimci Sol, FARC and the PFLP, countries with progressive governments like Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan which do not belong to the imperialist system, nationalist armed groups resisting imperialism and its collaborators like the IRA, ETA, the PLO, Tamil Tigers and the PKK, Islamist forces that are anti-imperialist and part of an anti-American society like Islamic Jihad and Hamas, and finally there are anti-imperialist individuals.

These movements were besieged by imperialism’s embargos and a policy of dozens of economic sanctions and alongside these there were also the “terror lists”. The struggle for rights and freedoms, the anti-imperialist, anti-fascist struggle, the struggle for independence were presented as crimes and the biggest crime of all was to take up arms and fight against imperialism.

In countries that gained freedom, imperialism declared the FSLN which made a revolution in Nicaragua in 1979 by tearing down the pro-American Somoza government to be terrorist; to bring down the FSLN government every type of terrorist action was carried out, sabotage, the people were slaughtered, and supporters of imperialism who carried out murders were announced to be “freedom fighters”. The government in Nicaragua was said to be “practising dictatorship”, accused of “trampling on human rights”, and called were made to “turn to democracy”. In the end, at the start of the 1990s, the FSLN government was worn down by imperialism’s “terrorism” attacks and embargos and at elections surrendered to the supporters of imperialism.

At the start of the 1990s, the imperialists began an economic blockade of the Saddam government in Iraq in order to strengthen their own sovereignty in the Middle East. Saddam was a dictator. He massacred the Kurdish people. He practised repression. There was no democracy in Iraq. The imperialists were not interested in any of this. What was essential for them was that Iraq should be open to imperialist markets and in the imperialist sphere of exploitation. As a result of this “terror” attack, at the start of 2003 Iraq would be under imperialist occupation.

Imperialism seeks to create peoples who have lost moral values and hope and are intimidated, culturally decayed and corrupted. Because peoples whose moral values, knowledge of their own history and cultural wealth have all collapsed and who are corrupted give in to the savage exploitation of imperialism and its collaborators. For this reason, it brings out vehicles for ideological and psychological attacks and makes use of them.

Revolutionism is the target of the “terrorism” demagogy and the attacks aimed at bringing about isolation!

While on the one hand the attacks on peoples and countries are continued, in physical, military, economic and political form, on the other attacks on M-L parties and organisations are stepped up exponentially using the demagogy of “terrorism” and “terror lists”. Using words like “conciliation” and “peace”, they try to bring these parties and organisations inside the system, distance them from all claims to powers and socialism or get them to “take a step back” or “give in”.

For this, imperialism and its collaborators seek to impose an opposition that seeks permission, a conciliatory “intelligent left”, concerned with civil society and the liquidation of revolutionism.

Especially since the start of the 2000s, imperialism has developed and extended to all areas of life an isolation policy aiming to distance the revolutionaries ideologically, culturally and physically from the peoples, to isolate and break them down with “terrorism” demagogy and to finally remove all obstacles to capitalist exploitation.

It can be said that with this comprehensive attack, since the 1990s and the 2000s, imperialism has made headway on the world stage against a great many parties and organisations. In this process a lot of parties and organisations have been torn away from M-L ideology, become distanced from revolution and any claim to revolution and power, removed the hammer and sickle, the symbol of workers and workers’ power from their flags, and sought conciliation with imperialism and collaborationist oligarchies.

In Latin America, Asia and Africa, in these years, there have been many examples of those who seek conciliation with the system, surrender their weapons to the murderers, turn their back on the hopes of liberation and the longing of the peoples, seek to make politics inside the system, and abandon their thoughts and ideals, and these examples continue.

The latest example is that in more than 50 years of armed warfare in Colombia FARC has achieved conciliation with the oligarchy which collaborates with imperialism and has sat down at the negotiating table with them. At the negotiating table they have sold the hopes of the people of Colombia for the future and betrayed their longings for an independent, democratic and socialist Colombia…

This policy of liquidation and inducing surrender successfully is based on imperialism’s multi-faceted attacks which are ideological, psychological and physical and designed to make the target give in. They seek to ignore the reality of imperialism being the murderer of the world’s peoples. They aim at making people forget class anger and class consciousness and their sense of historical rightness. Imperialist politics are not to be answered by revolutionary politics.

This effort to take away legitimacy is reflected everywhere. Not even one action can be carried out against imperialist exploitation, nor can even one word be uttered from that front. Whatever actions there are must be corrupted and emptied of content. The aim of actions must be forgotten, starting with the form they take. All that is of concern is that there should be no targeting of imperialism. It can never be placed on the “terrorism lists”. This is all they worry about.

When an organisation claiming to be progressive, revolutionary, patriotic etc. is concerned not be entered on the “terror lists” of imperialism and begins to pull away from anything violent, it has got to the state where imperialism has largely achieved the goals it seeks with the “terror lists”.

Today and tomorrow, what imperialism fears is organisation

The “lists” imperialism issues are actually lists of its own crimes. The lists are confessions of its own crimes against revolutionaries, progressives and patriots who fight for the liberation of the peoples of the world. The imperialists try to close the book on their own innumerable crimes against the peoples by using these “lists”, and they seek also to legitimise them. It tries to legitimise its own terrorism by presenting as a crime every fight by the peoples for independence, democracy and socialism and every kind of struggle for rights and freedoms.

The imperialists and their local collaborators threaten the peoples and the revolutionaries with these crime lists, saying that they will either surrender to the system or be destroyed. This is a way of making minds surrender in order to establish political and ideological hegemony. It is done to sow fear and increase it. This is the aim of the crime lists: to sow fear. The lists are a part of their psychological and ideological warfare. They are about strengthening ideological hegemony by getting fear to dominate peoples, organisations and states.

In the 1980s the FMLN in El Salvador and quite similarly the Maoists in Nepal who were aiming for power were told to give up their aspirations and to seek conciliation with imperialism and its local collaborators. This was the reality of the “price” paid. The FMLN guerrillas openly acknowledged this.

The imperialists do not simply seek to impose a heavy price, they continue their psychological and ideological war without interruption.

From this point of view, the significance of putting Grup Yorum members on the “terror lists” and “wanted lists” is that these lists are designed to make people abandon the struggle against imperialism and fascism. For the sake of organising imperialism’s own future, for the sake of guaranteeing its own future, imperialism and its oligarchy organise intimidate of the people and the people’s organisations.

It is trying to bring the political left into line. In this way imperialism seeks to create a left that will serve it. From yesterday to today, the area of art has been one of the prime targets of imperialism.

“ (…) When I got out of prison in the spring of 1951 and returned to Hollywood, I saw that the blacklists had “expanded”. The lists did not simply include actors, screenwriters and directors: musicians, technicians and secretaries were also on it. Everyone whose name came up in investigations was put on the list. Even those who said they were not Communists … This was the rose garden without thorns of Hollywood. Geniuses like Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin left America. Brecht and the Eisler brothers as well.” (Which Culture, p. 81)

To create a rose garden without thorns, art and culture in the USA are specially organised in line with the system. The first step in organising is arrests, slanders, provocations, imprisonment, executions, psychological and ideological repression and sowing state terrorism… Putting artists on blacklists denies them work, creates a fear of unemployment and makes them amenable to the system. And certainly all this in such a visible field for human beings reminds the people that even artists pay a price for being left-wing, Communist and oppositional and so a mountain of fear is created.

Today fascism wants to do the same with Grup Yorum in Turkey. But of course our country is not the USA, our artists are not Hollywood performing artists.

The very big difference between them is that these blacklists will not achieve the same result the ones in the USA did. This is because of the tradition created of the people’s artist, and because of being an organised force. Grup Yorum is organised and an organiser of the people in its own sphere…

From the 1950s in the USA to Turkey in the 2000s, a progressively wider range came under attack, at the same time the framework of the attack was also broadened. The result of this is that even the smallest demand for rights is labelled terrorism.

This reality is a clear statement of how deep their crisis is and how great the dead end is, and also how sharp their contradictions are.

And however savagely they attack with the “terror lists” and seek to establish psychological supremacy, the fact is that the revolutionary anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist dynamic is more powerful, as ever.

Imperialism with its “terrorism” demagogy, lists, embargos and physical violence has succeeded in getting quite a lot of forces to surrender to it

Besides physical violence and force, these “terror lists” are one of the means they use to achieve hegemony. This has been effective as a means of hegemony out of necessity in getting the PKK and the other left to fall into line.

Why?

Because they have no ideological strength. They have no scientific theories. Theory is a source of ideological strength. It is a matter of ideological and political programme. Those who do not have it or do not have confidence in it can easily be brought into line by the enemy.

In Latin America, Asia and Africa, guerrilla movements who defended liquidation and conciliation became distanced from their own aims. Certainly it was not just the aim of revolution and socialism that they left behind. They also lost their ideology and values.

Those movements who waged guerrilla struggles for decades and now give up their weapons are not just forced to explain their aims in a measured way, but also what they were fighting for all those years. A former El Salvador guerrilla commander says, “Nobody fights for a century.” He cannot say “War Until Liberation”.

The Kurdish nationalist movement has given up the aim of “independent Kurdistan” for “the national right to self-determination”.

Why?

Because to persist in spite of the imperialists and in spite of their local collaborators means to be stamped as “terrorist”. Moreover, it means being targeted by imperialism. Never mind the aims of the Kurdish nationalist movement, it actually finds it praiseworthy that it “has never carried out an action against imperialism”.

The Front as a target of imperialist policies

While imperialists cross organisations off their list one by one, the Front is an organisation on the list that attracts special attention… While quite a few organisations on the list determine their politics as to whether or not they are on the list, and prefer to give up their aims, claims, values and symbols to get off the list, the Front continues on its road without changing.

Because the Front has confidence in its ideological and political programme. Dead or alive or in prison, Front behaviour is directed to a particular objective; independence, democracy and socialism…

Because they are in the right. They fight for a world without exploitation and repression, without hunger, poverty and corruption.

Because the chief problem of the peoples, imperialism, is the murderer of the peoples, and only its removal from the earth can be a remedy to the peoples. Wars, hunger, poverty, corruption, torture, destruction of the environment and destruction of the peoples’ values will not stop and only become worse.

The greatest crime is the crime against the people. The people are exposed to exploitation, murdered, corrupted and condemned to hunger, narcotics, prostitution and collapse.

The greatest criminal is imperialism.

These truths are stated and everyone says them, in his or her area and language.

The artist says it with art, the lawyers says it in a defence speech, the engineer with a project; youth with thoughts for the future and people of the city neighbourhoods with the fight against drugs. And all of these are a force united in the Front. They wage a struggle in the light of these truths. This is why imperialism and fascism struggle against the Front. Because they cannot bring it into line, what the price this demands.

Everything is formed in such a way as to bring about the surrender of the mind.

There is no other explanation for members of a music group being placed on a “wanted” list. They seek to achieve the surrender of thoughts and minds. This is why they try to ensure that people cannot breathe or take a single step. They imprison those they can, those they cannot imprison are put on a wanted list and they say it is “dead or alive”. They encourage the people to turn informer and break ties with artists, also to leave them homeless, cut off from the people and also without a stage.

This is why, however strong imperialism and fascism may be, it is important to give a response to it. Very important indeed. It is imperative to resist under every condition, even if there is just one of you. Even in a place where nothing can be done, it is important to at least read out a press release.

And precisely because the enemy sees a press statement as like an armed action, this is why fascism is unable to tolerate them.

Because just like fear, resistance and courage are also contagious. Imperialists and their collaborators do not want the Front’s M-L ideology, its resistance, refusal to compromise, spirit of sacrifice, refusal to surrender to spread to the masses of people. Not being able to prevent this is tied to how much experience and class consciousness are present.

In the war against imperialism, even a single stone throw is very valuable

Using the lists, imperialism also seeks to divide the people. Both to tame the left and to make the people at least cautious when it comes to the left. Imperialism is familiar with history. Imperialism and fascism know that their own elimination and passing is contained within the people being an organised force against fascism, and in the organising of the Front, whether it is the work of artists, or in the villages, or the work of engineers in the city neighbourhoods. This is what is behind the targeting of areas and the attacks on professions capable of organising tens of thousands.

And this is what essentially frightens imperialism and its collaborators!

This is why even one stone thrown by us encounters such great violence.

Because the throwing of every stone carries the awareness that America is the chief enemy of the peoples. The throwing of every stone targets the USA’s world empire and the government by fascism. Every stone targets America’s occupation regimes, plots and exploitation. Every stone carries awareness of the law that capitalism needs to be replaced by socialism.

About 100 years the peoples of Anatolia fought imperialist occupation with shovels, pickaxes, hoes, whatever they had in their hands.

The heroic people of Vietnam fought against the British, French, Japanese and American imperialists in this way: “Those who had rifles used rifles, those who had swords used swords, those who had no swords fought with hoes or clubs. Every field or street became a fortress, every human being a warrior, every party cell was like a military headquarters.” This was said by the great leader of the people of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh.

So American imperialism has put the Party-Front on its list of “terrorist organisations” and one of the pretexts for this is that it openly opposed the occupation of Afghanistan and certainly the Party-Front does not have the physical strength to remove this occupation, nor does it have the physical strength to stand against it. Putting people’s artists on lists is not caused by the words in the songs they sing. It is because these songs organise the people.

What frightens America –

Is that it is being openly challenged.

Is the targeting of its empire.

Calls for war on it as the chief enemy of the peoples of the world.

Its ideological and political leadership opposing imperialist policies of conciliation, liquidation and surrender.

While everywhere in the world weapons were given up and surrendered, commander Leyla got weapons out from under seven layers of rubble and continued to fight with them.

Not abandoning the hammer and sickle.

Not abandoning socialism.

What frightens fascism in Turkey –

Songs tell the people about exploitation and injustice.

Telling the people that it is legitimate to struggle against exploitation and injustice.

Saying that every artist has to take up a place in the artist’s front opposing exploitation and injustice.

Opposing exploitation and justice and showing that there is an alternative to the corruption and filth that is thought (by the system) to be worthy of the people.

Artists do not simply describe and tell, they also organise.

They do not sedate the soul of the people, instead they organise it with art.

IMPERIALISM HAS NOT CHANGED;

IMPERIALISM IS THE ENEMY OF THE WORLD’S PEOPLES

IT IS RESPONSIBLE FOR EXPLOITATION AND TYRANNY IN THE WORLD

OUR AGE IS THE AGE OF IMPERIALISM AND PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION

THE CHIEF CONTRADICTION IS THE ONE BETWEEN IMPERIALISM AND THE OPPRESSED PEOPLES

This war in our country is essentially between US imperialism and its collaborationist oligarchy, and the Party-Front. The representative of people’s war in our country is the Party-Front. The war is between imperialism and the Party-Front and we can say that we are the only organisation in the world that continues the armed struggle against imperialism with M-L ideology, whose ideological and political leadership has not surrendered to imperialism’s process of conciliation, liquidation and surrender, and does not deviate to the left or right.

This is shown in how seriously imperialism takes its war on us. Today in various areas imperialism puts a price on the heads of our comrades, declares that it is necessary to eliminate people’s artists and us and puts up “terrorism lists”…. IMPERIALISM AND THE OLIGARCHY TAKE US SERIOUSLY AS ENEMIES. In this situation we must take the situation as seriously as our enemies do.

In the age of imperialism, the character of warfare is:

Imperialism tries to get minds to surrender, left-wing, opposition, every progressive force is to be turned, in such a process we have to engrave in our own minds the truth about warfare.

In a process in which imperialism has brought nearly everyone into line, we continue to say that “imperialism is the chief enemy of the peoples and is the greatest terrorist and the greatest dictator and also the greatest danger for the world.”

We will not surrender, we will fight the “lists” of imperialism and its collaborators everywhere, in every form and with every means

Will we surrender? We will respond to the lists with our musical compositions… Our songs, our poems, our broadcasts, our films, our choruses…. By producing, we respond by not abandoning our political programme and our aims…

We will fight with whatever we have in our hands, a gun, a bomb, a club, a Molotov cocktail, chains, a knife, a STONE, but essentially with our minds and hearts. We will fight until we have removed the last American murderer from our land.

A new century, with revolutions bigger than the preceding one, will go into the history books as one with the struggle of the peoples to remove the Shah. The imperialists and the oligarchy are today drunk with victory but this will be turned to defeat in the new century. We must be the ones who write this history. This we say.

We call on all who are honourable and who love their people and homeland, who want to live in a free country and who say no to exploitation to join this fight.

We said, “Wherever imperialism is, the only alternative is socialism” and we continue to say this. Even if the whole world changed, we did not and will not. Even if the whole world was filled with traitors, we said and continue to say, “We do not change… We will not betray the banner of Marxism-Leninism”. When everyone lost belief, we said, “this too will pass” and knew how to preserve our hopes and beliefs. We have said for 45 years and continue to say it… We will not be victims of imperialism – we will be its executioners. We know how to eliminate America’s footprints from our land…

If this war takes another century, we will fight until liberation…

Source: Yürüyüs magazine, No.56, March 4, 2018