DECONTSTRUCTING DISINFORMATION, PART 1

"Perhaps the most obvious political effect of controlled news is the advantage it gives powerful people in getting their issues on the political agenda and defining those issues in ways likely to influence their resolution."
~ W. Lance Bennett.

Sometimes the spin is so bad that you just don't know where to begin.

I'm referring to a recent post about PJAK at the Another Day in the Empire blog. I guess it might be best to start at the beginning with the name-calling:

. . . German television reported the Maoist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan (PKK), has “killed over 200 Iranians,” a handful by way of IED . . .

In the old days, when the PKK was the PKK, it never claimed to be Maoist. It never espoused Maoist ideology. The reason for that is very simple: Öcalan was never affiliated with any Turkish left groups that defined themselves through Maoist ideology. Of course, in a day and age when no one can remember what happened six months ago, I realize it's a big stretch for me to expect anyone to remember the history of Turkish leftist groups of the 1970s, but if someone's going to come out and post such an asinine phrase as "the Maoist Kurdistan Workers' Party," they damned well better be able to back it up. But they can't because they wouldn't know that Kurds existed unless they were able to use Kurds for their own agendas and the so-called experts won't back up their name-calling because they're generally agents of the Ankara regime, either formally or informally.

But I'm digressing a bit here. To get on with it, there were a number of Turkish leftist groups in Turkey during the 1960s and 1970s. These became more radicalized after the military coup of 1971 which the Turkish left violently opposed. In 1971, as with all the hard coups, the Paşas declared a "state of emergeny," deprived the people of the right of free association and the right to strike, and arrested all kinds of "undesirables" like students, activists, intellectuals, and certain politicians--you know, the usual suspects.

At the time of the coup, Öcalan was in Ankara and had been attending the prestigious Ankara University Faculty of Political Science. He was aware of the various political groups around him and his sympathies were with Mahir Çayan and the THKP. This group, the THKP (Popular Liberation Party of Turkey), was influenced by the Marxist ideology of Latin America in general and of Che Guevara in particular. Mahir Çayan was killed by the state with a number of other leftists in 1972 in the Kızıldere massacre. Öcalan himself was arrested and imprisoned for seven months in Mamak prison for having attended a protest of the Kızıldere massacre. After his release from prison, Öcalan remained a sympathizer of THKP (by that time, THKP-C), and was elected to the management committee of an organization of THKP sympathizers.

Throughout this period, Öcalan was working on the formation of a Kurdish version of these leftist groups but there can be no doubt that there was an influence on Öcalan's political thinking by THKP, which looked to the ideology of Che Guevara for its inspiration and not to Maoist ideology.


For more on that, see Turkey's Kurds: A Theoretical Analysis of the PKK and Abdullah Ocalan, by Ali Kemal Özcan.

Much later, in the late 1990s,the PKK and DHKP-C formed an alliance and this alliance was an example of mutual ideological sympathies. Around the same time, the DHKP-C and THKP-C issued a statement reaffirming their ideologies. Both continued to hold to Mahir Çayan's interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, stating that "[s]ince the death of Mahir Çayan to the combat (on March 30, 1972), his comrades did not cease following this line."

Remember, it was Mahir Çayan who favored a Latin American version of Marxism-Leninism, particularly that of Che Guevara. While criticizing Soviet communism, DHKP-C also criticized Mao's communism as having made the same mistakes as Stalin:

It is also what Mao did. The theses of Mao over the transitional period shows the errors of Stalin and supplements his theses.

In this direction it is interesting to quote the theses of Mao:“The transition to Communism does not consist obviously of the inversion of a class by another. But that does not mean to say that there will be no social revolution, because the replacement of a type of yield of production by another is a qualitative jump, a revolution ".

They are the social forces and policies which refused the change of the relations of production and of the superstructure which brought to the capacity the revisionism in Soviet Union.

In contrast, in 1996, true to Mahir Çayan, THKP-C and DHKP-C still favored Che's ideology:

The revolutionary personality of Che offers the best example of proletarian internationalism to us: “I leave behind me here my creative dreams most naive, dreams which relate to those that I like and my people which adopted me as if I were one of his sons. That means for me to tear off a share of my heart. On the new ground of fight, I will take along with me the convictions that you gave me, the revolutionary spirit of my people and the certainty that there is no nobler task to achieve than to fight Imperialism, whatever the place where I am “.

It is in these words that Che took leave of Cuba, the people and the leader of this country for the release of which he had fought.

In spite of the obvious--including the fact that PKK never defined itself as Maoist--in spite of the sympathy of Öcalan for Mahir Çayan and Latin American Marxism, in spite of the fact that PKK made alliances with groups on the Turkish left who followed Mahir Çayan, in spite of the fact that neither PKK, nor THKP-C, nor DHKP-C, nor any affiliated groups espoused Maoism or linked up for any length of time with Turkish Maoist groups--such as Kaypakkaya's TKP/ML--certain "experts" still spread the "PKK is Maoist" lie.

Funny, but the Maoist lie centers around organizations affiliated with the Neoconservative-Deep State core in the US. A simple Google search of "PKK Maoist" reveals the following groups, among others:


1. Soner Cagaptay, resident neocon/Deep State propagandist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). Soner disseminates his disinformation also through The Middle East Forum. He's also got a little something at WINEP, and it truly is very little. All his sources are administration lapdog American media, WINEP, or himself.

2. The Middle East Forum, promoting America's interests even when it means genocide. The propaganda organ here, The Middle East Quarterly, for which old Soner writes, happens to be edited by Michael Rubin, resident neocon/Deep State propagandist for the American Enterprise Institute. Also involved with promoting America's interests at The Middle East Forum is Ziad Abdelnour, a Wall Street thief who happens to be a co-founder and president of Lebanon's version of the ATC--the US Committee for a Free Lebanon. Among other propagandists at The Middle East Forum are Joseph Farah of World Net Daily, William Kriston of Lockheed Martin's The Weekly Standard, Daniel Pipes, and two Hudson freaks--Laurent Murawiec and Meyrav Wurmser.

3. The Jamestown Foundation is another source of disinformation and propaganda for the Deep State. It's headed by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Enough said.

4. The Foreign Policy Research Institute also tries to spin itself silly when it comes to the legitimate struggle of the Kurdish people against state-sponsored terror and genocide. But, what do you expect when a Nazi like Dov Zackheim is helping with the spin. Sieg Heil, Dov.


Of course, the question is where does the Another Day in the Empire blog fit in among all these fine, upstanding examples of humanity in the Deep State clique?

We'll try to find that answer tomorrow.