Revolutionary Student Union (DÖB, Türkiye)
Comrades,
As revolutionary students from Türkiye and Kurdistan, we send our greetings to the meeting organized by the Anti-Imperialist Youth Platform in opposition to NATO. We are the Revolutionary Student Union (Devrimci Öğrenci Birliği), concretizing our democratic university struggle in Türkiye within the victory of the Turkish and Kurdish peoples’ socialist fight.
There is an ongoing class war under conditions of civil war in Türkiye. Across Palestine and Syria, imperialists wage war; combined with the occupation in Kurdistan and the Russia–Ukraine conflict, the intensity of the class war—driven by imperialist dependency in our country—continues to escalate. Since the spontaneous popular uprising that began in Türkiye on March 19, the urgent issue of organizing the revolution faces the pressing responsibility of the working class, youth, and all revolutionary subjects. Both the bourgeoisie and we recognized how near this uprising was, yet the bourgeoisie was better prepared and more organized; the Turkish and Kurdish working class, by contrast, is organizationally weak. Now, a new uprising that embraces the Turkish and Kurdish working class is approaching. In this period, our organization—dedicated to explaining the goal of seizing political power to student youth and teaching them to overthrow fascism—was targeted and weakened by fascist attacks. Many of our members, including representatives, were arrested; many were subjected to travel bans abroad. We salute our comrades gathered in the Netherlands against imperialism and mourn not being there with them. We trust in the comrades from around the world united against imperialism. We trust in anti-imperialist youth. Youth is the Future, the Future is Socialism!
Comrades,
The imperialist war ongoing today is fundamentally different from the First and Second Imperialist World Wars—it is not about territorial division or rivalry among imperialist powers; rather, it is a war launched by imperialism and global capitalism as a bloc against socialism, workers, and working peoples. Across all bourgeois regimes that reject full integration or economic annexation, imperial centers have launched war to subdue all autonomous forces and to reinstate lost hegemony. In 2022, the intensification in Ukraine revealed—obvious even to a child—that the U.S. and NATO waged war against the Donbass People’s Republics, Soviet peoples, and the legacy of the USSR. The following year, popular uprisings across Africa saw French imperialism withdrawing from Burkina Faso with its army. While this retreated occupation still poses threats, uprisings in Niger, Mali, and Nigeria have sparked a new war of independence, and the people’s power in Africa has reached a scale French imperialism cannot confront.
In 2023, the war begun in Palestine—still ongoing—was propelled by the Palestinian people’s organized resistance and delivered devastation to Israel like never before. Imperialists, reeling from defeats in Ukraine and scrambling to fund the far-right Zelensky regime, found a new front in Palestine—again exposing the imperialist-capitalist bloc’s structural collapse.
Since the formation of the World Anti-Imperialist Youth Platform, we have witnessed an escalation of NATO’s imperialist attacks—in Russia, China, Korea, Syria, Kurdistan, and Palestine. The capitalist system is collapsing worldwide, and every plan to delay this collapse spells death for the world’s peoples. In Syria, with the ascension of fascist HTS, massacres targeting Alevis and Kurds began; in Palestine, genocidal war persists; and attacks on ships like the Madleen—delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza—show that the imperialist system spares no brutality in attempting to recover lost hegemony.
In these circumstances, the duty of anti-imperialist youth is to take up the spirit of May 9 and raise the banner of proletarian internationalism against imperialism. No imperialist war is the problem of just a few peoples. Imperialists are dragging the world toward annihilation—and plundering and destroying our homelands. All countries suffer the economic and military devastation of imperialist wars. Today, the best answer to imperialists and their capitalist collaborators will be given in the streets. As revolutionary students from Türkiye and Kurdistan, we salute all anti-imperialist youth around the world and make this call:
• The imperial-capitalist system—struggling to maintain its collapse—brings death to working peoples and threatens the world’s existence with nuclear weapons. From the most “democratic” European states to fascist-client regimes, all bourgeois governments respond to imperialist wars and solidarity actions with the same severity: police batons and arrests. Even peaceful calls for peace meet the iron heel of the bourgeoisie.
• The only way to fight imperialism is to emulate the honorable struggle of the Soviet peoples on May 9 by raising the banner of proletarian internationalism—just as communist volunteers from every nationality did in Spain in 1936, at Stalingrad in 1943, and in Donbass in 2021 during the imperialist war against the full annexation of Russia… like comrades Michael Kononovich and his brother Alexander Kononovich, detained by the neo-Nazi Ukrainian government under the pretext of Russian espionage… like all comrades who have gathered in the Netherlands today against U.S.–NATO imperialism…
By exposing the role and complicity of our own bourgeois governments in these wars, the anti-imperialist youth united to overthrow capitalism will carry victory against imperialism to every corner of the world.
No to war between peoples, no to peace between classes!
Now is the Time for Revolution!
Long live the Anti-Imperialist Youth Platform!