The Process and Manufactured Despair: Are We Good for Anything?

Rastinews — Let's pause the reel of overlapping headlines and fast-moving events to refresh our memory. The Gaza War, which began in October 2023, expanded across the region and directly shaped Turkey's political atmosphere alongside world and regional politics. Speaking from within that atmosphere, several state officials warned that the war posed a threat to "the survival of the state." One of them, Devlet Bahçeli, said the "home front" needed to be fortified against this "threat," and shortly after, in October 2024, told Turkey's parliament: "Let the head of the terrorist organization, who said he was 'ready to serve in any capacity' as he was brought to Turkey, unilaterally declare that terrorism is over and that the organization will be dissolved." After Erdoğan lent his support to those remarks, now regarded as the starting point of the process currently underway, Öcalan responded: "I have the capacity and the resolve to make the positive contribution needed to the new paradigm that Mr. Bahçeli and Mr. Erdoğan have empowered."

The process, which state institutions labeled "Terror-Free Turkey," triggered fierce debate among Kurds when HTS seized Damascus in the final days of 2024. Long arguments followed over whether the process extended to Rojava — in other words, whether it would shape Rojava's fate. When the process was renamed "Terror-Free Region" to match the new situation in Syria, it read almost as an early answer to that tense debate within Kurdish public opinion. As the argument continued, the declaration issued after a meeting with Öcalan offered important clues to the process's true character. The statement, known publicly as the "February 27 Declaration," fell roughly into two parts. The first instructed the organization to dissolve itself and disarm, along with the reasoning behind that instruction; the second contained ideological positions on the historical, social and political status of the Kurdish and Kurdistan question.

Öcalan summed up his strategy on this point in now-famous words: "A separate nation-state, federation, administrative autonomy and culturalist solutions — the inevitable outcome of a lurch into extreme nationalism — cannot answer to the sociology of historical society."

With those words, Öcalan effectively wrote the Kurds' fundamental collective rights and every possible model of status out of history — stating, perhaps for the first time this starkly, the paradigm he has pursued systematically and consistently for thirty years. In the weeks that followed, a "democratic integration" formula, again voiced by Öcalan, ran in step with the "Terror-Free Region" strategy and surfaced in Rojava as an "integration drive." That drive ultimately dismantled the de facto autonomy Rojava had maintained for more than a decade. To grasp the nature of this "integration" process — one proceeding amid deep uncertainty and serious risk, and one that could fairly be called "re-colonization" — recent events are instructive enough. In Rojava, where Kurdish-language education has run from primary school through university for more than ten years, people are now staging protests demanding the right to education in their mother tongue and the addition of Kurdish to official signage bearing the words "Syrian Arab Republic." The officials who once ran the autonomous administration are now busy calming public protest and backlash.

This process of self-dissolution, carried out against loud objections from Kurds worldwide, has left deep disappointment and unease in Kurdish society. Öcalan and the politicians and media figures aligned with him, meanwhile, have promoted this dismantlement as a strategic victory and a paradigmatic success. That contrast alone points to a visible gulf between the Process and the expectations of Kurdish society. Political observers have said from the outset that this process — in which existing gains are being dismantled by politics itself, and fundamental collective rights are being removed from the political agenda altogether — has failed to stir the enthusiasm seen in comparable episodes in the past, and that its core message has not taken hold among the public. Media outlets that support the process have at times confirmed as much, if only with a note of complaint.

In fact, this can be traced directly to how the current process is being managed. The earlier process, it will be recalled, had a clear public-relations strategy: numerous mechanisms were built to secure social support, and an information campaign was run to manufacture consent. The current process, by contrast, is being run more like a top-down "operation." From the very start, we have witnessed a commanding, suppressive tone rather than one built on consent and negotiation. Compared with past processes, this one is marked by the systematic discrediting and silencing of criticism and concern. Indeed, in the disarmament and dissolution talks between the state and Öcalan, Kurds' legitimate rights and their existing or potential gains are being treated as bargaining chips, and anyone who objects to Öcalan's core positions is branded pro-war or anti-peace. Unlike comparable precedents, this process is entirely closed and vertical in character, and it is being run alongside multi-layered strategies for managing public perception and emotion.

The Bewilderment Strategy

Many signs suggest that the "new process," launched at a moment when regional status quos across the Middle East are being tested and historic doors of risk and opportunity stand ajar, is not merely a tactical move but a multi-layered, long-range paradigm of dissolution. A project of this scale cannot be expected to run on political, military and administrative strategies alone. Such a move inevitably requires a wide-ranging "social engineering" strategy. I believe it is worth focusing on one of these strategies, one I consider to have had a major effect on society.

I believe a systematic 'engineering' is at work, aimed at breaking society's mental and emotional resilience: there is a top-down information pressure campaign underway that no longer even bothers to manufacture consent. This pressure, applied on both sides, has from the outset aimed to numb society's mind, so to speak. Within this framework, the most devastating retreats, the heaviest losses of status, and calls to abandon fundamental rights are poured onto the masses one after another, without pause, as if they were inevitable truths, philosophical progress, and strategic victories. Displaying such an open break from the Kurds' most basic collective rights so brazenly and with such theoretical coolness produces a deep 'shock of truth' in society. It would be more accurate to say: it aims to produce that shock.

Öcalan's dismissal, in one stroke, of every possible status model for the Kurds as lying outside 'historical and social reality,' delivered from within the narrative that he is modern Kurdish history's sole 'founding leader,' produces a deep crisis of representation among broad segments of society. The state establishment's insistence, in parallel with this narrative, on the phrase 'founding leadership,' along with the debates over 'granting Öcalan a status,' cements the deepening of this crisis. The dissolution process underway in Rojava, and fears that a similar fate awaits the other parts of Kurdistan, deepen the feeling of not being politically represented. The feeling that 'we will once again miss the train we missed in the last century' is being built precisely by the politicians who themselves claim to represent the people. It falls to committed journalists and writers, and to newly emerged analysts, to 'interpret' this technique. The masses, subjected intensively to the message that 'the ideal and realistic course is to give up,' are being pushed into a mental and emotional void. Stunned by successive shock waves and meant to be left immobile within a circle of normalization, society will, over time, come to doubt its own collective memory and historical truth. Unable to decide what to do in the face of decades of labor spent so 'thanklessly,' people eventually begin to look for the fault in their own historical capacity. This state of mind will not only create a self-doubt that questions historical capacity but will also awaken, at a deeper level, an existential self-doubt. This demoralization pressure aims to make society utter one sentence: "Nothing will ever come of us!"

The "We" in this poisonous sentence, meant to be forced into people's mouths, describes not a political entity but an existence structurally doomed to elimination, inherently flawed. These two-sided 'engineering' techniques, built on stunning, demoralizing, and dragging people into despair and melancholic exhaustion, aim not only to condemn society to a psychology of defeat but also to strangle, before it is born, any objection that might be raised against the dissolution underway, along with any collective hope.

While Intellectuals Sleep

Under healthy conditions, while society experiences a crisis of representation within this tangled atmosphere and is exposed to the aforementioned strategies, intellectuals would be expected to decode this siege, or perhaps to confront it. Even if an intellectual has no responsibility to directly represent society, they do have a responsibility to represent structural problems through their own words by problematizing social and political crises. In the current situation, however, we can speak of only a limited number of intellectuals taking a critical and independent position. While a broad segment is busy interpreting the discourse and practices of dominant politics, another segment is content with taking archaeological strolls through the aesthetic and theoretical texts of distant lands and bygone eras. An even larger group appears to have withdrawn into seclusion, wrapped in deep silence in the face of all this upheaval. As things stand, the masses, already isolated politically, cannot find an echo to represent them in the intellectual sphere either. Deprived of political representation, and even besieged from within by politics itself, society, once also deprived of intellectual representation, becomes a largely defenseless target for the top-down strategies of exhaustion and despair being constructed. As society, already forced to doubt its own historical capacity and vision of the future, is abandoned by intellectuals as well, the odds increase that this manufactured engineering of perception and emotion will achieve its purpose.

Let us end this piece by putting a question on record: one day, when the waters settle (if they ever do), what kind of reckoning will take place between the society that has carried the burden of this bruising siege and the silent, indifferent, or committed class of intellectuals?