Page 118 - America's Failure to Perceive the PKK

has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: "We must
know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must
explain the source of faith and religion among the masses
in a materialist way. The combatting of religion cannot be
confined to abstract ideological preaching". 40

Marx described religion as a tool in the hands of the ruling class
used to lull the people into compliance; it was referred to by Marx as
"the opiate of the masses". Öcalan adopted the same view of religion
in the light of the ideology he followed, regarding religion as a tool of
the bourgeois and the state, which he regarded as a colonialist power.
Indeed, the founding manifesto of the organization refers to Islam as
an agent of colonialism and as a Trojan Horse installed among the Kurds
with a covert influence over them. The metaphor of the Trojan Horse
appears as follows in Öcalan's own words on page 32 of the 1994 edi-

tion of the "Manifesto of the Kurdish Revolution":

The Kurds have been subjected to foreign colonization in the spir-
itual sense as well. Islam is like a "Trojan Horse" whose role is
to prepare for national denial in the heart and brain of the Kurd
and to conquer the citadel from the inside. 41

As a result of its Leninist perspective, the PKK's main idea was to
establish a system under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and believed
that the dictatorship of the proletariat could primarily be possible by
the spread of irreligion. These words of Öcalan's need to be borne in
mind in this context, "The Kurdistan Revolution is part of a Revolution of
the World Proletariat that began with the October Revolution and is becoming

42
increasingly strengthened through the national liberation movement". The
primary method of imposing the hegemony of the proletariat for the
PKK is without doubt through armed struggle but the first condition
for this mentality to install itself within the PKK has always been

116 America's Failure to Perceive the PKK