You say you want a revolution

Thirty Years of Hope: Martyrs of the Party and the Revolution begins with photos of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong, followed by photos of the movement's Turkish founders, Kemal Ruzgar, Halil Ibrahim, Reza Berivan. The text is in Turkish, but much can be conveyed through the photos, mostly bearded youths, serious blazing women, some as young as 17. Most hold their weapons in their photos and, if for some reason, no one has provided a photo, a graphic of a man thrusting an automatic weapon in the air appears in its place.

Mustafa tells me that his uncle is in the album – that he was killed in the eighties in a shoot out. The uncle’s name is Ugur Tulkan and he was his mother’s brother. Mustafa was only three years old when the shoot-out took place, but apparently he remembers his mother and his uncle’s wife leaving to identify the body. The wife apparently intended to fight with the guerillas until she became pregnant and then instead opted to stay with her mother in the village. Her fatherless son now lives a quiet life as a civil servant.

There are quite a number of women fighters, all of whom appear to be young, between the ages of 18 and 22, all not smiling, all with sad, penetrating gazes, and all, of course, now dead.

1980: I see an image of the big house on the hill, the rushing Chattahoochee River, the jumps I have set up outside for my imaginary horses, the autographed photos of Olivia Newton John and Ronald Reagan taped to my wall. The neatly folded Izod Lacrosse polo shirts, the Mad Magazines, the bad play I am writing about our Episcopalian principal reimagined as a cross-dresser and a hoarder of Playboy magazine, the talented Mr. Bernstein enduring my tone deaf guitar playing.

By the fifth grade, in Ms. Field’s geography glass, we learn of the histories of China and Russia. We read Betty Bao Lord’s Eighth Moon. I involve my stuffed animals in very involved rescue missions. We must defect by repelling from the second story loft space down to the couch. If we do not land on the couch, we will be eaten in the shark- infested waters of beige carpeting, or even worse we will be banished – sent back to the loft. In my mind the loft represents Cuba or Russia or China, places where they eat nothing but gruel and porridge, and endure an endless ritual of singing revolutionary party songs, marching and hoarding rations.

Nothing about that world appealed to my eight-year-old mind, so how could it have held such promise for Mustafa? What about Chairman Mao would attract a small child from a village in the middle of Turkey? In answer to this question, I seek out any websites about the party I can find. The basic information I can find about the party coincides with the dates of the Thirty Years of Hope album. Yes, the man in the album is the same as the founder of the party, a strikingly handsome man, with very sharp cheekbones and a cruel mouth, by the name of Halil Ibrahim.

Their explicit goal is to fight for a classless society and to overthrow the state by force. On their website they boldly proclaim that they will continue their revolution until they reach their goal of world communism. They want no national borders. They want the proletariats from each land to act as a platoon of the world proletariats. They are a part of the Peasants Freedom Army of Turkey, an outgrowth of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China.

On the website is a tribute to Chairman Mao but also a tribute to the party and violence and power and militancy. Everything that the passages from Romans 12, the ones the Anglican Minister called us (we fifteen battered members attending that battered church) to reflect upon, oppose.

“His (Mao’s) development of other principles is also a great treasure: people are the main factor in revolutionary war; the starting point is relying on the masses; the Party; leadership is the principal aspect; the principle of self-reliance, the decisive importance of a correct political and ideological life (?), and especially the question of the new political power; and the revolutionary violence as a law without exception, as indispensable to seizing political power, which is the main law of every revolution.”

At times they have even cribbed Thoreau – throwing around terms like self-reliance and attributing them to Mao.