The most inhumane aspects of the capitalist system are felt in imperialism and fascism. It was a universal misconception that colonialism ended with the collapse of the great empires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In fact, the colonies of the past, from India to China, from African countries to the Middle East or Latin America, all emerged on the stage of history as independent states. At the end of the first half of the 20th century, we have seen Hitler, Franco, Salazar and Mussolini, and have been thinking that fascism had come to an end.
We were literally wrong. Capitalism had the potential to reproduce these evils. So, it was the formal changes that misled us. Today, when Trump talks about resettling the Palestinian people in a completely different country, he doesn’t even care that what he is proposing is outright genocide. Rafael Lemkin, the creator of the definition of genocide as a legal term, also had defined deportation as a crime of genocide. Hrant Dink, on the other hand, had made the following statements in an article years later:
“It is precisely for this reason, that it is sometimes insufficient to confine what happened to the terms of international law. While Turkey prefers exile, migration or deportation instead of the term “genocide” based on the legal perception of the term today, how much does this affect the essence of what happened? Does the suffering become less of a crime against humanity when the name is changed? Even if people were sent out with the golden planes under the most comfortable conditions, would this detachment from the homeland they belong to become less tragic?” (BirGün, April 22, 2005)
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan described Trump’s outrageous statement on Gaza as ‘the law of the jungle’. When he said this, he did not even remember that the same law of the jungle was in question when the Armenians of Karabakh were expelled from their homeland. Just as he did not remember what happened in Dersim in 1938. There, too, people belong to the Kizilbash Alevi faith were killed in mass massacres, their surviving children were distributed to military families, and the rest were exiled to different provinces of the country under the Compulsory Settlement Law.
In international relations and diplomacy, every word, even body language and gesture has a meaning. They can never be explained away as slips of the tongue or coincidence. The fact that Elon Musk turned to the crowd and gave the Nazi salute (some say the Roman Empire salute) during Trump’s inauguration speech, is not something that can be explained by the excitement of the moment. That salute was a message, and Trump is proving the content of that message with his statements. Last but not least, he demanded a share of the country’s underground riches in return for the military aid he provided to Ukraine during the war with Russia.
After all, Trump’s outrageous statements cannot be explained by his character alone. He represents the new order of the world. In this new order, the principle of the ‘strong is right’ applies. This reminds me My mother’s saying ‘Tell me who your friend is and I will tell you who you are’. Trump’s character reveals how compatible he is with Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Ilham Aliyev and many other leaders around the world. Is it possible to think of neo-Ottomanism independently from this new imperialism?
It is not just some countries and classes that are in danger. Humanity as a whole and future generations face the danger of fascism and imperialism imposed by capitalism.