>>63970533Yes.
The PKK are basically Kurdish Maoists. Not "officially" but they came out of that ideology in the 60s/70s. You know how there were these militant leftist student groups all over the world at that time, the PKK emerged from the Kurdish version of them but were actually effective and turned into an actual rebel army with 10,000 militants by the early 90s.
They also had a dispute within the Turkish left. They didn't get along well with other leftists in Turkey. A lot of Turkish leftists didn't take Kurdish autonomy seriously as many Kurds saw it. It's like debates you hear on the left today about minorities and identity politics. The Kurdish Marxists believed that Kurds were an oppressed, colonized people like Palestinians, so they formed their own groups. Or like the Black Panther Party in America. Maoism was more influential with these types. "Nationally oppressed" groups. Their leader, Abdullah Öcalan (or "Apo" for short), was first introduced to Marxism by reading Bukharin (the Bolshevik revolutionary) and was also ruthless, and they grew in size and adopted a Maoist-style or Viet Cong-style guerrilla war in the mountains, which the Turkish gendarmes there were unprepared to deal with.
There were also military coups in Turkey which destabilized the situation, and crushed other leftist groups, but the PKK were border hoppers and had foreign sources of support (the USSR, Bulgaria, Greece, Syria, Iraq), and they also would go to DFLP-run camps in Lebanon for training. (That's a Palestinian Maoist group.) Also the PKK got money from the Kurdish diaspora, a lot of them in Germany.
Idk what'll happen. I'd say they lasted longer than most of these 70s/80s leftist groups, and were more imaginative and creative. When the Cold War ended, Apo rejiggered the ideology to something called "democratic confederalism" which took inspiration from environmentalism and anarchism, including the ideas from an American anarchist from Vermont named Murray Bookchin.
