CENTRAL NEWS
“As part of our militancy in the liberation movement, the building of Democratic Confederalism, and especially in the women’s liberation movement, militant men also have responsibilities and tasks to fulfill. Our struggle in the women’s liberation movement is an internal struggle, a struggle with ourselves. It is about more than solidarity with our sisters, it is about fighting against the men in us and ending the culture of domination and rape that has been instilled in us by the patriarchal institutions of the system. To do this, the first step is an act of humility and questioning. Accepting the fact that the system has shaped our view of the world, it has appropriated a part of our mentality. Patriarchy has shaped our relationship with our bodies, our emotions, our nature and therefore our relationships with others. It is about looking into our minds for the manifestations of the patriarchal mentality to rediscover our deepest self, our natural self, our free and democratic essence.
‘Our responsibility: destroy the patriarchy’
It is our responsibility to rediscover the identity of the man except patriarchy, to understand ourselves as men and to understand our emotions. Only a collective dialectic can allow us to rediscover the stolen identity of humanity within us. It is not a matter of erasing parts of our personalities, but of learning to live again. Learning to contemplate and interact with the reality in which we live without trying to dominate or control it. Patriarchy and its millennial history have created the socio-historical status of women, but also that of men in an unnatural binary. It has enslaved women, while locking men in a role of perpetual domination. We have to understand how the role that the system of capitalist civilization attributes to us also makes us, as men, slaves, lackeys of power.
The patriarchy is based on the mentality that it has instilled in our souls to keep women under its domination, it has made men the police who are the first to repress women who resist their conditions. It has created men who are in constant competition with each other, very often unable to develop emotional intelligence, unable to understand themselves. Patriarchy creates from scratch meaningless, rootless men, slaves to the impulses that the system uses to control our desires and generate artificial needs within us. The capitalist mentality is based on the idea of domination. The domination of material things by property and the impulse of accumulation that this generates in us.
The impulse that urges the need to possess, to keep under our control everything that can exist, nature, other men and of course women. The system creates apathetic men eager for power and monopolies because they are easier to control, to influence. The attraction of profit and power are the carrots that lead legions of men to the infernal rhythm of the capitalist machine. The fear of being weak or being seen as weak is the stick that brings recalcitrant male identities into line. And women are used as a class, as a scapegoat for the constitution of this toxic masculinity of domination. They are the pavements upon which these legions of death walk. Şehîd Atakan Mahir used to say that, in the system, when a man loves a woman he is actually loving himself. He loves his capacity for control and ownership that he feels, and this is how the system wants us to conceive us. The system denies us the bonds that make men living beings, preventing us from expressing and feeling our love for life, alienating our understanding of love and freedom. However, this love, this freedom has resisted for centuries in the depths of our souls, it is this repressed love that sometimes explodes in revolutionary fireworks.
‘Love and the revolutionary will’
When a man studies the history of patriarchy and the enslavement of women and nature, his first reaction is to hate the status of man. It generates in him a hatred of man and a self-reflection of himself that he also recognizes in the attitude of other men. This hatred is nothing more than the expression of a deep love for freedom and justice which, in the face of the historical role that we reproduce in spite of our will, we only manage to express in the form of hate, since love is forbidden to us. This is the starting point for the construction of the democratic personality. To understand the love that is in us, to contemplate it and to accept it. It is love that gives us the impulse for the revolutionary will, that gives us the courage to resist the capitalist system and its legacy of injustice and historical misdeeds. We must understand the love that is hidden within us and learn to express it in terms other than those of the patriarchy. We must seek to develop revolutionary love. That which makes us feel the freedom of the other as our own freedom, that joyful emotion of seeing a bird fly freely in the mountains. That emotion that allows us to build hevaltî (comradeship, companionship) in which the flowering and development of the other is our common goal. The love that is hidden deep within us and that once released creates the unity of beings, the unity of peoples. This unity that will be our strength to defeat capitalist modernity and its patriarchal mentality once and for all.
Source: Revista Lêgerîn
