Çiğdem Doğu, an executive board member of the KJK (Community of Kurdistan Women), spoke in this interview with ANF about the character of the unspoken Third World War against women, society and nature.

What can be said about the character of World War III? What methods, tactics and strategies are the capitalist world systems and nation-state regimes using in the Middle East and beyond?

World wars are anchored in the minds of humanity as processes in which states in mutual alliances officially declare and wage war against each other, in which millions of people die and suffer great damage in a wide geographical area. Since the two world wars were fought in this way, World War III is being approached in a similar way, resulting in a similar pattern. As is well known, both world wars led to successes of socialist, democratic and national liberation struggles of the oppressed and to lasting achievements.

The most important conclusion for the forces of capitalist modernity is that the Third World War is being fought on the basis of preventing possible achievements of the oppressed and societies. There is a holistic approach to both reshaping the world according to their own capitalist interests and to liquidating the existing fighting power of the peoples and oppressed in the implementation of this shaping strategy and neutralizing possible fighting dynamics at an early stage. For this reason, the war is being fought with means that are too protracted to be compressed into a period of a few years and too rich to be limited to a few countries and addressed with a single method. War is everywhere, although in different forms and in some areas it is more visible and intense.

Deepening and expanding the war

From cold war methods to hot war methods, from the use of hard power to soft power, from nation-states to non-state structures, all ways of physical and special warfare form the basis of this process. World War III is characterized and fought as a struggle of capitalist modernity against all societies, nature and women. Another important feature of this war is that it is protracted and long-lasting. The powers of capitalist modernity deepen and expand the war by drawing on the entire accumulation of power and experience of the central civilization. In shaping its new system that transcends national borders, global capital skillfully uses all kinds of nationalism, religious fanaticism, sexism and scientism.

War is made invisible through fragmentation

It is very important for the forces of capitalist modernity to make war invisible so that they can carry out their strategy without damaging the nation-state structure, which is an obstacle to the global circulation of capital, and without causing a revolutionary development for the oppressed. So the more skillfully nationalism, religion, sexism and scientism are used within nation-states, the more invisible the world war character of violence becomes. The intensive use of violence in a geography makes war more visible, but the fragmented use of violence within each nation-state prevents this. A state of open war dominates societies, the oppressed, and plays a role in the development of a more integrated and powerful strategy of struggle. Societies react faster and more strongly to a war that they see open.

World War III has not just started

World War III is directed against societies, women and nature and has been fought in this way for almost 30 years. It is being conducted without naming it and without making it visible, by giving the impression that it is limited to the internal structure of nation-states and some of their enemies. This process is being carried out in a very clever and ruthless manner. In this context, it is important to point out that World War III has not just started now, as is sometimes suggested. It began in the 1990s, when the US targeted Iraq. Rêber Apo [Abdullah Öcalan] had already made this observation many years ago, and the strategic value of this observation is much better understood today.

New phase since 7 October

The period since 7 October 2023, after Hamas's attack on Israel, and the war that Israel has continued to wage to this day represent a new phase of World War III. Netanyahu's declaration in his first statements after 7 October that the maps are being changed and the situation that has now emerged are a clear indication of this.

It would be a positivist approach to limit the discourse on changing maps to a purely political meaning. The maps of the hegemonic system, the calculation of new energy routes, geostrategic and geopolitical calculations essentially denote massacres of societies, women and children. This should never be forgotten.

To what extent does this war fuel misogyny? And in what ways do nationalism, religious fanaticism, sexism and scientism, as the fuel of fascism, affect the existence and identity of women today?

The main goal of global capital is to break the will of society, and society means women first and foremost, and women mean life. While the capital is male-dominated, society is female-oriented. Social life is moral-political life, and it is women who maintain, implement and keep moral-political life moving. The mother of social life in material and spiritual terms is woman. From the first hours of domination to today, the main strategy for suppressing social will is based on suppressing the will of women. In this respect, there is a history and the experience and corpus of male-dominated power created by that history. While this accumulation and experience itself is constant, the level reached by male-dominated capital and the need to overcome all limits require methods and forms of politics that go beyond the usual.

Destruction of organized resistance

The answer to your question can be found precisely at this point. Since World War III is based on the long-term destruction of the will of society, therefore also the will of women, and the associated construction of hegemony, nationalism, religious zeal, scientism and sexism become the main weapons. These four elements, also called hybrid wars, play an enormous role both as physical and as special elements of warfare. They divide and fragment society down to its atoms, weakening in particular the moral-political strength of women and making them incapable of offering organized resistance to male-dominated capitalist power. By applying polarizing and corrosive ideological methods, societies, women and men, religions, nations, individuals are incited against each other and made to fight each other. In the atmosphere of this war, the moral-political force is weakened to the greatest extent. When the principle of moral-political life, the consciousness of being a community, is weakened, there is no longer any strength to resist.

War against society and nature

For this reason, we consider World War III as a war against society and nature, starting with women. This war is very deliberately not named, it is made almost invisible. How can we define the massacres of women with a thousand faces all over the world, in the Middle East and in Kurdistan, other than with the term war? In what period have there been such intense massacres of women, massacres of nature, social degradation and degeneration of life? Even a general and rough overview makes us clearly see that we are dealing with a massive femicide in almost every geography and on every square meter of the world. It is a big lie to claim that this war violence against women only occurs in some "backward" countries and that it is caused by individuals. This claim is part of the special warfare to conceal the war against women. We know very well that those in power use national, sectarian and cultural differences in societies to provoke nationalism and religious fanaticism. In doing so, they provoke male-dominated violence and make femicide commonplace by creating areas of conflict.

What is happening today in Turkey, Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya, Afghanistan, etc.? If we look at the massacres and exploitation of women in these countries, we can see very clearly how these methods are applied and produce results. On the other hand, if we look at the places that capitalist modernity calls developed countries, where there are no hot conflicts, we see that these methods are now being applied more visibly and women are being attacked.

Tactical projections of the war against women

A very important point, of course, is that the war against women must not be limited to the results of conflicts that arise from the provocation of nationalism and religious fanaticism. This is really very important. Because if we do not see the special aspect of war, namely the aspect of not physically killing women, but of completely transforming their body and soul into a market commodity, we have an incomplete and therefore wrong approach to the strategy of World War III. The tactical projections of war that women face at every moment range from the devaluation of female labor to the transformation of every organ of the female body into a sexual commodity, which takes femininity to an extremely degrading and humiliating level.

This war is causing terrible disruptions in women, in their physicality, psychology, spirituality and relational world. A woman whose body and world are torn apart means a divided society and a fragmented nature. That is why our world has become a world without love, without light, without meaning.