The Press Regime in Turkey and the Merdan Yanardağ Case

Young Comrades,

We must correctly grasp the political climate we face today, the games the ruling classes stage in judicial corridors, and the heavy siege concretized in journalist Merdan Yanardağ and TELE1. Our basic purpose in writing this text is to decipher the shallowness of liberal "press freedom" rhetoric bourgeois media dumps on us every day and to offer you young comrades the mental tools of dialectical materialism ready to break away. Our aim is for you to see not a "victimhood" wailing when looking at the Merdan Yanardağ file but a fighting epistemological trench. Because what the rulers fear most is the working class and youth meeting objective truth.

Theoretical Framework: Monopolization of the Means of Mental Production

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in The German Ideology, considered the founding text of Marxist philosophy, expose the greatest illusion of class societies with this plain and shattering observation:

"The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it."

This observation is the clearest formula for why press, television, and digital media cannot be "impartial" in capitalist society. While the bourgeoisie seizes the worker's surplus value in factories, in media towers it must also seize the worker's consciousness and capacity to perceive reality. Material property inevitably brings mental property and monopolization with it.

French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser advanced this mechanism one step with the concept of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). For Althusser the state cannot stand only with the police baton and prisons (Repressive Apparatuses). Real success is making the masses consent to this order of exploitation. The press stands at the very heart of this consent production, mass manipulation, and continuity of class domination as the most vital Ideological State Apparatus.

Core Thesis: Truth Coded as "Class Enemy"

The ruling classes have a philosophical fear of truth—an epistemological phobia. Because objective reality is by nature revolutionary and shakes the legitimacy ground of rulers' exploitation-based rule.

Jamming the Consent Production Machine: When a media organ or journalist shatters the fake illusions the ruling class produces and puts objective reality before the masses, they have sabotaged the Ideological State Apparatus in the Althusserian sense.
Becoming a Target: That Merdan Yanardağ and TELE1, where he is editor-in-chief, are targeted at exactly this point is no accident. They broke the gears of the consent production mechanism by stepping outside the giant "Pool" simulation the bourgeoisie built.

Young comrades, the "terror," "propaganda," or lately the absurd "political espionage" charges directed at Merdan Yanardağ in rulers' courts and pool media headlines are masks of bourgeois law. Philosophical and class reality is this: Every press worker defending truth and not partnering in the rulers' lie factory is coded directly as a "class enemy" by the bourgeois state apparatus. The Merdan Yanardağ file is not a single legal case; it is an organized dispossession and silencing operation the ruling class resorts to in order to protect its monopoly over its own means of mental production. Now let us clarify the picture further by looking together at the historical roots and bloody memory of the capital state in this operation.

Part One: Bloody Memory — From Physical Annihilation to Legal Siege (Historical Continuity)

The dialectical method teaches us that no social phenomenon falls from the sky; every current bullying has a historical root cell. That Merdan Yanardağ is today wanted thrown into prison with absurd bag laws like "political espionage" cannot be treated independently of the genetic code of the Turkish bourgeoisie. Before us is the historical and dialectical evolution of the tools the capital state uses to strangle truth.

In Turkey ruling classes in crisis periods have always operated a savage violence spiral against press workers to protect hegemony they could not fortify. This process is uninterrupted counterrevolutionary continuity that began with physical elimination and is crowned today with legal/economic dispossession.

The 1970–1980 Period: Gladio and In-System Elimination (Abdi İpekçi)

The late 1970s were a period of structural crisis for Turkish capitalism, when the rulers prepared the 24 January Decisions and the 12 September fascist coup against the rising struggle of the working class. In this period the Abdi İpekçi assassination (1979) carried out by the bourgeois state's underground apparatuses (Gladio/Counter-Guerrilla) is a structural break in press history.

Why Was He Targeted? İpekçi was not a radical revolutionary; he was rational, center-left inclined, trying to do honest journalism within the bounds of bourgeois democracy.
Class Meaning: The order of capital was in such great distress that while dragging the country into darkness in line with imperialism and local comprador bourgeois interests, it could not tolerate even "rational" and balanced voices within itself. İpekçi's murder was the first big step in the bourgeois press being disciplined by its own rulers and forced toward a fascist turn.

The Darkness of the 1990s: Primitive Accumulation, Dirty War, and Physical Annihilation

The 1990s were one of the most savage, most mafioso, and dirtiest periods of capitalism in Turkey. Behind the discourse of state survival, a great capital transfer, a drug-politics-mafia spiral, and a dirty war were being waged in Kurdish geography. The press martyrs of this period are our comrades and press workers who deciphered the gears of this dirty mechanism.

Uğur Mumcu: Exposure of the Capital-Sect-Mafia Triangle

Uğur Mumcu was killed by a bomb placed in his car in 1993. Mumcu wrote about imperialism's local collaborators in Turkey, holdings becoming sects, arms smuggling, and gang formation in the deep layers of the state. Philosophically Mumcu was physically eliminated by the joint decision of imperialist and local cliques because he exposed the darkest moment of capital's primitive accumulation processes—the organized crime structure beneath the mask of legality.

Musa Anter and Namık Tarancı: Resistance of the Free Press

In the same dark period, revolutionary and patriotic press targeting violations in Kurdish geography, village burnings, and counter-guerrilla apparatuses like JİTEM was targeted. Musa Anter (Apê Musa) was killed in Diyarbakır in 1992 in the middle of the street. Our comrade Namık Tarancı, reporter for Gerçek magazine, fell martyr in 1992 in a Hizbullah/Contra ambush. The bourgeois state tried to silence the cry of an oppressed people and this resistance blended with class consciousness by directly physically destroying the press (bombing newspapers, shooting distributor children).

Metin Göktepe: Batons Against the Voice of the Working Class

In 1996 Metin Göktepe, Evrensel newspaper reporter, was detained by the bourgeois state's law enforcement while following the funeral of revolutionaries killed in prison and beaten to death in a gymnasium. The Göktepe murder is the naked, shameless, barbaric face of the state's repressive apparatus. The rulers wanted to intimidate all opposition press by killing in the street a journalist carrying the voice of the working class's party.

The Dialectical Transformation of Violence: From Bullet to Robe

Philosophical Note (Walter Benjamin and 'State of Exception'): Walter Benjamin in Theses on the Concept of History says: "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of exception' in which we live is not the exception but the rule." Comrades, the "state of exception" applied with bullets and bombs in the 70s and 90s has today changed form and become institutionalized under the robe of bourgeois law. We must analyze well this dialectical transformation of violence:

Old Method (Physical Annihilation): Eliminating the body, silencing, spreading fear with unresolved killings.
New Method (Legal and Economic Siege): Today the ruling class, not to drop the "democracy" mask entirely in the international arena, prefers to make journalists "civilly dead" legally and economically in courtrooms rather than shooting them in the street.

Merdan Yanardağ's detention on fabricated grounds, indictments without evidence, and finally trial on heavy charges like "political espionage"; RTÜK blacking out TELE1's screen with astronomical fines—is exactly this new type of elimination method. The aim is not to destroy the body but to sink the institution, seize property, render the pen dysfunctional, and choke the masses' voice with legal covers.

Yesterday the shameless class reflex that killed Metin Göktepe is the same reflex that today wants to cram Merdan Yanardağ into prison with an espionage frame. Only the instruments the rulers use change—in one the police baton, in the other the bourgeois judge's pen. Knowing this historical continuity is the first condition of standing upright with revolutionary consciousness rather than liberal astonishment before today's frame-up.

Part Two: Origins of Fascist Press Policies and Social Engineering

To understand the brazenness the bourgeois state displayed in the Merdan Yanardağ and TELE1 example, we must decipher the philosophical and historical roots of fascist regimes' approach to mass communication tools. Fascist policies do not see the press only as an enemy to be silenced; they also design it as an apparatus of social engineering that will reshape the masses' minds and bend society like an object in a laboratory.

That fascism's founder Mussolini was himself a former journalist, or that Goebbels established the "Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda" in Nazi Germany, are not accidental constructs. Fascism rises on the monopolization of truth.

Gramsci, Consent and Force: The Foundation of Fascist Media Policies

Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, examining bourgeois state structure, also decoded fascism's mechanisms of rise. For Gramsci ruling class power stands on two legs: Force (Coercion) and Consent (Hegemony).

Under normal conditions bourgeois democracies emphasize consent production; they convince the masses they are "free." But when capitalism's structural crises deepen, the ruling class has no consent argument left to offer the masses (economic prosperity, justice, future security). At these moments of hegemony crisis, fascist policies enter the scene.

"Coordination" Strategy: The essence of fascist policies is to fully integrate the press with the state apparatus. In Nazi Germany this was called Gleichschaltung (coordination/bringing into line). The reason no independent center and no single dissenting voice is tolerated is this.
Organization of Fear: A regime that cannot produce consent turns the press into an instrument of terror and fear. Merdan Yanardağ's detention overnight declared a "spy" sends this fascist message to society: "If you step outside the boundaries we draw, you face lawlessness in its most naked form."

Social Engineering, Culture Wars, and Production of "Nothingness"

The capitalist state conducts giant social engineering to prevent the working class and youth from gaining class consciousness using the press. French Marxist theorist Guy Debord analyzed this situation wonderfully in The Society of the Spectacle. For Debord in modern capitalism images and spectacles have replaced reality.

Economic Crisis / Exploitation > (Bourgeois Media Filter) > Artificial Culture Wars / Survival Discourse

The ruling class's media produces constant "nothingness and illusion" to make the worker's hunger, the youth's futurelessness, deep exploitation invisible.

Artificial Polarizations: Class contradictions (rich-poor, exploiter-exploited) are covered; artificial culture wars produced over identity, religion, sect, and nationalism are substituted.
Collective Narcosis: The press narcotizes the masses constantly with bombast, demonization, and fake threat perception. Social engineering aims to inflict a mental paralysis that will make the masses defend even their own conditions of exploitation.

Election Periods and Hyperreality: Using Simulation as a Weapon

The places where this fascist social engineering is applied most shamelessly and intensively are election periods. Taking into account post-Marxist and postmodern philosophical debates in the modern world, we must situate Jean Baudrillard's concepts of "Hyperreality" and "Simulation" here.

For Baudrillard the boundary between real and fake has been erased; simulation produced by rulers is presented to the masses as if more real than reality itself.

Epistemological Assassination in Elections: During elections bourgeois press works like a simulation machine. Montage videos, manipulated audio recordings, fake documents, and a "disinformation" storm launched to blacken the opposition are epistemological assassinations that seize the voter's free will from their hands. Objective reality (poverty, corruption, repression) is entirely hidden behind this simulation wall.

Here lies the real crime and reason for being targeted of centers like Merdan Yanardağ and TELE1: They are those who smash this simulation wall with a sledgehammer. They shattered the hyperrealistic illusion the power bloc constructs in election periods and afterward by shouting objective and materialist truths from the screen.

The ruling classes are terrified that the fake paradise and fake enemy perception (simulation) they create will be deciphered. Silencing Merdan Yanardağ is a move to prevent the masses from exiting this simulation in election processes and moments of social rupture. Because if simulation collapses, the working class will see naked truth; a class that sees naked truth will move to break its chains.

Part Three: Epistemological Rupture in the AKP Period and Technical Mechanisms

The AKP's years in power are not merely a political change of power for Turkish capitalism and state structure but a qualitative epistemological rupture. The marriage of Political Islam with neoliberalism had to rewrite the algorithms by which the masses perceive reality to make its hegemony permanent. This period was the scene of constructing a sophisticated technical regime where crude violence went beyond press control and capital transfer, bureaucratic siege, and ideological illusions intertwined.

Now let us put on the table the chronological stages and technical application details of this fascist mechanism.

Chronological Transformation: Step by Step Construction of Illusion

AKP's domination over media did not follow a linear path but a dialectical chronology according to the course of class struggle and intra-state clique conflicts:

2002–2007: Liberal Illusion and Position-Winning Period: In this first phase AKP used bourgeois liberalism's discourses of "EU standards," "rolling back military tutelage," and "democratization" as masks for consent production. Direct seizure of media ownership did not occur; on the contrary, central bourgeois media (Doğan Group, Sabah-ATV etc.) was co-opted into this discursive chorus to fortify power.
2007–2013: Elimination and First Primitive Capital Transfer: After the 2007 e-memorandum and the Ergenekon/Balyoz processes that followed, clique war in the state apparatus intensified. The first big technical intervention of this period came: Sabah-ATV Group, the central media's most important arm, was seized through TMSF and transferred to Çalık Holding (capital belly-tied to power). The astronomical $2.5 billion tax fine imposed on Doğan Media Group in 2009 was the technical delivery of the message "obey or go bankrupt" to the rest of bourgeois media.
2013–2018: Gezi Resistance, Establishment of the "Pool," and Total Siege: Gezi Park Resistance was the moment the power's consent mechanism collapsed. Bourgeois media broadcasting penguin documentaries while masses were in the street completely lost epistemological legitimacy. This crisis gave birth to the organized and technical ownership system called "Pool Media." With transfer of all Doğan Media Group assets to Demirören Holding in 2018, mainstream central media was completely eliminated and a state-guided single-voice chorus was built.
2018–2026: Exception Law and Digital Censorship Era: With the presidential regime institutional consent production was entirely abandoned, replaced by permanent "exception law" executed through RTÜK, BİK, and the judiciary. The Censorship Law ("spreading misleading information to the public" crime) that entered force in 2022 and lately the arbitrary use of TCK Article 328 (Political Espionage) seen in the Merdan Yanardağ case are this period's legal-technical weapons.

"Not Enough But Yes" Epistemological Blindness: How Liberals Were Fooled

In this chronological march we must philosophically examine one of the greatest tragicomedies in Turkish intellectual history: the elimination process of liberal and social-liberal intellectuals swept up in the "Not Enough But Yes" (YAE) wind.

Lenin in State and Revolution mercilessly criticizes petty-bourgeois reformists' and liberals' illusion of seeing the state as a "class-neutral, impartial referee." Liberals who took the YAE line during the 2010 constitutional referendum process became victims of exactly this philosophical blindness.

Separation of Essence and Form: Liberals made an epistemological error separating political form (democratization discourse) from economic class essence (Political Islamist bourgeoisie's desire to seize the state apparatus). They thought AKP's elimination of the old state bureaucracy (Kemalist/military tutelage) was "civilianization."
Use as Ideological Wedge: Power used these liberal intellectuals in press, on TV screens, and in columns as ideological wedges to legitimize its own counterrevolutionary moves. While liberals convinced the masses "Military tutelage is ending, the judiciary is being civilianized," they were actually carrying bricks for today's fascist judiciary bureaucracy and one-man regime.
Dialectical Result: The moment the power bloc's monopoly over the state apparatus was finalized (especially after 2013), there was no need for these useful liberal apparatuses. Most were fired, thrown into prisons, or sent into exile. This process is the inevitable dialectical end of those who abandon Marxist class analysis and believe bourgeois democracy fairy tales.

Technical Economic Mechanisms for Bringing the Press into Line

That Merdan Yanardağ and TELE1 are today wanted suffocated is not only ideological hatred but the product of very finely calculated technical and economic mechanisms. The capital state operates these specific tools to collapse opposition press:

Surplus Value Transfer and the Pool Mechanism

Pool media is belly-tied to the capitalist state's tender system. The state gives giant public tenders—bridges, highways, airports, city hospitals—to pro-government gang holdings (Cengiz, Limak, Kalyon etc.). These holdings use the public surplus value from these tenders, on power's instruction, to fund losing newspapers and televisions (Sabah, Yeni Şafak, Akşam etc.). Thus the working class's taxes and labor are transferred again to capital through media to dull the working class's consciousness.

BİK (Press Advertisement Institution) Economic Embargo

Official announcements are the most basic public income source for newspapers' survival. BİK applies official announcement cutting penalties lasting months to revolutionary/opposition newspapers like Evrensel and BirGün on watery pretexts (for example citing the word "exploitation" or "corruption" in a column). This is the strategy of economically suffocating opposition press and crushing it under paper and printing costs.

RTÜK: Ideological Police and Screen Blackout

RTÜK (Radio and Television Supreme Council) has ceased to be an administrative board and turned directly into the power's censorship and dispossession police. The mathematics of fines given to independent channels like TELE1 is very clear:

Astronomical fines are cut at 3% or 5% of the channel's advertising revenue.
These fines are stacked until the channel's cash flow is paralyzed.
Then 3- or 5-day screen blackout (broadcast suspension) penalties break the channel's bond with viewers and scare advertisers.

There you have it, comrades, the technical reality behind the Merdan Yanardağ case is exactly this. When power could not economically collapse TELE1 with RTÜK fines, this time it prepares ground for direct material/administrative seizure (trustee appointment or frequency cancellation) of the channel by detaining the editor-in-chief on fabricated "espionage" charges. This is the most current, most organized technical seizure the bourgeois state applies to protect its monopoly over means of mental production.

Part Four: Current Concretization — The Merdan Yanardağ and TELE1 Case

The nakedest and most laboratory-quality example today of the fascist and economic dispossession practices we theorized is undoubtedly the organized operation against journalist Merdan Yanardağ and TELE1. This case is not an abstract legal debate; it is concrete proof of how power and the capital cliques behind it try to "physically and materially" swallow a media organ that breaks the consent production machine and tears their simulations.

Let us examine step by step the chronology and epistemological squalor of this frame-up.

Chronological Flow of the Frame-Up: Timetable of Step-by-Step Seizure

The operation against Merdan Yanardağ and TELE1 is not a single "mistake" or momentary anger but an elimination plan spread over time and planned in fine detail:

June – October 2023 (First Probing): After Yanardağ's objective observations on legal isolation conditions at İmralı, he was targeted with montage videos by pool media and detained on "terror organization propaganda" charges. After months in prison he was released. (Indeed in November 2025 the Constitutional Court would rule this first detention unlawful, but the bourgeois state had already prepared its second and bigger move.)
24 October 2025 (On-Air Raid and Dispossession): As the hour approached 19:30, while TELE1's main news bulletin continued live, police and judiciary raided the channel. Before Merdan Yanardağ was even detained and his statement taken, the Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF) was appointed trustee to the channel. The last free voice heard on screen was "Do not surrender to lies." This move is the perfect fusion of Althusser's "repressive apparatus" and "economic seizure."
27 October 2025 (Big Bag: "Political Espionage" Detention): Yanardağ was detained together with IBB Chair Ekrem İmamoğlu and political advisor Necati Özkan under Turkish Penal Code (TCK) Article 328 for "political or military espionage."
April – May 2026 (Plunder Phase): Here the "dispossessing" character of law rose to the surface. Before even the case's first hearing, the trustee administration appointed by power put TELE1 up for auction to pro-government capital at a price at least 10–15 times below market value for a comic sum (28 million TL). Merdan Yanardağ, writing from prison, characterized this situation as "political bullying and plunder."
July 2026 (Continuity of Exception Law): In these days we live in (at the second hearing on 6 July 2026), despite the prosecution presenting no concrete evidence, it requested continuation of detention for all defendants and the court rejected release requests. The ruling class is determined not to release truth carriers it has taken prisoner.

Epistemological Squalor of the Indictment: "No Foreign Country, No Organization, What Espionage?"

Marxist philosophy deciphers ideological manipulations that empty concepts and invert reality. TCK Article 328 (Political Espionage) by nature requires "giving information that must remain secret of the state to a foreign state or terror organization." What is in this case's file?

Material Groundlessness: In the file there is neither a named foreign state, nor a secret document, nor any espionage activity. The indictment rests entirely on mind-reading, "mailing and contact" scenarios fabricated to shadow the political legitimacy of success in the 2019 local elections.
Organic Fusion of Judiciary and Executive: The most striking philosophical-political detail of the case is that Prosecutor Can Tuncay, who signed this absurd espionage indictment, was appointed during the process directly to Deputy Minister of Justice (i.e., to the very heart of the executive, a political position). This situation shatters the liberal illusion that the judiciary is an independent "power"—it is the organic fusion (merging) of judiciary and political power.

A Dimitrov at the Silivri Podium: Yanardağ's Defense

Young comrades, bourgeois courtrooms for revolutionaries and anti-imperialist intellectuals are not defense rooms but historical podiums where rulers are judged. Merdan Yanardağ's stance in the courtroom carries precisely the character of ideologically shattering fascist law.

In his defense at the hearing Yanardağ defied imperialism and local cliques, reversing the rulers' conceptual game:

"NATO is a bandit and imperialist organization. They accuse people who spent their lives struggling against NATO and imperialism of political espionage. We are not facing a real political espionage case; we are here as part of the political violence process and the operation to silence the opposition."

Reclaiming Concepts: Those who collaborate with imperialism, who sacrifice the country's public assets to foreign capital, cannot accuse a revolutionary intellectual whose life was anti-imperialist struggle of "espionage." Yanardağ demolished this conceptual hegemony with his defense.
The Pen That Would Not Bow: Yanardağ, rejecting bourgeois offers indirectly conveyed to him to "Sell the channel, live comfortably," declared TELE1 not a commercial company but an independent social responsibility and enlightenment position belonging to the people.

Young comrades, the Merdan Yanardağ and TELE1 case is the continuation executed today under robes of the great historical memory press workers wrote with blood in Turkey. The rulers' aim is clear: to economically collapse the channel, cut the opposition's voice, and condemn the masses to the "hyperrealistic" lie simulation they produce. Our task is to see the class character of this frame-up and transform that upright stance in courtrooms into organized struggle in squares and streets.

Conclusion: The Class's Voice Is the Class's Trench — Call and Historical Task for Young Comrades

Young Comrades,

Bourgeois ideologues and liberal theorists love to package the concept of "press freedom" as class-neutral, abstract, romantic "freedom of expression" fairy tale. Yet Marxist philosophy shows us there is no abstract freedom in class society; there is either the bourgeoisie's dispossessing, exploiting freedom or the working class's liberation struggle. Therefore the struggle to liberate the press is not a liberal luxury but a social and class existence war.

The Class Essence of Liberating the Press and the Principle of Reciprocity

Liberating the press means tearing means of mental production from bourgeois monopoly. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in What Is to Be Done? defines revolutionary press not only as collective propagandist and collective agitator but also as collective organizer. If press in a country is under capital cliques' control, the working class's grasp of its own conditions of exploitation is being blocked.

The proletariat can reach its own class consciousness only when it meets objective truth. This dialectical bond imposes on us an inevitable principle of reciprocity: Those who carry the class's voice must be shielded by the class itself. Revolutionary press is the greatest epistemological weapon the working class will wield against bourgeois illusions; the class is the main body that will never allow this weapon to be broken.

Current Positions of the Truth Front: Evrensel, BirGün, and Independent Digital Publishing

The heavy siege concretized today in Merdan Yanardağ and TELE1 is only one part of the truth front. Against the ruling class's total assault we must defend with the same determination other positions carrying the class's voice, in united front logic:

Evrensel — The Factories' and Class's Newspaper: This tree watered with Metin Göktepe's blood has for more than thirty years reflected the working class's daily life, strikes, surplus-value exploitation in factories in its nakedest form. Standing with Evrensel, wanted suffocated economically through BİK (Press Advertisement Institution) embargoes and seizure of announcement rights, is directly the working class standing with its own presence in the factory.
BirGün — Voice of Social Opposition: BirGün, courageously carrying sect darkness, sect-capital-politics spirals, plunder of nature, and the people's impoverishment processes to its headlines, is another barricade cracking rulers' consent production. This position wanted silenced through lawsuits and censorship laws is the people's common defense area.
Independent Digital Publishers and the Social Media Front: In today's world where conventional media has been pooled, revolutionary/opposition digital workers doing independent publishing on YouTube, podcast channels, and social media platforms, delivering truth instantly to the masses bypassing mainstream monopolies, are also on this front's forward lines. Every digital censorship, every lynch operation through trolls, every criminal investigation they suffer is a blow to the working class's news arteries.

The Duty of the Class Shielding Those Who Give Voice to the Class

Young comrades, the bourgeois state's official announcement cutting penalties, RTÜK screen blackouts, and "bag crime" cases are not accidental. Capital wants to subject revolutionary press to economic and legal war of attrition, leaving it without subscribers, readers, and solidarity.

Here class reflex must enter: If a newspaper or television writes the worker's strike, shouts the youth's futurelessness, deciphers NATO's imperialist manipulations; paying that newspaper's bill, shoulder to shoulder in that television's solidarity campaign, spreading that digital broadcast is the working class's and vanguard youth's historical debt. If we do not give support, the bourgeoisie will swallow those voices one by one with its law-crushing apparatuses.

Concrete Tasks of Young Comrades

Merdan Yanardağ's upright stance rising from Silivri prisons is the current defense of that honorable barricade stretching from Abdi İpekçi to Metin Göktepe, from Uğur Mumcu to Namık Tarancı. Now to enlarge this barricade is a historical task on your young communists' shoulders:

Organize Material and Political Solidarity: Organize collective digital/print subscriptions to newspapers like Evrensel and BirGün at universities, neighborhoods, workplaces. Build a social legitimacy barricade against seizure and plunder auctions targeting TELE1.
Break Digital Algorithm Walls: Break bourgeois media's invisibility censorship by spreading content of independent digital platforms and revolutionary broadcasts on social media. Each of you be a digital distributor, a truth carrier.
Build the Factory and Campus Link: Carry revolutionary press news directly to the class's heart; deliver its own newspaper to the worker in the factory, its own journal to the student on campus. Turn the press from an intellectual reading object into a practical action guide in the masses' hands.

Comrades!

The bourgeoisie can whisper lies to us from those high towers it trusts its property in. It can turn its courts into inquisition courts, cram our bravest intellectuals into prison with espionage frame-ups, black out our televisions and appoint trustees to our channels, seize our newspapers' paper.

But they forgot dialectic's inevitable and revolutionary law: No power can stand before naked objective truth of an idea whose time has come and an organized class.

Pens can be broken but truth's ink does not dry! Prisons can be closed but it has been historically proven that free thought scales walls! The upright stance of Merdan Yanardağ, Evrensel workers, BirGün employees, and digital publishers defying censorship is our faith in tomorrow.

History's wheel turns not toward rulers' lies but toward the working class's absolute truth. Your consciousness, your anger, and your organized struggle will accelerate that wheel.

The darkest hour of the night is the hour closest to dawn. Truth will win, class struggle will win, we will win!

Against fascism, imperialism, and capital frame-ups: Long Live Revolutionary Press, Long Live Class Solidarity!