Turkey: Open Letter to Greta – Emre Güntekin

Dear Greta,

The action you  started about a year ago is still on the agenda all over the world today. Climate strikes all over the world attract millions of people to the streets to seek alternative ways to respond to the climate crisis, which is now a vital problem. The important thing for the action against ecological destruction today is the perspective of this movement of which you became the symbol. Perhaps it is a grim reality, but those who welcome and give you the platform, are the ones who are trying to tame the  energy of the movement you have initiated. And they will never be in favor of a real solution to the ecological crisis. The capitalist system is a profit-based order, and each capitalists have one unchangeable purpose: an endless capital accumulation! This is the reason of the exploitation of the labor of billions of workers in the world and the destruction of the nature as they  see it only as an unlimited source of raw materials. Therefore, struggles against ecological destruction will not be able to create a real and permanent solution unless the capitalist system is targeted. You have a long future ahead of you. There are two options for you to choose from. The first one is easy: adaptation to the current wave of the so called green capitalism and continue as a bourgeois-liberal environmentalist for the rest of your life. . The second is to take part in the struggle against the capitalist which is the fundamental reason of the climate crisis.

The country in which you were born and raised may have favorable conditions for a child compared to many other countries in the world. However, there are hundreds of millions of children around the world who are not as lucky as you are, and their destiny depends on the removal of this order, the creator of wars and massacres. Millions of children in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia are struggling to survive in conditions. We as the revolutionaries of Turkey, directly witness misery of those children who escape from the civil war in Syria. We assume that you know Aylan Kurdi, who lost his life in the. Likewise, countless number of children in Palestine are struggling to survive under the Israeli persecution. Children living in Yemen face the risk of hunger every day because of the dirty war waged by the Western-backed Saud regime.

Millions of children in Africa experience hunger and drought. The hypocrisy of the Western politicians, including Sweden, seem to criticize, for example, bloody Saud regime on the one hand, and try every cunning way to increase trade volumes on the other hand. You must remember that the capitalists who smiles at you today are the most hypocritical people in the world! For example, you can take advantage of the lessons of the past by looking at the dirty history of the Green Party, which supported the war in Yugoslavia when they were in the government. As you know, wars do not only kills people but it also destroys the nature.  In short, the solution of the ecological crisis is not independent of the solution of other disasters created by capitalism: ecological destruction, gender oppression, exploitation are all the different faces of the mega problem of humanity: capitalism! Only by elimination of it, we can create an egalitarian and free world where children can have a future and end the wars that create bloodsheds every day. That is why the struggle you have started will only be consistent to the extent that it is directed towards this goal.

As the Iranian author, Samed Bahrengi told in Little Black Fish, the beautiful story of a little freedom seeker: if you swim ahead  and leave the shallow water of the system behind you , you will see the great ocean ahead . It is the salvation of the humanity and the planet.