The “Peace and Democratic Society” process, developed under the leadership of Leader Apo, who has been held in severe isolation for 26 years in İmralı Island Prison, continues to gain increasing international support. This process has also enabled the democratic, ecological, and women’s liberationist paradigm advocated by Leader Apo and the Kurdish Freedom Movement to become more widely recognized and visible.
Many experts in various fields see these ideas, which revolve around the perspective of peace and a democratic society, as a hopeful alternative not only for the Kurdish people but also for the peoples of the Middle East and the world.
One of these figures is Prof. Peter McLaren, a leading theorist in the field of critical pedagogy, as well as a Canadian educator, writer, and academic.
In a message he recently sent to the DEM Party, Prof. McLaren expressed his support for the ongoing process. We spoke with him about the peace process and the significance of Kurdish People’s Leader Abdullah Öcalan’s proposed paradigm.
We publish the first part of the interview Prof. McLaren gave to ANF.
Your message about the peace process in Turkey and Kurdistan drew attention not only as a political statement but also as a moral and human appeal. What motivated you to write it?
I grew up in the wide hush of Canada, where snow fell like the world’s soft refusal of war. There was no draft notice at my door, no uniform waiting on the bed—only the echoes of other men’s courage and fear. Yet the Second World War was the invisible companion of my childhood. My father carried its memory in his silences, the way some men carry scars. He had fought in the sodden trenches of Europe with the Royal Canadian Engineers, building bridges amid ruin. My uncle, Terry Goddard, flew with the Royal Navy’s 808 Squadron, a winged hunter pursuing the German Bismarck battleship across the gray Atlantic until the steel leviathan bled fire and sank beneath the cold, eternal sea.
They fought, so they said, that their sons might never have to. And so I grew up believing that peace was not a gift but an inheritance purchased dearly with the anguish of others.
When my time came, I chose another battlefield—the classroom, the street, the conscience. I stood against the wars of empire, against the delirium of nations mistaking domination for destiny. I marched, I spoke, I wrote. I went where hope still had the courage to name itself socialism. In Venezuela, at the invitation of Hugo Chávez’s government, I walked among those who dreamed of justice not as a slogan, but as bread shared among equals.
For that, the powerful took notice and paid students to report on leftist professors. In 2006, my name appeared among the so-called Dirty Thirty—professors accused of poisoning young minds with subversive thought, our words secretly taped and reported like contraband. And now, years later, I find myself again inscribed on a list, this time by Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA—a man recently assassinated in the fevered crosswinds of the nation he helped divide.
Such lists are the modern inquisition’s ledgers. Yet I take no pride in persecution, only a quiet understanding: that to stand with the oppressed is to invite the wrath of the comfortable. My father fought the fascists with steel and smoke; I fight their ghosts with words and witness. Both battles, in the end, are for the same fragile dream—that humanity might learn, before it is too late, to see itself in the eyes of the other.
You said, “I salute the courage of those who choose words instead of weapons.” Why do you think the language of peace is so difficult to hear in today’s world?
Then let us add this truth, for it belongs to the marrow of the story.
Words, too, are weapons. They have always been. They can wound deeper than bullets, for they shape the mind’s battlefield before any soldier takes aim. Empires have been built on syllables of deceit; civilizations, shattered by a single word spoken in hatred. To name is to wield power—to define another as inferior, as an enemy, as less than human—is to begin the work of violence long before the sword is drawn.
Today, as in darker times, demagogues rediscover the old lexicon of fear. They brandish words like vermin and traitor as though humanity were a stain to be scrubbed from the earth. When Donald Trump proclaimed, “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” he was not inventing a new language of hatred—he was echoing the ghosts of the twentieth century, borrowing from the same poisoned well that fed Hitler’s delirium.
What is most chilling, perhaps, is his ignorance—or his cynicism. To call others fascists while standing knee-deep in one’s own cult of grievance and violence is not simply irony; it is moral blindness weaponized. Trump does not know what fascism means, because fascism cannot see itself. It survives precisely through its ability to accuse others of its own crimes.
And so the war of words becomes a war for the soul. The question is not only who speaks, but who listens—and who still believes that language can be used for love, for truth, for the fragile work of remembering that every human being, even now, carries a spark not meant to be extinguished. Yes—and it is here, in the luminous circuitry of our new Babel, that the ancient art of dehumanization has learned to speak in code.
Today, the weapons are not forged of steel but of syntax—lines of algorithmic logic humming beneath the surface of our screens. Bots whisper in the language of persuasion; platforms amplify rage because outrage is profitable. The machinery of communication has become a cathedral of mirrors, reflecting back not the world as it is, but the world as each tribe wishes it to be. Within these digital catacombs, truth is no longer a river that flows between us—it is a stagnant pool where only our own reflections appear.
People no longer converse; they transact. Words are exchanged not to seek understanding but to score points, to signal allegiance, to purchase belonging in the marketplace of identities. The discourse that once held the promise of transformation—of becoming more human through dialogue—has been recast as a performance of loyalty. The algorithm, indifferent yet all-powerful, rewards those who shout the loudest, who hate with precision, who bleed emotion into data.
And so we find ourselves exiled from the possibility of communion. The same technologies that could have knit humanity together have instead multiplied our solitudes. In these echoing chambers, empathy becomes a foreign tongue, and truth, a rumor no one dares to believe.
To speak compassion in such an age is itself an act of resistance. It is to remind ourselves that language, even when captured by machines, can still be a vessel of the human spirit—that words, once cleansed of their venom, might again become instruments not of division, but of awakening.
It is difficult to hear the language of peace among the din of today’s digitalized discourses because the language of peace is a quiet tongue, and the world has forgotten how to listen.
Amid the thunder of slogans, the algorithmic shouting matches, the ceaseless scroll of outrage and accusation, peace speaks in tones too soft for the machinery of our age. It does not trend; it does not sell; it does not flatter the ego or promise victory. Peace is not a spectacle—it is a whisper between souls. Yet that whisper is drowned beneath the metallic roar of today’s discourses, where every word is sharpened into a weapon, every sentence a skirmish, every silence mistaken for defeat.
We live, it seems, in an age of amplified noise and diminished meaning. The instruments of communication have multiplied, but the art of communion has withered. Words once meant for healing are now repurposed for conquest. We build digital towers of Babel, each rising higher toward confusion, and the higher we climb, the less we understand one another.
And yet, the language of peace endures. It lingers in the pauses between words, in the breath before reply, in the courage to listen without preparing to strike. It dwells where compassion still refuses to die—in a letter written by hand, in a mother’s lullaby, in the small miracle of forgiveness.
To speak peace today is not naïveté; it is defiance. It is to believe, even now, that humanity’s better voice still waits beneath the static, trembling like a candle in the wind—fragile, yes, but still alight.
Do you see Abdullah Öcalan’s call for “peace and a democratic society” as a form of politics grounded in human dignity?
I cannot speak as an authority as I have been following events mostly through what I have been reading. That said, it certainly seems to be a very dignified politics. From the solitude of his prison, Abdullah Öcalan has sent forth a message that has been heard across the highlands and valleys and pomegranate groves and rocky passes of Kurdistan. He has called upon his comrades to lay down their arms, to let the fire of resistance transform into the warmth of life. That sounds very dignified to me. How could it not? Beneath skies that had long known the roar of warplanes, Ocalan’s comrades broke their weapons. The act was neither humiliation nor defeat; it was a ritual of reclamation, in fact, I would maintain this to be a testament to the very dignity of life itself! When rifles, once symbols of rebellion, become relics and when voices once estranged begin to converse—that can activate ancient currents of discourse bearing fragile vessels of possibility. Which is not the same thing as a guarantee.
At a time when militarization and war rhetoric are increasing globally, especially in the Middle East, how should we understand Kurdish People’s Leader Abdullah Öcalan’s consistent stance in favor of peace and dialogue?
I speak as one who straddles two nations — a dual citizen of Canada and the United States — now enduring the second reign of Donald Trump, a man tearing apart whatever democratic foundations remain in the United States. I watch as he lashes out at my native country, seeking to cripple its economy through tariffs, to fold it into the dominion of empire, to make it the fifty-first state. I live in a country that dreams of war — that speaks of oil as destiny and of other nations as prey. A country that seeks regime change through war with Venezuela, that helps to fund the devastation of Gaza, that calls annihilation self-defense, that wraps the machinery of death in the language of freedom. I have learned, through bitter witness, to be skeptical of geopolitics — that theater where power too often masquerades as principle and war is sold as virtue.
And yet, amid this clamor for domination, there stands a voice from a prison cell on an island in the Marmara Sea — the voice of Abdullah Öcalan — speaking not of conquest, but of conscience, speaking not of stipulations but of conversations. When the world sharpens its knives, he speaks of dialogue. When others call for war, he calls for awakening. In a time when the globe is fevered with militarization, his words sound almost unearthly, as if spoken from another moral dimension, one that remembers what humanity has forgotten. Peace is not the absence of conflict; it is a labor of creation, a cultivation of life where death once ruled. It is the hands that choose compassion over conquest, the eyes that see dignity where others once saw only threats, and the hearts that trust in the possibility of reconciliation.
For Öcalan’s vision, it seems to me, is not about victory in the worldly sense. It is about metamorphosis — the transformation of the human spirit itself. Freedom is not the taking of power but the awakening to responsibility: responsibility to the other, to the living, and to the dead who sacrificed before the dawn. Peace is not the absence of conflict; it is the courage to turn struggle into creation, fire into light, rage into vigilance, suffering into wisdom. And in the villages and towns, from the wind-swept plateaus to the fertile river valleys, a fragile hope has now arisen : that those who had been enemies might yet walk the same paths without fear, that blood once spilled could nourish understanding instead of grief. Let’s be clear: peace is no gift. It is a covenant — a sacred labor, a song of life that must be sung with hands that refuse to strike, eyes that refuse to hate, and hearts that refuse to forget. And in the light of that covenant, there is hope that peace will become the moral and spiritual architecture of the land — fierce, unyielding, eternal,
Peace is not submission, nor an erasure of struggle, but a transformation of it: the courage to convert fire into light, to honor sacrifice without perpetuating its sorrow. Freedom, is not a weapon to wield but a horizon to approach, shared by all.
To favor the success of the peace process, the Kurdish side has taken several concrete steps, including the proposal to dissolve the PKK. Yet the Turkish state has not taken tangible steps in response, and Öcalan, the key actor of the process, remains in prison. In your view, what responsibilities fall on the state?
There are serious obstacles at play. The first obstacle appears to be silence. Öcalan’s voice comes to us through a wall of state-imposed silence. He is isolated on Imrali Island — denied visits, denied the right to speak, even to breathe in the world he’s trying to change. And that silence is not accidental; it is policy. The state wants his ideas without his agency, his words without his presence. Peace itself has been imprisoned alongside him.
The second obstacle appears to be the fear of recognition. The Turkish state has spent a century pretending that the Kurdish question is a problem to be managed rather than a people to be embraced. Even now, when the PKK declares disarmament, when Öcalan extends a hand toward peace, the government calls it victory over terrorism instead of the beginning of reconciliation. The old reflexes persist: deny, control, rename, contain.
And then, of course, there is politics — the grand stage upon which all this is performed.
President Erdoğan approaches the peace process not as an act of moral transformation, but as an instrument of political survival. Facing constitutional term limits, he knows that Kurdish support could be the key to extending his rule. Yet he is shackled to an alliance with the ultranationalist MHP — a party whose very identity depends on rejecting Kurdish aspirations. So he is caught between two fires: to reach for peace risks alienating his base; to appease his base requires stifling the very peace he claims to pursue.
Even as he speaks the language of peace, Turkish drones speak another language in northern Syria. “Operation Dawn of Freedom” continues — an operation that extends the conflict beyond Turkey’s borders, striking at Kurdish groups whom Ankara insists are indistinguishable from the PKK. It’s a double theatre: diplomacy at home, destruction abroad.
And yet, through all this, Öcalan’s idea endures — an idea of radical democracy, of coexistence built from the ground up, of a Turkey that might one day include rather than erase. But for that to happen, the state itself must undergo disarmament — not of weapons, but of fear, arrogance, and denial.
So yes — the greatest obstacle is not in the mountains, not among the Kurdish people, not even in the prisons. The responsibility of the Turkish state lies in its heart. Until that heart learns to listen — truly listen — the path to peace will remain blocked, and the key to the future will stay locked inside the cell of Imrali.
What significance do you think the peace process in Turkey holds for the broader debates on democracy in the Middle East and globally?
The peace process in Turkey is a fragile bridge of hope over a river carved by centuries of conflict, where the voices of the young may be the only ones steady enough to carry democracy across. Far across the Atlantic, the voices of a younger generation stir. According to the University of Maryland’s Critical Issues Poll (July-August, 2025), 37% of young Americans lean toward Palestinians, only 11% toward Israelis, and even the youngest Republicans break from the loyalties of their elders.
These movements in public feeling mirror the fragile experiment of democracy itself—a living, breathing dialogue that bends beneath the weight of history. Whether in the streets of Istanbul, the demolished lands of Palestine, or the polling booths of Maryland, the test remains the same: can we hold the bridge steady long enough to let empathy, justice, and courage pass across it before the river of division sweeps everything away?
Who is Prof. Peter McLaren?
Born in 1948, Canadian educator, writer, and academic Prof. Peter McLaren is one of the world’s leading theorists in the field of critical pedagogy. He is known for his Marxist educational theory, cultural studies, and education approach based on social justice.
After many years of teaching in the United States, he served as a professor at institutions such as the University of Los Angeles and Chapman University. Influenced by thinkers like Karl Marx, Paulo Freire, and Antonio Gramsci, McLaren views education not merely as the transmission of knowledge but as a tool for social transformation.
Through his approaches of “critical pedagogy” and “revolutionary pedagogy,” he advocates for students to develop critical consciousness and achieve liberation. His work has influenced academic circles across a wide geography — from Latin America to Europe, the Middle East to Asia. His most well-known work, Life in Schools (1989), is considered one of the cornerstones of critical pedagogy literature.