#kemalism

तुर्की का आधुनिक गणराज्य भले ही यह मानता हो कि उसकी सीमाएँ ऐतिहासिक रूप से तय थीं, लेकिन बेंजामिन सी फोर्टना की तुर्की का सबसे छोटा इतिहास दर्शाता है कि देश सांस्कृतिक, राजनीतिक और धार्मिक विकास का प्रतीक है। किसी को “तुर्क” के रूप में परिभाषित करने से लेकर अतीत में इसकी सीमाओं पर कैसे विवाद हुआ है, यह पुस्तक देश की कहानी को संक्षिप्त और प्रभावी ढंग से बताने का प्रयास करती है। यह अक्सर माना जाता…

Thanks for the response.

Bursa Nutku, "GERİCİLERİN BİLMENİZİ İSTEMEDİĞİ ATATÜRK KONUŞMASI" clickbaiti gibi hissediyor ama tamamiyle gerçek bir Atatürk nutku.

The book in question is Sosyalizm Kemalizm ve Din (Socialism Kemalism and Religion [probably a topic I myself will post about in the future]). It was a fucking trip to read and I only got to reading half of it (in a day). Never read any of it again.

It's contents include (but are not limited to):

A most unexpected comparison between Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Necmettin Erbakan. The two most similar people. You may ask why.

Well it's simple: They are both -somewhat- in favor in petty bourgeois economics.

Damned be the fact that one is an French Anarchist Philosopher and the other is a casually racist Islamist Turkish politician. (Although Proudhon did apparently harbor some pretty reactionary ideas)

Also the repeated citation of noted Holocaust Denier and the most *interesting* philosopher of all time: Roger Garaudy.

The overt "left-kemalist" bias in the book. (Kaypakkaya rolling in the grave atm. But honestly he can eat shit.)

And trying to reconcile the titular ideologies, which is to say the least a daunting task.

May translate this post to other languages and post it again idk

siktir yazarla ben hemşeriymişiz artık eleştiremiyorum da

shit me and the author are from the same city (not really but whatever)

cant even criticise the guy anymore

Kemal Ataturk, a somewhat Bacchic character, the full record of whose personal life makes you blink, is the dictator-type carried to its ultimate extreme, the embodiment of totalitarian rule by character. This man, in personality and accomplishments, resembles no one so much as Peter the Great, who also westernized his country at frightful cost. Kemal Ataturk is the roughneck of dictators. Beside him. Hitler is a milksop, Mussolini a perfumed dandy, and Goemboes a creature of the drawing-room. At one of his own receptions Kemal, slightly exhilarated, publicly slapped the Egyptian minister when he observed the hapless diplomat wearing the forbidden fez.

No man has ever betrayed more masters, and always from motives of his own view of patriotism. In 1918, a staff officer, he was chosen to accompany Vahydu’d-Din, the Crown Prince, to Berlin, and there assist him in consultations with Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and the German high command. Three years later Kemal booted him, as Sultan VI, out of Turkey.

After the Armistice Kemal was sent by the authorities as inspector-general of the eastern vilayets to investigate a nationalist insurrection in Kurdistan. He was ordered to find and quell these rebels. He found them all right. But instead of crushing the movement he took charge of it! Within two years he brought victory in all of Turkey to the very organization his superiors had sent him to suppress.

In 1926, following a not very professional attempt on his life, he hanged what amounted to the entire leadership of the opposition. Among those he allowed to be sentenced to death and executed were Colonel Arif, who had been his comrade-at-arms in the Greek campaign, and Djavid Bey, the best financial mind in Turkey. Kemal had a champagne party in his lonely farm-house at Chankaya, near Ankara, to celebrate the occasion, and invited all the diplomats. Returning home at dawn, they saw the corpses hanging in the town square.

(In 1930 Kemal decided that totalitarian rule to the extremity which he carried it was a bore, and, uniquely among dictators, he proceeded to create an opposition, naming various men to be its leaders. Somewhat timidly, they accepted. Kemal wanted to see if Western democratic methods would work; he wanted an opposition bench to argue with in parliament. The system didn’t work. The Turks, with the memory of 1926 in mind, didn’t seem to understand. . . .)

...

Kemal’s early life was that of a rebel and above all of a hater. He wrote revolutionary pamphlets and even poems. He was sentenced to jail in Constantinople, but his skill as an officer made him valuable, and be was released. Although a “Young Turk,’’ his position was that of a suppressed oppositionist; he detested the Young Turk triumvirs, Talaat, Mavtr, and Djemal, a feeling they warmly reciprocated. But his reputation as a soldier was invincible, after service on the most remote, dangerous and hopeless fronts, and the way to his career was open.

That career is without parallel in modem times. Kemal engineered the congresses of Erzenun and Sivas and organized the nationalist movement, leading it to victory. Other people have created nations. Kemal’s job was harder. He took a nation that was centuries deep in rot, pulled it to its feet, wiped its face, reclothed it, transformed it, made it work. In 1919 Turkey was so crushed and broken that it would have welcomed renunciation of sovereignty and a British mandate. In 1922 Turkey was the one enemy state so strong that it practically dictated its own peace terms.

Kemal alone, it may be said, does not deserve credit for all this. The general program of westernization was planned by the Young Turks and he simply appropriated it The Greeks were destroyed by the duplicity of Lloyd George and the treason of the allies, also by their own incapacity, not by Kamal’s armies. Sultan and caliph were doomed in any case, and it is no tribute to Kemal that he kicked them out The Treaty of Lausanne was won not by Ismet Pasha, but because of jealous squabbles between the Western powers. And so on.

Kemal lives these days in Chankaya, a complete recluse. His model farm is his avocation ; a true megalomaniac, he designed the water reservoir in the shape of the Sea of Marmora! He married a woman named Latiii Hanum in 1923, but divorced her a few years later ; now he lives alone. He is the most inaccessible public character in Europe. King George V himself would not have been more difficult to interview. Unlike all other dictators, he keeps from the foreground; the Turkish papers do not mention his name half a dozen times a month. He has a group of soldier underlings and cronies with whom he plays poker. Rarely, he gambles at cards with foreign diplomats; he usually wins, then insists on returning his winnings. He still likes to drink.

The Turkish dictator differs from almost all others in that he had no socialist period in youth and even in maturity betrays not the faintest interest in socio-economic stresses. His only policy was Turkey for the Turks. He is certainly a revolutionary, but as far as economics is concerned he might be President of Switzerland. The theory that all nationalist dictators must bear to extreme Right or extreme Left breaks down on Kamal Ataturk, as it did on Pilsudski."