Welcome back to The Deep Dive. Today we are tackling
a subject that is genuinely massive. I mean,
we are talking about a figure who isn't just
a part of history. He quite literally defines
the present for an entire nation. That's absolutely
right. You really can't walk down a street, open
a wallet, or walk into a government office in
Turkey without seeing his face. Not an exaggeration
in the slightest. We are looking at Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk. And to say he's the founder of the Republic
of Turkey is true, but it almost feels like an
understatement. He's the architect of modern
Turkey's entire psyche. Exactly. The architect.
I was reading through the source material and
it just struck me. This guy is on every single
banknote. His portrait is in every classroom,
every government office. There are statues of
him in every town square. It feels less like
historical reverence and more like a ubiquitous
living presence. Almost like a form of secular
sainthood. Yes. That's the perfect phrase for
it. And that's really what makes this deep dive
so fascinating. Our mission today is to understand
how one man took a crumbling, centuries -old
Islamic empire, the Ottoman Empire, and in the
span of roughly 15 years dragged it, sometimes
kicking and screaming, into becoming a secular,
modern nation -state. And it's not just a simple
hero story, right? the sources we have. I mean,
they paint a very, very complex picture. Oh,
incredibly complex. We've got a comprehensive
biographical and historical overview here covering
his military career, his reforms, but also the
the controversies because and this is the tension
we really need to explore. He championed Western
democracy. He was always talking about the sovereignty
of the people. Right. But to get there, he ruled
as a single party leader who. you know, brutally
suppressed opposition. Precisely. It's the central
paradox of authoritarian enlightenment. Can you
force a country to be free? Can you impose democracy
from the top down? Ataturk is the ultimate test
case for those questions. He believed he had
to temporarily suspend freedom to build the institutions
for future freedom. It's a huge contradiction.
A massive one. And his entire legacy is caught
in the balance of that contradiction. OK, so
let's unpack this. We have to start at the beginning.
Origin story time. He wasn't born out of Turk,
was he? That name came much, much later. Not
at all. He was born simply Mustafa in 1881. And
he was born in Salonika. Now, you have to understand
Salonika was part of the Ottoman Empire back
then. But today it's Thessaloniki in Greece.
Right. So that location is important. It's absolutely
key to understanding him. Salonika wasn't some
dusty backwater. It was a bustling, cosmopolitan,
multicultural port city. It was the empire's
main window to the West. So it was a melting
pot. A total melting pot. You had a huge Jewish
population, Greeks, Albanians, Slavs, Turks,
merchants from all over Europe. Revolutionary
ideas were bubbling up in the coffee houses.
So young Mustafa grew up seeing the stark contrast.
between the dynamism of the West and the slow
creeping decay of the Ottoman state. And I was
reading that there's even some debate about his
family background. There is, yeah. It's a topic
of endless debate. Some theories suggest he had
Albanian or Slavic roots. The more generally
accepted view is that his family were Turkish
-speaking Muslims who had migrated from Anatolia.
But culturally, he was a product of that cosmopolitan
Ottoman Balkan environment. He wasn't looking
toward Mecca. He was looking toward Paris and
Berlin. And what about the name Kemal? Where
did that come from? I found this detail kind
of charming in the source material. He is a nice
bit of lore, isn't it? He was a gifted student,
especially in math, and his mathematics teacher
gave him the second name, Kemal. Which means?
It means perfection or maturity. The common story
is that the teacher did it to distinguish him
from another student who was also named Mustafa.
But some sources suggest it was just because
the teacher was so blown away by young Mustafa's
capability. He was a standout from the very start.
So we have Mustafa Kemal, the perfect student.
He decides to go into the military, which I gather
was the standard path for ambitious young men
in the empire at that time who didn't come from
money. It was really the only path for someone
of his relatively modest background to rise.
The Ottoman Empire was a lot of things, but the
military was one of the few places that was a
genuine meritocracy. And rise he did. was pretty
active. He was involved in suppressing revolts.
He was part of the Young Turk movement. But the
first real gritty combat experience came in Libya,
right, during the Italy -Turkish War. Yes, in
1911. And this is where he gets a significant
injury. He was fighting the Italians near the
city of Derna. There was an air raid, one of
the first in history, actually, and a piece of
limestone rubble from a bombed building struck
his left eye. Ouch. And the injury was permanent.
It was. He suffered permanent tissue damage.
He actually tried to leave the medical facility
early to get back to the front. It just shows
you his tenacity, his drive. Even in later photographs,
if you look very closely, you can see that his
left eye has a slightly different, more strained
look. But the real turning point, the moment
he goes from being just another capable officer
to a genuine national hero, is World War I. Gallipoli.
Gallipoli. Gallipoli is the crucible where the
legend is forged. It's 1915. The Allied powers,
Britain, France, the Anzazis from Australia and
New Zealand, they're trying to force their way
through the Dardanelles Strait to capture the
capital, Istanbul. And if they succeed, the Ottoman
Empire is knocked out of the war immediately.
Instantly. The whole thing's over. Mustafa Kemal
was a commander there, a lieutenant colonel,
and he correctly anticipated where the Allies
were going to land at Suvla Bay. His superiors
disagreed. But he was right. He saw it coming
when others didn't. He did. He rushed his division
to the high ground and held it against overwhelming
odds. He famously told his men a line that has
gone down in history. I do not order you to attack.
I order you to die. That is such a chilling,
powerful line. It is. But it speaks to the absolute
desperation of the moment. He knew that if they
gave an inch, if they retreated, the capital
will fall and the empire will be finished. And
they held. They held on. And that victory, it
basically made him a household name. It made
him the savior of Istanbul. While the rest of
the Ottoman war effort was, frankly, a disaster
on most fronts, Gallipoli was this shining, incredible
victory against the might of the British Empire.
It gave him a level of credibility and fame that
no other general or politician had. Which is
deeply ironic because the empire collapses anyway,
doesn't it? It does. Despite his efforts, the
Ottoman Empire was on the losing side of World
War I, along with Germany and Austria -Hungary.
By 1918, it's all over. The empire is defeated
and the allied powers, Britain, France, Italy,
Greece, they start carving it up like a Thanksgiving
turkey. They don't just take the Arab provinces.
They start carving up Anatolia, the Turkish heartland
itself. Exactly. They occupy Istanbul, the Greeks
land in Uzmir, the French move into the south.
It looks like Turkey is about to be erased from
the map. And this is what the sources call his
George Washington moment, because most generals
would have just accepted the defeat, maybe retired
quietly. But Mustafa Kemal goes. rogue. He absolutely
goes rogue. The sultan's government in Istanbul
is basically a puppet of the British high commissioner
at this point. They're signing humiliating treaties
like the Treaty of Sevre, which basically gives
away huge chunks of Turkish land. So on May 19,
1919, a date that's now a national holiday in
Turkey, Mustafa Kemal lands in Samson, a city
on the Black Sea coast. And his official mission
is what? Officially, he's sent there by the sultan
to restore order and, crucially, to disarm the
local Turkish militias that are resisting the
Allies. But he has a very different definition
of restoring order. Completely. He uses his official
authority as inspector general to do the exact
opposite. He starts organizing a national resistance
against the partition. He defies the sultan.
He defies the British. He starts gathering delegates,
holding congresses in provincial towns like Erzurum
and Sivas, basically laying the groundwork for
a war of independence. Istanbul is not happy
about this. Not at all. They recall him. He resigns
from the army. They issue a warrant for his arrest.
Eventually, when he refuses to back down, the
sultan's government sentences him to death in
absentia. Wow. Let's talk about high stakes.
He's technically a mutineer with a death sentence
hanging over his head. But he's not just a mutineer
anymore. He's building a parallel state. In April
1920, he establishes the Grand National Assembly,
the GNA, in Ankara. Which is deep in central
Anatolia, far from the British gunboats in Istanbul.
As far as you can get. So now you have a diarchy,
two competing governments. You have the old imperial
government in occupied Istanbul, which represents
the theocratic past and capitulation. And you
have the new nationalist government in Ankara,
representing resistance and the will of the Turkish
people. And this inevitably leads us into the
second section of our deep dive, the War of Independence.
Because he's not just fighting political battles
anymore. He's fighting actual armies on multiple
fronts. It's an incredibly desperate situation.
He's got limited resources, no real industrial
base. He has to fight the Armenians in the east
to secure that border. But the main existential
threat is in the west, where the Greek army,
supported and supplied by the Allies, is advancing
deep into Anatolia, right toward Ankara. They
get pretty close, don't they? Frighteningly close.
The climax is the Battle of Saqqara in August
and September of 1921. It was a brutal three
-week -long engagement just miles from Ankara.
You have to imagine the scene. The roar of the
artillery is literally audible in the parliament
building while the delegates are debating. And
this is where he gets the title Ghazi, right?
Yes. The GNA forces, under Mustafa Kemal's personal
command, managed to stop the Greek advance in
its tracks. It was a bloody hard -won victory.
After that battle, the grateful parliament promoted
him to the rank of marshal and bestowed upon
him the title Ghazi. Which means warrior or veteran,
but it has a religious connotation, doesn't it?
A holy warrior. It does. Which is interesting
because here you have this committed secularist,
but he's also a pragmatist. He needed to unite
a very pious population of peasant soldiers.
The title Ghazi. carried immense weight with
him. It framed the war not just as a defense
of land, but as a defense of the faith against
foreign Christian invaders. He knew what symbols
to use. So Sicarius stops the bleeding. And then
comes the final push. The Great Offensive in
August 1922. It's a surprise attack that completely
shatters the Greek lines. The Turkish forces
drive the Greek army all the way back to the
agency, retaking the city of Izmir in September.
That victory effectively ends the war on the
ground. And the Alars finally realized they can't
enforce the partition. They have to deal with
Ankara. They have no choice. The government in
Ankara is the only real power left. So he wins
the war. The foreign occupiers are gone. But
now he turns his sights inward on the very structure
of the state. And this is where things get really,
really radical. Radical is the perfect word.
He doesn't just want to restore the old system.
He wants to tear it down completely. So in November
1922, the Grand National Assembly passes a law.
that abolishes the sultanate. That's huge. That's
over 600 years of Ottoman rule. The House of
Osman just ended with the stroke of a pen. Ended.
The Ottoman Empire is officially dead. The last
sultan, Mehmed VI, flees into exile on a British
warship. Then on October 29, 1923, the Republic
of Turkey is officially proclaimed. Mustafa Kemal
becomes its first president. A historic moment.
But is another shoe to drop? And this one in
some ways seems even riskier, even more audacious
than ending the sultanate. The caliphate. Yes.
This is crucial to understand. The Ottoman sultan
wasn't just a king. He was also the caliph, the
spiritual leader of the entire Sunni Muslim world.
So it's like having a pope, basically, for Sunni
Muslims. In a sense, yes. It was a massive source
of religious legitimacy and tradition that stretched
back centuries. And even after the sultanate
was abolished, the caliphate remained as a separate,
purely religious office. But not for long. Not
for long at all. Mustafa Kemal saw it as a relic,
a political instrument of the past, and a potential
rallying point for his conservative opposition.
He famously said that the new republic could
not be a land of sheiks, dervishes, and disciples.
So in March 1924, just a few months after the
republic was founded, he abolishes the caliphate.
The caliph and his entire family are put on a
train and expelled from the country. That move
must have sent shockwaves through the entire
Muslim world. It was an earthquake. But for Ataturk,
it was a necessary amputation to save the patient.
And this really brings us to the Cultural Revolution,
because once he clears the political deck of
the Sultan and the Caliph, he starts this top
-down campaign to change the daily life of the
Turkish people. And when I say change, I mean
he wants to pivot the entire civilization from
east to west. His goal was, in his words, complete
independence. But for him, that also meant joining
what he called the Family of Civilized Nations,
which in his mind was exclusively Western civilization.
He believed the Ottoman Islamic past was the
source of all the nation's problems, and it had
to be severed. He didn't want to modernize Islam.
He wanted to modernize the state by removing
Islam from the public sphere. Exactly. And that
brings us to maybe the most symbolic of all his
reforms, the Hat Law of 1925. This one always
fascinates people. Banning a hat. Why was a hat
so important? Right. It seems almost trivial,
but it wasn't. It was all about the visuals.
The fez, that red cylindrical brimless hat with
the tassel, was seen by Westerners as a symbol
of the Orient. But within the empire, it was
a symbol of religious and social order. Because
it was brimless, a man could press his forehead
to the ground during prayer without removing
it. To Ataturk, it represented the old, backward
religious mindset. It was the hat of a subject,
not a modern citizen. So he didn't just suggest
people change hats. He made it illegal to wear
a fez. He did. He mandated Western -style hats,
Panama's fedoras, any hat with a brim. And he
led by example. He went on a tour of the most
conservative towns in Anatolia, like Kastamonu,
and deliberately walked through the town square
wearing a white Panama hat. Just to make a point.
It was a direct challenge. He was basically saying,
look at me. This is what a civilized, modern
Turkish man looks like. Follow me. It was a forced
psychological shift. Change how people look to
change how they think. There was resistance,
wasn't there? Oh, there were riots. Some men
were even hanged for refusing to give up the
Fez. It was not a gentle transition. And then
came an even bigger, more fundamental shift.
The alphabet revolution in 1928. This is just,
it's mind -blowing in its ambition. The source
notes that the literacy rate in the New Republic
was only about 10%. And a big reason for that
was the script. Ottoman Turkish was written using
a modified Arabic script. And that was a problem.
A huge problem. Turkish is a Turkic language,
full of vowels. It has eight distinct vowel sounds.
Arabic is a Semitic language whose script is
based on consonants and has only three vowel
markers. The fit was just terrible. It made learning
to read incredibly difficult. It was an elite
skill reserved for scholars and bureaucrats.
So Ataturk's solution was just to scrap it entirely.
Scrap it. He decided to switch the entire nation
to a new Latin -based alphabet, like the one
used in English or French, which was much better
suited to the sounds of Turkish. And he wanted
to do it practically overnight. And that's where
we get that amazing anecdote about the timeline.
Right. He gathered a commission of linguists
and experts and asked them how long the transition
would take. They told him, if we work very hard,
maybe three to five years to phase it in. And
Ataturk said, He replied, we shall do it in three
to five months. And he did. How? How do you even
do that? He became the headmaster of the nation.
He traveled the country with a blackboard and
chalk, literally teaching the new letters himself
in village squares and schoolyards. It was a
massive nationwide mobilization. Newspapers,
books, street signs, everything had to change.
The results were undeniable, though. Literacy
rates skyrocketed. They more than doubled between
1927 and 1940. It was a huge success in that
regard. But there's a cultural cost to that,
right? A massive one. What was the cost? By changing
the alphabet so abruptly, he effectively cut
the new generation off from the entire Ottoman
written past. A child born in 1930 could not
read the tombstone of their grandfather, who
died in 1920. They couldn't read the old imperial
archives, the classic poetry, the religious text.
It was hard reset of the national memory, intentionally
so. He also tackled the status of women with
that same aggressive revolutionary speed. This
is one of the pillars of his legacy. He abolished
polygamy. He did away with the Islamic courts,
the Sharia courts, when it came to family law.
In 1926, Turkey adopted, almost wholesale, the
Swiss Civil Code. Which meant what for women?
It meant that suddenly women had equal rights
in divorce, in inheritance, and in child custody.
This was a complete revolution from the patriarchal
Ottoman system. And he gave them political rights,
too. Yes. Women gained the right to vote and
to run for office in local elections in 1930
and in national elections in 1934. And the source
makes a point of this. This was before France
and before Switzerland. That is just wild to
think about. Turkish women were voting in national
elections before French women were. And he used
his own family as a model for this blue Turkish
woman, didn't he? He absolutely did. He had several
adopted daughters. One of them, Sabiha Goksin,
famously became the world's first female fighter
pilot. Think about the symbolism of that. In
a country that... Just a decade prior was a traditional
Islamic empire where women's public roles were
heavily restricted. Now the president's daughter
is flying a combat airplane. It was an incredibly
powerful message. The new Turkish woman can do
anything. But this all falls under the umbrella
of secularism laicite, as the French call it.
It wasn't just about empowering women or changing
alphabets. It was about removing religion from
the public sphere entirely. The separation of
religion and state was absolute and non -negotiable
for him. He closed the religious orders, the
mystical Sufi lodges, the dervish convents. He
called them places of primitivity and superstition.
He even had the cult prayer? And the Quran translated
from Arabic into Turkish. Which was incredibly
controversial. Why so much? Because for Orthodox
Muslims, Arabic is the sacred language of Islam.
It is the literal language of God's revelation.
Translating the call to prayer, the Izan, into
Turkish was seen by many as a deep sacrilege,
an attack on the faith itself. But Ataturk's
argument was a rationalist one. He said people
should understand what they are chanting and
praying. He wanted a rational religion stripped
of what he saw as superstition and, frankly,
Arab cultural dominance. OK, so we've painted
this picture of incredible, rapid and often brutal
modernization. But we need to look at the other
side of the coin. This brings us to section four,
the shadow side. Because you don't overturn a
society this fast without cracking some heads.
No, you absolutely don't. And this is where the
dictator question comes in. The source material
is very clear on this. While he championed the
ideal of democracy in his speeches, he ruled
through a strict one party system. The Republican
People's Party, the CHP, which he founded, was
the only game in town for most of his rule. There
were some experiments with opposition parties,
weren't there? They didn't last long. They didn't.
He allowed them or even encouraged them on a
couple of occasions. There was the Progressive
Republican Party in 1924 and the Liberal Republican
Party in 1930. But every time an opposition party
started up, it immediately became a rallying
point for everyone who opposed the reforms. The
religious conservatives, the monarchists, the
Kurdish separatists, people who missed the fez
and the caliph. And when that happened? When
that happened, Ataturk decided the country wasn't
ready. for multi -party democracy, and he shut
them down. He saw them as threats to the revolution
itself. And it wasn't just about shutting down
parties. Things got much darker. There was the
1926 assassination plot. Yes. An assassination
attempt against him was uncovered in the city
of Izmir. This became the pretext for a massive
purge of all his remaining political rivals.
He set up these independence tribunals, which
were basically kangaroo courts, and they tried
and hanged dozens of opponents, including some
of the former war heroes who had fought alongside
him in the War of Independence, but who later
disagreed with the speed and severity of his
reforms. So it consolidated his power completely.
It did. It sent a chilling message to everyone.
There is no going back. Do not stand in my way.
We also have to talk about the treatment of minorities
and this concept of Turkification, because the
new republic was built on the idea of a homogenous
nation state. It was. The slogan was Turkey for
the Turks. And this had very serious consequences
for the non -Turkish, non -Muslim populations.
The source mentions the Armenian Genocide. Now,
to be clear, Ataturk was not the architect of
the 1915 genocide. He was at Gallipoli when it
was happening. But what was the new republic's
stance on it? The source notes that his government
essentially granted immunity to the perpetrators.
The new state didn't look back or offer any kind
of restitution or apology. The republic was,
in many ways, built on the demographic engineering
that had already removed the vast majority of
Armenians and Greeks from Anatolia. It wanted
a clean slate, and it wasn't interested in digging
up the crimes of the past regime. And then there's
the Kurds. They were the largest remaining minority.
And the Kurds faced significant repression under
the new centralized Turkish state. There were
a number of major Kurdish rebellions, like the
Sheikh Said Rebellion in 1925, which were framed
as religious and reactionary uprisings and were
crushed with overwhelming military force. And
there was a push for cultural assimilation, too.
A huge push. The government launched campaigns
with slogans like Citizens Speak Turkish, putting
immense pressure on people to abandon non -Turkish
languages in public. They even undertook a massive
project of renaming geographical locations, changing
thousands of Kurdish or Armenian village names
to new Turkish ones. The source specifically
points to the Dursim Massacre in 1937 and 38
as a particularly brutal example. Yes. This is
a military operation against a rebellion by Alevi
Kurds in the Dursim region. The source notes
that Ataturk was aware of the planning and personally
gave operational orders. Thousands were killed,
and much of the population was forcibly resettled
to other parts of Turkey to dilute their demographic
concentration. It was a brutal application of
state power to enforce centralized control and
a singular Turkish identity. And even surnames
became part of this project, didn't they? The
Surname Law of 1934? Yes. It's another one of
those reforms that seems modern on the surface
but had a darker assimilationist side. Every
citizen had to take a fixed hereditary surname,
like in the West. Before that, people mostly
used patronymics, you know, Ali, son of Ali.
Mustafa Kemal himself was given the unique name
Ataturk, father of the Turks. by the parliament.
But for minorities? For minorities, they were
often pressured or forced to take names that
sounded Turkish. You were discouraged from having
Armenian endings like Jan or Greek endings like
Poulos. It was another tool for erasing difference
and forging a single uniform identity. It's just
such a stark contrast. On one hand, you have
this progressive beacon of women's rights and
mass literacy. On the other hand, you have forced
assimilation and violent military suppression
of dissent. That is the fundamental complexity
of Kemalism. It was a project of modernization,
but it was absolutely not a project of liberalism
or pluralism. It was about creating a unified,
singular identity. He believed that for the Turkish
state to survive in a hostile world, it had to
be monolithic. Let's shift gears a little bit
to Section 5, foreign policy and his later years.
Because for a guy who spent the first half of
his life as a soldier fighting constant wars,
his foreign policy slogan was surprisingly peaceful.
Peace at home, peace in the world. And he really,
really stuck to it. This is what separates him
from so many other dictators or strongmen of
the 1930s. You think of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin.
Ataturk did not try to expand Turkey's territory
once the borders of the republic were set. He
wasn't an irredentist. He had no interest in
trying to reconquer the old Ottoman lands in
the Balkans or the Middle East. He even made
friends with former enemies. He did, which was
remarkable. He signed a treaty of friendship
with Greece in 1930. Can you imagine? Just eight
years after his armies had driven the Greek army
into the sea, he's hosting the Greek prime minister
in Ankara. He established the Balkan pact with
Greece, Yugoslavia, and Romania. He understood
that Turkey desperately needed a period of stability
to focus on internal modernization. And he pulled
off a major diplomatic victory with the Turkish
Straits. The Montreux Convention in 1936. This
is a masterstroke of diplomacy. Under the post
-WWI treaty, The Straits, the Bosphorus and Dardanelles,
had been demilitarized and internationalized.
Ada Turk correctly sensed that another major
war was coming in Europe, and he skillfully used
that fear to negotiate a new treaty that gave
Turkey full military control over them. He regained
full sovereignty over one of the most strategic
waterways in the world without firing a single
shot. Now, what about the man himself during
these later years, his personal life? The source
material paints a picture of someone who lived,
well, intensely. He lived incredibly hard. He
was known for being a very heavy drinker, particularly
of Rocky, which is the Turkish Annie's flavored
national spirit. He smoked constantly. He worked
late into the night, often until dawn. He was
an intellectual insomniac, always reading history,
language, philosophy, always debating with his
inner circle. And he had a very brief marriage,
correct? Yes, to a woman named Latif Ushakligil.
She was a well -educated, modern, westernized
woman. In many ways, the very model of the new
Turkish woman he was promoting. But the marriage
was reportedly stormy and unhappy, and it lasted
only two years. It seems he was far more married
to his project, to the nation, than he could
be to any individual. He was a very solitary
figure at the top. And there's that odd little
detail about his name changing again. In 1935,
he briefly changed it. Briefly. This is a great
deep cut for the history nerds. During the height
of his sun language theory reforms, where he
was trying to prove that all languages derived
from Turkish, he changed his name from Kemal
To Kamal, spelled with a circumflex over the
A. He claimed it was an ancient, pure Turkic
word for fortress. But it didn't really catch
on, and he quietly went back to Kamal after about
a year. Just shows you how deeply obsessed he
was with the language project. He was willing
to rewrite his own name to fit the theory. Sadly,
that intense, hard -living lifestyle caught up
with him. It did. He was diagnosed with advanced
cirrhosis of the liver. He spent his final months
in the Dolmabas Palace in Istanbul, the opulent
former palace of the sultans he had overthrown.
He died on November 10, 1938. He was only 57
years old. And that brings us to his legacy,
Section 6, because he dies in 1938, but in a
very real way, he never really left Turkey. He
left behind a country that was utterly unrecognizable
from the one he was born into. In just 15 years
as president, he transformed a medieval agrarian
theocracy into a budding modern industrial state.
The source notes the GDP per capita rose significantly.
He initiated state -led industrialization, building
factories for sugar, for cotton, even for aircraft.
He laid the industrial foundation of modern Turkey.
But the cult of Ataturk that we talked about
in the intro, it's interesting that it actually
got stronger, more institutionalized after he
died. It did. It became fossilized into state
ideology. In 1951, the Turkish government passed
a law, law 5816, on crimes committed against
Ataturk. It is literally a criminal offense in
Turkey to this day to publicly insult his memory
or to damage his statues or portraits. So his
image is protected by law. You don't see that
in many democracies. Almost none. And then there's
that ritual on November 10th. I find this absolutely
fascinating. It is one of the most surreal and
powerful things you can witness. Every year,
on the anniversary of his death, at exactly 9
.05 a .m., the minute he died, air raid sirens
wail across the entire country. And everything
stops. Traffic stops on the Bosphorus Bridge
in Istanbul. People get out of their cars and
stand at attention. Ferries blow their horns.
The whole country, 85 million people, pauses
for a minute of silent tribute. That is incredible.
It shows a level of national devotion that is
very hard for outsiders to comprehend. It connects
back to that name, Ataturk, father of the Turks.
In Turkish culture, the father figure is paramount.
And he is the ultimate father of the nation.
And his global perception is just as complex.
Leaders of the decolonizing third world, people
like Gandhi in India, Bourguiba in Tunisia, they
absolutely adored him. They saw him as the pioneer,
the first leader from the East to stand up to
the Western imperial powers and win. Exactly.
He proved that the West wasn't invincible. He
provided a blueprint for creating a modern nation
state out of the ashes of empire. But he also
had admirers in very, very different corners
of the world. The source mentions Hitler. Yes,
and this is the chilling part of the legacy.
Hitler openly admired him. He called Ataturk
a star in the darkness. What Hitler saw was a
fellow nationalist who had taken a defeated empire,
purged it of what he saw as foreign elements,
rejected an internationalist treaty, and built
a strong, centralized, militarized state. The
methods appealed to him. That's a very uncomfortable
endorsement. It is. But we have to be very careful
here. Ataturk was not a fascist. He rejected
the expansionist racial purity ideologies of
the Nazis and, in fact, kept Turkey neutral during
most of World War II, preventing fascism from
taking root there. But his methods of top -down
authoritarian state building certainly appealed
to authoritarians everywhere. John F. Kennedy
respected him. Winston Churchill respected him.
And yes, the dictators respected him, too. So
when we zoom all the way out, what's the final
takeaway here? I think the takeaway is the sheer
magnitude of his impact. We're talking about
a man who forced an entire nation to jump centuries
forward in a single generation. He changed the
clothes they wore, the letters they wrote, the
laws they lived by, and the very way they related
to God. No other 20th century leader, with the
possible exception of Mao, changed the daily
life of his people so completely and so rapidly.
But the central question remains, and the source
alludes to this very strongly. He built the structures
of a modern democracy, but he ruled as an autocrat
to protect them. And that is the final provocative
thought here. Ataturk believed he had to be a
dictator so that one day Turkey wouldn't need
one. He believed that people weren't ready for
the responsibilities of democracy, so he had
to act as their tutor to force them to guide
them into modernity. He called it a period of
tutelage. So the question for you listening is
this. Can a true sustainable democracy ever really
be established from the top down by a single
powerful authoritarian figure? Or does that benevolent
dictator model inevitably leave deep fractures,
like the intense polarization between secularists
and religious conservatives we see in Turkey
today that last for generations? It's the difference
between building a house and growing a tree,
isn't it? He built the house very quickly, very
strongly, with a clear blueprint. But did the
democratic roots have enough time to take hold
naturally in the soil? That is the question Turkey
is still answering almost a century later. A
fascinating and very heavy question to end on.
Thanks for taking the deep dive with us. Thank
you.