German and Italian fascism failed. Turkish fascism has been a success.

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), May 23, 2008 at 15:30

No Sharia, you wrote : If you care to remember modern Turkey's past, you may well know that at its very inception between 1919-1924 Turkey was conceived and engineered by Gazi Mustafa Kemal Pasha as a pure fascist state, based on his own personal dictatorship ( later reinforced by his personality cult), one-party-system, mock democracy and terror as a normal way of solving political and social problems in the country. Trade Unions were forbidden, freedom of speech never existed under him or his successors. (A Turkish proverb says that the most dangerous profession in Turkey is journalism).

Criticizing Kemal's wisdom was paramount to suicide as many a bold or uncautious person had to learn. Any form of opposition to Kemal's ruthless Turkification policy was punished barbarously. He personally exterminated not just the Greeks in Smyrna and Pontus, but the Kurds who rebelled as he had cancelled their very right to exist in Turkey as non-Turks.

He didn't hesitate to impose a forcibly "purified" language upon his subjects together with his totally mad historical theories of the racial and cultural superiority of the Turks which now dominate Turkish curricula and minds. Kemalist Turkey has always been a more or less overt military dictatorship with totalitarian ideology, contempt of the ruling military caste for democratic and civilian insitutions and for any freedom of speech.

This military caste has staged three coups d'etat, many a bloody pogrom, has stood behind incessant political murders and plots which have been such a typical aspect of political life in Turkey. If all of that is not fascism, then I do not really know what fascism might be at all. "Turkish democracy" in your mouth sounds very fine and sublime but it has always been a ghost without a real body to dwell in, a miscarriage of history. If this wraith of democracy is being replaced now by a sanguine archaic Islamic dictatorship, then the metamorphosis is the most natural and logical one. The corrupt Turkish body has been waiting for a right soul to enter and rule it and it has come at last.

Democracy - a Greek concept-was not invented to live and thrive in Turkey. In Turkey as we know it only fascism is possible - be it Kemalist fascism or Islamic fascism.

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