History - "Turkey Talk"

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), Aug 8, 2010 at 19:41

Hi, dhimmi !

I have come across a curious document from 1933 on Kemalist history education which supports better than anything else your correct conjecture :

"I suspect that the turks are told that history starts and ends with the Turks".

This is what "Time" wrote on new Turkish ideas about history on 25.09.1933 "Education: Turkey Talk"

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,882201,00.html

"Dictator Kemal lately turned to history as taught in the schools. He caused an official textbook to be prepared for cheap and universal circulation. The first volume tells how Turkey passed through the Old Stone Age 5,000 years before Western Europe. The famed Amazons were Turkish women. The early Chinese dynasties, the Indo-European Hindus, the Etruscans, Trojans and Cretans were really of Turkish origin."

Well, it reads like a silly fairy tale , doesn't it ? And in fact this nonsense was exposed at that time by American Professor Walter Woodburn Hyde of the University of Pennsylvania. He had received the translation of Kemal's history textbook from History Professor Edgar Jacob Fisher, dean of Robert College in Constantinople.

When the Turks learned about the leakage and ridicule in America their first reaction was to fire Fisher. And they had a legal tool to fire him because "by the Treaty of Lausanne, all Turkish education is controlled by Turkey's Government. U. S.-founded and U. S.-supported, Robert College must teach the official Turkish history in Turkish. Robert's teachers must be satisfactory to the Ministry of Education."

So whatever you may think otherwise when you are in Turkey you have to repeat the Turkish lies or else ...

Later the Turkish Ministry got an order from above and reinstated him. They had fired him earlier too when he made some critical comments on Turkey to foreign tourists. It seems Turks' dislike for exposing their lies has a very long tradition.

We have read much hagiography on Ataturk and his "bright" legacy from Dr. Pipes' pen. It would be interesting to read an article by him on that shameful legacy of historical lies and myths created by Ataturk too which still dominate the hearts and minds in Turkey.

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