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Turkish hagiography and its Western believers and parrotsReader comment on item: Turkey's Islamist Turn, 10 Years Later Submitted by Ianus (Poland), Nov 21, 2012 at 15:28 Dr. Pipes wrote :
Presumably, everybody who has ever dealt with Turkey or any other Oriental land is sooner or later confronted with a pervasive and enervating contrast between reality and fiction when fiction is pressed upon us as reality and reality is simply denied and suppressed on behalf of fiction. This is what comes to my mind whenever I hear the name of Ghazi Mustafa Kemal Pasha aka Ataturk in the mouth of a Turk or a Westerner. Fiction has totally replaced reality. To see why let's compare the laudatory phrases by Dr. Pipes or even better by John F. Kennedy with some of Kemal's own words. I take them from the correspondence between him, his closest collaborators on the one hand and their Soviet allies on the other hand. Kemal was after all looking for and found quite successfully inspiration and leadership in various and most unlikely places. Kemal said among others (p.66) :
And on page 62 we read
How does it compare to Kennedy's soft soap :
Well, Kemal indeed had a very perceptive understanding of the modern world . This is why he survived the death fatwa by the caliph and several assassination plot while Kennedy didn't. This is also why he had the opposition party all hanged in a public square when their free speech became too free and he established a one-party dictatorship instead. The rest of Kennedy's paean reads like a hilarious parody. He says e.g. "I am proud that the United States can be a partner in this alliance linking us to the country of Ataturk and to the ideals which Ataturk helped establish in Turkey and the World." Kemal's ideals revealed personally to J.V. Stalin in his own word included also "the downfall of Western imperialism, the necessary prelude to the destruction of capitalism." Comic effects always set in where fine fiction allied with ignorance tries to replace reality and fails dismally. Submitting....
Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments". Daniel Pipes replies: This is called cherry-picking - finding a few quotes and claiming they have more importance than almost two decades at the top of Ottoman and Turkish politics, plus implementing policies that remain of deep consequence close to a century later. Further, I characterized Atatürk's legacy, not he personally, as one "of looking to the West for inspiration and leadership." I stand by this description. Reader comments (36) on this item
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