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(from a socialist perspective...) (OK OK - still some valid points...)
75 years of the Turkish Republic
A balance sheet of Kemalism
By Justus Leicht
17 November 1998
exerpts
The founder of modern Turkey has become a somewhat of cult figure in the country. There has been hardly any critical appraisal of his role and that of "Kemalism", nor of the principles on which the state was founded.
The essence of Kemalism was the unity and independence of the country, secularism and republican principles (i.e., the separation of state and religion), modernisation and the creation of a society without classes and privileges. It is obvious that none of this has been realised.
Nothing remains either of Atatürk's principle of "Halkçilik", which means a policy in the interests of the people and the denial of class contradictions. Unemployment and poverty have exploded over the last years...
In the cities, a large part of the population live in slums. Many of these slum-dwellers are refugees from the Kurdish areas of south-east Turkey, where a murderous war has "preserved national unity" at a cost of tens of thousands of lives. At the same time, it is has become clear that the state, the mafia and extreme right-wing death squads are closely linked.
Not a single pledge or ideal of Kemalism has been realised.
History
The decay of the Ottoman Empire was already quite advanced in the nineteenth century.
the Sultans feared the growth of a working class
The exploitation of the peasantry by the feudal lords and the moneylenders (not infrequently one and the same person) rose enormously. An 1858 law permitting private ownership of land meant they were able to acquire large land holdings and to strengthen their position against the Sultan. The money they squeezed out of the peasants was often "invested" in buying posts in the state apparatus, the army or clergy.
There was practically no significant productive bourgeois layer opposed to the old feudal system. For this reason, the leadership of the first revolution in 1908 was composed of army officers, the so-called Young Turks--"Yeni osmanhlar".
Instead of mobilising the people against imperialism, they surrendered to Prussian militarism, and entered the First World War on the side of the German Empire.
A solution to the national question through the voluntary unification of all nationalities and religions--unthinkable without a federal structure and democracy and above all a serious appeal to the bonded peasant masses--soon gave way to the ideology of Pan-Islamism, and then racist Pan-Turkism, or Turanianism. In 1915 the government of the Young Turks, supported by German officers and the Kurdish tribal chiefs, organised a violent pogrom of the Armenians, that lead to hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians being slain.
Mustafa Kemal
He proclaimed a counter-government to the Sultan in Istanbul and waged a three-year war of liberation.
As with the Young Turks, in Kemal's 1920 "Grand National Assembly" and government, corresponding to the weakness of the Turkish bourgeoisie (my note: as that had been almost entirely Armenians and Greeks...), it was the big landowners and officers who set the tone. Kemal appealed to Islam, and declared the "person of the Caliph and Sultan is sacred and inviolable" (Quoted in Baku, Congress of the Peoples of the East, Stenographic Report, London 1977, p. 32). He spoke of the "fraternity of the Turks and Kurds" in the struggle against the "unbelievers" (Greeks, Britons, Armenians). He appealed also, with almost communist-sounding rhetoric, to the workers and peasants. He promised the peasants land, to grant the workers their rights and the Kurds autonomy.
...he sought and received generous military and diplomatic aid from the young Soviet Union. In a telegram to the Soviet government at the end of November 1920, he employed the following demagogy: "I am deeply convinced, and my conviction is shared by all my compatriots, that, on the day when the workers of the west on the one hand, and the enslaved people of Asia and Africa on the other, understand that at the present time international capital is using them to annihilate and enslave one another for the exclusive benefit of their masters, and on the day when consciousness of the wickedness of a colonial policy penetrates the hearts of the toiling masses of the world, the power of the bourgeoisie will end" (Quoted in E.H. Carr's The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 3, Penguin, 1973, p. 296).
In reality, the longer the liberation struggle lasted and the nearer victory approached, the more right wing became Kemal's policies, since he feared the independent actions of the workers and peasants above all.
At the beginning of 1921 he had the entire leadership of the recently founded Turkish Communist Party killed. With increasing military success he murdered socialists, left-wingers and radical peasant leaders. Following the founding of the republic he acted against strikes and persecuted the establishment of trade unions. He banned the Kurds from using their own language.
The only feudal lords against whom the new government proceeded harshly were the once privileged Aças and the Kurdish tribal chiefs. Apart from those that collaborated with Ankara, they were forcibly deported to predominantly Turkish regions, like hundreds of thousands of Kurdish peasants. Together with those from the Islamic orders and other formerly privileged layers, they led many uprisings against Ankara's brutal policy of enforced assimilation. These uprisings were bloodily defeated and were used to justify even greater political repression.
...the inclusion of a modernised Islam into Turkish nationalism. The state and the clergy were not completely separated. Rather the priesthood was placed under state supervision and paid by the state. Atatürk's successors have since pushed Islamisation even further.
Ideologically, Ziya Gökalp, one of Kemal's most important theoreticians, formulated this symbiosis of religion and nation. Amongst other things, he sought the translation of the Koran into Turkish...
The modernisation of Turkey inevitably created the very thing both the Sultans and Caliphs feared most: the significance of agriculture decreased, the mass of the peasantry became increasingly impoverished, and in the cities a working class arose which has been increasingly militant since the 1970s.
At approximately the same time, the malignant forces were growing which play such a fatal role in the Turkish state today. The journalist Serdar Çelik writes: "Along with the social divisions and social movement of the 1970s in Turkey, there began a concentration of drug and black market weapons dealers into a form of mafia. They usually enjoyed close relations with the MIT [secret service], the police, the ÖHD [Office of Special War Operations, the Turkish arm of the NATO secret organisation Gladio], and above all the MHP [the fascist party also known as the "Grey Wolves"]. These Turkish drugs and weapons gangs financed many MHP militants. Following a military coup, almost all the gang chiefs were interrogated, some were killed. Those remaining were under the ÖHD-controlled mafia. With this development, the MHP militants became, over time, the most effective mafia grouping throughout Europe" (Fikrit Aslan and others, The Special War of the Turkish State in Kurdistan and the Role of the MHP, in The Grey Wolves Howl Once More, Münster 1997, p. 115).
Through systematic state terror, the military destroyed the resistance of the workers organisations.
To counter the increasing social polarisation that ensued, Turkish governments, military and civilian, relied to a lesser or greater extent on nationalism, state repression or the right-wing extremist murder gangs, and also on a further systematic Islamisation.
The rise of Islamic fundamentalism follows the very logic of Kemalism. Incapable of resolving the social and national problems, it utilises Islam as a weapon against the movements of the impoverished and oppressed masses.
The central points of many of the demands from organisations like the Welfare Party (my note: now Victory party) and the MHP, which call for a return to Islam, or the resurrection of the Ottoman Empire, resemble those which the Kemalists used to propagate but never realised: national unity and independence, economic development, public welfare, the symbiosis of Turkish nationalism and Islam.
To present Erbakan (my note: or Edryogan) and the MHP-mafia as the "heirs" of Atatürk is one of history's baneful ironies.
75 years of the Turkish Republic
A balance sheet of Kemalism
By Justus Leicht
17 November 1998
exerpts
The founder of modern Turkey has become a somewhat of cult figure in the country. There has been hardly any critical appraisal of his role and that of "Kemalism", nor of the principles on which the state was founded.
The essence of Kemalism was the unity and independence of the country, secularism and republican principles (i.e., the separation of state and religion), modernisation and the creation of a society without classes and privileges. It is obvious that none of this has been realised.
Nothing remains either of Atatürk's principle of "Halkçilik", which means a policy in the interests of the people and the denial of class contradictions. Unemployment and poverty have exploded over the last years...
In the cities, a large part of the population live in slums. Many of these slum-dwellers are refugees from the Kurdish areas of south-east Turkey, where a murderous war has "preserved national unity" at a cost of tens of thousands of lives. At the same time, it is has become clear that the state, the mafia and extreme right-wing death squads are closely linked.
Not a single pledge or ideal of Kemalism has been realised.
History
The decay of the Ottoman Empire was already quite advanced in the nineteenth century.
the Sultans feared the growth of a working class
The exploitation of the peasantry by the feudal lords and the moneylenders (not infrequently one and the same person) rose enormously. An 1858 law permitting private ownership of land meant they were able to acquire large land holdings and to strengthen their position against the Sultan. The money they squeezed out of the peasants was often "invested" in buying posts in the state apparatus, the army or clergy.
There was practically no significant productive bourgeois layer opposed to the old feudal system. For this reason, the leadership of the first revolution in 1908 was composed of army officers, the so-called Young Turks--"Yeni osmanhlar".
Instead of mobilising the people against imperialism, they surrendered to Prussian militarism, and entered the First World War on the side of the German Empire.
A solution to the national question through the voluntary unification of all nationalities and religions--unthinkable without a federal structure and democracy and above all a serious appeal to the bonded peasant masses--soon gave way to the ideology of Pan-Islamism, and then racist Pan-Turkism, or Turanianism. In 1915 the government of the Young Turks, supported by German officers and the Kurdish tribal chiefs, organised a violent pogrom of the Armenians, that lead to hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians being slain.
Mustafa Kemal
He proclaimed a counter-government to the Sultan in Istanbul and waged a three-year war of liberation.
As with the Young Turks, in Kemal's 1920 "Grand National Assembly" and government, corresponding to the weakness of the Turkish bourgeoisie (my note: as that had been almost entirely Armenians and Greeks...), it was the big landowners and officers who set the tone. Kemal appealed to Islam, and declared the "person of the Caliph and Sultan is sacred and inviolable" (Quoted in Baku, Congress of the Peoples of the East, Stenographic Report, London 1977, p. 32). He spoke of the "fraternity of the Turks and Kurds" in the struggle against the "unbelievers" (Greeks, Britons, Armenians). He appealed also, with almost communist-sounding rhetoric, to the workers and peasants. He promised the peasants land, to grant the workers their rights and the Kurds autonomy.
...he sought and received generous military and diplomatic aid from the young Soviet Union. In a telegram to the Soviet government at the end of November 1920, he employed the following demagogy: "I am deeply convinced, and my conviction is shared by all my compatriots, that, on the day when the workers of the west on the one hand, and the enslaved people of Asia and Africa on the other, understand that at the present time international capital is using them to annihilate and enslave one another for the exclusive benefit of their masters, and on the day when consciousness of the wickedness of a colonial policy penetrates the hearts of the toiling masses of the world, the power of the bourgeoisie will end" (Quoted in E.H. Carr's The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 3, Penguin, 1973, p. 296).
In reality, the longer the liberation struggle lasted and the nearer victory approached, the more right wing became Kemal's policies, since he feared the independent actions of the workers and peasants above all.
At the beginning of 1921 he had the entire leadership of the recently founded Turkish Communist Party killed. With increasing military success he murdered socialists, left-wingers and radical peasant leaders. Following the founding of the republic he acted against strikes and persecuted the establishment of trade unions. He banned the Kurds from using their own language.
The only feudal lords against whom the new government proceeded harshly were the once privileged Aças and the Kurdish tribal chiefs. Apart from those that collaborated with Ankara, they were forcibly deported to predominantly Turkish regions, like hundreds of thousands of Kurdish peasants. Together with those from the Islamic orders and other formerly privileged layers, they led many uprisings against Ankara's brutal policy of enforced assimilation. These uprisings were bloodily defeated and were used to justify even greater political repression.
...the inclusion of a modernised Islam into Turkish nationalism. The state and the clergy were not completely separated. Rather the priesthood was placed under state supervision and paid by the state. Atatürk's successors have since pushed Islamisation even further.
Ideologically, Ziya Gökalp, one of Kemal's most important theoreticians, formulated this symbiosis of religion and nation. Amongst other things, he sought the translation of the Koran into Turkish...
The modernisation of Turkey inevitably created the very thing both the Sultans and Caliphs feared most: the significance of agriculture decreased, the mass of the peasantry became increasingly impoverished, and in the cities a working class arose which has been increasingly militant since the 1970s.
At approximately the same time, the malignant forces were growing which play such a fatal role in the Turkish state today. The journalist Serdar Çelik writes: "Along with the social divisions and social movement of the 1970s in Turkey, there began a concentration of drug and black market weapons dealers into a form of mafia. They usually enjoyed close relations with the MIT [secret service], the police, the ÖHD [Office of Special War Operations, the Turkish arm of the NATO secret organisation Gladio], and above all the MHP [the fascist party also known as the "Grey Wolves"]. These Turkish drugs and weapons gangs financed many MHP militants. Following a military coup, almost all the gang chiefs were interrogated, some were killed. Those remaining were under the ÖHD-controlled mafia. With this development, the MHP militants became, over time, the most effective mafia grouping throughout Europe" (Fikrit Aslan and others, The Special War of the Turkish State in Kurdistan and the Role of the MHP, in The Grey Wolves Howl Once More, Münster 1997, p. 115).
Through systematic state terror, the military destroyed the resistance of the workers organisations.
To counter the increasing social polarisation that ensued, Turkish governments, military and civilian, relied to a lesser or greater extent on nationalism, state repression or the right-wing extremist murder gangs, and also on a further systematic Islamisation.
The rise of Islamic fundamentalism follows the very logic of Kemalism. Incapable of resolving the social and national problems, it utilises Islam as a weapon against the movements of the impoverished and oppressed masses.
The central points of many of the demands from organisations like the Welfare Party (my note: now Victory party) and the MHP, which call for a return to Islam, or the resurrection of the Ottoman Empire, resemble those which the Kemalists used to propagate but never realised: national unity and independence, economic development, public welfare, the symbiosis of Turkish nationalism and Islam.
To present Erbakan (my note: or Edryogan) and the MHP-mafia as the "heirs" of Atatürk is one of history's baneful ironies.