When I visited Turkey in the late 80s I was told there were still elderly people, educated in the early part of the century, who had learned to read and write using the old Ottoman Arabic script that was swept away by Ataturk's reforms. Many of them never became literate in the new alphabet. That was a small part of Ataturk's legacy - secularism imposed from above at great human cost. Listen to the
interview with Ece Temelkuran that I posted on the Armenian genocide thread for an idea of Ataturk's legacy for Turkish society as a whole.
It's worth bearing in mind what Hitler had to say:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/11/24/the-20th-century-dictator-most-idolized-by-hitler.htmlA decade on, in 1933, Hitler would tell the Turkish daily Milliyet that Atatürk was, in his words, “the greatest man of the century,” and confess to the paper that in the “dark 1920s” “the successful struggle for liberation that [Atatürk] led in order to create Turkey had given him the confidence that the National Socialist movement would be successful as well.” Hitler called the Turkish movement his “shining star.” In 1938, on his birthday, Hitler would tell journalists and politicians that “Atatürk was the first to show that it is possible to mobilize and regenerate the resources that a country has lost. In this respect Atatürk was a teacher. Mussolini was his first and I his second student.”
The fascism of the 1930s was also, in part, the legacy of Ataturk.
http://www.amazon.com/Atatürk-Nazi-Imagination-Stefan-Ihrig/dp/0674368371/Early in his career, Adolf Hitler took inspiration from Benito Mussolini, his senior colleague in fascism—this fact is widely known. But an equally important role model for Hitler and the Nazis has been almost entirely neglected: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. Stefan Ihrig’s compelling presentation of this untold story promises to rewrite our understanding of the roots of Nazi ideology and strategy.
Hitler was deeply interested in Turkish affairs after 1919. He not only admired but also sought to imitate Atatürk’s radical construction of a new nation from the ashes of defeat in World War I. Hitler and the Nazis watched closely as Atatürk defied the Western powers to seize government, and they modeled the Munich Putsch to a large degree on Atatürk’s rebellion in Ankara. Hitler later remarked that in the political aftermath of the Great War, Atatürk was his master, he and Mussolini his students.
This was no fading fascination. As the Nazis struggled through the 1920s, Atatürk remained Hitler’s “star in the darkness,” his inspiration for remaking Germany along nationalist, secular, totalitarian, and ethnically exclusive lines. Nor did it escape Hitler’s notice how ruthlessly Turkish governments had dealt with Armenian and Greek minorities, whom influential Nazis directly compared with German Jews. The New Turkey, or at least those aspects of it that the Nazis chose to see, became a model for Hitler’s plans and dreams in the years leading up to the invasion of Poland.
Topic: The legacy of Ataturk