Atatürk, Kemal, 1881-1938; Turkey -- Description and travel; Turkey -- Politics and government -- 1918-1960
Great events create great men, and it is but once in the life of a
nation that situations so grave as that which found Mustapha Kemal are
ever likely to arise. He rose out of the terror of the Hamidian régime,
the years that followed, and the humiliation of _occupied_ Smyrna. It
needed, however, the suffering and sorrow to which all reformers must
serve their apprenticeship to mould his character and to bring him where
he now stands. It was the long-suffering martyrdom one saw in the face
of his late mother that forced him to realise what he must do, and he
has never faltered from the goal.
Only here, beside them, can one understand all the Government has had to
do in Angora, and see for oneself how the whole flock still look to this
one man for courage and inspiration. Had _he_ lost faith in the goal or
in his capacity to reach it, all would have been lost. “Freedom for
Turkey or death for the Turks” has been his motto throughout the years.
I suppose that, however often one may proclaim it, they will not believe
who have not seen, a new Turkey is born into the world. It is, indeed,
idle to weep over the days that are dead and gone, when the Turk counted
for nothing in his own land; when the foreigner ruled the roost, and
ambassadors were princes! The new Turk has arrived; the member of a new
nation. No important demand was made at Lausanne by Turkey that any
self-respecting people could be asked to forgo.
And yet the Powers are still attempting to treat with “old” Turkey! We
have no longer to maintain our officious, if well-meant, interference on
behalf of disloyal minorities; to insist, _par exemple_, that Christians
shall be exempted from military service, as America never exempted her
negro population.
[Illustration:
THE GHAZI MUSTAPHA KEMAL PASHA.
PRESIDENT OF THE GRAND NATIONAL ASSEMBLY, ANGORA.
(Signed portrait presented to the Author).
p. 160
]
No wonder, again, M. Kemal has been more than tempted to wish (what, for
no other reason, he could desire) to abolish religion altogether, after
the imposition upon Constantinople of that arch-intriguer the Greek
Patriarch! When France and Italy recognised the “State” Church for the
parasite that may, at any moment, suck up its life-blood, they cast the
Church aside. Confronted at the very outset by a precisely similar
danger, Mustapha Kemal at once cut off the Khalifat from the Assembly
and considerably limited the power of the Hodjas, a far more difficult
operation than French disestablishment. Yet we expect him a second time
to expose himself to the intrigues of a Greek Patriarch!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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