What evidence is there against Mustafa Kemal forming the Turkish State?
There’s an old adage about leadership, “Find a crowd going somewhere and get in front of it.” Certainly if it wasn’t for Atatürk, modern Turkey as we know it would not exist. However the fact that his policies and ideas met with such support from his countrymen surely shows that Turkey was already “going somewhere”, heading in the general direction of modernity and Westernization. I’ll just give you three examples: – The Tanzimat, or Ottoman Reform, starting in 1839 was a long and radical process whereby the Ottoman Empire tried to ensure its own future by modernizing itself. A few examples: banknotes (1844), a parliament (1845), establishment of universities (1848), even a stock exchange (1866). They also attempted to fully integrate non-Muslims and non-Turks into a homogenous nation-state through civil, legal and executive reforms. This was quite something for a state which, for religious reasons, had previously divided their people into four religious groups with different rights an
