"The world is divided into armed camps ready to commit genocide just because we can't agree on whose fairy tales to believe." -Ed Krebs, photographer (b. 1951)

"The average (person), who does not know what to do with (her or) his life, wants another one which will last forever." -Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924)
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Sunday, January 23, 2011

Ataturk Was a Secular Nationalist Who Implemented Massacres and Ethnic Cleansing of Millions of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and Other Christian Minorities in Turkey.

In an article called “Saving Aqsa Parvez” in The Humanist magazine (the official magazine of the American Humanist Association) of October 2010, the author Luis Granados said that Kemal Ataturk had brought the humanist revolution to Turkey, implying that Ataturk was a humanist. Granados is wrong about Ataturk, as Ataturk was no humanist.

Rouben Paul Adalian[i] , the Director of the Armenian National Institute in Washington, D.C., and the author of From Humanism to Rationalism: Armenian Scholarship in the Nineteenth Century, the editor of Armenia and Karabagh Factbook, and associate editor of Encyclopedia of Genocide, writes[ii]:

“Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) was the founder of the Republic of Turkey and the consummator of the Armenian Genocide. Kemal was an officer in the Turkish army whose defense of Gallipoli in 1915-1916 defeated the Allied campaign to breach the Dardanelles and quickly eliminate the Ottoman Empire from World War I. … he stayed out of politics until 1919 when he organized the Turkish Nationalist Movement …. 

…. The attack by Kemalist units against the city of Marash in January 1920, which was accompanied by large-scale slaughtering of the Armenians, spelled the beginning of the end for the remnant Armenian population. …. 

The final chapter of the Armenians in Anatolia was written in Smyrna (Izmir) [by Kemalist forces] … in September 1922. … Mustafa Kemal completed what Talaat and Enver had started in 1915, the eradication of the Armenian population of Anatolia and the termination of Armenian political aspirations in the Caucasus.

In 1936 Kemal began to pressure France to yield the Sanjak of Alexandretta, or Iskenderun, a district on the Mediterranean under French administrative rule whose inhabitants included 23,000 Armenians. Preoccupied with the deteriorating situation in Europe, France yielded when Turkey send in its troops in 1938. Kemal died that year having prepared the annexation of the district. His action precipitated the final exodus of Armenians from Turkey in 1939 as most opted for the French offer of evacuation to Syria and Lebanon rather than risk mistreatment yet again.”

[Important aside: In April 1915 the Ottoman government embarked upon the systematic decimation of its civilian Armenian population. The persecutions continued with varying intensity until 1923 when the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by the Republic of Turkey. The Armenian population of the Ottoman state was reported at about two million in 1915. An estimated one million had perished by 1918, while hundreds of thousands had become homeless and stateless refugees. By 1923 virtually the entire Armenian population of Anatolian Turkey had disappeared.[iii] Ataturk’s involvement in the Armenian genocide took place prior to him being designated President of the newly proclaimed Republic of Turkey in 1923, as described above.]

George J. Dariotis, the Supreme President of the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association writes[iv]:

“While Ataturk did shape Turkey into a secular Turkish state, as Turkey's first dictator he did so by committing widespread human rights violations against his own people and by implementing the large-scale massacre and ethnic cleansing of millions of Turkey's Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other Christian minorities.

After his forces had already routed the Greek army out of Asia Minor in 1922, Ataturk's troops perpetrated one of the most infamous and widely reported war crimes against an urban civilian population prior to WWII. According to reports by U.S. Consul George Horton, Ataturk's troops massacred 200,000 Greeks and Armenians in Smyrna (now Izmir), burning this cosmopolitan New Testament city to the ground while Western warships passively watched from its quay.”

P. D. Spyropoulos, Executive Director of the American Hellenic Media Project writes[v]:

"Arguments advocating the collective guilt of Asia Minor's indigenous Greek population and the fact that the mass slaughters of populations and other horrors perpetrated under Ataturk's command were effected during a time of war, should make any decent-minded person recoil in horror: both the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust were perpetrated under cover of war, and these very same arguments have been used by apologists of these and other horrors to alternatively justify or excuse them."

He also writes, “Given Ataturk's pivotal role in the massacre of tens of thousands of Greek Orthodox and Armenian Christians in Smyrna during Kemal's 1922 invasion and destruction of that once-cosmopolitan city; given the fact that Kemal was a high-ranking officer in the Young Turk government when it perpetrated the Armenian and Pontian Greek genocides and that his dictatorship established the Turkish state's official doctrine of denying and covering up these genocides; given that his regime's ethnic cleansing of over a million Greeks extinguished Asia Minor's indigenous Hellenic civilization from an area that it had flourished in for two millennia (see http://www.ahmp.org/1922NYT.html for reports of the 1922 holocaust by The New York Times); given Ataturk's brutal repression of practicing Muslims; and given the fact that Kemal Ataturk is directly responsible for creating the authoritarian militocracy that continues to rank as among the worst human rights violators on earth and as Europe's worst postwar transnational aggressor -- in effect the only nationalist-fascist government to have survived the WWII era to this day -- ….”

In summary, Ataturk was a secular nationalist who implemented massacres and ethnic cleansing of millions of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and other Christian minorities in Turkey. 

Ataturk’s belief that Islam was holding Turkey back from being able to have the power that the Western nations had is why Ataturk chose to follow a dictatorial secular path.  It was a desire for power, not humanistic concerns, that motivated Ataturk.  Secularism (separation of religion and government) is what all humanists and many religious groups support; but secularism in itself is not humanism.

Ataturk is also responsible for the various laws in today’s Turkey, one of which forbids people in Turkey from criticizing Ataturk.  According to human rights organizations, Turkey has some of the worst records for torture, unjust arrests and disappearances, and "unsolved" murders mostly committed by state-sponsored nationalist groups that call themselves "Kemalist", after Kemal Ataturk.

Ataturk’s legacy is secularism, combined with ruthless nationalism, realized with conscious use of fatal force against innocent human beings. For Granados, the author of the article in The Humanist, describing Ataturk as a humanist and omitting mention of the atrocities he committed is much like calling Hitler a great leader and omitting mention of the holocaust. For humanism to flourish, all of us, particularly the American Humanist Association in its magazine, must be careful not to make such harmful associations.

Armineh Noravian
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[Armineh Noravian was a member of the Board of Directors of the Humanist Community in Silicon Valley between 2007-2010, where she served as Vice President in 2008 and President in 2009 and 2010. She was also President of the Silicon Valley Chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and state from 2005-2006, and a member of the Board of Directors of the ACLU, Santa Clara Valley chapter from 2006-2008. She holds a M.S. in Engineering and a M.A. in Applied Anthropology (cultural).]

4 comments:

  1. Ataturk was a Secular Nationalist and one of the first to institute ethnic cleansing as a national policy. His secularist approach was strictly political and he could never be considered, under any circumstances, to be a Humanist!

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  2. Thanks. The facts speak for themselves. Here's a video I recommend. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n_OywOzPcQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player

    Mary Mi

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  3. High Court Declines to Consider Turkish Lobby-Sponsored Bid to Force Genocide Denial into Public Schools: http://www.anca.org/press_releases/press_releases.php?prid=1983

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  4. Mein Kampf, the book Hitler wrote in prison before he rose to power in 1933, has become a bestseller in Turkey. To read more, go to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/mar/29/turkey.books

    ReplyDelete