Comment by katamari-damacy
4 days ago
Erdogan is a war criminal too. And I’m sure the ones before him were not much more enlightened about this issue. I wonder what Ataturk thought about the Armenian genocide. I will google that to get educated on what he thought because he is about the only leader in Turkey’s history including Ottoman history that deserves respect.
>And I’m sure the ones before him were not much more enlightened about this issue.
They weren't. Ataturk was literally part of the secular CUP movement which committed the genocide. That secular party also known as the "Young Turks" did not see themselves as Ottomans but Turks only. Atatürk needed international legitimacy for the new Turkish Republic that's why he tried to distance himself from the CUP leadership although he was part of the military-political establishment that enabled the CUP's rise.
While not directly involved in the genocide, he was part of the system that allowed it. His later condemnations of CUP leaders came when their policies had been thoroughly discredited. Part of Ataturk's "modernization" efforts included suppressing discussion of the genocide. The official Turkish position of genocide denial was essentially established during his rule.
Ataturk tried to whitewash the "Young Turks" and give them a "fresh start" by propagating a false narrative that blamed the crimes on the "Ottoman identity" so their "new identity" of "pure Turk" has a clean slate because Atatürk needed international legitimacy for the new Turkish Republic.
Wow thank u for this. Ottoman history is part of my history. May my paternal grandfather was in the same army class as Ataturk and some point one of my cousins had a letter addressed to him from Ataturk sent to all his former classmates calling to join the rebellion and my grandfather refused saying he was loyal to the state. We come from an old Ottoman tribe that settled in Kirkuk (now Kurdistan) and my grandfather was then guven land in Babel (Babylon) where my dad was born. Long painful and very interesting history. My dad’s maternal grandfather protected the Jews from pogoms in the 1940s under British rule (paid for police protection for entire neighbourhoods) and remembered by history, including surprisingly as corroborated by ChatGPT.