Turkey's PM Erdogan under fire over "ugly to be called Armenian" comment!!..

[Condottiere 40K]

Sounds like they're using the Chinese development model to become the workshop of the Muslim world.

[neoptolemos]

Erdogan is not an extremist. His lyrical waxing about Muslim unity is a cover to sell Turkish tech and construction to their brother countries. Turkey has done very well out of it. Couple this with the "Protestant work ethic" of the Anatolian conservative Turks has propelled Turkey from between 30th to 40th strongest economy to currently 15th ish. Erdogan is a Messenger of the God of Capitalism.

True, very true.

[Mayer]

He did not want to lose power.

Like almost any other politician in the world..
But he was special for having a grand vision for his country (the transformation to a open-minded, literate, secular and industrialized nation) which he succeeded in passing over to the next generation.

He was a classic 1920's dictator like ... Franco

I can't take you serious with such bad comparisons (btw Franco established his dictatorship in 1939, not the 20s).
Franco was reactionary through and through, he led a failed coup against a legitimate parliament republic which turned into a bloody civil war because he disliked popular sovereignty and wanted a return to absolutist monarchy, also he gave the catholic cleric the privileges and control over society back (sth you would probably like to see).
Atatürk on the other hand was a great modernizer and founder of the secular turkish republic, by all accounts the exact opposite.

All wonderful and well, implying the Ottoman state was pure evil and could not be reformed without ethnic cleaning and mass murder.

Although a revolution from above or white revolution was a theoretical possibility, sultan Abdul Hamid II was deeply conservative and had no intention to do such things. Besides, Hamid started mass murder under the glorious banner of Pan-Islamism.

But tell me more on the rights of people to visit their madrassas and their rights to visit their tekke?

I didn't know there was a human right for religious indoctrination

Tell me more on the rights people had to wear a hat of their choosing without being hanged?

Do you know of any incident in which someone was hanged for wearing a hat in a secular nation? Me neither. You are spouting fantasy.
However i know of people stoning people to death for small offenses in religious communities.

The problem with this ideology to create a Turkish national state is a. the presence of the other national groups (who happen to be Christian) and b. the people who they consider to be fit to become a "Turk" but who are not already Turkish speaking people who follow Turkish culture (even though the Ottoman Turkish culture too was different from the culture they proposed). Hench Turkish Nationalism cannot exist without ethnic cleansing and/or forced assimilation (including forced population dispersal, which has been going on against Kurds until Erdogan came to power).

The problem with your argument is, you deliberately forgot to mention that Greece was quite nationalistic too and under its Alexander complex invaded anatolia right after WW1, starting the war of extermination which led to atrocities commited by both sides.

Ofcourse he was a great demagogue. Fact of the matter ofcourse is that his Revolutionaries killed 600.000 Christians and deported most of the remaining Greeks. After this only some Greeks remained in Konstantiyye (later renamed Istanbul in one of his many acts of blatant historical falsifications) and some Armenians in the same city.

and both sides had population exchange as result of the war. Greece had originally a muslim minority of 20% at the end of WW1

He and the Three Pashas before him created the Turkish Nation. There was not such thing as a Turkish Nation during that time. The Turkish speaking members of the Muslim Millet were not a real nation.

Nation is constituted by a group of people sharing a cultural identity like traditions, language, ancestry.
Turkification happend already in Seljuk and Ottoman times.

But let us assume this is the case, what gives this supposed Turkish nation the sole right to the land even though at the time of Atatürks illegal usurpation of the legitimate government in Istanbul like 35% of the inhabitants were not even Turkish? I mean 25% of the population of Anatolia was Kurdish, Lazic or Arab. Also 25% was composed of refugees (muhacir) of whom a large portion was not Turkish (Bosnians, Albanians, Pomakes, Circassians, Abchazians et cetera). I do not include the Christian refugees in Greece and Syria in these numbers. According to Atatürk these peoples have only 1 right, the right to adopt Turkishness.

They were (minus the refugees) subjects of the Ottoman empire, why can't they fulfil their duties for the turkish successor state if they want to stay?
And Atatürk founded a parallel government in Ankara after sultan Mehmed VI dissolved the parliament and signed the humiliating Treaty of Sèvres

Considering Turks were the biggest group they decided that this group should become the focal point. Hench these refugees and later during WW1 also Kurdish refugees were strategically resettled across the Turkish majority areas in order to easily assimilate them. This has worked very well in the end.

Of course the majority were turks, the ottoman empire was a turkish empire. Also resettlement wasn't a invention by Atatürk or 'francophiles', heck even the old byzantines dispersed troublesome groups of people in the same region.

After Abdülhamid was disposed the Ottoman Empire basically ceased to exist, at this point the modernist reformers and social engineers came to power and subjected the people to their designs.

horrible freedoms instead of oppression in the name of islam, how sad.

Truth of the matter is is that after WW1 the CUP elements did not admit defeat and rallied around the banner of their war hero Mustafa Kemal and retook control of the state after the Allies had removed them from power after the Armistice of Mudros.

The entente did not only remove the Committee of Union and Progress, they also played with ideas how to partition the cake like a greater Armenia, living space for Greece, south-eastern anatolia to France, south-west to Italy, the north for cossack settlers from Russia, etc.

But appearantly religious freedom does not apply to Sufi Orders or people who value religious education for their children. For them no such thing existed in his Republic.

children require scientific education to become productive members of society, not spiritual gibberish

He looked at his own people and the state they were in. I think he was infact deeply dissapointed by the state of his people and sought to improve them by creation a Turkish nation based on the French model. He deeply resented "Oriental backwardsness" (unlike most of his fellow countrymen of the time) and implemented his radical policies in order to combat this. He was more extreme in his views than the Three Pashas who were more focussed on creating a homogenous state that could me managed against seperatist minorities. Atatürk was more active on the social front but I am quite sure the CUP would have followed much of the same path if they has won/remained in power in 1914-1918.

Indeed he was, Atatürk gave the turkish people a whole new way of life which opened unimaginable opportunities. C'mon they were illiterate peasants, how could they have any opinion on orientalism when they didn't know of anything else?

They don't but they are not a small group. Infact Erdogan is a Kemalist, just more mild mannered in issues such as cultural behaviour of minorities and religious freedom for muslims.

Nope, he certainly isn't. Secularism is a basic tenet of Kemalism. Erdogan on the other hand instrumentalizes islam and pushes a islamic agenda down your throat.

the laïcism bans religion from the occasion entirely and is an unwise and harmful exercition invented by French mass-murders.

I assure you, there are more than enough recorded incidents of religious inspired mass-murder in human history.

Now Turkey has a third system were the state is certainly free from religious influence but where the state also controls the religion (by operating their own mosques et cetera) and (has) actively used religion in order to further their social designs.

How can a state be free from religious influence when it controls religion and uses said religion to further a social agenda? How is that not religious influence?

You see ghosts. Turkey is hardly islamist or whatever.

Absolutely, you convince me. ISIS fighters are just ghosts who happen to like finding shelter and selling oil in Turkey.

It is much like in Russia were Putin tries to bring back Christian values in the foreground.

Putin attacks same-sex relationships wheras Erdogan supports sex segregation, maybe he secretly brings gay values into the foreground lolol

who has no need for the artificial adoption of European culture (devoid of any morality as it is today I certainly cannot find them blameworthy).

Nihilism and Theocracy aren't the only options

Turkey will be a better country when this Ataturk-cult nonsense will en and constructive criticism for him will be put forward.

and i think it will be a better country when it returns to the course Atatürk envisioned

btw i found this nice documentary about him

Erdogan is a capitalist, a hungry one too and will push Turkish economic interests and trade over everything else.

Even over his own people
"The biannual Society at a Glance report highlighted the fact that the gap between the poorest and richest 10 percent of society steadily increased after 2008. The figures showed that poorer households tended to have less disposable income than they did before 2008, and many experienced prolonged periods of unemployment.
While the economic hardship is felt most acutely among youth and low-income earners, 50 percent of adults in Turkey are out of work.
Ozturk Turkdogan, secretary general of the Human Rights Association, said that among 11 million registered workers, about half earn minimum wages. Meanwhile, there are millions of unregistered workers who are vulnerable to exploitation.
But among the workers who are registered, only 10 percent of them are unionised. Hence the working class of Turkey cannot act together to push for improvements in their salaries and work conditions. For example, last year 1,500 workers lost their lives in work-related accidents. But since unionisation is very weak, most of these cases remained unheard."
http://turkey.setimes.com/en_GB/arti.../07/feature-01

[PointOfViewGun]

Looking at the economic stats and the massive increase in Turkish regional and international power, Erdogan is a capitalist, a hungry one too and will push Turkish economic interests and trade over everything else. Even though neighbouring economies have stalled, Erdogan has presided over a jaw dropping period of growth.
Look at this chart and fear the Turk
http://kushnirs.org/macroeconomics/g...turkey.html#p1

Erdogan is not an extremist. His lyrical waxing about Muslim unity is a cover to sell Turkish tech and construction to their brother countries. Turkey has done very well out of it. Couple this with the "Protestant work ethic" of the Anatolian conservative Turks has propelled Turkey from between 30th to 40th strongest economy to currently 15th ish. Erdogan is a Messenger of the God of Capitalism.

Erdoğan is a short-sighted opportunist. He's after short fixes without any regard for long-term consequences. He's also reaping the benefits of his predecessors projects and policies that came into maturity during his terms. Then you add the natural growth of a developing country and you get that chart.

Turkey had a similar economy size ranking back in 2001 when AKP wasn't in power...

[Edelfred]

They are very concerned about Kurdish separatism .
They will have positive increase in trade due to embargo, sanctions/ - countered- /Concern about Crimean Tartars and Nagorno- Karabakh .
Erdogan antisemitism does not improve relations with US

[Condottiere 40K]

Turkey is entering into a period of economic stagnation, so the electorate went with a known quantity.

[The Noble Lord]

Turkey is entering into a period of economic stagnation, so the electorate went with a known quantity.

In all honesty I think that Erdogan can't be blamed for any coming economic stagnation, it is undeyable fact that during the AKP rule Turkey's economy exploded into
a juggernaut of more than 800 billion. If I remember correctly only in 1999-2000 it was Turkey that was facing a economic bust of sort, and then AKP came and things
turned around, of course it was the almost perfect economic time and there was growth everywhere, but you got to give them credit for making things possible in Turkey!

[Treize]

Like almost any other politician in the world..
But he was special for having a grand vision for his country (the transformation to a open-minded, literate, secular and industrialized nation) which he succeeded in passing over to the next generation.

So did Hitler. If you want to use these kind of agruments to justify brutal repression, mass murder and forced assimilation of millions of people, well good for you but I wont buy it.

I can't take you serious with such bad comparisons (btw Franco established his dictatorship in 1939, not the 20s).
Franco was reactionary through and through, he led a failed coup against a legitimate parliament republic which turned into a bloody civil war because he disliked popular sovereignty and wanted a return to absolutist monarchy, also he gave the catholic cleric the privileges and control over society back (sth you would probably like to see).
Atatürk on the other hand was a great modernizer and founder of the secular turkish republic, by all accounts the exact opposite.

Bring me back to the above point. Seems like many people in this world like to exonerate horrible people because of their "vision" or positive effects of their actions. Hence we have people who think the French Revolution was a great and wonderful thing, how Lenin was not so bad at all et cetera. One thing I would like to awnser. "Popular soveignty"?! Oh my dear God, are you into Rousseau or something? The "General Will" that made the French thugs tie women and children together and drown them in rivers is the source of Atatürk legitimacy? Let me tell you what... He was a usurper himself. He gathered people from the CUP (that had lost power) around him in some little village near Ankara (first in Sivas) and declared to be the legitimate government. Little detail is that the real government was right there in Istanbul (Konstantiyye at that time ofcourse). So how did this man give legitimacy to his usurpation? Well, indeed by claiming to represent the "General Will" (which is a joke used by capricious dictators to justify their crimes) and issueing the death penalty to everybody who rejected the legitimacy of his parallel government. These are facts. It is also a fact that atleast 5000 "political opponents" were hanged by his kangeroo courts. These indeed include monarchists (such a horrible crime really ahum) but also his fellow "modern" chaps such as this one Arif Bey the Bearkeeper. The only thing that made him save a few people like Kazım Karabekir and Refet Bele from hanging was because of their status as war heroes.

Although a revolution from above or white revolution was a theoretical possibility, sultan Abdul Hamid II was deeply conservative and had no intention to do such things. Besides, Hamid started mass murder under the glorious banner of Pan-Islamism.

Abdülhamid was dead when MKA did his coup remember? Other great modernists and modernisers had already come to power in 1908 and subjected the Ottoman population to their beneficial grand designs.
Also Abdülhamid had a very difficult task in keeping everything together under massive foreign encroachment and subversion while his funds were very limited (state was basically bankrupt). So he had to employ Kurdish tribes to fight the Armenian insurrection. These tribes, composed of poor and dumb villagers, used this as an excuse to pillage the rich Armenians and rape their women and stuff. Bad enough but this does not prove he had a grand design to remove all (or most) christians to create a Turkish national state. Also Abdülhamid might has opened a few schools for the children of Kurdish and Arab tribal leaders were they were educated in Turkish but he never had grand designs to assimilate all non-Turkish muslims into a "Turkish Nation" like Namık Kemal for example had proposed. Infact he banished such people from the state.

I didn't know there was a human right for religious indoctrination

Actually human rights do not exist as they are an invention by 18th century pamphleteers but I would like to argue that religious freedom is an important right citizens of a state should have. Religious people in general find it important their children are taught the basics of this faith. So do most Turkish people think Islam is important to their lives. Why do you think Atatürk and his men has to rule by repression and terror? Not because the average Turkish person was "ready" for his "modernism" I am sure.

Do you know of any incident in which someone was hanged for wearing a hat in a secular nation? Me neither. You are spouting fantasy.

Maybe you should do your research.

One of the most interesting figures opposing the “Hat Law” was İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Hodja, an Islamic scholar who made a name for himself in Istanbul’s Darü'l-fünun Divinity School. In an influential pamphlet, “The Imitation of the West and the Hat,” he argued that it was absurd for Muslims to try to dress like Westerners. Mehmed Âtıf’s pamphlet was seen as particularly toxic by state officials who gave orders to detain the scholar immediately. In December 1925 he was arrested and sent to an Independence Tribunal. During his inquisition, Mehmed Âtıf was pressured to repent for his views and at the end of his two-day long trial he was sentenced to death by hanging.

The Hat Law was one of the more laughable attempts to impose "modern European culture" on the largly rural and conservative people in a truely superficial manner. As with most of his supposed modern reforms they were merely superficial. You can impose on people laws and state structures you borrowed from the west just like that but you will miss out on all the subtilities. Here in Europe these things grew in a period of centuries and were not imposed overnight. Hence Turkey has had superficial ""European"" features but in reality it is cleary an Oriental society led a succesion of very autoritarian governments (by our standards atleast).

But then again, you dislike Abdülhamid for being an absolutist ruler with dicatorial powers yet you admire MKA who was also an absolutist ruler with dicatorial powers. Atatürk was a man who reshaped the "Oriental despotism" which he supposedly hated in a new shape, legitimised not by God but by the "General Will".

However i know of people stoning people to death for small offenses in religious communities.

Offtopic.

The problem with your argument is, you deliberately forgot to mention that Greece was quite nationalistic too and under its Alexander complex invaded anatolia right after WW1, starting the war of extermination which led to atrocities commited by both sides.

Strawman argument really. It is true that after the Balkan Wars a great many muslims became refugees. But before the exhange there were still many many Turks in Greece, there are many Turks in Bulgaria even today. Bosnians are still present too just like Albanians. So the ethnic cleanings against greeks in western-anatolia in 1914 was not really provoked I would say. But still after 1918 how many christians had died of were displaced by the grand modernist designs of the Three Pashas? The anwser is a great many. Now I would agree with you if you claim the Sevres Treaty was very harsh on the Ottoman State for two reasons. Now I must add I do believe the treaty was not really unjust considering the extreme crimes the Young Turks had commited and the Turkish population was guaranteed their rights anyway. But still, I have seem the population figures and muslims were a clear mayority in all vilayets. So in this regard it is unjust to give Greek minority regions to the Greek Kingdom. On the other hand the worst acts commited by the Greeks were the result of Atatürks refusal to sign the treaty. He forced their hand to march on Ankara before he could gain more strenght.

But look at the war itself. It was quite clear the Greeks wanted more land that the Smyrna Zone and they did large scale ethnic cleaning (something they never really did in the Smyrna Zone actually, important detail) and destroyed many villages. Meanwhile in the east Armenians wanted to have their own state and this resulted in many (reprisal) attacks against muslim villagers by Armenians armed bands. But the result of all this tragic violence was like 15000 dead muslims. Atatürks people killed over 550000 Greeks and Armenians in their "counter attack".

So we have people doing large scale ethnic cleaning and we have had many massacres commited yet the death toll the other side made was still more than 30 times as high. Now how can that be? The answer is not that Atatürk planned to live in peace with his fellow christian anatolians. This much is clear.

and both sides had population exchange as result of the war. Greece had originally a muslim minority of 20% at the end of WW1

Exactly, two capricious "modern" dictators deciding over the lives of hundereds of thousands of people in such a drastic way, destroying hundereds of ancient communities, their local cultures, local dialects and everything. Only people devoid of any morality will defend such state sanctioned ethnic cleansing.

Nation is constituted by a group of people sharing a cultural identity like traditions, language, ancestry.
Turkification happend already in Seljuk and Ottoman times.

Clearly you did not read what I wrote because what you say is miles away from the reality.

They were (minus the refugees) subjects of the Ottoman empire, why can't they fulfil their duties for the turkish successor state if they want to stay?
And Atatürk founded a parallel government in Ankara after sultan Mehmed VI dissolved the parliament and signed the humiliating Treaty of Sèvres

You think it is acceptable when a government tells entire ethnic groups to overnight drop their culture, language and lifestyles and start acting like wannabe Frenchmen having to speak some heavily modified version of Turkish?

Of course the majority were turks, the ottoman empire was a turkish empire. Also resettlement wasn't a invention by Atatürk or 'francophiles', heck even the old byzantines dispersed troublesome groups of people in the same region.

So you admit Atatürk acted like a medieval caprious theocratic despot? I agree.

horrible freedoms instead of oppression in the name of islam, how sad.

Tell me more on the great freedoms Ismail Enver and his posse gave to Armenians and Assyrians for starters.

And let us not pretend the late Ottoman Empire was such a horrible place anyway. If it was such a nasty place why did the Greeks and Armenians manage to thrive, have European-style education and such? They banned alcohol yet MKA and his friends managed to get drunk on rakı every evening regardless. A horrible place were women were second class yet someone like Halide Edip managed to gain a prominent position and education. Stop with your black and white vision with regards to old fashioned states please.

The entente did not only remove the Committee of Union and Progress, they also played with ideas how to partition the cake like a greater Armenia, living space for Greece, south-eastern anatolia to France, south-west to Italy, the north for cossack settlers from Russia, etc.

Most of that included mandates. Some Turkish intellectuals even welcomed it because they though the Europeans would impose civilisation. Cossack settlers, what?
Anyway as I said I do not agree with this treaty.

children require scientific education to become productive members of society, not spiritual gibberish

I would argue both are important.

Indeed he was, Atatürk gave the turkish people a whole new way of life which opened unimaginable opportunities. C'mon they were illiterate peasants, how could they have any opinion on orientalism when they didn't know of anything else?

Your low opinion on the common people is tale-telling.

Nope, he certainly isn't. Secularism is a basic tenet of Kemalism. Erdogan on the other hand instrumentalizes islam and pushes a islamic agenda down your throat.

Nonsense.

I assure you, there are more than enough recorded incidents of religious inspired mass-murder in human history.

But if you do mass murder in the name of modernity it is all good and well, yes?

When Atatürks men herded thousands of Dersimi's into their houses and lit them on fire this was a neccesary evil for the sake of modernism I assume?

How can a state be free from religious influence when it controls religion and uses said religion to further a social agenda? How is that not religious influence?

The state controls religious institutions but is not driven by religion.

Absolutely, you convince me. ISIS fighters are just ghosts who happen to like finding shelter

This makes the Turkish people mouthfoaming Taymiyya-loving takfiris? Lol. I mean I can find you images of ISIS appearal shops in Istanbul but to claim Turks are anything more than normal Sunni's with an additional love for heterodox poetry is absurd.

and selling oil in Turkey.

What do they do? Roll the drums over the barbed wire?

Putin attacks same-sex relationships wheras Erdogan supports sex segregation, maybe he secretly brings gay values into the foreground lolol

Oh.

Nihilism and Theocracy aren't the only options

Erdogan is not a theocrat. If you want to see true "islamism" at work visit Mosul or Raqqa. Wake me up when Erdogan is beheading Alevi's alright?

and i think it will be a better country when it returns to the course Atatürk envisioned

You want them to return to burning Kurdish villages and expelling hijabi girls from schools?! Please...

btw i found this nice documentary about him

I always thought Atatürk looks a little like Dracula but this black and white movie as convinced me.

[white-wolf]

Bring me back to the above point. Seems like many people in this world like to exonerate horrible people because of their "vision" or positive effects of their actions. Hence we have people who think the French Revolution was a great and wonderful thing, how Lenin was not so bad at all et cetera. One thing I would like to awnser. "Popular soveignty"?! Oh my dear God, are you into Rousseau or something? The "General Will" that made the French thugs tie women and children together and drown them in rivers is the source of Atatürk legitimacy? Let me tell you what... He was a usurper himself. He gathered people from the CUP (that had lost power) around him in some little village near Ankara (first in Sivas) and declared to be the legitimate government. Little detail is that the real government was right there in Istanbul (Konstantiyye at that time ofcourse). So how did this man give legitimacy to his usurpation? Well, indeed by claiming to represent the "General Will" (which is a joke used by capricious dictators to justify their crimes) and issueing the death penalty to everybody who rejected the legitimacy of his parallel government. These are facts. It is also a fact that atleast 5000 "political opponents" were hanged by his kangeroo courts. These indeed include monarchists (such a horrible crime really ahum) but also his fellow "modern" chaps such as this one Arif Bey the Bearkeeper. The only thing that made him save a few people like Kazım Karabekir and Refet Bele from hanging was because of their status as war heroes.

Nonsense.

At your first post you fail miserably.

The struggle against the occupation was done by TBMM (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi), The Turkey Grand National Assembly, The Parliament. The "elected" Parliament members escaped to Ankara, where it is decided to convene after Amasya, Erzurum and Sivas conferences. You would ask why they escape to Ankara. Because the parliament would not agree with Serves treaty and it was raided by British military. Brits caught some and put them prison at Malta. All the strugles done by name of TBBM and Mustafa Kemal got the responsible from the Parliament. The government at Istanbul was a kangroo cabinet not backed by a Parliament.

[Treize]

The government in Istanbul was the legitimate government of the Ottoman Empire. The elected parliament did not flee to Ankara this is nonsense. It is true many members of parliament fled to Ankara at a later stage but the group that originally gathered in Sivas and also in Çankaya was not composed of elected parliamentarians. Forgive me if I get the details wrong but wasn't the TBMM composed of representatives of regions? Infact it was composed from "patriots" who were in sync with the commitee for national defense or whatever it was exactly called that had all kinds of regional branches.

Atatürk was a man who claimed to represent "the will of the Turkish nation" and hanged everybody who dared to take a stand against him. This is fact. He was the Big Boss, not the TBMM which was just a body of flatters and brainless followers for the biggest part. Ofcourse he had some rivals such as Karabekir but they were quickly sidelined if not hanged. With the military succeses his coup succeeded and he usurped the Ottoman state to create a republic out of it, using his goodwill as a war hero to implement his social designs.

[Tureuki]

From the very beginning there were different political stances in the TBMM, they were not simply followers of Ataturk, but its true power is gathered in him, in my opinion, he wished for true democracy but concluded it was too early to the nation(as you know he tried it one time), after all there were still people in country who would cut heads with scimitars for Sharia.

[gastovski]

Kamal is the man responsible making millions of people literally ignorant in one day.

[Tureuki]

Kamal is the man responsible making millions of people literally ignorant in one day.

I hope you're not one of the retards who think people became ignorants because alphabet is changed ? over %90 of the population were already ignorants , in addition to them not knowing how to read and write, they were also not understanding literary language Ottoman elite was using, and its not like knowing or learning old alphabet is banned, nothing is lost, anyone who wish can learn literary language , old alphabet and dig into Ottoman archives.

[Odenat]

Looking at the economic stats and the massive increase in Turkish regional and international power, Erdogan is a capitalist, a hungry one too and will push Turkish economic interests and trade over everything else. Even though neighbouring economies have stalled, Erdogan has presided over a jaw dropping period of growth.

Look at this chart and fear the Turk

http://kushnirs.org/macroeconomics/g...turkey.html#p1

This is a very good chart which explain Turkish politics today. At 2002, when Erdogan won the election, GDP was 232 bn $ and at 2014, it'll probably be about 820 bn $ ! At 12 years, it grew almost 350% ! That's why people keep voting for Erdogan. A growing economy gives better living conditions, better salaries etc ... Even small Turkish villages have 3G internet connection today, people are living much and much better than 12 years ago.

And Erdogan is very good to call for Turkish pride and expectations. Today, almost all Turks believe that in case of war, we can easily invade Greece at 48 hours (which is b** of course) When you pump such a proud people with huge projects, nationalists speech and a good economy, you'll get at every election 50% easily.

And what CHP and MHP can only say is that Sharia is coming, Turkey is on the brink of collapse and Erdogan is a dictator. Than, the voters look around them, look to their economic situation and go to vote for Erdogan.

[Treize]

From the very beginning there were different political stances in the TBMM, they were not simply followers of Ataturk, but its true power is gathered in him, in my opinion, he wished for true democracy but concluded it was too early to the nation(as you know he tried it one time), after all there were still people in country who would cut heads with scimitars for Sharia.

I am not convinced it was a genuine attempt. The other party was popular because they had less extreme views (still in line with much of CHP ofcourse). So the leadership was hanged on false charges with the exception of Karabekir and a few others because of their high standing (pardoned personally by MKA IIRC). This leads me to believe it was more an attempt to create a false opposition to give him more legitimacy for his usurpation. Much like Bashar al-Assad has done by allowing other parties in his parliament. They are tolerated as long as they are weak and follow his line for 95%.

[Heinz Guderian]

This is a very good chart which explain Turkish politics today. At 2002, when Erdogan won the election, GDP was 232 bn $ and at 2014, it'll probably be about 820 bn $ ! At 12 years, it grew almost 350% ! That's why people keep voting for Erdogan. A growing economy gives better living conditions, better salaries etc ... Even small Turkish villages have 3G internet connection today, people are living much and much better than 12 years ago.

And Erdogan is very good to call for Turkish pride and expectations. Today, almost all Turks believe that in case of war, we can easily invade Greece at 48 hours (which is b** of course) When you pump such a proud people with huge projects, nationalists speech and a good economy, you'll get at every election 50% easily.

And what CHP and MHP can only say is that Sharia is coming, Turkey is on the brink of collapse and Erdogan is a dictator. Than, the voters look around them, look to their economic situation and go to vote for Erdogan.

absolutely true. People are pushing this "Erdogan is an Islamist" agenda in the Western Media for a while now, while by his economic policies, one can easily discern he is a neo-liberal. I remember when he sided with Morsi a couple of years ago and his delegation mostly consisted of businessmen and women - Egypt is a massive market for them.

The same for projects in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many homes and places of work in Europe and the Middle East have Beko electricals because of the economic policies he has encouraged. The biggest money they have made however is Telecoms and Construction. These are the gifts that keep on giving. Soon he will be able to export military equipment to most Muslim nations. He has positioned Turkey to be the One-Stop-Shop for all your military needs. If they can get the new Otakars and Altay out on time, they would just need to add a decent low cost fighter, and they are sweet.

[hellheaven1987]

Can someone reject Sharia call himself/herself Muslim?

[gastovski]

Can someone reject Sharia call himself/herself Muslim?

You can't simply reject Sharia. You say you don't want Sharia or don't like Sharia laws but it is like saying that "I am Muslim but i reject Quran, Prophet and Allah". Most of Muslims doesn't know what Sharia is and believe me that's %80 of Muslim population in the world.

[Mayer]

So did Hitler. If you want to use these kind of agruments to justify brutal repression, mass murder and forced assimilation of millions of people, well good for you but I wont buy it.

To be brutally honest, not everything Hitler did was bad.
It just became fashion to denounce Secularism in political discourse by saying how bad Hitler and Stalin were due to their godless ideologies, thus pushing for a religious agenda by making it look like a saner alternative. Which is ironic since Abrahamic monotheism was never tolerant in the first place, causing brutal repressions of people and cultures, mass murders and forced proselytism for centuries.

Bring me back to the above point. Seems like many people in this world like to exonerate horrible people because of their "vision" or positive effects of their actions. Hence we have people who think the French Revolution was a great and wonderful thing, how Lenin was not so bad at all et cetera. One thing I would like to awnser. "Popular soveignty"?! Oh my dear God, are you into Rousseau or something? The "General Will" that made the French thugs tie women and children together and drown them in rivers is the source of Atatürk legitimacy?

Indeed now you are expanding your attack on the idea of democracy and everything the French revolution stands for (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity), because they stand in the way of god's design sigh

So how did this man give legitimacy to his usurpation? Well, indeed by claiming to represent the "General Will" (which is a joke used by capricious dictators to justify their crimes) and issueing the death penalty to everybody who rejected the legitimacy of his parallel government. These are facts.

Fact is that sultan Mehmed VI dissolved the parliament and signed the Treaty of Sèvres (the grave of the nation), losing all legitimacy in the process.

Also Abdülhamid had a very difficult task in keeping everything together under massive foreign encroachment and subversion while his funds were very limited (state was basically bankrupt). So he had to employ Kurdish tribes to fight the Armenian insurrection. These tribes, composed of poor and dumb villagers, used this as an excuse to pillage the rich Armenians and rape their women and stuff.

So, when Abdülhamid fights a armenian insurrection which results in excessive violence, it all ok but when Atatürk does it, it's bad. Ok.

Actually human rights do not exist as they are an invention by 18th century pamphleteers

Evil human rights! They cause Atheism, Nazism and Decadence. Away with them!

Religious people in general find it important their children are taught the basics of this faith.

And why can't they do it themselves? Why do they need public funded schools for child indoctrination with islamic faith?
What's with the parents who don't want this because they are christian or pagan or atheist or have this strange idea that their children should choose a faith they want to believe in?

The Hat Law was one of the more laughable attempts to impose "modern European culture" on the largly rural and conservative people in a truely superficial manner. As with most of his supposed modern reforms they were merely superficial. You can impose on people laws and state structures you borrowed from the west just like that but you will miss out on all the subtilities. Here in Europe these things grew in a period of centuries and were not imposed overnight. Hence Turkey has had superficial ""European"" features but in reality it is cleary an Oriental society led a succesion of very autoritarian governments (by our standards atleast).

It took the bloody Thirty Years war in which protestants and catholics were massacring each other and the bubonic plague till enough europeans became disillusioned with this crap. However if this Shia-Sunni conflict explodes into epic proportions, it might result in a similar loss of attractivity and prestige for islamism.

But then again, you dislike Abdülhamid for being an absolutist ruler with dicatorial powers

Nope, i dislike him for being a islamist prick. I do have a good opinion about enlightened absolutists like Frederick II or Catherine II.

Offtopic.

Hardly, these are practices in islamist societies and Erdogan supports jihadists in Syria and Iraq who create such a society.

Now I must add I do believe the treaty was not really unjust considering the extreme crimes the Young Turks had commited and the Turkish population was guaranteed their rights anyway... On the other hand the worst acts commited by the Greeks were the result of Atatürks refusal to sign the treaty.

Ah, you defend the treaty

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I doubt that your love affair with the Scramble for Turkey will make you many turkish friends

But look at the war itself. It was quite clear the Greeks wanted more land that the Smyrna Zone and they did large scale ethnic cleaning (something they never really did in the Smyrna Zone actually, important detail) and destroyed many villages. Meanwhile in the east Armenians wanted to have their own state and this resulted in many (reprisal) attacks against muslim villagers by Armenians armed bands. But the result of all this tragic violence was like 15000 dead muslims. Atatürks people killed over 550000 Greeks and Armenians in their "counter attack". So we have people doing large scale ethnic cleaning and we have had many massacres commited yet the death toll the other side made was still more than 30 times as high.

Playing with numbers are we? The destruction of Cassaba alone killed more than 30.000 turks and that was only a part of greek scorched earth tactics.
It was Nurettin Pasha who wanted to kill all remaining greek and armenian populations, Atatürk rejected it.

Exactly, two capricious "modern" dictators deciding over the lives of hundereds of thousands of people in such a drastic way, destroying hundereds of ancient communities, their local cultures, local dialects and everything. Only people devoid of any morality will defend such state sanctioned ethnic cleansing.

The League of Nations must be part of the immorality then, since they commissioned the creation of this scheme of population exchange between both countries. It was widely regarded as a humane remedy to the ethnic tensions after the Greco-Turkish war back then, Fridtjof Nansen even got the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

Clearly you did not read what I wrote because what you say is miles away from the reality.

Andrew Mango wrote how turkish nomads intermarried with people of Anatolia and that many locals converted to islam and learned turkish.
By the 1330s most place names had already been changed from greek to turkish. Turkification was a real thing.

You think it is acceptable when a government tells entire ethnic groups to overnight drop their culture, language and lifestyles and start acting like wannabe Frenchmen having to speak some heavily modified version of Turkish?

Strictly speaking, Yes. Atatürk certainly saw the superiority of the high literacy rates, rationalized culture and open lifestyle in western european countries to oriental fatalism.
Besides, modern lifestyle is globalized, you won't be able to revert it unless you cut all connections with the outside world (e.g. ban of the internet) and remove everyone and every organization connected to these lifestyles. And i doubt even that would be successful.

A horrible place were women were second class yet someone like Halide Edip managed to gain a prominent position and education.

She gained her education because her parents sent her overseas to a american college, hardly a argument for the ottoman education system.

Stop with your black and white vision with regards to old fashioned states please.

I don't call theocratic states old fashioned (which would be an insult for many ancient civilizations), i call them ignorant and deluded.

Most of that included mandates. Some Turkish intellectuals even welcomed it because they though the Europeans would impose civilisation.

So you say that when turks adapt european civilisation in a independent state it is bad, but when europeans colonize their country it becomes good? Cool.

Your low opinion on the common people is tale-telling.

When they literally know nothing besides their small life and preachings of the local imam, they are unable to govern themselves and are exploitable by the cleric.

Nonsense.

Erdogan banned the advertisement of alcohol, prohibited the selling of alcohol between 10 pm and 6 am and boasted to use security forces to investigate complains about cohabitation of unmarried students, going so far to label mixed-sex houses as a source of drug trafficking, prostitution and terrorism. How is that not intrusion with a islamist agenda?

But if you do mass murder in the name of modernity it is all good and well, yes?

These modernists normally don't perpetually kill people for deviation from a strict moral code. For the most part they just crush fanatics.

The state controls religious institutions but is not driven by religion.

ridiculous, i don't think you can convince anyone that Erdogan and the AKP isn't driven by religion

What do they do? Roll the drums over the barbed wire?

Turkey's border to ISIS isn't closed, this is how a border checkpoint looks like:

Wake me up when Erdogan is beheading Alevi's alright?

As a matter of fact, most of those killed during the Gezi park protest were alevis and Erdogan verbally attacked Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu for being alevi.
And a PR man of AKP said to journalists that kurds qualify more as turks than alevis, because they are sunni and not heretics.

absolutely true. People are pushing this "Erdogan is an Islamist" agenda in the Western Media for a while now, while by his economic policies, one can easily discern he is a neo-liberal.

Except i fail to see how a capitalist agenda makes him less of a islamist.
I recall that in Afghanistan people were rallied by mullahs against the land reform of the government by saying "Allah decides who is rich and who is not, how can men change this"

[Tureuki]

I am not convinced it was a genuine attempt. The other party was popular because they had less extreme views (still in line with much of CHP ofcourse). So the leadership was hanged on false charges with the exception of Karabekir and a few others because of their high standing (pardoned personally by MKA IIRC). This leads me to believe it was more an attempt to create a false opposition to give him more legitimacy for his usurpation. Much like Bashar al-Assad has done by allowing other parties in his parliament. They are tolerated as long as they are weak and follow his line for 95%.

If he wished he could easily make Ottoman family his puppet and guarentee his power, in fact this way he would have even more popular support, after all he would be both savior and would not kick out Ottoman family which a lot of people were still supporting, so what was the point of all that democracy games if all he wished was power on him ?