ATATURK vs ERDOGAN? And why?

Question

nightdrot · Accepted Answer

Not even a close call. Ataturk by a country mile.

Ataturk, for whatever his considerable sins and imperfections, sought to reorient his country to confront the upheavals of a century that was unkind to tradition and order. He attempted to ground his country in an identifiable nationalism - a sense of identity - but that was adapted to its' era. The sultanate was discredited and the caliphate not well suited to an oncoming secular era. Faith laying in the ruins of a lost world war, and therefore no longer sufficient as a socially unifying force.

By contrast, Mr. Erdogan brings, in terms of governing, all of Ataturk's sins but none of his assets. Mr. Erdogan being little more than a populist with no greater vision than to ground his people in a forlorn nostalgia and religious fundamentalism that will - as all fundamentalisms tend to do - crash on the rocks of modernity.

Thus Turkey gets from Mr. Erdogan the worst of all possible worlds. An autocrat - complete with the suppression including one of the worst records on press freedom in the world - who looks resolutely backward. Who plays to the Turkish public's - especially the rural public's - insecurities and sense of nostalgia for the tropes of a simpler time without offering any forward vision. Thus he divides society.

To be sure, Ataturk was no saint. His was hardly a cuddly and loveable democracy in the Western sense. This made worse by a certain bent toward social engineering. Using his people as guinea pigs in a grand social experiment.

However, Ataturk offered a sense of national identity and pointed it toward the future. He saw, however dimly, the shape of the century to come and he set his country on a course to prosper in it. This he largely accomplished, Turkey surviving the great ideological contests of the 20th century - World War II and the Cold War. The former as a careful neutral, the latter allied to the West in NATO and thus preserving Turkey from being reduced to a mere satellite of its historic enemy - the USSR as Russia was from 1917 to 1991.

Ataturk's project faltering into the populist resentments of Erdogan only as the end of ideological contest was replaced by an economic globalization that strained the gap between urban and rural populations. The former adapting to the economic environment, the latter - not without reason - rejecting the effect that environment was having on its traditional values and way of life.

It being arguable that were Ataturk alive today that he could have bridged that gap and not simply allowed the country to fall back into Mr. Erdogan's hopeless populism. The later the politics of envy and resentment, tarted up in a pious if paper thin religiosity. It to be regretted that Ataturk's later successors were not the equal of their times. Though then again that seems to be a phenomenon across large swathes of the Western world - see also the likes of Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden in the United States.

It is axiomatic that the clock can never be fully turned back. That the best leaders are those who strike the balance between their society's timeless principles and its' current circumstances. As the 18th century British statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke put it, "In that case, Prudence (in all things a Virtue, in Politicks the first of Virtues) will lead us rather to acquiesce in some qualified plan that does not come up to the full perfection of the abstract Idea, than to push for the more perfect, which cannot be attain'd without tearing to pieces the whole contexture of the commonwealth, and creating an heart-ache in a thousand worthy bosoms. In that case combining the means and end, the less perfect is the more desirable."

CONT.

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Doesn't matter because we are forever Master of the Turks.

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Erdogan is taking a beautiful country and making it more Arab and less western. He is ruining it.

Anonymous · Answer

Ataturk never hot over the Shame of his surrender &defeat in ww1Turks still feel shame over the occupation by British forces who had their way with their great grandmother's while their great grandfather's watched powerless jerking off in the corner using their salty tears as lube knowing the British would forever be their masters

Frontier-Man · Answer

Ataturk, he was able to reverse the declining power of Turkey and set it back on its feet. Erdogan doesn't really seem to be doing a whole lot in comparison.