Screenshot, Bild. March 27, 2017.Why did this centre-spread in the BILD newspaper instruct Turkish voters that the founder of their new Republic, Mustafa Kemal “Atatürk” (pictured) would have voted NO in the recent referendum? BILD, owned by the media giant Axel Springer, is the largest circulation newspaper anywhere outside East Asia.
In the first place, understanding what Atatürk was up to confuses many. He followed the ideas of August Comte at the Paris École Polytechnique, mentor to many of the French-trained élite officer corps who helped him carry out the coup in 1908, though not Atatürk himself. It was Comte’s ideas about “rational religion” that he sought to apply to Islamic practice to generate a strict moral code he would maintain was a genetic Turkish characteristic.
This ideology of state supervision by a Soviet-style “Directorate of Religious Affairs”would later be called Ataturkism by 1980 coup leader General Kenan Evren. It could be argued that the straightjacket of Ataturkism, which would not allow for variations in belief (viz. Alevis) or ethnicity (viz. Kurds), together with its aggressive policing, still lies beneath Turkey's divisions today, prompting the political psychosis of what Kerem Oktem refers to as an “Angry Nation”.
