In the past, I had summarized the way I saw Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, with a few posts here:
...A modernising autocrat, who used the justified violence of a revolutionary state to establish a nation with humanist sentiments. In spite of all the efforts by various parties to abuse and capitalize him, he is still loved like a father by millions of Turks, who are not brainwashed idiots, but enlightened masses with sincere feelings...
Austin Bay, who recently published a book called "Atatürk: Lessons in Leadership From the Greatest General of the Ottoman Empire" in the United States, has written an interesting article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, filling most of the gaps in my previous posts about Atatürk.
The article, "Arab Spring demands echo ideals of Ataturk," puts the Turkish leader of 1920s/1930s into a contemporary, international context.
Simply, the article shows that the founder of Turkey is still inspiring for the region, formerly known as the Ottoman Empire, as he was the one to lay grounds for the first democracy of the Middle East.
Everyone in the world, especially in the United States and the Western Europe, should read this article to see that Atatürk is not an idol that should be broken.
For Turkey and the world, he was an idea.
He was the ideal.
Still, he is.
