Lindsay Tanner on Murray Whelan: “Long-term insiders like me can attest to the fact that Murray Whelan actually is the Victorian Labor party. The peculiar composite of naivety, cunning, decency and incompetence that’s reflected in Murray is like a pastiche of my experience in my thirty years as a party member. It’s a pity we […]
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Tags:ALP·Labor·Political Fiction·Politics
In 1934 Atatürk learned that a ship carrying relatives of fallen Allied soldiers had docked near Gallipoli and that its passengers were mounting at the site. He sent them a moving message that is now chiseled, in English translation, into a memorial stone there. “Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives,” he […]
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Tags:Anzac·Australia·Death·leadership·poetry·Turkey·WW1
“I am leaving no sermon, no dogma, nor am I leaving as my legacy any commandment that is frozen in time or cast in stone,” (Ataturk) said shortly before his death. “Concepts of well-being for countries, for peoples and for individuals are changing. In such a world, to argue for rules that never change would […]
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Yet guardians of the old order could honestly say that in their elitism, in their insistence that an “enlightened” vanguard should rule on behalf of the ignorant masses, they were in fact embracing an essential feature of Atatürk’s ideology. He had, after all, given his political party the slogan “For the People, In Spite of […]
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Tags:Democracy·Elites·elitism·Political Communication·Politics·power·Slogans·Turkey
Since time immemorial, Turkish life had been centered on villages and clans small enough that in each there was likely to be only one Abdullah, one Hikmet and one Fatma. Those days were gone, and as a logical result of his Westernizing impulse, Kemal decreed that each citizen must have a last name. The head […]
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Tags:Culture·Surnames·Turkey
In some places I have seen women who put a piece of cloth or a towel or something like it over their heads to hide their faces, and who turn their backs or huddle themselves on the ground when a man passes by,” Kemal (Ataturk) said in one speech. “What are the meaning and sense […]
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Turkey’s experience as an ally of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany was disastrous, with one shining exception. To the astonishment of Europe and the world, in 1915 a Turkish force managed to resist and then repel British-led invaders whose battle plan had been drawn up by no less a personage than First Lord of the Admiralty Winston […]
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While still a young officer, Kemal (Ataturk) became a clandestine operative for a subversive group founded in the 1890s and known as the Committee of Union and Progress; the world called its members Young Turks. In 1913 the committee managed to seize key posts in the Ottoman regime, but war broke out before its work […]
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During postings in Istanbul, Tripoli, Cairo, Damascus and Sofia, and in trips to Germany and Austria, Kemal (Ataturk) became aware of the wider world and the currents that were surging through it. He learned French and devoured the works of Voltaire and Rousseau, together with translations of Thomas Hobbes and John Stuart Mill. They helped […]
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Tags:enlightenment·History·Rationalism
This titanic figure (Ataturk) was born in 1880 or 1881 to a humble family in Salonika, now the Greek city of Thessaloniki, a thriving port on the outer edge of the crumbling Ottoman Empire.
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Tags:Heritage·History·Nationality·Turkey