From Atatürk to Erdoğan (II)

The other day, an interesting email dropped into my inbox. It included a scanned page from the Los Angeles Examiner dated Aug. 1, 1926. One of the headlines was particularly notable, for it read: “Kemal Promises More Hangings of Political Antagonists in Turkey.” The “Kemal” in question was Turkey’s founder and first president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who was then busy with crushing the “conspirators” against his rule.

The paper quoted Atatürk (who was still called “Kemal Pasha” at the time) as saying: “I shall not stop until every guilty person, no matter how high his rank, has been hung from the gallows as a grim warning to all incipient plotters against the security of the Turkish Republic.”

These “plotters,” Mustafa Kemal explained, were of two kinds. One was “the group who combined religious fanaticism and ignorance with political imbecility.” Their main crime was staying loyal to the Caliph-Sultan, the very leader of the ancient regime that Ataturk did away with. “I crushed them with an iron hand,” Kemal Pasha proudly said to the Los Angeles Examiner reporter. “For example, [I] had over sixty of their leaders hanged at dawn.”

The second group of “plotters” consisted of the members of the Committee of Union and Progress, or the political party that dominated the final decade of the Ottoman Empire. Although these people “fought in our ranks” against the occupying powers, Kemal Pasha explained, once the country was saved, they turned subversive and turned treasonous by trying to assassinate him.

The treason in question was the so-called “Izmir Assassination,” which was an alleged plot to kill Mustafa Kemal in June 1926. Most historians accept that the failed plot was real, but...