Kemal Pasha: Conflict in Turkey
By: Isaac F. Marcosson
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Related stories: “Turkey in Transition” by Isaac F. Marcosson, November 10, 1923, and “The Eastern Mess” by George Pattulo, December 23, 1922.
Kemal Pasha
October 20, 1923
by Isaac F. Marcosson
Kemal Pasha as Field Marshal of the Turkish Army
THERE was a time when Angora was famous solely for cats and goats. Today the shambling, time-worn town far up in the Anatolian hills has another, and world-wide significance. It is not only the capital of the reconstructed Turkish Government and the seat therefore of the most picturesque of all contemporary experiments in democracy, but is likewise the home of Ghazi Mustapha Kemal Pasha—to give him his full title—who is distinct among the few vital personalities revealed by the bitter backwash of the World War.
Only Lenin and Mussolini vie with him for the center of that narrowing stage of compelling leadership. Each of these three remarkable men has achieved a definite result in a manner all his own. Lenin imposed an autocracy through force and blood. Mussolini created a personal and political dictatorship in which he dramatized himself. Kemal not only led a beaten nation to victory and dictated terms to the one-time conqueror, but set up a new and unique system of administration.
Lenin and Mussolini have almost been done to death by human or, in the case of the soviet overlord, inhuman interest historians. Kemal Pasha is still invested with an element of mystery and aloofness largely begot of the physical inaccessibility of his position. To the average American, he is merely a Turkish name vaguely associated with some kind of military achievement. The British Dardanelles Expedition know it much better, for he frustrated the fruits of that immense heroism written in blood and agony on the shores of Gallipoli. The Greeks have an even costlier knowledge, because he was the organizer of the victory that literally drove them into the sea in one of the most complete debacles of modern times.
At Angora I talked with this man in a critical hour of the war-born Turkish Government. The Lausanne Conference was at the breaking point. War or peace still hung in the balance. Only the day before, Rauf Bey, the Prime Minister, had said to me: “If they [the Allies] want war they can have it.” The air was charged with tension and uncertainty. Over the troubled scene brooded the unrelenting presence of the chieftain I had traveled so far to see. Events, like the government itself, revolved about him.
via Kemal Pasha: Conflict in Turkey | The Saturday Evening Post.
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