points by gkya 8 years ago

[I've written a long comment about how this happened, and it seems that it's been too long to include in a single comment, so I'm splitting it into parts.]

[Part 1]

I'm from Turkey myself, in my initial 20s, undergrad at the faculty of letters in Istanbul. We're that interesting generation whose parents were kids/newborns at the first coup d'etat after the first conservative government of Turkey (that of Menderes), teens and young adults during the left/right clash and the coup of 12 September 1980 (that date is so much ingrained to our memories as probably 9/11 is to American ones), 30-something parents during the '90s' hideous bloodshed, and middle aged individuals during the first decade of the millennium where the AKP phenomenon started happening. For us the '90s kids, the dawn of AKP rule is a childhood memory, and also the coalitions, 90-years-old Bulent Ecevit, the shy beginnings of an alternative conservative party that managed to become the sole dirigent power of this country. This past is interesting in that it let us, at least the curious among us with educated parents, to either live firsthand or learn from eyewitnesses the funny story that led us to where we are now as a country. The decline of Turkish schools began since the first day, just like that of every other institution of the republic, and nothing is or was a coincidence.

Ottomans were a family, like Hapsburgs or Bourbons. There was no Ottoman people. Under Ottoman rule were though turkish speaking muslim peasants, which were called Turks. During the 19th century, some intellectuals, under the influence of European romantic racism and nationalism, developped the idea of Turkish nationalism, in the same era where many christian nations parted from the empire, and lots of bloodshed was suffered in particular by Armenians, because they were a way more integrated part of the Empire and one of the last groups to seek independence, and they were Christians (I'm not referring to the Medz Yeghern here, but to the Hamidian massacres). In this atmoshpere of ethnoreligious clash and of the disintegration of a long-standing empire that followed many other long-standing empires since Darius the Great, the ideals and the ideas of Turkish nationalism were initally born. Intellectuals were seeking the origins of the Turkish-speaking anatolians in Central Asia, fooled by linguistic relations (today it seems to me that there's little doubt that the Turkification of the Asia minor was through language and culture replacement provoked by elite dominance by Persianised Turkish military powers, not unlike how the same region was Hellenised under Alexander the Great and how southern Europe was Latinised under Roman rule and later with the influence of the Catholic church), and a plethora false narratives of war glory, mass migrations, racial/ethnic supremity etc. started being produced by the Ottoman-Turkish intelligentsia. When WWI was happening, the Turkish nationalists (Ittihat Terakki Firkasi) was in control of the recent constitutional monarchy, and under their control the biggest bloodsheds happened in Turkey; deportation and massacres of Christian ethnoreligious groups, mass poverty and lots of war casualties because of the short-sighted government following unrealistic, inhumane and bloody agendas (the event of Sarikamis is a really popularly known one, where 90 thousand Ottoman troops died of cold in the extreme conditions of very-high-altitude province Kars, without encountering a single enemy soldier). At the end of the war, the constituent peoples of the empire were tortured both by themselves, the empire itself, and the belligerent European forces; and the empire was dead. As the European belligerent states were in the process of sharing the Ottoman territories, nationalism was becoming more fierce among the Turkish-speaking muslims of Asia minor.

In this atmosphere were born many organisations for Turkish or Muslim indipendence. Kuva-yi Milliye (National Forces) was one of them, it comprised many disorganised bands of amateur warriours, not much unlike the Italian partigiani. In the last decade and a half, Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk) was rising as a successful general in a decadent army of a moribond empire. After 1919, he left Istanbul to Samsun in disguies on a ship called Bandirma, quit his role in the Ottoman army, and with his many friends started to organise an independence movement in Anatolia. He managed to unify, organise and regularise Kuva-yi Milliye, and to form an army that then fought its way through 1919-1922 to successfully establish a Turkish republic in Thrace and Asia Minor in 1923, with the Lozanne Treaty in 24 August and the declaration of the Republic in 29 October. After this point came the long rule of Ataturk as the de facto BDFL of the nascent country, where the wartime elite executed many reforms to realise their ideal Turkey. They made their Turkey, now they had to make the Turks. The state encircled at that time Muslims of diverse ethnic backgrounds, split mainly in Sunnites and Alawites, and also in Turkish-speakers and Kurdish-speakers; and the surprisingly populous remnants of the Christian population of the territory (given the catastrophe they faced). Ataturk's government implemented a series of rather oppressive and authoritatisn reforms, based on his seven principles (see Kemalism), to modernise and westernise the country and its peoples, and to assimilate the citizens into the figure of modern Turk: a turkish speaking, secular and laicist, patriotic, hard-working individual, for whom religious and ethnic ideals are bad memories of the past, or better yet forgotten altogether. And thus came the dismissal of the Ottoman dynasty, the removal of the Sultanate, the dismissal of the Caliphate, the language reform, the clothing reform, secularist and laicist reforms, mass programmes of assimilation, and a reformist, unquestionable dictating government of recent war veterans. Nearly all of these reforms were unwelcome by different constituent ethnolinguistic and ethnoreligious groups of the new republic, and bloodshed came. The Westernisation was imposed by the founding fathers, either by authoritarian laws or by force. It's really interesting that it's the same government who both executed Sheik Said and incarcerated Nazim Hikmet Ran. Turkey was Ataturk's little baby to be raised as a hard-working modern man, but it was never becoming what he wanted when left on his own, so he didn't. This period did a lot of good to Turkey, but also lots of bad.

In this period were formed the initial modern institutions of education in Turkey. The Istanbul University existed in some form since the 4th century AD, and the Levantines and the Christians had their lycees, but the Turks mostly had the religious medreses at their disposal for study. Under Ataturk a new education system was installed, copying the Western system (I guess a mix of the German and the French systems), and modifying it to produce the first "seed" generation according to Kemalist ideals, securing the continuity of the new Turkish republic and its fundamental philosophy. And surprisingly this worked, though, the copycat nature and the focus on quantity over quality still remains to date in many institutions of the country along with its education system.