Mustafa Kemal Ataturk Quotes
Men, I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die. In the time that it takes us to die, other forces and commanders can come and take our place.
Ünaydın, Ruşen Eşref. Anafartalar Kumandanı Mustafa Kemal ile Mülakat. Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1981, p. 43.
An example of this was the landing in the beaches of Normandy in WWII. Once on the beaches the allied troops had to win or die. Some of the most heroic fighting in American and English military history occurred on those beaches. Another was the Spanish Explorer Hernando Cortez who after landing in the New World, had his ships burned so that he and his soldiers had to conquer or they would die.
Ataturk was a young major at the time commanding troops of a weak and corrupt Ottoman regime. However a combined English and French (the strongest military powers in Europe) invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula threatened to capture the Turkish capital, Constantinople. Ataturk alone rallied the Turkish defenders and fought the invaders to a standoff in long drawn out battle with huge casualties on both sides. Ataturk became a national hero. Although Ataturk thereafter was very reluctant to use military force or endanger troops, the thing he always thought worth the supreme sacrifice (including his own) was the independence and sovereignty of the nation. See {584502} for his continuing belief in this type of sacrifice.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus. This famous quotation has been echoed in virtually every language and every country of the world. However, see Ernest Hemingway for a counter view.
Attila the Hun. The Romans aided by Theodoric, King of the Visigoths, fought the Huns in the only battle that Attila ever lost which he lost badly. There were 165,000 men killed in an afternoon. The Roman General, Flavius Aetius, had been a boyhood friend of Attila’s and had fought with him against the Visigoths. The Romans had Attila trapped but his old friend let him escape with just a good thrashing to his ego and army as to not upset the balance of power and tilt it in favor of the Goths. Roman foreign policy at the time was to keep all the Barbarians strong enough to fight one another so that none would be dominant but all weaker than Rome. Divide and conquer.
Drumbo was morally opposed to war. He also refused to name Hollywood communists to Congressional Committees during the Red Scare. He was then blacklisted from his occupation, screen writing.
Kemal Atatürk was a Turkish field marshal, revolutionary statesman, author, and the founding father of the Republic of Turkey, serving as its first president from 1923 until his death in 1938. He undertook sweeping progressive reforms, which modernized Turkey into a secular, industrial nation. Ideologically a secularist and nationalist, his policies and theories became known as Kemalism. Due to his military and political accomplishments, Atatürk is regarded as one of the most important political leaders of the 20th century.
