Mustafa Kemal Ataturk Quotes
We did not win the war with prayers, but with the blood of our soldiers..
This would be like an American President firing the congressional chaplains. However this is only one small, but telling, example of Atatuk’s secularization of the nation which had a great deal to do with Turkey becoming a modern great power—by far the strongest and most developed of the Islamic world.
Kemal Ataturk, 1881-1938, 1st President and founder of the Turkish Republic, Explaining his dismissal of the imam assigned to the Turkish Grand National Assembly, Quoted in M. Sükrü Hanioglu, Ataturk : An Intellectual Biography
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Lincoln was opposing the Mexican War.
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.
It was then customary to return with the head of a killed Samurai which would be made up as if in life so the dead man could be recognized. That way, the victor received more recognition with the importance of the Samurai who he defeated.
Trumbo 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.
