Mick Hartley

Christopher Hitchens writes of the End of the Kemalist Affair after the mass resignation last week of Turkey's top military brass:

To read of the stunning news, of the almost-overnight liquidation of the Ataturkist or secularist military caste, and to try to do so from the standpoint of a seriously secular Turk, is to have a small share in the sense of acute national vertigo that must have accompanied the proclamation of a new system in the second two decades of the 20^th century.  […]

But this long, uneven symbiosis between state and nation and army and modernity has now run its course. In its time, it flung a challenge to the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles, revived regional combat on a scale to evoke the Crusades, and saw the American and Turkish flags raised together over blood-soaked hills in Korea in the first bellicose engagements of the Cold War. That epoch is now over. One wonders only whether to be surprised at how long it lasted or how swiftly it drew to a close and takes comfort from the number of different ways in which it is possible to be a Turk or a Muslim.