Word: kemalized
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Blackboards went up in the National Assembly, and Kemal himself gave the Deputies their first lesson. He went to the countryside and guided the gnarled hands of peasants who had never held a pencil before, as they wrote clumsy signatures in the new script. This patient teaching took five years; then abruptly he switched from precept to fiat. He gave civil servants three months to master the new script-or find new jobs. He had not been to Istanbul since 1919; now he returned in style and with a purpose. He sailed into the Golden Horn on the Sultan...
...these electric days was Oy Birligile, meaning by unanimous vote. Opposed, Ataturk was ruthless. One evening in 1926, he gave a champagne party for foreign diplomats; it turned into an all-night carousal. Returning home at dawn, the diplomats saw the corpses of the entire opposition leadership, among them Kemal's old friends, hanging in the town square...
...later years, after he had raised his people up, he decided to ease his dictatorship. He brought his ambassador home from France, ordered him to head an opposition, ordered his own sister to join it. The new Liberal Republican Party was so polite at first that Kemal demanded more vigor; when it became more vigorous he abolished it. "Let the people leave politics for the present," he said. "Let them interest themselves in agriculture and commerce. For ten or 15 years more I must rule...
...been drinking and whoring, searching, without finding, some personal peace. He tried marriage once in 1922 to Latife, the daughter of a Smyrna shipowner, but was soon divorced. In 1938, exhausted by periodic debauches and drinking bouts, undermined by diseases, he died. The timing was just right. Kemal Ataturk had held the Turks by the hand just long enough to help, not long enough to crush...
TURKEY became the Middle East's most modern state in a generation and through the efforts of one man. Kemal Ataturk, a rough, hard-drinking neurotic who combined traces of Lincoln's vision and Stalin's ruthlessness, established the Turkish Republic, ran it like a dictatorship, topped it off with a tailor-made opposition. Modern Turkey, striving to be even more modern, still needs capital, roads, teachers, more private enterprise...