A Speech Delivered By Ghazi Mustapha Kemal, President Of The Turkish Republic, October 1927 - Livres de poche

SPEECH delivered by GHAZI MUSTAPHA KEMAL President of the Turkish Republic OCTOBER 1927 K. F. KOEHLER, PUBLISHER, LEIPZIG 1929 GHAZI MUSTAPHA KEMAL PASHA INTRODUCTION This volume comprises a speech which lasted from the 15 th to the 20 th October, 1927, delivered by Ghazi Mustapha Kemal Pasha, President of the Turkish Republic, at Angora before the deputies and representatives of the quot Republican Party 7 of which he was the found er and head. Unconventional as the length and character of this speech is, the subject of it, which is a comprehensive account of one of the most remarkable events in the many centuries of Turkish history, is equally unique. It reveals the activity of the speaker from the time when he first felt himself called upon to take the leadership of his nation into his own hands and guide it from shame and threatened ruin to free dom and power. Now that danger from abroad has been averted and since the foundations have been prepared in the country on which a revivified State is arising, Mustapha Kemal Pasha is moved to show r his people how this new Turkey has been built up, on what foundations she is standing and what are the paths she must tread in future. The speech was delivered before Turks by a Turk, by a man who from the commencement of his military career w r as intimately associated with the political events occurring in his country before men who, like himself, have lived to witness or to share in the two eventful decades of the modern history of his native land. This fact alone will explain that the speaker presumed many a circumstance to be perfectly well known to his hearers with which the reader is not familiar. The present Turkish State under its newConstitution is an ex tremely democratic republic, which emphatically declines to be in fluenced by religious considerations. As an easily to be understood, and we may even say inevitable counter-blast to the close connection existing for many centuries between the most absolute monarchy and a religion permeating every sphere of private and public life, the freedom of the citizen and the complete separation of State from Kemal Pasha J Religion have become the battle-cry of the present day. The most liberally conceived Western ideas are accepted with the most jubilant enthusiasm. Western development, civilisation, progress are the aiTT amp gt 5 and substance of the efforts that were made. But the main object of all the anxiety and all the bitter struggle is the nation itself, the people of Turkey. In the West the national idea has a long and variable history in the East it is new, and with ail the ardour and the exalted flight of imagination of which an unexhausted people are capable of concentrating on a new ideal, it is seized upon and contended for in the leading circles. It is evident that between these two ideals, the civilising and the national, conflicts and dissentions must arise. Extensive adoption of the western or, at all events, foreign advantages of culture on the one hand, and the maintenance of their own native culture on the other, is the main choice that new Turkey has to make. Historical development never advances by leaps and bounds, but is the consequence of mutually recognised stages. It is the same in regard to Turkey, but here also, through the prolonged resistance of stubborn elements and the moral pressure exerted from without, the effects of which were felt evenin the most remote districts, and, finally, through the appearance of a great leader, the last phase of the development occurred with remarkable rapidity. During the first half of the ig th century efforts to reform the obsolete political system of Turkey could already be observed. At that time it was the Sultan himself, Mahmud II the c Reformer quot 1808 1839, who, succeeding Sultan Selim III, was amicably inclined towards reform and who made these attempts...