I have many candidates in my head for this post, including Augustus, Catherine the Great, Gandhi, Churchill, Roosevelt and de Gaulle. But after pondering for a little while, I decided to write something about Kemal Atatürk, the “father of modern Turkey”. Although I am not Turkish and even have never been to Turkey, and indeed I know very little about Kemal, I still regard him as a venerable statesman because he saved the cultural and political basis of Turkey after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. More importantly, he started the transition of an ancient people, making Turkey the most modernised and secularised Islamic country in the Middle East.
Every Turkish I have met in Europe thought highly about Kemal regardless of their age, education and career. Many of them even frankly said: “Had there never been Kemal Atatürk, I would have never been here in Europe and studied for a degree!” I have a few Turkish acquaintances and colleagues; most of them are proud of their democracy in the Middle East. Although Erdogan has flexed his ambition to be a “Sultan”, Turkish politics is still obeying democratic principles in general. Kemal’s institutional design was to balance the religious traditionalists and pro-western secularists, which is playing a remarkable role in stopping Erdogan from coronating himself as a de-facto dictator.
Kemal Atatürk’s reforms on social cultures, however, should even outweigh those on politics. Compared to most other Middle Eastern countries, for example, Turkish women have more rights and equality. People are not disciplined for participating in entertainment forbidden by fundamental Islamic laws or drinking alcohol. However, many traditions of Islam are preserved by the government and ordinary people, which helps to sustain the essential morality of society. It should be safe to say that Kemal’s secular reforms on religion lessened the obstacles to accepting new ideas from Western countries.
As a historical figure, there is no doubt that Kemal was a dictator and, to some extent, a political conspirator to his rivals. Today in most Western countries, “morality” or “ethics” has become the exclusive standard to measure a historical figure. No matter how critical a historical figure contributed to our modern society, a stigma offending modern moralities will make the left-leaning intellectuals and activists will get him or her censored or condemned in public opinion—for example, Winston Churchill. Left-wing thinkers denounce all historical figures offending their radical moral standards and ignore their essential contributions. Had Kemal been a European or American statesman, he would have been cancelled for being a “tyrant”; as for his far-flung reforms, there would have been naturally slighted by the leftists.
Unseen Variables 
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