Erdogan is not the deviation that ruined a clean republic. He is the loud voice of a state tradition Ankara had long sold as Western, secular and safe. Jerusalem, Athens and Brussels now face the same mistake: the belief that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was an antidote to Turkish power, rather than its most successful costume.

The Jerusalem clash did not expose Erdogan’s Turkey. It exposed the older lie about Turkey before him.

Turkey’s Interior Minister Mustafa Ciftci spoke of “liberating” Jerusalem and prayed to govern it under Turkish rule. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz rejected the fantasy, then reached for Ataturk as the antidote. That was the mistake. Ottomanism is the easy enemy. Kemalism is the harder lie.

Erdogan did not create the poison. He stripped it bare. He gave an Islamist voice to a state reflex Kemalism had dressed in uniform, diplomacy and Western manners. Turkish primacy first. Minorities squeezed. History locked. Crimes denied. Responsibility deferred. The West mistook the suit, the salute and Ataturk’s portrait for moderation.

Secularism is not innocence.

Kemalism was Erdoganism with better manners.

Not as faith. Not as party. As state instinct.

The continuity was not inertia. It was a state operating system. Schools sanctified the myth. Courts guarded the silence. Diplomacy renamed denial as “sensitivity”. The army ordained itself as the republic’s priesthood. Neighbours became unfinished files: Greece to contain, Cyprus to hold, Armenia to silence, the Kurds to manage, Israel to use until inconvenient. Islamists and Kemalists did not fight the machine. They fought for the controls.

The violence crossed regimes. The CUP, the late Ottoman Young Turk regime, erased much of the Christian map it ruled: Armenians driven through deportation, massacre and death, Assyrians broken across Hakkari, Tur Abdin, Siirt, Diyarbakir and Urmia, Pontian and Anatolian Greeks targeted first by the late Ottoman state and then by the Turkish national movement around Mustafa Kemal. Smyrna was the burning terminus.

The Turkish Republic did not author every crime. It inherited the crime scene. It kept the result, absorbed the property, sealed the file, nationalised denial, secularised amnesia and sold the silence as modernity.

The victims changed. The method did not.

Armenians,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)