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Why Atatürk became a god
In recent years, the more moderate and reasonable Kemalists are asking themselves a curious question: How in the world has Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s founder, who devoted himself to fighting "dogmatism" become a dogma himself? ....
Can Dündar, recently received the wrath of radical Kemalists because his documentary titled "Mustafa," was asking the same question last week in his column in daily Milliyet. Under the headline, "Turning A Leader Who Fought Dogmas Into a Dogma," Dündar was pondering how such a bizarre paradox emerged in Turkey. Like many other moderate and reasonable Kemalists, he was thinking that this was a most unfortunate and unexpected turn of events.
The Goddesses of Reason
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To see this, one just needs to look at how radical secularism ended up creating ersatz religions in other cases. When the French Revolutionaries dethroned Christianity in that organized bloodshed called the Great Revolution, they established not a free medium of rationality, but a cult of reason. The atheistic "Culte de la Raison" devised by Jacques H?bert, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette and their supporters was not a lack of dogma; it was rather an alternative dogma. Thanks to their campaign, the French Convention proclaimed a "Goddess of Reason" on Nov. 10, 1793, and the statue of this new idol was enacted on the high altar of the Notre Dame de Paris. Maximillian Robespierre, who was a little less radical, preferred to create a deistic religion named "the Cult of the Supreme Being," which yet again celebrated an alternative god to the Judeo-Christo-Muslim one.
The same thing also happened in the communist dictatorships of the 20th century. The totalitarian secularism of Lenin and Stalin created not a godless society, but one that worshiped these dictators as if they were gods. In the east, Mao and Kim Il Sung became national deities for China and North Korea. ....
So, there is nothing surprising about the deification of Atatürk. He and his followers believed that "science and reason" would be enough of a guide for society....... artificial religions such as Kemalism arise to fill the vacuum.
Blaming Atatürk for all this wrong direction would be unfair, because he simply followed the best wisdom of his time and milieu. ....
Lessons from the Turkosphere
That proof especially came from the British and the American experiences of modernization, in which religion acted not as an obstacle to, but, quite the contrary, an agent of progress. Walter Russell Mead, whose must-read title "God and Gold" is an eye-opening history of the ideas that led to the Anglo-Saxon ascendancy, put it this way:
"....it appears that a secular society -- one in which religion has been effectively marginalized -- can also grow disturbingly nationalist, xenophobic and paranoid. It is sad story with little hope of change in sight.
He has an interesting point..
full article:
http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/english/opinion/10362280.asp?yazarid=301&gid=260
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this is called "auto-orientalism".