1930´s was a Jacobean period for Turkey led by a Jacobean leader who has been hailed all around the world as a great leader and a hero in his own country.

Even his enemies gave him full credit for his achievements. Some of his enemies for example, Churchill was not a lesser racist than some of the fallen heroes of the day. He is famously known as not regarding Turks proper human beings. Even Churchill sang praises of Ataturk upon witnessing the transformation he achieved in his country.

Criticizing Atatürk for his patriotism is like expecting Socrates to write his comments on a football match played yesterday. A shallow perspective leads you to this anachronism. The general public remembers Victor Hugo as a humanist but he is also responsible for what we call today post-colonial racism. Every knows the true merit of Hugo, we can´t understand Hugo without remembering the time frame.

By the way, I am not a fan of these oaths and the stuff. I believe they belong to a people who emerged victorious from an all-consuming independence war. They were left alone with depleted resources and an untellable kind of poverty and destitude and laid the foundation of modern Turkey. 

We are where we are today thanks to their selfless and relentless efforts to defend their motherland. They are our forefathers. They were the unlucky ones who fought a series of bloody wars that were inflicted on them due to an unskilfull management that left the country to the mercy of greedy foreign invaders.

True these oaths smell passion, determination and maybe there is something bad about them but... one must understand the time-frame, the feelings of those who wrote them.

When I hear them today, I remember that determination which has persisted over time and came down through generations to remind us of our bloody and miserable past. Straightforward reasoning doesn´t work here. Here is a good example, everybody hails the Renaissance as the period of enlightening but no one remembers how much blood was shed to make it possible. Straightforward reasoning declares Renaissance like a feast of salvation from barbarism, the truth is it was just a new chapter in the history of mankind marked with brutality and oppression that gradually reached such a high level that it caused a series of immense social breakdowns giving way to the destruction of a number of established institutes which resulted in a shift in the way governments and society perceive themselves.

Future is not safe unless we remember the calamities of the past.Yet, it may be unnecessary to teach those oaths to small children who can´t understand their true context. They learn about sexuality elsewhere. Israeli government instills military awareness into the minds of young generation. Those oaths are not a big blow to democracy as democracy is still a fancy name elsewhere in our world.

See below

This war was fought by these two sides: crusaders comprising Serbs, Hungarians, Germans (and other European nations of the day) whose main target was to clean the Balkans from Turks who did not even call themselves an army of Turks but an army of Allah and remember the former called themselves "the Crusaders" i.e another army of God....

In other words, this was a political and religious war rather than a nationalist one. Janisaries who took up important missions in this war were mostly converted Christians. Turkish army was bearing the flag of Islam.

Now what do you mean by racism? A great deal of Ottoman Pashas were European, some were even Christian. Ottomans supported the millet system which gave minorities control over their own internal affairs. What they hated was küfür, they called their European enemies küffar meaning infidels and in return Europeans called them infidels.

I think I would not think about learning a language just because it sounds good otherwise I would want to learn Russian, French, Irish (at least the way they speak English). I just like listening to them. Meanwhile, American English which happens to be the accent closest to the way I speak sounds horrible to many ears. (sorry for this remark)

As a person traveling around Turkey giving engineering service to a number of so-called giant industrial facilities, you can have my word for it - it might be a perfectly innocent accident. I was electrocuted, fell from scaffoldings and hurt myself on countless occassions just because some Mr. Mehmet had not done his job properly.

We are the champions of procrastination. You can´t get anything done properly in this country and you must also forget about getting it done in time. That roof might have caught fire just because the whole organization behind it did not care even a bit about the historical value of the building from the very beginning.

interactions, one could consider this a window into the Turkish culture. More than often, the person looking from this window is someone who doesn´t speak Turkish at all. We can´t ask that person to provide a Turkish summary.

Ultimately, the persons who launched this site were not completely thoughtless. They thought about these and many other things before investing their time, energy and money in this web site.

For example, the site owners can owner and decide to change the site language to Arabic. It is all up to them, it is their site.

tunci there is no such requirement. We will post in line with the rules determined by the admins. We can´t force our own rules. 

Repeated violations will have consequences as laid out in the site rules. Let us avoid dead ends as much as we can.

When you post in Turkish, please don´t forget to provide an English language summary.

It seems as if we offended Nixie somehow and not the other way around but I don´t understand what went wrong.

There are three general groups of Turkish Class users:

1- Those having a Turkish date.

2- Those using mostly the political discussion forum

3- Those wishing to learn Turkish only.

I belong to group two that´s why I jumped into this discussion.

I incorrectly indicated Sweden´s population as 12 million. It must be 9.5 million.

You did not offend me even a bit. I don´t know why you thought like that.

In the end, we all indicate our opinions that´s all. I may not even be right. It is always nice to hear other people´s opinions.