Hello everyone;
My problem is not to make politics, but I have collected his words for you, which also describe this period we are in.
There are two Mustafa Kemals: One is me, flesh and blood, the temporary Mustafa Kemal.
The other is the Immortal Mustafa Kemal… I cannot describe him with the word “I”; he is not me, he is us! He is a community of intellectuals and warriors who strive for new ideas and new life, for the great ideal in every corner of our country. I am only their dream. My initiatives are to fulfill what they long for.
That Mustafa Kemal is you; that Mustafa Kemal is you, all of you. You are the Mustafa Kemal who is not ephemeral, the Immortal Mustafa Kemal who must live and prosper!
In this article Mustafa Kemal introduces the internal enemies of our nation. Immortal Mustafa Kemal completes, comments and updates.
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1-There are two forces which are the enemies of our independence, which prevent us from developing our economy and thus from reaching our development goal. One is the external enemies. These are those who want to colonize our country, and for this reason they do not want us to wake up and develop.
2- However, there is someone more harmful and deadly for us than the external enemies, and they are the internal enemies, the traitors among us. They say, “We cannot protect our existence without the help of a great state”, and they sided with and served the external enemies. They are the greatest enemies of our national independence. Because without their cooperation, external enemies would not be able to harm our independence in the slightest.
3-The internal enemies appeared before us in the National Struggle as two enemy groups. One of them was the government, which sacrificed general interests for personal interests; and the second was some internal enemies who were waiting for us to perish. These enemies were incapable of appreciating the might and will of the Nation. They engaged in treacherous plots and actions against the homeland and the nation with the enemies. They fell prey to the foolishly delusional promises of some fools, and committed dastardly deeds by selling their consciences to foreigners who were harmful to our nation and homeland. I said to them, keep in mind the responsibility of your actions to be applied by the nation. When you learn the fate of the people and power you trusted, do not forget to compare it with your own fate.
4- Dear young people! I warned you in the Speech, oh those internal enemies, those internal enemies!… They were the ones who were instruments of the enemy’s ambitions to violate national unity and lead the country to disintegration. They were traitors bought by the British, aiming to pit the nation against each other; they were telling all kinds of lies to deceive the people. They were scoundrels who wanted to shoot from behind those who defended our enemy-infested homeland and our brothers and sisters who shed blood for the honor of religion and nation.
5-They were scoundrels who carried enemy money instead of conscience. They are some bloody-handed, reckless, stateless men who are still among you today. They try to make the sons of the nation, who are struggling for national existence and independence, for the honor of the country, turn against each other with foreign money and money for the sole purpose of gaining profit. May the curse of Allah be upon these traitors who help the enemy.
6-Our cause was very great. We were engaged in a life and death struggle. The enemy was coming from the west, shedding blood, extinguishing hearths. The four corners of the homeland had turned into a ring of fire, every side was ablaze. The danger of being left without a homeland and independence was getting closer every day. Moreover, how difficult it was to deal with the enemies within us, how painful it was. We could not show mercy to those traitors. If we did not destroy them, they would destroy us in a worse way.
7-In a speech I made to some newspaper representatives in Izmit in January 1923, I explained our people’s attitude towards these manipulative traitors and their disregard for them as follows: There are now many people who honestly declare the absolute truth to the nation. Our nation, on the other hand, is very capable and capable of understanding the truth and applying its requirements. Even recent history has many examples to prove this understanding. Our nation, which understood its catastrophe, did not attach any value to the fatwas of the sheikhulislams inviting to reaction because “it is a requirement of religion”, nor to the armies of the caliph and the sultan carrying gilded banners adorned with verses stolen from mosques and hadiths of the prophet on their heads. He also did not pay attention to the statements that continuing the National Struggle would not only achieve nothing, but would lead to total destruction. It did not and will not pay any attention to the careless and uninformed work of the notables of the Sublime Porte and finally to the deceptions of the Greek army, which threw the declarations of the caliph and the sultan into the ranks of our fighting army with airplanes and said that it was acting on behalf of the caliph. Especially from now on, it definitely will not. Because this nation has been naive for centuries to believe the words of such reactionaries, ignorant people, hypocrites, manipulators and vagabonds, today it is condemned to sit in mud and thatched huts and has to come to its senses again with its bare feet and naked bodies under the relentless slaps of mud, snow and rain.
8- It is painful for a country and its people to be harmed by the enemy. But it is even more painful for a country, a people of a country, to suffer disloyalty and calamity from their own descendants, from the people they have known as great and carried on their heads. This is an irreparable wound for the heart and conscience.
9-They not only betrayed their country, but also humiliated their own nation and made it look inferior and incompetent. Some people who had not read the history of the nation or who lacked national feeling did not reject the accusations made against us by foreigners and did not hesitate to make our nation look guilty. Let me give you an example: Rıza Tevfik, one of the members of the delegation that went to Paris to sign the Treaty of Sèvres, was saying to the French delegation what impersonal words: “I have learned a lot from the English. I am passionate about French civilization. Whatever is admirable in me in terms of feelings and ideas is yours. I am the source of everything that is bad in me.”
10-There is probably a right in the world and right is above force. However, it is necessary to give the world the conviction that the nation has realized its rights and is ready to make every sacrifice for their defense and protection. The attempts of our enemies to portray our nation as cruel and incompetent have arisen from their belief that our nation lacks this realization and this sense of sacrifice.
11-The attitudes and actions of the submissionist governments have led our nation to be wrongly recognized as a bloodless, sluggish nation that has forgotten its past and is ignorant of the rights bestowed by nationality and civilization. However, our nation has a great fault in allowing itself to be accepted in this way. And what is this fault? This fault, my dear compatriots, is that the government, through its actions, has shown an excessive confidence in the honor of Europe. It is because of this fault that it has fallen to the extent of forgetting its own value, its own nature, its own virtues.
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12-The rulers cannot theoretically be against independence. Those who are in charge of a people always want that people to remain in their hands, but they are hostile to the realization of the will of the people. This hostility is so great that there are rulers who, in the face of the possibility of being defeated in this regard, resort to foreign powers. History has recorded such rulers.
13- This has also been the case with us. As I explained in my speech to the Parliament on January 29, 1921, the British needed a valuable tool, an instrument, to maintain their pressure on the Islamic world under their captivity. They showed this need from time to time. In their eyes, this valuable tool was the person they would place in the office of the caliphate. After the Armistice, the British, who were engaged in this endeavor, were looking for the tool they were looking for – in their own words, I heard it from them: “ün şoz presiyöz” meaning “very precious gem” – they were of the opinion that it was absolutely necessary to have that gem in the palm of their hands. Indeed, they found it in the palm of their hands. This thing that fell into the British palm was Sultan Vahdettin.
14-Britain, or any nation, any government, can only take a position in the face of power, and a person who is materially proven to lack power and strength is no longer “Petro”, as they call him. When he was no longer of any value to them, they abandoned His Majesty as well.
15-But I had already written to that Sultan that your great nation, which has been striving for independence, freedom and religion for more than a thousand hundred years since the Seljuk Turks, your nation, which has a worldwide reputation as the flag of Asia and Islam, does it ever expect its salvation from the mercy of its enemies who are thirsty for its life?
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16-As for the government, the central government, which has shown nothing more than incapacity and indolence in protecting the sacred values of the country and the nation, has shown all its belligerence in acts of strangulation and inconsistency, which can only be written in the interests of our enemies, such as stifling the voice of the nation, breaking the common national bonds and thus making the nation always look defeated. This is naturally a very dubious chapter in our national history on the account of the central government. It is to be thanked that our honorable army, which is the full helper of the nation and national power, warned the central government and prevented the damages.
17-Yes, this was the bitter truth: While our nation, in the last remnant of that great homeland, retreated to the last fortress and made its last defense, the delegations that took the name of government were working on behalf of the enemy, among the ranks of the enemy, against their own nation. In the last days of Byzantium, the government of today’s caliph and sultan, who came from a dynasty inheriting the throne of the last Greek ruler who said “I will only surrender this country, which is a trust of Allah to me, to Allah” in response to Fatih’s call for surrender, was trying to bind the nation, which did not want to be enslaved, with its own hands and hand it over to the enemies.
18-The governments established by Damat Ferit adopted the idea of absolute obedience to the Entente States at all costs. They had made it their special business to fail the sacrifices that the country had made in order to maintain its law and sovereignty by working with enemies. The adherents of this idea incited and equipped all the ungrateful sons of the country who were capable of evil and treachery, and used them against the patriots who devoted themselves to the defense of the nation. Anatolia was forced to fight for months with the forces of spiritual and material poison and mischief spread against the idea of independence and defense by the false fatwas issued in the name of Islam and the Anzavurs who were rewarded with pashliks. How many times they struck our fronts from behind on behalf of the enemies.
19-Was it not the Caliph himself who submitted to the Treaty of Sevres? Was it not the Sheikhulislam who issued the fatwa of execution against me, against Mustafa Kemal Pasha, against my friends, against me, who started the Anatolian Revolution? This fatwa was suppressed by the British! It was dropped into Anatolia by Greek airplanes; yes, Greek, Greek!…
20-You cannot get results by begging for mercy from the enemy. Yet this is what the Istanbul Government was doing. I announced to them that if you think that by showing such false favoritism towards the Entente Powers you will succeed in arousing mercy towards us, and that these hypocritical acts will influence the change of the terms of peace, we pity your ignorance.
21-Ferit Pasha said, “There is nothing to do but to submit to the decisions of the Paris Conference. For the time being, it seems appropriate to choose the option of getting along”, I gave him the following reply: I find it regrettable that the Istanbul government has chosen the path of getting along, because in my opinion, getting along does not mean accepting and perpetuating weakness. After the signing of the Armistice, the central governments, unfortunately, imitated each other and became incapacitated and weak, and did not draw any strength from the national power; in the end, it facilitated the unhindered invasion of our country by the Entente states. It was this way of getting along that led the enemy to occupy the western parts of Anatolia and our capital in a disastrous manner up to the palaces of the sultan, to separate and exterminate the national forces, and to prepare the same kind of treatment for Eastern Anatolia.
22-The Turkish nation could never, under any pretext, surrender its destiny and future to a government doomed to be a toy in the hands of the enemy.
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23- There were some other men in Istanbul who were hypocrites in their appearance. They had deceived and were deceiving the world. Therefore, it was not possible for our entire nation and the entire Islamic world to read these people, who had somehow gained fame and presented themselves as patriots and patriots, as much as we read them. They were deceiving the world with the authority given by the position they were able to gain. We felt it our duty to show the inner face of the people who acted with these apparent and deceptive promises to our nation and the Islamic world.
24- One of the greatest men who had been in this nation for years, who had grown up with the money and bread of this nation, who had risen to the highest positions, who had made a name for himself in the world, said to me: “Friend, is your intention to make our already ruined country ruined to the end? Therefore, what today’s reason and logic dictates is that we should accept what our enemies say. As a result, our independence will be lost. But there is no harm. There are nations in the world that were deprived of their independence, but after a while they regained their independence with hard work. What can we do, this is fate. Let’s surrender this once. Then let’s think about getting it.” You will be surprised if I tell you the name of this person.
25- Our nation should no longer deceive itself with delusions such as this big man, that small man, that middle man. You can be sure, my friends, that it is the men whom we recognize as great, but who are very small, who always deceive us and the nation. I myself gave the following answer to such men: There is a sloth, there is a meanness in the middle that requires turning away from honor, dignity, independence and sovereignty. But, gentlemen, this sloth and this meanness are not in the heart of this noble and great nation, but in your heart and in your evil brain. Therefore, according to what I understand, what I have seen and what I have conclusively judged, this nation has decided. Either it will live with its honor or the whole country will be burned, destroyed and devastated, and this will always be the case. We will go to the last hill of this country. And there we will fight until no stone is left on stone and there we will die. Only then will the enemies be able to possess this country. I am very grateful to Allah Almighty that I was not deceived in any of these convictions and in any of my statements that clearly explained these convictions. Events have confirmed my words and convictions. But it was not my convictions, my feelings and ideas that were confirmed. It was the feelings, ideas and convictions that already existed in the nation. What was lacking was nothing but the fact that these were not crystallized.
26- When the Republican regime was established, those who resisted me the most were the Ottoman westerners. As an example, I can give the example of Cavit Bey, a pro-Westernist; here is his pro-Western view: “Without the help of the great European states and without making the concessions that will ensure this help, it is not possible for us to establish a state in the middle of Anatolia and live on our own.” And years later, in 1945… The domestic enemy is on the stage again… Feridun Cemal Erkin, Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the CHP Government: “Turkey can only achieve prosperity if it binds its destiny to America and Great Britain.”
27- I would like to conclude by adding a few more points that I consider important: First of all, I succeeded in our cause of complete independence by struggling not only against imperialism, not only against internal enemies, but even against my closest colleagues. “What can we do without money, without an army? Becoming an American mandate is the only way of salvation”, I defended the understanding of the National Misak.
28-Secondly, I opposed both reactionism and superstition, but I did not put them in the same category. I condemned the reactionary in the harshest terms, especially because of its treasonous character. According to us, treason was “trying to bring the country under the control or captivity of the imperialist colonizers in some way.”
29-An example of treacherous reactionaries is İskilipli Atıf Hodja. He had betrayed the struggle for the Defense of Law. His crime was to completely or partially amend the Constitutional Law of the Republic of Turkey. This was the reason for his hanging, not the hat pamphlet.
30-Atıf Hodja made efforts not to oppose the Greek army occupying Western Anatolia during the National Struggle, he sided with the enemy; this has been documented by the court. He used the means of the Teali-i Islam Society, of which he was the head, to work for not resisting the British and Greek occupation, and distributed the declarations he had prepared in this direction to Turkish villages. Betrayal of the National Struggle, not even the slightest bit of treachery, was not something we would forgive.
31-Thirdly, in order to violate the national determination to save the independence of the nation in the National Struggle, the first remedy our enemies tried to use was internal discord. Because they expected the most success from the fact that our nation, unable to realize its vital interests, fell prey to hypocrites. In order to ensure national independence, we took decisive decisions and measures, especially against internal attempts to sow discord. The likes of Anzavur and Gavur Imam were among the heads of mischief who were instrumental in turning our nation against each other.
32-My fellow citizens, remember! One of the means to break your resistance is the enemy’s attempt to undermine Turkey from within. The enemy always works by taking advantage of the existing political discord in the country and the tendency of the higher authorities to surrender. The measures you have taken against the external enemy and the unity you have demonstrated against the internal enemies and internal enemies must be shown and realized with more vigilance and intensity.
Source: Mr. Prof. Dr. Cihan Dura
