New book exposes Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s brutal nation-building

Title: The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East
Author: Simon Sebag Montefiore
Publisher: Knopf, 2026
(Available from Amazon Canada)

On Oct. 30, 1918, the Ottoman Empire concluded an armistice with the victorious Allied powers. Although the empire’s demise had long been anticipated, being on the losing side in the First World War delivered the final blow.

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s new book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, paints a vivid picture: “After 600 years of empire, the Ottomans faced the catastrophe of occupation and partition: fifty-five Allied ships sailed into the harbour of Constantinople. British, Italian, Greek and French troops landed, and the French Allied commander rode into the imperial city on a white horse.”

But out of the ashes of empire, the smaller entity that became modern Turkey was waiting to be born. And in the personage of a senior army officer named Mustafa Kemal, the primary architect of the new country was already at hand.

As per Turkish custom of the time, he didn’t have a surname. However, when surnames later became mandatory (at his behest), he chose the name Atatürk – the father of Turks. For convenience, that’s how we’ll refer to him.

Atatürk was born in 1881 in Ottoman Salonika (now Thessalonica, modern Greece’s second-largest city). He was originally a “Young Turk,” the term used to describe members of a secret revolutionary organization. Later, he distinguished himself leading the Ottoman 19th Division at Gallipoli in 1915-16. By war’s end, he was the only Ottoman commander who hadn’t been defeated in battle.

The empire may have been irretrievably gone, but Atatürk was determined to minimize the losses. The first test of resolve was precipitated by the idea of a Greater Greece. The Greeks had entered the war on the Allied side with the promise of territorial rewards, and now they wanted to collect.

The city of Smyrna, which had a significant Greek population, was located on the Aegean coast of Anatolia (Asia Minor), and taking control of it was conceived as a logical first step. So Greek troops landed there on May 15, 1919. And concurrently, an Armenian Republic was formed in eastern Anatolia. This was all too much for Atatürk, who saw it as a mortal threat to the Turkish homeland.

In January and February 1920, Atatürk’s forces defeated the French and the Armenians at the Battle of Marash, after which he turned his attention to the Greeks. When Smyrna was taken in September 1922, the city burned while 200,000 Greeks fled. As Montefiore puts it, “here ended 2,500 years of Greek life in Asia Minor.”

And there was to be no more talk of Armenian or Kurdish republics. At bottom, Atatürk had a cynic’s realism about international affairs. If the Allies weren’t prepared to enforce rhetoric regarding autonomy for non-Turkish minorities, he needn’t worry about it.

Meanwhile, Atatürk moved to personally consolidate power, becoming president of the new Turkish Republic proclaimed in October 1923 and abolishing the caliphate in March of the following year. It wasn’t necessarily a peaceful process. He dealt with his enemies ruthlessly, noting that “Bloody revolutions are solid, bloodless ones are not permanent.”

Whether Atatürk was a dictator is perhaps a matter of nuance. He was certainly an autocrat, a man who believed in the forms of democracy while simultaneously thinking that Turkey wasn’t yet ready for the genuine article. This made him a dangerous man to cross.

Kurdish statehood aspirations were a particular problem, and their insurgencies were brutally suppressed. In Montefiore’s telling, as many as 40,000 civilians were killed in the process of crushing a 1937 rebellion.

However, it wasn’t all repression, violence and the accumulation of personal power. Atatürk also set out to modernize the new Turkey, in effect turning it into a secular society. In many respects, this translated into a version of Westernization, symbolically marked by replacing the traditional fez with Western-style hats for men.

But there were more substantial changes.

Female education was promoted, the need to wear the veil was eliminated, polygamy was abolished, and marriage became a civil contract. With a view to enhancing literacy, Arabic script was replaced by the Latin alphabet. This has been described as “A reform of truly revolutionary proportions … setting Turkey on the path to achieving one of the highest literacy rates in the Middle East.”

Economically, Atatürk’s approach envisioned the state as the major driver in creating industrial self-sufficiency, modernizing agriculture, building infrastructure, and establishing an effective banking system. Five-year industrial plans would set the priorities to make it all happen. Effective or not, this was very much in tune with the economic orthodoxy of the time.

Atatürk was also a nationalist, determined to create a distinct sense of Turkish identity, to which end he promoted the Turkish language and an interpretation of history calculated to make Turks feel proud, even superior. Along the way, Constantinople was renamed Istanbul. He had a saying summarizing how he wanted his countrymen to feel: “Happy is the one who says, I am a Turk.”

A longtime heavy drinker, Atatürk died of cirrhosis on Nov. 10, 1938. He was 57 years old. Even today, Turks pause to remember him at 9:05 a.m. on Nov. 10, the precise time and date of his death.

Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy casts a history buff’s eye at the goings-on in our world. Never cynical – well, perhaps a little bit.