a lightweight discussion of WW2 aerial ops and the like

churchill would have loved the New Turkey . Where even the attempts to reach out to disenfranchised have a "quality" of their own . There's this singer and actor that turns out to be an Alevi , ı had no idea . ı would have no idea , if ı was paying any attention that he would be an Alevi , considering he's named Yavuz and Alevis like lost 6 or 7 people in 2013 for rioting over a bridge named Yavuz , right ? He is reported in the newspaper to have commented that the PM was just an human being and he was really mad at protesters who made graffiti in the streets that insulted his deceased mother ; that's why he got the mother of a 15 year old killed in the Gezi events / Taksim riots booed in the election campaign . Lucky the singer / actor is ; in less stable countries he would have been shot already . He claimed the journalist who made the interview misreported it and the journalist immediately rushed to print the entire qoute . ı read a couple of times , this quote , and could not see where the paraprased version was based on . Allow me remind that ı have studied Nostradamus in my youth , in the cheezy cute r16 way to eternal failure . If the Journalist is right , oh-kay , my bad . If he is not right , why isn't he apologising ?


churchill would have loved the Anti-semiticness , too . After the troubles in Kudüs over the Al Aksa Mosque , the Governor of Edirne -not Edrine as CivIII says- declared he would turn the Synagogue in the city to a museum and he was acting on "Spite" . Fully matching speeches that the Youth will be educated to be with Spite . The Governor was , of course , not sacked at all ; he offered an apology instead . The seperatists being the blue eyed boys and the Goverment being busy reaching out to Alevis , before the elections of 2015 and after the months of street demonstrations where they quite faced off the Police , the New Turkey just had to prove the "purity" was still there . This is what America installed ; as "Moderate" Islam to fight off the common threat of Islamic Radicalism . Oh , the Churchillian tradition goes on , unabated . With every new thing wellcomed behind closed doors .

say the coming education reform . Sure enough , girls are a security concern for boys and they got to be seperated into classrooms of their own . [Turns out to be refused by the Minister of Education , being too early perhaps . Or not , still debated as am drafting this up . ı learn there ain't no co-education in America , Japan and Korea ... The guy on the radio even says it's a "condition" of Islam .] The European Human Rights Court -or whatever it's called in English- decreed compulsory Religion lessons for teenagers were not the thing to have ; the lessons will go . To be replaced by compulsory Religion lessons for 6 to 9 year olds , preceded by "Ethics" or moral values education in Kindergarten . Oppose and get called Jew ; you can't be anything else . Not even a Muslim if challenging that the Arabic letters are not the "Alphabet of the Kuran" , sacred hence to be learned above all , to the extent that they forced a reform that wasted a year for hundreds of thosands of kids and might have penalized the education life of many . There is a new way of tests every year and they subtly channel teenagers into Imam Hatips where the teachers are kinda all of the New and there's this brainwashing . Allah Is All-Powerful and Will Protect Islam from the "new" but it will be cool for us 70-80 million inhabitants of the country if we were spared the Wrath of Allah !

otherwise life goes on . The PM's palace now gets to be reported to cost something like 5 Billion Turkish Liras ; something about 2.2 Billions of US Dollars -possible exaggeration , at least so far . Where the visitors drink water from gold covered glasses , worth a reported 1000 dollars each . And the PM declares it's not his palace but of the Turkish Nation . Everybody thus sees where the country is ruled from and it's to be a source of pride for the country and mind you , it was built with means of "this" Nation . The last said thing is everywhere these days , "this" nation , the 50% who votes for the A-K-P controls the means of economy , too . Hence the Minister for Energy openly says the wealth of country "belongs" to "this" Nation and they might simply cut down olive trees which produce less than 120 000 liras a year to get into coal mining that will produce billions . Hence the reported source of the financing of the palace , the funds for jobless insurance where the unfortunate get money for 6 months after getting fired or something , naturally belong to "this" nation . If elections are lost , does it belong to the other nation or are we all one nation then ?

massively publicized as the fall of the PM gets billed as the reform that should get the New Turkey accepted . And the PM fights back . His lot even got to sack the media guy of a co-founder of the Party . The Party woved to limit people to 3 consecutive terms in one function and this most democratic promise of 2002 gets to bug many , allowing the PM to create a vacuum within party ranks to prune any "replacements" while his successor has already implied he might reverse the thing . As the fight goes on , the expertise that created the new Turkey allows the PM's side bury themselves . With the same stuff they already did for ages but not reported in a negative light . Accordingly the PM talks as he presents awards to artists ; promising to keep "struggling" to be a Great Power . He orders education reforms to create a more self-confident youth . Expect the truth about Muslims discovering America becoming the truth . Muslims , since the new Turkey still aims to attain the control and absorbtion of the Muslim Brotherhood -as a geographic entity . Thus it has never been reported that the "first" gliding stuff in history has been replaced . The previous version that named Hazerfan Ahmet Çelebi in 1640 or so gets moved to Endulus of 1040 or so . Even if ı am kinda sure "that" Muslim kinda went straight down , instead of flying , gliding , and any kind of 'ing -apart from falling . All the journalists must be fearful of any discussion of the thing ; considering there was a "popular" movie of the 1990s that made Hazerfan an humanist and the Ottoman Administration some kind of morons . With the heady 2000s you could easily get 20 years in jail for coup plotting on that .

the artists and stuff play the part . The winner for Literature (?) talks a full 20 minutes declaring George Orwell , the guy who wrote 1984 , would give the PM a standing ovation . Lacking the full stuff , ı wasn't exactly sure whether she was applying what the Turkish slang calls "Oiling" or whether the crowd in palace had enough brains to grasp what the ovation would be for . In that case she would have been quite "ungrateful" ... Turns out it would be the first option , with some Soft Power of Russia included . Putin himself made it look like it was just meeting with the PM that he scrapped a natural gas pipeline to replace with one that crosses this country . Never minding replacing the ever troublesome Bulgarians with Greeks would be like a working solution in the Cold War 2.0 ... Apart from forming an evermore stronger case for the Western "babbling" when the time comes , where Turks will be "forced" to make a choice between the PM and the Little Imperialist . Never minding all the "diplomacy" regarding Russia is solely about preventing them getting burned alongside America -due to fear of God- and not a "required" protection . With Cold War 2.0 being a solid waste of time . Being a Turk is so hard , nobody believes that you might .

on "personal" stuff the TV series that troubles me much wasn't on this week . Don't know if cancelled . The Congregation is silent on the subject . Their flagship newspaper merely reported up to 20 series have been cancelled this season , due to poor acting and the like . They are the "innocents" these days ; otherwise they would be very on coup-plotting with how the Chief Baddie was hanging a Congregation operative each week . And as you might have guessed ı have utterly failed to convey that ı am not in that damned series , but hopeful for the future . And nothing to do with its yet unclear demise . Am not the one to play with peoples' bread as the Turkish phrase goes ; and if had ı been real it wouldn't have started in the place .


the reason might be more related to the "revelation" that one of the actors is actually Armenian . Didn't know , wouldn't care . Even if it turns out he was quite unwelcome in Turkey , having taken part in the Midnight Express , the very symbol of Western plotting to defame this country or something in the 1970 and 80s . We learn he has been here for 4 years now . No , ı don't think the cancellation-if-true is due to fears of mobs stringing him up in the middle of Istanbul . See , he plays a retired official that advises the Chief of Intelligence . The Chief of Intelligence is the bravest man in the show , while the "political authority" namely the PM was represented by a mere "Sir" the good people talk on the phone and nothing else . Now that any Turkey watcher readily knows who has an Armenian advisor , the revelation makes it impossible to keep the facade that the Chief of Intelligence represents the actual head of the National Intelligence -who must be like a PM loyalist . See , the succession fight immediately involves everything .

oh yeah , turns out to be a repeat of the normal r16 or something ? The time for a re-account of how ı count for nothing and the necessary reminders to that end long nullified by the consistent efforts of Borachio to prove he's less worthy . That should perhaps led me to cut out the excess and come to the "subject" . Even if ı still think am by far the mostest forum idiot with a weekly or monthly dose of required silliness ; and Mr. Borachio , between the sip of the tea and the bit of the biscuit regularly has to write stuff like "Do not make him angry!" 'Cause you know , when crossed we are only capable of picking on poor Engeland . And not the gloriously mightious US . This of course does not claim am responsible for some tabloid reporting 'cause my idea was a Do-17 in the first place ; and it was considered that it would be overtly aggressive . We don't want unjustified beliefs that we sing "Wir travellen im Space gegen Engeland" , right ?

ı know am an idiot and knew ı was an idiot before ı was ever online , too . Nor there's a claim that some other relic was flown around just for the noise . ı win December 2014 solely on the tea and biscuit part . Let's see objections if any . Even if Daily Mail kinda claims it was shooting practice , it still ain't a forum member , right ?


PS : Took me some 5 hours to type these 3 posts at home . Wrapped them up and went next room to watch TV . The series is there , moved to compete against the Kurtlar Vadisi so just another case of of told you am not real stuff . The Ottoman language courses will be compulsory for all highschool students so that they all can read Arabic script when this country realises its strategic wonderous designs and become a "Muslim" country under Saudi and stuff domination .

on Saturday ı collected the 21 coupon book ; "November 1938, Atatürk in the World Media"... Impressive in size to begin with . Paying no particular attention ı was of the opinion that the book was printed on 2002 and the company was merely reducing the stocks . Led me to a thinking of something 10 seconds to decide it was content that mattered and the paper had not suffered at all . Meaning it was years ahead of the encyclopedia ı collected coupons for months back in the 1990s . That one was printed on grocery bag quality paper ... My brother had opted for a different campaign , this being a cutthroat competition era between newspapers . He collected all 20 or 24 volumes and ı gave up ; his choice was more up to date anyhow .

and how pathetically careless ı am . Simply by chance another glimpse on the front pages and actually reading stuff leads to a different outcome . That second look proves this is the 3rd edition , dated November 2014 ! Luckily for me , my scholarship has been rightly described as wannabe ...

the guy who started the book was quite visible in the media affairs of the 2000s . Possibly of the "Not enough but Yes!" crowd which describes the Liberals who vocally supported the "reforms" that provided the leverage for the Counter-revolution . ı think ı have also seen a reference about him being sympathetic to the Congregation this or last year . At the late 80s he was the London correspondent of Milliyet , a Turkish daily . The British Foreign Office regularly releases formerly secret documents after a given amount of time . In 1988 that included some amount of correspondence relating to the events 50 years back when Atatürk died ; some good words on official papers not meant to be seen by the Turkish side . Encourages him to look for newspapers of the day to bulk the work up so that Milliyet can have a series of articles . But it's 1980s , despite Santa Turgut's best efforts to liberalize the country -to have himself lionized as a democratic leader so that he can win the elections to create his own one party state , no doubt ... The problem with the material supplied is the newspaper clippings . They all laud the dictator ... Quite unpalatable , despite the favourable commentary . Kenan Evren is still the President , after leading the coup of 1980 . The way of Atatürk is the thing .

2002 means a decade or two has passed with all the attendant changes . It's now quite fashionable for a major newspaper to deal with a project that refers to Atatürk as a dictator . And Hürriyet is in the same media holding with Milliyet but certainly with an audience less attuned to the way of Atatürk , "Center" to "Center Left" ... The researchers collect articles and news of the immediate aftermath of Atatürk's death with a bare minimum of commentary from the 21st Century . Can Dündar - a visibly Left oriented documentary producer and journalist- contributes a piece on the succession fight as Kemal was in deathbed . Dündar is not exactly aware of what lies ahead but what he tells is established history ; that Fevzi Çakmak is a firm supporter of Democracy ; but most usefully for this wannabe he implies Çakmak was Italy's candidate for the top job . In strict contrast to Inönü , the Berliner who studiously studies English after taking note of Silly Kemal's interest at the prospects of the US at the coming world war . Or Bayar , London's friend and the Prime Minister of the day , well aware of the way Inönü isolated Kemal to a drinking table to do his own way and Kemal tolerating that in order to create and protect a base of support for the Revolution - so that the Turkish Nation will never again face a Treaty of Sevres . Bayar goes one better with implicating the name of Kemal in an extermination -with the use of Chemical bombs- as Kemal's adopted daughter flies combat . Or finally Fethi Okyar , the ambrassador to London , Kemal's handpicked choice for an Opposition party to create a pluralistic Democracy . A British newspaper will call it "a strange experiment" after Kemal dies ; quite Orientalist in the sense Turks can not be aware that checks and balances are quite effective in bringing an order to social life which eases the existantial fight - which Kemal knows one day will come . It being an essential part of the Western thinking when it comes to strategy . That the 1930 experiment miserably crashed is more of a failure of people other than Kemal and Okyar , kinda with the names in this paragraph in mind .

it's 2002 afterall . We gonna be in the EU and the Military be curbed or damned . And we learn the Marshall stood firmly with Democracy , respecting elections . It is beyond expection that it will ever be noted that Kemal sent a General in his Ottoman uniform , a martinet of a Major and a Sudanese Colonel formerly in Ottoman service to fight the Italians in Ethiopia and not in Antalya . That's how the thing about a Turkish Duce becomes support for Democracy . But then it's also stuff you learn through reading Ospreys instead of Turkish History .


this is not a criticism of Can Dündar . Even if a film he made on Kemal can be very tempting to comment on . In which the documentary-maker despite his undoubted honest intention to humanize Atatürk did kinda so much for the New Turkey . A dilemna if you will , keep the Founder of the Republic high in the sky and people turn away , take him down to the level of us mortals and people turn away . We saw so many kids in evening news after the schools took busloads of pupils to cinemas , sorta all aghast at what they saw on screen . Kemal smokes and kids rightly know that's bad . Kemal , the brave soldier , is afraid of the dark . Can be possible , we are all human with the attendant frailties . It went down like a lead balloon ; if that's a phrase used in English ... The New Turkey , as you might have noticed , is very brave and fears nothing ! As long as it's someone else to do the fighting in their conquests .

there has even been a so far lonely voice against the National Anthem , which has stood firm even in the godless phase of the godless Turkish Republic still including the word Allah and various religious phrases . Because , you see it starts with the words "Don't fear" . 1921 being a terrible year , though certainly not as bad as 1912 or '18 . And the entire War of Liberation at risk and people needing a boost in morale . And Mehmet Akif being the man to do it . Who , as you know , was writing jihadist propaganda in Berlin in 1917 . It's a judious blend of martial spirit , righteous justification and resigning to fate when there is nothing left humanly possible to do . It's superb and not just because once ı got to read the entire poem in class in high school halfway in the way ı suppose it should be read . The lonely voice belongs to a guy who defines himself as an Islamist , seriously famous for his alternative reading of history , ascribing every single thing in the secular Republic to treason . He was apparently wearing a fez as well when he insulted Mehmet Akif to declare that it is not us but the world that should fear . You know , the New Turkey talks and the world fears ...

the lonely voice , the gloriously courageous guy will no longer be lonely , in the name of glorious Oil revenues this country will soon start discussing the Anthem , though after the elections . And once again it will be a coalition of Islamists , seperatists , Liberals , "What's the point? Let's avoid bloodshed." crew , "We are defenders of our race but let's not get us tested." bunch and all under the cover of the USAF and the like to reach fruition by about 2016 . 2016 , 'cause the year 2015 belongs to the acceptance of the Armenian thing , as the first priority . The Turkish Foreign Ministry diligently works to that end with the convenience of the Party-Congregation clashes , claiming to be inundiated with Congregation propaganda against New Turkey ; they can't fight the Armenian theses .

though they can find time to re-polish Moderate Islamist credentials . From a TV debate we learn the Salafists have accepted an imam who has published a book that solemnly proves the world is flat . Salafists being idiots , America must support smarter Muslims .

or maybe something else is in play . From some TV debate ı deduce the Congregation might be using the phrase Don't Fear in some catchy slogan to suggest there is no reason to be afraid of the Party . Me being never in Twitter ı cant really say if so .

it would be then crystal clear to see that this glorious lonely voice simply requires some patronage , with money flowing to all comers as long as they serve the Counter-revolution . So , not due to an inflated ego that gets insulted to see the world doesn't fear when it should ? But don't bet on that ...

besides , such alternative "history readings" are the linchpin of this New Turkey . In everything it does . By chance ı encountered a documentary on TV about Anadol , a brand of car from the 70s or so , of local production . Ah interesting ! Cute little cars , unimposing but working nonetheless . Hey , wait ! The interviewed are bad-mouthing Devrim , a State ordered effort that produced 2 prototypes in the 60s . Now this happens to be a story of hard work , actually a legend of the old times ; hence it "deserves" to be insulted . As such we learn the Locomotive Works had no business in car making to begin with . Then it was ordered by the evilly dark and evil coup makers , so it's undemocratic or something , plus being something of a Commie approach , too . So , it's real stupid of them to have built a car from scratch in 128 days , including the engine . The undisputable fact is that the then President Cemal Gürsel , truly delighted to see the car in the flesh , was to be driven to a official function , the anniversary of the foundation of the Republic to be precise . And the car just stopped after a few meters . Leading Gürsel to this iconic statement that we could make a car with the Western mind of us , only to forget to fill the gas tank with our Eastern one . But , naturally the documentary has the truth , nothing but the truth . The pistons just seized , now that locomotive enginering knows nothing about cars , the pinnacle of all human endevours . Bear with me , will you ?

the show goes on . Now it's the time for the heroes on screen to show themselves . Mind you , at the time they are assembling Ford trucks and buses already . This must be something like mid 1960s . And the narrator starts to lay it on . Turkey is a backwards country back then , with industrialized countries maintaining monopolies , almost like parazites ; they will object to a Turkish brand . Sure they will . ı know that already , ever since the first time ı ever read about the Devrim , the car from the Locomotive Works , when ı was like 10 years old . And funnily the face that used to come to my mind when ı imagined those monopolies and the Turkish dealers and bigshots who protect and maintain them belonged to Vehbi Koç . When ı was like 10 ...

the narrator moves the story onwards . Rahmi , son of Vehbi , one day sees a car in the streets of Ankara . He likes it very much and runs to his daddy , so that his daddy can build a car factory to make it . You won't be surprised to hear that the car comes from Israel . For a "kid" to impress his daddy , the fabricator , to invest so much while he's so happy being the chief distributor of Ford , it must be something important , right ? Should have checked Wikipedia , but Rahmi is certainly big enough in those days to take an executive with him to Israel to investigate . They two discover fibreglass down there ... Lots of talk and stuff . Ford opposes , the Turkish market is far too small for local facilities . Rahmi presses . Vehbi caves in . Ford agrees to the business model . Chassis and engine will be from Ford ; all the rest of equipment will come from a British company , apparently a pioneer in the field . The same company will also design the overall shape . It takes some two years . This is real engineering , we hear from the engineers , who are like bragging on how they did everything right . In such stark contrast to the Locomotive guys who did it in 128 days ... Even if the the two years in Turkey seems to have been spent on learning how to apply resin with an handbrush ...

am not scoffing or making fun . That stuff they apply resin to is called "glass wool" in Turkey and it gives you some horrible itching if you don't take care working with it . My late father built and repaired roofs in the last 15 years of his life and ı would be around . We had the misfortune of using that glass wool thing once as an heat insulator ; my father would talk people to buy something else before agreing on the cost and stuff ...

oh yes , the choke of Imperialism on Turkey is broken with a couple of handbrushes ! The narrator says this much ... Or maybe am truly exaggerating .

meanwhile ...

mr. Robert Strange MacNamara is the US Defence Secretary at the time . He was the same during the Cuban Missile crisis when Washington "slapped" Turkey in the face with withdrawing Jupiter missiles , only to draw a kinda muted response of "Good riddance." He is the same during the Johnson Letter incident where the US Administration threatens not to assist us if them Commies come to kill us all ; and we are real coy or something not to return the favour . Mr. Robert Strange MacNamara is also a Ford man . He knows all about Devrim the car . He knows how and why it just stopped with an Head of State onboard . He doesn't regret it , too . Cars need a production line and such lines require tool production , a ton of stuff with high precision . Mr. Robert Strange MacNamara is an industrialist who can really see the Locomotive Works is rather meant to gain experience for active use in our "coming" heavy industrialisation . With tool making , so that we won't have to beg for each individual case ; our money seems to be never enough on its own merit , we always have to adress Western suspicions that we are like unhappy . There can never be a disagreement on our eternal slavehood , right ? Mr. Robert Strange MacNamara is a much hated man in the US military circles . Ask the fans of the SR-71 and hear them vail on how the Secretary had the production line tooling for the Blackbird destroyed , so that a then coming USAF procurement programme could be resolved in favour of a yet undeveloped F-106 variant . So that President Johnson could remain in favour of the Big Money in Texas .

and sometimes the truth even catches up with Ford men . US military circles discover them Commies is quite ready to do business with Turkey . Really real and distressing signs that Russia is somehow willing to assist Turkey with the heavy industry thing . The Justice must be done , sins must be atoned . America is not exactly ready to give Turkey a Polaris submarine ; previous notion of combined crews from America , Italy , Greece and Turkey having fallen apart . No molds , no dies , no tools for "Heavies" , just an handbrush and a can of resin . A fiberglass Ford ...


macNamara's wagon . What use we would have for a Polaris sub anyhow ? Or maybe , exactly not ...


writing stuff takes time and the time between the posts can be a sure proof that am so lazy . Must keep this short in a way . So that ı can wrap up 2014 . The World War III didn't happen . Americans being lazier .

didn't happen yet will be a truer expression . My finest with regards to conjectural engineering is still the X-Wing with TIEs coming a close second . ı busied myself with putting warpdrives on Shorts Shetlands . Turns out some people had done the same years back for Martin Mariners . Mine is a neater installation due to size of the planes involved . Then by coincidence ı had a chance to work on Dwarven Cutlasses , the ones that look like the A7U ... Even a little update work on Phantom landing gears .

coincidences happen . Just natural that they happen . Just like when ı was out to buy a newspaper on the first day of this year to see this Ford with large and bold lettering on the side . Claiming to be the best mpg or the least polluting in its class . Coincidence ; and not that ı would be expected to buy a newspaper to check the lottery numbers . A tradition of sorts from my late father . One would seriously expect though , that the Ford Corporation still to be aware of this thing that one does not make Lord Vader angry , even when he is retired . Even when the truth is that even 40 years back he was such a cute kitty kitty in the presence of Lady Vader ; he behaved , right ? And what are you going to do , offer me a fief in Osaka ; of 10 000 koku ?

but then it ain't no coincidence that there is this documentary in this New Turkey . The watchers of the scene are readily aware of that the smarties and the politicos they advise want a local brand of car to brag about . And Rahmi Koç declines to build them one . Talking of cost effectiveness issues , the size of the market etc. etc. Spitting on the plate that one just ate from is such a Turkish tradition ; it doesn't surprise one bit to see all those employees and colleguagues of Rahmi reminiscing about the past . Rahmi who once liked a car on the street , who once defeated America and stuff on a whim to make his daddy to invest in a car factory ( As ı am drafting this , Eyecandy has these people on her show and they insist the New Turkey is working hard in order not get into a war . As if there is a war left in Syria that Ankara win by proxies ... The theme ? The Tomb of Süleyman Şah , which ISIL can attack and the Party can finally capture the Turkish Army . Oh dear ... ) Anyhow , let's keep to cars and traitorous Rahmi who now refuses to do the same . How shameful , considering all those men who knew him do not flinch from telling the "truth" ... The New Turkey [as it must be clear] is well trained in the ways of PR , with the best America can give to use-and-dispose-of-class apparatchik types . You don't see any finger pointing and shaking ; they don't call Rahmi Jew or something , don't claim he doesn't want Muslims to succeed . They merely point out , after all the chest banging about how they defeated America , Rahmi sold out and bought a license from Fiat , to build a metal car . Instead of the glorious Anadol ; which they couldn't keep in production . After the Oil shocks which did draw the costs steeply up . With the price of a given amount of "Polyester" , the thing they applied as resin , from 4 USD to 60 .

the intended audience is already aware of that thing that lies underneath . There is no need for clips of the Gezi events / Taksim riots in which the Party accuses Rahmi Koç "directing" the revolts from his hotel right on the spot . This is a generation familiar with smartphones and the internet ; propaganda aimed at them has to be subtle because they can simply use the phone to look up for an alternative .

(distractions also happen . And this Professor on the TV decribes how useless the southern borders of this country is ; one should have natural borders instead of the railway that seperates Syria from Turkey . It's so incredible , now that the New Turkey is so ready give a quarter of the country to the seperatists and so vocal to expand elsewhere . One wonders where is this most incredible courage of theirs , which they apply gloriously as long as it's somebody else who does the fighting and bleeding . They should be bold enough to talk without the buffer of conquest .)

they are bold enough to make documentaries , when there are Wikipedia pages on the subject . Once again Wikipedia is hardly the last word on being true but it tends to be a good start . The documentary does not mention the guy who did the "design" of the Sports version was a graduate from some art school in Belgium . The audience being very Muslim these days . And very democratic hence kinda anti-militarist , too . As such the audience does not hear it the lines of the car was much influenced by the Spitfire , the warplane . ı would say by the Griffon engined ones with all the lumps and bumps . After reading the page ; while watching the documentary ı was so snickering at the claims that it was original and so Turkish . Unaware that it was kinda copied from Datsun and its like ; instead thinking it as a fat Mustang and nothing at all ...

speaking of Mustangs , the former engineers have the guts to slur the very 128 days of hard work by the Locomotive works . So we have these 2 or 3 heroes who work a night or two cutting and folding flat plates when the lagging sales justify a pick-up truck in the eyes of Ford , America . With an established production line , compared to the all-up-work-from-nothing of the Commies in the Locomotive works . Whose work still falls short of North American building the prototype P-51 in a scant 102 days and waiting a bit more for the engine to be delivered to complete the other Mustang . In 127 ... But then North American was an established aircraft company , right ?

ı hear there is this mine of jokes to be made about cars that hark back to the days when this USAF Colonel who owned a Mustang ... and he advised Lord Vader to stop pestering people about aircraft production in Turkey and buy a share of DeLorean ...

documentary was either mump on the subject or ı was in the kitchen for stuff to eat in front of the TV , being a certified couch potato . The subject being Ford trying to sell Anadol cars in New Zealand and failing . As reported in the Wikipedia . Actually ı was about to get into a discussion of the fauna in New Zealand before reading the whole text ; ı then saw that there are a few examples going around down there somewhere . The issue being the rumours that donkeys would eat the car body when hungry and the heroes of New Turkey refusing that vociferously ; it would mean the donkeys of New Zealand being far worse ... Worse enough to scuttle sales . The heroes still accept up to 80 cars went up in flames due electrical issues . A problem they claim they solved with a minimum amount of referrals to the British engineers who arrived to do the thing . They are indeed very happy though to tell that they finally got rid of English crew , Brit hating is a fixatition of New Turkey anyhow . Must be a British invention to steal the show from those who would have a reason already ...

the heroes definitely love to talk about the sports car . Repeating widespread "rumours" from auto afficinados the STC-16 definition means Super Turkish Monster , with a massive performance and all . Then they tell the truth that they just made it up , with the car definitely not having "Twin Cams" but a 1600 cc engine . After of course making fun of the idea that STC actually stands for Spor [Araba] Türkiye Cumhuriyeti . Which actually does . With 16 being the license plate number of the province of Bursa . Where the Military in its wisdom used the compulsory cuts from the salaries of officers and non-coms to establish a car factory as the catalyst for "an" auto industry . Renault being a perfectly good company with some real acceptable military potential to make German companies like MAN behave and follow the deals and stuff . Which then naturally led Ford to get this license from Fiat , Fiat selling even on the other side of the Iron Curtain .

the choice of Bursa has been remarkably effective , because no other city could conceivably held a working "Turkish" car industry . Considering it's not exactly Africa for engineers and managers who would rather live in Istanbul and doesn't bug the Western strategy people . You know back in the days of Ottomans , the valuable farmland of Bursa was deemed a strategic "risk" and the ever increasing Western influence made it certain the needs of the Capital was insistently provided by the Balkans . Teeming with people who would love to starve the Konstaninople if there was a Russian Army or a British Fleet over the horizon . It's not much of a coincidence that Ahmet Vefik Paşa , once ambrassador to France , worked very hard to develop the city . With the fall and doom of the Ottoman Empire imminent throughout the 19th Century . The isolation of Bursa was chiefly through lack of roads -and railroads once they were invented . With a French company finally making a narrow-gauge one to the pier in Mudanya . To secure the Silk trade when Germany started to have this lust for "colonies" . With the adherence to strategic concepts secured through the fact that Ottomans could not actually sail in their own seas , undercut massively by the massive presence of Western merchant ships . And guess what , Bursa , the fourth largest city of Turkey , in the 21st Century , still doesn't have rail connection with the rest of the country . Had this been a Civ III game , it would have been an excellent example of the AI stupidies . Oh yes , Bursa doesn't have a railroad and it won't . With the official accounting office discovering the current contract has spent 96% of the money allocated . Only to complete the 13% of the work . So typical of the new times where people discover stuff only after the plans are approved and work starts . Who would have known the planned route would pass through prime farmland or cut water supply to the city ? Any Christian would be most compelled to say Jesus Christ after reading the newspapers ...

the city of Bursa still has its trains though , Light Rail or Metro or whatever you want to call it . And ı get to ride on it time to time . Two varieties exist . One , the old one from the first phase of the development . Carriages built in Sakarya or something in the State Railroads factory under license from Siemens . Second , the one the A-K-P Municipality added . The carriages are like totally of Turkish production , as the Election campaigns screamed and shouted over the years . The new cars -of Bombardier ı believe- all carry a metal plate inside and kinda extremely visible . Declaring "Made at Bautzen, Germany. 2011" Elin gavuru , meaning "the Infidels" have a way of reading through people , you know . Now that you don't see anything like that in the old ones afterall . Never minding the old ones being an issue for a court case where the contractor seemingly wants money that it has no right to anyhow ...

the New Turkey is handy with words and PR . It like always works . As long as there is a repeating of everything with adding a twist or two . Now that we are like so democratic , the heroes who made Anadol solemnly declare that they were so far sighted that they designed a car so that people could drive to beach in their swimming suits , over a distance of let's say 50 or 100 meters . They sold 200 , too . The Wikipedia says it was a Volkswagen inspired thing , supposedly to result in a "field" vehicle for the Turkish Army . The Wikipedia seems to be rather more true on the subject , now that back in the 80s ı would see this odd thing on the roads like once every two years and my older brother would tell me it's an Anadol which failed as a military thing ... Well , the Koç group kinda finally provides Cobra , an armoured thing on HMMVW running gear and kinda works hard on selling the most expensive tank , ı think , based on the one that lost to M-1 and developed for Korea later on ...

it's almost obvious that the car will be a Tesla , but the New Turkey needs a original looking hood on the wheels and somehow our Muslim friends like the Saudis and the Qataris have turned their backs on Ankara to use their Western assets ; makes it kinda hard to materialize the thing .

yours truly once again appears as a forename in a movie , this time as the evil Police chief of Congregation who fights off his idealistic Journalist brother ; Party definitely wants to acquire Congregation rank and file and you know every little thing helps ...

onwards with the book from post #223 ... The issue that saw the replacement of İnönü with Bayar in 1937 is a first for me ; this Canadian newspaper identifies the reason as Kemal viewing Inönü as too lenient on the Fascists , stalling orders on sinking submarines which attack Soviet cargo ships to Republican Spain . This being a binding decision of an international conference and stuff . Guess the probability of learning this at school in the 1980s where the Turkish Youth is supposed to learn the necessity of standing against Communist Aggression , standing shoulder to shoulder with Reagan's America ! No reference to buying airplanes from Grumman for Spain , either .

the world of 1938 definitely views Inönü under the influence of Berlin , by a majority . Seems to be the English take . For the Japanese certainly feel the opposite . Quoting the Osaka Mainichi verbatim :

"The Soviets are elated over the report that General Ismet Ineunu, former Premier, has been elected the new President.

General Ineunu, together with Premier Celal Bayer, is known as a pro-Soviet statesman. After Ataturk became ill, General Ineunu issued a decree prohibiting any anti-Soviet campaign.

Nippon Parley Opposed

It is alleged that the two were responsible for the protest served against the Istanbul conference of Japanese diplomatic agents in the Near East on the ground that the parleys were aimed at discussing anti-Soviet policies."


must be easy to grasp now that the Japanese are shortly to be involved with a clash with the Soviets and looking for distractions . Apparently rather high approval of Kemal's Turkey extending the railroads to Erzurum ; and supposedly agitating the Muslims in the Soviet Union against their Bolshevik masters , too . ı think the Nationalists would have been much busy recounting that back in the good old 70s when the Left could use the legacy of Atatürk for almost anything . A daydream ? Japanese of the era are kinda lunatics but they still can look at a world map and see that they are but a weak power at an age where land hence agriculture hence population hence millions of bayonets on the front still matter a lot . They need a distraction ... Otherwise their basic reports on the death of Kemal are exactly same with the ones the Chinese read in their newspapers . As the reader well knows the guys who were involved in some robust fight against the Japanese . Probably because it originates from Reuters ; and in a book of 360 pages ı must have seen and read the same exact outline at least 60 times . The Dictator dies and he was a drunkard , a menace to women but abolished the Turkish grip on Islam or something . Could have lead to a discussion on the dangers of foreign media and how it distorts and could have gained one or two "Yea, exactly so." stuff in CFC , but then this is about a book ı collected 21 coupons for .

soviet language on November 1938 is uncommitted , no cheers for Inönü the closet Bolshie . Who had to close the institutes for village schools in something like 1947 after one project tried to build an auditorium or something in the shape of an hammer and sickle . Easy to see for Spitfires crisscrossing the skies , recon Spits were absolutely safe until them Russkies finally fielded MiG-15s . Very few people had radar establishments on the scale of WW2 Germans ; and this readily omits the Americans who would soon be all over the country as advisors and stuff . Hah , if you think this proves anything , Lord Vader would hang the aerial view of a certain USN barracks erected in the 60s once or twice every year ; when the Yanks would drop by , to accuse Turkey of plotting against the good old Uncle Sam . The said barracks being built in the shape of a swastika for them Russians to see with their spy satellites . Such insulting them Commies were part and parcel of the game and Americans regularly got carried away ; though it's still possible that they are smarting from the error they made in the 1984 or something when some smartie wrote an insult on the roof of the Northrop factory that thad begun to assemble the B-2 ... KGB quickly deduced the location and the programme ; Americans quickly boasted of catching a military attachee spying and went into a mental lockdown . Based on a confidence that their expertise in Stealth could be protected ; cut down US work on "advanced levels" . Until of course 2009 , where the Chinese supposedly stole them all .

still the Soviet participation in Kemal's funeral seems somewhat lukewarm , with Assistant Commissar for Foreign Affairs coming in with just two guys . One of them being the Commander of the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet . Now that this is what ı translate from a Turkish text already translated from Russian , it's quite possible that he was the commander of the whole Black Sea Fleet . Definitely paltry compared to the French who sent their Interior Minister , the commander of the French Navy , 2 Army generals from their forces in Syria and the "chief" of French Cabinet in addition to the High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs - don't know whether thus he would be the Foreign Minister . German participation can not be measured on the level of info ı have on the basis of this one book . A Baron von Hoyrat or maybe Heurath repeatedly gets mentioned with some generals , especially on Yugoslav newspapers but ı have no clue on who they are . Still quite possible the German delegation was sized to match the French one . The Yugoslav delegation is headed by their "War and Navy" Minister . The Afghan King cuts an European tour short and Metaxas , the Greek Prime Minister , also arrives now that there is a pact against Irredentism , meaning Bulgaria .

actually the Yugoslavs use the opportunity to have a crack of relationships or something . The Yugoslav military detachment to join the funeral in Ankara goes through Bulgaria on a train and they receive a welcome from their Bulgarian counterparts . Flags unfurled , marches played . The Yugoslav press calls the sides who meet each other on the parade ground for the first time since 1918 as "brave brother soldiers" . Can't say what the Bulgarian reaction is , considering the two items spread over 3 pages do not refer to that at all . Though it's possible to see they are ready to mock the "Sun Language Theory" , some stuff Kemal invented that claims Turkish is the oldest language in the history of the world . ı have read a re-print of book from the 1940s that solemnly accuse Sofia of refusing to follow the Kemalist "Alphabet Revolution" of 1928 and sticking to Arabic letters to create a wall between Ankara and Turkish minority in Bulgaria . Not much of an issue , in 1938 the feeling about the heady days when they were just about to take Istanbul must be still quite warm . Let's say a diplomatic language on how it's possible that the Kemalists will shortly fall and the old kind of jerks the Bulgarians could handle easily will come back .

the Ottoman Family has shown quite a resilience to such a comeback ; even if the book has a basic prologue on how there was a letter campaign of sorts in '38 now that the man was dead and his followers were not him , at all . And had ı not been kinda a nut and a nerd and a geek and an anorak , ı would have been real quick to mention that the British sent Malaya to Istanbul to take part in the funeral . The same battleship that had carried the last Sultan to exile . But being the four things in the last sentence or two ı know battleships are rare and they live a pampered existence . It's not like the Brits had 50 battleships and chose Malaya on purpose . It was the flagship of their Mediterrenean squadron and not sending it would have been real obvious way of suggesting London respected Turks . Now , that's a thing that won't happen , right ?

the Brits and the colonies happen to take a lot of space in the book ; can not blame the publishers . Now that English is a language everybody knows and English speaking countries tending to be places where newspapers have reporters to search the libraries and stuff . And surprisingly America takes a lot pages , some 30 compared to 38 pages from German newspapers , 10 of French , 2 Spanish , 15 Greek , 40 Yugoslav , 7 Soviet , 9 Chinese and 7 from Japan . Even if all the American articles are of two or three paragraphs and as such look almost superfluous in the like totally blank pages they occupy . The translations are also supported by an image of the page they appeared and on a personal base ı feel the Los Angeles Times had the easiest fonts to read ... Americans are kinda disinterested while the Brits have some merry accounts of the sickness of the Ottomans and of the guy who took them down . Some drunkard as you might have heard . Even to the extent that Kemal's favourite drink , rakı , was banned for the British Occupation troops in Palestine , being too strong if not suitably watered down . Canada doubts about the future of the Republic after Kemal's death and Jamaica agrees that that there will be no more greatness for Turks .

and no surprises from Australia and New Zealand somehow . The first identifies Kemal as the noblest Turk , the second as the good dictator . Going on to stress that among the then current crop of dictators only Kemal had a distinguished military record ; '38 is when ANZACs are getting ready for a world war again . And they are rather more "familiar" with the Mustafa Kemal as it seems . The Japanese , possibly still smarting -from being snubbed for an attempt for agitation in the Western parts of the Soviet Union and working hard to enlist any member of the Ottoman Family for likewise agitation even in Mongolia- claim his mother was Jewish , Australians declare this to be false with both parents Turkish . New Zealanders add a twist that some Arab teacher beat him as a kid , that's why Atatürk was so stuck with notions of Reform . Never heard that before , but ı digress .

do ı hear a whisper of an question: "What about the Poles?" Well , they think he did nothing of import in the Great War . This after a reference of defending the Gallipoli and getting a promotion to General after defeating the Russians in 1916 . Poles are kinda upset with us in those days as well ; for failing to agitate against the Soviets . They welcome anybody that was forced out of Turkey due to pressure from Moscow . Lithuanians on the other hand declare he at least had a sense of beauty , he was presented with a nice piece of amber and wrote back a letter of thanks . Something that maybe deserves special mention now that when he became the leader of Turkey , his people were semi-wild and couldn't read a thing ; semi-barbarians in short . The London correspondent of that newspaper in question then goes on renumerate the successes ; he is really confident that Kemal's Turkey will live on ...

could it be possible he was somewhat deaf to English spoken in 1938 ? Say , even the Irish whom we barbarians living on the edge of the world would assume to be opposed to "English" narratives , are almost the harshest on him . There's talk of throwing the Kuran across the Parliament in Ankara , as some guy named Mr. Ronald McNeill did to Bible in the House of Commons . Trust me , if this had been so the New Turkey would be like bulldozing Kemal's mauseleum down 10 times over in the last 10 years . But then this is something America expects ISIL to carry out , right ? ı have glimpsed in a book on the discussions of Caliphate after 1924 and ı sense there was a massive backlash , especially in India . Few pages present seems to suggest there was some respect in '38 , probably for proving non-Europeans , even if not praying to Allah could still gain some fruits of hard work ; White Man's superiority was not in the genes . Egypt also discusses the interaction of Religion and the secular aspects of Kemal's Turkey . Being the central pillar of that then new thinking about "English-Muslim" structures .

you know , Kitchener failing to become the Viceroy of India , attempting to create a new "throne" in Cairo , And Egypt being quite spectacular as always and a possible center of a "re-awakened" Islam , now that the French had Syria and Colonialism is about always coveting the neighbour's possessions . Hence we learn , we Turks were actually never religious at all ... Went in and out of various religions over the centuries . Although Islam is not yet dead in Turkey and what replaced Islam is weak ... And of course , a full praise on the reforms : Like the use of Western type alphabet which opens new horizons . So that the Egyptians will be encouraged to learn English and the "oppression" which disbanded so many sects is a good thing too ; with the sects being quite the equivalent of parasites . Fully justifies any English action to disperse similar stuff in Egyptian society ; in case they start talking about London's idea on this or on that . There is even talk of a will Kemal had prepared in 1934 , where he orders all the statues made for him to be destroyed after his death .

a sine qua non of dictatorship , where the dictator needs visual presence all around the country and Kemal justifying the heavy-handedness as a mission to make things right so that there would be no need for dictators after him . Didn't happen , as Inönü needed Kemal's name , especially after what happened to him . Actually it's history what makes the New Turkey hysterical . Feeling there was this thing called the WW2 out of the borders , in 1941 or 42 Inönü attempted to have a monument in the park named after his victories in the fields of Inönü 20 years back . Bigger the Taksim monument which is right there . Actually justified by the presence of Soviet Commissars or Marshalls in the Taksim thing as a reference for the military aid and stuff ... And people had the gall to demonstrate . Kemal as a dictator was all for the development of the country ; fell on deaf ears for years , still does . No leeway for dictatorship can be expected , unless one is named Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and it's 1919 and on . It's easy to have a court ruling for a name change , but ain't it kinda hard to convince the whole world that calendars should be re-arranged ? Of course , it never surprises to hear some State School in the New Turkey is being re-built and Kemal's portraits need to be taken down to the basement , right next to heating . To protect them from damage , the Principle says . ı don't know what he has against Ottoman Sultans , now that he has their portraits hung instead . Lies and deceit is so common nowadays .

now that lies and deceit are what made the New Turkey .

of course these newspapers are merely written by individuals and they certainly do not represent the whole of their countries of their origin ; but ı should say they carry a certain weight that they are the products of the environments their writers live in . One can say , many of the people respect him solely for the supposition that he "hurt" Islam and this is the sugar coating on the pill ; 'cause Turks are not exactly much liked then or now . Otherwise , he would be seen as a mere bloody dictator as some Argentinian newspaper suggests , a war lord and nothing else :


"He was a man born out of due season, an anachronism...

Had he been born in the centuries when all Central Asia was on the move he would have ridden out with Sulyman Shah under the banner of the Grey Wolf, and with the heart and instinct of a Grey Wolf.

With his military genius, and his ruthless determination unweakened by sentiments, loyalties or moralities, he might well have been a Tamerlane or a Jenghis Khan riding at the head of great hordes of wild horsemen, conquering countries, devouring and destroying cities, and filling in the intervals of peace between campaigns with wild and hideous orgies of wine and women..."


this Grey Wolf thing of course stems from this biography written by a dude named H.C. Armstrong , which was the only thing available on the market for quite a while . Even if the Buenos Aires Herald article changes the tack completely as it moves on . Armstrong's book is what the educated people of Argentina know ; it's where the article starts . Actually that book is available for sale in Yugoslavia for 125 Dinars ; you can pay for it in 5 monthly installments of 25 . The cover of course shows him as some Fu Manchu , with the eyes of some lizard . The ad in the newspaper definitely describes him as the greatest friend of Yugoslavia ; it seems after the assassination of the King in 1934 he diplomatically said he would mobilize Turkey , the entire country of 18 million , to protect the integrity of Yugoslavia . Presumably against the Croats supported by Italy with some undiplomatic stuff as well ; the Nazis were still weak at the time . A discussion of Germany will actually follow but let's still stick to Fu Manchuism of the Brits ... After rounding up with some reference to Yugoslav accounts . Kemal might be Yugoslavia's best friend , but Yugoslavia has lots of Bosnians who invariably side with Turk . Kemal's reforms "against" Islam would help assimilation of Bosnians , but there are also ethnic Turks who create a reason to act carefully . Turkish success can not be too much approved . And perhaps a little anger with Ankara failing to agree to a Belgrad offer that ethnic Albanians deported to Turkey so that Kosova can be emptied of Muslims . As such we have the thing on Kemal's parents ... Once again ... This time , they are just remnants of Serbians of Selanik , must be the reason why the newspaper which sells Armstrong's Greywolf pays attention to why Kemal can not be a Grey Wolf . With that phrase depicting supporters of Süleyman Şah , who were known to be bad , period . Kemal maybe can be called a bit like Petro , the Great or the Mad as Turkish history calls that guy ...

at least nobody doubts Kemal's military prowess . That the British were stopped cold in the Gallipoli is known throughout the world ; perhaps thanks to the absolute need for the likes of Winston Churchill to justify themselves . Being defeated by Turks is a most unwelcome thing in the world of conspiracies , makes you the laughing stock of people . As such even in 1938 Mustafa Kemal gets to be called "Genius" a lot . Takes some of the sting , ı presume , now that yin-yang duality or something ensures even fools like Turks can win some of the times , which can better be explained by the explanation that never fails , a freak occasion that can't possibly be repeated again .

you know , in 1938 they have two big things on the way , before they come here to drive us into Central Asia whence we came to bring ruin , damnation and doom to Europe and stuff serving the Devil , to be the Scourge of God . Them Commies and them Germans who might turn smart and shoot Adolf are the only two things that stand between the White Man and correcting the wrongs we were and are .

that must be a reason why not a single British newspaper can bring itself to kinda fully discuss the National War of Liberation . Limited to reports of guerilla warfare , which indeed were true , especially for the first phase when the Army was being assembled . Or at most , the defensive action in Sakarya . Romanians seem to be the only newspaper editors who think their audience would be familiar with Eskişehir , the place where we were routed and Sakarya had to be fought as a result . Then it becomes a feat of endurance , which the Ottoman soldiery were already famous for . Egyptian newspapers , now that there are lots of Greeks living in country , also celebrate the heroism of the Greek Army in that battle . What happens after then is murky . Irish , as already reported , are way cool to Turkey ; from them we learn the war was won in 1921 and Kemal poured the Greeks into the sea and burned Izmir , their Headquarters . At least there's still a possibility of a misprint , maybe they meant 1922 . Yugoslavs on the other hand solemnly declare that the defeated were Anglo-Indian invaders . South Africa , being the country where the tradition of Boer Commandos is still warm inside somewhere , and having Smuts [the celebrated Balkanist] as a leader and stuff , references 1922 allright instead of stressing unconventional warfare but attributes him another victory . The Kut-ül Emare , the highest number of British POWs -now that Singapore 1942 is like totally science fiction in 1938 , obviously we can't have any other commander that can measure up to the White Man . Don't know what we did to Smuts ... Similarly there are lots of references to an event that took place in Mersin , unbelievably in Spring 1919 , where a French Detachment was disarmed and sent back . Obviously impossible in the sense it was June at the earliest that the formerly Ottoman Army accepted that the Greeks were here to stay and rape and kill and there was nothing but a proper fight . Until then nobody could even dare thinking about defying the Mondros Ceasefire Agreement . As such even the most disbelieved official histories say nothing on such a thing . Obviously because of the thing that it didn't happen .

the British , at least in the pages of the book , have the final word on our war then . It was in Sakarya when the thing was decided . In 1938 there are millions of men in the UK who have had served in the trenches of the Great War , each one possibly having lost a close friend in frustatingly futile assaults of 1915-17 . Defence wins too easily and hence our victory was one of Defence , it would be almost un-British to talk of the time we attacked and won . A clear and swift one , with rate of advance "perhaps" as good as the time the British were defeating us in Palestine . And did we have guns and planes and gas and tanks like the Brits of 1918 ? No ? Then Sakarya it is . But for Kemal's luck , not even Sakarya would have happened . Because , you see , back in the exciting days of 1915 , the ANZACs could have acted more decisively and there would be nothing left of Turkey to save ... Evening Standart of November 12th , 1938 has the dope :

"The Australians struck for the crest of the hill. They were seen by a few Turkish gendarmes who rushed off bareheaded and noisily excited until they bumped into a Turkish regiment out for exercise.

'What's up?' asked the commander.

'They come, they come.' came the reply.

'Who comes?'

'The Inglis, the Inglis!'

The Commander turned to his chief of staff. 'Have we ammunition?'

'Yes.'

'All right. Forward!'

now this happens to be a central thing about the hagiography or something about Atatürk ; luckily for Turks and stuff it's now widely reported to be not so ... Those "noisily excited" were the tripwire and when questioned by the Lt Colonel Mustafa Kemal on why they were running , they told they had no ammunition left . Kemal's regiment had all the ammunition its soldiers could carry , now that they were basically rushing to the sound of guns . Kemal ordered fixed bayonets , the troops went down as well . The ANZACs smelt something fishy , they stopped , the regiment arrived in force , the attack was stopped . The Inglis were like totally justified in smelling something fishy , now that they were trained to believe the Turk was not man enough for bayonet work ... ı have even read that the Australians have been long reported to be cowards or something , while the New Zealanders were unblemished , now that New Zealanders didn't stop in the face of 20 bayonets . Or something . One presumably can measure the affection the Australians have for their Mother country , accepting to be called cowards and all . So that the British Narrative stays ... A little courage and no delays in the capture of the assigned target , the Ottomans fall and the Turk remains as a bad word in history and nothing else ...

could it be possible ? Let's be topical and trendy and talk abour anniversaries ; could the Allies manage to pass the Straits in 1915 and take Istanbul ? So that by June 1915 , America would have declared on Germany with a couple of million men in training by 1916 , with some 300 000 already taking part in the war in the trenches ? With Russians preparing a Grand Offensive on Berlin , after just taking Vienna ? With we already being served "Justice" at the hands of a multitude of masters and all dead by 1940 as a nation or even as ideals ? Let's arm ourselves with hindsight and establish what we surely couldn't have coped with ...

hindsight naturally calls for extensive ground operations instead of the March 18th attack and the April Landings that had to follow . A grand coalition of the Balkan states , once again , just like the 1912 affair . Which would be hard to realise , with a severely wounded Bulgaria ? The proud victor of 1912 , dislocating the entire Ottoman effort so that without defeating the Bulgarian mass , there was no way of coming to grips with the rest of the Balkan powers . The dazzling show , swift and terrible , which somehow turned into a more equal fight when the Ottomans ran out of territory to be outmaneouvred . Broke Bulgarian hearts and inflamed their brains , too . Facing the Turk with his back to wall , it was insulting to see the Serbians and Greeks stealing the rest of the Balkans at a breeze . Oh yeah , there were sieges where defensive firepower still took a certain measure of the Righteous Warriors , the heroes of Christendom bent on cleansing Evil from this world , but Bulgarians , between Turkish bullets and non Turkish epidemics , had to accept a Serbian corps to reduce Edirne , instead of racing to plant their standarts at the walls of the Topkapı Palace .

and that's another thing one can safely lay at the feet of Wilhelm , the Kaiser . He just wanted to be like a British King , with subjects in some sunny climate . And not partners , which would have been the net result of Berlin's efforts in the Ottoman Empire . Which were supposed to bring about a rejuvenization of Ottoman power which would then be a pillar of support for the German speaking Empires , with a market and resources lacking in Europe , in addition to a not exactly feeble Army . But did the Kaiser want any of that ? Having decided to supplant the Austria-Hungary one way or the other , what use could he have for some bunch of Muslims , except as slaves serving tea to a reviled cousin , who also happened to rule in London as he came for visit , to see the newest acquisition of Berlin ? Russia arranged the Balkan Alliance , so that the fear of subjects comin' to kill us all would have caused us to call for Russian protection , just like the 1830s when we had this extreme fear of our subjects in Egypt . Russia indeed coveted to get rid of us completely but the Straits were too big a plum to chew at once despite the British guarentees of 1908 or so ... 1920ish maybe , when the Russians made a through inventory of all possible assets in the country . Right after the Balkan Wars " Russians in Istanbul had detected a “Russophilic” tendency among social circles and the press already in the fall of 1913" there was an offer of a education scheme for Ottoman students in Russia ; leading to " a “Turkish–Russian Committee” [which] was established in Istanbul [in March 1914] for the development of closer cultural, economic, and political ties. It planned to accomplish these objectives by influencing the press in the two countries, publishing a monthly newspaper, organizing travel excursions, and holding conferences. It had an executive board of twelve and a total membership of forty, half Ottoman, half Russian. The Ottoman members ... were all Unionists. Which finally led to an offer of Alliance from Talat , and "The suggestion so shocked him, Sazonov later wrote, that he nearly fell over." The Ittihad ve Terakki was a just means for politics after all ; politicians are so capable of stuff ... The German puppets were quite tame to become Russian puppets , too . Especially after the not so bright results of the 1912-13 debacles . Since it was the Kaiser who favoured a Serbian victory to drive Vienna crazy and a total Ottoman defeat that would entail the loss the European parts of the Empire so that we would just shut up and kiss his feet for protection in the lands that remained elsewhere , the to-be-German Asiatic Empire if you will . And that with Vienna reduced to vassalage . How this was achieved would entail a wholesale examination who sold what for what ; details of which ı have no right to be privy to ; nor a will to discuss such treachery exists in yours truly . Disgustingly enough treachery in the 21st Century afterall . Not that the peoples of Balkans could be expected to honour their benefactor who of course had made his first mark on History with sacking Bismarck , a guy truly opposed to adventures in the Balkans ... Nonetheless the Ottoman defeat was to much rejoice all around the world . Though , something good still came out of it : France and England were already operating on a course for global war to destroy Germany but the extensive wins of the Balkan States removed the incentives that London and Paris could offer for a "combined" Balkan contribution to the war to come .

not only there was a dearth of Rumeli to distribute among partners voluntering to fight Berlin and Vienna but Bulgaria's disasterous endevours in the Second Balkan War spelt doom for specific Entente Cordiale designs . Instead of a Balkan Alliance that would physically prevent Russia from gaining too much from a dying Austria-Hungary , seething Bulgarians would be quite ready to hear what Berlin and Vienna were to offer . Even defeated they had a potential . Greece sat out the "war" , Serbia didn't have the wherewithal to resist when the fighting involved German professionalism , the already present bulk of the Dual Monarchy and a second front ; the Romanians simply waited to long to get in as they haggled for increased gains . We kick harder when dead .

bulgaria was indeed the key ... Greeks' experience of war since 1800s quite centred on rebellions against us ; which they regularly won after we were too tired to fight , regularly after Foreign meddling if not straight intervention . They were coveting Asia Minor , lusting very seriously and full of hope for success , considering the menpower potential they had in the Ottoman citizens who happened to be of Greek origin . An angry Bulgaria seeking revenge could well find a perfect chance to strike as the Greeks were conducting the ethnic cleansing they desired in Anatolia ; Greeks had long experience of insurgencies , they knew we could simply copy their glorious example and play hide and seek in the mountains waiting for something , anything to happen . The Germanophile King and Germanophobic Venizelos played an excellent game of waiting through the facade of disagreements ; even when they might have come close to tearing Greece apart with the possibility of a full blown Civil War in the process . Serbia torn apart decreased the risk that Belgrade could agree with Sofia on a joint effort to see who would reach Selanik first . The loss of Romania was perhaps a negative in light of a careful Bulgaria husbanding strength throughout the Great War . Yet with the Ottomans in bloody battles all around , in constant weakening it was a palatable risk . Until of course the Western Allies figured that they were being duped daily by the wily Venizelos , it was an invasion and off to war the Greeks marched .

bringing Bulgaria to war would or at least could win the Great War for the Allies by 1917 . If not '16 ...

greeks were a maritime nation , they understood the potential of the British and French better than the landlocked Bulgarians , the Western Allies could never lose . Still Wilhelm had to offer Istanbul to Sofia and Bulgarians could prepare for the Balkan War III as soon as the Great War was won . Berlin claimed it would look the other way , citing troubles in the newly acquired Ukraine and the rest . Just like he was already finding Kings among the Arabs ; when ı say the world doesn't like us Turks , it's only because the World doesn't like us Turks .

to this only practicable option could be

"...the destiny of the peoples of the Balkans is once more set on the issue of war. It is not inconceivable, therefore, that some or all of those States may be drawn into the present colossal conflict. In 1912-1913 the first war showed Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Servia allied against Turkey; and in the second war Greece, Montenegro, and Servia were joined by Roumania in the war against Bulgaria, who was also independently attacked by Turkey. What may happen in 1914 or 1915 no one can predict. But if this terrible conflagration, which is already devastating Europe and convulsing all the continents and vexing all the oceans of the globe, spreads to the Balkans, one may hazard the guess that Greece, Montenegro, Servia, and Roumania will stand together on the side of the Allies and that Bulgaria if she is not carried away by marked Austro-German victories will remain neutral,—unless indeed the other Balkan States win her over, as they not inconceivably might do, if they rose to the heights of unwonted statesmanship by recognizing her claim to that part of Macedonia in which the Bulgarian element predominates but which was ceded to her rivals by the Treaty of Bukarest."

says Jacob Gould Schurman on November 26, 1914 . The US Ambrassador to Athens at the times , as he finishes a book he has authored .

Most unlikely , who has ever heard of Balkan folk agreeing on anything , apart from short term alliances against each other ? The Balkan Solution to the dreadlock of trenches of course capitalizes on the demonstrated weakness of Austria-Hungary ; Italy was more than willing to join the war , a concerted Balkan effort would have caused even more distraction to the Entente , allowing more space for Russian attacks , causing a lesser German presence on the Western Front , allowing the French to recover their initial losses and allowing the British to conduct a more effective Eastern strategy , meaning increased powers for the Balkan League and so on . Which would mean ? Serbia and Romania would find compensation in the lands to be captured from Vienna , which could certainly make it palatable to return Dobruca and a bit of Macedonia to Sofia . The Bulgarians would also have some of Thrace , maybe even a port in Marmara . Greece could look forward to a invasion in Asia Minor . Russians can naturally be expected to be against such a scheme ? Why , they could prop the Bulgarians against the Greeks who no doubt would immediately start a scheme to get Aya Sofia from the Russian barbarians ; Greeks no doubt would have trouble with Armenia as well , naturally under St. Petersburg's thumb . Istanbul and the Straits would remain Russians' for centuries to come . As for Kurds , they would be given a promise of oil to get and they would be an immediate concern for Kitchener's Arab kingdom . Which even solved the thorny issue of Americans , such united the Big Three of England , France and Russia could simply order Washington to stand on its feet at the corner . In case it ever tried to play dirty tricks and attempt to support us Turks , now that we would be fighting everybody and everything and hence be ready to pay anything .

at variance with historical fact ? With Russians defining Armenians as the most troublesome subjects of theirs and doing their utmost to prevent the formation of an Armenian state ? You are disregarding the unspoken . Throwing Turks out of Europe was a Christian goal for long but when it happened , it's just a little step to reach a more comprehensive "solution" . Erasing the Turks out of Asia Minor as well would provide extensive benefits to the Colonial Powers . With the total defeat of the Muslim Superpower or something of some 6 centuries teaching the Mussulmans or Mohemmedans their proper place in the world . The world created for the rule of the White Man ... Guess what happens you kick out the Turks out of Anatolia and create a vacuum of sorts where "native" Christians are the only ones to remain . Oh yeah , Armenia needs a protector . And it won't be the Westerners now that they are like duty bound to support the Greek theses ...

a perfect thing it is to find something of which you are terribly terrifed of and let people know so that they also know their brother-in-arms also know and each one gouges the eyes of the others so that they won't benefit the most .

it always pays to read stuff and there's this Osprey title , "Gallipoli - Command under Fire" which promises to talk well about the performance of Turkish Command and Control in those battles ... The author -seemingly with a thesis that the Ottoman officers knew what they were doing in stark contrast to the Allies- then declares a certain surprise . That at the start of war we tried to operate at the margins of the Empire with certainly minimal forces while there was some 200 000 troops around Istanbul with a definite readiness to fight the Greeks , who were not in the war ! Well , to be honest , ı didn't know it at all until ı read it in the book . But , it proves our conviction and Bulgarians are left thinking . It also deters the Greeks , now that certain British plans have asked only 50 000 troops from Athens to support a Royal Navy attempt on Istanbul . This can surely be deduced from experience with Albion Perfide , they surely wouldn't start a thing they couldn't control in the end , meaning the Greek contribution would not be allowed to beat us on its own . And 200 000 is quite a number , right ?

not that it would be through a concious decision by the Ittihad leadership , too . One of pet theories of mine is that the the trio that ruled the country knew there was no hope for the Ottomans as it was . And history is clear for all to see ; give Legions to Caesars and watch them crossing Rubicons . Cemal for all his desire to be the King of Arabia had a tiny contingent to get over the Suez , so that Berlin could see how a great soldier he was and forget his repeated attempts to ally with France . Enver cheated as he was the Commander-in-Chief and tried for a bigger victory , an Ottoman Tannenberg , to outshine Cemal and blast a path for his Empire in the Turkics to be saved from Russians to be proxy dominated by Germans . Talat was just a post office clerk and Istanbul had still hundreds of partizans of Cemal and Enver . Talat would keep the fort and shine as an administrator while the troops would deter any attempts at a coup ; it's almost heart rending to read that with inevitable wastage of war and the ever increasing displeasure at the Ittihadists that by 1917 they needed German sentries at Party buildings . Yeah , ı still have to grant that they might have also thought of defending the heart of the Empire as they were bidding each other farewell . Although anyone with half of the wits (of any armchair general) already knows it in his heart . That those 200 000 men were supposed to be railroaded to Galicia as soon as the Bulgarians were bribed with a big enough sum to enter the war ; so that the faltering Austro-Hungarian units could be supported with some cannon fodder ...

and actually you can find it in the books if you have the nerve to delve deep to read and see the frustrating self repeating cycle of history again and again . In this case it arises from the promises of Enver to Germans :

...General Liman von Sanders also reported on the signing of the alliance and its prospects. Writing General Helmuth von Moltke, the chief of the general staff, about his meeting with Enver on August 1, he outlined exactly what the war minister had promised in military terms. One hundred and twenty thousand troops would be massed at Edirne for joint action with Bulgarian forces against Russia. These troops would be ready for action on the thirtieth day of mobilization, that is, on September 1. Romania’s support for such an operation would be essential, however, as a joint Bulgarian–Ottoman campaign against Russia would have to cross Romanian territory. A second Ottoman army of 90,000 troops would be massed south of Edirne for action against either Greece or Russia. This second army required sixty days of mobilization to get ready. Five further Ottoman divisions would be headquartered along the Ottoman–Russian border in eastern Anatolia.


in this one certainly can not find the irrefutable proof that Enver sold the country for Kaiser's pat on the back . Now that the source and indeed many other books make it clear the Ottoman practice of playing Great Powers against one another was a highly honed art by the end ; within its limits .

The outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914 did not automatically entail Ottoman participation, for the carefully worded treaty with Germany did not make Ottoman entry into the war a definite obligation. Accordingly, on August 3, the Ottoman government merely declared armed neutrality and initiated a full military mobilization. The Ottomans aimed to mobilize within the thirty-nine days scheduled for the execution of the first phase of the Schlieffen plan against France, so that the Ottoman army would be ready to lend a helping hand to the Germans when they turned eastward against Russia.


which greatly "helped" the eventual destruction of the Ottoman Army . Despite later efforts to present him as a level headed politician and almost a match for Mustafa Kemal in strategic vision , Enver and his cohorts' urgency in mass mobilization created spectacles . Of still loyal masses of people arranging 3 days of food as ordered by the authorities before "surrendering" to depots where they are to be inducted into the Army . Imagine the hosts of villagers walking one or two days to depots only to discover the system is not up to dealing with the numbers presenting themselves and simply there is neither food nor means to deliver food . Induced the "brave" ones to dodge the draft . Since this carried a death penalty , they were reduced to banditry which then of course simply increased the problems of law and order . It becomes ever harder to maintain an authority as the men you train and arm (with great sacrifises and the like) simply vanish at night , it also eats up your military potential . Because the deserters naturally are smart enough to know that they will need your rifles and your ammunition for basic survival let alone banditry they will have to commit . In 2015 it's just obvious that the Ottomans could never recover from the loss of the Shia Iraq by the beginning of the war . Possibly would happen anyhow but an attempt to recover deserters resulted in some wholesale rebellion in places like Kerbela . Such failures on part of the Army , which was the only instrument that could serve , simply encouraged more troubles of the same sort . Marching through some Arabian town might cost an Ottoman formation up to 50% losses as troops simply melted away . The Ottomans might have mobilized almost 3 million soldiers but never had more than 800 000 at the field at the same time . A gradual mobilization would have taken months and given less cause for hearts and minds to doubt the prospects of the country and would have provided the exact same initial combat power , now that in the real life 1914 it took months to assemble anyhow . But a gradualism of this kind would have meant nothing on the only matter that mattered ; it would have done nothing to get Kaiser's pat on the back .

a yet another veiled attempt of sarcasm on the faboulously glorious New Turkey way of things where the conquest and domination of the globe is just for grabs but for the few traitors who still refuse to see the light ? ı hear all my posts everywhere , including this thread , have gained a new popularity , being read line by line . No doubt to ensure none of my slurs on the New Turkey escapes notice , hence punishment . The possibility of the smarty Party losing elections must be somehow making a cause for concern that the old ways will return and ı will make people pay , as if ı had been real in the past before this glorious newliness came to Turkey and did away with evil . It still amazes to see people forgetting all the jokes and believe in their own fiction ; it's now the third time in this last 10 years that ı -walking in the street minding my own business , say out to buy a loaf of bread- overhear housewives discussing why ı should be dead from open windows two or three stories up . As if the proposed victors , in case they actually win , will be like wellcoming the Starfleet . America doesn't like the Starfleet but neither BMD nor voo doo dolls in various sizes and shapes ranging from 1/144 Constitutions to 1/720 Star Destroyers work . So the new new would still be all against me , right ? Now that America would tell them so . And never minding the elections could be like lost by the Party ; America right now is once again arranging its bets . Congregation TVs refused to report on the polls when the Opposition was gaining . It's no surprise to see them talking the numbers now , almost breathing again to see their deadly enemies , the Party gaining a few percentage points back ... Oh America , you are so mighty !

just wasting my time watching TV , but not the State Channel , unless ı catch something interesting enough while surfing . As such didn't see that particular Eyecandy programme . But read about it in the newspaper . That some guy naturally appears on the official channel of this "Oooo, so Muslim" country and declares Turkish history had few people that could ever match the idealistic heroism of Enver . Eyecandy , no doubt due to her being blonde and blondes being dumb to begin with and being Turkish automatically involves being born dumb anyhow , mentions Atatürk . That's the format , man . Every level headed discussion must somehow result in a comparision of the false prophet , the godless pharoah aka Mustafa Kemal with anybody available , with a numerical value assigned to stress Kemal's true worth whenever possible . So the guy on TV says Enver was worth 80 Atatürks . And the format naturally involves a second guest tasked with a spirited defence of Atatürk , so that the target audience , those ungrateful jerks who don't vote for people who want to bring down this Republic will give a sigh or utter some amount of unprintable words and change the channel and never come back ...

and why ? It's so true ... Enver could have destroyed 80 Ottoman empires but Kemal could have saved only Turkey ... Pity that Enver had only one empire to destroy , right ?

back on subject of current discussion , it's then entirely possible that people with actual knowledge of something , history in this particular case , will suggest the Ottomans were already dead in 1914 anyhow , they would fail to induct people as required and morale would have been deep down in some hole in the ground after the defeats of 1912-13 . Let me to suggest that the system could cope with a slow tempo and those who were "in" during the 1915 proved a certain amount of fallacies were indeed fallacies .

it's this unshakeable belief of the leading lights of the Ottomans in the unfallible superiority of Europeans . Depending on which state's payroll the leading lights were . The majority was then for Germany , the majority then played hard to be on good terms with Germany . Incredible "foresight" from an Army which had so recently failed to dislodge the Bulgarians from the very gates of the capital ; you would expect them to have a bitter understanding of the bloody modern war to come... 30 days and Germans marching on the Russians . But then Germans were like individually bulletproof , ja ?

the first quote in the post above . It's from a book ı found and enjoyed and learned quite a few from . It won some award or at least some recognation as the best dissertation to come out that year , has gone to print in a series from a major publisher , after (in all probability) gaining approval from Hew Strachan , whom ı sense to be a real serious big name in the field of history . Aims to challenge the narrative that suggests the Ottoman Empire was bankrupt by all means in 1914 and foolishly blundered into the Great War by intent and mistake . Intent , on part of the Germans who needed to expend us as a proxy , greatly helped by the egomania and idiocy of a select few . And mistake , of the rest , mainly Ottoman , who felt there was no recourse left but war ... Does a through job of assigning agency to Ottomans , too . Must have gotten whole marks from Strachan , ı have seen a volume of his and his wide examination of the Ottoman options and actions between 1914 to 16-17 was totally fresh , new , unknown for me in quite a few areas . It kinda adds upto a quite "convincing" discussion on how Kemal's work was merely a continuation of this heart rending period of Ottomans who were struggling get on their feet ; that the same overall results could have been achieved if the State had been allowed a respite , hence a perhaps resounding "no need" for the Republic . Narratives are nice to challenge and it even doesn't have to be a part and parcel of some conspiracy ; there's a source and reference for anything put forward - ı would have no doubt that the things did happen quite similarly to what the author writes . But the thing is challenging narratives take place in the "shadow" of the new narratives and that there-was-no-need-for-the-Republic happens to be the mantra of the New Turkey . Actually it has been a bragging point of this new country . Say , that they are building railroads . With tax-payer money and not from that their own pocket but you need to understand the bragging that goes on to assign some sense to this sentence ... And it's not some grand strategy or long term planning . Apart from juicy contracts to companies in support of the Party the aim is merely selling to the highest bidder but of course this is not the thing . They are building railroads and building them better than Kemal's Republic ever did . The New Turkey builds railroads with 70 meter lengths of rail ; hence fewer points of connection , hence less bumps , hence a better ride for the passengers . In strict contrast to 10 meter rails at the time of Kemal ... As if there was this whole panoply of CNC "benches" , automated spot welding and whole sets of construction equipment in the 1930s and the godless Kemal chose a 10 meter standart so that Muslims would suffer at the every turn of the wheels . It's as if the New Turkey has invented 70 meter rails while the world still struggles with 20 meters ... Then it never surprises to see trolls of New Turkey coming up with buying newspaper ad pages to declare it would have been quite OK without Mustafa Kemal Atatürk at all .

he was just a man , better than many , no worse than many , with no fewer faults than many . His was a one man dictatorship , true and he did had a few shot and hung . As such , it's equally true that it would have been much better if he had shot and hung a couple dozens or hundreds more . Watching wildlife documentaries one can never avoid the sight of the Lion who hunts and brings down the food and watches in dismay as the Hyenas increase in number and drive away the Lion . Mustafa Kemal was a product of the days when it was a question of life and death and he was willing to exploit it all so that the future generations could have a future . It was merely the thing that he had a right to expect from the past generations who had failed instead . If the past generations had not , there would have been no need for him to risk all . For a future for future generations . A cheezy attempt to cover up for the dictator ? A pathetic try to derive some respectability from shame and disgrace ? Be my guest , we all see those who try to bring him down for good . For Kemal's , of the Republic he established and hence our unforgiveable sin , reason to be obliterated , justification to be hated is that the Turkish War of Liberation beat this much mentioned New World Order in battle , someway and somehow . In its Beta version ; and it has been amusing and baleful simultenously for those old guys to watch the New World Order thing develop by leaps and bounds and never forgetting the kinda small scale actions of the 1919-22 and this mighty thing trying to catch its tail instead of a hard day's work . Or maybe two , if there's any luck left for us , Turks . Nobody can possibly win against the US , in battle , fiction or fact , right ? Never forget those old guys can , of the days when the Foreigners and the like loved and liked Kemal more than the old guys ; so that the old guys couldn't drive this wedge or that wedge into the machinery of conspiracy that never forgives but has also forgotten the hell why ...

this is why the false prophet lying dead in Anıtkabir is still the target of uncomprimising efforts . To diminish his legacy in the eyes of a still great many people who have ever increasing doubts about the New Turkey , your all dancing all singing new super power , now set to rule Asia and not the world (for a while) . You know , our glorious Saudi masters are buying Rafales for Egypt so that we can die fighting Egyptians over natural gas deposits in the Eastern Mediterranean . Means 2017 hopes of an American Crusade to get rid of Turkish evil will have boots on the rudder pedals , too . So , the evil Turks must look elsewhere for the moment . Now that ı have just watched the Lord of the Rings again on some Azeri satellite channel , am so primed to offer the sight of Sauron looking at the rabble of the Men of the West , as Sam carries Frodo up the mountain ... Or maybe it's the violent Libyan reaction over what they certainly supposed to be an arms shipment to the other Libyans , opening fire on a Turkish merchant ship . So that dominion over all Islam lands has to be forgotten for the moment , because -you know- some two bit seculars can fire on gloriously glorious New Turkey ? And just as the post above mentions direct action against Atatürk tends to backfire . As such and as already mentioned countless times , the mood is to assign agency , so that the accolade of vision can be taken away from the founder of the Republic . And a necessary reminder of the same thing again , the book in question doesn't have to be a part of a conspiracy ; it's the general atmosphere today .

now that copy paste makes easy writing , let's go :


Given the war’s disastrous consequences and its human cost for the entire Middle East, it is not surprising that the decision taken by the leadership in 1914 has been roundly blasted by historians and memoirwriters alike. In these accounts Enver Pasha, the war minister, a hawk in thrall to Germany, more or less single-handedly pushed the empire into a war it did not want. Alternatively, intervention has been ascribed to the hare-brained ideas of a tiny inner circle of the Young Turk leadership who had hijacked Ottoman policy – either because they were corrupted by German gold, blinded by German promises, pressured by German diplomats, or moved by voracious personal ambition, megalomaniac expansionism, or naïveté, attributable to their “below-average” intelligence. In short, instead of welcoming the war as a reprieve from international pressures and remaining aloof from the bloodshed enveloping Europe, Enver and the men around him had sped up the “Sick Man”’s demise by entering the fight on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary on October 29, 1914.

The " below-average" comment is traced in the book to the "doyen of Turkish diplomatic history" writing around 1965 , times when loving Atatürk was a foremost requirement . Especially pertinent in the sense there were tons of people alive , people who had been in that fight where defeat simply meant anhilation . People who had seen the likes of Enver in the flesh ... People who could tell the likes of Enver were below average only in the field of unsatisfaction with the still surviving bulk of the Ottoman empire . Writing history requires the final product to be tainted with a bit of honesty , now that entirely dishonest efforts are easily discovered and disregarded by anybody who has a basic level of knowledge , allow me to be honest and say that the likes of Enver could indeed be sorry about the losses the Ottoman Empire suffered , now that it was their own reputations at stake . But they were still below average in hating the Empire , especially when compared to their pals in other empires !

but this

dramatic study ... demonstrates that responsibility went far beyond Enver, that the road to war was paved by the demands of a politically interested public, and that the Ottoman leadership sought the German alliance as the only way out of a web of international threats and domestic insecurities, opting for an escape whose catastrophic consequences for the empire and seismic impact on the Middle East are felt even today

hard to challenge . And a perfect match for these days of 2010s when being a Turk was indeed a crime , the Turkish flag was a symbol just about to be banned and police actually clashed with demonstrators when the Goverment tried to ban commeration of the days important to the Republic . It's indeed not a decade old when the then President had to order lifting of Police barricades as thousands of obviously misguided civilians attempted to march to Anıtkabir as "reforms" made celebrations much shorter and without "contribution" of dignitaries . Oh , those were the days when there was this soon to be realized democratic uprising in Syria where millions of Sunni hence proper people would be so free , to join our long lost Kurdish brothers in their warm embrace of a new global power in Ankara , the breathtaking wonder that would support them in their wholesale theft of oilfields in Iraq in addition to the entire Syrian output . It's just two years that yesteryears racists lament that had they known the Turkoman of Iraq were Shia , they wouldn't waste the 1980s with weekly attacks on the Saddam's Sunni machine of oppression ; they might have rather more profitably raise awareness for the Kurdish cause instead ... And their face do not redden at all to say all this while ISIL takes over places like Telafer and the gods of war , the shiny uniforms of Barzani , deny the Shia Turkoman entry into refugee camps in 45 degrees of temperature so that they can be induced to go South , for assimilation to boot . Not blaming the guy who wrote a book on some past event ; he might have been taken to court in 1965 for challenging that Enver was an idiot , in 2015 he can only be lionized . For it's merely kept under the lid for re-use ; this tale of entire notion of Turk was an evil invention designed to deny domination to people who deserve it . The New Turkey hates Turks , because Turkish nationalism and stuff is not likeable , acceptable or tenable for our Kurdish brothers whom are assigned custodianship of some mighty amount of oilfields by Washington D.C. Nor for our sunnier Sunni Brothers who are invariably geared for cutting of infidel heads and time-to-time eating of freshly cut-out human hearts . Just dandy then , for this poster - idiotic believer in stuff he learned in primary school and next commander of the Starfleet- to read that CUP, the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress (Osmanlı Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti), [was] originally formed in 1889 as the Ottoman Union Society at the Royal Medical Academy by four medical students, two ethnic Kurds, one Albanian, one Circassian... Because you know , the evil Turks are not brainy enough to be fascists and racists on their own ...

the book is merely a basis to construct this post to the flow of my "personal" narrative and it's not even a quarter of what it might have been . Mine is a country where people have no shame for declaring the entire Turkish history was written after 1940 in the glow of Adolf Hitler's victories . This is more generally a ploy and play on the Nationalist vote that's always itchy to get when A-K-P talks of "Peace" with the seperatists ; it implies Alparslan Türkeş lost his fingernails in torture in 1944 and he came up with a lovely BS of supposed history to keep the Fascists around him and stuff . Otherwise the Republic was a Fascist thing that barely missed becoming Nazis or Communists . Offered as a basis of discussion but put on hold for the duration ; after the elections with the Party victory and seperatist autonomy one way or the other , after Saudi victory in Yemen , after the fall of the secular Syria , after the backroom understanding ratified into action so that Iran can have its bomb , after Barack Hussein gets a spine transplant or Jeb gets in as Bush III to the Whitey Home , we Turks are going to be taught we don't exist and we are a figment of imagination and we all better walk into that showers which are showers and all the tales Zyklon B are tall tales , now that it's like 70 years on and there are better inventions around now . On this day of May 29th , we are celebrating the anniversary of conquest of Istanbul ; just a year or two back we had learned we foolish Turks had not taken the city on the 29th but some other day in the spring of 1453 . A newspaper for the old school Islamists is quick to the front with observation that it's the first time that there's a such a vigour for the celebrations . In the early years of the party when joining the EU was the tactical roadmap and people had to look less "aggressive" ; afterwards as already noted today , the conquest of the Middle East was just around the corner . Elections require so much patriotism . Hate of the Turks will come back , no oil wells for Turks ...


In 1914 the July Crisis and the possibility of war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia seemed to offer an escape from what many Ottomans perceived to be a dead end. With the support and guidance of the German Empire, Ottoman leaders hoped to carry through the kind of radical transformation they deemed necessary for the creation of a modern, sustainable state. Wartime, some of these leaders believed, presented a suitable, even ideal, environment for the realization of such drastic changes. The Young Turks intended to transform the empire into a politically and economically independent, modern country by removing foreign control and cultivating a citizenry that would be loyal to the state. These individuals imagined that conditions of war could offer an appropriate pretext for the expulsion of foreign businesses and the nullification of fiscal and legal exemptions for foreign nationals, the so-called “capitulations” (their actual cancellation on October 1, 1914, announced on September 9, produced massive public celebrations). Wartime, moreover, presented the state with additional tools for the mobilization of the citizenry behind the Istanbul government.

Resituating the decision for war in the psychological climate of prewar society makes it possible to see Ottoman intervention as the product of wider political trends rather than of the immediate pressures of the July Crisis. Feroz Ahmad has remarked that the CUP leaders, civilian and military alike, were united in their strong desire to achieve full independence and were prepared to go to war for this cause: “Thus Turkey’s intervention in 1914 was not the result of collusion between the Germans and the war party. It was mainly determined by the nationalist aspirations of the [CUP] which Enver Paşa came to personify.” If we follow Ahmad’s lead that Enver’s actions reflected the wider circles of Ottoman leadership and society, then the empire’s entry into the First World War must be re-examined in light of the prevailing political arguments circulating on the eve of the war.

a whole new ball game if you will , where the precedessors of the Republic are given some humanity and stuff , not by the author but the narrative that needs the precedessors of the Republic as the inspiration for the Republic -to diminish what should be diminished .

Throughout their wartime partnership with Germany, the Ottomans made it clear that they were acting in the deliberate pursuit of their national interests. When the Ottoman navy minister, Cemal Pasha, and Enver rejected a sum of money Berlin had offered to finance an expedition against the Suez Canal in early 1915, Enver declared the amount sadly wanting, and he aired some of his general views about the German–Ottoman alliance: “If Germany supports Turkey materially and financially, it does so for its own advantage. If Turkey accepts [German aid] and thereby ties its fate to that of Germany, then it, too, does so exclusively to its own advantage. There can be no illusion about that.”

this is an essential part of the New that tries to devour the old , that the old is a paranthesis between the greatness . Of the Ottomans who lived happily with their Arab brothers and of the New which will do likewise . It must have been this year's April 23rd that ı saw on TV , a magnificent image of 4 or 5 people with Turkish flags in front of a shop supposedly in Lebanon , celebrating the opening of the Parliament in 1920 . It was like imposing proof of the falsity of my beliefs or something , coming right after my mindless posting or something . Funnily enough , as this most serenely idiotic fool , ı can't remembered what ı had posted anyway ... Then , it shouldn't rankle anyone one bit that the Ittihadists who were long the bete noire of the Right for spawning Kemalism , let alone the unforgiveable sin of toppling the Great Sultan Abdülhamid II are now popular . With the so called Liberal opposition to Party rankling the smarties , it was incredible to hear that it wasn't the Ittihad ve Terakki that toppled the great Sultan , but evil Liberals of 1909 who tricked the heroic patriots in this CUP thing to commit sin and stuff . If America somehow needs to define the Liberals useful as well , ı suspect it might have to be the tripod Martians who brought Abdülhamit down .


perhaps Enver was always popular , with the imperative needs of the US to create a basis of operations in the Turkics ; with the voter base of the almost racist party always partial to the plight of our brothers under the yoke of Communism . So that Enver's death at the head of the Rebellion in 1922 was referenced a lot but could do very little for the disaster of Sarıkamış . ı would say there could have been no "popular" accounts of Enver talking as an equal , putting the interests of the country first when coming face to face with Germans who were the masters of all . This "Nation's interests first!" gets to be bandied a lot these days ; back in the 90s when ı was 20 odd ı was highly sceptical of such claims coming from the last vestiges of Kemalism / Militarist hold on power in Ankara . Today am 40 odd and even more so : Back then there was nothing of the sort of the current spectacles as formed by the power struggle inside the New ... CIA opened "Turkish" schools all around the world using the Congregation and Party paid full tribute to such -in the missionary mindset both sides still have . The partnership fell and we learned police survaillance was inhuman and unlawful in stark contrast to the days when it was the "truth" that only criminals had to reason to fear such . ı bought this newspaper for the puzzle page and there is this skimpy reference to Albanian answer to demands for the closure of CIA schools ; the Albanian reaction (which rightly goes unreported here) seems to revolve around the question of whether Ankara sees itself as the colonial master of Tirana . The sole and simple reason why the West is putting up with the New Turkey is ...

because the New buries the country under even more dirt , faster and cheaper the West would bother doing .

Is R16 the author of all posts in this thread?

Not any more, thanks Domen

I am certainly afraid of people who post long, long posts containing many facts the public not recognized.

it's r16 , because am not worthy of being a Capital Letter , for starters hating all those League of Legends players especially those who take the computer ı tend to prefer , now that it opens pages of , say CFC , faster .

nothing to be afraid of me , unless you are anything that might deserve steady turbolazer fire , that's why ı stick to trolling or something Barack Hussein or something . As for Poland ı have assigned the limited numbers of Mudhen squadrons in the Turkish Airforce for keeping an eye on the Winged Hussars , that's sure to assure victory or something .

well , the "Peace Process" , the "Solution" or the "Dissolution" in Turkey has ended up on its rear end ... Without much of a grace , too . Now that the only thing smarties are ever good at is burying the country under dirt . And no gloating online on how the gods of war , the heroic Kurds are laying waste to the oppressive thuggery of worthless Turks , so that ı could have a chance to rant .

am not that tough a customer . The only thing ı have ever done world class is playing SSI's Panzer General , a relic from 1994s . And only by taking full advantage of the knowledge of the game engine and through the trusted save and reload ... An honest AI ; when you turn off spotting it forgets the location of your units ; so unlike the Civ III . ı have a screenshot of sorts that shows a wounded unit of mine chased by hundreds of AI trooops . The PG never does that if you are out of the event horizon . Even better when the scenario has the "weather" applicable . ı bomb the Russians and attack their planes and turn on the weather and they can't do the same - with howling blizzards of 1941 or '44 . Playing with supply on and off my planes fly forever and tanks never need gas while the AI has to continiously stop for topping up . That's how ı once won in a scenario the scenario-maker had deemed impossible to win . Took 18 or 20 hours of gameplay over 2 or 3 days . With no losses of friendly units and a wholesale massacre of German panzers . ı somehow feel that my account in that relevant forum locked simply for that .

and hurts me now ... The PG is a DOS game , that can run as a Windows 95 application , but of 32 bits . Don't you hate progress whenever it makes your favourite game not only obsolote but also impossible to play ... Got an emulator and can't see a thing on the laptop's screen with that emasculated resolution , which was so fair 20 years ago . And just last week or so ı discovered that fans have been busy and have come up with Panzer General Forever . Which runs on the laptop but alas it follows later SSI releases aiming to make it more of a wargame . Slows me down a bit , quite a bit . ı doubt ı will ever make 64 000 credits again where the CPU deems your success in the game non-computable and takes all the "money" away ...

and ı can't ask for an "old" PG as a 64bit .exe file . Now that am locked out ... A bad thing considering strategy games take one's mind off more pressing , actually real problems . The death toll on this side must be around 70 . Maybe 100 on the other , despite glorious claims of 800 or 900 killed . Basically a move for the coming elections in 2 or 3 months . Despite the intentions of airraids which wouldn't hurt anyone and seperatists expected to play along , it turns out to be a mess which draws out the true qualities of the smarties . Who turn out to be war-loving undemocratic couths without the slightest trace of principles but then nobody expected otherwise : If they had anything good worth mentioning , America wouldn't have put them in charge . With a penchant for altering reality , as they fondly believe themselves to be capable of achieving .


chanced upon a book online . Some 400 pages in small font , all about the so called humanaterian interventions in the Ottoman Empire . Usual problem of mine , too much to read and too much to do , not enough time nor drive . Barely glimpsed at the opening chapter . To see the celebrated struggle of Greeks for their freedom involved supercharged ethnic cleansing even when they were down . Which even all those driven Hellenophiles could not ignore to see . Oh those heroes who contributed coin , ink and blood to the Greek Liberation could only avoid remarking in the open . Greeks will be first to remark that they were Whitemen who would consider Greece a much better place without any Greeks in it . Had once claimed the modern day export of Democracy (and everything in the book about it) was entirely developed through the experience of fighting us . With the West fomenting trouble nonstop and actually intervening if the situation was ripe enough , in case all the "relevant" countries could agree on not backstabbing each other while teaching us a lesson or two . Americans and the like minded progressives of the 21st Century are still allowed a doubt or two that the demon seed better known as the Turks are still alive and kicking since then despite all the best efforts of humanity or something . And that's almost certainly why the failure for the re-enactment of 1914 naturally leads to a re-enactment of 1800s . With the Kurds taking the part of the Greeks , ISIL becoming the hateful actions of the Ottomans and West hinting this and that and sabotaging us all along the way so that the repeat of Navarin will be so cheap .

when equipped with a mentality like that it's extremely easy for me to say there's the dumbest probability of such foul play in the "outing" of Adriana Lima by Daily Mail . She comes to Turkey a lot , but to suggest Victoria's Secret models are sympathizers of Turkish Right wing terrorists because in some photo-op the host asks for that "cute" handsight ? But then this is exactly what might happen , when His Spineless Majesties Barack Hussein decides it's time and not one single person who might talk in sympathy to Turks can be allowed a chance ...

and that's almost exactly why the political branch of the seperatists were so warlike in the beginning ; they expect the intervention immediately with their reputation enchanced while fighting the creatures of ISIL . They have now started talking peacefully -as the make believe air campaign has given way to ineviteable contact on the ground and they are having casualties . Suffering causes self doubt . Especially when it's all over place .


and it's indeed hard to keep track . Fighting and dying for any cause need symbols and assurances that it won't be in vain , that sacrifices however great or small will be remembered if not properly honoured . From the newspapers we learn there is a tree in a park in Ankara . Long dried and dead it has been turned into a monument where the dogtags of those fallen soldiers are fixed into position . At a reported 7500 or so , there is no more place left ... The city of Erzurum has a NGO of sorts established by the relatives of likewise fallen soldiers and they have a room where the pictures of some 512 people of the province are hung . Since the walls are entirely covered and the odds are that there will be many more losses , they will take down all the pictures down to have their sizes reduced . Fighting requires a steadiness which is a state of mind and states of mind are easier to construct with traditions and customs . Osmaniye , a town even ı would have trouble finding on the map , had its 6th loss in 20 days . The downside of having a reputation of reliability with people ending up in riskier places . And the brutality of war , with heartbreaking stories where ever you look at . You can always expect to see a conscript , the only child of his family and his parents would have waited 20 years for him and spent another 20 years bringing him up . Only to receive a casket draped in the flag . Or a member of a large family , yet tearing up a similarly large gap in the lives of those who remain . Osmaniye's 6th was the smallest of 8 siblings and he had asked for local pastries from his father . He fell before he received the parcel .

he was an officer , a Captain in the Jandarma . As such required a funeral with the "protocol" in attendance . Osmaniye is the birthplace of the leader of the almost racist party , you would expect him to have a strong support base there . As such , the A-K-P members of the Parliament wisely avoided the 15000 or so people who had come to the funeral . And pushed their way forward right in time for the religious ceremony . They naturally need to be in the front , right by the casket , so that TV cameras can record them . Reportedly even pushing family members out of the rows . Now the Captain had his older brothers , two serving , with one being a NCO in the Navy and the other a Lieutenant Colonel in the Jandarma . The Lieutenant Colonel exploded and he also came from the back rows . Now he will never make a general . For questioning why it was so fashionable to talk of peace before and now people are full of battle , talking of fighting to the end , even to the end of the world . Traditions and customs need reinforcement time to time , as such we see Goverment members lauding the concept of Martyrdom , with the Energy Minister declaring he hopes to become one himself . Got the proper response from the Lieutenant Colonel who remarked the Energy Minister has 20 bodyguards and an armoured limousine where the fight isn't . Naturally he , the Jandarma , is in for a disciplinary investigation . There will be no social media campaigns on his behalf from the Starfleet . Let it suffice it to say the investigators will honourably serve double whatever the Lieutenant Colonel gets .

as you should expect by now , he got a ton of criticisms along the lines which are customary for the New Turkey . Conduct unbecoming while under uniform or whatever is what the disciplinary investigation will look into . Laws and rules to be upheld for rules make the Army and that's why the investigators will serve double because they have to uphold the rules . Apart from that we learn the Lieutenant Colonel is a Congregation plant . We also learn he is a seperatist plant and he should go and join the fighting side of the seperatists . We also learn he is an Alevi . The family declares they are Sunnis . This last stings not because the family have to declare that they are Sunnis but for the thing that Alevis who die in the service of the country and arrive back home in a casket draped in the flag are not considered to have died in the service of the country . Alevis today , Sunnis tomorrow . No trouble , the New Turkey doesn't want anyone to fight and die for Turkey . They have no trouble with destroying the traditions , customs and rules only because they walk on the water and will create a stupendously glorious new fact on the ground . Only if Barack Spineless Jerk Hussein helps them out ...

that's why the religious ceremony for the Captain "ended" quickly with town's state appointed religious authority speeding ahead while the cameras were recording the MPs of the A-K-P reciting prayers while the crowds were protesting and not praying . The Imam promised a complete funeral at the burial site and didn't give it , too . In the New Turkey , it's now possible to be a martyr and not given proper prayers .

don't expect to make it a dent on the goverment generals . Their heroic chief went out "early" satisfying America that the calls for him to carry out what he had promised to do back in the day are now "satisfied" . You see , when the conspiracy to neutralize the Turkish Military was in full swing the last Chief of Staff decided to offer his resignation in protest . And the 4 other members of the Command Council or something decided to support him by doing likewise . Among the four was the august chief of the goverment generals . He had every chance to be the top general and yet he wanted it faster . Considering the invasion of Syria was just around the corner and he wanted the laurels of the conqueror . Hence he bidded action and took back his resignation immediately after the 4 others acted . Instead of risk that the conspiracy might blow up ... There were laws passed for him to remain in his post until 2017 . Resignation of the last Chief of Staff took place in a July , a month before when promotions take place in the Turkish Military ; America ordered the the chief of goverment generals to step down in this August . 10 days before he was due . Yeah , he completes the bidding and it's all rosy cosy . Yeah , right !

his so called replacement is the guy who arranged the "experts" who provided the get go for the legal proceedings of the conspiracy . He took a medal from General Odierno who ordered the once famous Petraus to arrest Turkish Special Forces as terrorists , with bags over the heads and plastic handcuffs so that Turkomans of Iraq would see who the boss was and turn over Kerkük to Kurds . He tells it was the US who gave him the medal , not Odierno . (OK , this is valid enough) He is also a scholar with a thesis on the Armenian troubles . Now that the only Nobel laurate of this country got the Nobel only after "admitting" a million Armenians were massacred . Why , offering homosexual sex to the Nobel Committee wouldn't work , that's why ... The so called replacement obviously fits like a glove to a new kind of Turkey which would confess to all kinds of crimes and get authority over Kurds so that Iraqi Oil could be stolen from Iraq . But the so called replacement is a mouthful to say . ı think marshall's aide fits just right , with chief of goverment generals dutifully sacked by the US instead of given the title of marshall . After he did so much to destroy this country .

and will the marshall's aide care ? No , laws were changed in 2012 to give "ownership" of the Armed Forces Day or something of August 30 to the President . The last President had a problem with his eardrums and jets were flying higher in parades for his comfort . All in the past , this year's parades supposedly includes the brilliant invention of an helicopter dipping its nose in saluting . This ı learn from the newspaper am buying to collect coupons . This time for a puzzle of a thousand pieces . ı am opting for the "Turtle Trainer" which seems to be the most famous Turkish painting ever and not a portrait of Mustafa Kemal in uniform . The Turtle Trainer has many more hues and colours , surely will help me complete the puzzle . That seems to be why ı see so many editorials that justify the chief of goverment generals and marshall's aide , with strategically placed discussions of how that newspaper believes Turkey belongs to the Turks .

and no doubt the helicopter will be an A-129 , the product of a massively successful project that has produced 9 helicopters in 9 years . One might remember how the Iraqi Army was entirely bereft of weapons like RPGs , because the US military didn't allow them before withdrawal in 2011 and Barack Hussein badly needed ISIL to succeed . The justification in this case is the like totally true requirement of a National Software and the choice of AH-1W in 2000 went nowhere by this . Supposedly our guys wanted total access and America denied and the '129 is the result of this , with Turkish software . With the same rate of success we could have 6 more Cobras , 15 to 9 ... Or 150 with the pilots using their smart phones in a crisis to navigate . Oh yeah , everybody loves the Kurds with Oil ...

the downward trend of course worries some . From the same newspapers we learn a famous twitter account for the Congregation has decided to whitewash the top religious authority in the country , a relentless enemy of Congregation on the face of it . According to this tale this guy goes to that palace and sees a calligraphic painting on the wall . More to the point identifies it as an Umeyyad lie on how the sultans are the shadow of God on earth , gets chewed in return ... Just like the tales of how the high ranking officers of flag rank in Turkey are actually all patriots . With imams now serving the Party without let or hindrance there is this possibility of backlash , ain't it ? Instead of refusing the Party , people might just see that there needs to be a full scale accounting of what the hell is going on . The Counter-revolution is based on Islamization . Islamization based on the Gulf Arabian perversion and funded by Gulf Arabian money . This last is the only truth that counts , to the extent of all those otherwise so "insular" Blacksea businessmen all in line to build a road network of 2600 kilometers in the Blacksea mountains so that Arabs can come and buy land . Naturally opposed by other Blacksea people who know they will soon be unable to take any advantage of resulting "richness" and denied access to their own backyards . And in the classical New Turkey way , construction goes on despite court orders to the contrary . Even if the Gulf money is taking away a lot more value than giving ...

and the Counter-revolution is daily checked by the US . Wondering about the risks . Whether it be a cracking or a snapping . If this country snaps , well nice . If it cracks , we are in for the Civil War , with a casualty list starting from a million dead . And despite the suspicions of pointless paranoia this is the thing that makes the world go around . The Federal Reserve of US is supposed to raise the interest rates for maybe a year now . Or two , who knows ? Which will do nicely to wreck the fakely rich economy of this country but they are still not sure whether we can find succour from non-Western sources . Explains much why a guy reportedly with a Turkish passport tries to blow up a shrine in Bangkok , but anyhow ... And as Washington frets and frets the Chinese start to show the cracks in their economy . Well , who cares for the record fall in Wall Street , reportedly 1% in the opening minute ? The only Wall Street ı care about is the one in the Civ III , 5% interest to a maximum of 50 gold per turn .