Controversy Project
It is well known that, not counting the dark forest societies of Africa and Latin America, there are three civilized countries in the world today that are particularly keen to carry out military coups: Burma, Thailand and Turkey. However, unlike the other two, the Turkish army did not carry out the coup d'état for "personal ploy".
1. Kemal's reforms.
After the end of the First World War in 1918, the sick man of West Asia was divided among the great powers because he was on the wrong side in this battle. Most of the native Anatolian plateau was brought under the influence of the old enemy Greece.
Unwilling to die in response to the call of the national hero Kemal, patriots went to Ankara from all directions to form a loya jirga in an attempt to save the country. After five years of hard fighting, Kemal, with the great assistance of Soviet Russia, succeeded in driving out the invading Greek army. The Great Powers, exhausted from World War I, had no intention of fighting another war of national independence with Kemal, and in 1923 the two sides signed an agreement in Lausanne, Switzerland, to establish Turkey's independent status.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, Kemal was bent on reform and strength. In his view, Turkey's religious traditions over the past thousand years are the biggest stumbling block to the country's development.
As a late-developing country, Turkey must carry out land reform if it wants to complete the primitive accumulation of industrialization. In the Islamic world, the largest landlords are none other than religious groups. If you want to strengthen the country, you have to attack the religious forces. It is said that religious forces were staunch supporters of Kemal in the War of Independence, but once they became an obstacle to Kemal, Kemal turned his face faster than turning a book.
In order to crack down on religious forces, Kemal took measures including but not limited to: confiscating mosque land and distributing 79% of the country's arable land to landless peasants on the grounds that "religious property should be returned to the public and the divine property should be divided equally".
For the stubborn forces that resisted the land reform, Kemal followed the example of his loving father next door and chose physical transcendence. As a result of the campaign, 130,000 people were killed and 370,000 were sentenced to life imprisonment. In addition, he closed all madrassas and mosques, cutting off the transmission of Islamic ideas from the roots. This led to a negative consequence, that is, the religious lineage was forced to go underground, the suppression of the orthodox church was lost, and various extreme sectarian ideas began to emerge one after another.
Kemal is well aware that Islam has been passed down in Turkey for thousands of years, and its influence is deeply rooted and cannot be erased in just 15 years.
In 1938, at the age of 57, the founding father of the country left a legacy before his death, and after the resurgence of religious forces, the Turkish army had the right to stage a coup d'état to set things right.
2. The Death of Democracy.
Kemal is gone, but the system he left behind in Turkey has become a haunting nightmare for posterity.
It turned out that after the founding of Turkey, in order to show his determination to keep up with civilized society, the Father of the Nation refused the persuasion of his ministers, resolutely abolished the sultan (secular leader) and caliphate (religious leader) system, and chose the Western parliamentary republic for Turkey. Everyone must know that whether it is democracy or republic, the core meaning is two words: separation of powers. And decentralization has an advantage and a disadvantage.
The advantage is that all kinds of forces can participate in political life through money and votes, and if a new power rises up to replace the old dominant power, it can complete the transfer of power through the relatively moderate method of parliamentary struggle, without the need to start a social revolution at every turn. To put it bluntly, decentralization is equivalent to plowing the soil, and new seeds will experience less resistance when they break out of their shells, and they will be easier to survive.
In a centralized society, the soil of power is cemented, and there is much greater resistance to the development of new things, and it is often necessary to carry out change through bloodshed. In the capitalist era, the industry changes frequently, its rise is also vigorous, and its demise is also sudden, and various forces are singing and I appear, and the separation of power in this situation is undoubtedly very appropriate.
The disadvantage of decentralization is that it will inevitably cause internal friction, thereby reducing the efficiency of the entire country. Therefore, not all cats and dogs can learn from the West.
Because, national strength = total efficiency. If you want to reduce efficiency, you must ensure that your total amount can be far behind the third world, and only in this way can you reduce efficiency and still be able to suppress them, as is the case in the developed countries of the West.
On the contrary, for developing countries, the total amount is not as good as others, and the only thing you can fight for is efficiency.
Therefore, for the late-developing countries, you can only have the capital to implement so-called democracy if you first develop the aggregate and then step into the ranks of developed countries. Isn't that what South Korea and Singapore are all doing? As a late-developing country, Turkey should have followed the line of centralization first and then democracy, but at the beginning of the founding of the country, it chose democracy too early, which virtually laid a hidden danger for the political turmoil in the future. Kemal was not at the time of his reign, and there was only one Republican People's Party in the country during his reign, and the leader of the party was himself. Coupled with the fact that he has the aura of a founding leader and a national hero, no one can compete with him at all. It's more like centralization than democracy. Therefore, when Kai Taizu was here, the country was developing prosperously, and nothing happened.
Kemal. But when the second generation of ** people came to power, the situation began to be a little untenable. Turkey's second prime minister was Kemal's close comrade-in-arms Inonu, who was the founder of the country after Kemal, the signatory of the Treaty of Lausanne, and a loyal supporter of Kemal's ideas.
Kemal died on the eve of World War II, the second year of Inonu**, Germany blitzed Poland, World War II officially broke out, it stands to reason that Turkey is located in the Eurasian hub, a proper place for soldiers, and it is almost impossible to stay out of troubled times. However, Inonu managed to move between the Allies and the Axis powers with his flexible diplomatic skills, miraculously saving Turkey from the flames of war.
However, no one expected that Inonu's hard work was exchanged for the spurning of the people. With the benefit of hindsight, these people began to accuse Inonu of both ends of the rat, why didn't you decisively bet on the Allies at the beginning?
On one occasion, when Inonu was interacting with the people, a young man angrily accused, "You once made us hungry because he was dissatisfied with the food distribution system that Inonu had put in place during the national security campaign during World War II." Hearing this, Inonu was filled with grief and indignation, and retorted: "I made you have no food, but I let you have parents." ”
But the people don't care about this, they only remember the things that Inonu made them hungry, but they take for granted the peace dividends enjoyed in World War II.
In 1950, Turkey held a **, and the angry crowd bombed the only Inonu who could still hold the field. Since then, Pandora's Box has been officially opened.
Inonu. The new leader elected by the Turkish people is called Manderes, and his father is the landlord who was killed by Kemal. During his reign, Menderes did three major things.
The first big thing was that he sold Turkey to the United States for a "sky-high price" of $3.2 billion. This is a stupid move, and Turkey's geography is the best option. Taking 10,000 steps back, even if you want to sell yourself, you can't just sell 3.2 billion, India took $14 billion from the Soviet Union alone during the Cold War, not to mention that 2.7 billion of the 3.2 billion is still used to build military bases for the US military.
The second major event is to curry favor with the United States in sending troops to the Korean battlefield to participate in the war, and the United States cannot stop the enthusiasm. The Korean War is a high-end game, which is what you Turkey can play, and as a result, the Turkish brigade of 5,000 people was reimbursed 3,000 in one photo. Inonu tried his best to keep Turkey out of the flames, but as soon as the guy came up, he rushed to send it up.
The third major event that Menderes did, and the most far-reaching one, during his reign, he forcibly turned into an infrastructure maniac regardless of the country's strength, and frantically embarked on various dams, railways, highways and other major projects, although this move laid a solid infrastructure condition for the development of Turkey in later generations, but not everyone can be an infrastructure maniac, and Turkey's finances at that time were simply not enough to support such an ambitious strategy. In order to make up for the fiscal deficit, Menderes had to print money to fill the holes, and Turkey's magically high inflation began from him.
In the 10 years that Menderes has been in office, people's incomes have increased by 50%, while the inflation rate has doubled.
In 1960, in order to win the second **, the low-popularity Menderes actually wanted to take a risk to win over religious forces to help him, which completely angered the old ministers left behind by Kemal. Without saying a word, the army staged a coup d'état and hanged Menderes.
As an aside, when Menderes fell, the people who had put him on the throne held the largest parade since the founding of the People's Republic of China to celebrate.
After the coup d'état, the army invited the old boss Inonu to preside over the endgame, and then announced that he would return the government to the people and let Inonu form a government with various parties. But at this time, Inonu could no longer control the situation, and the Republican People's Party, which Kemal single-handedly created, did not even have half of the seats in the parliamentary election. In desperation, Inonu had no choice but to form a coalition with far-right parties such as the Justice Party and the National Democratic Party.
Although Manderes was democratically elected, during his reign he was still engaged in Kemal and Inonun's one-way affair. It is only now that the shortcomings of the democratic system have been completely exposed, and because of the coalition government, the second cabinet of Inonu has been infighting from the beginning, and nothing can be done in the four years of power, the economic development has slowed down, and the dissatisfaction of the people at the bottom is getting worse day by day.
Some of the army's young officers, dissatisfied with the incompetence of the ruling party, began to make private contacts in preparation for a coup d'état, which frightened the army's top brass. They made the same choice as Chen Xuanli before Ma Weipo, since the coup was inevitable, it must be led by the top.
In 1964, the army staged another coup d'état to overthrow the incompetent democracy**, and even Inonu was temporarily placed under house arrest by the military. Poor Inonu, the founding hero is so far! Shortly after the coup, the military again announced the return of government to the people and the release of Inonu, and after a popular election, a man named Demirel was finally appointed as Turkey's prime minister.
But this Demirel is not as good as Inonu. The 60s when he was in power was a magical era, in that decade, various left-wing movements rose one after another, the confrontation between the left and right in the world was extremely sharp, and Turkey added a layer of left-right struggle on the basis of party struggle, and the already chaotic ** was even worse.
Even Inonu, a middle-aged faction, has promoted the Republican People's Party as a center-left party in order to follow the trend.
By 1971, the contradictions between the two sides had reached the point of meeting each other, and the left and right factions, plus the ** department sent by Demirel to suppress, broke out in a three-way brawl directly on the streets of Ankara, known as Bloody Sunday. In the face of this chaos, the military took action again, Demirel resigned, and the left and right factions were suppressed by thunder. Tranquility has once again returned to the hustle and bustle of Turkey.
In 1974, the military returned to the people again, after all, the road of democracy was chosen by the father of the nation, and the army, as the inheritor of the will, had to finish it on its knees.
After the army left, the Republican People's Party came to power. By this time, the Republican People's Party's Dinghai Shen Needle Inonu had died a year earlier, and the Republican People's Party had betrayed Kemalism and turned into a second-rate party. Naturally, such a party cannot control the situation. As a result, Turkey changed 6 prime ministers in the next 6 years, and there were more than 5,000 political cases, with an average of 10 political cases per day in 1978, the peak.
Who can save the mess at this time?
The military, or the military, can only be the military!
In September 1980, the army again overthrew Demirel**, ending a six-year chaos.
Eh, why is Demirel again? There was no way, this old brother made a comeback again, and as a result, he was very unlucky to take the last baton from the short-lived prime minister.
This time, the military no longer returned government to the people, they banned all political parties, and recruited a group of non-partisan technocrats to form a cabinet in person. The benefits of a strong ** were immediate, and Turkey's economy began to improve at a rate visible to the naked eye after the military came to power. Turkey's inflation rate fell from 95% to 29% in the second year, and in 1987, the last year of the military's administration, the economic growth rate reached 949%。
But just when all this was getting better, the army's ** illness was committed again, and they were going to return the government to the people again! With the withdrawal of the army, the previously banned bulls, ghosts, snakes, and gods changed their vests and made a comeback again, and a new round of party infighting began.
In 1997, after many rounds of fighting, the Prosperity Party, which represents religious forces, finally came to power. How can this army endure it? In the past, they could turn a blind eye to partisan fights, after all, they were all secular political parties, and this was a religious force that was strictly guarded by the edict of the Father of the Nation!
There was no suspense in the result, and the army came out again to wash the floor.
3. The significance of Erdogan.
In this political purge, a party leader named Erdogan was also branded because of his religious overtones and was forced to quit by the military.
This incident deeply touched Essoudan, and after that, he no longer dared to brazenly flaunt the market under the banner of religion, but fooled the military with the slogan of coexistence between democracy and secularity.
It's secular, it's easy to understand, this is something that the military has always insisted on. But this democracy is interesting, because there is a Muslim majority in Turkey, and democracy is actually religion under the one-person-one-vote system. This is selling dog meat with a sheep's head! However, the military did not carry out a coup d'état to overthrow him, at least when Essoudan came to power.
And the religion-based Ethiopian Sultan also has an overwhelming advantage over the secular parties of the past, and the partisan strife of the past has disappeared during his tenure. After half a century of chaos, Turkey has entered a period of stability that has lasted for more than 20 years. It wasn't until 2016, when Essoudan showed his fangs, that the military remembered to get rid of him, but it was too late.
This proves that there is no force in Turkey that can shake him at this time. Since the founding of the country, I am afraid that only Kemal, the father of the nation, has had this kind of power. Since then, Turkey has said goodbye to turmoil.
For the Turks, the rise to power of the religious strongman of Ethiopian is not necessarily a bad thing.
Why? Because the religious forces had already been abolished in the Kemal period, their land and wealth had been deprived, and the clergy clique had far less influence on society than their counterparts in Persia, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, the generations after Kemal had in fact succeeded in tearing a hole in the iron curtain of religion and burrowing half of their bodies into modern society, and their momentum was like an arrow from the string, and there was no turning back. Therefore, there is no need to worry that religious forces will turn back the clock on history.
Now, Turkey is the only modernized and industrialized country in the Islamic world, and the beneficiaries of its modernization control the country's main productive forces, and they contribute the vast majority of the country's GDPEven if Erdogan has the power to do it, he won't be able to drag it back!On the contrary, with such a political strongman as Essounta, Turkey can go further.
Wen Shijun said. Although Kemal, the founding father of Turkey, brought Turkey into the orbit of modernization by severely attacking religious forces, the democratic system he chose was inevitably suspected of overkill, so that the latecomer Turkey was not adapted to the soil and turmoil after this precocious political system. In the end, the person who patched his system was the religious force he had been guarding against strictly, which has to be said to be a kind of irony!
References. Li Bingzhong, The Construction of the Turkish Nation-State and the Evolution of the Kurdish Question, Social Sciences Academic Press, 2017.
Author: Haoran Literature and History, Northwest Wolf).
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