BY CAN DUNDAR
MILLIYET- Years ago I saw a newspaper story about an unemployed young person protesting his plight. He was holding a gun to a statue of Ataturk in the local town square, threatening to shoot if anyone got too close. After some initial confusion, the police convinced the young man to surrender. The newspaper reported the next day that the troubled young man apologized by laying flowers in front of the statue.
There's another incident that sticks in my mind. A trade union leader said he knew what to do if the government failed to give the workers their rights. One would think his first priority would be calling for a general strike. But no! He said he would go to Ataturk to complain about the government.
Of course, visiting Ataturk's mausoleum shows the nation's love and respect for its leader. But going there and shedding tears, saying that we're desperate, turning his mausoleum into a tomb, ascribing an ethereal function to this visit, and turning the visitor's book there into a book of complaints don't reflect the image of a nation that he would be proud of, do they?
In 1924, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk told teachers in Samsun that the real guide for civilization, life and success in the world was science, and that looking for any other guide was sheer ignorance. In the 1930s, he said that he wouldn't leave behind as his legacy any saying, dogma or calcified rule, but that his legacy was science and knowledge.
But instead of giving out annual awards for academic research and the like, what are we doing to honor such a leader who saw life from this perspective? We organize commemorations at a mountain where some people see a shadow which resembles his face. Isn't it sad that some young people here say that his Nutuk (Great Speech) is the only resource and that reading anything else is a betrayal? Can we forgive those who censor his most revolutionary ideas, make him ambiguous, interpret him as they want, and make everyone completely confused?
A shanty house owner who appears with a picture of Ataturk in front of a bulldozer set to knock down his unlicensed construction. A coup supporter who tries to overthrow the government and explain Ataturk's principles with verses from Koran on the pretext of protecting him. A politician who thinks that he can keep a leader alive by putting up a statue of him, while there's still no library or museum devoted to him, while his complete works have yet to be published and his houses and works are left neglected. A scholar who distributes pins of his likeness, instead of producing academic works. A teacher who turns him into dogma by making students learn by heart such words as 'loving him is worship,' instead of teaching the students about his fight against dogma. A trade union leader who tries to raise his profile by visiting Ataturk's mausoleum, when he can't organize the workers under him. The young people who think that the way to honor him is to vote for him in a poll about the 20th century's greatest leader. These people and indeed all of us should rethink his struggle for science and knowledge and how he was left alone in his fight. Now is the time for us to secularize our approach towards a leader who provided Turkey with secularism.