Posted on 10/31/2018 1:01:39 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
World War I ended with the Ottoman Empire vanquished and facing imminent collapse, its doomed alliance with Imperial Germany costing hundreds of thousands of Ottoman lives and dealing a death blow to the already creaking empire.
But 100 years after the surrender of the Ottomans to the Allied powers at Mudros on October 30, 1918, the Great War is in no way seen as a pointless waste or even a defeat by modern Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Rather than focusing on the four years of devastating conflict that ended in the capitulation and eventual dissolution of the empire, Turkey remembers key individual battles where Ottoman forces, often against huge odds, defied the Allies and helped forge a new Turkish national identity.
Chief among them is the Battle of Gallipoli...
Gursel Goncu, the editor-in-chief of the monthly Turkish history magazine #tarih, said the empire's defeat was not something that existed in the memory of contemporary Turkey.
"We Turks remember and talk about that period through the Gallipoli victory and the triumph of the siege of Kut al-Amara. The devastating defeat of 1918, on the other hand, is still being interpreted as the 'treason' of the authorities at the time..."
Erdogan increasingly gives these brief triumphs prominence, tracing a line of continuity through the centuries of great events in Turkish history from the pre-Ottoman era into the modern republic right up to the defeat of an attempted coup against him in 2016.
The president sees these battles as a defiance of the West and defence of territory which was historically in Turkey's natural sphere of influence.
The Ottoman resistance at Gallipoli prevented the conquest of Constantinople and helped lay the foundations of the modern state that would be formed in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a key commander at Gallipoli.
(Excerpt) Read more at france24.com ...
"There is no room in this narrative for Armenian victims...Armenians contend they were the victims of the first genocide of the 20th century at the hands of Ottoman forces but Turkey rejects this..."
Erdogan wants to be the Sultan.
It sounds like you knew Turks back in the day, when the Westernists still held sway before the Islamists took over.
Were you in the military or lived over there?
that ended in the capitulation and eventual dissolution of the empire,
*************
Actually the end of the Caliphate. He want to revive it with his as the Sultan for life. He’s just one more Muslim dictator, who views himself as the Mahdi, or the Mahdi’s helper.
There’s a whole hall at Versailles with paintings commemorating great French victories. Of course it ends with Wagram in 1809.
Ping
Turkey projects continual State Approved Propaganda.
There are no journalists left in Turkey, only paid state approved propagandists.
There has never been freedom of speech or the press. Never in Turkey’s history, Never in the history of the Ottoman Empire.
In fact for a very long time the Gutenberg press was outlawed in the Ottoman Empire. It was against the law to use it.
“We Turks remember and talk about that period through the Gallipoli victory and the triumph of the siege of Kut al-Amara. The devastating defeat of 1918, on the other hand, is still being interpreted as the ‘treason’ of the authorities at the time...”
That means that the Turks think that they’re entitled to reconquer their old empire because it ‘rightly’ belongs to them.
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