How coincidental do you want it?
In October 1927, Kemal Mustapha gave a speech that lasted six days. Yes, Fidel Castro certainly fell short of that with his six or eight hour speeches. When I was preparing my book “IS, the Kurds and the Caliphate. Turkey: from sick occupant to paranoid neighbor”. [The footer contains a link to my Kindle-books at Amazon. Take note: nowadays these Kindle-files can easily be read on laptops etc] I discovered that a verbatim account of that speech was written and published. Despite the great popularity of this so-called ‘Father of the Turks’ (Atatürk), only one edition was ever printed; in 1929!
So of course I had to try to buy my copy second-hand. And I succeeded. It turned out to be a véry special specimen. I got hold of a copy that had been in a library for quite some time. But that was not all. Long before, in 1966, this specific copy, then already 37 years old, was given to the then ambassador of America in Turkey! You wouldn’t believe me without the photo.
I could not have written my book without studying this speech. You could say that speech is a primary source par excellence.
And yet!
The ambassador had made some short notes in the margin. But only in the first part of it. Apparently even this ‘Friend of Turkey’ did not go through the trouble of reading the complete speech!
Deeply worrying.
Talking about the founder of Turkey without reading this speech is like talking about nazi-Gemany without reading Hitlers ‘Mein Kampf’ or talking about the 1917 revolution in Russia without mentioning Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known under the nickname Lenin that he chose for himself.
And I got a little sick -literally!- by reading this copy of the speech. Especially the cover had become poisonous with mildew! I had to re-cover the book.
Talk about special signs!
PS: The word Ghazi has a very different word than the word Gazi: that is explained in one of the hundreds of notes in the e-book.
P.P.S.: The Amazon preview of the book provides much context: Direct Link
2 comments