End Of Days News
The Ottoman Empire, the "sick man of Europe" in its last days, threatened the gates of Vienna and the heart of Europe a few decades before the American colonies won independence. It was not so nearly "sick" then. But for us today, Turkey holds a special place as the first overwhelmingly Muslim nation to become a thoroughly non-Islamic, secular government. The riots in Turkey can turn our world upside-down fast. Turkey's geographical position as a European and an Asian nation which commands the natural straits into the Black Sea are important as long as sea lanes have value. The history of this land -- the home of Troy, the place where Constantine founded his great city and empire, the marches across which Achaemenid emperors sent their polyglot hordes against the fledging city-states of Greece, the center of much of the early Christian church -- makes Turkey as important in atlases of the past as Rome or Persia.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was not a nice man. He was, in fact, a ruthless strongman, but he believed passionately in a Turkey which could enter into the company of modern industrial nations, as Japan had done. Atatürk and his followers revolutionized Turkey, creating a state in which women had equality before the law, in which all religions were tolerated and no state religion reigned, and in which Turkey would become a "rational actor" among the family of nations.
This meant that Turkey wisely sat out the Second World War, although Muslims around the world overwhelmingly yearned for Nazi victory. This pretty strict Turkish neutrality not only spared the Turkish people all the horrors of war, but also prevented the Nazis from overrunning the Middle East or, in the event of a Nazi defeat, prevented Stalin from occupying Turkey. The cautious Turkish government played the diplomatic game perfectly and tilted, to the extent that it titled at all, in favor of the British, who hated both totalitarianism and world war.
During the Cold War, Turkey became one of the earliest converts to containing communism, and its membership in NATO was vitally important to the security of the West. More than that, as the other nations of the world which were Muslim gained independence, Turkey became an important model for Muslim nations of how to enter the Western world.
Iran followed this model, becoming a close ally of America and the West, a Muslim land in which other faiths were welcome, a nation in which the lands of the mullahs were redistributed to peasants and the status of women was elevated, as in Turkey. Much of the nightmare we face with global Islam today is the product of the overthrow of the shah and his replacement by a blatantly theocratic and anti-Western clique.
