[Part 2]

On 10 November 1938 Ataturk died (Many Turks still who were born on November 10 either don't celebrate their birthday or celebrate a couple days prior to or after that day). Until '50s Ismet Inonu was going to rule the country, as the head of the founder party CHP, and the president, as one of the top men of Ataturk, always under his shadow. Under him the Kemalist nationalism, which was denominational rather than ethnic, began to become more and more ethnic. With the imminent WWII, an era of Realpolitik started to defend the still-young-and-forming quasi-republic, and during this episode four very important events happened: Koy Enstituleri (Village institutes), Varlik Vergisi (Wealth tax), the admission of Turkey to Nato, and the immigration to Turkey of some German academics. Koy Enstituleri was a project to bootstrap the largely uneducated anatolian peasants as modern citizens. They endured 5 years, and until their removal by the same Inonu who lead their establishment, they produced a generation of rather cultured individuals out of analphabetic peasants. Varlik vergisi was a tax introduced in 1942 and collected as a percentage of wealth from the Christian and Jewish bourgoisie of the republic, which was intended to raise the funds required to defend the country in the WWII (in which she never really participated), and to covertly remove the said bougoisie to give way to a Turkish one (recall the ethnic nationalism of Inonu in opposition to the denominational one of Ataturk, the latter one was more favourable to the ethno-religious "minorities" of Turkey). This tax caused lots and lots of Christians to leave the country, and left the country prive of its biggest class of educated elite. It was collected as about %100-250 of the wealth of the Christians, and %5 from the Muslims. The rest of the Christian population that survived this event left the country after various pogroms and ever-growing ethnoreligious tension during the '50s through '80s. Today the Christian and Jewish population of Turkey is in the hundred-thousands range, and while the active oppression is very weak compared to the recent past, they are still practically second class citizens. The admission of Turkey to Nato happened in the final moments of the WWII, where Turkey declared was on Germany, and per Nato's rules that any state who officially fought Germany would be a part of Nato, Turkey became so, although no battles happened. And lastly, the German professors who fleed Germany for Turkey raised a generation of sophisticated academics especially in the Istanbul University. Most of these returned to Germany shortly after the end of Hitler's regime, but their legacy and their contribution to the nascent Turkish higher education was of vital importance.

1950 is the year of the first really free elections in Turkey, and the right-leaning, conservative party of Menderes won it. His anti-secular and anti-laicist stance brought the coup-d'etat of '61; which executed him, installed a very liberal constitution, and set the path to the formation of the first real Turkish intelligentsia during the '60s, and also to the clash of different wings of this inteligentsia, mainly right/nationalist/religious and left/secular/laicist/communist. This tension quickly escalated and gave way to civil war, especially during the '70s, and epoch of continuous and omnipresent idealistic violence that was finished with the infamous coup-d'etat of 12 September 1980. As the juntas head, the Gernral Commander of the army Kenan Evren read their manifesto on the state TV, a new epoch was on the brink of coming to stay. Under the juntas violent regime, in 1982, the still-present constitution of Turkey, named after that year, was becoming effective after popular vote where it received the approval of the %92 of the Turkish voters. Hundreds of thousands were arrested and tortured, and thousands killed by this regime, and they sterilised every institution of the republic, apolitised nearly everyone, and initiated a regime of fear and uncertainty under the disguise of democracy, always at the gunpoint of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK), ready to take over should the founding ideals be under threat. Widespread cencorship of all media and centralisation of all kinds of education came, and universities, seen as the root of the evil of the politicised youth, became sterile, high-school like institutions, deprived of any kind of intellectual liberty. It's this episode during which the statues and pictures of Ataturk started to appear everywhere, and nationalism and statism became incredibly prominent everywhere. The schools deteriorated quickly, producing apolitical, unquestioning, anti-intellectual individuals. Free thought was strangled. State entered in each mind.

In mid '80s came the government of Turgut Ozal, a right-wing libertarian politician, under whose lead Turkey became less and less a strictly social-democrat state. And also religious organisations were conceded some liberties, after being completely prohibited for decades, since the Kemalist reforms. Many of these were born, including the Gulenist organisation.

During the '90s Turkey was going through a weird political situation where the government was swinging between prominent right and left wing parties, occasional coalitions (most of which were big failures, thus the Turkish aversion to coalition governments), while a covert bloody war was going on in South eastern regions, fighting PKK, and oppressing Kurds. The oppression on Kurds started right after the Sheik Said event, continued until the coup-d'etat of 1980, only to worsen due to the new agenda the new Consitution and the new mindset installed by the junta, and peaked in 1990s in outright was and nearly a program of ethnical cleansing. The same decade saw the governments of Necmettin Erbakan, a fundamentalist islamist, Tansu Ciller, the only female prime minister of Turkey, a nationalist conservative, and Bulent Ecevit, a left wing politician. Widespread identity crisis was beginning. Especially the continuous failure in joining EU and the general humiliation of living the schizophrenic life of a Turk in the middle of a passage from a mostly agricultural people to a Western, civilised one; and the ever-continuing fascism of the junta constitution was being felt and suffered by everyone.