Please activate JavaScript!
Please install Adobe Flash Player, click here for download
ePaper created 2014-11-09, 13:16:45 | version 1.33.00
Reproduced by Australian Atatürk Cultural Centre Inc. 3 independence of individual states formed by the nations of the world should be held sacrosanct. The road to his universal goal leads down through independent nation states and rests on the rights and liberties of the individual. At the root of the nation state lie the six basic principles of reform. Through Nationalism Atatürk gave his own people a national identity. These were the people who had waged the War of Independence and whom he had extricated from the theocracy that was the Ottoman Empire. The principle of Populism stands for the contemporary concept of democracy. This is a cornerstone of the state and is a form of consciousness of national sovereignty. With the principle of Republicanism, Turkish reforms find concrete backing in the structural nature of the state. Secularism provides for the administration of the state by laws based on scientific fact as well as for free formation and development of rational thinking away from the pressure of any type of dogma or narrowness of thought. The principle of Statism gives government responsibility for updating Turkish society and all social institutions through national education. This, in turn, derives its strength from the national economy which itself watches over the national interests of society without impeding the economic initiative of the individual. Statism thereby seeks to ensure a sound basis for society. The principle of Reformism is instrumental in following up developments and advances in the world of science. Through reformism, ways and means of getting Turkey to the top of contemporary civilization may be constantly reviewed. Any one of the six principles in question should not be viewed in isolation. Each one is an integral part of Atatürk's universal view of life. Between 1963 and 1969, under the supervision of Prof. Charles W. Hart, then Head of the Social Anthropology and Ethnology Department at İstanbul University. I prepared a thesis dealing with Atatürk‘s knowledge of world history and how it affected his performance. At that time the library at Atatürk's Mausoleum contained 3114 different publications, which he had read. Atatürk had underlined sentences and scribbled notes on a number of pages he had found particularly interesting. Of those publications I studied 278 of the books, which dealt with the history of various civilizations, and I appended this list to my thesis2 . In subsequent years I developed the thesis and in 1981 I published it in book form with the title "Atatürk's Way of Thinking". This small brochure which is based on the above, attempts to explain, by quoting his own words, those reflections of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish 2 In 1973, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Turkish Republic, a catalogue of Atatürk's private library was published by the Department of Culture, At the present time we are making preparations for the publication, in book form, of photocopies of all the pages which contain sentences underlined by Atatürk and the notes which he scribbled.