people enter the twentieth century. Progress was "too slow to satisfy his fiery spirit. While illiteracy lasts the great mass of the people can get very little further." The Turkish alphabet constituted a serious handicap to learning how to read and write, and a brake in communication with the more economically developed countries of the world. Ataturk fought illiteracy in part by modernizing the Turkish language, including by adopting the Latin script. The President of Turkey felt that he could not autocratically compel his people to become "Westernized" overnight, but he could, just as autocratically, educate his people to the ways of modern society. An Act of Parliament made the new script official. National Schools were opened with a view to teaching the three R's. All Turks under the age of forty were obliged to attend these schools; shirkers were punished. Kemalist police combed the country for illiterates. A Turkish Language Academy was founded. Arabic was prohibited for religious use. International terms were adopted for technical and scientific fields. "The ultimate goal was the removal of discord between the language of the simple man and that of the educated man." Doubtlessly, this was a laudable enterprise which tended to strengthen the cultural and political unity of the Turkish people--while further alienating the Kurds and other ethnic minorities.
Here is another example of the allegedly beneficent influence of elitist power. Reza Shah Pahlevi, Emperor of Iran, even as Kemal Ataturk, aimed at lifting his people out of the Middle Ages into European Twentieth Century. He founded the Farhangestan, or Iranian Academy, the main purpose of which was to "purify the Persian language from the overlay of Arabic words that it had acquired after the Isla
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