h the west, Kemal up a democratic system in which, on a long-term view, he believed. It would be necessary to use dictatorial means for a time in order for democracy to become reality. "He stood by his Occidental Assembly. But it needed, on the short-term view, a President exercising some degree of autocracy--a power which, though he himself would not have admitted it, was in character Oriental. Kemal's political and economic policies were ones of expediency--the most effective means to political and economic reform . . . the ideologies behind such policies "could be shed after changing circumstances had divorced them from reality."
Kemal Atatnrk was often called a dictator by his contemporaries, and in a sense he certainly was. But, in saying this, one must remember that his rule was very different from that of other men, in Europe and the Middle East yesterday and today, to whom the same term is applied. Lewis gives us a three-dimensional portrait of Kemal in his book on the emergence of modern Turkey:
An autocrat by personal and professional bias, dominating and imperious by temperament, he yet showed a respect for decency and legality, for human and political standards, that is in astonishing contrast with the behaviour of lesser and more pretentious men. His was a dictatorship without the uneasy over-the shoulder glance, the terror of the door-bell, the dark menace of the concentration camp. Force and repression were certainly used to establish and maintain the Republic during the period of revolutionary changes, but no longer; and after the executions of 1926 there was little danger to life and to personal liberty.
In 1927, during one of the debates on the promotion of secularization and disestablishment of Islam as the state religion, Kemal had had enough of the endless arguments pro and con. During this joint committee meeting of the Constitutional Committee, Judicial Committee, and the Religious Law Committee,...