WHEN DICTATORS SUCCEED.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 55, 6 March 1929, Page 6

WHEN DICTATORS SUCCEED.

Ex-King Amanullah fell in love with Western civilisation in the course of his European travels. But the principal incentive towards reconstructing Afghanistan overnight is said to have been supplied by the example of a fellow Moslem, the redoubtable Kemal Pasha. As a virtuoso of revolution and dictatorship Kemal towers head and shoulders above all other personal and partv autocracies since the World War. The changes which he has wrought among his people make Mussolini's reforms mere surface scratchings by comparison, and they reach further and deeper than the Bolshevist experiment.

Lenin had to beat a retreat before private ownership as affecting five-sixths of the Russian people, the peasants. The Communist war upon religion has experienced a similar fate. But Kemal Pasha has destroyed the Caliphate, has violated the fundamental principles of the religion of the Koran, has set himself to recast the ha"bits of millenniums in the matter of sex and family relations. The Communist dictatorship has been content to eject a few useless vowels from the Russian alphabet and has failed to impose the Western calendar on the majority of the people. But Kemal blithely throws an entire Oriental alphabet into the Bosphorus and sets a whole nation to learn the Latin characters. It is as remarkable a volte face as history can recall; an entire nation at the word of command gives up reading from right to left and begins °to read from left to right.

Many complex reasons, historical, social and personal, are necessary to explain why Kemal has been able to have his own way so emphatically. But one factor, common to all post-war dictatorships, has been peculiarly to the fore in the case of Turkey. It is the spirit of nationalism asserting itself against the foreigner. "In this task (cementing the Communist regime) Lenin was incalculably aided by allied intervention," and every well-informed person on Russia knows how true this is. The Fascist revolution was due, in no small measure, to the prevalent sense of resentment in Italy at the behaviour of Italy's allies. Kemal had more than foreign arrogance or foreign "intervention" to point to. A Greek army was marching into the heart of Anatolia and Greek victory would unquestionably have led to complete rational dismemberment. The thought of what Kemal did to save his country unquestionably produces acquiescence in reforms that bv themselves offend or outrage large sections of popular sentiment. If Afghanistan had been invaded by a Russian or British army and saved by Amanullah, the Shinwari mollahs* would have submitted to the Ameer's Western motor cars and Queen Souriya's decollete evening gowns.