Kemalist historiography
[3] It asserts that the Republic of Turkey represented a clean break with the Ottoman Empire, and that the Republican People's Party did not succeed the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).
Kemalist historiography views Ottoman traditions as an obstacle to the introduction of Westernising political reforms, and instead adopts the heritage of pre-Islamic Turks, which it considers to be naturally progressive, culturally pure and uncorrupted.
[4] Today, Kemalist historiography is embraced and further developed by Turkish neo-nationalism (Ulusalcılık),[4][b] and sometimes by anti-Kemalist conservatism and Islamism, especially in the case of Armenian Genocide denial.
Entrenched Islamic tradition was seen as an obstacle to introduce such reforms, and in order to subvert them, Turkish ideologue Ziya Gökalp composed a myth, suggesting that old Turkic people had the characteristics of a feminist society.
For this reason, he argued that Turkey did not necessarily need to become a part of the West, which he saw dangerously individualist and romanticist, but rather should turn back to their semi-mythical Central Asian origins.
[8]: 147–148 The same historiography also attributed the roots of Sumerian, Akkadian, Celtic, Mongolian, Russian, Irish and Chinese people to Turkishness, to suggest that Turks were the ethnicity that spread 'civilization' to the rest of the world.
[12] The reforms implemented in the late Empire that date back to Selim III and the Tanzimat period, is regarded as a "teleological history of modernization" that aims to facilitate "ideological mobilization", a view that thrived further in the early Kemalist Republic.
Erasing the memory and culture of the Ottoman Empire was therefore seen as a necessity by the Kemalist regime, in order to successfully implement said "ideological mobilization", that is, to introduce modern Western political ideals into Turkey.
[13][14] The Kemalist narrative of the Great War (Cihan Harbi) puts an emphasis on the victories that took place on the Turkish mainland, thus excluding Balkan and Arab provinces.
The historiography also downplays the importance of German officers and Esad Pasha in the former battle, thus elevating Kemal; this is achieved by an extensive interview published in a newspaper called Yeni Mecmua, publicising him as the "hero of Anafartalar".
[18]: 162–164 After the establishment of the Republic, politicians Kazım Karabekir, Rauf Orbay, Rıza Nur disputed the official historiography of War of Independence by writing and publishing their own memoirs.
During this period, the government purged a large number of left-wing scholars from higher education institutions, especially the ones who worked on disciplines such as economy, political sciences, and history, in order to reorganize academia.
The ones who remained, founded scientific publishing houses such as Belge and İletişim, and associations such as Tarih Vakfı (the Foundation for History), as the military regime liberalized overtime.
[12]: 369–370 Post-Kemalism was also criticized by scholars today as over-focusing on the foundation years of the republic, while ignoring Ottoman-Turkish political culture and historical developments before and after of Kemalist regime.
Today, after a series of name changes, this department is known as Askerî Tarih ve Stratejik Etüt Başkanlığı (ATASE, Directorate for Military History and Strategic Studies).
