The Leader and the Demagogue

The title piece opens with a simple but memorable distinction: in multi-party systems it is easy to found a party, and every party chairman is called a 'leader', but being a chairman is not the same as being a leader. Aydemir compares: Britain has three parties, the US two, whereas before the Second World War Greece had 47 parties and Bulgaria 50. His conclusion: a multi-party system is 'a field that grows leaders', but not everything that grows in it is a leader.

The author defines a leader by three qualities: assessing events and conditions most accurately, seeing furthest ahead on the basis of that assessment, and ultimately being able to give direction to the course of events. A demagogue, in his words, is a 'man of the moment' who, in countries without adequate education, speaks according to the prevailing wind without any sense of conscience and performs acrobatics before the public with cheap slogans. Aydemir names trading on religion and trading on a 'fictitious fight against communism' as concrete examples of demagoguery.

The last part concerns Turkey in 1974: the country is in crises that seem unsolvable, and 'demagogues flap their wings with ominous cries in this smoky air'. But Aydemir does not lose hope: he recalls how the nation escaped hopeless dead ends between 1918 and 1974 and ends with the line 'the day we fall into despair is the day our internal and external enemies are waiting for'. The sentence captures both the mood of the time and the author's Kemalist optimism.

The second piece is one of the book's most interesting texts. Aydemir writes that the greatest misfortune of ideas and doctrines is that 'one day they become mere words': just as Aristotle's logic became the basis of medieval scholasticism and the law of Moses turned into the formalism of the Pharisees, in Turkey there is a danger of turning Kemalism into 'word Kemalism' — the slogan of those who wave Atatürk's name like a flag but never bother to understand his ideas. Against this he sets 'idea Kemalism'.

Here Aydemir also makes a bold admission: in 1962 there was not even a proper biography of Atatürk in Turkish written with modern scholarly methods, and it was hard to recommend a serious Turkish work to a foreign intellectual — he makes the point through his meeting with Lord Kinross, who was preparing a book on Atatürk. His comparison of Atatürk's idea of the homeland with those of Namık Kemal, Enver Pasha and Ziya Gökalp (the borders of the National Pact versus the dream of 'Turan') is another strength of the piece.

The book's weakness is its editing: the pieces are not in chronological order, each ends only with the name of the paper and the date, and there are no explanations or footnotes. Readers who do not know the names, parties and events of the 1960s–70s will struggle with many articles. The language is also full of the Ottoman-rooted vocabulary of the period. Even so, the 'leader versus demagogue' distinction can be applied to the politics of almost any country today.

• Short newspaper pieces, each readable on its own
• Journalism rich in historical comparisons and personal memories
• Each piece ends with the paper and date of publication
• A foreword by the compiler, the author's son Ertuğrul Aydemir