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In the countless hours I have spent for over a decade scouring the Internet to locate high-quality learning websites, I have become a fan of the genre that captures the web author’s expertise and enthusiasm for a particular subject. I found one today. As crises seems to be stirring in Turkey, I started looking around for some historical information, and found Ataturk.com, subtitled The founder of the Turkish Republic and its first President.
As he reveals in one of the pages of this extensive site, the author is a man named Cent who was born and raised in Turkey, and now lives in the Untied States. I, for one, value what I can learn about Ataturk and about Turkey, past and present, from this man’s work in creating the website. I doubt that he would claim to be an objective scholar, but think his affection for and the personal experience he has with Turkey present facets of understanding that objectivity cannot provide. Raising a flag to enlightenment, Ataturk.com’s homepage banner quotes these words:
“The humankind is consisted of two sexes, woman and man. Is it possible that a mass is improved by the improvement of only one part and ignore other? Is it possible that if half of a mass is tied to earth with chains and the other half can soar into skies?”
– M.K. Ataturk
It seems to me that the availability of many viewpoints and nuances of memories and understanding that are available for a historical subject online do a couple of constructive things. For one thing, they do not let revisionists rewrite history and then completely bury other views. Secondly, the inevitable networking of viewpoints on a topic that the open Internet generates provides a mechanism for the emergence of consensus, and dare I say, of truth.
