Praising Atatürk on X: Wilders acquits Hitler’s role model

If a tweet can bury a genocide, Geert Wilders just posted it. On November 10, 2025, the Dutch leader wrote: “Indeed Ataturk was a true leader, Erdogan a dangerous Islamist. Turkey deserves another #Ataturk and freedom and separation of church and state instead of more Islamism and violence to women.” This is a slap in the face to the graves of millions. For Atatürk was a butcher, the man who planned the mass killing of almost all Christians of Anatolia. So Wilders’s praise is either plain ignorance or deliberate lies.

Atatürk’s hands are covered in blood. From 1915 to 1923, under German guidance, he organised the murder of 1.5 million Armenians, 750,000 Greeks, and 300,000 Assyrians – women, children, civilians – just for being Christian. Death marches, burnings, rape camps: The Holocaust’s model. The 1915 Armenian Genocide wiped out 90 per cent of Anatolia’s Armenians. Pontus Greeks lost 350,000, villages were torched, survivors were worked to death. It was ethnic cleansing for a Muslim Turkish state.

Wilders calls Atatürk a secular hero. Nonsense. He banned the fez alright, but banned Christianity, too. Churches became stables, priests were hanged. The 1923 Lausanne Treaty forced out 1.2 million Greek Christians for 400,000 Muslims. Atatürk’s “church-state separation” meant state-run Islam. His 1934 Surname Law erased Christian names. The 1928 alphabet change buried the remnants of  Greek and Armenian heritage. Secularism? No, Geert. Turkification by force.

Erdogan may be bad – 47,000 human rights abuse cases in 2025, according to the Human Rights watch – but he did not start the Christian genocide. Atatürk did. Erdogan may have reopened Hagia Sophia as a mosque in 2020, but Atatürk made it a museum in 1935 only to mask the bloodbath. Atatürk’s genocide killed more Christians in eight years than the Ottoman Empire did in centuries. Calling for “another Atatürk” means inviting another extermination.

Wilders insults history. German officers taught Neo-Turks gas tactics. Enver Pasha used them on Armenians. The 1919–1922 Greek genocide ended up with Smyrna, Asia Minor’s most cosmopolitan city, in flames. Great Powers battleships watched it burn, its population slain, women raped, mothers clutching their dead children on the waterfront. SS brigades copied Anatolia’s “empty the land” dogma. “Atatürk was a teacher; Mussolini was his first and I his second student”, Stefan Ihrig quotes Hilter as saying in his 2014 Harvard University Press book, Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination.

Kemalist legacy was alive as ever in 1974 when Turkey invaded Cyprus, expelling 200,000 Greek Cypriots and taking 37 per cent of the island. Modern-day Turkey continues the purge, backing SNA militias in Syria that carry out ethnic cleansing and systematic displacement of Christians and Yazidis. Not to mention the decades-long war Turkey wages on Kurds within and beyond its borders. Praising Atatürk nods to today’s persecutors.

Of course, Europe’s complicity runs old and deep. It was the West that let Constantinople perish in 1453. Imperial Britain and France never really cared for Christian populations under the Sublime Port; Germany and the Entente powers both backed Turkish regimes that killed Christians during and after the Great War. The 1923 Lausanne Treaty legalised removing 1.2 million people from their ancient cradles. Nationalists like Wilders, who allegedly fight for European identity, should know: Europe ends where the Christian world ends.

Wilders’ tweet is nothing short of a crime against memory. European conservatives must reject this whitewash. If Europe is to survive as a culture and geopolitical entity, it must realise its single cultural entity and essence, which is inseparable from the world of the Cross – and build on strengthening Europe’s common conscience. Leaders who resist the Islamic invasion that the Old Continent is currently faced with cannot afford to disregard this.