Interview: Austin Bay on Ataturk, Lessons in Leadership

Col. Austin Bay, longtime contributor to PJM and the co-author of A Quick and Dirty Guide to War, has a new book out titled Ataturk, Lessons in Leadership from the Greatest General of the Ottoman Empire. As Austin says during our interview, “You can make the case that Ataturk was really the 20th century’s most successful revolutionary. It certainly wasn’t Vladimir Lenin, it wasn’t Mao Tse-tung, it wasn’t Ho Chí Minh. It wasn’t Gandhi. I think it was Ataturk. It’s not that his legacy is all settled inside contemporary Turkey, because there are moderate Islamists that are testing that secular legacy of Ataturk. But he certainly established what has grown into a modern state.”

Don’t miss Austin discussing Ataturk on the C-Span2 channel this weekend. C-Span2 is covering the Texas Book Festival, and is scheduled to run the following panel at 4:00 PM eastern on Sunday:

4-5pm ET: Panel on the Arab Spring with Austin Bay, “Ataturk,” Robin Wright, “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World,” and James Zogby, “Arab Voices.”

In the meantime, click below to listen to our interview:

(21 minutes long; 20MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 6 MB lo-fi edition.

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