After the First World War, the former Ottoman Empire, allied to the Germans, was carved up by victorious Britain and France. The modern nation of Turkey emerged from that dismemberment. The Turkish Sultans were driven from power by the young Kamil Attaturk, a brilliant General who had personally engineered the defeat of British/Australian forces at Gallipoli in the Dardenelles Straits.

The Greeks decided to exploit disarray in Turkey by launching an invasion in the early 1920s to reconquer Istambul, the ancient Constantinople. They failed miserably. Attaturk rallied his “young Turks” to the defense of the new nation. He expelled the Greeks.

This was the last attempt at a reconquest of Istambul by the Greeks. It led to a massive Turkish military buildup. Attaturk secularized Turkey, adopted the Roman alphabet and western dress, and outlawed the fez, an Islamic symbol. Hagia Sophia, an ancient Greek Orthodox cathedral, was converted from a mosque to a museum as a token of the modern Turkey’s western orientation.

Spencer and his allies are insane to sign on to another “reconquest” scheme.