The Enlightenment Idea of History as a Legitimation Tool of Kemalism in Turkey

The study analyzes the effort to build political legitimacy in the Republic of Turkey by ex-ploring a group of influential texts produced by Kemalist writers. The study explores how the Kemalist regime reproduced certain long-lasting enlightenment meta-narrative in its effort to build political legitimacy. Central in this process was a hegemonic representation of history, namely the interpretation of the Anatolian Resistance Struggle of 1919 1922 as a Turkish Revolution executing the enlightenment in the Turkish nation-state. The method employed in the study is contextualizing narratological analysis. The Kemalist texts are analyzed with a repertoire of concepts originally developed in the theory of narra-tive. By bringing these concepts together with epistemological foundations of historical sciences, the study creates a theoretical frame inside of which it is possible to highlight how initially very controversial historical representations in the end manage to construct long-lasting, emotionally and intellectually convincing bases of national identity for the secular middle classes in Turkey. The two most important explanatory concepts in this sense are di-egesis and implied reader. The diegesis refers to the ability of narrative representation to create an inherently credible story-world that works as the basis of national community. The implied reader refers to the process where a certain hegemonic narrative creates a formula of identification and a position through which any individual real-world reader of a story can step inside the narrative story-world and identify oneself as one of us of the national narra-tive. The study demonstrates that the Kemalist enlightenment meta-narrative created a group of narrative accruals which enabled generations of secular middle classes to internalize Kemalist ideology. In this sense, the narrative in question has not only worked as a tool utilized by the so-called Kemalist state-elite to justify its leadership, but has been internalized by various groups in Turkey, working as their genuine world-view. It is shown in the study that secular-ism must be seen as the core ingredient of these groups national identity. The study proposes that the enlightenment narrative reproduced in the Kemalist ideology had its origin in a simi-lar totalizing cultural narrative created in and for Europe. Currently this enlightenment project is challenged in Turkey by those who are in an attempt to give religion a greater role in Turkish society. The study argues that the enduring practice of legitimizing political power through the enlightenment meta-narrative has not only become a major factor contributing to social polarization in Turkey, but has also, in contradiction to the very real potentials for crit-ical approaches inherent in the Enlightenment tradition, crucially restricted the development of critical and rational modes of thinking in the Republic of Turkey.

Thunderstorm climatology and lightning location applications in northern Europe

Thunderstorm is a dangerous electrical phenomena in the atmosphere. Thundercloud is formed when thermal energy is transported rapidly upwards in convective updraughts. Electrification occurs in the collisions of cloud particles in the strong updraught. When the amount of charge in the cloud is large enough, electrical breakdown, better known as a flash, occurs. Lightning location is nowadays an essential tool for the detection of severe weather. Located flashes indicate in real time the movement of hazardous areas and the intensity of lightning activity. Also, an estimate for the flash peak current can be determined. The observations can be used in damage surveys. The most simple way to represent lightning data is to plot the locations on a map, but the data can be processed in more complex end-products and exploited in data fusion. Lightning data serves as an important tool also in the research of lightning-related phenomena, such as Transient Luminous Events. Most of the global thunderstorms occur in areas with plenty of heat, moisture and tropospheric instability, for example in the tropical land areas. In higher latitudes like in Finland, the thunderstorm season is practically restricted to the summer season. Particular feature of the high-latitude climatology is the large annual variation, which regards also thunderstorms. Knowing the performance of any measuring device is important because it affects the accuracy of the end-products. In lightning location systems, the detection efficiency means the ratio between located and actually occurred flashes. Because in practice it is impossible to know the true number of actually occurred flashes, the detection efficiency has to be esimated with theoretical methods.