The CUP was seen as a violent cult to most people. The only two options available to join were "to serve for a year as a candidate and then become a real member or to offer a sacrifice to the committee and thereby become a member immediately" (Zapotoczny 3). An acceptable sacrifice was the assassination of an important official.
The CUP would often terrorize towns by committing various assassinations and would send spies to discover government secrets. Even when Ataturk came into power, many resented the rapid changes. Most affected were the elderly and religious who felt their rights were violated by being forced to do things they didn't want to do. Even abroad Ataturk was considered a communistic dictator who ruled his people with an iron fist. It was said that: "Besides him, Hitler is a milksop, Mussolini a perfumed dandy, and Goemboes a creature of the drawing room." -John Gunther (Inside Europe)
The CUP would often terrorize towns by committing various assassinations and would send spies to discover government secrets. Even when Ataturk came into power, many resented the rapid changes. Most affected were the elderly and religious who felt their rights were violated by being forced to do things they didn't want to do. Even abroad Ataturk was considered a communistic dictator who ruled his people with an iron fist. It was said that: "Besides him, Hitler is a milksop, Mussolini a perfumed dandy, and Goemboes a creature of the drawing room." -John Gunther (Inside Europe)
"They were the last and hardiest of the Young Turks, a band of revolutionaries who in 1908 had come out of the mountains of Macedonia, stormed into Constantinople, and deposed the bloody butcher, Sultan Abdul Hamid.It was suppose to have been a cleansing, democratic reform. The ideal has seldom anywhere been more hideously mocked and degraded. In office, these men behaved like the worst of the Chicago mobs in Prohibition days, using murder, torture, and terror to consolidate their gains." -Samuel L.A. Marshall and Alvin M. Josephy (World War I)
"Mustafa Kemal Pasha had always been a lone man, a solitary, playing a lone hand. He had trusted no one. He would not listen to opinions that were contrary to his own. He would insult anyone who dared to disagree with him. He judged all actions by the meanest motives of self-interest. He was insanely jealous. A clever or capable man was a danger to be got rid of. He was bitterly critical of any other man’s ability. He took a savage pleasure in tearing up the characters and sneering at the actions even of those who supported him. He rarely said a kind or generous thing and then only with a qualification that was a sneer. He confided in no one. He had no intimates. His friends were the evil little men who drank with him, pandered to his pleasures and fed his vanity. All the men of value, the men who had stood beside him in the black days of the War for Liberation were against him." -Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi (Mustafa Kemal Ataturk: The Enemy of Islam)