He was the driving force behind the Young Turk movement which arose in the Ottoman Empire before the First World War and advocated for modernization/revitilization of the empire that was known as "The Sick Man of Europe" (forgetting that Europe had three "sick men" at the time, Russia and Austria were tottering as well). Ataturk helped usher out the monarchy when the Ottomans lost World War I, defended the country from a joint Greek/British/French/Caucasian effort to destroy Turkey after the first world war, then went on to enforce secularization, flipped their country off of the Arabic alphabet and onto the Roman one, and brought the first democracy to the near East

Just don't ever mention the word Armenia.

He was the driving force behind the Young Turk movement which arose in the Ottoman Empire before the First World War and advocated for modernization/revitilization of the empire that was known as "The Sick Man of Europe" (forgetting that Europe had three "sick men" at the time, Russia and Austria were tottering as well). Ataturk helped usher out the monarchy when the Ottomans lost World War I, defended the country from a joint Greek/British/French/Caucasian effort to destroy Turkey after the first world war, then went on to enforce secularization, flipped their country off of the Arabic alphabet and onto the Roman one, and brought the first democracy to the near East

Just don't ever mention the word Armenia.

I read something about that while reading on wikipedia for Ataturk, could you elaborate a little?

Well, during and after World War I, the Ottoman Turks staged a large-scale genocide of Armenians living in the Empire. Nowadays, Armenians are largely confined to Armenia (and Nagorno-Karabakh, but that's a story for another day). It was predicated upon similar reasons as the later Holocaust of the Jews, with the idea that the Armenians were undermining the integrity of the Empire, and therefore had to be moved and/or killed off en masse. The methods used by the Ottomans at the time helped provide a framework for Hitler to use later on. Anyway, due to the large amount of control and influence Kemal and the Young Turks had within the Ottoman Empire even before the Empire collapsed, there's some question as to how much of the genocide was their fault, moreso than the elements of the old Empire proper.

Either way, to this day the Turks deny vociferously that the Armenian genocide ever occurred, a significant sticking point in Turkey's relations with the West, who has been trying to get the genocide acknowledged as a genocide.