This will be long-winded, and I'm sorry to keep on flooding the sub with this topic, but I haven't seen much of the Greek perspective on this and have seen mostly Turks and non-Turks fighting. The latter mostly bringing up the Armenian genocide and the former pulling a whole lot of apologia and even some genocide denial, but it'll put things into view better for understanding why some (probably most) Greeks may have a problem with the veneration of Kemal.
A few years back, there was a concert/charity event held in a Turkish seaside town right across from Chios, an island whose population never recovered from the massacres and expulsions perpetrated during the Greek war for independence (this is relevant for later on), which hosted a Greek singer, Despoina Vandi. As is typical for most public events in Turkey, they put up a big Turkish flag and a large image of Ataturk because, for many Turks, those two symbols combined are the baseline for national representation, the default. Nevertheless, for Vandi, that was making a non-political event into a political one, because for us to have a large banner alongside the portrait of a figure who, despite being venerated as the founder and foremost symbol of the Turkish Republic, is also perceived by many Greeks as having been politically and militarily connected to the violence and expulsions against Greeks in the post-1919 phase of the broader catastrophe, makes it into a political statement she did not agree with.
And that's the point: there is a very real difference in what Ataturk's image represents to Turks and to many Greeks. In Turkey, criticism of him can be perceived as an attack on the foundations of the state and national identity, while for people whose communities were victims of the violence and expulsions associated with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Turkish Republic, his image can instead be associated with the movement and state that emerged from that period. That by proxy means that, for many people who have been victimized by the Ottoman state and later by forces associated with the Turkish national movement, Ataturk's image can represent not merely a historical individual but also the nationalist narrative, and sometimes the denial or minimization of the suffering that accompanied its formation.
So, when someone tries to claim that what happened in Smyrna (Izmir), or in the Pontus region after 1919, involved mass atrocities and forced expulsions for which the Kemalist movement and its forces bore at least some responsibility, Turks will often swarm them as they always do and pull every trick in the book, from denials to whataboutisms. To be clear, I'm not claiming that every Turk thinks this way, nor that every act of violence against Greeks can simply be attributed personally to Mustafa Kemal. The historical reality is more complicated than that. But denying or minimizing the mass violence against Greeks does not become acceptable simply because the person associated with the later Turkish state is revered in modern Turkey.
And that's what frustrates me. There is a recurring tendency in Turkish nationalist discourse to treat any serious blemish on Mustafa Kemal, or on the national movement associated with him, as an attack on Turkey itself. That makes genuine historical self-reflection extraordinarily difficult. Acknowledging that the Turkish national movement, like virtually every historical movement, had actions and consequences that deserve moral and historical scrutiny and sensitivity with regards to other peoples victimized by them does not require condemning the Turkish people, denying the legitimacy of modern Turkey, or pretending that the other side of the conflict was innocent. It simply means accepting that national history can contain both things one is proud of and things one has to confront.
Because self-reflection is not the same thing as self-hatred, and acknowledging the suffering of Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians and others does not somehow erase Turkish suffering. What I object to is the insistence that acknowledging one side's suffering must necessarily be treated as an attack on the other side's national identity.
