This article aims to shed light on the origins of the Turkish ultra-nationalist Nine Lights ideology and explain why this ideology failed to take root. Soon after the Turkish ultra-nationalists controlled the Republican Peasants' Nation Party (RPNP), the party leader Alparslan Türkeş embarked on a dual strategy which saw the party maintaining a racist and militaristic political discourse in informal circles while it officially embraced a moderate and liberal leaning ideology - the Nine Lights. Racist Nihal Atsız had been known as the party ideologue, but the ideas of liberal-leaning Mümtaz Turhan dominated the Nine Lights. The Nine Lights not only rejected nationalism based on blood, but also embraced the Charter of the United Nations and thereby issued a de facto recognition of the equality of all nations! In this article, I argue that the Nine Lights ideology failed because the Turkish ultra-nationalists treated it like a stillborn child and continued to embrace earlier forms of racist and militaristic political discourse. Even after the RPNP became the Nationalist Action Party and adopted the concept of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, it still indoctrinated its youth with the teachings of radical thinkers like Atsız, while the Nine Lights ideology existed only on paper.