Arnold Toynbee

“ All the props of Ottoman dominion in Asia have fallen away, but nothing dooms it so surely as the breath of life that is stirring over the dormant lands and peoples once more. The cutting of the Suez Canal has led the highways of commerce back to the Nearer East; the democracy and nationalism of Europe have been extending their influence over Asiatic races. On whatever terms the War is concluded, one far-reaching result is certain already: there will be a political and economic revival in Western Asia, and the direction of this will not be in Ottoman hands. ”

“ Here far-sighted engineers and stronghanded rulers turned the waters of Babylon into waters of life, and the Sawâd became a great heart of civilisation, breathing in man-power—Sumerians and Amorites and Kassites and Aramaeans and Chaldeans and Persians and Greeks and Arabs—and breathing out the works of man—grain and wool and Babylonish garments, inventions still used in our machine-shops, and emotions still felt in our religion. ”

“ Thus, three months after the German armies crossed the frontier, the German invasion of Belgium and France gave place to a permanent German occupation of French and Belgian territories behind a practically stationary front, and with this change of character in the fighting a change came over the outrages upon the civil population which remained in Germany’s power. The crimes of the invasion and the crimes of the occupation are of a different order from one another, and must be dealt with apart. ”

“ No one who has studied the history of the Near East for the last five centuries will be surprised that the Allied Powers have declared their purpose to put an end to the rule of the Turk in Europe, and still less will he dissent from their determination to deliver the Christian population of what is called the Turkish Empire, whether in Asia or in Europe, from a Government which during those five centuries has done nothing but oppress them. ”

“ The Arabs created a wonderful civilisation at the time when Medieval Europe was in its darkest age. Their discoveries in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, are the foundations of modern science, as is witnessed by the Arabic words in our scientific vocabulary. This Arabic civilisation was swamped by the Turkish migrations from Central Asia in the 11th century, and blotted out by the Mongols, who followed in the wake of the Turks and sacked Baghdad, the Arab capital, in the 13th century. ”

“ Although you are an Arab, yet you and your race are subject to Turkey. Have not the Turks colonised your country, and have they not conquered it by the sword? The Ottoman State, which you plead, is nothing but a social trick, to which you resort in order to attain your ends. As to religion, it has no connexion with politics. We shall soon march forward in the name of Turkey and the Turkish flag, casting aside religion, as it is only a personal and secondary question. You and your nation must realise that you are Turks, and that there is no such thing as Arab nationality and an Arab fatherland. ”

“ The first road led from Aix-la-Chapelle, in Germany, to the bridge over the Meuse at Visé, skirting the Dutch frontier, and Warsage [4] was the first Belgian village on this road to which the Germans came. Their advance-guards distributed a proclamation by General von Emmich: “I give formal pledges to the Belgian population that they will not have to suffer from the horrors of war.... If you wish to avoid the horrors of war, you must act wisely and with a true appreciation of your duty to your country.” ”

“ This Nationalism, which dominates Turkey's present, has also decided the question of her future. If such a movement has taken possession of the Osmanlis, the Osmanlis must lose possession of their Empire. Turkish Nationalism now directs the Ottoman Government, wields its pretensions, is master within its frontiers; and how does it use its mastery? To make a hell of Armenia and Syria, and to plot out new Macedonias in Persia and the heart of Russia. Thus Turkish Nationalism shows where the Turk is intolerable and must go, but it also shows where he has some right to stay. ”

“ Crossed the Belgian frontier and kept steadily along the high road until we got into Belgium. We were hardly into it before we met a horrible sight. Houses were burnt down, the inhabitants driven out and some of them shot. Of the hundreds of houses not a single one had been spared—every one was plundered and burnt down. Hardly were we through this big village when the next was already set on fire, and so it went on.... ”

“ The Syrians and Armenians have not, as the Turks and Germans allege, been disloyal to Turkey in her hour of danger. The Arab and Armenian conscripts have fought dutifully for a cause not their own in the Balkan War and in the present more terrible conflict. Their leaders are too prudent and the people too peaceable, their stake is too great, their forces are too scattered, to allow them for a moment to contemplate rising in arms. But their loyal and straightforward conduct has not preserved them from the ferocity of their Turkish rulers ”

“ The Arabs speak their own language and are as ignorant of Turkish as if their country were not a dependency of Turkey. It is the business of the Porte to make them forget their own language and to impose upon them instead that of the nation which rules them. If the Porte loses sight of this duty it will be digging its grave with its own hands, for if the Arabs do not forget their language, their history, and their customs, they will seek to restore their ancient empire on the ruins of Ottomanism and of Turkish rule in Asia. ”

“ The Turk has never been of any use for any purpose except fighting. He cannot administer, though in his earlier days he had the sense to employ intelligent Christian administrators. He cannot secure justice. As a governing power, he has always shown himself incapable, corrupt and cruel. He has always destroyed; he has never created.
Those whom we call the Turks are not a nation at all in the proper sense of the word. ”

“ Egypt, rid of the Osmanli, and India, where he never ruled, have kept their ancient wealth of harvests and population, and have man-power to spare for the reclamation of the Sawâd. All the means are at hand for bringing the land to life—the water, the engineer, the capital, the labour; only the Ottoman pretension stands in the way, and condemns the Sawâd to lie dead and unharvested so long as it endures. ”

“ In Syria there is a reign of terror. The Arab leaders have been imprisoned, executed, or deported already, and the mass of the people lie paralysed, expecting the Armenians’ fate and, dreading every moment to hear the decree of extermination go forth.
This wholesale destruction, which has already overtaken two of the subject peoples in Turkey, and threatens all that 60 per cent. of the population which is not Turkish in language, is the direct work of the Turkish government. ”

“ How should I have felt if, in traversing the deserts and swamps which to-day represent what was the richest and most famous tract of the world, I had thought that I was a scion of a race in whose hands God had placed, for hundreds of years, the destinies of this great country, and that my countrymen could give no better account of their stewardship than the exhibition of two mighty rivers flowing between deserts to waste themselves in the sea for nine months in the year, and desolating everything in their way for the remaining three? ”

“ In the settlement of Turkey, conspicuously, the Allies will be crowning a historic task, at which they themselves have laboured in former times. The liberation of the subject peoples of Turkey, and the reorganisation upon the principle of nationalities of countries under the Sultan’s murderous tyranny, began a century ago with the national struggles for independence of the Serbs and Greeks—struggles which were part of the general struggle for freedom in Europe, and which gave inspiration to the people of other subject lands. ”

“ Constantinople, since the Turks conquered it from its last Christian Emperor in 1453, has been the political capital of the Ottoman Empire. But ever since it has been a city at all, it has also been the strategical and economic key to the Black Sea, conditioning the security and dominating the economic development of all peoples bordering on the Black Sea coasts. It is the most cosmopolitan city in the world. ”

“ This jumble of efforts, half-admirable and half-absurd, will justify Turkish Nationalism if it brings about the regeneration of the Anatolian peasantry. The Anatolians have suffered as much from the Ottoman dominion as any of the races which have come under its yoke. They have paid for Ottoman Imperialism with their blood and physique; their villages have been ravaged by the syphilis of the garrison towns, and the wider the frontiers of the Empire the further from their homes the Anatolian soldiers have died—in the Yemen, in Albania, in Irak, on the snow-covered Armenian plateau. ”

“ It was to end it that the Young Turks entered the war on Germany’s side; for foreign control automatically breaks down if one Great Power, and still more if a group of two Powers, stands out of the Concert, renounces responsibility for the policy of the Turkish government towards the subject peoples and the economic highways which it holds in its power, and supports that government effectively in repudiating all claim to intervention on the part of the other Powers concerned. ”

“ The Young Turk politicians, though they have embarked on a Nationalist policy, are not so reckless as to break openly with Islam or to denounce the founder of their State. They see clearly enough that Turkish Nationalism carried to a logical extreme is incompatible with the Ottoman pretension, and they favour the view, so severely criticised by Tekin Alp, "that all three groups of ideas—Ottomanism, Islamism, and the Turkish Movement—should work side by side and together." ”

“ British diplomacy was constantly exerted on this behalf, and British belief in this policy was so sincere that half a century ago Great Britain embarked in pursuit of it on a bloody war with one of her present allies. If Great Britain is now a convinced adherent of the alternative and more drastic settlement, it is because the system of joint European control, after a century of experiment which perpetuated and aggravated the ancient tyranny, bloodshed and despair, has been made finally impossible by the present War. ”

“ Germany has an important interest in effecting and maintaining contact with the Armenian nation. We have set before ourselves the necessary and legitimate aim of spreading and enrooting German influence in Turkey, not only by military missions and the construction of railways, but also by the establishment of intellectual relations, by the work of German Kultur—in a word, by moral conquests; and we are determined, by pacific means, to reach an amicable understanding with the Turks and the other nations in the Turkish Empire. ”

“ Actually, however, the Young Turks, after they had destroyed the Missionaries’ work by exterminating the subject peoples among whom it was principally carried on, dragging away to exile, shame and death the boys and girls in their schools, torturing to death the native professors whom the Missionaries had trained up to be their colleagues, have finally confiscated the American schools, colleges and mission-stations in many parts of the Empire, and have put the harshest pressure on the Missionaries themselves to quit the country of which they are the benefactors. ”

“ There are now sixty to seventy million Turkish subjects of various states in the world, who should succeed in giving the nation an important place among the other Powers. Unfortunately, there is no connexion between the separate groups, which are distributed over great tracts of land. Their aspirations and national institutions still divide them.... Now that the Ottoman Turks have awakened from their sleep of centuries they do not only think of themselves, but hasten to save the other parts of their race who are living in slavery or ignorance.... ”

“ That is why the control of the Straits, as well as the dominion over subject peoples, must be taken from the Ottoman Turks in the reorganisation of Europe, guaranteed by a stable settlement, which is the aim of the Allies. But neutrals, rightly anxious for a peace as speedy as may be compatible with the attainment of the essential objects at stake, may ask whether either or both [26] of the objects essential to the settlement of the Turkish Empire are not attainable by less drastic measures than a redrawing of frontiers and a transference of territorial sovereignty. ”

“ I should not be fulfilling my duty as a German official and an accredited representative of German culture, if I consented to keep silence in face of the atrocities of which I was a witness, or to look on passively while the pupils entrusted to my charge were driven out into the desert to die of starvation. ”

“ It used to be a stock argument against the Jews that 'all nations' regarded them with equal hostility, but the War has brought upon the Germans such a superabundance of almost universal execration that the question which is the most despised of all nations—if one goes, not by justice and equity, but by the violence and extensiveness of the prejudice—might well now be altered to the Germans' disadvantage. ”

“ It is the Turk’s at present by right of conquest, but that right justifies his expulsion by war if it justifies his original intrusion, and on broader considerations of population, sentiments, traditions and monuments of the past, Constantinople is more truly the capital of all the Christian peoples of the East. ”

“ Only anarchy has banished cultivation; for, since the Ottoman pretension was established over the land, it has been the battleground of brigand tribes—Kurds from the hills and Arabs from the desert, skirmishing or herding their flocks, making or breaking alliance, but always robbing any tiller of the land of the fruits of his labour.
"If once," Dr. Rohrbach prophesies, "the peasant population were sure of its life and property, it would joyfully expand, push out into the desert, and bring new land under the plough; in a few years the villages would spring up, not by dozens, but by hundreds." ”

“ Only a third of the two million Armenians in Turkey have survived, and that at the price of apostatising to Islam or else of leaving all they had and fleeing across the frontier. The refugees saw their women and children die by the roadside, and apostacy too, for a woman, involved the living death of marriage to a Turk and inclusion in his harem. ”

“ For the Zionists Jewry is a nation, and to become like other nations it needs its Motherland. In the Jewish colonies in Palestine they see not merely a successful social enterprise but the visible symbol of a body politic. The foundation of a national university in Jerusalem is as ultimate a goal for them as the economic development of the land, and their greatest achievement has been the revival of Hebrew as the living language of the Palestinian Jews. ”

“ The Arabs call it the Sawâd or Black Land, and it is a striking change from the bare ledges of Arabia and Iran which enclose its flanks, and from the Northern steppe-land which it suddenly replaces—at Samarra, if you are descending the Tigris, and on the Euphrates at Hit. The steppe cannot compare with the Sawâd in fertility, but the Sawâd does not so readily yield up its wealth. To become something better than a wilderness of dust and slime it needs engineering on the grand scale and a mighty population—immense forces working for immense returns. ”

“ The cities of Turkey are as various as the climes, with the added impress of many generations of men: Adrianople, set at a junction of rivers within the circle of the Thracian downs, a fortress since its foundation, well chosen for the tombs of the Ottoman conquerors; Constantinople, capital of empires where races meet but never mix, mistress of trade routes vital to the existence of vast regions beyond her horizon—Central Europe trafficking south-eastward overland and Russia south-westward by sea ”

“ We teachers, who have been teaching Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Turks, and Jews in German schools in Turkey for years, can only pass judgment that of all our pupils the pure Turks are the most unwilling and the least talented. ”

“ The great bulk of business being done on credit, hundreds of prominent business men other than Armenians are facing bankruptcy. There will not be left in the places evacuated a single tanner, moulder, blacksmith, tailor, carpenter, clay-worker, weaver, shoemaker, jeweller, pharmacist, doctor, lawyer, or any of the professional people or tradesmen, with very few exceptions, and the country will be left in a practically helpless state."
The German memorialist presses the indictment:
"You cannot become a merchant by murdering one. You cannot master a handicraft if you smash its tools. ”

“ Germany's control over Turkey depends upon the maintenance of a corrupt minority in power—too weak and corrupt to remain in it without Germany's guarantee, and corrupt enough, when secured in it, to put it at Germany's disposal. A free hand at home in return for servitude in diplomacy and war—the deal is called "Hegemony," and is as old as Ancient Greece. By her hegemony over the Ottoman Government Germany threatens the British and Russian Empires from all the Ottoman frontiers ”

“ But the Jews, Syrians, and Armenians are equal to their task, and, with the aid of the foreign nations on whom they can count, they will certainly accomplish it. The future of Palestine, Syria, and Armenia is thus assured; but there are other countries—once as fertile, prosperous, and populous as they—which have lost not only their wealth but their inhabitants under the Ottoman domination. ”

“ There are pure-bred Arab nomads of the desert; there are Arabs who have settled in towns or on the land, some within the last generation, like the Muntefik in Mesopotamia, some a millennium or two ago, like the Meccan Koreish, but who still retain their tribal consciousness of race; there are Arabs in name who have nothing Arabic about them but their language—most of the peasantry of Syria are such, and the inhabitants of ancient centres of population like Damascus or Bagdad ”

“ If we persist in treating the massacres of Christians as an internal affair of Turkey, which is only important to us because it ensures us the Turks' friendship, then we must change the orientation of our German Kulturpolitik. ”

“ The Ottoman Empire is named after the Osmanli, but you might search long before you found one among its inhabitants. These Osmanlis are a governing class, indigenous only in Constantinople and a few neighbouring towns, but planted here and there, as officers and officials, over the Ottoman territories. They come of a clan of Turkish nomads, recruited since the thirteenth century by converts, forced or voluntary, from most of Christendom, and crossed with the blood of slave-women from all the world. They are hardly a race. ”

“ If the Turkish Nationalists had confined themselves to economic weapons, the Turks' economic ineptitude would have prevented them from doing serious harm; but by abusing the political and military powers of the Ottoman State to perpetrate the recent atrocities they have struck a mortal blow at the prosperity of Western Asia. ”

“ This artificial language is hardly a link between Osmanli officialdom and the Turkish peasantry of Anatolia, which speaks Turkish dialects derived from tribes that drifted in, some as late as the Osmanlis, some two centuries before. Nor has this Turkish-speaking peasantry much in common with the Turkish nomads who still wander over the central Anatolian steppe and have kept their blood pure; for the peasantry has reverted physically to the native stock, which held Anatolia from time immemorial and absorbs all newcomers that mingle with it on its soil. ”

“ Turkish Nationalism and the Panislamic Idea precluded a priori any equality of treatment for the various races and religions of the Empire, and any movement which looked for the salvation of the Empire in the decentralisation or autonomy of its various parts was branded as high treason. The nationalistic and centralistic tendency was directed not merely against the various non-Mohammedan nationalities —Greeks, Armenians, Syrians, and Jews—but also against the non-Turkish Mohammedan nations—Arabs, Mohammedan Syrians, Kurds, and the Shia element in the population. ”

“ The popularity of an unpopular war may temporarily be promoted among the Turkish masses by the destruction and spoliation of the non-Mohammedan elements—the Armenians most of all, but also, in part, the Syrians, Greeks, Maronites, and Jews—but thoughtful Mohammedans, when they realise the whole damage which the Empire has sustained, will lament the economic ruin of Turkey most bitterly, and will come to the conclusion that the Turkish Government has lost infinitely more than it can ever win"—it is a German writing—"by victories at the front." ”