Turkmen people

“ The absence of all glaring vices, even among the lowest ranks of the community; save indeed such as they have inherited from their more civilized allies, and appropriated with the same awkwardness as they have done their costume, speaks volumes for the Turkish people. A Turk never games, never fights, never blasphemes; is guiltless of murder; is innocent of theft; and has yet to learn that poverty is a crime, or even a reproach; or that the rich man can shut his doors against the mendicant who asks to share his meal. ”

“ Thus the life of this strange people, the Turks, goes on{108}{107} from day to day, leisurely business transacted with all dignity of inherent idleness, endless gossip under the vines and awnings of small cafés, talk which begins nowhere and arrives nowhere. Squalor, dirt, picturesque decay, and over all the sense that a migratory race has settled here for a while, is not disposed to move until turned out, and has just put up a leader or two with sufficient enterprise to make others build him a place of worship to glorify himself above his fellows. ”

“ In speaking of the Turks it is necessary to carry two distinct types in mind. The pure Tatar vagrant, true to his native indolence, which unfits him for sedentary occupation, is in the minority. The mass of the Turkish population consists of a mixed element in which the racial strain of given localities persists along with characteristics imparted by fusion with Turki conquerors. This mingling is indicated further by the spirit which moves this people in the performance of their daily tasks. Its members are recruited among the plodding, gentle-mannered and kind-hearted peasants of the land. ”

“ They do not seek to imitate blindly western nations. They do not care to be over-westernized. These Turks realize that with all its superiority over the Oriental structure, the social structure of the West is far from being perfect, and they do not propose to introduce and adopt customs which either might be incompatible with their temperaments and traditions or which have been and are strongly criticized by well-thinking people even in western countries. ”

“ By this means the Turk preserves so many different sorts of people, as he hath conquered, in due obedience, using no other help than a severe hand, joined to all kind of oppression: But such as are Turks, and bear any name of office or degree in the service of the empire, feel but part of this oppression, and live with all freedom, having their spirits raised by a licence they attain to insult over others that dare not resist them. ”

“ Future generations will profit by it. But the peasant who had had all his ideas and habits upheaved had had time to forget the oppression of the Turk, but remembered, with kindness, his slop-dawdle tolerance, This happens, I believe, in every land "freed" from the Turk. The people vaguely expect an earthly paradise where every one will do as he pleases, and find to their dismay that you can no longer evade the sheep-tax by tipping the hodja to let you put your flock on "vakuf" land. ”

“ By all means give the Turk the chance of governing himself in the provinces inhabited purely by Turks.
[Pg 31]
During the Turkish retreat from Thrace in 1913, the evidence of newspaper correspondents was that the Turk was leaving Europe in the same state—moral, material and intellectual—as he entered it four centuries ago. The fact is, that centuries of contact with civilization has made no difference to the nature of the Turk. War brings to the surface the true nature of a people as nothing else can. ”

“ Someone has said: "The greatest enemy of Turkey is the Turk." I have too much love for the Turkish people, too much sympathy for them, to adopt this pessimistic attitude without great inward opposition; but unfortunately it is only too true. We have seen how the Turkey of Enver and Talaat has reacted sharply against the Western-minded, [Pg 263] liberal era of the 1876 and 1908 constitutions, and has turned again to Asia and her newly discovered ideal, Turanism. To the Turks of to-day, European culture and civilisation are at best but a technical means; they are no longer an end in themselves. ”

“ It is a stirring history, full of ups and downs, that of the Turkish people. As we have seen, they emerged from a seething mass of nomadic humanity which infested Central{158} Asia, and threatened those Empires which had settled and acquired civilization, such as China, whence, by the way, come some of the earliest records of the Turks. These nomads had no other use for civilization than to acquire unearned riches ”

“ Thus it is between the Turks and us—the little of their affairs which the prejudices of the Mahomedans have allowed themselves to communicate, or suffered others to glean among them, has been in 18generalgeneral so misused, distorted, and misrepresented by the prejudices of the Christians, that it is not going beyond the truth to say, there exist not a people in the civilized world whose real history and genuine state are so little known as those of the Turks: and the worst of it is, that not one misrepresentation, not one single mistake has fallen on the generous, charitable side ”

“ Turkestan means 'The land of the Turks.' On the maps it is generally divided into Eastern and Western Turkestan, the former lying partly in the Chinese Empire, and the latter covering the vast plain of the Caspian and Aral seas. The population is variously estimated at from eight to twelve millions. Russia has absorbed nearly all of Western Turkestan, and the Russian officials think they have at least eight millions of people in their new possessions. ”

“ It must be remembered that the corrupt officialdom created by the Palace, which had a degrading influence on everything in touch with it, is not representative of the Turkish people. The typical Turk possesses the virtues and the failings of a conquering and dominant race. He is courageous, truthful, and honest amid races not conspicuous for truthfulness or honesty, some of which are likewise lacking in courage. The Turk, moreover, is shrewd and gifted with common sense, and he is not a visionary, as are the Arabs and some other peoples holding the Mos7lem faith. ”

“ The causes that must operate against any change are many and deep-seated. In the first place it cannot be expected that a few Turks of liberal ideas (or it may be French polished) at Constantinople, are going to change the thought and character of the nation. The characteristics of a people change very slowly, if they ever change at all, and the predominant national traits of the many-blooded modern Turk have been shown to the world to be, cruelty and fanaticism, combined with a fierce sensuality ”

“ For the fifth, the Turks are an exceedingly sensual race, by nature and education, as I have shown. The very religion that should help to make them pure, helps to make them vile. Lust leads them, and they follow; nature prompts, and their religion requires it. I am truly ashamed to tell it, but even when they go to their mosques to worship, they manifest their sensuality. Not only the relations of male and female are very rank, but between male and male they are worse; between the old Turks and young Turks, the very boys, the relations are too disgusting to describe. ”

“ When one sees how a Turkish child is brought up he begins to wonder how any Turk can help being vicious and dishonest. It is quite certain that there is no hope for the Turks so long as Turkish women [3] remain what they are, and home-training is the initiation of vice. So far as can be judged, the Turk naturally possessed some of the true elements of greatness; but it is rarely they come to bear fruit: they are choked by the pernicious social system which destroys the moral force of the women and thereafter the men of the empire. ”

“ A people of Turkish race, who, at the close of the 15th century, invaded and conquered the numerous principalities into which Turkestan was at that time divided, and have ever since maintained dominion over the country. At the present day, they are for the most part a settled people, and are scattered over both Independent and Chinese Turkestan. ”

“ It will be a long and wary struggle, and no man can prophecy the result. The Turks are a people easy to govern, were even the imperfect laws, now in existence, fairly administered. They would 'thrive and improve under a better state of things ”

“ I am just coming from my visit to Japan, where I exhorted this young nation to take its stand upon the higher ideals of humanity and never to follow the West in its acceptance of the organized selfishness of Nationalism as its religion, never to gloat upon the feebleness of its neighbours, never to be unscrupulous in its behaviour to the weak, where it can be gloriously mean with impunity, while turning its right cheek of brighter humanity for the kiss of admiration to those who have the power to deal it a blow. Some of the newspapers praised my utterances for their poetical qualities while adding with a leer that it was the poetry of a defeated people. ”

“ As a country inhabited by 18,000,000 Moslems, 5,000,000 Christians and a scattering of lesser faiths, the internal life of the Empire had been generally peaceful and not ignoble, but if its population were to be changed over into a matter of 9,000,000 Turks, 8,000,000 Arabs, 2,000,000 Greeks, 2,000,000 Kurds, 1,500,000 Armenians, etc., all of them inter-tangling into each other, the prospect of trouble was limitless, not only for the Turks themselves but for every race in the country. ”

“ In the same way, whenever a massacre of Armenians is reported from Asia Minor, every one assumes that it has been carried out "under orders" from somewhere or another, no one seems to think that there are people who might LIKE to kill their neighbours now and then. ”

“ I mention the circumstance in order to prove to those who are inclined to treat the Turks as barbarians, and to speak of them as such, that there are many among them who may be both wronged and wounded by such an opinion, and who are capable of convincing them by their actions that it is unfounded. The Turks require only time, example, and a perfect confidence in their European allies, to become a polished as well as a civilized nation; they possess all the elements of civilization, but they are flung back by events—they are blinded by subtlety—they are hoodwinked by deception. ”

“ There were Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Turcomans, Tartars and Laz in the country, a few remaining Armenians in the interior, an increasing number of Greeks between Samsun and Trebizond along the Black Sea littoral, and a handful of widely scattered Americans, mostly in the employ of the Near East Relief. The large majority of its population, however, was Turkish and most of the non-Turks were bound to the Turks by their acceptance of Islam. The country, while wholly primitive, was far more single-minded than its capital had been for a century. ”

“ The Turk, as a race, is composed of two elements, a ruling class of land-owners and military and civil officials, arrogant though courteous, corrupt though honest in private life, parasitical though self-respecting, and a peasant class, hopelessly ignorant, lacking in energy, initiative, ambition, aspirations, and ideals. The great bulk of the Turkish element in the Empire looked with the indifference of ignorance and the hostility of jealous regard for their unique position in the community upon the granting of a constitution. ”

“ With few exceptions the races interpenetrate one another to a remarkable extent and the Turk himself is numerically in the majority in comparatively few districts of Asia Minor, where the bulk of the Turkish population lives, and in scarcely any part of European Turkey. The Turks are literally overlords, a ruling class. ”

“ The beliefs appropriate to the impulse of aggression may be seen in Bernhardi, or in the early Mohammedan conquerors, or, in full perfection, in the Book of Joshua. There is first of all a conviction of the superior excellence of one's own group, a certainty that they are in some sense the chosen people. This justifies the feeling that only the good and evil of one's own group is of real importance, and that the rest of the world is to be regarded merely as material for the triumph or salvation of the higher race. In modern politics this attitude is embodied in imperialism. ”

“ There is no greater mistake than to imagine that the Arabs, who spread with such astonishing rapidity over half the civilized world, were in any real sense a united people. So far was this from being the truth, that it demanded all Mohammed's diplomatic skill, and all his marvellous personal prestige, to keep up a semblance of unity even while he was alive. The Arabs were made up of a number of hostile tribes or clans, many of whom had been engaged in deadly blood-feuds for several generations, and all of whom were moved by a spirit of tribal jealousy which was never entirely extinguished. ”

“ It is the continual and stupendous dead pressure of this inhuman upon the living human under which the modern world is groaning. Not merely the subject races, but you who live under the delusion that you are free, are every day sacrificing your freedom and humanity to this fetich of nationalism, living in the dense poisonous atmosphere of world-wide suspicion and greed and panic.
I have seen in Japan the voluntary submission of the whole people to the trimming of their minds and clipping of their freedom by their government, which through various educational agencies regulates their thoughts, manufactures their feelings, becomes suspiciously watchful when they show signs of inclining toward the spiritual, leading them through a narrow path not toward what is true but what is necessary for the complete welding of them into one uniform mass according to its own recipe. ”