汉萨同盟

“ The success of any native insurrectionary movement in Trans-Caspia would depend, therefore, upon the precise amount of support that it received from any disaffected sections of the Caucasian establishment that might be incorporated with the Russo-European army on service in the Khanates. No doubt the wide area covered by the rebellion in the Caucasus will encourage the Caucasian element in the Trans-Caspian army to be troublesome; and, since the Caucasian races in a measure are akin with the Central Asian peoples, mutual sympathy may give rise to positive revolt in Central Asia. ”

“ It should be noted that in the fourth demand we wish the English to give up their mandate of Mesopotamia and Palestine and remove their influence from the Hedjaz. As to the question whether the Arabs will acknowledge the Sheriff of Mecca or the Sultan of Turkey as their Khilafat, or whether the Arab Government of Hedjaz, Mesopotamia and Palestine will be independant or under the suzerainty of the Khilafat, they will be decided by the Musalmans. We do not want non-Muslim advice and assistance. ”

“ Sooner or later, their own people will become the victims of this plague. With the reckless sacrifice of the blood of the Soviet slaves, the fighting in eastern Europe still goes on, moving up and down the front, only to come finally to a halt. In East Asia, however, it has just begun. While the two blasphemers pray for their deals, the nations are shaking off their shackles.
The coming year will make great demands on us, but the front and the homeland will meet all requirements! As a National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft, the homeland will make every sacrifice. ”

“ Whatever may happen in the future, she has gained imperishable glory in the past by her victories of peace along the desolated frontier of Khorassan; but here the register of her good deeds must end. To suppose that she launched her forces across the Caspian in 1869 and engaged in Central Asian warfare with a view to these beneficent results, is to ignore the whole spirit and character of her policy. ”

“ What was to be the outcome of this Hunan dissension any one who knew the Hunanese would not be inclined to say offhand, but the fact that there has always been some little contempt mutually between the Hupehese and the Hunanese probably magnified the dissension in the military that occurred. One of the first arts of warfare is to cut off the pursuers. Now, when the Hunan men were in the city of Hanyang the Friday previous there was a little teashop squabble between a couple of dozen men, the Hupeh men being accused of flinching the hard graft of the front line. ”

“ The non-Arabic-speaking elements in this area do not, I believe, exceed one per cent, of the whole.
The aim of the Arab nationalist movements (of which my father became the leader in war after combined appeals from the Syrian and Mesopotamian branches) is to unite the Arabs eventually into one nation. As an old member of the Syrian Committee I commanded the Syrian revolt, and had under me Syrians, Mesopotamians, and Arabians.
We believe that our ideal of Arab unity in Asia is justified beyond need of argument. ”

“ The Pan-Islamists want the alliance of these Russian parts as well, but from another point of view, and, above all, they aim at the expansion of Ottoman rule to the farthest corners of Africa and South-West Asia, to the borders of negro territory, and through Persia, Afghanistan, and Baluchistan to the foot of the Himalayas, while on grounds of practical politics they strive to abolish the old, seemingly insurmountable antithesis between Sonnites and Shiites within the sanctuary of Islam. ”

“ The military position of Russia in Central Asia, therefore, is that of a great but distant Power, which during the last fifty years has overrun and taken possession of extended territories belonging to fanatical Mahomedan tribes. The people themselves are, many of them, warlike and hostile; but they are badly armed, have no discipline, training, or leaders, and are not therefore in a position to withstand the advance of regular troops. ”

“ Without for a moment wishing to absolve the German Government of its responsibility, before God and humanity, for not exerting its influence to save more than a million absolutely innocent human beings from death, slow torture, and slavery: the fact, nevertheless, remains that Hulagu, Sultan Selim, Bayazid and Abdul Hamid were not under German influence, that there were no Germans at the sack of Constantinople or the massacres of Bagdad and Sivas, or, in more recent times, at the butcheries of Chios, Greece, Crete, Batak, Macedonia, Sassoon, Urfa, or Adana. ”

“ At the same time, we must strike a balance between our need for allies in the region and our commitment to advancing the cause of freedom and human rights. In Central Asia, for example, I support our efforts to work closely with Uzbekistan and appreciate that the fact that we have received permission from that nation to use its military bases. ”

“ Even if Austria-Hungary wished to make a separate peace, she could not do so, for all her motive power, diplomatic and military, is exclusively controlled by the Kaiser’s agents. The [58] Austro-German alliance is merely a piece of stage scenery. The much-talked of device of smuggling the Hapsburg Empire into Germany by a back door, that is, by her entrance into the Zollverein or Customs Union, is a broad farce. It can merely deceive those, alas still too numerous, who are insufficiently informed of the true facts in Austria-Hungary. ”

“ The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvellous potency. If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence. The sanctuaries of Christendom would be safeguarded by assigning to them an extra-territorial status such as is well-known to the law of nations. ”

“ As we have done in other regions of importance to the United States, we must expand our efforts to promote pluralism, tolerance, and openness in Central Asia. The people of these nations deserve a political avenue to express their opinions and grievances. Extremist Islam must not be the only outlet for Uzbeks, Turkmen, Tajiks, and other Central Asians as it unfortunately has become for so many other people in the region. ”

“ Husein's difficulty was to get his own people to rise together and throw off the Turkish yoke, for the Hejazi tribesman, especially between the coast and Mecca, has long been more of a brigand than a warrior, as any pilgrim will tell you. Such folk are apt to jib at hammer-and-tongs fighting, and of course we could not land troops to assist them, as it would have violated the sacred soil that cradled Islam and merely stiffened the bogus jihad which the Turks had proclaimed against us, besides compromising the Sharif with his own tribesmen. ”

“ Everyone is allowed to enter Lha-Ssa; everyone can go and come, and engage in commerce and industrial pursuits without the least restraint. If entrance into Thibet is forbidden to the Chinese, this prohibition must be attributed to the government of Peking, which, to show its complete adherence to its narrow and suspicious policy, forbids its subjects to penetrate among other nations. It is probable that the English would not be excluded more than any other nation, had not their invasive march into Hindostan inspired the Talé-Lama with a natural terror. ”

“ It is an alliance, against a common foe, of traditional enemies who, once the bond was loosed [Pg 85] in victory, would inevitably quarrel among themselves. Turk would fly at Arab and Turkoman at Persian, as of yore, while India would become a welter of contending Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs, Gurkhas, and heaven knows what, until perchance disciplined anew by the pressure of a Yellow Peril. In Western Asia it is possible that the spiritual and cultural bonds of Islam might temper these struggles, but Western Asia is precisely that part of the brown world where population-pressure is absent. ”

“ It was only at last when the Tibetans, having broken the treaty, having declined to have any communication with us, yet sent Envoys to the Russians, that we took high action, and despatched a mission with an escort into Tibet. If we had shown no inclination to hold the Tibetans and Chinese to their engagements, others might well think that they also would not be held to theirs, and our authority and influence would slacken in proportion as this impression got abroad. No Government can conduct the affairs of contiguous States if it allows a treaty to be broken with impunity. ”

“ Here we may feel what the Children of Israel were, the Egyptians, the Syrians, [45] the Persians, the Turks, the Russians. We see the destiny of Rome, the destiny of the Church of Christ, of Christianity, of barbarism.
Not that there are many pure or clear types of historical races in Central Asia to-day. The land has been a running ground for fierce tribes coming out of China and Manchuria, coming from the mysterious and vague regions of the Pamir and Thibet. The Kirghiz to-day exhibit every shade of difference between the Mongol and the Turk. ”

“ Chinese suspicion, moreover, as to the projects of Great Britain as a Mohammedan Power, already aroused by the procedure of the Sladen Mission in 1868, had received confirmation in the interim in the shape of a convention contracted with another Mohammedan rebel, on another troublous frontier of the flowery kingdom, the Athalik Ghazi Khan, Yakub Beg, who was playing at empire on his own in the dim distance of Chinese Turkestan. ”

“ After two thousand years of untold misery and suffering, the Jewish people cannot possibly be content with attaining at last to the position of a small and insignificant nation, with a State tossed about like a ball between its powerful neighbours, and maintaining its existence only by diplomatic shifts and continual truckling to the favoured of fortune. ”

“ Just as the Hun assault could not be beaten back by pious wishes or fair warnings, just as the invasion of our country from the southeast in the course of centuries was not warded off by diplomatic tricks, and the Mongolian onslaught did not spare old monuments of culture, this danger also will not be overcome by right in itself but only by strength supporting this right. ”

“ The progress of Islam in Central Asia coincided with the advance to the west and south of vigorous tribes known as Turks or Mongols, and by giving them a religious and legal discipline admirably suited to their stage of civilization, it greatly increased their political efficiency. The Moslim invaders of India started from principalities founded by these tribes near the north-western frontier with a military population of mixed blood and a veneer of Perso-Arabic civilization, and apart from the greater invasions, there were incursions and settlements of Turkis, Afghans and Mongols. ”

“ It is the firm intention of the Chinese Government to maintain its territorial integrity basing its case on historical records, on treaty rights and finally on the principle of nationality. It is notorious that the Mongols will be extremely unwilling to see Uriankhai incorporated into the Russian Empire. While Russia is spending countless lives and incalculable treasure in fighting for the sacred principle of nationality in Europe, we cannot believe that the will deliberately violate the same principle in Asia. ”

“ It is, on the contrary, the duty of every nation, as of the individual human being, to live and to develop to the utmost extent of its powers; but at the same time it must recognise the right of other nations to fulfil the like duty without let or hindrance, and “patriotism”—that is, national egoism—must not induce it to disregard justice, and to fulfil itself through the destruction of other nations. [173] Hence 244Judaism was able thousands of years ago to rise to the lofty ideal expressed in the words, “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation.” ”

“ In all civilized countries envoys who have to negotiate a treaty go straight to the capital, and how it could ever have been expected that in Tibet, where all power was concentrated in a supposed god, who relied upon the support of Russia in any difficulties, we should have been able to negotiate a treaty at anywhere short of Lhasa, it is hard now to realize. ”

“ Formerly we made a National Convention that none was to enter the country. So now, even if the Sahibs should come to Lhasa and meet the Dalai Lama, this will not advantage the cause of friendship. Should a fresh cause of dispute arise, we greatly fear that a disturbance, contrary to the interests of friendship, may follow. So we beg of the Sahibs both now and in the future to give the matter their earnest consideration, and if they will negotiate with the delegates who are now here all will be well. ”

“ The Chinese conquest of Jungaria and Eastern Turkestan having become an accomplished fact, what did the new rulers do to justify their forcible interference in Central Asia? What measures did they adopt to conciliate the subject peoples, and what to increase the prosperity of a vast region, naturally fertile, but impoverished by centuries of improvident government and of civil anarchy and war? ”

“ Indeed, it is China alone that has a grievance—against Russia for the occupation of the Alichur Pamir—against Afghanistan for expelling her troops from Somatash (of subsequent Yanoff fame) —and against England for encroaching on her ancient feudatory of Hunza, whose services in suppressing the Khoja rebellion in 1847 are commemorated in a tablet on one of the gates of Yarkand.
H. H. Mihtar Nizam-ul-Mulk and his late Yasin Council. ”