The Turks are not the ferocious fanatics that our respect for the
commandment against bearing false witness does not forbid us to
affirm. They are a good-natured, rather indolent people, among whom
all races and religions find security in good behavior, and, in so far
as differences of social and religious customs will allow, fraternity.
They are a trifle corrupt, but from neither an American legislator nor
his constituents is censure of political profligacy in other lands
than ours an edifying utterance. In Mohammedan countries even slavery
is a light affliction. As to “savagery,” “butchery” and the rest of
it, let the ten thousand Americans murdered with impunity by their own
countrymen last year open their white lips and testify. And let the ten
thousand who are to be murdered this year reserve judgment on the right
of the American character to mount the pulpit and deal damnation round
on heads that wear the fez.
Like the Bulgarian “massacres” of a few years ago, which so pained
the blameless soul of Christendom and drew from holy Mr. Gladstone
that Christianly charitable term, “the unspeakable Turk,” the Armenian
“massacres” are mostly moonshine—as massacres. It should never be
forgotten that our accounts of these deplorable events come almost
altogether from Christian missionaries—narrow, bigoted zealots,
who doubtless stand well in the other world, but in this world are
untrustworthy historians of the troubles which their impenitent
meddlesomeness incites. They are swift and willing witnesses, and their
interest lies in the direction of exaggeration. Not much of moderation
and disinterestedness can under any circumstances be expected of
persons who make it the business of their lives to go abroad to
crack theological nuts upon the heads of others and eat the kernels
themselves. A man of sane heart and right reason will no more interfere
with the spiritual affairs of others than with their temporal. This
much any one may know who has the sense to learn: that the troubles in
Armenia are not religious persecutions, but political disturbances,
and that next to Mohammedan Kurds the most incorrigible scamps in Asia
are Armenian Christians.
Among military men the superior character of Turkish soldiers is a
familiar consideration. The war minister or general who should order
or conduct a campaign against them without conceding to their terrible
fighting qualities a particular attention in reckoning the chances
of success would show a lamentable ignorance of his business. For
that veritable folly the Greeks recently paid through the nose. With
a childish trust in an enthusiasm that hardly outlasted the smoke of
the first gun, they threw their undisciplined crowds against superior
numbers of these formidable fighters in a quarrel in which their only
hope of national existence if beaten lay in the magnanimity of the
Powers whose protection they disclaimed. It is by the sufferance and
grace of these Powers that the name of Greece remains on the map of
Europe.
All this sentiment about the debt that civilization owes to Greece is
foolish: the Greece to which civilization is indebted for its glorious
heritage of art, philosophy and literature is dead these many ages—a
memory and a name. The debtor is without a creditor, the claimant
without a claim. Greece would herself be justly liable for her share
of the debt if there were anybody to whom to pay it. As to the claims
of “our common religion” (that is, the right to our assistance in
violating our common religion’s fundamental and most precious precepts)
it should be sufficient to say that if the modern Greek is a Christian
Christ was not. If Christ were among the Athenians to-day they would
part his raiment among them before crucifixion and cast lots for his
vesture with loaded dice.
From the first the cause of the Greeks was hopeless. They were a feeble
nation making unjust war against a strong one. They were a merely
warlike people attacking a military people—the worst soldiers in
Europe, without commanders, challenging the best soldiers in the world
led by two able strategists. Without resources, without credit, without
allies, and relying upon miracles, they flung themselves upon an enemy
favored by united Europe. It was the act not of heroes, but of madmen.
Had they been content to accept the autonomy of Crete their action in
occupying that island would have commanded at least the respect of
every poker-player in the world. Demanding all, they naturally got
nothing. True, they had the moral support of that part of Christendom
addicted to the flourish of tongues, and were particularly rich in
resolutions of American sympathy, some of them beautifully engrossed on
parchment.
One of the most amusing rascalities of that war was the attempt
to invest it with a religious character. This smug villainy was
especially manifest in the “resolutions” and the telegrams of press
correspondents, from whom we heard very little about the Turks and the
Greeks, but a great deal about the “Moslems” and the “Christians.” Even
the soldierly superiority of the Turks in valor and discipline was
perverted to their disparagement. We were told of their “mad, fanatical
charges,” which by way of variety were called also “irresistible rushes
of crazy zealots”; and one splendorous historiographer described
the victorious battalions as “drunken with Armenian blood”! How to
distinguish between an assault that is fanatical and one that is merely
courageous—that is a secret that neither the saintly scribe nor the
sober Greek lingered to learn. In a general way the gallant charge is
made by troops of our own race and religion, the fanatical rush by
those of another and inferior faith.
Hardly less brilliant were the accounts of “Moslem” cruelty,
particularly to prisoners, under whom their captors kindled
discomforting fires—a needless labor, for it would have been greatly
easier to make the fire on unoccupied ground and superpose the prisoner
afterward. The customary rites of parting the heads of women and
eviscerating babes were not neglected: all the requirements of invasion
received careful attention—as they did in Cuba, as they once did in
France, as they previously did in the Southern States of our Union, and
before that in the revolted colonies of Great Britain. Edhem Pasha was
a strict constructionist of the popular law; as a conscientious invader
operating among an inhospitable populace, he thoughtfully gave himself
the trouble to be a “butcher”—as Cornwallis was in the Colonies, as
Grant was in the South, as Von Moltke was in France, and as Weyler
was in Cuba. If it were not for picturesque narratives of tortured
prisoners, multisected women, children ingeniously bayoneted and old
men fearfully and wonderfully defaced by the hand of an artist, the
literature of conquest would lack the salt that keeps it sweet in the
memory and the spice that gives it glow.
Of course it is all nonsense: cruelties are not practiced in modern
wars between civilized nations. (It is true that the Turks, or some of
them, are so uncivilized as to have a number of Turkesses each, but
that is not visibly bad for them, and appears to be condemned on the
ground that it is somehow bad for us.) Indubitably Turkey’s doom as a
European Power was long ago pronounced in the Russian language, but
she dies with a dignity befitting her glorious history. Foot to foot
and sword to sword she struggles with the hosts assailing her, now on
this side, and now on that. Against attack by her powerful neighbors
and insurrection of her heterogeneous provinces, she has manifested a
courage, a vitality, a fertility of resource, a continuity and tenacity
of purpose which in a Christian nation would command our respect and
engage our enthusiasm. Unfortunately for them, her people worship God
in a way that is different from our way, and with a sincerity which
in us would be zeal if we had it, but which in them is fanaticism.
Therefore they are hateful. Therefore they are unspeakable. Therefore
we lie about them and, because of the respectability of the witnesses,
believe our own lies. Truth is not in us, nor the sense of its need;
charity nor the memory of its primacy among virtues.
1897.