THE MAKING OF MUSTAPHA KHEMAL
The building up of Mustapha Khemal by certain Christian countries was one
of the unwisest, most pernicious and most dangerous deeds that Occidental
diplomacy, intrigue and jealousy has ever perpetrated. It is a legend
among Mohammedan peoples that the Turk is the “Sword of Allah,” “the
Defender of Islam,” and “the Scourge of the Unbeliever.” As he is the
lowest of Mohammedans intellectually, with none, or at best few, of the
graces and accomplishments of civilization, with no cultural history, the
other disciples of the Prophet do not consider him as their intellectual
or moral equal.
In only one particular has he always kept abreast of the age, and that
is in the art of war. He is perhaps the only example of a great and
scientifically warlike nation that is great in nothing else. He destroys
but can not construct. Even the other Mohammedans who have been subjected
to his rude and blighting sway, have continually fought to be freed from
it, and have only joined him in common cause against the Christians.
Of him, the historian Butler says:
“The Goth might ravage Italy, but the Goth came forth
purified from the flame which he himself had kindled. The
Saxon swept Britain, but the music of his Celtic heart
softened his rough nature. Visigoth and Frank, Heruli and
Vandal, blotted out their ferocity in the very light of the
civilization they had striven to extinguish. Even the wildest
Tartar from the Scythian waste was touched and softened in
his wicker encampments, but the Turk, wherever his scimitar
reached—degraded, defiled and defamed, blasting with eternal
decay Roman, Latin civilization, until when all had gone he sat
down satisfied with savagery to doze into hopeless decrepitude.”
But Mohammedans do not forget that it was the Turk who took the great and
splendid city of Constantinople, the last bulwark of Europe against the
devastating and enslaving hordes of Asia; that it was the Turk who firmly
established himself in Europe on the field of Cossova; that it was the
Turk who destroyed the flower of the Hungarian chivalry—twenty thousand
together with their king—on the stricken field of Mohacz in 1526, and
three years later arrived at the gates of Vienna, which he besieged; that
a little over a hundred years later a Turkish horde again stormed the
Austrian capital, which only the timely arrival of a Polish army saved.
At the close of the Great War the Turk was beaten to his feet and his
prestige ruined. “The Sword of Islam” had been broken. The victory over
the Greeks, though with the aid of European officers and material,
and the spectacular destruction of Smyrna with the massacre of its
inhabitants, revived the legend of the conquering and avenging Turk. “The
Sword of Islam” had been welded again, to conquer and destroy. The noise
of that event resounded and is still echoing throughout the Moslem World,
in Egypt, in India, in Northern Africa and in Syria.
And more than that, the rise of Mustapha Khemal, creature of divided
Christendom, of the mutually jealous and internecine Occident, has given
new courage to all the yellow and black and brown peoples whom Kipling
describes as “the White Man’s Burden,” who while they may cut one
another’s throats over the question of Mohammed or Confucius or Buddha,
are united in their hatred of the white man.
The ferment in the East is the bubbling up of a deeper feeling than
the careless or unobservant thinker wots of: It is the revelation of a
profound and fundamental antipathy. The East is tired of being civilized
by superior peoples; of being educated and converted; of being shoved off
the sidewalks; of being called “Eurasians” and having their daughters
ostracized if they marry whites; of having their children excluded from
white schools; of being discriminated against in immigration laws.
One can not say that the West is entirely wrong in attempting to maintain
its prestige and its Occidental civilization, but he can safely affirm
that the hatred that has been steadily growing in the Orient is deep and
implacable, and that the result will be murders, uprisings, little wars,
big wars. The maker of this statement may be set down as an alarmist.
So is the man who sticks up the sign at the railway crossing, “Stop!
Look! Listen!” The dissension in the Western World that made it possible
for the Turks to make a clean sweep of Christian civilization in the
Ottoman Empire, to burn Smyrna and massacre its inhabitants in sight of
a powerful fleet of European and American war vessels, has added unknown
weight to the “White Man’s Burden.”
That a mutual hatred of the West is bringing together peoples hitherto
antagonistic and of different creeds is confirmed by Lothrop Stoddard in
his book, _The New World of Islam_, quoting the writer, R. Vambery, the
authority on Moslem affairs:
“The change in Moslem sentiment can be guaged by the numerous
appeals made by the Indian Mohammedans at this time to
Hindus, as may be seen from the following sample, entitled
significantly, ‘The Message of the East’:
“‘Spirit of the East,’ reads this noteworthy document, ‘arise
and repel the swelling flood of Western aggression! Children of
Hindustan, aid us with your wisdom, culture and wealth; lend
us your power, the birthright and heritage of the Hindu! Let
the Spirit Powers hidden in the Himalayan mountain peaks arise!
Let prayers to the God of Battles float upward; prayers that
right may triumph over might; and call to your myriad gods to
annihilate the armies of the foe!’”
Let the reader compare this appeal of Mohammedan to Hindu with the
spirit of the article from the _Progres de Salonique_ of July 22, 1910,
quoted in an early chapter of this book, in which Turkish Mohammedans
and Japanese Buddhists, etc., are conceived as having common cause
against Western civilization. That Oriental peoples believe that their
opportunity will come from the dissensions and wars of Western nations,
which they are watching with much interest and satisfaction, was
expressed as early as 1907 by Yahya Siddyk, an Egyptian judge and writer
of Mohammedan faith, who seems to have foreseen the Great War:
“Behold these Powers ruining themselves in terrifying
armaments; measuring each other’s strength with defiant
glances; menacing each other; contracting alliances which
continually break and presage those terrible shocks which
overturn the world and cover it with ruins, fire and blood!”