THE TURK REVERTS TO THE ANCESTRAL TYPE
The withdrawal of the Allied fleet from the Dardanelles had consequences
which the world does not yet completely understand. The practical effect
of the event, as I have said, was to isolate the Turkish Empire from all
the world excepting Germany and Austria. England, France, Russia, and
Italy, which for a century had held a restraining hand over the Ottoman
Empire, had finally lost all power to influence or control. The Turks
now perceived that a series of dazzling events had changed them from
cringing dependents of the European Powers into free agents. For the
first time in two centuries they could now live their national life
according to their own inclinations, and govern their peoples according
to their own will. The first expression of this rejuvenated national
life was an episode which, so far as I know, is the most terrible in the
history of the world. New Turkey, freed from European tutelage,
celebrated its national rebirth by murdering not far from a million of
its own subjects.
I can hardly exaggerate the effect which the repulse of the Allied fleet
produced upon the Turks. They believed that they had won the really
great decisive battle of the war. For several centuries, they said, the
British fleet had victoriously sailed the seas and had now met its first
serious reverse at the hands of the Turks. In the first moments of
their pride, the Young Turk leaders saw visions of the complete
resurrection of their empire. What had for two centuries been a decaying
nation had suddenly started on a new and glorious life. In their pride
and arrogance the Turks began to look with disdain upon the people that
had taught them what they knew of modern warfare, and nothing angered
them so much as any suggestion that they owed any part of their success
to their German allies.
“Why should we feel any obligation to the Germans?” Enver would say to
me. “What have they done for us which compares with what we have done
for them? They have lent us some money and sent us a few officers, it is
true, but see what we have done! We have defeated the British
fleet--something which neither the Germans nor any other nation could
do. We have stationed armies on the Caucasian front, and so have kept
busy large bodies of Russian troops that would have been used on the
western front. Similarly we have compelled England to keep large armies
in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, and in that way we have weakened the Allied
armies in France. No, the Germans could never have achieved their
military successes without us; the shoe of obligation is entirely on
their foot.”
This conviction possessed the leaders of the Union and Progress Party
and now began to have a determining effect upon Turkish national life
and Turkish policy. Essentially the Turk is a bully and a coward; he is
brave as a lion when things are going his way, but cringing, abject, and
nerveless when reverses are overwhelming him. And now that the fortunes
of war were apparently favouring the empire, I began to see an entirely
new Turk unfolding before my eyes. The hesitating and fearful Ottoman,
feeling his way cautiously amid the mazes of European diplomacy, and
seeking opportunities to find an advantage for himself in the divided
counsels of the European powers, gave place to an upstanding, almost
dashing figure, proud and assertive, determined to live his own life and
absolutely contemptuous of his Christian foes. I was really witnessing a
remarkable development in race psychology--an almost classical instance
of reversion to type. The ragged, unkempt Turk of the twentieth century
was vanishing and in his place was appearing the Turk of the fourteenth
and the fifteenth, the Turk who had swept out of his Asiatic fastnesses,
conquered all the powerful peoples in his way, and founded in Asia,
Africa, and Europe one of the most extensive empires that history has
known. If we are properly to appreciate this new Talaat and Enver and
the events which now took place, we must understand the Turk who, under
Osman and his successors, exercised this mighty but devastating
influence in the world. We must realize that the basic fact underlying
the Turkish mentality is its utter contempt for all other races. A
fairly insane pride is the element that largely explains this strange
human species. The common term applied by the Turk to the Christian is
“dog,” and in his estimation this is no mere rhetorical figure; he
actually looks upon his European neighbours as far less worthy of
consideration than his own domestic animals. “My son,” an old Turk once
said, “do you see that herd of swine? Some are white, some are black,
some are large, some are small--they differ from each other in some
respects, but they are all swine. So it is with Christians. Be not
deceived, my son. These Christians may wear fine clothes, their women
may be very beautiful to look upon; their skins are white and splendid;
many of them are very intelligent and they build wonderful cities and
create what seem to be great states. But remember that underneath all
this dazzling exterior they are all the same--they are all swine.”
Practically all foreigners, while in the presence of a Turk, are
conscious of this attitude. The Turk may be obsequiously polite, but
there is invariably an almost unconscious feeling that he is mentally
shrinking from his Christian friend as something unclean. And this
fundamental conviction for centuries directed the Ottoman policy toward
its subject peoples. This wild horde swept from the plains of Central
Asia and, like a whirlwind, overwhelmed the nations of Mesopotamia and
Asia Minor; it conquered Egypt, Arabia, and practically all of northern
Africa and then poured into Europe, crushed the Balkan nations, occupied
a large part of Hungary, and even established the outposts of the
Ottoman Empire in the southern part of Russia. So far as I can discover,
the Ottoman Turks had only one great quality, that of military genius.
They had several military leaders of commanding ability, and the early
conquering Turks were brave, fanatical, and tenacious fighters, just as
their descendants are to-day. I think that these old Turks present the
most complete illustration in history of the brigand idea in politics.
They were lacking in what we may call the fundamentals of a civilized
community. They had no alphabet and no art of writing; no books, no
poets, no art, and no architecture; they built no cities and they
established no lasting state. They knew no law except the rule of might,
and they had practically no agriculture and no industrial organization.
They were simply wild and marauding horsemen, whose one conception of
tribal success was to pounce upon people who were more civilized than
themselves and plunder them. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
these tribes overran the cradles of modern civilization, which have
given Europe its religion and, to a large extent, its civilization. At
that time these territories were the seats of many peaceful and
prosperous nations. The Mesopotamian valley supported a large
industrious agricultural population; Bagdad was one of the largest and
most flourishing cities in existence; Constantinople had a greater
population than Rome, and the Balkan region and Asia Minor contained
several powerful states. Over all this part of the world the Turk now
swept as a huge, destructive force. Mesopotamia in a few years became a
desert; the great cities of the Near East were reduced to misery, and
the subject peoples became slaves. Such graces of civilization as the
Turk has acquired in five centuries have practically all been taken from
the subject peoples whom he so greatly despises. His religion comes from
the Arabs; his language has acquired a certain literary value by
borrowing certain Arabic and Persian elements; and his writing is
Arabic. Constantinople’s finest architectural monument, the Mosque of
St. Sophia, was originally a Christian church, and all so-called Turkish
architecture is derived from the Byzantine. The mechanism of business
and industry has always rested in the hands of the subject peoples,
Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and Arabs. The Turks have learned little of
European art or science, they have established very few educational
institutions, and illiteracy is the prevailing rule. The result is that
poverty has attained a degree of sordidness and misery in the Ottoman
Empire which is almost unparalleled elsewhere. The Turkish peasant lives
in a mud hut; he sleeps on a dirt floor; he has no chairs, no tables, no
eating utensils, no clothes except the few scant garments which cover
his back and which he usually wears for many years.
In the course of time these Turks might learn certain things from their
European and Arab neighbours, but there was one idea which they could
never even faintly grasp. They could not understand that a conquered
people were anything except slaves. When they took possession of a land,
they found it occupied by a certain number of camels, horses, buffaloes,
dogs, swine, and human beings. Of all these living things the object
that physically most resembled themselves they regarded as the least
important. It became a common saying with them that a horse or a camel
was far more valuable than a man; these animals cost money, whereas
“infidel Christians” were plentiful in the Ottoman countries and could
easily be forced to labour. It is true that the early Sultans gave the
subject peoples and the Europeans in the empire certain rights, but
these in themselves really reflected the contempt in which all
non-Moslems were held. I have already described the “Capitulations,”
under which foreigners in Turkey had their own courts, prisons,
post-offices, and other institutions. Yet the early sultans gave these
privileges not from a spirit of tolerance, but merely because they
looked upon the Christian nations as unclean and therefore unfit to
have any contact with the Ottoman administrative and judicial system.
The sultans similarly erected the several peoples, such as the Greeks
and the Armenians, into separate “millets,” or nations, not because they
desired to promote their independence and welfare, but because they
regarded them as vermin, and therefore disqualified for membership in
the Ottoman state. The attitude of the Government toward their Christian
subjects was illustrated by certain regulations which limited their
freedom of action. The buildings in which Christians lived should not be
conspicuous and their churches should have no belfry. Christians could
not ride a horse in the city, for that was the exclusive right of the
noble Moslem. The Turk had the right to test the sharpness of his sword
upon the neck of any Christian.
Imagine a great government year in and year out maintaining this
attitude toward many millions of its own subjects! And for centuries the
Turks simply lived like parasites upon these overburdened and
industrious people. They taxed them to economic extinction, stole their
most beautiful daughters and forced them into their harems, took
Christian male infants by the hundreds of thousands and brought them up
as Moslem soldiers. I have no intention of describing the terrible
vassalage and oppression that went on for five centuries; my purpose is
merely to emphasize this innate attitude of the Moslem Turk to people
not of his own race and religion--that they are not human beings with
rights, but merely chattels, which may be permitted to live when they
promote the interest of their masters, but which may be pitilessly
destroyed when they have ceased to be useful. This attitude is
intensified by a total disregard for human life and an intense delight
in inflicting physical human suffering which are not unusually the
qualities of primitive peoples.
Such were the mental characteristics of the Turk in his days of military
greatness. In recent times his attitude toward foreigners and his
subject peoples had superficially changed. His own military decline and
the ease with which the infidel nations defeated his finest armies had
apparently given the haughty descendants of Osman a respect at least for
their prowess. The rapid disappearance of his own empire in a hundred
years, the creation out of the Ottoman Empire of new states like Greece,
Serbia, Bulgaria, and Rumania, and the wonderful improvement which had
followed the destruction of the Turkish yoke in these benighted lands,
may have increased the Ottoman hatred for the unbeliever, but at least
they had a certain influence in opening his eyes to his importance. Many
Turks also now received their education in European universities; they
studied in their professional schools, and they became physicians,
surgeons, lawyers, engineers, and chemists of the modern kind. However
much the more progressive Moslems might despise their Christian
associates, they could not ignore the fact that the finest things, in
this temporal world at least, were the products of European and American
civilization. And now that one development of modern history which
seemed to be least understandable to the Turk began to force itself upon
the consciousness of the more intelligent and progressive. Certain
leaders arose who began to speak surreptitiously of such things as
“Constitutionalism,” “Liberty,” “Self-government,” and to whom the
Declaration of Independence contained certain truths that might have a
value even for Islam. These daring spirits began to dream of overturning
the autocratic Sultan and of substituting a parliamentary system for his
irresponsible rule. I have already described the rise and fall of this
Young Turk movement under such leaders as Talaat, Enver, Djemal, and
their associates in the Committee of Union and Progress. The point which
I am emphasizing here is that this movement presupposed a complete
transformation of Turkish mentality, especially in its attitude toward
subject peoples. No longer, under the reformed Turkish state, were
Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, and Jews to be regarded as “filthy giaours.”
All these peoples were henceforth to have equal rights and equal duties.
A general love feast now followed the establishment of the new régime,
and scenes of almost frenzied reconciliation, in which Turks and
Armenians embraced each other publicly, apparently signalized the
absolute union of the long antagonistic peoples. The Turkish leaders,
including Talaat and Enver, visited Christian churches and sent forth
prayers of thanksgiving for the new order, and went to Armenian
cemeteries to shed tears of retribution over the bones of the martyred
Armenians who lay there. Armenian priests reciprocally paid their
tributes to the Turks in Mohammedan mosques. Enver Pasha visited several
Armenian schools, telling the children that the old days of
Moslem-Christian strife had passed forever and that the two peoples were
now to live together as brothers and sisters. There were cynics who
smiled at all these demonstrations and yet one development encouraged
even them to believe that an earthly paradise had arrived. All through
the period of domination only the master Moslem had been permitted to
bear arms and serve in the Ottoman army. To be a soldier was an
occupation altogether too manly and glorious for the despised Christian.
But now the Young Turks encouraged all Christians to arm, and enrolled
them in the army on an equality with Moslems. These Christians fought,
both as officers and soldiers, in the Italian and the Balkan wars,
winning high praise from the Turkish generals for their valour and
skill. Armenian leaders had figured conspicuously in the Young Turk
movement; these men apparently believed that a constitutional Turkey was
possible. They were conscious of their own intellectual and industrial
superiority to the Turks, and knew that they could prosper in the
Ottoman Empire if left alone, whereas, under European control, they
would have greater difficulty in meeting the competition of the more
rigorous European colonists who might come in. With the deposition of
the Red Sultan, Abdul Hamid, and the establishment of a constitutional
system, the Armenians now for the first time in several centuries felt
themselves to be free men.
But, as I have already described, all these aspirations vanished like a
dream. Long before the European War began, the Turkish democracy had
disappeared. The power of the new Sultan had gone, and the hopes of
regenerating Turkey on modern lines had gone also, leaving only a group
of individuals, headed by Talaat and Enver, actually in possession of
the state. Having lost their democratic aspirations these men now
supplanted them with a new national conception. In place of a democratic
constitutional state they resurrected the idea of Pan-Turkism; in place
of equal treatment of all Ottomans, they decided to establish a country
exclusively for Turks. I have called this a new conception; yet it was
new only to the individuals who then controlled the destiny of the
empire, for, in reality, it was simply an attempt to revive the most
barbaric ideas of their ancestors. It represented, as I have said,
merely an atavistic reversion to the original Turk. We now saw that the
Turkish leaders, in talking about liberty, equality, fraternity, and
constitutionalism, were merely children repeating phrases; that they had
used the word “democracy” merely as a ladder by which to climb to power.
After five hundred years’ close contact with European civilization, the
Turk remained precisely the same individual as the one who had emerged
from the steppes of Asia in the Middle Ages. He was clinging just as
tenaciously as his ancestors to that conception of a state as consisting
of a few master individuals whose right it is to enslave and plunder and
maltreat any peoples whom they can subject to their military control.
Though Talaat and Enver and Djemal all came of the humblest families,
the same fundamental ideas of master and slave possessed them that
formed the statecraft of Osman and the early Sultans. We now discovered
that a paper constitution and even tearful visits to Christian churches
and cemeteries could not uproot the inborn preconception of this nomadic
tribe that there are only two kinds of people in the world--the
conquering and the conquered.
When the Turkish Government abrogated the Capitulations, and in this way
freed themselves from the domination of the foreign powers, they were
merely taking one step toward realizing this Pan-Turkish ideal. I have
alluded to the difficulties which I had with them over the Christian
schools. Their determination to uproot these, or at least to transform
them into Turkish institutions, was merely another detail in the same
racial progress. Similarly, they attempted to make all foreign business
houses employ only Turkish labour, insisting that they should discharge
their Greek, Armenian, and Jewish clerks, stenographers, workmen, and
other employees. They ordered all foreign houses to keep their books in
Turkish; they wanted to furnish employment for Turks, and enable them to
acquire modern business methods. The Ottoman Government even refused to
have any dealings with the representative of the largest Austrian
munition maker unless he admitted a Turk as a partner. They developed a
mania for suppressing all languages except Turkish. For decades French
had been the accepted language of foreigners in Constantinople; most
street signs were printed in both French and Turkish. One morning the
astonished foreign residents discovered that all these French signs had
been removed and that the names of streets, the directions on street
cars, and other public notices, appeared only in those strange Turkish
characters, which very few of them understood. Great confusion resulted
from this change, but the ruling powers refused to restore the detested
foreign language.
These leaders not only reverted to the barbaric conceptions of their
ancestors, but they went to extremes that had never entered the minds of
the early sultans. Their fifteenth and sixteenth century predecessors
treated the subject peoples as dirt under their feet, yet they believed
that they had a certain usefulness and did not disdain to make them
their slaves. But this Committee of Union and Progress, led by Talaat
and Enver, now decided to do away with them altogether. The old
conquering Turks had made the Christians their servants, but their
parvenu descendants bettered their instruction, for they determined to
exterminate them wholesale and Turkify the empire by massacring the
non-Moslem elements. Originally this was not the statesmanlike
conception of Talaat and Enver; the man who first devised it was one of
the greatest monsters known to history, the “Red Sultan,” Abdul Hamid.
This man came to the throne in 1876, at a critical period in Turkish
history. In the first two years of his reign, he lost Bulgaria as well
as important provinces in the Caucasus, his last remaining vestiges of
sovereignty in Montenegro, Serbia, and Rumania, and all his real powers
in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Greece had long since become an independent
nation, and the processes that were to wrench Egypt from the Ottoman
Empire had already begun. As the Sultan took stock of his inheritance,
he could easily foresee the day when all the rest of his domain would
pass into the hand of the infidel. What had caused this disintegration
of this extensive Turkish Empire? The real cause, of course, lay deep in
the character of the Turk, but Abdul Hamid saw only the more obvious
fact that the intervention of the great European Powers had brought
relief to these imprisoned nations. Of all the new kingdoms which had
been carved out of the Sultan’s dominions, Serbia--let us remember this
fact to her everlasting honour--is the only one that has won her own
independence. Russia, France, and Great Britain have set free all the
rest. And what had happened several times before might happen again.
There still remained one compact race in the Ottoman Empire that had
national aspirations and national potentialities. In the northeastern
part of Asia Minor, bordering on Russia, there were six provinces in
which the Armenians formed the largest element in the population. From
the time of Herodotus this portion of Asia has borne the name of
Armenia. The Armenians of the present day are the direct descendants of
the people who inhabited the country three thousand years ago. Their
origin is so ancient that it is lost in fable and mystery. There are
still undeciphered cuneiform inscriptions on the rocky hills of Van, the
largest Armenian city, that have led certain scholars--though not many,
I must admit--to identify the Armenian race with the Hittites of the
Bible. What is definitely known about the Armenians, however, is that
for ages they have constituted the most civilized and most industrious
race in the eastern section of the Ottoman Empire. From their mountains
they have spread over the Sultan’s dominions, and form a considerable
element in the population of all the large cities. Everywhere they are
known for their industry, their intelligence, and their decent and
orderly lives. They are so superior to the Turks intellectually and
morally that much of the business and industry had passed into their
hands. With the Greeks, the Armenians constitute the economic strength
of the empire. These people became Christians in the fourth century and
established the Armenian Church as their state religion. This is said to
be the oldest Christian Church in existence.
In face of persecutions which have had no parallel elsewhere these
people have clung to their early Christian faith with the utmost
tenacity. For fifteen hundred years they have lived there in Armenia, a
little island of Christians surrounded by backward peoples of hostile
religion and hostile race. Their long existence has been one unending
martyrdom. The territory which they inhabit forms the connecting link
between Europe and Asia, and all the Asiatic invasions--Saracens,
Tartars, Mongols, Kurds, and Turks--have passed over their peaceful
country. For centuries they have thus been the Belgium of the East.
Through all this period the Armenians have regarded themselves not as
Asiatics, but as Europeans. They speak an Indo-European language, their
racial origin is believed by scholars to be Aryan, and the fact that
their religion is the religion of Europe has always made them turn their
eyes westward. And out of that western country, they have always hoped,
would some day come the deliverance that would rescue them from their
murderous masters. And now, as Abdul Hamid, in 1876, surveyed his
shattered domain, he saw that its most dangerous spot was Armenia. He
believed, rightly or wrongly, that these Armenians, like the Rumanians,
the Bulgarians, the Greeks, and the Serbians, aspired to restore their
independent medieval nation, and he knew that Europe and America
sympathized with this ambition. The Treaty of Berlin, which had
definitely ended the Turco-Russian War, contained an article which gave
the European Powers a protecting hand over the Armenians. How could the
Sultan free himself permanently from this danger? An enlightened
administration, which would have transformed the Armenians into free men
and made them safe in their lives and property and civil and religious
rights, would probably have made them peaceful and loyal subjects. But
the Sultan could not rise to such a conception of statesmanship as this.
Instead, Abdul Hamid apparently thought that there was only one way of
ridding Turkey of the Armenian problem--and that was to rid her of the
Armenians. The physical destruction of 2,000,000 men, women, and
children by massacres, organized and directed by the state, seemed to be
the one sure way of forestalling the further disruption of the Turkish
Empire.
And now for nearly thirty years Turkey gave the world an illustration of
government by massacre. We in Europe and America heard of these events
when they reached especially monstrous proportions, as they did in
1895-96, when nearly 200,000 Armenians were most atrociously done to
death. But through all these years the existence of the Armenians was
one continuous nightmare. Their property was stolen, their men were
murdered, their women were ravished, their young girls were kidnapped
and forced to live in Turkish harems. Yet Abdul Hamid was not able to
accomplish his full purpose. Had he had his will, he would have
massacred the whole nation in one hideous orgy. He attempted to
exterminate the Armenians in 1895 and 1896, but found certain
insuperable obstructions to his scheme. Chief of these were England,
France, and Russia. These atrocities called Gladstone, then eighty-six
years old, from his retirement, and his speeches, in which he denounced
the Sultan as “the great assassin,” aroused the whole world to the
enormities that were taking place. It became apparent that unless the
Sultan desisted, England, France, and Russia would intervene, and the
Sultan well knew, that, in case this intervention took place, such
remnants of Turkey as had survived earlier partitions would disappear.
Thus Abdul Hamid had to abandon his satanic enterprise of destroying a
whole race by murder, yet Armenia continued to suffer the slow agony of
pitiless persecution. Up to the outbreak of the European War not a day
had passed in the Armenian vilayets without its outrages and its
murders. The Young Turk régime, despite its promises of universal
brotherhood, brought no respite to the Armenians. A few months after the
love feastings already described, one of the worst massacres took place
at Adana, in which 35,000 people were destroyed.
And now the Young Turks, who had adopted so many of Abdul Hamid’s ideas,
also made his Armenian policy their own. Their passion for Turkifying
the nation seemed to demand logically the extermination of all
Christians--Greeks, Syrians, and Armenians. Much as they admired the
Mohammedan conquerors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they
stupidly believed that these great warriors had made one fatal mistake,
for they had had it in their power completely to obliterate the
Christian populations and had neglected to do so. This policy in their
opinion was a fatal error of statesmanship and explained all the woes
from which Turkey has suffered in modern times. Had these old Moslem
chieftains, when they conquered Bulgaria, put all the Bulgarians to the
sword, and peopled the Bulgarian country with Moslem Turks, there would
never have been any modern Bulgarian problem and Turkey would never have
lost this part of her empire. Similarly, had they destroyed all the
Rumanians, Serbians, and Greeks, the provinces which are now occupied
by these races would still have remained integral parts of the Sultan’s
domain. They felt that the mistake had been a terrible one, but that
something might be saved from the ruin. They would destroy all Greeks,
Syrians, Armenians, and other Christians, move Moslem families into
their homes and into their farms, and so make sure that these
territories would not similarly be taken away from Turkey. In order to
accomplish this great reform, it would not be necessary to murder every
living Christian. The most beautiful and healthy Armenian girls could be
taken, converted forcibly to Mohammedanism, and made the wives or
concubines of devout followers of the Prophet. Their children would then
automatically become Moslems and so strengthen the empire, as the
Janissaries had strengthened it formerly. These Armenian girls represent
a high type of womanhood and the Young Turks, in their crude, intuitive
way, recognized that the mingling of their blood with the Turkish
population would exert a eugenic influence upon the whole. Armenian boys
of tender years could be taken into Turkish families and be brought up
in ignorance of the fact that they were anything but Moslems. These were
about the only elements, however, that could make any valuable
contributions to the new Turkey which was now being planned. Since all
precautions must be taken against the development of a new generation of
Armenians, it would be necessary to kill outright all men who were in
their prime and thus capable of propagating the accursed species. Old
men and women formed no great danger to the future of Turkey, for they
had already fulfilled their natural function of leaving descendants;
still they were nuisances and therefore should be disposed of.
Unlike Abdul Hamid, the Young Turks found themselves in a position where
they could carry out this holy enterprise. Great Britain, France, and
Russia had stood in the way of their predecessor. But now these
obstacles had been removed. The Young Turks, as I have said, believed
that they had defeated these nations and that they could therefore no
longer interfere with their internal affairs. Only one power could
successfully raise objections and that was Germany. In 1898, when all
the rest of Europe was ringing with Gladstone’s denunciations and
demanding intervention, Kaiser Wilhelm the Second had gone to
Constantinople, visited Abdul Hamid, pinned his finest decorations on
that bloody tyrant’s breast, and kissed him on both cheeks. The same
Kaiser who had done this in 1898 was still sitting on the throne in
1915, and was now Turkey’s ally. Thus for the first time in two
centuries the Turks, in 1915, had their Christian populations utterly at
their mercy. The time had finally come to make Turkey exclusively the
country of the Turks.