Germany -- Foreign relations -- Turkey; Turkey -- Foreign relations -- Germany; World War, 1914-1918 -- Turkey
These phrases somehow have a familiar ring, do they not? Indeed, I might
rewrite all these interviews with Enver, use the word Belgium in place
of Armenia, put the words in a German general’s mouth instead of
Enver’s, and we should have almost a complete exposition of the German
attitude toward subject peoples. But the teachings of the Prussians go
deeper than this. There was one feature about the Armenian proceedings
that was new--that was not Turkish at all. For centuries the Turks have
ill-treated their Armenians and all their other subject peoples with
inconceivable barbarity. Yet their methods have always been crude,
clumsy, and unscientific. They excelled in beating out an Armenian’s
brains with a club, and this unpleasant illustration is a perfect
indication of the rough and primitive methods which they applied to the
Armenian problem. They have understood the uses of murder, but not of
murder as a fine art. But the Armenian proceedings of 1915 and 1916
evidenced an entirely new mentality. This new conception was that of
_deportation_. The Turks, in five hundred years, had invented
innumerable ways of physically torturing their Christian subjects, yet
never before had it occurred to their minds to move them bodily from
their homes, where they had lived for many thousands of years, and send
them hundreds of miles away into the desert. Where did the Turks get
this idea? I have already described how, in 1914, just before the
European War, the Government moved not far from 100,000 Greeks from
their age-long homes along the Asiatic littoral to certain islands in
the Ægean. I have also said that Admiral Usedom, one of the big German
naval experts in Turkey, told me that the Germans had suggested this
deportation to the Turks. But the all-important point is that this idea
of deporting peoples _en masse_ is, in modern times, exclusively
Germanic. Any one who reads the literature of Pan-Germany constantly
meets it. These enthusiasts for a German world have deliberately
planned, as part of their programme, the ousting of the French from
certain parts of France, of Belgians from Belgium, of Poles from Poland,
of Slavs from Russia, and other indigenous peoples from the territories
which they have inhabited for thousands of years, and the establishment
in the vacated lands of solid, honest Germans. But it is hardly
necessary to show that the Germans have advocated this as a state
policy; they have actually been doing it in the last four years. They
have moved we do not know how many thousands of Belgians and French from
their native land. Austria-Hungary has killed a large part of the
Serbian population and moved thousands of Serbian children into her own
territories, intending to bring them up as loyal subjects of the empire.
To what degree this movement of populations has taken place we shall not
know until the end of the war, but it has certainly gone on extensively.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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