Germany -- Foreign relations -- Turkey; Turkey -- Foreign relations -- Germany; World War, 1914-1918 -- Turkey
These phrases somehow have a familiar ring, have 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 500 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. Anyone 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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