The blight of Asia : $b An account of the systematic extermination of Christian populations by Mohammedans and of the culpability of certain great powers; with the true story of the burning of SmyrnaHorton, George
History
The blight of Asia : $b An account of the systematic extermination of Christian populations by Mohammedans and of the culpability of certain great powers; with the true story of the burning of Smyrna
Horton, George
Christians -- Turkey; Fires -- Turkey -- İzmir; Greeks -- Turkey; Turkey; İzmir (Turkey) -- History
“Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only
possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their
Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and Yuzbashis, their
Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage,
shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have
desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most
blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to
those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of
matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which
has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you
like, of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large. There
is not a criminal in an European jail, there is not a criminal
in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not rise and
over-boil at the recital of that which has been done, which
has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged, which
has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions which
produced it and which may again spring up in another murderous
harvest from the soil soaked and reeking with blood and in the
air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame.
That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to
the portion of our race which did them; that the door should
be left open to the ever so barely possible repetition would
spread that shame over the world.
“We may ransack the annals of the world but I know not what
research can furnish us with so portentous an example of the
fiendish misuse of the powers established by God for the
punishment of evil doers and the encouragement of them that do
well. No government ever has so sinned, none has proved itself
so incorrigible in sin, or which is the same, so impotent in
reformation.”
[Illustration: RAHMI BEY
Turkish war governor of Smyrna.]
The time will never come when the words of Gladstone, one of the wisest
of English statesmen, will be considered unworthy of serious attention.
The following characterization of the Turk by him has been more aptly
verified by the events that have happened since his death than by those
that occurred before:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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