Non-fiction ~ history/politics
Published 1918 (an expanded version of the earlier Deutschland über Allah)
Approx. 49,000 words
THE CRITICS
When the Young Turks came into power, they proclaimed that they were
going to weld the Ottoman Empire into one homogeneous and harmonious
whole. But by a piece of brilliant paradoxical reasoning, says Mr.
Benson, Germany determined that it was she who was going to do it for
them. He proceeds:
In
flat contradiction of the spirit of their manifestoes, which
proclaimed the Pan-Turkish ideal, she conceived and began to carry
out, under their very noses, the great new chapter of the
Pan-Germanic ideal. And the Young Turks did not know the difference!
They mistook that lustyTeutonic changeling for their own new-born
Turkish babe, and they nursed and nourished it. Amazingly it throve,
and soon it cut its teeth, and one day, when they thought it was
asleep, it arose from its cradle, baby no more, but a great Prussian
guardsman who shouted, “Deutschland
über Allah!”
Mr. Benson concludes that in Turkey "there is no God but
backshish and the Deutsche bank is his prophet." Turkish youths
are now sent to Germany instead of France for education. Mr. Benson
adds: "Certainly, Prussian Gott is nearer Turkish Allah."
Aside from the book's chronicle of how Turkey has practically become
a German colony, another feature distinguishes it—the author's
position concerning Germany's part in the Armenian massacres. He
asserts that Germany did not
want these massacres. "She wanted more agricultural labor, and I
think that, if only for that reason, she deprecated them. But she
allowed them to go on when it was in her power to stop them, and all
the perfumes of Arabia cannot wash clean her hand from that stinking
horror."
~The Outlook (US), 05/06/1918
Concerned
with Eastern affairs, but rather with things political than with
things military, is E. F. Benson's Crescent
and Iron Cross
[...]. Of Turkey the author maintains that the famous phrase of
Nicholas I, "Turkey is a sick man," is no longer true.
"Turkey is not a sick man," he says; "Turkey is a
sickness." And he continues: "Turkey, the rodent cancer,
has been infected by another with greater organization for devouring;
the disease of Ottomanism is threatened by a more deadly hungerer,
and Prussianism has inserted its coal-pincers into the cancer that
came out of Asia." It is these phenomena, and their reaction
upon the subject peoples of Armenia, Syria, and Palestine, that Mr.
Benson here examines, with the result that he sees a brighter future
for Turkey He feels that the Turkey of the future is to be for the
Turks; not for the persecuted Armenians, nor for the Arabs, nor for
the Greeks, and assuredly not for the Prussians.
~The Nation, 09/11/1918
Between America and Turkey there has been a severance of relations,
but no war. Nevertheless,
when on January 8, 1918, President Wilson, in reply to the Russian
challenge, set forth with detail and precision the fourteen
conditions which are now ostensibly the basis of the peace to be made
with the Central Powers, the liberation of the subject peoples of the
Ottoman Empire was coupled with 'self-determination' for the Turks.
That Turkey, in reply, did not immediately declare war was a
sign and a portent. For Turkish foreign policy was dictated from
Berlin, and the future of Turkey had been determined in Berlin. A
declaration of war on the part of Turkey would have added the United
States in an 'internationally-legal' way to the powers sharing
against Germany the potentiality of determining the fate of Turkey.
And it was not to imperial Germany's interest that this should be so.
Turkey was the base of the economic arch of Mittel-Europa, the
keystone of the military arch of the contemplated hegemony of. Asia
and Africa. The German over-lordship of Turkey had hence to be
preserved by any and all means—by the massacre of the Armenians, by
the
abortive assaults on the 'Arabs' and the Jews, by the economic
penetration of the unhappy Ottoman Empire.
Mr. Benson does not say this. His work is largely a survey of the
established dominion of the Germans in Turkey, particularly of those
aspects of it which have developed during the war. It is well
written, with a power of phrase unusual in works of this type, but
also with a passion and a somewhat infantile irony that greatly
detract from the force and persuasiveness of his narrative. The mere
data of this are sufficient. To any one acquainted with the programme
of Mittel-Europa they make clear immediately that the pan-Germans had
been preparing in Turkey for after the war. They make clear
immediately why this high sovereign power, the Ottoman Empire, failed
to resent the 'deadly insult' levelled at it by the chief magistrate
of a nation with which it was offcially at peace. They make clear
immediately why the chief magistrate found it necessary to make this
'insult' one of his explicit conditions of a peace settlement.
The Young Turks, Mr. Benson points out, reversed the policy of the
'Old Turks.' Those had impressed the youth of their
subject-populations into their armies, had Moslemized them and had
then used them to misgovern the peoples of their own blood. The Young
Turks, on the other hand,
used their armies to kill out these non-Turkish peoples. They did it
with the connivance of the Germans. They did it to the Armenians, and
they were prevented from accomplishing it upon the Jews and Arabs.
They planned it, and carried it out as a part of the programme of
Turkish nationalism; to establish the numerical supremacy of the
Turks in the empire, the dominion of the Turkish language and Turkish
culture. They were encouraged by the Germans because the Turks are
the most inferior people in the empire; because German control might
meet competition among Syrians and Armenians, but could meet none
among Turks. To ensure control they had since the war
added to their already great concessions in railroads, harbors and
irrigation, the control of most of the railroads in the empire, the
control of the coal mines at Rodesto and of the copper mines at
Arghana Maden. By treaty, January 11, 1917, they acquired control of
the whole reorganization of the economic system of Turkey, and
already in 1916 they had it arranged that German law might
replace
the Shuriat. They had undertaken the Germanification of young
Ottomans by means of the schools and of all industries by means of
concessions. But their most astute operation was the bankruptcy of
Turkey, which gave them, victorious or defeated, a stranglehold on
the land. They did it by taking away all the Turkish bullion and
replacing it by German paper notes to the amount of about
seven
hundred and fifty million dollars. This paper is to be redeemed in
gold, at par, two years after the end of the war. To this paper they
added more, in the shape of a loan, just after failure of the
Gallipoli
campaign, and then they
added further loans. As it had been made a criminal offence to hoard
gold, German paper had to circulate. Soon, however, it had to be used
as a 'reserve'
and fresh paper was issued with the old paper as its guaranty. The
result is that all
German paper has depreciated so that the Turkish gold pound, which is
worth 100
piastres in silver,
is worth more than 280 piastres in German paper. In all, Turkey has
received from Germany in paper just about 142 million pounds. She is
to repay this, at par, with interest of course, in gold. Turkey will
never, as the German financiers and the astute Young Turk rulers of
Turkey know, be able to do this. Germany will collect her claim by
appropriating the natural resources of that rich land, kept a desert
for a thousand years through misgovernment.
Prior to the war the most serious rival of Germany in the
exploitation of Turkey was France. England had interests, since
greatly expanded, but France was foremost. Mr. Benson suggests—and
his suggestion smells of an official understanding, a secret treaty
in fact, between the powers of the Entente—that the solution of the
Turkish problem would be the formal establishment of a French
protectorate in Syria, the concentration of the Turks in Anatolia,
and so on. The proposal is in complete harmony with the tradition of
the old imperialism. It is entirely contrary to the President's. That
demands clearly and explicitly freedom and security for all the
peoples in the Turkish empire, the Turks included. Between the real
Turks in Anatolia and the offspring of the Janizzaries in
Constantinople there is no community, either of blood or of speech or
of culture. Anatolians have been the victims of a tyrannical military
autocracy only in less degree than the Armenians, Arabs and Jews.
First the present Ottoman government must be destroyed. Then the
Ottoman lands and people must, like the Ottoman debt, be assigned, as
the Inter-Allied Labor and Socialist Conference
suggests, to international guardianship. No more spheres of
influence, no more protectorates. As Mr. Wilson has insisted, and as
he must now most vigorously demand, the interests of the peoples
concerned come first. If these interests are to be safeguarded, there
is necessary an international commission which will protect all of
them from the exploitation which has been their lot in the past—the
Turks of Anatolia no less than the Arabs of the Hedjaz; the Kurds, no
less than the Armenians. Particularly must they be protected from the
financial manipulation by which their present nefarious government
has loaded them with an overwhelming burden of taxation. If ever
there was a national debt meriting repudiation, the present debt of
the Turks to the Germans merits it.
~H. M. K. in The New Republic, 18/01/1919
